The house phone was off the hook and lay on the floor — a fact which led to the early discovery of the crime. The desk clerk of the Westside Residential Hotel had plugged a jack under a signal light that had suddenly flared for Apartment 26. He had said “Office” several times, but got no response. He thought he heard curious sounds in the background and repeated “Office” three more times. When he heard what he thought was the sound of a door closing, he had run up the stairs — the self-service elevator was somewhere in the stratosphere — and had banged on the door of Apartment 26. When there was no response, he ran back down the stairs and called the police. He made no attempt to enter the apartment with his passkey until the squadcar cops arrived. Why should he, a law-abiding and unarmed citizen, usurp the unquestioned duty of the uniformed forces of the law?
While the print men, photographers, and other technicians were picking their way gingerly through the mess in Apartment 26, Lieutenant Ritter was collecting pertinent data. But the swarthy, lugubrious beanpole of a detective found the desk clerk, the manager, and the neighbors singularly uninformative. It seemed incredible to Ritter that such a desperate life-and-death struggle could have gone on without arousing some auditory interest; yet this appeared to be the case. The man and wife across the hall were addicted to loud television — the wife was rather deaf — and the people in the apartment next door were out for the evening. The girl at the end of the hall had taken a sleeping pill and even slept through five minutes of door pounding by the police.
Neither the desk clerk nor the house manager was of much help at first. The desk clerk, a young man with curly brown hair, long eyelashes, and suspiciously red lips, was terribly, terribly bored and terribly, terribly vague about who had entered and left the lobby during the evening. The manager said that the dead man had registered three weeks previously as Gerald Sampson of New York, although he agreed with the desk clerk that the deceased had a pronounced Southern accent.
Lieutenant Max Ritter was convinced that the dead man’s name was not Sampson and that he had not come from New York. In the wastebasket of Apartment 26 the Lieutenant had found an envelope addressed to Mr. Paul Wallace, General Delivery, Northbank, and postmarked Baton Rouge, Louisiana. There was no return address on the envelope and no letter inside the envelope or in the wastebasket.
In a dresser drawer, under a pile of expensive shirts, Ritter found a Social Security card in the name of Paul Wallace and a passbook showing a balance of $1706 in a Cleveland bank to the credit of P. L. Wallace. In an envelope stuffed into the inside pocket of a Brooks Brothers sports jacket hanging in a closet, the detective found an envelope containing a dozen newspaper clippings about a young singer named Patty Erryl.
Even in the smudged halftone pictures, Patty was a comely lass, apparently not far out of her teens, brimful of that intangible effervescence which is the exclusive property of youth. In most of the poses her eyes glowed with the roseate vision of an unclouded future. Her blonde head was poised with the awareness of her own fresh loveliness. Patty Erryl was quite obviously a personality. Moreover, Lieutenant Ritter concluded as he read through the clippings, Patty had talent.
Patty had been singing in Northbank night clubs for the past year. Just a month before the sudden demise of Mr. Paul Wallace, she had won the regional tryout of the Metropolitan Opera auditions. In a few weeks she would go to New York to compete in the nationally broadcast finals.
Ritter took the clippings downstairs and reopened his questioning of the bored desk clerk.
“Ever see this dame?” He dealt the clippings face up on the reception desk.
“Ah? Well, yes, as a matter of fact I have.” The clerk fluttered his eyelashes. “I saw the pictures in the papers, too, even before I saw the girl, but I somehow didn’t connect the one with the other. Yes, I’ve seen her.”
“Did she ever come here to see this bird Wallace?”
“Wallace? You mean Mr. Sampson?”
“I mean the man in Twenty-six.”
“Ah. Well, yes, as a matter of fact she did.”
“Often?”
“That depends upon what you call often. She’s been here three or four times, I’d say.”
“Do you announce her or does she go right up?”
“Well, the first time she stopped at the desk. Lately she’s been going right up.”
“What do you mean, lately? Tonight, maybe?”
“I didn’t see her tonight.”
“If she comes here regular, maybe she could go through the service entrance and take the elevator in the basement without you seeing her?”
“That’s possible, yes.”
“Does she always come alone?”
“Not always. Last time she came she brought lover boy along.”
“Who’s lover boy?”
“How should I know?” Again the clerk fluttered his eyelashes. “He’s a rather uncouth young man whom for some reason Miss Erryl seems to find not unattractive. She apparently takes great pleasure in gazing into his eyes. And vice versa.”
“But you don’t know his name?”
“I do not. We don’t require birth certificates, passports, or marriage licenses for the purpose of visiting our tenants.”
“You’re too, too liberal. You let in murderers. Did lover boy ever come here without lover girl?”
“He did indeed. He was here last night raising quite a row with the gentleman in Twenty-six. When he came down he was red-faced and mad as a hornet. Right afterward the gentleman in Twenty-six called the desk and gave orders that if lover boy ever came back, I was not to let him up, and that if he insisted I was to call the police. Lover boy had been threatening him, he said. But I think he came back again tonight.”
“You think?”
“Well, I had just finished taking a phone message for one of our tenants who was out, and I turned my back to put the message in her box when this man went by and got into the elevator. I only had a glimpse of him as the elevator door was closing, but I’m sure it was lover boy. I shouted at him but it was too late. I tried to phone Twenty-six to warn Mr. Sampson—”
“Wallace.”
“Wallace. But there was no answer, so I assumed he was out. Then a few minutes later the phone in Twenty-six was knocked off the hook.”
“Did you see lover boy come down again?”
“Now that you mention it, no, I didn’t — unless he came down while I was up banging on the door of Twenty-six.”
“Or took the car down to the basement and went out the service entrance, maybe?”
“You’re so right, Lieutenant. Or he could have been picked up by a helicopter on the roof.” The clerk giggled.
“Very funny.” Ritter advanced his lower lip. “Any other non-tenants come in tonight since you came on duty?”
“Traffic has been quite light this evening. There was the blonde who always comes to see the man in Sixty-three on Wednesdays. There was a boy from the florist’s with roses for the sick lady on Nine, and there was an elderly white-haired gent I assumed to be delivering for the liquor store on the corner.”
“Why?”
“Well, he had a package under his arm and it was about time for Miss Benedict’s daily fifth of gin, so—”
“What time do you call about time’?”
“About an hour ago.”
“This was before Wallace’s light went up on your switchboard?”
“About twenty minutes before. Now that I think of it, I didn’t see him come down either. Of course, with all the excitement—”
“That makes two for your helicopter,” the detective said. “Let me know if you think of any more.”
Ritter went upstairs again for another look at the dead man and to wait for the coroner who had been summoned from his weekly pinochle game but had not yet arrived. At least this was one case the coroner could not very well attribute to heart failure — “Coroner’s Thrombosis,” as Dr. Coffee called it — since the cause of death was plainly written in blood.