“Julia Frye says it was Pierre Laurence who made that call,” Barney said.
“Then why ask me?”
“Because I can’t be sure Julia isn’t lying. Everybody seems to be lying today, or nearly everybody. Henry Frye wants the police to think that maybe he’s the murderer. Kilkenny thinks it might be Tom Norfolk, although he’s got enough evidence on Penelope Dunne to convince a couple of juries.”
“Know what I think, Barney?” Vivian drew up her knees under the sheets. Her eyes were only half open as she turned them to Barney, but they were aglow with a warmth that came from deep down inside.
“What do you think?” Barney asked.
“That you’re a very swell person and that I ought to be spanked for not appreciating the fact.”
“Nonsense,” Barney said. “You’ve got a career.”
“Don’t rub it in, darling.”
“You have a career,” Barney repeated. “All this publicity has made you famous. Several art editors have wired you in care of the police. The papers say that the police are shielding you, in case you don’t know. Kilkenny opened the wires, of course. He wouldn’t give them to me, but he let me read them. One was from Checkerman, asking you to bring him a portfolio of your work first chance you get. Another was from the art editor of Colliers, suggesting you give him another look at the stuff you showed him a few weeks ago. Somebody else called Pen’s apartment wondering if you wouldn’t illustrate your own story of the Riverside Drive murder for some newspaper syndicate. You’re made, pal. All you have to do to be a successful illustrator is to draw nice pictures and then get pushed under a subway train.”
Vivian sat up in bed. “Maybe I’d better go right up and see some of these people,” she said.
Barney pushed her back on the pillow. “Nothing doing,” he said. “You’re not moving from this room. Kilkenny’s orders.”
“But why, Barney?”
“Tony,” Barney said.
“Oh.” Vivian closed her eyes. A slight tremor ran through her body. “Then what should I do?”
“Keep thinking of anything that might have made somebody want you to be run over in the subway. Keep thinking until I come back this afternoon. I’m going back to the serology lab in the meantime.”
“And you’re not going to spank me before you go?”
“No.”
“At least there’s one thing you must do before you leave,” Vivian said, tilting her face toward him. “That night nurse might be on duty again by the time you get back.”
Barney did it.
XXIV
DETECTIVE KENNETH KILKENNY spent a rather uncomfortable afternoon. He had eaten a hurried lunch with Dr. Rosenkohl, after all, which was partly responsible for his discomfort. In the first place, he was having difficulty digesting the hot pastrami sandwich on rye (with dill pickle) which he had consumed on Second Avenue. In the second place, he was having just as much trouble digesting the confused olla-podrida of clues and conflicting facts which was supposed to produce the murderer of Pierre Laurence, and, very likely, of Boris Pilozor. At one moment all of his suspects seemed equally guilty, at the next he was certain none of them could have done it. Having gone into a drugstore for some bicarbonate of soda, he decided to stop working backward from his suspects and to work forward from the victims. It was a dreary prospect of checking routine clues, but it would give his subconscious (and his gastric juices) a chance to cope with the disorder within him.
He spent a few hours at the Central Park South apartment of the late Jan Pilozor, alias Pierre Laurence. Kilkenny’s colleagues had already swarmed over the place like a flock of starlings, but, like a hopeful robin, he pecked about in search of something they might have overlooked. He methodically went through drawers, examined lists of telephone numbers, prodded sofa cushions, read cryptic notes on paper matchbooks, tried to analyze the heavy musky scent clinging to the silk dressing-gown in the closet. When he found nothing that seemed important, he gave up and drove to Brooklyn.
In a quiet, tree-lined street not far from Brooklyn Heights and the harbor, he parked in front of the rooming-house in which the late Boris Pilozor had lived. Here, too, he had been preceded. There had been a procession of detectives from the 18th precinct and headquarters and, just for good measure, a few homicide men from the 84th Brooklyn precinct. The Brooklyn men were still there when Kilkenny walked into the little room which had been the shipping clerk’s home.
The cubicle was not very illuminating at first. It was a typical furnished room, even to the yellow-varnished woodwork and the furnished-room smell. There was a built-in washstand in the corner with a dingy curtain to hide it, a few sticks of lesser Grand Rapids furniture, a worn grass rug. Kilkenny spent half an hour at the rickety desk, going through the papers he found there. He studied a price list from a direct-mail advertising firm, on which were ringed lists of addresses for 2700 manufacturing furriers, 280 fur dressers and dyers, 2000 raw-fur dealers. He glanced through the fur trade journals, trying to discover an item that would touch off a train of thought. Nothing.
In the closet two neatly pressed suits were hanging. They were good suits, made to order according to the tailor’s labels, much better suits than one might expect a shipping clerk to wear. Kilkenny carefully went through the pockets. He studied a tobacco pouch, some matches, a handkerchief, theater-ticket stubs, a pencil, a folded piece of yellow paper. He unfolded the yellow paper and saw that it was a subway map of the Interborough system, obviously torn from the front of the classified telephone directory. He was about to put the whole collection of trivia back in the pockets when he noted that something had been written on the margin of the map in pencil. He looked closer and noted that there was a circle penciled around the 110th Street station on the Broadway-Seventh Avenue line. The marginal notation read: Or No. 4 bus to 110th and Drive.
He carried the map to the desk and compared the penciled inscription with samples of the dead shipping clerk’s writing. They did not match. And yet there was something vaguely familiar about the script. Kilkenny was certain he had seen that hand before, and not very long ago, either. This afternoon, as a matter of fact. Of course. It was the writing of the clerk’s brother Jan, alias Pierre Laurence! And the subway station was the one nearest Penelope Dunne’s apartment house.
A great light suddenly burst upon Detective Kilkenny. He began swearing aloud—juicy, picturesque epithets, all directed against himself. And you call yourself a detective, Kilkenny. You ought to be walking a beat in Staten Island somewhere. You ought to have yourself thoroughly kicked on both cheeks for being as blind as a bat. Or deaf. You ought to have figured it all out this morning, when you saw the dead man wheeled into the pathology lab. You ought to have heard the phrases still echoing in your mind’s ears. “Fellow name of Redman—Old fellow, sort of, with a beard—”
In an instant Kilkenny was leaping down the stairs. There was a phone booth just inside the street door, and the detective stepped inside and called the West 100th Street station in Manhattan. While waiting for the answer, he made a note of the phone number of the booth. Rubicon 9-4475.
“Hello, Lieutenant,” he said. “Listen, send a car right over to three sixty-nine Riverside Drive, will you, and pick up the superintendent? His name is Wurtzburg or Wurtzel or something like that. That’s it. Wurtzel. You talked to him last night. Yes, and rush him right down to four hundred East Twenty-Ninth Street. Sure, the morgue. I’ll meet you there. No, it’s nobody new. I just want the super to have a look at Mr. Boris Pilozor. I’m at his place in Brooklyn. Rubicon nine—four four seven five. Right away, Lieutenant.”
Dusk was deepening when Kilkenny drove back across the East River, through the giant steel spider webs of Brooklyn Bridge, toward the dark, star-pierced towers which Lower Manhattan thrust against the indigo sky. His car rolled down into the twinkling gullies between the skyscrapers, joined battle with the rush-hour traffic. The soles of his feet grew hot against the pedals, the roof of his mouth grew dry from sweari
ng at trucks and taxi drivers, as he fought his way up the East Side. When he pulled up in front of the city mortuary, the gloomy pile seemed gloomier than ever, but its forbidding façade was no gloomier than Mr. Wurtzel, superintendent of 369 Riverside Drive, who was already there with a man from the West 100th Street station.
“You really want me to go inside with you here, Officer?” Mr. Wurtzel said, when Kilkenny arrived.
“You said it,” replied the detective.
Mr. Wurtzel’s patellar reflex disappeared as he walked up the steps. His knees flexed, and his feet kicked out helplessly as though he were suffering from beri-beri. As he passed through the main portals, he seemed to shrink before the peculiar effluvia of dinginess and dismal depression. His face was green, and he held back.
“This ain’t going to do any good,” the super said. “I don’t even know this fella. You ought to get somebody who knows him to go in there.”
“You’re the only man in New York who can tell me what I want to know about Boris Pilozor,” Kilkenny said.
“I’d rather not go in,” Wurtzel said. “I ain’t scared or anything, but this gives me a funny feeling, just the idea. I—”
“He won’t bite you,” Kilkenny said. “He’s pretty dead.”
“I know. But—”
“Come on,” said Kilkenny, taking his arm.
The barren neatness of the rows of mortuary lockers reduced the superintendent to cheerless silence. An attendant opened one of the refrigerated compartments. An icy breath flowed into the room. Kilkenny released Wurtzel’s arm long enough to pull out the slab. Wurtzel swallowed audibly.
“Well?” said Kilkenny.
Wurtzel forced himself to look down at the gray, bearded face of Boris Pilozor. He swallowed again.
“That’s him, all right,” he managed to say. “That’s the fella said he was Redman, and rented fourteen-B. He paid three months in advance. That’s him.”
“That’s all I want to know,” the detective said. “Now let’s go up and have a look in that apartment he rented. I should have had you unlock it for me yesterday.”
Kilkenny didn’t know what he expected to find in 14-B, but it would probably illuminate the whole case, whatever it was. He should have looked in yesterday, all right, but it was typical of New York that he did not. The New Yorker has no concern for the apartment next door. The next-door neighbor might just as well be in Kamchatka, for all the interest he arouses. And when the fingerprint and moulage men reported that no one had come into the Dunne apartment via the iron grille that separated the balconies, Kilkenny had not even considered that the door and the hallway were also means of communication between apartments.
In the lobby of the apartment house they passed Matsuki, going out to walk Mrs. Dunne’s Pekes. He smiled toothily and doffed his hat to the detective as Kilkenny got into the elevator with Wurtzel.
The superintendent opened 14-B with his passkey. Kilkenny groped along the wall and snapped the electric switch several times. There was no light—only an odor of dust and stale air.
“I guess there’s no bulbs,” said Wurtzel. “I’ll lend you my flashlight.”
“I got my own,” the detective said.
“I’ll look in the kitchen. I think the painters left an old bulb in the kitchen,” Wurtzel said.
Kilkenny’s pocket lamp sent a beam swinging through the vacant apartment, picking out curtainless windows, radiators standing forlornly isolated on the bare, dusty floors, scraps of purplish flooring paper scattered here and there, a tattered window shade hanging precariously from one roller. In the corner the light beam located two trunks and a packing-case. The detective immediately made for the corner, set his light on the packing-case so it shone on the trunks, squatted on his haunches, and got to work.
He was surprised to find that the locks of the two trunks had been forced and broken. There were marks of some metal lever scarring the fiber finish, and the brass of the lock itself was twisted and bent. He had no trouble lifting the lids.
He extended his hand into the first trunk he opened, and was not surprised to feel his hand sink into something yielding and fuzzy. His fingers closed about a handful of long, sleek hairs, and he pulled. The luxuriant pelt of a platina fox came to view. He knew it was a platina fox because it had the same smoky veil of longer darker hairs over the pearl-white under fur, the same dark streak along the back, the same blaze of white across the neck and snout as he had noted on the pelts brought in the night before. It had, too, the lead seal of the Norwegian fox breeders’ association fastened to the head.
Kilkenny bent over the trunk, somewhat awed by the sight of so much luxurious, furry wealth. Most of the hundred platina fox pelts stolen from Henry Frye must be here in these trunks and the case—nearly $150,000 worth, less the few that Tony Grove had tried to liquidate.
Damned clever idea of the Pilozor brothers to rent this vacant apartment as a cache for their loot. Brother Jan—alias Pierre Laurence—would have easy access to it at almost any time, with little chance of anyone knowing he had even visited it. Known as a frequent visitor to Penelope Dunne’s, he could take the elevator to the fourteenth floor, collect a few furs for immediate needs, and let the elevator boy assume he had been visiting Pen. As far as the world and Mr. Wurtzel was concerned, nobody had been inside of Apartment 14-B since “Mr. Redman” leased it. That meant, of course, that Brother Boris had kept out of sight since his original appearance.
Still, some third party obviously knew the secret—someone, probably, who had killed both men. Tony Grove, too, knew of the fur cache, since he had been disposing of some of the pelts. Perhaps Tony Grove was the third party, after all, as Barney Weaver insisted. It began to look that way. It looked as if—
A muffled howl interrupted the detective’s musings—a brief, spasmodic cry, hoarse with terror. He straightened up, reaching for his gun, and his elbow knocked the flashlight from the packing-case. The light rolled, hit the floor, went out. In the darkness Kilkenny heard frantic feet pounding over the bare floor, heard convulsive gasps coming toward him.
He held his gun in one hand, groped for the flashlight with the other. Something kicked him. He flung out his arms, tackled a flying leg. A heavy body hit the floor with a thump and a grunt. He scrambled astride the prostrate form, sat with no appreciable gentleness.
“Ow!” gasped a voice. “Don’t, Officer, please! It’s me! It’s Wurtzel, the super.”
“What’s the idea, galloping around in the dark like Paul Revere?” Kilkenny demanded. “Where’s your light?”
“I dropped it! There’s a man in there.”
“A man in where?” Kilkenny was groping for his flashlight.
“In there. In the kitchen.”
The detective found the flashlight, snapped it on. He shone the beam down the hallway, then into the superintendent’s face.
“Who was it?”
“I don’t know.”
“What did he do to scare the hell out of you like this?” Kilkenny asked, again flinging the lance of light into the hallway.
“He didn’t scare me. Startled me, that’s all. I didn’t see him until I almost touched him.”
Kilkenny finally understood. He handed Wurtzel the light, cocked his gun.
“Here, hold this,” he said. “Lead the way to the kitchen. And don’t drop the light this time.”
Their footsteps echoed from the bare walls as they walked down the hall, across the vacant dining-room. The swinging door creaked as they pushed into the pantry. At the entrance to the kitchen, Wurtzel stopped, held the light at arm’s length to shine it through the door.
“In there,” he said.
Cautiously Kilkenny took a few steps across the threshold, stopped, stared. Then he put away his gun.
The man was kneeling in front of the gas stove. He was slumped forward, his head in the oven.
The detective reached behind him, took the flashlight from Wurtzel’s hand, walked quickly to the stove. He bent over the man’s
shoulder, trying to get a look at the face. As he touched him, the man toppled over, made a horrid, lifeless plop as he struck the floor, where he lay stiffly in the same stooped position. He must have been dead some time. Rigor mortis was complete.
Kilkenny had never seen the dead man before, and as the face was livid and swollen, it was several seconds before he realized that he had seen his photograph. Even the superintendent did not recognize the distorted features at once. It was not until the detective prompted him with “Tenant of yours, ain’t it?” that he exclaimed, “Why, it’s Mr. Grove! But how could he commit suicide by sticking his head in that oven? The gas hasn’t been turned on in this apartment since last July.”
“Grove didn’t commit suicide,” the detective said. “He’s got rags stuffed in his mouth. He was strangled, unless—Hello, what’s this?” He bent over the corpse, intent on a gleam of metal protruding from the dead man’s pocket. With the tip of a pencil, he lifted the pocket flap open so he could see better. “Unless I miss my guess,” he said, “that is the twenty-five-caliber Belgian F.N. that shot Pierre Laurence.”
XXV
IT WAS SEVERAL HOURS after Barney had left that Vivian Sanderson’s recollections began to assume a useful and orderly pattern. Vivian was not really surprised, because no girl could be expected to think straight in a borrowed negligee, and contact with the subway tracks had done for the dress she wore when she came to the hospital. A student nurse volunteered to go to Vivian’s apartment for a fresh wardrobe, but the afternoon was well advanced before she could get away.
The student nurse could not know, of course, that a girl reporter from the Journal-American had been practically camping on the doorstep of Vivian’s apartment since early morning. The girl reporter knew that any woman, even a woman being hidden by the police, would sooner or later send for her own things, so she waited until someone came out of Vivian’s apartment with a package or an overnight bag. The reporter followed the student nurse back to the hospital, but since she did not succeed in crashing the barriers to Vivian’s room, Vivian had no way of knowing that her hiding-place had been discovered.
See You at the Morgue Page 17