“Christ, I hope the doc gets here first. We’re liable to have a sick woman on our hands. You beat guys ought to wait for instructions. Suppose you run down now and bring the desk clerk up here.”
Drake departed. Shorty lit a cigarette and said, “Rigor mortis hasn’t set in yet. Couldn’t be dead more than a couple of hours, four at the most.”
The sergeant scowled. “The M.E. will let us know. Ah, here’s our clerk.”
The clerk had small, darting eyes and deep scars on his face from a long-ago bout with acne. Lobeless ears, too. I began to hope the sergeant was an ardent believer in criminal types because then the desk clerk would divert some of his attention from me.
The clerk whined, “I can’t… look. Can’t we talk… someplace else?”
Shorty snickered and said, “He won’t bitecha,” but found an extra blanket in the closet and draped it over the corpse.
“Now then,” the sergeant began, “what happened tonight?”
“I can’t… well… at about seven o’clock — I know it was seven because I was setting my watch with Fulton Lewis, Jr. — this man comes in and asks for Mr. Prey’s room. I say Frey is out but he gets all excited and says he’ll wait. He leaves a note for Mr. Frey, then goes upstairs to Mr. Frey’s room.”
“Then what happened?”
“Well, about an hour ago Mr. Frey comes down from his room and says there’s a murdered man in there.”
“Down
from his room? Then he was home all along?”
“That’s right, down.”
“I thought you said Frey was out earlier.”
“That’s right, too. The day clerk gives me a list of who’s in, who’s out.”
“Could Frey have come back without you seeing him?”
“I did,” I said. “He wasn’t at the desk.”
“Jeez,” said the clerk. “I go to take a leak or something, but I wasn’t gone long.”
“I want to point out one thing,” I told the sergeant, “Lutz left a note for me at the desk. You found the note in my room, right? I’d like to ask the clerk if he gave me the note.”
“I didn’t give you nothing,” the man admitted.
“Right. So I took the note. You see, sergeant. He wasn’t at the desk.”
“Yeah, Frey. Very bright. Real sharp.” The way he spoke, it wasn’t grudging approval. It was: we’ll bust that little alibi wide open later, not that it’s worth a hill of beans even if it stands.
So we bantered it about. We got no place in particular, but I liked the sour sergeant less and less with every word. I wasn’t sure who I’d rather slug, him or the preening Billy Drake. I was hoping I’d keep my temper in check until someone with a high school education or the equivalent took over, but I had my doubts.
And then Becky Lutz stormed in, panting and wheezing and undulating unprettily and without benefit of a brassiere under her print housedress. “They said my Ben’s been hurt.”
The sergeant cleared his throat and recited rapidly and with about as much emotion as a tobacco auctioneer in Greensboro, North Carolina, “I have something tragic to tell you, Mrs. Lutz, Please brace yourself. Your husband has been killed.”
Becky wailed and I ran to catch her as she fell and eased her down on the understuffed chair. She was trembling all over and her lips wouldn’t keep still as her lower jaw bobbed up and down on loose hinges.
“There now, Mrs. Lutz,” the sergeant said, still without compassion.
Drake filled a glass at my sink and set it against Becky’s lips, but she couldn’t drink. She was a needle trapped in one groove on a broken record and I turned away and wished I could plug my ears. “Ben Ben Ben Benbenbenben….”
“I wish the M. E. would get here,” the sergeant said uncomfortably.
“A funny thing,” the room clerk mused, groping for a way to take himself off the hook. “That woman’s been here before. I didn’t know her name then, but she visited Mr. Frey a couple of nights ago, stayed quite a while, but I ain’t gonna swear nothing went on that shouldn’t of.”
“God damn you!” I said. “Becky wanted to see me about her husband.”
The sergeant smiled for the first time. He had a fine set of small, even white teeth, like the enamel caps the leading men use in Hollywood. With teeth like that I’d have smiled more often. Billy Drake would have walked around with a perpetual leer. “I thought you said you only knew Lutz casually, Frey. Are you married?”
“No.”
“I am. I don’t like home-wreckers. I had you figured as a lady’s man from the start. It isn’t hard to see how maybe you spin a fast line or two for Mrs. Lutz and she falls for it, then maybe does something she regrets later and tells her husband about it. So he comes to see you, mad as hell and leaves a note because the clerk thinks you’re out. He goes upstairs to make sure. You have a fight and there it is.”
I should have kept my yap shut, but I said, “Then where’s the murder weapon?”
Freckles held a knife up for all of us to see. Pocket variety,’ but long, with a mother of pearl finish and a small button at one end to activate the switch blade. “Taped under the sink,” Freckles said. “Someone figured he could hide it there. Pretty good.”
“You didn’t have a chance to get rid of the weapon yet, Frey. So you hid it.” The sergeant clicked his teeth together hard and ground them and now I knew why they were so even.
I didn’t say a thing. I wished I could get out of there and go away and make believe I’d never served with Bert Archer in Korea. The late, lamented war, but it was following me all the way to Coney Island. Whoever had killed Bert and tried to kill me the day of the inquest and killed Ben Lutz, had now decided he didn’t have to kill me after all. Let the taxpayers do it.
“You’ll have a chance to make a call down by the station, Frey. You’re being booked on suspicion of murder.”
I laughed in his face and kept laughing until the look on his face said he wanted to pull my vocal cords out and stretch them till they snapped. Then I said, “You’ll never make it stick, not if your medical examiner can establish the time of death. You see, I was out at the Tolliver Estate in Port Washington until midnight, then caught a train. If you figure it out, you’ll find…”
“That’s not my worry, Frey. That’s for the Grand Jury. It slicks, brother.”
Maybe Becky had been able to listen, after all. The police wore uniforms. The police sergeant wore stripes. The police sergeant indicated I was guilty. Becky Lutz oozed up from the chair slowly, as if she wanted to leap at me but had neither the strength nor the coordination. She managed to circle my legs with her beefy arms before she fell, shapeless and sobbing at my feet. It made me look great. Casanova Frey, home wrecker. Of course, Becky would tell them later there was nothing between us, but she might spill what she knew about the doings at Tolliver’s Funland, and I wasn’t sure which was worse. What a grand old time to think about Karen. It smelled like love, all right, but I was in no mood to relish the fragrance.
They gave me a free ride down to headquarters in a green and white Plymouth coupe. Freckles did the driving up front and the sergeant sat in the back With me, prodding my ribs with a .38 Special. At headquarters a uniformed clerk took down data in a book and fingerprinted me and asked if I wanted to make a phone call, which I did not, not yet. They emptied my pockets and confiscated my belt and made me take off my shoelaces. All this went into a manila envelope and was filed in a drawer, appropriately with the F’s. Very efficient. Someone else gave me a rusty pail, a bar of soap and a surplus Army blanket with U. S. Medical Corps stamped on it in large, faded letters. My private room wasn’t much worse than my accommodations at the hotel, except it had a metal door, locked on the outside, and bars on the window. And now I was Gideon Frey, jailbird.