“No. She had an apartment of her own, until she got arrested. They made her move back here, but she didn’t bring any of her stuff with her. Nothing but clothes, that is.”
“You know where this apartment is?”
“She’d never tell me. She said she was going back there, as soon as her probation was over.” He paused. “She didn’t want me showing up around there, I guess.”
“She have an agent?”
“Yeah. Let’s see...” He thought a moment. “Guy named Tyner, down in the Brill Building.”
I went down to Tyner’s office, took one fast look at the nine by twelve glossy he showed me, and knew I was no further along than I’d been when I first picked up Thelma Olsen’s missing-person report. I thanked Tyner and went back downstairs to the cruiser. Later on I found that Thelma had been picked up at a reefer pad over a curio shop in Greenwich Village. It seems one of her personal enemies, another girl, had seen Thelma go there, knew she was on probation, and saw an opportunity for personal vengeance by tipping off Thelma’s probation officer.
I drove back to the brownstone. Walt Nelson, my partner, hadn’t found out a thing. He’d talked to the rest of the tenants, but no one had even seen the girl, let alone known anything about her. Or so they said. Walt had had to call a few people in from their jobs, and the hard time they’d given him had left him a little bitter.
“Funny thing,” he said, “but the very ones that yell the loudest when you ask them for help are the same jokers that yell the loudest for help when their own toes get stepped on. I never saw it fail.”
We left a patrolman staked out in the murder room, and started back to the precinct. Neither of us said much on the way. I knew Walt was probably thinking the same thing I was — that we’d shot an entire day on the case, without turning up anything whatever. The first hours after a murder are the most important ones for a detective, and a lot of them had already gone by. You can usually tell, in those first few hours, just how the case will go. And this one was going nowhere. Our score was exactly zero, and it was beginning to look as if it might stay that way for a long time.
And then, when we walked into the squad room, the picture changed completely. We hadn’t been there more than a minute when I got a phone call from the morgue. It was from Johnny Morton, who had been on his job a long time.
“Listen, Dave,” he said. “I’m calling from a pay phone in the hall. There’s a kid in my office, see, and he wants to look at that girl you guys are working on. He hasn’t got a permit, and he’s acting funnier than hell. He isn’t drunk, but he kind of acts that way; I mean, like maybe he isn’t sure just what’s going on. He won’t say who he is, or why he wants to see the body. I stalled him by saying I had to leave the office to check with somebody else on letting him in without a permit. But he isn’t going to stay put long, Dave. You’d better get a move on.”
We got a move on. The boy was still in Johnny’s office. He was a nice looking kid, tall, and very thin. We took him out to the cruiser to talk to him. I could see what Johnny had meant about his acting funny. The kid was so scared he couldn’t think straight.
I climbed into the back seat with him while Walt got into the front, and then I said, “All right, son. What’s your name?”
“I knew this would happen,” he said. His voice was shaky, as if it wouldn’t take much to get him bawling.
“What’s your name?” I asked again.
“Ted,” he said. “Ted Wimmer.”
“Why’d you want to look at that girl, Ted?”
“I–I read about it in the newspapers, and I–I just had to see her again, that’s all.”
“Did you kill her, Ted?”
“No! God, no, mister!”
“What was your interest in her?”
“She — well, we were going together. I—”
“What’s her name?”
“Grace Knight.” He seemed to be pulling himself together. “But she didn’t like Grace. She made me call her Judy.”
“How long did you know her?”
He frowned thoughtfully; then, “From the first part of February. I met her right after she got to New York.”
“Where was she from? Atlanta?”
“Atlanta?” he repeated. “No. She was from Nebraska. From Omaha.”
“You sure about that?”
He nodded. “That’s about all she ever talked about. She liked it here in New York, but she kept talking about Omaha. She was pretty homesick, I guess.”
“She ever mention being in Atlanta?”
“No. This was the first time she ever left her home town.”
I studied his face a moment. “When was the last time you saw her, Ted?”
“Yesterday afternoon. We went to a movie.”
“You didn’t see her last night?”
“No.”
“Where were you around midnight last night?”
He hesitated. “I–I was just walking around the streets.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I don’t know where I walked, exactly. I just felt like walking. I guess I must have walked nine or ten miles altogether.”
“What time did you get home?”
“About one.”
“Just walking around, eh, Ted?”
“I know how it looks, officer, but—”
“We’ll take that up a little later,” I said. “Now here’s the way it is, Ted. If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear from us. Understand? You tell the truth, and tell all of it, and you’ll be okay.”
He nodded, swallowing hard a couple of times.
“All right,” I said. “Now tell us this. Who do you think might have killed her?”
“That bastard she started running around with,” he said.
“What’s his name?”
“I don’t know. Honest to God, I don’t. I just know she started fooling around with somebody else. She wouldn’t tell me his name or anything else about him. I guess maybe she was afraid I’d beat him up.” He reflected a moment. “And I would have, too.”
“She must have dropped something about him, Ted. Think again.”
“Well... she did say once that he really knew his way around. She said he was always getting things for her at half price; things like that.”
“Like what, for instance?”
“Oh, you know... clothes and stuff.”
“You ever in her room, Ted?”
“Her room? Not a chance. That hotel she lived in won’t let men past the front door.”
“Hotel?”
“Yeah. That girl’s hotel over on the east side.”
“She wasn’t killed at any hotel, Ted.”
“I know that. The paper said where she was killed. The way I figure it, this guy and Judy rented that room just so they could use it once in a while.” His voice was starting to break again.
He could be right, I knew. And if the rest of his story was true, then he probably was right. It would explain why we hadn’t found anything in the furnished room but the girl herself. If she and this other guy were using it for a trysting place, she wouldn’t be likely to keep anything there.
We talked to Ted for another twenty minutes, but we didn’t get anything more. When he started getting rattled and panicky again, we took him down to the precinct. We left him in a material witness room, with a police matron to keep him company, and went down to the corner for a cup of coffee.
We sat there, drinking coffee and mulling things over, and suddenly I got a flash. I pushed the coffee cup back and stood up.
“What goes?” Walt asked.
“We do,” I said. “Out to Long Island.”
“What’s out there?”
“The Jules Courtney shoe factory. I’ve got an idea that’ll bug me to death till I check it.”
“All right, so let me in on it. I work for the same people you do, you know.”