The reaction I’d expected and the reaction I got were two different things. She smiled, turned abruptly, and walked to a small carved table. When she returned she was holding a clear crystal water tumbler. She held the tumbler up for my inspection, and her smile became knowing.
“This is how I heard,” she said.
I stared at her.
“Come with me,” she said. She walked to the wall between her apartment and the murdered girl’s and placed the bottom of the tumbler against the plaster. Then she leaned her head against the open end of the tumbler in such a way that her ear was inside it.
I didn’t say anything.
She straightened and extended the tumbler to me. “Try it,” she said. “The tumbler picks up sounds and amplifies them. I’m surprised that a police officer doesn’t know such things.”
I went through the routine with the tumbler. What she had said was true. I could hear the different voices distinctly enough to identify each of them, and I could hear the sound of footsteps and the popping of flashbulbs.
Mrs. Hallaby stood with her hands on her hips, smiling triumphantly. “Well, young man...?”
I handed the tumbler back to her. “Amazing,” I said.
“Isn’t it?” Her eyes began to shuttle between the tumbler and the wall, and I knew she was itching to listen in on the activity over there.
“About her men friends,” I said. “Can you remember any of their names?”
“Well...” She frowned.
“It’s very important to us, Mrs. Hallaby. I know you’d like to help the forces of the law.”
“Yes, yes, of course. Well, I remember only one, really. That’s the man that apparently spent the night with her.”
“Last night, you mean?”
“Yes. Of course I couldn’t swear he was there all night, but—”
“Exactly what happened, Mrs. Hallaby?”
“Well, I awaken quite early — around six o’clock, most mornings. Usually my first act is to place the... well, telephone against the wall. If I hear nothing, I prepare breakfast. Otherwise—”
“You remember this man’s name?”
“Quite well. It was—” she paused dramatically — “Jeffrey Stone.”
“Was their conversation friendly, would you say?”
“No, indeed. It was far from that.”
“How do you mean?”
“They’d been keeping up a running argument for several weeks, she and this Jeffrey Stone. It seems that Mr. Stone was jealous of her other men friends. He apparently wanted her to devote herself entirely to him.”
“You hear him threaten her?” She hesitated. “Well... no, I couldn’t say he actually threatened her.”
“You ever see this man?”
“Why, no.”
“Or the girl?”
“Oh, yes. I saw the girl. Several times. In the hall and in the elevator, and several times on the street.” She made a clucking noise. “A shame. She was such a pretty little thing, to be so utterly abandoned.”
I turned toward the door. “We’d like to get a statement from you, Mrs. Hallaby,” I said. “Would you mind if—”
“A statement? Why, I’ve just given you one.”
“I know. I meant a written one. Would you mind if we drove you down to the station house? We’d like you to dictate—”
“Is it absolutely necessary?”
“It’s the usual routine, Mrs. Hallaby.”
“Then, of course, I shall be glad to.”
“We’ll send someone around for you a little later in the day,” I said. “Will that be all right?”
She nodded, trying very much to look like a martyr. It was the first really successful expression she’d had since I’d met her.
I went back to the murdered girl’s apartment.
4
The tech crew and the assistant M.E., Dave Anders, were hard at work. The carpet was covered with chalk marks, the photographer had climbed to the top of the writing desk to get an overhead shot of the body, and the fingerprint men were dusting every flat surface in sight.
Fred Spence glanced at me a little glumly. “Looks like a real fast hit, Jake,” he said. “One will get you ten it was a loid-worker.”
“Maybe not,” I said. “Our girl friend next door says there was an argument over here this morning. Seems Elizabeth Hanson here had been having a running feud with somebody named Jeffrey Stone.”
“Yeah? Who’s this Stone?”
“I don’t know.” I walked over to the telephone table and picked up the directory. Dave Anders glanced at me and nodded.
“Be with you in a minute, Sergeant,” he said.
I nodded, running my finger down a page of S’s. Jeffrey Stone was listed at an address in Greenwich Village, Five-thirty-one Charles Street. I made a note of the address and phone number in my note book.
“There was a call came in while you were talking to Mrs. Hallaby,” Fred said.
“You get the name?”
“It was one of those telephone answering services. They said they had a call from a Miss Doris Webber, and that Miss Webber wanted Miss Hanson to call her back. They told me the Webber girl said it was urgent.” He handed me a slip of paper with the name and phone number. I transferred them to my note book and lit a cigarette.
Dave Anders stripped off his rubber gloves, put them in his bag, and came over.
“You wouldn’t want to go out on a limb about the cause of death, would you, Dave?” I asked.
“Not me, Sergeant.”
Neither of us was kidding. No matter how obvious it may seem that a person has been killed in a certain way, nothing is official until after a body is posted. People have been shot after they have died of poison; others have walked a considerable distance with a bullet wound through the heart, only to step in front of an automobile and be killed that way. Stranger things have happened, and will happen again. That’s the reason for the postmortem. The cardinal rule in any medical examination is to establish the actual cause of death, and do it in such a way that there is no possibility, however remote, of any other cause. It is not always so simple as it sounds, but it is vital in any criminal investigation and prosecution, as well as in the settlement of estates and life insurance policies.
“One thing, though,” Dave said. “You notice that stain on her lip?”
“Yeah. Blood?”
“Hard to be sure.”
“Can’t you check it at Bellevue?”
“No. There isn’t enough for that. And it’s mixed with her lipstick, too. We couldn’t do a thing with so small a quantity, Sergeant.” He glanced over at the girl. “The point is, though, it might not be her blood.”
“What makes you think that, Doc?”
“Well, there was no bleeding through the mouth. It’s surprising, but that’s the way it is. So, unless her killer got some of her blood on himself, and then brushed it against her mouth, the chances would seem pretty good that she got her teeth into someone.”
“But there’s no way to test the blood, right?”
“I’m afraid not. We’d need a lot more of it before we could make any kind of test.”
“So, offhand, you’d say that if we got a suspect with a few teeth marks in him, we’d be pretty close to home?”
“That’s the way it strikes me, Sergeant.”
“Thanks, Dave. That’s the kind of thing a cop likes best.” I turned to Fred Spence. “Stick around till the techs are through,” I said. “And you’d better call the lieutenant and ask him to send you a stake-out to leave here for a while.”
“Okay. You leaving?”
“Uh-huh. I think I’ll talk to this guy Stone.”