Walt walked over to where the girl lay and I left the room and walked along the corridor to the bedroom. I reached it just as Mr. Boardman stepped into the corridor. He was still in evening clothes, a graying, florid-faced man with heavy eyebrows and a build like a professional wrestler.
“She feels a little better now,” he said. “I gave her a sedative.”
“The doctor out there would have been glad to prescribe for her,” I said.
“Perhaps. Personally, I didn’t see the necessity.” He closed the door behind him and gestured toward another door at the far end of the corridor. “I assume you want to talk to me again,” he said brusquely. “We can do it down there.”
I followed him along the corridor to a nursery where two small children lay sleeping, and through that to a room outfitted with a white, kidney-shaped desk, white book shelves, and two white leather chairs. Boardman sat down in one of the chairs and motioned me to the other.
“Now,” he said. “What can I tell you that I haven’t already told you?”
I got out my notebook again and studied it for a moment. “Let’s see if I have everything straight,” I said. “You and Mrs. Boardman got home from your party at a few minutes past eleven. You left the party early because Mrs. Boardman wasn’t feeling well, and you happened to look at your watch when you came out on the street. It was exactly eleven, and it couldn’t have taken you more than four or five minutes to reach here because the party’s just down the street, at Four-twenty-seven. You and Mrs. Boardman entered the house together, walked through the entrance hall together, and came into the living room together. You saw the body, realized from the appearance of the girl’s face that she was dead, and called the police.” I looked at him questioningly.
“That’s right,” he said.
“The girl’s name is Doris Linder,” I went on. “You’ve engaged her several times as a baby sitter during the last four months. You met her through a business acquaintance of yours who recommended her to you when your previous sitter left the city. Your friend vouched for her, and you didn’t bother to check into her background. You were usually able to reach her on the phone when you needed her, and both your wife and you liked her and found her dependable and cooperative. She seldom talked about herself, but you gathered that her parents were dead and she lived with an aunt.”
Boardman gestured impatiently. “Yes, yes. Must we go over all this again?”
I closed the notebook on my finger and leaned back in the chair. “Did Doris ever mention being in trouble of any kind, Mr. Boardman?”
“No.”
“She ever mention any enemies?”
He shook his head. “As I told you, she said very little about herself. She never even mentioned any friends or acquaintances, let alone enemies. Why should she? After all, she was merely our baby sitter.”
“Baby sitters often have their friends visit them while they’re on a job,” I said. “She never asked your permission to have a boy friend over while you and Mrs. Boardman were out?”
“No. I’m well-acquainted with that practice, sir. I made it quite clear to Miss Linder at the outset that under no circumstances was she ever to have company while she sat for us.”
“Baby sitters sometimes don’t concern themselves too much with permission,” I said. “They have a habit of entertaining friends, whether their employer likes it or not. My partner and I think there’s a good chance that Doris knew her killer, because she probably opened the door to him. There’s no sign of forcible entry, and that lock on your front door is almost impossible to pick. It would take a professional locksmith.”
Boardman seemed to have directed his thoughts elsewhere. “The children,” he said, more to himself than to me. “Thank God they weren’t harmed.” He shook his head musingly. “The little devils, they slept right through everything.”
And perhaps they didn’t, I thought. But in any case, the children were too small to talk.
“Did you check your valuables, Mr. Boardman?” I asked.
“Yes, of course. There’s nothing missing.”
“Did either you or Mrs. Boardman call here at any time during the evening?”
“It wasn’t necessary. We had full confidence in Doris. She knew where we were and had the telephone number there. If she’d felt there was something to tell us about the children, she would have called.”
“And neither of you came home for a moment, to make sure everything was all right?”
Boardman smiled at me coldly. “I just told you we didn’t even feel it was necessary to phone. Doesn’t it follow that we wouldn’t have thought it necessary to make a personal visit?”
“Just a routine question, Mr. Boardman.”
His eyes narrowed slightly, the brows pulling together into an unbroken gray line. “Was it?”
“I thought you might have seen someone hanging around the building. The girl was killed within an hour of the time you got home, Mr. Boardman. Maybe only minutes before.”
He nodded slowly, and some of the hostility went out of his eyes. “I see... No, there was no one loitering around. At least I saw no one.”
I got to my feet and turned toward the door. “I guess that’ll be all for now,” I said. “We’ll want to talk to your friend. The one who recommended Miss Linder to you. Where can we reach him?”
“Doris sat for him and his wife just this afternoon, as a matter of fact,” Boardman said, rising. “His name’s Charles Steward. He and his wife live at Five-seventy West Seventy-fourth.”
Boardman walked back with me as far as the bedroom where his wife was resting. He went inside and I continued on down the corridor to the living room.
Walt Logan was just hanging up the phone. “That was Barney,” he said as I came up to him. “He couldn’t find a detective in a hurry, so he went over there himself.”
Barney was Barney West, the squad commander. I’d called him and asked that he have someone locate Doris Linder’s address, through the phone number Boardman had given us, and send a detective there to tell Miss Linder’s aunt what had happened. I’d also asked that a preliminary interrogation be conducted to determine whether the aunt had any information that might give us a lead.
“Did Barney come up with anything?” I asked.
“Nothing that’ll help much. The aunt says the girl didn’t have any boy friends at all, that she knew about. Never even paid any attention to boys, to hear the aunt talk. Barney says he figures Doris just never bothered to tell her. She and the aunt weren’t very close, Barney thinks, because right now the aunt’s worried more about having to talk to cops and reporters than she is about what happened to her niece. He says she’s one hell of a cold fish, and he’s a guy who’s seen some cold ones in his time.”
“Boardman says he thinks the parents are dead. Did Barney find out for sure?”
“It seems the father died when Doris was ten, and the mother died last winter. This was in Los Angeles. Doris came here right after her mother’s death.”
“Any other relatives?”
“No. Just the aunt. She told Barney that Doris had been baby sitting all summer, so she’d have money for new clothes when school started this fall.”
“And that’s it?”
“That’s it. Barney says he’s sorry but he can’t do us much good. He’s going to take the aunt over to Bellevue for the identification. That way, we’ll be able to get an ID before they start the autopsy.”
I nodded. “Well, if an old-timer like Barney can’t dredge up anything from the aunt, there’s no point in you or me trying it.”
“That’s for sure... What now, Steve?”
I led Walt over to a far corner of the room and lowered my voice. “I think we’d better check a little more on Boardman, Walt,” I said. “I get a very low reading on that guy.”