“Yes,” Paul said, and he pulled the knot in his tie tight with an abrupt, almost angry gesture.
After he had gone, I sat on the darkened balcony, waiting. Over across the way the girl waited, too. Then the by now familiar ritual began as she went to answer her door.
This time, though, it was quite a while before she came back into view, and there was now a tenseness and stiffness about her movements that had never been there before. She reached up to pull the drapes closed, then stopped abruptly in mid-act to turn and shout something back at her unseen companion. I couldn’t hear the words, of course. But I could see the expression on her face, and it was angry. Good. This was even better than I’d hoped for when I’d deliberately sowed seeds of suspicion in Paul’s mind.
Then as I watched, a hand lashed out from beyond the drapes to slap the girl savagely. She reeled back, stumbled, and fell toward the coffee table.
The story made quite a splash in the papers the next day: GIRL MURDERED IN LUXURY APARTMENT. I made a point of reading it to Paul at the table that evening.
“Good lord, Paul,” I said, “it’s that girl across the way! Look, here’s her picture. And it says that the back of her head was smashed in — either from striking the edge of the coffee table or from a blow from some kind of club.”
I looked up, pretending not to notice his white face and stricken expression. “I was right about her,” I said. “She was two-timing somebody and he found out and killed her. I think I ought to go to the police.”
“No,” Paul said sharply. “What I mean is,” he went on as I looked at him curiously, “you couldn’t really tell them anything. Like names or who the men are. The police might even think you were making it up.” He shook his head. “It’s just better not to get involved.”
I sighed. “I suppose you’re right,” I said and put the paper aside. “Do you have to work tonight?”
He shook his head again. “No. That’s all over.”
“I’m glad,” I said. “It’s good to have you back.”
Paul nodded and mumbled an excuse to go over to the liquor cabinet and pour himself his third stiff drink of the evening.
Poor Paul. I hope he isn’t going to turn into an alcoholic over this — especially since he has no real reason to. Because I sat there for a long time that night watching the girl’s apartment after she’d fallen. And I saw her get up again. From the way she staggered though, it was obvious she was alone and either hurt or at least groggy.
So it had been a simple matter, while Paul was off somewhere walking out his anger and frustration, to slip over to the other building, find the girl’s apartment, and just to make sure he was never tempted again, finish what he’d begun.
Hugh Pentecost
Jericho and the Studio Murders
John Jericho, painter by profession and detective by instinct and force of circumstance, investigates the Greenwich Village murder of a tycoon’s son. But this murder has a dangerous, large-scale potentiaclass="underline" if Jericho doesn’t find the killer in a few hours, the waterfront will erupt like a volcano, explode like a bomb, in bloody violence...
It was said of J. C. Cordell that he owned half of the world — oil, electronics, airlines, shipping, hotels, you name it. In an article about him Cordell was quoted as saying that he had the only three things in the world that could matter to any man. “I have my son, my health, and the wealth and power to live and do exactly as I please,” he told his interviewer.
On a warm lovely summer day J. C. Cordell was deprived of one of those assets. His son lay dead in a small studio-apartment in New York’s Greenwich Village, with three bullet holes in his head. “The police suspect gangland revenge,” an early radio report informed the world.
It revived an old waterfront story — old by at least two years. Special guards in the employ of J. C. Cordell had trapped some men trying to steal a cargo of expensive watch mechanisms from the hold of one of Cordell’s ships. The guards had opened fire and one of the thieves was killed. The dead man turned out to be Mike Roberts, son of the reputed czar of the waterfront underworld, Reno Roberts. The word was out at the time that Reno Roberts would even that score with J. C. Cordell, but two years had gone by without reprisals, and Roberts’ threats were forgotten.
Now J. C.’s only child, Paul Cordell, was dead, and the waterfront and the Village were alive with police trying to pin a Murder One rap on Reno Roberts and his men.
It was almost overlooked in the heat of that climate that a second man had died in the Village studio, also of gunshot wounds. He was the artist who lived there. Richard Sheridan was considered to have been an innocent and unfortunate bystander. It turned out that J. C. Cordell indulged himself in the buying of paintings and sculpture. He had come across the work of Richard Sheridan in a Madison Avenue gallery, been impressed, and had commissioned Sheridan to paint a portrait of his son.
Paul Cordell had gone to Sheridan’s studio in the Village for a series of sittings. Ever since the shooting of Reno Roberts’ son on the waterfront and Roberts’ threats, Paul Cordell had been accompanied everywhere by a bodyguard.
One had to assume that the tensions had relaxed after two years. The bodyguard, a private eye named Jake Martin, had grown fat and careless on his assignment. He had waited outside dozens of places where Paul was gambling or involved in one kind of party or another. Jake Martin’s life was almost entirely made up of waiting for Paul Cordell to satisfy his various appetites.
On that particular summer day Paul had told Martin that his sitting for Sheridan would last a couple of hours. Certain that no one had followed them to Sheridan’s studio, Martin had gone across the street to a bar to have himself a few beers. It was a hot day. While Martin was away from his post a killer had struck, wasting Paul Cordell and Richard Sheridan, the innocent bystander.
Telephone lines were busy with the story. J. C. Cordell was in touch with the Mayor, the Waterfront Commission, the F.B.I. Reno Roberts was going to have to pay for this. The Mayor, in turn, was in touch with the Police Commissioner. Unless a cap was put on this case, fast, bloody waterfront violence was facing them. A girl who had been with Paul Cordell only the night before called her friends. My God, did you hear what happened to Paul Cordell? And the news had spread like wildfire...
John Jericho was not in the habit of listening to the radio. He didn’t own a television set. He had been working with a kind of burning concentration on a painting in his studio in Jefferson Mews at the exact moment when Paul Cordell and Richard Sheridan had been wiped out only a few houses down the block. When Jericho, six feet four inches of solid muscle, his red hair and red beard giving him the look of an old Viking warrior, got absorbed in a painting, the sky could have fallen in on Chicken Little and he wouldn’t have been remotely aware of it.
Exhausted after the last brilliant strokes on his canvas, Jericho had thrown himself down on his bed and slept. An unfamiliar creak in a floorboard would have awakened him instantly. He heard the telephone ring, but it was a nuisance, so he ignored it. But the caller was persistent, dialing the number every five minutes over a long stretch of time. Finally, outraged, Jericho reached for the instrument on his bedside table and shouted an angry hello.
“Mr. Jericho?” It was an unsteady female voice. “This is Amanda Kent.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Amanda.” Jericho glanced at his wrist watch. “It’s after one o’clock in the morning!”