But then the sobs came again.
I said, “I’ll ask questions, and you try to answer them. And get hold of yourself, will you please?”
“Yes. Yes.”
“You say you live here. Is this the new apartment you moved to?”
“Yes.”
“And this girl. She Sandra Mantell?”
“Yes.”
“She live here too?”
“Yes. My room-mate.”
“You know her well?”
“I met her a couple of months ago. I was introduced to her.”
“By whom?”
“A man. Johnny Hays.”
“Johnny Hays, huh? That guy mean anything to you?”
“Nothing. An acquaintance. I went out with him a few times.”
“And this Sandra Mantell. Was she a friend of his too?”
“No. She was a friend of a friend of his. Nick Darrow.”
“How well do you know this Nick Darrow?”
“I don’t know him at all.”
“You mean you just met a girl, and you became room-mates?”
“No. She lived in Jersey. She was a dancer, working in Union City.”
“Doing what?”
“A burlesque turn. But she was a trained ballet dancer. We were short a girl for our show, and I brought her in, and she qualified. We became better acquainted, and she suggested taking this apartment.”
“How’d you get along?”
“I didn’t like her. She was tough, hard, unpleasant. I told her I was going to move out after the first month, for which my rent was paid.”
“How’d she take that?”
“She said she didn’t care. She said if things worked out for her, she’d be living in a penthouse, and very soon.”
“Yet she attended rehearsals as a ballet dancer?”
“Attended them faithfully. She wanted that, terribly. I think she was trying to prove something to herself. She made much more money in burlesque. She did a specialty.”
I went away from her and looked over the apartment. It was clean, neat and nicely furnished. When I came back, I said, “Okay. I think you’re in shape now. I want to know what happened here, and I want it coherent.”
She wiped her palms with a handkerchief and laid it away. She said, “We’d both been at rehearsal. She said she had a date, and a very important one, a business date.”
“Did she say where?”
“At a restaurant. She didn’t tell me which restaurant. She said she was going to talk business. She said she was going to give somebody a last chance to make her rich. That’s what she said.”
“Where’d you go?”
“I went to a movie.”
“Then?”
“I came home. As I entered the hallway, I heard the shots. Our door opened and a man came running out. We collided, and that’s when the gun dropped to the floor.”
“What gun?”
“The gun right there.” She pointed at it, on the floor.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “If you and the guy collided in the hall, what’s the gun doing here?”
“Well, when I looked in here, and I saw her, like that, I went to her, saw she was dead. Then I went back into the hall for the gun. I remembered about not touching things... fingerprints. I kicked it... with my foot... kicked it along until I worked it into the apartment.”
“Good enough. Now, what did the guy look like?”
“I don’t know.”
“Honey, you just told me you collided with him, out there in the hallway. You must have seen what he looked like.”
“No. Remember I was coming in from a sunny street into a dim hallway. And he was running. And we collided. And then he ran out. I just have no idea what he looked like.”
“Okay,” I said. “That’s it. Now we go call cops.”
“Can’t we call from here?”
“I don’t want to touch that receiver. You’re supposed to leave things as close to what they were as is possible. Sometimes it helps. Come on.”
On the way to a phone booth, I asked her for a favor. I asked her to tell her story exactly as she told it to me, but to leave out one thing. Nickie Darrow. Not to mention him. That’s all. Nothing else. Just omit Nickie Darrow.
“Why?” she said.
“It’s a personal thing, my little Greek philosopher. I’ve been trying to get through to him, and this gives me a wedge. Don’t worry. You won’t be breaking any law, and if there’s any trouble, I’ll take full responsibility.”
She was hesitant but she was cooperative. “All right, if you say so, Peter.”
“I say so.”
I called down to Headquarters and then we went back to the apartment and pretty soon there were cops, lots of cops, tons of cops, and they were in the charge of Detective-lieutenant Louis Parker, and Parker was in a gruff mood. “Never fails, does it? How come whenever there’s a corpse... there’s you?”
“It’s mixed up with the other thing, Lieutenant?”
“What other thing?”
“The Abner Reed snatch.”
“You kiddin’?”
You straighten him out on current events, from the phone call in your office from Sandra Mantell to right now (omitting friend Darrow) and now his mood is ameliorated and he’s on your side again. “Go home, Pete. Go home and stay home.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re a good kid.”
“That’s why you want me to go home?”
“Listen. For once will you listen? There’s nothing you can do here, and there may be a lot I can do. But I’ll come up and see you, Pete, as soon as I can get loose from all of this. You’ve played ball with me — I’ll play ball with you. I’ll come up and see you and we’ll kick it around some more. Okay?”
“About Trina Greco, Lieutenant.”
“Yes?”
“She’s a friend of mine.”
“So?”
“Treat her nice.”
“Okay. She’s a friend of yours. I’ll treat her nice. Now, will you please go home?”
7.
So you go home. You’re a good little boy and you’ve listened to Papa. You sit around like an old lady with lumbago... but you sit. You do some home cooking, and some home eating, and some home drinking... but you sit. You get sick and tired of sitting... but you sit. Day melts into night, and night is getting wearisome, and you’re still sitting. Finally, at twelve-thirty in the morning, Parker shows up, perspired and tired-looking.
“Hi,” he said. “How you doing?”
“Been sitting. Been sitting real good. How you doing?”
“Pretty bad.”
I went to the liquor cabinet. “A bit of the potables, Lieutenant?”
“Thanks. I can use a drink.”
He used a couple.
I said, “Let’s get down to cases, Lieutenant.”
“That’s my boy. Always in there pitching.”
“Cases, Lieutenant.”
“Well, sir, that gun on the floor was the murder gun. And we were able to garner a gorgeous set of fingerprints off it. Only prints on it, as a matter of fact. Gun’s an old one. Couldn’t do any tracing from the serial number. Dead end on that phase.”
“How much luck do you want, pal? Gorgeous fingerprints, you said.”
“There’s a catch.”
“As my Greek philosopher would say — isn’t there always?”
“Who’s your Greek philosopher?”
“Skip it. Where’s the catch?”
“Gorgeous set of prints, but they match nothing we’ve got on file. And don’t match anything out of Washington either. Where’s that leave us?”
“Way out in left field on a rainy day, and there is no ball game.”
“Very aptly put, me lad. I’ll have another drink.”
I served him another drink. I said, “You check her friends?”
“I’ve got forty men working on this. We’ve checked everybody that’s ever had the remotest connection with her. No prints fit the prints on that gun.”