For a moment I thought it was Jim who was clairvoyant because it wasn’t too bad a description of Jellicoe as we had seen him on the table at Bellevue, when he was having the adhesive tape slapped on him; but then I remembered that Jim was an old hand at spoonerisms. I transposed it back to bone and muscle.
“We’ve seen him,” Gibby said. “Twice and both times in trouble.”
Jim was interested. “Murder kind of trouble?” he asked.
“Could be,” Gibby said. “Meanwhile which one was killed?”
“Henry Camplin, also known as Henry Cameron, also known as Harry Cane. Less politely known as Harry the Pimp.”
“Owner of the car I was checking on?”
“Registered to him,” Jim said. “Owner of a nice little smelly record. When they switched me from Vice to Homicide I wondered how many of the old customers would move with me just because they were used to giving me their business. I was beginning to think I had no following at all, but things are looking up. Harry is the first.”
“Procurer?”
“Was when I knew him last,” Jim said. “I’ve checked with the boys over at my old shop. They say they haven’t had a thing on him since I left and I remember on my own that there wasn’t a thing on him for some time before that. It adds up to two years of retirement for Harry or two years during which he’s been smarter than us.”
“Getting strangled is smart?” Gibby asked.
“The old brain can’t be working all the time,” Jim answered.
“Where did the body turn up?”
“His apartment. Two-roomer in the West Thirties. He had a broken window and he’d been yelling for the super to get a fresh pane of glass in it. The super didn’t have any panes of glass. He had to buy one and he couldn’t buy one without the authorization of the owner. That took time but he finally got it and he went up to put it in. He found the apartment door open and no answer to the bell, so he went in. He found Harry, warm as toast but dead as a herring.”
“Been moved yet?” Gibby asked.
“Not yet. You can still see him in situ.”
Gibby nodded. He reached for the phone and called Bellevue. He asked for the doc who had put K. R. E. Jellicoe on ice for us. He had to wait a bit while they located our boy. He was just checking on whether they still had him for us. They didn’t have him. Within an hour after Jellicoe had gone up to the alcoholic ward his lawyer—and it was one of those legal names you conjure with—arrived on the scene with K. R. E.’s personal physician, also eminent. They’d had him out of there in what our spoonerizing friend, Jim, called three lakes of a sham’s tail. Our Bellevue friend knew all about it. He’d been having a grim time over it. He asked only one thing of us. We were to go elsewhere for our favors thereafter.
Gibby didn’t go after the grimy details. He had, after all, been cutting a corner on the thing and it hadn’t worked out. If you want to be in a position to pull the big virtuous indignation act, you can’t cut corners. It’s nice to be able to wrap the law around yourself and take a firm stand. There wasn’t any law Gibby could wrap around himself.
How it had been worked was obvious enough. The fact that neither Gibby nor I had recognized Jellicoe on sight didn’t mean that anyone that rich and so much the darling of the tabloids would go unrecognized indefinitely. Some ward attendant or perhaps an ambulatory patient who could get to a telephone had come down with the idea our friend in Grand Central Station had laid before us. It could be a nice piece of change, Jellicoe’s gratitude. K. R. E. asks this character to put a call through to his lawyer and tell the lawyer where he is and what’s being done to him. After that it unfolds itself automatically. K. R. E., of course, wouldn’t have had any piece of change on him just then but it could be worth obliging him just on the chance that he would remember later.
We pulled out of the office and headed for Harry’s place. We had Jim Harrity with us. Gibby had a couple of chores for Jim to do. One was easy. He wanted a call put through to the President Polk to check on just what time Joan Loomis and Milton Bannerman had returned to the hotel and on whether they had remained there.
The other promised to be rather more difficult. He wanted to know whether our man in the brown hat was still waiting around Grand Central Station. The station police could have a look around for him but it had to be done on description alone. We had no name for him. Gibby worked at filling Jim in on the description.
I sat back and marveled, as I always marvel. This was no new thing with us. We see someone. It may be on the job and it may be just in passing. I get as good a look at this person as Gibby does. I have 20-20 vision and everything else it takes but I lack something that Gibby has. He has 20-20 attention. Whatever he sees he registers and what he registers he remembers. If you think that isn’t remarkable, test yourself on it some time. Take somebody you see all the time. The waitress in your favorite restaurant will do. Sit down now and write out a description of her, every last thing you can remember. Put it in your pocket and the next time you go out to eat compare it with the original. You’ll find out how little you observed, how little of that you remembered, and how little of that you had seen correctly. Any time you want to give Gibby the same test, you could take what he wrote down and use it to put out a wanted flyer and it would be as good as a mug shot.
Brown hat, medium height, solid build, ruddy skin—that would have been the total I could have come up with if I’d had to do it. Gibby knew that the man had brown, curly hair and gray eyes. He also knew that the man wore short sideburns, something between a normal cut and the full sideburn deal. He even knew that on the left side the man had a hairy mole just in front of his ear and he guessed that the purpose of the sideburns was to make it less conspicuous.
Harrity grinned. “Last time I saw that one,” he said, “it was at Sing Sing. The prison barber doesn’t go for sideburns. Skinheads are his style. That mole you talk about showed up as plain as plain.”
“Also out of your old clientele?” Gibby asked.
“Harry the Pimp’s nearest and dearest,” Harrity answered. “Same line of work except with muscles.”
I told myself that it had been too good to be true. We couldn’t be getting all our identifications that easily. Brown hat was well built but he hadn’t looked to be anything that would require special mention in the muscle line.
“He runs only average for beef,” I said.
“That’s the boy,” Harrity insisted. “To look at him you’ll assume he’ll be easy to handle, but don’t take any chances off it. I know him. He’s all steel springs and cute. Mix it up with him and you’ll find that they come no cuter. As long as I’ve known them, he’s handled Harry’s rough stuff for him. No matter how big they come, George cuts them down to size.”
“George what?” Gibby asked.
“George Monroe,” Harrity answered. “That’s his right name, but he’s also gone as George Madison, George Lincoln, George Adams, and George Johnson. He has a rare taste in aliases. It’s always Presidents. One of these times he’s going to be George Washington. I’ve been waiting for it.”
“You know George and you know K. R. E. Jellicoe,” Gibby began.
“Not exactly in the same way,” Harrity interrupted to explain. “Over in Vice I used to get to arrest George now and again. K. R. E. was always the one who walked away from a raid and whose name was carefully omitted from the court proceedings.”
“You’ve seen him though?”
“I’ve even tangled with him. There was one time when he was concerned for the lady’s good name. He thought he could wrestle long enough for her to get some clothes on and get away. He didn’t last the course. He’s big enough and strong enough but he’s too clumsy and too slow and too stupid.”
“No match for George then?”
Harrity laughed. “Ever been to a bullfight?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Then you know how much the bull outweighs the matador and you also know which one usually gets cut up and dragged o
ut of the arena. Jellicoe’s a bull and he’s not even a fighting bull.”
“What about Mae?” Gibby asked.
“It comes after April and before June and it has thirty-one days,” Harrity said.
“Not it, she.”
“Mae what?”
“Just Mae.”
Harrity shook his head. “Leave us not switch roles, oh, Master,” he said. “You’re the clairvoyant. I’m the cop. Maybe I sounded brilliant on old George, the Presidential range, but I wasn’t picking him out of the whole field. You gave me the mole and I was thinking along the lines of Harry’s associates. What does Mae look like? She could have been calling herself June when I knew her.”
Gibby filled him in on Mae. That is, he filled Harrity in as far as he had any filler to offer. This Mae was known to Jellicoe, George, and Harry. She might or might not have been giving a party to which George and Harry might or might not have been taking Jellicoe.
We drew a blank on Mae. Harrity did run down for us a list of dames given to party throwing, given to the delusion that K. R. E. Jellicoe would be an ornament to one of their parties, and given to commissioning Harry or George or both to handle the issuing of invitations. None of these had he ever known as Mae. Any of them might be calling herself that at the moment.
“If you ask me, though,” Harrity said, “I’m guessing that Mae will be a number I don’t know. The boys have been out of trouble for a long time and it doesn’t look as though they’ve been in retirement. The odds are they’ve been playing in some new backyard the Vice Squad has never caught up with yet. Mae is probably a new playmate.”
“Or a new boss,” Gibby suggested.
Harrity shrugged. “Who knows?” he said.
“Two years they’ve been smarter than you,” Gibby told him. “They never were that smart before. Would you say they could have turned that smart all of a sudden?”
Harrity gave it the “oh, Master” routine again, but he conceded Gibby’s point. If there was anything in the way of uncommonly effective thinking being done, it was being done for George and Harry, not by them.
We came to the house and Harrity dropped off to hit a phone and do the couple of chores Gibby had handed him. We went up to have a look at the new corpse.
CHAPTER SIX
THIS one was not only very new. It was also soaking wet. If it hadn’t been for the fact that the marks of the strangler’s hands were perfectly clear on the man’s throat, I would have been prone to expect this one to be a death by drowning. Water was still streaming from the hair and drops of water stood on the dead man’s skin. The body was completely naked. It lay across the threshold of the bathroom doorway and a large bath towel lay in a heap on the floor beside it.
“Fresh out of the shower and reaching for his towel when he got it,” Gibby said. “Taken by surprise, I’d say.”
The cops who were in there working the deal seemed to be seeing it the same way. I was coming down with a couple of reservations. I went back for a close look at the apartment’s front door. There was no indication that there had been any tampering with the lock or forcing of the door.
“Killed by someone he left waiting while he went to take a shower?” I asked. “Or would it be someone who had a key to the place?”
“Could be someone who just walked in because the door had been left open,” Gibby said.
The building superintendent was still hanging about, still clinging to the pane of glass he had been going to put into the window. He had a bit of information and he volunteered it.
“He was always doing that, Mr. Camp was,” he said.
Gibby indicated the body. “That Mr. Camp?” he asked.
“Yes, him. He was always doing that, like I said. He wanted something done in here, like maybe put in a new washer or something, he’d tell me and he’d leave the door open so I could get in to do it. Off and on, it seems like, he had the door open more than it was shut.”
“And he wanted the glass put in his window,” Gibby said. “That makes it easy, doesn’t it?”
“Trusting soul, extraordinarily trusting for his line of business,” I remarked.
Gibby didn’t see it that way. He argued that a procurer would ordinarily have no one to fear but the police and that locking the door to his apartment wouldn’t do him much good if it was the police who wanted him.
“What about burglary?” I asked. “Most people in New York are at least a little bit concerned about the possibility of burglary.”
Gibby swept the place with a quick glance. “What could a burglar get?” he asked.
From anyone it would have seemed a stupid question. From Gibby it seemed incredible. The answer couldn’t have been more obvious. It lay right out in plain sight. When Harry had undressed for his shower he had draped his clothes over the back of a chair. He had taken off his watch and had left it lying on the table. It was a cinch that any money he would have had on him would have been in the pockets of his clothes. I pointed to the watch and spoke of the money.
Gibby conceded me a point, but he took the concession back almost as quickly as he had given it. It was quite true, he argued, that while Harry had been under the shower, someone could have slipped in and made off with his watch and his money. He even allowed that it was a nicer than average watch, a watch that a man might not care to lose. He went on to check the pockets of Harry’s coat and pants. The pants pocket yielded something over a dollar in change. The coat pocket yielded a billfold and it was not too badly stocked. There was something over $150 worth of folding money in it. Gibby looked at it, counted it, and put it back. While he was at it, he went through the rest of the contents of the billfold. He didn’t find anything much. There was a driver’s license and there were about a half dozen little photographs. In the trade they call them art poses. The police have been bearing down on the places that sell them. Gibby showed more interest in them than he usually does in that sort of thing and, when he caught me looking at him quizzically, he explained.
“I just wanted to know whether Sydney Bell had posed for any of them,” he said. “She was a model, you know.”
It was an engaging idea. I took a good look. It didn’t look like Bell and anyhow in these the photographer had most emphatically not been concentrating on hands.
“There are other models,” I said.
“At the moment,” Gibby said, “other models aren’t much our business. We were talking about burglary. Here it is, available for a burglar: one good watch, something a little over $150 in cash, and six very high quality feelthy pictures.”
“I’ve known burglars to show interest in a lot less,” I said.
“A lot less,” Gibby agreed. “But these would normally be on Harry’s person. There isn’t another thing in this place he would worry about losing. Since there’s nothing around he worries about losing, he forms the habit of never giving burglars a thought. Comes the time when he doesn’t have his valuables on his person, when he’s under the shower, the old habit persists. He’s careless. He doesn’t give a thought to burglars.”
“What about his clothes?” I asked.
“Also normally on his person any time he leaves the door open,” Gibby said.
“Extra clothes?”
“I doubt that he has much,” Gibby said.
He threw open the door of the one closet the place had. There were a few things hanging in there, but they were little better than rags.
It was my first thought that here we had another one just like the first. Clothes are taken and money is left. I didn’t speak the thought because Gibby had prefaced the opening of the closet with the remark that Harry hadn’t owned much in the way of clothes. I asked about that.
“We’ve had one where only clothes seem to have been taken,” I said. “It’s screwy, but if it can happen that screwily once, why not again?”
Gibby pointed to the clothes hung over the chair. “Look at those,” he said.
They looked all right to me, nothing like that worn junk that h
ung in the closet. Everything looked brand-new, in mint condition.
“He was a snappy dresser,” I said.
“That he was,” Gibby agreed. “New shirt, never been laundered. New shorts, never been laundered. Everything new. I know these snappy dressers. They own one suit at a time. If it needs a press, they sit in the back room of the tailor shop while it’s being pressed. Cleaning, that gets done overnight. You check into a Turkish bath and by morning they’ve done the complete valeting job for you. Once in a while, maybe, you send something out to the laundry, but mostly when you need a clean shirt, you stop in and buy one, change into it in the store and don’t bother to take the dirty shirt along.”
“Sounds like an expensive way to manage,” I said. “What’s the purpose? No laundry marks for identification in case of trouble?”
Gibby shook his head. “No,” he said. “It’s usually a corpse who is identified by laundry marks and you don’t often find one of these boys prone to look that far ahead.”
I took objection to that. I remembered a killing we’d had down in the Village. It was one of the easier ones. The killer had bloodied his shirt in doing the killing. He changed out of the bloody shirt and left it while he took off in a shirt he’d swiped out of one of his victim’s drawers. The laundry marks on the abandoned shirt had led straight to him. I reminded Gibby of that one.
He laughed it off. “What made that so easy,” he said, “was that the dope had never thought of laundry marks. Anybody who’d thought of them enough so that he wouldn’t want any wouldn’t have left us the shirt.”
I could hardly dispute that. I returned to my original question.
“Then why all this buying of new shirts instead of having the old ones laundered?”
The Girl Who Kept Knocking Them Dead Page 12