I had been looking at nothing in particular, but all at once I realized that the man who had been on vigil across the street was no longer there. I half turned to comment on this to Sonia when the doorbell rang. Sonia answered it.
Anderson stood outside, his mild face dour. The heavyset man who had been on watch was directly behind him. I asked them in.
The Lieutenant walked into the room, then stopped in his tracks. He looked at Sonia and again at me. “Bill, here, tells me that neither one of you left the building all night. Is that right?” he demanded.
Sonia answered, “We haven’t left this room.”
Anderson’s shoulders drooped. He clenched his fist, then relaxed it. “I told you yesterday that we had a mighty cold trail to work on, Doctor. Well, it’s warmed up a little overnight. Nan Bulkely was found shot to death this morning.”
His usually pleasant blue eyes were boring into mine. I returned his stare. “Where? In her apartment?” I asked, more to make a response than because I was curious; more to hide my own amazement than because I expected the place of Nan’s murder to be significant.
“Her body was found on the doorstep of an apartment building on West Tenth Street at five minutes after seven o’clock this morning by a milkman who was making a delivery. She had been shot through the temple with a .45 automatic equipped with a silencer that was found lying in the street a few yards away. The medical examiner has set the time of her death as occurring at anytime during the previous six hours.” Anderson recited these facts rapidly and mechanically, and with a trace of disgust. He continued to stare at me so steadily that I was discomfited.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. “But we didn’t have anything to do with it. Your own man will tell you…”
He cut me short with a wave of his hand. “I’m not saying you had anything to do with it. I just want to know where the goddamn horse came from!”
“What ‘goddamn’ horse?” I asked.
Anderson’s face was a mask of exaggerated disapproval. “A percheron, one of those big truck horses, was found tethered to the lamppost next to where the body was found. He had a feedbag tied on and a red ribbon in his mane.”
I regarded Anderson and Anderson regarded me. It was one of those looks that convey absolutely no meaning, but establish a community of disbelief. I kept thinking “This is where I came in.”
But there was no convenient exit that led out of the movie and into the sane and sunny street.
ELEVEN
The Beginning of the End
Anderson wanted us to go with him to the scene of the crime. On the way over in his car, I realized that for some reason West Tenth Street was significant to me. I turned around and asked Sonia, who was sitting in the back seat, “Do we know anyone who lives on West Tenth Street in Manhattan?”
Before Sonia could answer, Anderson cut in, “If the street sounds familiar to you, the address would sound even more so. It’s the same address as Frances Raye’s.”
My voice showed my surprise. “Do you mean that Nan Bulkely was killed in front of Frances Raye’s house? Why that means both killings have occurred at the same address! Why?”
Anderson shook his head. “Don’t ask me why. The more I get to know of this case, the more ‘why’s’ I can think of myself.”
“But doesn’t that mean that the same person must have murdered both Raye and Bulkely?” Sonia asked excitedly.
“It may indicate that,” Anderson conceded. “Or it may mean that whoever killed Bulkely wanted us to think that she was killed by Raye’s murderer.”
Bill Sommers, a fat detective, sat forward in his seat. “You know, lady, murderers do funny things sometimes. Take this horse that keeps popping up, for instance. Now I gotta theory about that horse.”
“Yes?”
Sommers laid his large hand on Sonia’s trousered knee. “I think that horse is the most important clue we got to who done these murders,” he said. “Only a guy with a sense of humor would think up a gag like that. The horses don’t serve any useful purpose that I can see. He just thought it would be cute to tie a big horsie to a lamppost every time he killed somebody.”
“Well,” said Anderson, over his shoulder, keeping his eyes on the road ahead. “Let’s hear your theory, Sommers.”
“That’s it,” said the detective. “We gotta look for a guy with a sense of humor. A funny guy. A card. That’s all.”
“Huumph!” was Anderson’s only comment. He kept his eyes on the street. Sommers kept his hand on Sonia’s knee. She looked down at it, regarded it as she might some peculiar creature that she had just laid eyes on for the first time in her life, then gently removed it.
But Sommers had given me an idea. There was something in what he said, although that something was probably not what he had intended. In the last analysis the psychology of the murderer and of the practical joker did differ only in degree. Both were sadists, both enjoyed the pleasures of the grotesque and of inflicting pain on others. Murder might be termed the ultimate practical joke; similarly, a practical joke might be called the social form of murder.
There was little to see at the scene of the crime. Both the horse and the body had been removed. Two policemen stood talking to the superintendent of the building; Anderson approached them and joined in the talk. Sonia and I looked around at the sidewalk, the lamppost. What we expected to see, I do not know – blood, perhaps? We saw nothing. Sommers stood leaning against the fender of the police car, his hat tipped over his face to keep the morning sunshine out of his eyes. He seemed about to fall asleep.
After a few minutes, Anderson came back to us. “I talked to the super,” he said, “and he’s going to let us into the apartment that used to be Frances Raye’s. The lady who lives there now is out for a few hours.”
As we followed him into the foyer of the small apartment building, I said, “You don’t expect to discover any significant fact about Raye’s murder here now, more than nine months after it happened, do you?”
Anderson jabbed the elevator button. “You never can tell in this business. Finding that body outside this morning makes me wonder.”
“Won’t you need a warrant?” Sonia asked.
“The super is taking the responsibility and I’ll back him up if necessary. We won’t touch anything and they’ll never know the difference. A warrant would take too long.”
The elevator came and we went upstairs. Anderson opened the apartment door with the superintendent’s key. It was a medium-sized flat, impeccably clean, furnished with severely modern furniture. Anderson stood in the middle of the living room and pointed at the floor. “This is where we found Raye’s body,” he said. “She lay flat on her face. She had been stabbed in the back, but the knife was not to be found. There were no signs of struggle. The doors and windows were all unlocked, but the apartment was in order. We took fingerprints all over the place, but the only recognizable impressions we found were those of Raye herself and her maid’s. Since the maid could prove that it was her day off, that got us nowhere. The only conclusion we could reach was that the murderer was a friend who had just walked in, and since she knew him she did not raise a fuss.”
I kept looking about the apartment–it fascinated me. I wandered into the bedroom and Anderson followed me. This room was finished in powder blue and one whole wall was a mirror. There was a low vanity and a chaise longue beside the bed. Nothing else was remarkable.
We walked into the kitchen. Anderson opened the dumbwaiter and peered down the shaft. “This is big enough for a man to get into,” he said, his voice reverberating in the empty shaft, “but the super says he keeps it locked at both the bottom and the top. He insists that it was locked on the night of the murder, too. So whoever did it couldn’t have escaped that way, not that there weren’t other ways, plenty of them, that he could have used.”
I cleared my throat. “Andy,” I said, “I know something more about the man who pretended to be Jacob Blunt. The man you released into my custody.”
“Yes. He held me prisoner for many weeks. He and Nan Bulkely. His name is Tony. I began to remember it all last night…” And I told him about my ordeal in Nan’s Central Park apartment, about the ‘doctor’ and his ‘treatments,’ Tony’s probable death and my escape.
When I had finished Anderson said, “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
“I only remembered it last night.”
“D o you know when this took place?”
“Not exactly. It must have started the same day Tony was released, the day after Raye’s murder. But when it ended I can’t tell for sure, perhaps a month or six weeks later.” I told him about my “timetable” then.
“When you went back to Jersey after your escape, did you see anyone you knew? Somebody who could remember seeing you and help us arrive at a probable date?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Are you sure you didn’t see your assailant before you were struck that night on your front porch? Haven’t you any idea who it might have been who attacked you?”
“No. I’m sorry, but I did not see who it was.”
“There was someone in the house though?”
“There was a light on in the house.”
“Are you sure you didn’t see your wife?”
“I tell you I saw nobody, Andy.”
Anderson sat down on the kitchen stool, pulled a cigar out of his pocket and bit off the end. Sonia, who had been in the living room, came into the kitchen. She saw the frown on Anderson’s face and looked questioningly at me. “I have just told him what I remembered last night,” I said in answer to her unspoken question.
Anderson kept silent for a long time. Finally, he looked up at me. “You are certain you don’t remember anything after you lost consciousness on the porch of your house? From then on remains a blank? You’re not holding back anything?”
“That’s all I remember. You see,” I said, “I think being hit on the head served to bring on my amnesia. It might have overcome me anyway, or it might not — but with the effect of the concussion to add extra pressure, my loss of memory was certainly aggravated. I may have recovered from the actual blow in a few minutes, returning to a state of consciousness that resembled the normal, but at that time I probably could not remember my name.”
Anderson looked at his watch and stood up. “We’re not doing anything sitting here,” he said. “Let’s go back to Headquarters and see what the boys have dug up on the Bulkely murder. I had a man following her last night, you know. He says she left her building about ten minutes to one this morning. She met a man outside and then they took a taxi. My man was too busy hailing a cab himself to see what the man looked like. He followed their cab to Sheridan Square where he was stopped by a traffic light. He would have had the driver crash the light, but he saw them draw up to the curb across the street and leave the taxi. He jumped out of the cab and followed them into a nightclub – there are several there, you know. But when he got inside he could not find them. Like a fool he looked all around the club before he asked the doorman where they had gone. The doorman had seen them. He said they came in, looked around at the crowd, then left. Somehow my man had missed seeing them. When he reached the street, they were nowhere in sight. And that’s the kind of rotten break we’ve been getting all along!
“I’ve a hunch that whoever it was that Nan met is the one we’re looking for, the one behind it all. Now, at least, we know that Bulkely had a part in your kidnapping. She may have been killed because she knew too much.”
“Don’t forget that only yesterday she was in your office making a big point of having seen me in the cafeteria. There must be a reason for that stratagem,” I reminded Anderson.
Anderson nodded his head. “That might have been an attempt to discredit anything you told me in advance.”
“If so, a pretty clumsy one. Because it tied right in with my story.”
He shook his head. “Don’t be too sure about that,” he said. “It might have been just clumsy enough to look like the truth. I remember thinking yesterday that perhaps I was wrong in believing your story without more investigation. You had been released from a mental hospital recently – then this girl comes down with a report that she had seen you. She reminds me that you might be the one uninvestigated suspect in the Raye case, and that it might be profitable for me to look you up. When you walk in and ask to see me – Nan could not have expected that you would come so quickly–it would have been better for her if you had come the next day – it looks like you know you’ve been recognized and had decided you had better give yourself up before we came and got you.
“As I say, I wasn’t at all sure I believed your story yesterday, and if I hadn’t known you before I would not have been inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt. That’s one of the reasons why I left a man outside your door last night – not only to protect you, but to watch you. Now, of course, I know you didn’t kill Bulkely, but only because I know you didn’t leave your house last night.”
“You think it’s likely that the same person killed both Bulkely and Raye, don’t you, Lieutenant?” Sonia asked.
Anderson smiled briefly. “I’m not answering that question yet.”
We went outside to the waiting car. Sommers was still leaning against the fender, apparently more asleep than awake, but he stiffened to attention when he saw Anderson. I looked back at the apartment building as we began to move away. A woman was climbing the steps to the front door, a small, well-dressed woman. I saw only her back, but my pulse began to pound in my throat. The woman was Sara, my wife, who was supposed to be in Chicago. I would know her anywhere. I craned my neck to stare back at her. She was fitting a key into the lock as we turned the corner and lost sight of her. Only then did I realize that Anderson had been watching me out of the tail of his eye.
“See somebody you know?” he asked casually.
“I’m not certain,” I said. I saw he was not going to let me off with that. I could lie, or I could be honest. I surprised myself by being honest. “I guess my eyes were playing tricks on me,” I said. “I thought I saw Sara.”
Anderson swerved the car abruptly down the next street, ignoring completely the one-way signs. “We’ll go back and see,” he said. We sped dizzily around the next corner and screamed to a stop on West Tenth Street. No one was to be seen. Anderson and I jumped out of the car and ran up the steps. Anderson rang the superintendent’s bell.
“Did anyone come into the building just now?” he asked the man when he appeared.
The fellow shook his head. “I didn’t see anybody.”
Anderson glanced at the long row of doorbells. “We could search each apartment,” he said to me, “but we would have to get warrants for that many.”
“I wouldn’t do that,” I said, having noted the hesitation in his voice. “My eyes were playing tricks on me, I’m sure.”
He turned and started back to the car. “Yes,” he said, “that must be it. The last I heard of your wife she was still in Chicago staying with her parents. She said that if she ever came back to New York she would notify me.”
“I was imagining things,” I said. But as I said this, I made up my mind to come back and see for myself as soon as I could. I was certain that I had not been imagining things, but I was not sure that it would be a good idea to let Anderson know that.
We climbed back into the car and this time we went to Police Headquarters.
TWELVE
Percherons Don’t Come Cheap
Anderson’s desk was piled high with reports from the various men he had working on the Bulkely slaying. Sonia and I sat down while he read his way through the pile of official-looking papers. When he finished, he spoke into the intercom on his desk: “Tell Arnheim to report to me.”
Minutes later, a swarthy, dark-haired detective opened the door to the Lieutenant’s office. He had narrow shoulders and a broad, jovial face.
Anderson spoke to him withou
t looking up from the reports. “You checked on that horse and its owner?”
“Yes, sir. Bide-Away Farms at Algonport, Long Island. A Mr Frank Gillespie. He rented the horse to a Miss Bulkely yesterday and delivered it to a stable on Seventh Avenue. I checked the stable, too. The horse was there from three o’clock yesterday afternoon until five o’clock this morning. It was delivered in a closed van and called for by the same van. The van belonged to Mr Gillespie. It has not been returned yet although Miss Bulkely promised to have it returned last night. I reported it stolen this morning.”
Anderson snapped, “I know all that. It’s down here on your report. What I want to know is did any of your men see that van last night? Somebody must have seen it between upper Seventh Avenue and West Tenth Street!”
“I checked with all precincts, sir. No one reported it. A general alarm is out now and it may be picked up any minute. O r one of the men who is off duty may have seen it and will report it later. Then again, it may have been noticed, but not reported because there is nothing unusual about seeing a moving van on the street, sir.”
Arnheim spoke quietly and rapidly. He had his facts well in hand. Anderson remained surly, but I could see this was his way of showing one of his men that he was pleased.
“You say here that this is the same man who sold another percheron to Miss Bulkely at the time of the Raye case,” Anderson noted, tapping his fingernail on the report he held in his hand. “Why didn’t that come out then? Didn’t we contact every horse dealer in this vicinity in an attempt to find the owner of that horse–and didn’t we draw a blank on every one of them?”
Arnheim bobbed his head in agreement. “That’s right, chief – but this guy, Gillespie, now admits that he lied. He says this dame, Bulkely, paid him ten grand for the previous horse. The price was so high because the horse was bought only on the condition that Gillespie asked and answered no questions. So when we came around he claimed to know from nothing.”
The Deadly Percheron Page 14