She paused and looked at Shapiro, a question in her broad dark face.
“Yes,” Shapiro said. “That’s what I want to hear about. Go ahead, Mrs. Jenkinson. The bed?”
The bed had not been slept in. She went on into the bathroom, carrying fresh towels. “I always gave her fresh towels on Friday.”
Her employer—“the lady”—was lying in the bathtub. The tub was almost full of reddened water. “I said, ‘Miss Jones? Miss Jones, honey,’ but I knew she couldn’t hear me. Then I went all faint like for a minute or two. Then I got out to the telephone. It was in the living room and I got the operator and said something awful had happened and that I wanted to talk to the police. And then I sat down in a chair, because I felt faint like, and pretty soon the police came. And then a lot of other people. And after while Mr. Pieronelli and another man. And then they brought me down here and I told them about it.”
“Yes,” Shapiro said. “When you saw her in the bathtub was she wearing anything?”
“A nightgown. Sort of—oh, thin, if you know what I mean. The kind you can almost see through. Only—only it was all red, like everything else.”
“Was there much water in the tub, Mrs. Jenkinson?”
“It was pretty near full, I guess. But her head wasn’t in the water. It was sort of propped back against the tub.”
Shapiro said he saw. He said, “Was the water running? Into the tub, I mean?”
“I don’t know, sir. It—it was such an awful thing that I got all faint like. Could be it was only—only I don’t remember hearing water running.”
Shapiro looked at Pieronelli.
“Not when we got there,” Pieronelli said. “I doubt if any of the boys would have turned it off. Unless it was overflowing, of course. No prints on the faucet, the boys say.”
“The water?”
“Almost up to the overflow outlet. Full of blood. Cold when we got there. But—all right—so was she. You’ve seen the autopsy report, Lieutenant. Dead about thirty-six hours when they got to her. They cool off when they’ve been dead that long.”
Shapiro said, “Thanks, Pieronelli.” Pieronelli said, “Sorry, sir.” Shapiro turned back to Mrs. Jenkinson.
“Just Miss Jones?” he said. “Didn’t tell you her first name?”
“No, mister.”
“She didn’t leave your money in a check?”
“No. Just the money. Sometimes more, maybe a dollar more, than it came to by rights.”
Shapiro turned back to Detective Pieronelli and raised his eyebrows.
“Unlisted number,” Pieronelli said. “Subscriber just ‘A. Jones.’ Installed three weeks ago, the company says.”
“The man who installed it?”
“We haven’t got to him yet, Lieutenant. The company’s checking for us. Says it is, anyway. Says it may take a while.”
“Let’s hope they don’t get a wrong number,” Nathan Shapiro said.
“No barbiturates in the apartment?”
“Not that Bob Holmes and I could find. Holmes will go over it again when the fingerprint boys finish. Nothing in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, anyway.”
“You mean no bottle of barbiturate tablets?”
“I mean not a damn thing, sir. No toothpaste and no toothbrush. None of the things women put on their faces. Just nothing at all.”
“No typewriter? No papers with typing on them?”
“No, Lieutenant. Just a white dress in a closet on a hanger. And a bra and what they call pantyhose. Oh, yes, and a pair of white shoes. Sandals, that is—summery, like the dress. Except for that—the dress and things, I mean—you wouldn’t have thought anybody was living in the apartment. Come to that, there wasn’t anybody when we got there. Living there, I mean.”
“Yes,” Shapiro said. “I know what you mean. Mrs. Jenkinson, you’re quite sure there was a typewriter? Except this morning, I mean? On a table by the window?”
“Course I am. You think I’m lying to you, man?”
“No,” Shapiro said. “A typewriter and a pile of paper beside it. With typing on the paper, you say?”
“First time I was there. Like I said, I straightened the papers up a little. Made them neat, sort of. That was before she left me the note saying not to.”
Shapiro said, “Yes, Tony?”
Anthony Cook hadn’t said anything. He had merely moved a little. For a man who was good only with a gun, Tony thought, Nathan Shapiro was extremely observant.
“We’re going over there?” Cook said and Shapiro said, “Of course, Tony.”
“Because,” Tony Cook said, “there’s something I can maybe help check out. If it’s the place I think it is.”
“All right,” Shapiro said. “See that Mrs. Jenkinson gets home all right, will you, Pieronelli?”
Pieronelli said, “Sure.” Mrs. Jenkinson said, “I got two more ladies to do for. Only by now maybe they think I’ve stood them up. Two ladies and a gentleman, if I can get to him.”
“I’ll see that she gets where she wants to go,” Pieronelli said, and Shapiro and Tony Cook went out to the unmarked sedan and drove the few blocks to Gay Street. There were two cruise cars and the lab truck in Gay Street, parked partly on the sidewalk. Somebody could get past them in a car if he didn’t mind going up on the other sidewalk. Gay Street is not a wide street. Tony parked the car, partly on the sidewalk, behind the lab truck.
Shapiro started to climb the few gritty steps which led up to the front door of the narrow house. Tony stood on the sidewalk and looked up at the house, and Shapiro said, “You coming along, Tony?”
“I’m pretty sure it’s the same house,” Tony said. “Same window Rach—Miss Farmer looked up at last night. In fact, I’m damn sure.”
Shapiro came back down the steps and joined Cook in looking up at the window. It was one of two windows on the second floor.
“For a couple of weeks, Miss Farmer says, there’s been a woman sitting near that window—most of the time with it open—pounding on a typewriter. In the evenings. Sometimes late at night, I gathered. We—well, we happened to be walking by here last night and Rach—I mean Miss Farmer—said she guessed the woman was finished.”
“You can call Miss Farmer Rachel,” Shapiro said. “After all, you brought her over to see us once. Said she guessed the woman was finished?”
“With what she was doing,” Tony said. “With whatever she was typing. That’s all Rachel meant, Nate.”
“Of course,” Shapiro said. “She wasn’t there last night? You’re sure it’s the right window? The one on the left?”
“Pretty sure,” Tony said. “All right, I am sure. I checked it last night on my way home. It was dark then. And closed, I think.”
“Let’s go on up,” Nathan Shapiro said, and led the way on up.
The door of the apartment at the top of the first flight of stairs was open. A uniformed patrolman stood outside it. Inside, two men were shaking dust on the little furniture there was in the room and blowing the dust off again. Another man with a small camera was taking pictures of surfaces from which they had blown the dust. A fourth man was standing watching them. He said, “Hello, Tony,” and Tony said, “Hi, Bob,” and, “This is Lieutenant Shapiro.” The fourth man, who was broad-shouldered and heavy and had sandy hair, said, “Sir.” Then he said, “They’re about through, Lieutenant.”
“And not getting much except hers,” one of the fingerprint men said. “Hers clear enough all over. Somebody else’s on the phone. Hers on the coffee cup, which was over there.”
He pointed to a low, oblong table in front of a sofa which looked too hard to sit on.
“The boys took it away.”
“Yes,” Shapiro said. “Only one cup?”
“More in the kitchen on hooks in a cupboard. Only one on the table. Three cups, two dinner plates, a little stainless steel stuff. No prints on any of it.”
“I guess that does it,” the man with the camera said. “A few that came up all right. Probably the deceased’s.
The ones on the phone. The rest pretty much blurs.”
“The ones on the telephone probably are the cleaning woman’s,” Shapiro said.
The telephone rang. Shapiro raised his eyebrows at one of the fingerprint men and got a “Sure, Lieutenant” and picked the telephone up. He said his name into it. Then he listened. He said, “Thanks, Sergeant,” and put it back in its cradle.
“There’d been coffee in the cup,” he said. “Black. No cream or sugar. And a trace of Nembutal. Might have been almost a gram of the stuff in the coffee, they figure.”
The fingerprint men were packing up. One of them said, “All yours, Lieutenant,” and the three of them went out of the apartment and down the stairs.
“We may as well go over it again,” Shapiro said, his voice sad. “Not that we’ll find anything, probably.”
The living room was, like Rachel’s, the width of the narrow house. A narrower bedroom opened off it—a bedroom narrow and long, with a double bed occupying most of it. A bathroom opened off it and, nearer the front of the apartment, a tiny kitchen with a two-burner electric plate on top of a small refrigerator. In the kitchen there was a cabinet against one wall. Three coffee cups hung on hooks in the cabinet and two plates were on the shelf under them. In a drawer under the cabinet were two stainless steel knives and two forks to match them and a small jar of instant coffee. It was a little less than half full. There was a teaspoon beside the little jar.
Shapiro opened the refrigerator door, and it began to hum at him. It was empty. It looked, Nathan Shapiro thought, as if it had always been empty. As, he thought, does the whole apartment. It looks as if nobody had ever lived here. He went back into the bedroom.
Tony Cook had opened up the bed.
“Clean sheets,” he said. “Don’t look as if anybody’d ever slept on them. Clean pillow cases, too. The lab boys will have run a vacuum over everything, of course. Looking for hairs and things.”
Shapiro said, “Yes, Tony.”
Detective Holmes came out of the bathroom. Looked at, he shrugged his shoulders. He said, “Not a thing, Lieutenant. Tub will need scrubbing out. Nothing in the—”
He stopped because Tony Cook, who had continued to look down at the bed as if it were hiding something, suddenly crouched and looked under it. He reached under it and lay on the floor and reached farther. He said, “Got it,” and wriggled out and stood up.
He held “it” out to Shapiro. It was a key on a metal tag, and embossed on the tag were the words, “Hotel Algonquin, New York.” Above the identifying words, punched into the metal, were numbers—“912.”
Holmes said he’d be damned. He said, “Don’t see how we missed it the first time around.”
“Probably she stowed it under one of the pillows,” Shapiro said. “Fell down between the end of the mattress and the headboard.”
“Hell of a place to keep a key,” Tony Cook said. “It’s dusty. Mrs. Jenkinson didn’t clean under beds very carefully.”
“Miss Jones probably thought it was lost,” Shapiro said. “The hotel gave her another and she kept it in her handbag.”
“Of which there isn’t any,” Tony said.
“There wasn’t,” Holmes said. “That we wouldn’t have missed. Just this dress and some of those pantyhose and a pair of shoes in that little closet.” He pointed to a narrow door between the kitchen and the bathroom doors. “No handbag.”
Shapiro opened the narrow door and looked into a narrow closet, with a rod across it and three coat hangers hooked to the rod. There was nothing else in the closet.
“Guys from the lab took her things,” Holmes said. “And the paring knife that was in the tub. Cheap knife. Rough wooden handle.” And Shapiro closed the narrow door and said, “Yes, Holmes. Their job.” Holmes said, “That’s right, Lieutenant.”
“Nothing else here,” Shapiro said. “At least, I hope there isn’t. Come on, Tony. Put a seal on it, will you, Holmes?”
Holmes said, “Sure will, Lieutenant,” and Shapiro went out of the bedroom and through the living room—the living room in which Shapiro felt nobody had ever lived—and down the stairs to the street. On the sidewalk, Shapiro stopped and looked up at the two windows of the second-floor apartment. He said, “Did Miss Farmer get a good look at this woman, do you think?”
Tony Cook didn’t think she had. He told Shapiro what Rachel had said—about the woman at the typewriter having been merely an outline against a light.
“All the same,” Shapiro said, “she might remember more, under the new circumstances. I’d like to know what this Miss Jones looked like.”
“There’ll be shots.”
“They don’t look the same when they’re dead,” Shapiro said. “Do you suppose Miss Farmer’ll be at home now?”
Tony didn’t think so. He said she’d be working.
“Could you find her, d’you think? See if she can add anything.”
Tony Cook said he could try.
“I’ll take the car,” Nathan Shapiro said. “Go up to the Algonquin and ask around. On Forty-fourth, isn’t it?”
Tony said it was—on Forty-fourth just off Sixth.
“If you turn up anything, try to check with me there,” Shapiro said. “Or at the office and leave word where you’ll be. O.K.?”
Tony said, “O.K.,” and Shapiro went to the car and Tony went the other way, around the twist in Gay Street. There was a chance Rachel might have come home for a breather between jobs. He didn’t think it was much of a chance. He rang the doorbell several times. Rachel hadn’t come home for a breather. Probably she was still standing in Mackenowitz’s drafty studio.
Tony knew where the studio was. He had picked her up there once when she had finished posing. It had been an off day for him and a Saturday and they had driven up to the country in a hired car. It had been a pleasant day in mid-spring. It had been a fine day in the country. And a fine night.
3
Shapiro had to drive through Forty-fourth Street almost to Fifth Avenue before he found a spot to wedge the police car into. He used the telephone in the car to say where he was and to learn that there were no messages for him. He locked the car up to be sure that it would still be there when he went for it and walked back through Forty-fourth Street with sunshine part of the time on his long sad face. He was a tall man in a gray suit which could have done with pressing. It was a warm day, but he kept the suit jacket buttoned to cover the gun. He walked west with long strides.
He had heard about the Hotel Algonquin. Everybody has heard about the Algonquin. He had never been in it. He went into the hotel and it was cool inside. He walked beside an almost-head-high partition until he came to the desk, and he stood there for a moment with his back to it.
He looked on a large room with chairs and sofas and people on most of them. He watched a man in a white jacket carrying drinks to tables. He heard the sharp tinkle of bells and saw that each table in the room had its little bell. Beyond the room was a wide entrance to “Restaurant.” A group of four men-three of them looking like Madison Avenue and the fourth fuzzy with beard and long hair—was standing just inside the entrance. A man in a dinner jacket came up to them and nodded his head and smiled and led them into the restaurant.
Shapiro turned back to the desk and saw what he wanted and went to the telephone at the end of the desk. He lifted the telephone and heard, “Can I help you?” in a light female voice.
“Room Nine-twelve, please,” Shapiro said, and got, “Just a moment, sir,” and a repeated buzzing sound. After a number of buzzes, Shapiro got what he had expected—“I’m afraid Room Nine-twelve doesn’t answer, sir.” Shapiro said, “Thank you,” and hung up and went back along the desk.
A tall man smiled at him and at the same time shook his head. He said, “Have you a reservation, sir? I’m afraid if you haven’t we’re—”
“I don’t want a room,” Shapiro said. “Have you a Miss—or perhaps Mrs.—A. Jones registered here?”
The reception clerk turned to a rack and fli
cked cards. He turned back and shook his head. He said, “A Mr. Armand Jones?”
“No,” Shapiro said. He took the key marked “912” out of his pocket and put it on the desk. He also took his badge out of his pocket and put it beside the key. The clerk picked the badge up and looked at it. Then he looked at Shapiro. Then he said, “Yes, Lieutenant?”
“I’d like to know who’s occupying Room Nine-twelve,” Shapiro said. “He—or more likely she—doesn’t answer the phone.”
The man behind the desk said, “Well,” drawing it out. Shapiro said, “Police business,” and pointed at the badge still on the desk. He said, “I’ll pin it on, if you’d rather. Where it shows.”
“That won’t be necessary,” the clerk said. “That won’t be at all necessary. Would you like to see the manager, Lieutenant?”
“All I want at the moment,” Shapiro said, “is the name of whoever is occupying Room Nine-twelve.”
The desk clerk looked doubtful. When he spoke it was with doubt in his voice. But what he said was, “Well, I guess so, Lieutenant.”
He turned to another rack and flipped cards in it. He came back to Shapiro. He said, “A Miss Lacey, Lieutenant. Miss Jo-An Lacey.”
“Joan?”
“Two words, the way it’s registered. ‘Jo’ dash ‘An.’ She’s been with us for some weeks, Lieutenant. About a month, actually. Sir?”
The inquiring “Sir?” was not addressed to Nathan Shapiro. It was for a tall, youngish man with a neatly clipped but very thick red beard. It was followed by, “Can I help you?”
“Will you have Miss Lacey paged?” the red beard said. “Miss Jo-An Lacey? She doesn’t seem to be in her room and I’ve looked in the Oak Room and the Rose Room and—anyway, we’ve got a lunch date. Perhaps she left a message?”
“I don’t think so,” the clerk said. “Who would the message be for?”
“Shepley. Laurence Shepley.”
The tall desk clerk made a business of looking through a shelf under the desk. He stood up and shook his head. He said, “I’m afraid not, Mr. Shepley. Held up in traffic, probably. But I’ll have her paged.” Then he looked at Nathan Shapiro.
Write Murder Down Page 2