After getting into her own clothes, Vivian read the afternoon papers which were greatly concerned over the latest developments in the Riverside Drive murder case. The revelation that Pierre Laurence was born Jan Pilozor and had a police record in Europe shared the headlines with the strangling of brother Boris in the alley behind the Henry Frye Co. The questioning of Henry Frye himself was viewed through police eyes—which squinted skeptically. Vivian read and reread every account of every angle of the case. On her third reading of the story of the murder of Boris Pilozor and his supposed connection with the theft of the smuggled furs, something stirred in her subconscious. She wondered if something about the sequence of events didn’t suggest a reason for the attempt upon her own life the night before.
She got the Manhattan telephone directory and looked up the Henry Frye Co. The number was Vanderbilt 6-4065. It didn’t mean anything to her—and yet it did arouse a vague, uneasy sense of familiarity that she could not analyze. She took a pencil and wrote down the number in several ways, in an effort to prod her memory. She wrote it as she would dial it. V A 6-4065. She recited it aloud. She counted it on her fingers. Then something seemed to click in her brain. Van-der-bilt—
Excitedly she went to the telephone beside the bed. First she wrote down the black letters that appeared above the red figures in each dial opening she would use in dialing VA 6-4065. Then she wrote them down in a column, one above the other.
T U V
ABC
M N O
G H I
Z
M N O
J K L
She started drawing lines down through the column, straight lines, diagonals, wavy, zigzag lines. After each line, she stopped to study the resulting combination of letters it connected. Then she picked up the telephone and called the West 100th Street police station.
“Kilkenny’s not here,” the desk sergeant said. “Any message?”
“It’s very urgent,” Vivian declared. “This is Vivian Sanderson. I think I’ve found out something terribly important about the Laurence murder. I simply must talk to Mr. Kilkenny.”
There was a pause; then another voice came on the wire to say, “Detective Kilkenny is in Brooklyn. He called a little while ago from the house where that fellow Pilozor lived. You might still catch him there. The number is Rubicon nine—four four seven five. If you don’t get him, call here later.”
“Thank you,” Vivian said. She wrote down the number, RU 9-4475. She glanced at the dial. Yes, that might be it.
She tried the number. Detective Kilkenny had just left.
If only she could be sure. She wished she could get hold of Barney, but he had left no indications as to where he might be. And there was no time to lose now.
She found a piece of note paper, scrawled a note for the head floor nurse.
If either Mr. Kilkenny or Mr. Weaver calls me, tell them I’ve gone to the office at Overlook Arms. They’ll know where. Tell them I’ve gone over in a hurry, because I had to look up something very important and urgent.
She got up, pinned the paper to her pillow, jammed a tiny hat on her red head, twisted her fur scarf around her neck.
Cautiously she pushed the door open a crack, looked down the corridor. She saw the head nurse talking to an intern. Both had their backs turned to her. She slipped out the door, tiptoed down the hall in the opposite direction.
At a jog in the corridor, she looked behind her. The nurse was still talking. She drew a deep breath, turned the corner, hurried toward a small red light burning above the entrance to the emergency stairway.
As she dashed down the steps, she prayed she would not run into any nurse or intern or doctor who might recognize her.
XXVI
DETECTIVE KENNETH KILKENNY went across the hall to use Penelope Dunne’s telephone. He notified the medical examiner’s office, and called his base of operations for the usual crew of photographers, laboratory technicians, and print men. He did not tell Mrs. Dunne that her brother’s parole had come to an abrupt and unsightly end in the apartment across the hall, because Mrs. Dunne was taking a bath. She had had such a busy day, trying to straighten up the apartment after the mess the police had made, that she was exhausted, Kilkenny learned through a closed door. He thought he would let her finish her ablutions before breaking the news.
While waiting for reinforcements to arrive, the detective examined the layout of Apartment 14-B. He discovered that the front bedroom window, the one opening on the balcony that ran over to the Dunne apartment, had been forced from the outside but had been locked again from the inside—as well as the damaged fastener would lock it. It was not a recent job, for the marks of the jimmy on the frame already showed signs of weather. There might be prints on the handle of the catch.
One other thing that impressed the detective during his examination was the fact that the rear entrance to the apartment opened on the service stairway and the little hall that led to the service elevator. Across the hall was the service door of Penelope Dunne’s apartment, with the garbage can beside it. There was a superimposed spring lock on the service door of the vacant apartment, and the latch was set in the unlocked position—with the tongue of the lock withdrawn. This must have been done by someone inside the apartment, for while the spring lock could be opened with a key from the outside, the latch could not be set in the unlocked position from outside. It seemed hardly likely that the man who strangled Tony Grove would have left the door unlatched, as it would be to his advantage to make the corpus delicti, already protected by the fact that the apartment was vacant, as inaccessible as possible. It was just as unlikely that the persons involved in the theft of the platina fox furs would leave a door open upon either the evidence of their guilt or their fortune in stolen goods. Besides, the Pilozor brothers had keys to the front door, through a legitimate lease of the apartment, and the whole ingenuity of their plan would lie in Pierre Laurence’s unsuspicious access to the front door. Who, therefore, would have unlatched the service door? A pattern of the explanation was beginning to form in Kilkenny’s mind when he heard voices in front. He went to investigate and found the superintendent in important conversation with Haruzo Matsuki of the Riverside Canine Caterers & Dog Walkers, who had evidently just returned from airing Penelope Dunne’s Pekinese.
“You better stick around, boy,” the superintendent was saying confidentially. “There’s been another murder and they’ll want to question you again, so you’ll save time by not running off now.”
“Moh mahdah?” the Japanese boy exclaimed.
“Yep. It’s Mr. Anthony Grove this time. Somebody strangled him till he’s purple in the face. I found the body myself.”
“Hello, Matsuki,” Kilkenny interrupted. “Did you ever see Mr. Grove coming out of this apartment over here?”
Matsuki engaged in a moment of sibilant reflection. He cocked his head to one side like a robin eying a worm.
The arrival of the crew from police headquarters saved him from further cogitation.
“Hi, Lieutenant,” Kilkenny said. “Hi, Rosie. You on a twenty-four shift now? Or are you the only doc working in the medical examiner’s office these days?”
“I was just going home,” said Dr. Rosenkohl, “when the call came in. I thought I’d better stand by and take care of all the cadavers in this particular series. You going to turn up many more of ’em, Kenny?”
“Hard to say,” the detective replied, as they walked through the vacant apartment toward the kitchen, where a light now burned. The superintendent had found some bulbs. “Tell me this first. Has this bird been dead twenty-four hours?”
“Just about,” said Dr. Rosenkohl after a moment.
“Then he wasn’t killed much after Pierre Laurence was?”
“About the same time, I’d say. Of course we can’t time those things to the split second, you know.”
“Then I can’t figure how the hell Grove’s car could disappear after he was dead.” Kilkenny shook his head.
“Say, I
forgot to tell you about Grove’s car,” the lieutenant said. “It turned up. The stolen-auto boys have it. They spotted it yesterday, standing all day in front of Weaver’s place without license plates, so after inquiring around the neighborhood without results, they jacked it up and hauled it in. They checked back through the engine number to find out it was Grove’s car, but that took a little time. They just let me know a little while ago.”
“Well then, I think I’m all clear on the death of Mr. Anthony Grove,” said Kilkenny. “It was an accident.”
“Accident, hell!” said the lieutenant. “How can a man strangle himself accidentally unless he sticks his head in a noose and accidentally steps off a chair. Accident!”
“Well, maybe not exactly an accident,” Kilkenny explained, “because it was Grove’s own crooked character that got him into this. But he wasn’t a regular partner in this stolen-fur deal.”
“Why wasn’t he?”
“Frye’s platina foxes are in the back room there,” Kilkenny said. “Frye’s shipping clerk leased this apartment just to hide them in—Boris Pilozor, alias Redman—where brother Jan Pilozor, alias Pierre Laurence, could come and get a few skins as needed, and everybody thinking he was just paying a call on Mrs. Dunne across the hall. But Tony Grove wasn’t in on the deal.”
“The hell he wasn’t!” the lieutenant said. “He tried to sell some of the skins, didn’t he?”
“That’s just the point. Boris Pilozor, working for Frye, must have known that Frye was looking for the stolen goods to turn up. He’d have more sense than to try to dispose of such easily recognized furs right in the New York market. Grove didn’t have any such ideas—at first. That furrier Bloom this morning even said Grove had no idea of how much the pelts were actually worth.”
“Where’d he get the pelts, then?”
“That’s what I’m coming to. Suppose Grove sees Pierre Laurence one day coming out of this apartment, that’s theoretically vacant. Or going in. He’d be curious, wouldn’t he? But, being a crook at heart, he’d be more than just curious. He’d investigate. And he did. I think he climbed over the iron grille on the balcony late one night—”
“The boys didn’t find any fingerprints on the ironwork or footprints on the balcony,” the lieutenant said. “That’s why we never thought of this apartment before.”
“That’s because Grove did his climbing more than three weeks ago,” Kilkenny said. “It’s rained since—Plenty. And Grove only needed that balcony once. He forced the window—you may find some prints on the handle that he used to close it with afterward. When he found out what was in here, he set the catch to keep the kitchen door unlocked, so he could come and go pretty much as he pleased.
“All right. Now here’s the story. I’ve put it together from pieces I got from Barney Weaver and the Sanderson girl and Mrs. Dunne and Bloom and the Frye girl and stuff I’ve found myself. All right. Grove stumbles on these furs in a vacant apartment and helps himself to a few, just to see if they’re worth anything. They’re worth four grand from Mr. Bloom. Not bad for a suitcase full of skins. He waits awhile, spends the money, and nothing happens. He takes another suitcaseful to Mr. Bloom, and Bloom scares hell out of him. Says there was a dick writing down the number of his car; remember, Lieutenant? That was Thursday night.
“All right. Grove is plenty scared. He knows he’ll go back to jail if he’s caught with stolen furs, because he’s still on parole. He takes the license plates off his car, puts them in the suitcase with the furs, checks them in one of those self-checking lockers in Times Square subway station, and then runs to Barney Weaver. He tells Weaver that somebody stole the plates off his car to frame him. That’s an alibi, so if Bloom was telling the truth and somebody really was copying down the number off his car in front of Bloom’s place, he’ll swear that it was somebody else using his plates. And he’s so scared, Weaver says, that he gets jittery when he sees a police car, and runs like a jack rabbit when a truck backfires. He gets more scared next morning when he hears his sister talking about somebody who phoned that something was going to happen to the white-haired boy. He knows that Pierre Laurence used to call him the white-haired boy, and he knows, probably, that Laurence has something to do with the furs in the vacant apartment. So he sees himself menaced from both sides—the cops and Laurence. He sends for the phone-answering company’s slips to see who might know more about the message. He wires Barney Weaver to come and see him right away because he’s trying to get Weaver to drive him to the Middle West. He’s so scared that he hides in the maid’s room while he’s waiting, Weaver says. And while he’s waiting he hears the shot that kills Laurence.
“All right. When he thinks it’s safe to investigate, he sees a way he can clear himself of the fur business. He leaves the key to the checking locker next to the corpse, where Weaver found it. He thinks that when we find the furs, we’ll accuse the dead man both of the theft, and of using Grove’s license plates, since the plates are with the furs. He is just getting ready to make a neat, quiet getaway when his escape is cut off by people arriving. First Norfolk ringing the bell, then Vivian Sanderson, then Barney Weaver, and finally the Jap dog nurse. They all go except Weaver, so Grove decides he’ll clinch his innocence by framing Weaver for the murder. He calls the police—and Weaver socks him in the eye.
“When he comes to, he gets panicky again. Weaver is gone, he’s alone with a dead man, and the cops are on the way. It won’t look so good. So he sneaks out the back way, probably while we’re coming up the front elevator, crosses the service hall, and comes into this vacant apartment through the back door which he has left open for himself.” Detective Kilkenny paused significantly. He pushed his hat back from his face, shoved his hands into his pockets, and grinned triumphantly. “And then what, Lieutenant?” he demanded, with the air of a schoolteacher posing a problem in simple arithmetic.
The lieutenant frowned. “And then he’s strangled to death,” he said, looking at the body which Dr. Rosenkohl’s men were preparing to remove.
“Exactly,” said Kilkenny. “And doesn’t that mean anything to you, Lieutenant?”
“Sure,” the lieutenant replied. “It means that the murderer was waiting here for him. Because there was no time for anyone to come in afterward, since you yourself must have got here a few minutes after Grove telephoned, and the halls were full of the boys.”
“Exactly,” Kilkenny repeated. “The murderer was here waiting for him. The murderer was hiding here himself—after having shot Pierre Laurence. He still has the gun on him.”
“Why the devil would the murderer come here, instead of clearing out?”
“Well, I’m not much of a mind reader, Lieutenant, but this is the way it looks to me. To go down the back way he’d have to pass the maid’s room, where Tony Grove was hiding. Probably he heard something that let him know Tony—or somebody—was back there. When he tried the front hall, he could have seen by the indicator that the elevator was on the way up and under the circumstances I can see why he wouldn’t wait to see who would get out; the elevator, I guess you remember, was pretty busy about that time. All right, the quickest way for our guy to disappear is to step into the vacant apartment, which he does.
“Once he’s here, he hasn’t much chance to get out because there’s been a lot of traffic in the hallway outside. And now he’s trapped for fair. The police coming up in the elevator—he’s heard the sirens, unless he’s stone-deaf—and Tony Grove coming in the back way. He can’t shoot Tony, because we’ll hear the shot. And still he can’t leave his fate in Tony’s hands, because Tony is a rat. So he’s got to get rid of Tony Grove without any noise. He stuffs something in Tony’s mouth so he can’t yell, and he strangles him. As an afterthought, he sticks Tony’s head in the oven and the gun in Tony’s pocket, so maybe when we find Tony we’ll think Tony shot Laurence and then committed suicide. Does that mean anything to you, Lieutenant?”
“Sure,” the lieutenant said. “It means I got a pretty dumb bunch of detectives
working for me. While they’re investigating one murder, somebody commits another right across the hall from them, and they don’t even know it.”
“Maybe so,” Kilkenny said. “But it also means that if the murderer had a key to this apartment, the whole timetable of visitors that the elevator boy gave us is cockeyed. It means that both Mrs. Dunne and the elevator boy could be telling the truth, when they didn’t agree on what time Pierre Laurence came up yesterday. The boy says Laurence came up five minutes before Mrs. Dunne left. Mrs. Dunne says she didn’t see Laurence before she left. They’re probably both right. The boy was so sure of himself because Laurence asked him if Mrs. Dunne was home and he said yes. Well, according to Julia Frye today, Laurence didn’t want Mrs. Dunne to be home. So Laurence steps into this vacant apartment to wait. The murderer was already here—in another room probably, where Laurence didn’t see him, because Laurence must have stuck close to the door, listening for Mrs. Dunne to leave so he could go into her apartment and get on with his undisturbed search for the copy of his police record which he knew she had. When Laurence crossed the hall, the murderer obviously followed him, shot him, then returned to the vacant apartment. So I’ve been all wrong in trying to match the time of the murder with the time the murderer came up in the elevator.”
“Suppose you quit supposing, Kenny,” the lieutenant said, “and get something that the rules of evidence won’t throw out of court.”
“That’s exactly what I was going to do, Lieutenant,” Kilkenny said. He went to the door and called to the superintendent of the building, who was telling a group of bored bluecoats how he found the body. “Wurtzel, is that elevator boy on duty who was here yesterday afternoon?”
“He’s still here, yes,” the superintendent said. “Want him?”
See You at the Morgue Page 18