“The boys finished talking to the tenants,” he said. “I put them to looking for the knife. They’re spreading out all over the neighborhood. Okay?”
“Yeah, fine, Lew. We want that knife the worst way there is.”
“We figured the guy might have thrown it off the roof. Some of the boys are looking on the other roofs around here. If some citizen hasn’t picked it up, we’ll find it — that’s if the guy didn’t keep it with him, of course.”
“Good.”
“I made sure the boys all had something to eat first.”
“How about you?”
“I could stand to lose a little weight.”
I grinned and gestured toward the door. “Not today. Go down and get yourself something to eat, Lew.”
“Wouldn’t hurt me any, I guess.”
After the sergeant left, I called Headquarters again and asked for the Correspondence Bureau. I told them we’d discovered a next-of-kin for Barbara Lawson, gave them her brother’s name, and explained that we hadn’t been able to get a street address but that he lived in Kansas City, Missouri. The CB would take care of the details. They’d contact the Kansas City police by phone or teletype, ask them to notify Alan Lawson of his sister’s murder, and request instructions for disposition of the body.
But I had additional business with the CB this time. I asked them to have the Kansas City police check with Lawson to find whether he knew a man named Carl, last name unknown, who had been acquainted with Barbara and followed her to New York. I made sure that Lawson would be told he must keep this last item strictly confidential. I was especially interested in Carl’s last name, hoping that he might still be in New York.
Walt came in just as I was hanging up the phone.
“Our boy’s flown the coop, Steve,” he said.
“Benny Thomas?”
“Yeah. I got his home address from the rental agency easy enough. He had a furnished room on Twelfth Street. When I got down there, he’d moved out and his room had already been rented to somebody else.”
“You talk to the landlady?”
“It’s a landlord. Yeah, I talked to him. He said Benny came in about eight-thirty this morning, paid him a couple bucks he owed him, and said he was moving. The landlord seemed pretty hurt that Benny’d move out on him. I got the impression he was sort of fond of him. Anyhow, he said the money was in payment of a personal loan, not back rent or anything. He told me Benny never caused any trouble, never went over on his rent, and was always helping the landlord do little odd jobs around the rooming house. The landlord’s pretty old — about seventy-five or eighty.”
“I just talked to BCI,” I said. “They’ve got a package on him.”
“Bad?”
“Bad enough. Mostly dis-con and vag, but he did bits on two P.L. raps and another on a felonious assault.”
Walt whistled softly. “And now the guy turns up missing on the same morning our girl turns up dead.”
“Uh huh.”
“Maybe this is it, Steve. You want to lay any bets?”
“Not me. I’ve been in this job too long.”
“You going to get out an alarm for him?”
“Sure. Right now.” I called the CB, asked them to get a description of Benjamin Thomas from BCI and put out an alarm for him. The alarm would go out over the teletype to every station house in New York. It would be broadcast to every RMP car and every police radio station. If the first alarm didn’t result in Thomas’ apprehension, I’d ask for its big brother — the alarm that went to the police in every city of any size in thirteen states and the District of Columbia.
“You seen the papers yet?” Walt asked.
“No. They playing it big?”
“You’ll never see them play anything bigger. What they haven’t got in story, they’ve got in pictures. It looks like all the papers are having a contest to see who can print the most pictures of her. They must have gone to her agent and carried back glossies in a truck.”
“This case has what it takes, all right. The sheets should do real well with it.”
“And of course there’s a couple of editorials giving us the needle.”
I smiled. “So soon?”
“Well, they had it handy — from the last time.”
“We’ve got only about twenty thousand cops in this town, Walt. We need forty thousand. That’s the story and the answer — no matter who says what.”
“I think we’ll keep them happy on this one. Five will get you ten that Benny Thomas is our boy.”
“He’d look a lot better to me if I hadn’t just talked to Ann Tyner.”
“You get her over here?”
I told him how I’d located Ann, and filled him in on what she’d said about the man named Carl who had followed Barbara Lawson from Kansas City to New York.
“Those odds on Benny Thomas just went down,” Walt said.
“Barbara had a brother in Kansas City,” I said. “That’s where she met this guy Carl, on a visit to her brother a few months ago. The brother seems to be all the family she had. Communications is notifying him, and at the same time they’re having the Kansas City police ask him about Carl.”
“Anybody find the knife yet?”
“No. Lew’s got the patrolman going over the neighborhood. They finished questioning the tenants quite a while ago.”
Walt glanced at his wrist watch. “I guess I’d better call Florence and tell her I won’t be home for dinner tonight. It won’t do any good, though.”
“Why not?”
“Because she’ll cook just as big a dinner anyway. She’ll even set a place for me, exactly the way she always does.”
“I don’t get it, Walt.”
“Funny thing. About three years ago I called her up and told her I had to work and wouldn’t be home to eat. So about twenty or thirty minutes after that, a guy walks into the station house, confesses to the armed robbery I’m working on, hands me the gun, puts the other guy’s billfold down on my desk, and says lock him up. Just like that. The guy’s psycho, you see — a real nut. So then I call in the man who’d made the squeal. He identifies the holdup man, identifies his billfold — and that’s that. All over in about half an hour. I put the boy in the tank and hit for home. When I get there, Florence has warmed up a can of soup for herself and is just finishing it when I walk in.” He spread his hands and shrugged. “So ever after that, she goes right ahead and fixes a big dinner anyhow.”
“Then what’s the point in calling her, Walt?”
“Because she’d raise hell if I didn’t, that’s why.”
I watched him as he lifted the phone and began to dial, and then I left the apartment and climbed the metal stairs to the roof. I walked over to the parapet that faced toward the Hudson, thinking about the trips Edward Henderson had said he made every morning just to look down that way. There might have been worse views of the river, but I’d never seen them.
I turned and looked toward the spot where Barbara Lawson’s body had lain. The place was in the shade of the chimney now. The chimney itself was one of these twin affairs, actually two chimneys, but built very close together and mounted on the same three-foot-high foundation. The top of the double chimney was about ten or eleven feet above the level of the roof.
I hurried back to the apartment.
“Listen, Walt,” I said, “did you check that chimney up there?”
“Chimneys, Steve. There are two of them.”
“Have it your own way. Did you check them?”
“Why, no. Hell, Steve, they’re too tall. You couldn’t get up there without a ladder. And if we couldn’t, then nobody else could have, either.”
“But you could toss a knife into one of them, Walt.”
“I thought of that. It’d be almost impossible, though. Those things are a good ten feet high. You’d be lucky to get a knife to fall in one of them in less than a couple of dozen throws. And every time you missed, you’d have a clatter on the roof. The guy would have been afraid of attracting attention from some of the windows around here, Steve. Who’s going to stand up there, trying to put a knife in the top of a chimney, like a basketball player, for God’s sake?”