“Because you didn’t want to start a homicide investigation. You were afraid the police would find his bank deposits and start looking for their source. They might tie him up to you through Lydia. His deposits would coincide with your withdrawals. No, sir, it was better this way. Involve him in a kidnapping and shoot him in cold blood. You’d be a hero.”
Richardson’s tongue coiled slowly over his lips. “It’s a flimsy case. They can’t convict me.”
“Not so flimsy,” I said. “There’s plenty of corroboration, especially when they find the ransom money hidden right here in your office.”
He swallowed hugely and his eyes kindled with desperate hope. He was grasping at straws. “Corbin is dead. Nobody can place me near Lydia’s apartment the night she fell.” But he didn’t believe it himself. I waited, watching.
I don’t know what he was trying to prove, but suddenly he snatched a letter opener off his desk, and lunged at me. I had to twist him plenty before he subsided.
The way he looked now, I wasn’t sure he’d ever live long enough for the State of New York to strap him down and deliver the proper voltage.
I figured he was due for a heart attack any minute, maybe before the boys arrived.
Classification: Homicide
by Jonathan Craig
The police turned up suspect after suspect. But every suspect had a perfect alibi...
1
The dead girl lay near the chimney, about four feet from the parapet that fronted on Sixty-ninth Street. It was only a quarter past eight of a hot August morning, but the surrounding roofs were crowded with tenants who had climbed up to see the show. We were nine stories above the street, but this was still one of the smallest buildings in the neighborhood, and with all those people watching, you got the feeling of being on a stage, with the roofs and windows of the taller buildings all around serving as a kind of amphitheater.
My partner, Walt Logan, and I had caught the squeal just as we came on duty at the squad room for the day watch. The apartment building was only two short blocks from the Twentieth Precinct station house, and so we’d double-timed it on foot, rather than bother checking out an RMP car.
Walt and I stood together, a little apart from the other cops, studying the dead girl. She lay on her side with her knees drawn up, an extremely pretty girl of about twenty or twenty-one. She had been stabbed twice in the back and once in the left side. There was very little blood, which meant that she had probably died from the first thrust of the knife. She had dark auburn hair, caught at the back with a wide silver band, and was wearing a pale green dress and black shoes with very high heels. Both the dress and the shoes seemed to be of high quality, and so did the jeweled watch on her left wrist.
We couldn’t examine the body further, or search the clothing, because female DOA’s can be touched and searched only by policewomen. We’d had one of the patrolmen phone for a policewoman at the same time he notified the District Attorney’s Office for us.
Walt shook his head slowly. “Looks almost as if she’d just lain down there to take a nap, doesn’t it, Steve?”
“Maybe she was lucky,” I said. “Maybe she never even knew what happened to her.”
“Well, it was over fast, anyhow. There’s no sign of a struggle, that I can see. Not a scratch on her face or arms, and that dress looks like it’d been pressed just a couple minutes before somebody slipped that knife into her.”
I nodded. “I think we can forget about assault, and that wrist watch pretty much rules out robbery.”
“I wonder what the hell she was doing up here.”
“She was with some guy, most likely. Somebody she knew well enough to come up on the roof with.”
“That wouldn’t have to be too well,” Walt said. “There’s a lot of romance takes place on these roofs at night.”
“Yeah, that’s so. Well, we’ll probably find out soon enough, once we get a make on her.”
“I wish that policewoman would hurry it up a little. We’re not doing any good hanging around here.”
A gust of wind blew across the rooftop and lifted the girl’s dress. There were a couple of long whistles from the roof just above, and someone giggled. Walt bent quickly and tugged the dress back down. Several watchers laughed out loud.
“Listen to those characters,” Walt said tightly. “They’re probably sorry they didn’t see her get stabbed.”
“There’s always a few like that,” I said. “Listen, Walt. There’s no point in both of us losing time up here. You got the sixty-one?”
He fished a folded piece of paper from his pocket and handed it to me. It was the regular Complaint Report Form, which is made out for all squeals, from disorderly conduct to murder. Walt had grabbed it from the desk officer as we passed through the muster room on our way out of the station house. It was brief and undetailed, but it would be the key document in the department file pertaining to this homicide, and would be the basis upon which everything else was built.
Walt and I followed the usual practice of detective teams in splitting our watch, so that one of us caught squeals for the first half of the watch and the other for the second. This one had come in during my half of the watch, and so I would be in charge of the entire investigation and responsible for all paper work connected with it, while Walt would act as my assistant.
“What’ve you got in mind?” Walt asked.
“I want to talk to the super, and maybe to the guy who spotted her.”
“And leave me alone with the D.A.’s man? This is your squeal, don’t forget.”
I grinned. “You’ve handled D.A.’s men before, Walt. We want the fastest make we can get.”
“Yeah. Well, just don’t get lost. Things are really going to get cracking around here, once everybody shows up.”
I glanced up at the surrounding roofs. “No use giving them a spectacle,” I said. “Take the girl inside before the policewoman and the assistant M.E. go to work on her, Walt.”
“Yeah. Just don’t leave me by my lonesome too long, that’s all.”
“While I’m gone, you might as well take another look around the roof. Maybe we missed something the first time.”
“All right.”
I turned and went down the iron stairs to the top floor and along the corridor to the self-service elevator. I’d left a patrolman stationed midway between the fire stairs and the elevator, so there were no tenants in the corridor. But the door of almost every apartment was either wide open or partly ajar, with peoples’ heads bobbing in and out along its entire length. I took some pretty sour looks and ignored some pretty definite remarks about my ancestry. I couldn’t blame them. Most of them had jobs to go to, and they didn’t like being ordered to stay inside their apartments until we told them they could leave. New Yorkers are not the most reticent people in the world when it comes to telling cops what they happen to be thinking at the time, and these tenants were no exception. But what seemed to them a highhanded way to operate was SOP in a situation such as this one, and there was nothing I or Walt could do about it.
Two radio units had arrived at the apartment house a few moments before Walt and I reached it. We’d stationed patrolmen at the front and back entrances, and put a third on the switchboard. While this last man had been calling each apartment, requesting the tenants to stay inside, Walt and I had posted another man in the elevator, and then gone up with the other patrolmen to the roof.