“Let’s take our coffee over to the couch while my daughter is clearing the table,” Fred suggested, “and you can tell me the details.”
“Well, Cap, ah, sir,” the rookie sergeant began, “as you know, the victim’s name was Trudy Umber. She used to be married to Will Umber of Craven and Umber, the ad agency downtown, but they separated two years ago and she moved in here and has been living off a separation allowance. Off that and a little sideline she had. The old badger game. She’d let herself be picked up by a well-to-do older man — a married man, of course — and jump into the sack with him a few times while her accomplice made like Cecil B. DeMille with a camera hidden in the bedroom closet of her apartment. Then a few weeks later she’d put the bite on the guy — money in return for the negatives.
“The only unusual thing about the way she played it is that she’d put the bite on the guys herself; most of the time, as you know, it’s the male accomplice, the cameraman, who makes the approach to the sucker. She had six guys paying off regularly until today, when it seems one of them got fed up.”
“If you know so much about her activities,” Fred rumbled, “why didn’t you go after her while she was still alive?” He swallowed black coffee from a tall thick mug.
“Oh, we just found all this out today, sir, from her diary and the victims. We found a, well, a sex diary hidden inside a stereo speaker on a wall mount. Names all her marks, gives them report cards, tells how much she collected from each — the whole works, except there’s no mention of who her partner is, but we’ll get him soon enough.”
Fred crossed his slippered feet and folded his hands on his bulging abdomen. “The dubious pleasure of wading through the tramp’s diary is all yours,” he grunted. “Who found her body?”
“Today’s the day the window washers come around to do the outside of the building. One of the crew happened to look in from the outside of 16-C and saw her lying in a pool of blood and wooden chips in the dining room and gave the alarm. She was stabbed seven times with a long-bladed knife which the killer took away with him. Very messy. Medical examiner gives the time of death as between twelve thirty and two o’clock.”
“Wooden chips?” Fred’s gruff tone suggested annoyance at the unusual detail.
“Yessir. She must have been a brainy sort of tramp. Instead of watching soap operas or game shows on TV during the day she played Scrabble with herself. You know, the game where you make words out of little wood blocks with letters of the alphabet printed on one side?”
“I’ve played the game, Sergeant,” Fred remarked drily.
“Well, sir, she had the board set up on the dining-room table and was in the middle of a game with herself when the killer rang the bell. Apparently he brought his own knife — none seems to be missing from her apartment. Anyway, he stabbed her seven times, wiped the knife on a bathroom towel, and took the knife away with him.
“But she wasn’t quite dead yet. Mass of blood that she was, she dragged herself over to the table and pulled down the Scrabble box with all the letters in it and rooted around among those scattered little letters on the floor and palmed two of them before she died. When we found her, her other hand was clawed among the letters like she was looking for more of them.”
“What two letters did she pick up?”
“An R and an F,” Duffy said. “No way of telling which letter was meant to come first, of course.”
“It’s still a damned good clue,” his old instructor pointed out, “if you know how to use it.”
“Sir, I learned from you.” Duffy’s voice rang with pride. “The woman’s diary gives the full names of all six men she was blackmailing. And it happens that two of them have initials that match.”
“Who are they?”
“One of them is Roger Farris, a vice-president at the United Electronics main office. Tall, good-looking, fiftyish, standard executive-type complete with a society wife and two kids in college that hate his guts and a big fancy house out in Spruceknoll. In other words, one hell of a lot of respectability to preserve and a strong motive for killing the tramp who threatened his respectability. The other one is Franklin Roosevelt Quist. You’ve heard of him, I guess. The big civil rights lawyer?”
“I’ve heard,” Fred replied laconically. “Had a run-in with him the year before I retired over something one of his clients had decided in his infinite wisdom was a case of police brutality. Of course, as you pointed out, Duffy, there’s no way of telling which of the two letters was meant to be read first.”
“There’s a bigger problem than that, sir,” Duffy said. “The boys have already talked to both suspects and both of them claim to have alibis. Between twelve thirty and two o’clock this afternoon Roger Farris says he was sitting at the head table at the Sheraton Central campaign luncheon for Senator Huggins, and our friend the defender of the oppressed was downtown in Superior Court arguing a civil rights case.”
“Political lunches are organized chaos,” Fred reminded the younger man. “Courts take recesses. If you can’t crack one of those two alibis, you’d better find another line of work.”
“Oh, we’re working on them, sir,” Duffy assured his former instructor hastily. “But of course we have no positive proof that the killer is one of those two. Maybe the girl’s partner was named Roy Fox or Frank Rush or something and maybe he killed her in a dispute over sharing the payoff money. Maybe a homicidal maniac did it. Anyway, just as a matter of routine we’ve been checking out every person in this building whose initials are RF or FR or whose first or last name begins with one of those combinations.” The young sergeant lowered his eyes for a moment in embarrassment. “Uhh — were you in the library all day today, sir?” he asked Fred Buford.
In the sudden silence they could hear the friendly clink of dishes from the kitchen.
Fred glared at the hapless rookie. “Don’t you think you should read me your damn Miranda warning before you ask a question like that, Sergeant?” Then he spread his cracked lips in a feeble attempt at a grin. “I went for a bite to eat at Leo’s Luncheonette around the corner from the library sometime after noon. I always eat there when I spend the day browsing in the Reading Room. Leo’s is jammed at lunchtime, I don’t remember my waitress and didn’t see anyone there I knew.” He held out his wrists as if for the handcuffs.
Duffy raised his hands almost in horror. “Oh, no, sir, that was just a routine question, I was just being thorough like you taught us at the Academy. You were the last FR in the building that I hadn’t covered, but, my gosh, you’re no more a suspect than — well, than I am!”
“Glad to hear it, Duffy. You’re showing good cop sense.” The thought crossed Fred’s mind that the sergeant had not been quite as thorough as he stated he had been, but residual resentment of the rookie’s line of questioning led him to give Duffy no more than the subtlest hint. “Actually, I never talked to the Umber woman more than to say hello in the elevator. I only knew her name because an old man with no job gets curious about his neighbors, but I doubt she even knew my name or my daughter’s.”
“Uhhh — but you will come down to headquarters tomorrow and help me work on those alibis?” Duffy requested awkwardly.
“Oh, hell, sure I’ll help. Nothing better to do.” Fred carefully kept all his joy at being asked out of his voice.
“Gee, thanks a million, sir, I sure appreciate it!” Duffy rose fumblingly from his armchair. “Would ten o’clock be too early for you?”
Fred frowned as he hoisted his thick-bellied bulk to his feet. “Old folks don’t need much sleep. I’ll see you at eight.”