“Don’t forget that girl. The one that called here. Doris Webber.”
“I won t.”
“It shouldn’t take us long.”
“Fine. I’ll check with you at the station house, Fred.”
5
Jeffrey Stone’s room on Charles Street in the Village was even hotter than the squad room back at the Eighteenth. And it was much smaller; so small, in fact, that the two of us made the room seem cramped. He was a very handsome guy, Stone was, a big guy with a lot of chest and very long yellow hair. I went through the preliminary routine without getting any reaction from him at all. But when I told him Elizabeth Hanson was dead, I did get a reaction. He’d told me he was an actor, but there was no acting involved in the way he took the news. It took me nearly half an hour to quiet him down enough to question him further. And even then he sat on the side of his bed, staring at the wall, as if he had heard my words, and understood them, but couldn’t permit himself to believe them.
I poured him a drink from the fifth on his dresser, but he didn’t touch it.
“What were you and the girl arguing about this morning?” I asked.
“The same old thing,” he said dully. “Other men. It was just her way, I guess. She... She never seemed to feel right with only one guy in the picture. I... I wanted to marry her, but she... she...” He broke off, biting his lip.
“You know any of these men personally?”
He shook his head. “No. But she’d tell me about them. Not by name, though. And sometimes I’d go to her apartment, and she wouldn’t let me in. Sometimes I’d call her, and hear a guy laughing at her place... Things like that.”
“She was killed about eleven o’clock,” I said. “Where were you at that time, Mr. Stone?”
His eyes came over to me slowly, and then moved away again. “You couldn’t think I killed her. You couldn’t think that.”
“I don’t think anything,” I said. “But I do have to check. Can you prove where you were from, oh, say ten o’clock?”
He drank his whiskey and sat staring at the glass. “I can prove it,” he said. “I got to my sister’s house at a little after eight. I had breakfast with her and her husband, and I stayed there until about twenty minutes ago. I just got home.”
I took out my note book and wrote down his sister’s name and address.
He mumbled something beneath his breath, and I asked him what he’d said.
“I said she was a fine actress,” he told me. “So far, she’d had only a few walk-on parts in Broadway shows, and she’d done a little television work, but she was on her way. Another year or so, and she...” He shrugged. “Why would anyone want to kill her? Why?”
“Can you think of anyone who might have? I mean, did she ever tell you of any threats? Did she have any enemies, that you know of?”
“No. Everybody was crazy about her. Men and women both.”
“She have any family here in New York?”
“No. She didn’t have any family at all. She was from Canada, originally, and her mother and father were dead.”
“I don’t like to ask this,” I told him. “But we’ll have to get a positive identification. We’d appreciate it if you’d go over to Bellevue and do that for us.”
He nodded almost imperceptibly. “All right. And listen, officer — can I take care of the funeral and all?”
“I think we can work that out,” I said.
“I haven’t much,” he said, “but what little I do have I’d like to... to...” He broke off again.
I poured him another drink, then went out to the hall and called his sister on the pay phone. She backed up Stone’s story in every detail. I wasn’t surprised. A cop seldom can afford to believe anybody about anything — until the evidence is all in — but this was once when I’d been willing to bet six months’ pay that a man was telling the truth. It’s a good feeling to have once in a while, when your job involves you with so many phonies.
I stepped back into the room and told him we’d call him before we sent a car over to take him to Bellevue.
He nodded. “There’s one more thing I’d like to ask,” he said slowly. “She had a ring. It was my mother’s, until she died. I gave it to Betty about a month ago.” He paused. “I thought of it as sort of an engagement ring... Anyhow, I’d like to have it. You know how it is. My mother wore it so long, and then Betty wore it — and, well, I’d like to keep it. It... it would mean a lot to me.”
I started to tell him I hadn’t noticed any ring on the girl’s hand, but I caught myself. “I think we can arrange that,” I said. “It’ll take a little time, of course, but we’ll probably be able to work it out for you.”
“It’d sure mean a lot.”
“What’d it look like?”
He took a sip of the second drink I’d poured him and put the glass on the floor. “It was a wide gold band,” he said. “There were several small red stones set into the metal. I don’t know what they were, but I’m pretty sure they weren’t very valuable. The stones were set flush with the gold, all around the ring. And they were of an odd shape — something like red tears.”
I nodded. “We’ll see what we can do.”
I went to the door.
I said so long to him as I left, but he didn’t answer.
6
Fred Spence was waiting for me when I got back to the squad room.
“You come up with anything?” he asked.
“Nope. Stone checked out clean.”
“How about the girl?”
“Doris Webber? I haven’t talked to her yet.”
“Want me to do that?”
“Might as well, I guess.”
“What’s her number again?”
I looked it up in my note book, and Fred called Miss Webber and told her he was on his way over to see her.
After he left, I rolled a Complaint Report into my typewriter and began filling it in with as much data in connection with the homicide as we’d been able to get. Then I called Headquarters and talked to the chief of the tech crew. They hadn’t been able to do much for us. Most of the clear prints they’d gotten had checked out to the girl herself. There had been a number of larger prints — presumably male — but they’d been too blurred to work with. I asked the chief to call me the moment he got anything worth while, and hung up.
It was much too early to expect anything from the postmortem. I wasn’t really expecting anything, but as I said before, you never can tell.
It was a tough proposition to face, but the fact was that we were stymied. I couldn’t even call Stats and Records and ask for a list of possibles. Without a single fact about the man we wanted, without a witness, without a single clue — without anything, it looked like we were in for a hard time.
Fred came back an hour later. Doris Webber had an alibi for the entire day, and she’d convinced Fred she knew nothing about the murder. She’d called Elizabeth Hanson because she’d just heard of a possible opening for her in summer stock, up in Connecticut. She’d wanted Elizabeth to get up there in time for the audition. Other than the fact that the girls were friendly in a professional way, there seemed to be little connection between them. Fred had long-distanced the theater in Connecticut, and checked out Miss Webber’s story. The producer had told him Miss Webber had spoken up for Elizabeth Hanson and that he had agreed to hold the part open another day.
And so there we were. Nowhere.
We went back to the apartment house and talked to several of the other tenants and the resident manager. We called Miss Webber again, got a list of Elizabeth Hanson’s friends, and talked to every one of them. We talked to her agent, the delivery men who served her building, the man who did her hair, the stores where she sometimes modeled clothes. We talked to the producers and directors of the stage shows she’d been in, and to everyone connected with the television shows she’d done.