See You at the Morgue

by Lawrence G. Blochman

  “You mean you think enough of this gal to risk your neck, just to keep her name out of the Daily News?”

  Dunne looked the detective squarely in the eye. “Yes,” he said.

  “In that case,” the detective said, “why all this humbuggery about reconciliation with Mrs. Dunne? If you’re really in love with this gal, you have a funny way of showing it—moving back into your estranged wife’s apartment.”

  “On the contrary,” Roger Dunne said, leaning across his desk. “I think my actions were eloquent of my love for Miss Morse. I want to marry her—just as soon as I have my freedom. Mrs. Dunne promised me a year ago that she would get a divorce. I gave her the money for lawyers’ fees, and promised her reasonable alimony. She has done absolutely nothing about a divorce so far, so yesterday I decided to force the issue. Barney can tell you all about it; he was there yesterday and overheard the whole argument. I hesitated to bring suit myself, because New York divorces are always unsavory. So I told Mrs. Dunne that if she persisted in refusing to divorce me, I would move back with her and insist upon my marital rights. Knowing this to be extremely distasteful to my wife, I thought she would pack up and go to Reno at once. And I certainly should not have killed the very man who might have helped take Penelope off my hands.”

  “I should think not,” the detective said. He got up to go, then reconsidered. “By the way, you know Vivian Sanderson?”

  “Yes. That’s Pen’s cousin. Why?”

  “She had an accident last night,” Kilkenny said, “and may need a blood transfusion. Would you volunteer a pint or so of your blood?”

  “Gladly. Of course.”

  Kilkenny dropped a card on the desk. “Then go up to this address today and have your blood typed,” he said. “Get there before noon. Miss Sanderson will be grateful.”

  He signaled Barney and started out, but turned back at the door. As if by afterthought, he asked, “Did Mrs. Dunne own a pistol?”

  Dunne moistened his lips but did not reply.

  “You’ve done enough chivalrous lying to last you quite a while,” the detective said, “so I’ll prompt you. Mrs. Dunne does—or did—own a pistol?”

  “Then why ask me?” Dunne asked.

  “I wanted to see if you knew, that’s all. The boys found a pistol permit in the apartment, but no gun. Do you know what kind of gun it was?”

  “She used to have a little Belgian pistol,” Dunne said. “A twenty-five-caliber F.N., if I remember correctly.”

  “You remember perfectly,” said Detective Kilkenny. “Did she usually carry it around with her, like a compact?”

  “Only when she was driving the car at night. Usually she kept it in a drawer in the night table next to her bed.”

  “Well, it’s not there now. Do you know a man named Ian Pilozor?”

  “No.”

  “Didn’t know that Jan Pilozor was the real name of the man who called himself Pierre Laurence?”

  “No, really? I hadn’t any idea he was using a pseudonym.”

  “Mrs. Dunne knew it,” Kilkenny said. “She had a private detective agency in Paris dig up the dirt on your friend. The agency sent her a copy of Mr. Laurence’s casier judiciaire—that’s French for police record. Very interesting. She had it hidden away in one of those secret drawers that women like to have built into their furniture for hiding jewelry—and which burglars always find first thing. Even my boys found it.”

  Roger Dunne gave a short laugh that had nothing to do with amusement. He stared at the detective with unbelieving eyes.

  “That’s fantastic,” he said.

  “It would be even more fantastic,” the detective added, “if Mrs. Dunne told this fellow Laurence that he was seeing too much of this rich young Frye girl, and that he had better not get too involved with her unless he wanted people to know that he had learned his French in the Santé prison, instead of the Comédie Française. That might have started quite a lively little quarrel. And if that little Belgian gun was handy, and it just happened to go off—”

  “No, no! That’s impossible!” Dunne protested. “Whatever Penelope’s faults, she’s not—At least I find it hard to believe that she would—”

  He stopped, unable to bring himself to pronounce the words of accusation.

  “Maybe not,” said Detective Kilkenny. “All I know, is that I still haven’t been able to make her story fit with the elevator boy’s. The elevator boy says he brought up Pierre Laurence five minutes before Mrs. Dunne went down. Mrs. Dunne says he wasn’t there when she left. Either the elevator boy is mistaken or Mrs. Dunne is lying. I still don’t know which. Well, don’t forget to drop by and leave a sample of your blood, Mr. Dunne.”

  Kilkenny and Barney went out. Beyond the office door Miss Morse stood in a pose that seemed to have been hurriedly assumed to forestall any thought that she might have been eavesdropping. The detective winked at her solemnly. She stuck her tongue out at him.

  “A very provocative number,” Detective Kilkenny commented to Barney as they made their way between the owls and dolls and other glass-eyed examples of the Dunne Studios’ handiwork.

  As he rang for the elevator, Kilkenny made another note on the back of his envelope.

  XVIII

  AS THEY WENT DOWN in the elevator, Kilkenny asked Barney, “Did any of that you just heard recall something you haven’t told me yet—something that might fit in with the other pieces of the puzzle?”

  “It looks more complicated than ever to me.”

  “Hang on a minute, will you, while I phone the boss.” The detective went into a phone booth. When he came out, he said, “Look, the main reason I brought you along this morning is to meet Doctor Rosenkohl. He’s your sponsor, sort of, since he knows your father. I thought you might be able to spot some scientific angle on this that I’d miss, but that talking to Rosie would bring out. But we’re not going right to Bellevue. The lieutenant wants me to hop over to the fourteenth precinct station first. They got a guy over there that sounds like he might belong to our case. Mind coming along?”

  “Not at all,” Barney said.

  A few moments later they were climbing the stairs in the West Thirtieth Street police station. They were piloted into a room where three detectives were questioning a white-haired old man with a hawklike profile and a Second Avenue accent.

  “Start the story over again, Mr. Bloom,” one of the detectives said. “These people want to hear the beginning.”

  “Sure,” said the old man. “Look. It’s on account of this I come.” He unfolded a newspaper and showed a picture of Tony Grove, captioned: Sought by Police.

  “You know where he is?” Kilkenny asked eagerly.

  “No.” The old man shook his head vigorously. “Not now. I seen him night before last. He came to my shop—”

  “What shop?”

  “I’m in the fur business. Undressed furs. Thirty-five years I been in business in New York, and I ain’t had trouble with the police for twenty. So when I see this fella’s picture in the newspaper, I came right over to tell what I know. Last night—”

  “Start at the beginning. You said night before last.”

  “Well, at the beginning, it’s three weeks ago,” said Mr. Bloom. “Three weeks ago this fella, what’s his name? Grove. This fella Grove comes in my shop and opens a suitcase. He’s got half a dozen platinum foxes, all fine skins. ‘How much these are worth?’ he asks.

  “I look at the skins, all A-number-one furs, with the Platina-Norway seal on every one. Genuine. Well, I know the most of these foxes we ever get in this country is four hundred a year. That’s for the whole country. A fella on Fifth Avenue pays ten thousand dollars for a skin, according to the papers, but that’s just publicity. Friend of mine went to the auction and bid in all we wanted at fifteen hundred dollars a skin. I says to him, ‘It’s kinda late in the season, and the furs ain’t even made up. I’ll give you five, six hundred dollars a skin.’ ‘Make it seven and take the lot,’ he says. To make a long story short, I offer him
four thousand for the six and he accepts—”

  “Where did he say he got the furs?” Kilkenny interrupted.

  “Wait, don’t rush me. I’m coming to that,” Mr. Bloom said. “When he accepts four thousand and I’m all ready to pay six, maybe seven, I get suspicious. After all, platinum foxes don’t grow on trees, and I’m wondering why he is selling so cheap. I ask him. He says he’s in the shipping business and a sailor off a Norwegian ship brings him these furs. He says the sailor smuggled out quite a few and he thinks he can get some more if there is a market. I says, ‘Sure, bring.’”

  “What name did he give you, Mr. Bloom?” Kilkenny asked.

  “I don’t remember already,” the old man said. “Some name but nothing like Grove. Anyhow. Maybe ten days later I finish up a couple of skins and give them to a jobber on consignment. Right away my place is full of private detectives. Questions, questions—for hours. Where did I get the platinum foxes? What did I mean by handling stolen goods? I tell them I don’t know anything about stolen goods. They say, ‘Sure, the platinum foxes are part of the hundred skins stolen from Henry Frye, the big fur importer.’ I say, ‘Do I look like a schlemiel? Do you expect me to believe that a fella loses for one hundred and fifty thousand dollars of furs and keeps it a secret? If Frye is robbed for a hundred platinum foxes, why don’t I read about it in the Fur Buyers’ Guide or some of the trade papers? Why does Frye go to a private detective agency instead of the police? And, anyhow, I read all about the platinum-fox auctions, and Frye didn’t buy no hundred skins; he bought maybe twenty-thirty.’ One detective says, ‘Never mind the schmoos. We say the skins got stolen from Frye, so they are stolen from Frye, and we are going to get them all back.’

  “So every day one of these detectives come in and hangs around my place, and I am scared to death this fella Grove will come back while they are there, and I will get in trouble. Lucky for me, nobody is there when Grove finally shows up. Night before last, that’s Thursday, I am just closing up the shop, when Grove comes in with a suitcase. He says, ‘I got six more of them platinum foxes from that Norwegian sailor.’ I know I don’t want to get mixed up with this fella, so the best way to make him stay away from me is to give him a good schreck.”

  “A good what?” Barney demanded.

  “A good scare,” Kilkenny explained. “It’s easy to see you’re not a New Yorker; you don’t speak the language. Go ahead, Mr. Bloom.”

  “Sure. So to give him a good schreck, I say, ‘Fergossakes don’t open that suitcase in here. Your sailor friend lies to you. He steals those skins. Because ever since I got them skins in my shop, I am having detectives in here thicker than flies in a delicatessen in summer.’ This fella gets white like a sheet. ‘Detectives?’ he says. ‘In here?’ ‘All day long,’ I tell him. Then, to give him an A-number-one scare, I say, ‘One just went by since you came in just now. I seen him writing down the number of that automobile out in front. That ain’t your car, is it—that blue Buick coupé?’ Well, I tell you, I never seen a fella look so scared. He gets even whiter, white like two sheets. He’s too scared to look around, even. He says, ‘Is he still there by the car, that detective?’ I say, ‘No, he’s gone now.’

  “I don’t even have time to finish saying it, when this fella Grove is gone, too. He takes his suitcase, jumps in his car, and runs right through a traffic light at the corner, he’s in such a hurry. I say to myself, ‘Good riddance.’

  “But when I see this picture in the paper this morning, I start worrying again. I say to myself, ‘Moe, you’re going to get in trouble again with this fella. Better go right to the police station with the whole story.’ Believe me, gentlemen, I ain’t been in trouble for over ten years now. I been straight like a dime. Honest. I ain’t had nothing to do with this fella Grove except that first time he come in. I didn’t know he was maybe a murderer. I didn’t—”

  “That’s all right, Mr. Bloom.” Detective Kilkenny interrupted, before the old man broke into tears. “We aren’t even sure he’s a murderer; that’s just newspaper talk. And we’re thankful to you for coming in with your story. If we need you again, we’ll call you. We probably will. Soon.”

  XIX

  “HOW’S YOUR STOMACH?” Detective Kilkenny asked Barney as the car rolled through the depressing dinginess of the streets that crawled toward the sparkling splendor of the East River and the red brick glory of Bellevue’s new pavilions.

  “Fine,” said Barney. “No gastritis, no peptic ulcers, no hypertrophic stenosis. How’s yours?”

  “I mean, you don’t suffer from butterflies or morning sickness or anything?” the detective amplified. “Sometimes we have to put out smelling-salts for the rookie cops when they take a first gander at the scientific processes of homicide investigation.”

  “I can take it,” Barney said. “I’ve worked in pathology labs before.”

  Kilkenny grunted his approval. He squinted into the sun which had risen high above the jungle of factory chimneys on Long Island, beyond the row of cheap undertakers that lined the Twenty-Ninth Street approach to the city mortuary. Driving through the impressive gateway, he parked his car in front of the gloomy building and guided Barney between the great spiked funereal lanterns that flanked the entrance.

  “We’re late,” he said. “We won’t stop at the medical examiner’s office. The pathology laboratory is on the second floor.”

  In the impersonal, white-tiled vastness of the main laboratory hall, half a dozen cadavers lay on metal autopsy tables, waiting with naked resignation for the examiner’s knife to lay bare the cause of their death. Barney followed the detective past the pathetic ranks to find Dr. Rosenkohl in a small room adjoining. The doctor was honing a long steel blade to a razor edge.

  “Hello, Kenny,” the doctor said. “I thought you weren’t coming. I was just going to start without you. Anything wrong?”

  “A few things,” Kilkenny replied. “Meet Barney Weaver. He isn’t one of them.”

  “Glad to know you,” said Dr. Rosenkohl. “I’m an admirer of your father. He’s done great work in blood chemistry. I hear you’re a biochemist yourself.”

  “That’s why I brought him along,” Kilkenny said. “I thought maybe he could give us some trick scientific angle, knowing the principals in this case.”

  “Sure, we’ll take him upstairs later. You said something was wrong, Kenny. What?”

  “This, for instance.” The detective walked around the slab on which the nude corpse of Pierre Laurence was stretched. He indicated the identification tag propped between the waxen toes of one dead foot. “The guy’s name is not really Laurence; it’s Jan Pilozor.”

  “Who made the identification?” Dr. Rosenkohl asked, squinting along the edge of his knife.

  “The F.B.I.,” Kilkenny said. “We got the report back this morning. The French Sûreté sent a copy of his prints to Washington quite a while ago, because he was supposed to have a brother in America somewhere, and Paris thought he might show up here sometime.”

  “So he really was French?” said Dr. Rosenkohl. His knife was describing a long, straight, sure stroke that bisected Pierre Laurence’s navel longitudinally. Two deft lateral strokes, and his rubber-gloved hands were folding back yellow layers of fat.

  “French my eye!” said Kilkenny. “The French cops say he was born in Constantinople of a Bulgarian mother and a father who was too modest to step forward and settle the question of nationality. He was arrested in Paris for disposing of stolen goods. He played the same society game he played here, got into the company of rich women, and sold them stolen sable coats that he pretended were smuggled. Funny, the fascination that smuggled goods have for women. To them, smuggling ain’t a crime; it’s an art. They don’t even know if there’s any customs duty on the furs in the first place.”

  Barney was watching Dr. Rosenkohl’s skillful hands detach the sternum with a final careful twist, laying open the thorax. Ever since his undergraduate days when he had conquered the sick horror of watching his first auto
psy, Barney had been doubly fascinated by the opening of a dead body. He never ceased to marvel at the morbid beauty, the blue-gray labyrinthine symmetry of the human viscera when the silken veil of the peritoneum is first drawn aside. And he was in constant admiration of the skill of a good autopsy surgeon. He even thought he could distinguish between a good autopsy and a bad one. Rosie, here, for instance, had not only manual dexterity, but he had plan, knowledge, and foresight. Every move he made was in relation to the whole problem, whereas some young autopsists seemed to dip into the abdominal cavity at random, like reaching into a grab bag. Even a biochemist or a policeman could learn anatomy, just by watching the way Dr. Rosenkohl separated the heart from its complex envelope of membrane, muscle, and blood vessels.

  “Here’s your bullet, Kenny,” the doctor said. “It’s a little bit of a fellow.”

  “Probably twenty-five-caliber,” the detective said, reaching.

  “You found the gun, then?”

  “No, but Mrs. Dunne has a pistol permit for a twenty-five-caliber Belgian F.N.”

  “You still think Mrs. Dunne shot him?”

  “I can’t prove it yet. And if she did, I don’t think it was because of the obvious reason, because he jilted her. She’d gone to the trouble of having a Paris detective agency dig up the dirt on the guy, and since he apparently sneaked into the country illegally, she could have had him deported. I got a hunch she threatened him with just that, and that he came over and threatened to kill her, and she shot him in self-defense. That bloody handkerchief we found beside the body—it belongs to Mrs. Dunne. We found others like it in her dresser. The thread counts are identical under the microscope.”

  “We may be able to prove that she’s not the one who dropped it,” Dr. Rosenkohl said.

  “How are you going to prove that? You wouldn’t let the boys nitrate it for latent prints.”

  “Just wait. The handkerchief is upstairs in serology now. You’ve made arrangements to get blood samples from all your suspects, haven’t you?”