Prisoner's Base (20 page)

I thanked him as he rushed out.

I had had no lunch, and on the way to Centre Street, which wasn’t much of a walk, I bought four nice ripe bananas and took them to a soda fountain and washed them down with a pint of milk.

At the office of Police Commissioner Skinner things did not look too promising. Not because there was an assortment of citizens in the large and busy anteroom, which was only normal, but because I couldn’t find out who Mandelbaum had spoken to and I couldn’t even get anyone to admit that Cramer was within. The trouble was that there was another door out of Skinner’s office, around a corner of the corridor, and covering them both wasn’t easy. However, I tried. I went outside and to the corner of the corridor—and there, standing by the other door, was Sergeant Purley Stebbins. At sight of me he started growling automatically.

I went up to him. “When did I ever ask you for a favor?”

“Never.” He was hoarse, but he always was. “You’re not that dumb.”

“Not until now. I’m going to jump Inspector Cramer when he comes out, and ask him for five minutes, and you will kindly keep your trap shut. You can spoil it if you want to, but why should you want to? I’m a citizen, I pay taxes, and I’ve only been in jail nine times.”

“He’s busy.”

“So am I.”

“What do you want to ask him?”

I had the reply ready but didn’t get to use it. The door opened, and Cramer came through and was with us. He was going to move right on, so preoccupied that he didn’t even see me, until I stepped to cut him off.

“You?” He didn’t like it. He darted a glance at Purley. “What’s this?”

I got in. “My idea, Inspector. I’ve got something to say. If there’s a room nearby we can use, five minutes ought to do it.”

“I haven’t got time.”

“Make it four minutes.”

He was scowling. “Wolfe sent you.”

“No.
My
idea.”

“What is it? Right here will do.”

He moved to the wall, and I faced him. Purley made it a triangle. “At the DA’s office,” I said, “they told me to go on home. Instead, I came here to find you. You heard Mr. Wolfe there Tuesday, saying that I was his client. That was a swell gag, but also he more or less meant it—enough so that he sent me out to see if I could start some fur flying, and with luck I did, and last night they all came—”

“I know all about that.”

“Okay. I felt some responsibility about Priscilla Eads. I grant it was only bad luck that my using her for a stunt ended like that, but naturally I wanted to put a hand on the bastard that arranged the ending—”

“I know about that too. Get to it.”

“I’m getting. This Sarah Jaffee is something else. It wasn’t just bad luck. While she was telling me on the phone about her keys being gone, he was there in the closet waiting for her. I undertook to tell her what to do. Thinking that there was maybe one chance in a hundred that he was somewhere in the apartment—not more than that because I didn’t know any reason for anyone wanting her dead, and I still don’t—I told her what to do. I could have told her to run to an open window and start screaming, and that might have saved her. Or I could have told her to grab something to fight with—there was a stool right there at the phone—and back up to a wall and start yelling and pounding on the wall until someone came. That might not only have saved her but caught him. But I didn’t. I had something better. I didn’t want to put him to the trouble of sneaking up on her, so I told her to go to him. I told her to go to the foyer and cross to the outside door, because that would take her within a few feet of the closet where he was hiding, and as he heard her approaching and passing, he could swing the door and take just one step, and wham. I told her just how to do it, and she followed instructions, though she had admitted to me that she was a coward. Hell, that wasn’t just luck.”

“What do you want, a medal?” Cramer rasped.

“No, thanks. I want a chance to touch him. Feeling as I do, I will not go home and sit on my ass while waiting for Mr. Wolfe to have a fit of genius, and go to bed at bedtime. It happens that I can help, and I would like to. For instance, of course everyone who was there last night has been questioned, but you won’t finish with them until and unless it has been cracked. It was at Mr. Wolfe’s office last night that her keys were taken. That must have been while my back was turned, because
I have good eyes and I was using them last night. If one of them is being questioned now, I suggest that I be allowed to sit in and to offer comments if and when my memory says that one is needed, and that we go on that way until you get him. I claim to be qualified by the fact that I was present last night, with my eyes open, and I know more about when the keys could have been taken and when they couldn’t than anybody could learn in a month of questioning. Also I will be glad to help in any other way that may be useful, except that I will not take Lieutenant Rowcliff’s hand to lead him across the street.”

He grunted. “A typical Wolfe approach.”

“No. My one talk with Mr. Wolfe was at nine this morning with a lieutenant standing by and a sergeant listening in. This is strictly personal, as described, purely because I don’t expect to feel like sleeping for a while.”

He went to Purley. “He was there, and he could help. You know him as well as I do. What about it? Is this straight?”

“It’s possible,” the sergeant granted. “His head’s been swelling a long time now, and it got a bad jolt, and he can’t stand it. I’d buy it. We can always toss him out.”

Cramer came to me. “If this is a dodge, I’ll hook you good. Nothing goes to Wolfe, not a damn word, and nothing to the press or anyone else.”

“Right.”

“This was already a big noise, as you know, and now with this third one, another strangling, everybody in town has joined in. Two dozen copies have been made of your full report, and the Commissioner himself is studying one of them right now. Deputy Commissioner Wade is in a room down the hall with Brucker. At the DA’s, Bowen is with Miss Duday, and Mandelbaum was to start again on Hagh, the ex-husband, when he finished
with you. You can join any one of them, and I’ll phone that you’re coming, or you can come with Stebbins and me. We’re going to do a retake with Helmar.”

“I’ll go with you for a starter.

“Come on.” He moved.

My first appearance as an informal adjunct of the NYPD, seated at the left of Inspector Cramer as he interviewed Perry Helmar, lasted for five hours. It was by no means the first time I had seen and heard Cramer perform, but the circumstances were new, because I was all for him with no reservations. As a spectator at a quiz job I am probably as hard to please as anybody around, after the countless times I have watched Wolfe work, and I thought Cramer was good with Helmar. He couldn’t have read my report more than once, with the full day he had had, but his picture of the meeting at Wolfe’s office was clear and accurate. I made no great contribution to the performance, supplying a few interpositions and a couple of suggestions, none of which made a noticeable whoosh. At nine o’clock Helmar was sent home without escort, after being told that he would probably be wanted again in the morning.

Cramer went off to another conference in the Commissioner’s office, and Purley and I left the building together. He had been on duty thirteen hours, and his program was eat and sleep, and I offered to buy him fried clams at Louie’s.

I don’t know how I had learned that offering Purley fried clams at Louie’s was like dangling a bit of red flannel in front of a bullfrog, since our intimacy, not social to begin with, had never reached the peak of a joint meal. In view of my new though temporary status with the NYPD, he hesitated only four or five seconds.

At Louie’s I insisted on his company to a phone
booth, and, with the door open and him at my elbow, I dialed and got Wolfe.

I apologized. “I should have called earlier to say I couldn’t make it for dinner, but I was tied up. I was with Inspector Cramer and Sergeant Stebbins, questioning Perry Helmar. Cramer’s idea is that since I was there at the meeting last night it may help for me to sit in, and I agree. I am now going to buy Sergeant Stebbins some seafood, and afterward, as an aid to digestion, I’m going to the DA’s office and check in at a session with Andy Fomos—either that or one with Oliver Pitkin. So again I can’t say when I’ll be home. This triple homicide is of course a round-the-clock operation for the cops, and I might as well keep going until I drop—chasing the picturesque and the passionate, according to plan. I’ll give you a ring someday.”

There was a little noise like a chopped-off chuckle, which seemed ill timed. “The confounded doorbell keeps ringing,” he complained. “But Fritz and I will manage. Keep me informed at your convenience.”

It clicked in my ear. I hung up, slow motion, and sat for a moment. He was being picturesque himself. Either he intended to dig in and work on it, in which case he should have insisted on my coming home immediately to help, or he did not intend to, in which case he should have beefed about my fraternizing with our ancient enemies.

“You know,” I told Purley, “eccentrics are such interesting people.”

“Not to me,” he objected. “Every goddam murderer I’ve ever seen was an eccentric.”

By the time he had finished two full portions of fried clams with trimmings, two steins of ale, and two pieces of apple pie with cheese, I was fairly well caught up on the routine aspects. There had been no tails on any of
them Thursday night, including Andy Fomos. Within five minutes after getting my phone call Purley had started twenty men checking on them, some by phone and some in person, covering everyone who had been at the meeting at Wolfe’s office, not excluding Nathaniel Parker. Though four of them, including Parker, apparently had alibis—still being investigated—no one was conclusively eliminated, and no one was conclusively indicated.

On that Purley had a comment. When I got the phone call from Sarah Jaffee, if I had called Purley at once, and if he had jumped on it and had not only sent a man to Eightieth Street but had also immediately started the check on all concerned, we would now have the strangler. I agreed—but, I asked, if I had called him at once, would he have jumped on it; and he had to admit he wouldn’t, chiefly because there was no known motive for any of them to kill Sarah Jaffee. Even if I had told him about the threat of Sarah’s applying for an injunction, it would be stretching it thin to suppose one of them would murder her for that.

As for the alibis, whether they stood up or not, the law felt the same as Wolfe when he told Viola Duday that while she might not have committed the crimes there was no reason why she shouldn’t have contrived them. Purley said they had twenty-six men, the ones best qualified for that chore, trying to find a connection between one of the suspects and a death jobber. It was simpler in a way, but also harder in a way, because they were after a strangler, not a gunman.

They hadn’t found a hackie who had taken a fare, between midnight and 1:45, to the address on East Eightieth or the immediate neighborhood, or from there after two o’clock. They were still looking, but the
chances were slim. There was a subway station only three blocks away.

The name of the night man was William Fisler. My appraisal had been sound; he was a dope. At first he had maintained that from 12:30 to 1:45, the period during which the murderer must have got in and up to the apartment, he had been right on the job every minute, on guard near the front entrance, except for a couple of elevator trips with known tenants; but when he realized that if he stuck to that he was allowing the murderer, for entry to the building and the stairs, only the times of the brief elevator trips, he did a full flop and practically stated that he had been so busy downstairs with sandwiches and coffee that he had hardly seen the front entrance at all His position was approximately the same for the period from 1:58 to 2:23, during which the murderer must have descended the stairs and made his exit to the sidewalk, and on away. He did admit that around a quarter to two he had been out on the sidewalk with the door to the building standing open, because he had to; Sarah’s statement to me on the phone that that had been the situation when she and Parker arrived in a taxi had been corroborated by Parker.

Parker’s alibi was airtight. Sarah had told me that he had not entered the building with her; the night man verified it; and the taxi driver, who of course had been found, and who had taken Parker on home, had testified likewise.

The murder itself presented no problem. Having got himself in, the murderer had selected the bronze tiger and the Venetian blind cord as the proper tools, and concealed himself in the closet. If his plan had been to attack her at once when she entered, he had been forced to abandon it by the fact that the night man was there, letting her in. She had gone at once to the phone
in the living room to call me, and of course that was no place for an act of violence, by a phone with the line open. When he heard her steps coming to the foyer, either he didn’t know she had left the line open, or he couldn’t resist so near a target, or he was afraid she was going outside; anyway, he struck. That done, he left, took the stairs down, and either found the main hall deserted and went out that way, or continued down to the basement and departed by the service alley.

No fingerprints found in the apartment had been those of any of the suspects. There had been none on the bronze tiger, and none on the knob of the closet door.

They were hunting a motive. Whereas with Priscilla Eads the motive had been as plain as the nose on a face, and fitted all five faces, with Sarah Jaffee there was none at all. For one of them to kill her, or have her killed, on account of the threatened injunction would have been batty, and none of those five was anywhere near batty. So finding a motive for any one of them would have been a big help, and that was a major objective of the supplementary questioning. Two of the five hours Cramer had spent with Helmar, me present, had been devoted to a thorough and fine-tooth review of his association with Sarah Jaffee from the beginning to the end.

Purley unquestionably briefed me. It didn’t look as if he was holding anything back, and I was touched. Therefore, when the waiter brought the check and he insisted on splitting it, and during the debate he made a crack about city dicks not starving, I made it a point of honor because I got what was eating him. He knew that my take-home pay, considering that my home was with Wolfe, was at least four times his, and he wasn’t going to sponge fried clams off of any goddam plutocrat. So I
had to tell him I had invited him and my honor was at stake.