Outside, the policeman was standing beside his unmarked black Plymouth, his breath steaming in the cold air. The snow had stopped but the sky was still gray and heavy with low clouds, and the temperature was dropping.
Our destination was Central Park West near 89th Street, and on the way the cop filled me in on the situation. At eight-twenty this morning, a tenant of the building in question had come out to walk his dog, and found the crushed body of a woman lying face up on the sidewalk. The tenant returned immediately to the building and informed the doorman, who called the police. The doorman also obtained a blanket and went out to cover the body, at which point he realized the victim was someone he knew, a tenant who had occupied one of the penthouse duplexes atop the building. Apparently she had fallen or jumped or been pushed from the terrace up there.
A patrol car responded to the first call, but no one went up to the dead woman’s apartment until the precinct detectives arrived, and then it took considerable banging and doorbell-ringing to rouse the woman’s husband, who had been asleep and had not been aware of his wife’s absence from the apartment. According to the husband, his wife had been despondent and depressed recently and had spoken of suicide.
The couple’s name was Templeton, George and Margo, and they were both in their early fifties. He was a millionaire in the real estate business in the city, with ownership of office buildings and Broadway theaters among his holdings, and she was a one-time actress who had given up her career twenty-five years ago to marry him. They had two sons, both now grown and living away from New York. They had been to a party last night where both had become very drunk and where George Templeton freely admitted they had quarreled publicly over whether or not he had ruined her life twenty-five years ago by marrying her. They had returned home, continuing the argument in their chauffeur-driven limousine and in their bedroom, until Templeton had either gone to sleep or passed out from drink. And he had known nothing more until the pounding of the police at his door had awakened him.
The Templetons kept a staff of three servants, but only one of these — the maid — lived in the apartment, and she invariably spent her Saturday nights and Sundays with her family in New Hyde Park.
As to the time of death, the Weather Bureau said the snow had stopped at just about eight o’clock this morning. The body had been found at eight-twenty, and both the tenant who’d found it and the doorman who’d covered it swore there was no snow on top of the body. After eight o’clock, then, and before eight-twenty.
I was primed with all of this by the time we reached the building, and I was happy to see the body was no longer on the sidewalk. Clean and neat, that’s the way I like my murders.
My chauffeur-cop accompanied me into the building and up in the elevator. Going up I reviewed what he’d told me, and decided Al Bray was probably right. It not only sounded like murder, it sounded like my murder, plus a terrace. I mean the murder I’d committed. Argumentative women don’t commit suicide, they don’t want to give the opposition the satisfaction. What most likely happened was that George Templeton, tired and drunk and getting older by the second, had finally popped Margo a good one to shut her up and she’d done herself a fatal injury in hitting the floor. Not wanting the scandal or the trouble of a manslaughter trial, George had chucked her over the terrace, pretended to be asleep, and then told the police his wife had been suicidal lately.
I felt ambivalent about exposing old George; in a way, we were members of the same fraternity.
It was a two-story apartment, with a spiral staircase.
The elevator let me off directly into the living room, on the apartment’s lower floor, where Staples and Bray were sitting together on green velvet sofas, having a stiff-necked discussion. It ended when they saw me, and they both got up and came over, Staples looking a bit cocky and defiant, Bray awkward but determined.
It was Bray who did the talking, after we’d exchanged ritual hellos. “I feel a little funny about this situation, Mr. Thorpe,” he said. “It goes against the grain with me. But there’s something wrong here, I know there is, and I just can’t put my finger on it. You’ve come up with a couple of off-the-wall solutions the last week, so maybe you can do something this time.”
Staples added, “Even if it’s just to put those feelings of Al’s to rest.”
“I don’t know what to say,” I admitted. “You people are trained, I’m not. I’ve just had beginner’s luck.”
“Maybe you’ve still got it,” Bray said. “Come along.”
We went up the spiral staircase in single file, Bray and then me and then Staples, who said, “Templeton isn’t here right now. His doctor’s in this building and he’s down there, under sedation. If you need to talk with him, we can work something out.”
At the head of the stairs was the master bedroom, large and ornately furnished, with french doors leading to the terrace. Windows flanking the french doors featured hanging plants, with frost-blackened leaves.
Staples now took over, saying, “No one’s gone out on the terrace yet. It’s exactly the way we found it. Come take a look.”
I went with him. He opened the french doors and I stood in the doorway as he pointed out the obvious, saying, “You’ll notice there’s footprints in the fresh snow. But there’s only one set of them, and they lead straight out to the railing, and they don’t come back.”
I nodded. “So I see.”
“We took the shoes off the body,” he went on, “and compared them with the nearest prints, and those prints were definitely made by those shoes.”
“Ah.”
I stood frowning at the terrace. The recent windless snow, the current bitter cold, had combined to create an almost perfect tableau for us, as though it were a model made out of papier maché. Two lawn chairs were folded away to one side of the terrace, which was otherwise unfurnished. The layer of snow on the floor was two to three inches thick, and in it the footprints showed clearly. There was no other disturbance of the snow of any kind out there. Beyond the snow-topped wrought iron railing was Central Park, far below, shrouded in grayish white.
Cold air was seeping in, despite the lack of wind. I stepped back from the doorway, shivering a little and looking again at the frostbitten hanging plants. I said, “Have you been keeping this door open very much?”
“Not much at all,” Bray said. “Why? Does it matter?”
“I don’t know if anything matters,” I told him. “I’m just trying to get a picture of the situation.”
Staples said, “Shall I close it now?”
“Might as well.”
Staples closed the french doors and then he and Bray watched me as I wandered around the bedroom, studying things at random and trying to come to a decision. Finally I turned to Bray and said, “I’m sorry, Sergeant Bray. I’m not saying you’re wrong, but this time inspiration just refuses to hit.”
He frowned at me, and I could feel his confusion and his mistrust. He believed I was lying, but he didn’t know why. He said, “You don’t see any indication of murder, eh?”