The Doc and the Dame
by Eric Howard
Two cops chase an unknown killer — and we bet you’ll never guess who it was.
They pulled me off the traffic detail, where I was really doing something important, getting rid of deathtrap crossings, and put me on Homicide. I didn’t like it. But when you’re on the cops you do as you’re told. It’s like the army.
My partner, Luke Hennessey, had always been a Homicide man. Murder was his meat. He came into the office while I was studying a big map of the city, trying to see how the traffic jam at Sixth and Central could be eliminated. Three people had been killed there during the past month, four more injured. Luke stood there, looking down at me, with a grin on his broad, good-natured face.
“Still worried about the gas-buggies?” he asked. “I’ve got a better puzzle for you.” He tossed a sheet of paper down before me. “Read that, Mike.”
It was a sheet of cheap yellow paper, with a brief note typed in capital letters. It read: “Dr. Harris did not kill himself. He was shot by a man with a deep scar on his right cheek, black hair and black eyes.”
Luke sat down on the edge of the desk, pushed his hat back. I looked up at him, questioningly.
“I had a hunch there was something phony about that suicide,” he said. “Why should the old Doc kill himself?”
“Well, why not?” I argued. “He was sick, broke, all through. Living in that cheap, dirty hotel. He had lost everything — money, family, standing.”
“But not courage,” Luke smiled. “He still had that. He was still fighting. As long as a guy has courage, he doesn’t do the Dutch. Let’s go down there again.”
I handed him the note, which he folded and put in a billfold. I reluctantly left my traffic problem and got in the car with Luke. He drove down to the old firetrap where Dr. Harris had lived — and died.
The slovenly wife of the man who ran the hotel had found him on the floor of his room last night, after hearing a shot. He was lying on the floor, with a bullet hole in his head, and he had the gun in his hand. It looked like suicide.
The doctor was seventy. Two years before they had taken his license to practice away from him, after he had publicly admitted that he had performed an operation while drunk. His patient had died, and he had violently accused himself, saying that such doctors should be locked up. He could have covered it up, but in his grief and nervous excitement he had asked to be punished.
His second wife, considerably younger, had divorced him. He had settled everything he owned on her and had slipped down to the slums, to this cheap hotel. He had stopped drinking and had tried to start over in various kinds of work — selling gadgets from house to house, odd jobs and things like that.
He hadn’t had much luck. He ate when people fed him. He owed two months’ room rent, but the hotel man let him stay because the Doc had given him something for his stomach ulcers. The Doc had two stepchildren, his second wife’s kids, but they had run out on him, too, after his disgrace.
It still looked like suicide to me, no matter what Luke said, but he knew more about such things than I did.
“We’ll try to get a line on the scar-faced guy, with black hair and eyes,” Luke said. “Maybe this note means something.”
“Who wrote it?”
“You got me, Mike,” Luke shrugged. “It came into Headquarters in a plain envelope. Maybe a nut. Maybe somebody that saw the killer. Maybe — if he’s blond and baby-faced — the killer himself. Sometimes guys like that like to give us poor dumb cops some trouble.”
We went into the dump where the Doc had lived. It was smelly and dirty, and the man who ran it — Linker, by name — was dirty, too. Luke asked him about Scarface. He didn’t know such a guy; or, if he did, he wasn’t telling what he knew.
We went upstairs to the Doc’s room. It hadn’t been cleaned up yet. It was just as we had seen it last night, except that Doc’s body had been removed. There was a blood stain added to all the other dirt on the carpet. And Doc’s few possessions were still there.
I looked across the hall. There was a door almost opposite. Somebody in there, if the door was open, would have the best chance to spot the guy who came after Doc. I crossed the hall and put my hand on the knob.
“Hey! Don’t bother her!” the hotel man said. “She’s asleep. She works all night and her dogs give her hell. Let her sleep.”
“Who?” I said.
“Belle Henry. She’s a waitress on the night shift down at Sharkey’s Grill in the next block.”
I would have let her sleep, being a traffic engineer at heart, but Luke shoved Linker aside and opened the door.
“Jeez!” gasped Linker. And we said things, too.
Belle Henry, a fat blonde, was asleep all right — her last sleep. There was a knife in her back. A dusty curtain had been ripped off the window, probably by the man with the knife as he got in or out of the room, by way of the window and the fire escape.
“Nice place you run, Linker,” Luke said. “And this is not suicide.”
“It ain’t my fault,” Linker growled. “It could happen in the Biltmore. Jeez, Belle has been here for three years, never missed a rent day.”
“That’s all you care about, huh?”
“No, I liked her. Belle was all right. She was a good-natured girl and kind-hearted, too. She was always feeding the Doc. He took care of her when she had the flu. She thought he was swell.”
“And this is what it got her.”
Luke phoned in, got the boys to come down and take charge.
“Come on, Mike,” he said to me. “I want to look around another dump.”
He warned Linker not to touch anything till the medical examiner and the rest of them got there. He dragged me down the street, lined with pawn shops, cheap clothing stores, flop joints and employment offices. There were a lot of men hanging around, waiting for jobs; tough huskies, most of them, who had stuck around town all winter, getting by this way and that, waiting for construction work to open up in the spring.
Now it was spring, but things weren’t opening up. They were in for a long hard summer, most of them; and that meant the cops would have trouble. Some of these guys would get hungry; they’d pull stick-ups; they’d crack open service stations and so on; some of them would use rods on their jobs, or saps, and kill people.
We would have plenty to do, and meanwhile the traffic problem would get worse and worse. Traffic had me worried. But the Doc’s death — and now Belle’s — was different. The Doc had nothing to steal. Robbery hadn’t entered into it. Somebody had got him for other reasons. And Belle, too.
We went into Sharkey’s Grill, where Belle had worked. It was not run by a guy named Sharkey. The proprietor was a big, pallid Greek with stiff, bristly hair cut short, whose name was Sam Popoupolos. He thought Sharkey was a good trade name. He served two-bit meals, featuring tough steaks that covered a large area but were paper thin and greasy enough to give a coyote the bellyache. He was standing at the cashier’s desk, up front, typing out a menu with two thick fingers on a battered old typewriter.
He knew we were cops and gave us an oily smile.
Luke swung the typewriter around, looked at the print. He pulled out the note. Anybody could see that it had been typed on this machine — by Belle, maybe. Belle must have seen Scarface go to the Doc’s room. Afraid to talk, she had taken this way of letting the cops know what the killer looked like. That had been just too bad for Belle.