They were very small holes, and if they turned out to have been made by anything bigger than a .22, I was going to be very much surprised.
I lowered the arms to their original position, walked back to the living room, picked up the black sheath dress and the suede pumps, and went out to where I’d left Stan Rayder and the naked girl.
It was hard to believe that she was the same girl I’d almost dived off the roof with. She was sitting up now, holding my jacket tightly against the front of her body, watching my approach with just about the same degree of irritation she might have shown had I surprised her while she was taking a sun bath in the raw.
Still, when I reached her, I saw that she was breathing a little raggedly, and that she seemed to have all she could do to keep her lips from trembling.
Stan Rayder was leaning against the wall, studying per bemusedly. “She’s okay now, Pete,” he said. “She snapped out of it, just like that.”
“So I see,” I said. I put the shoes down on the floor beside her and dropped the dress across her thighs.
“They’re yours, aren’t they?” I asked.
She nodded.
“Better put them on,” I said. “There’ll be a lot of people around here any minute now.”
She hesitated for a moment. Then, still holding my jacket in front of her with one hand, she reached for the dress with the other and made a tentative effort to get to her feet. “Look the other way,” she said.
Stan and I walked down the hall a few steps and turned to face the open door of the apartment I had just left.
“Anybody home down there?” Stan asked me!
“There’s a man between the wall and the sofa in the living room. Somebody hit him four times with a small-caliber gun. You could cover all four wounds with a dollar bill.” I gestured back toward the girl. “She say anything?”
“Just her name. She says it’s Doris Hagen. And she didn’t even say that until just before you got back. She came out of it all at once, but she’d lost her voice. Which figures. The way she was screaming up on that roof, she’s lucky to get it back at all.”
I’d been listening to the soft, slithering rustle of the dress as the girl got into it, but now the sound had stopped.
“You about ready, Miss Hagen?” I called over my shoulder.
She didn’t say anything, but her heels clicked toward us, and we turned around. She was carrying my jacket. She handed it to me and I put it on. Even with nothing whatever beneath it, the sheath dress fit her like so much shimmering black lacquer. How she’d managed to get into it while wearing the lacy black lingerie I’d seen in the living room of the apartment, I couldn’t guess.
She bobbed her chin almost imperceptibly and raised a small, slender hand to brush the silver-blonde hair back from her forehead. “I really threw a fit up there on the roof, didn’t I?” she said.
“It happens,” I said. “This is my precinct partner, Detective Rayder. My name’s Selby. We’ll be carrying this homicide all the way.”
“He’s — dead, then?”
“You didn’t know that?”
She looked toward the open doorway. “No,” she said. “I was hoping he...” She broke off, her eyes suddenly very bright.
“Who did the shooting?” I asked, making it almost casual. “You?”
“Me? Oh, no. God, no. It wasn’t me.”
“Who, then?”
“I don’t know.”
“You were there, weren’t you?”
“Yes, but I... I mean, I was in the apartment, but not in the living room. I was in the bedroom.”
“You didn’t see the person that killed him?”
“Whose apartment is it? Yours or his?”
“His.”
I turned toward the open doorway. “We’d better go inside,” I said. “After you, Miss Hagen.”
“Do we have to?”
“You won’t have to look at him,” I said. “The body’s between the sofa and the wall, where you can’t see it.” I gestured, toward the door.
She hesitated, then squared her shoulders and walked resolutely to the doorway. At the threshold she hesitated again, then quickly stepped inside, sat down in the first fishnet chair she came to, and crossed her legs.
I drew another chair close to hers, got out my notebook, and sat waiting while Stan made a fast inspection of the body. When he’d finished and had taken a seat on a hassock, I said, “What’s the dead man’s name, Miss Hagen?”
“Larry. Larry Yeager.”
I wrote the name in my book and glanced over at Stan. “How about calling Barney?” I asked. “Tell him what we’ve got and ask him if he’ll start the ball rolling on this with Communications.”
Barney was Acting-Lieutenant Barney Fells, the commander of the Sixth Precinct detective squad, and Stan’s and my immediate superior.
Stan crossed to the phone, lifted the handset by hooking his left index finger beneath the flange at the receiver end — a method that neither leaves nor obliterates fingerprints — and began to dial.
II
By phoning Barney Fells we’d be saving time, but we would not, of course, be going by the book. In New York, the first police officer on the scene of a crime is usually a member of the uniform Force, and SOP is for him to immediately phone the Communications Bureau at police headquarters on Centre Street.
In the present case, however, Barney Fells would take care of the call to Communications, and they in turn would dispatch an ambulance and notify the Sergeant on Patrol, the Medical Examiner’s office, the District Attorney’s office, the Bureau of Identification, the Photographic Bureau, the crime lab, and others.
“Can I get my things?” Doris Hagen asked.
I nodded, and while she was about it, I looked in the outsize handbag that had been lying on the coffee table. There wasn’t any gun in it. I handed it to her, and she stuffed her underthings and stockings into it.
“First,” I said, when she was settled in her chair again, “let’s establish the relationship.”
She looked at me sharply. “What?” Her position in the chair had caused her dress to slide halfway up her thighs, but she made no effort to pull it down again. I got the feeling that little things like that made no difference to her, either way.
“You his girl friend?” I asked.
“I guess you could say that. We weren’t engaged or anything, though.”
“You live here with him?”
“No.”
Stan Rayder finished with his call and sat back down on the hassock. “I kept one ear tuned in on you,” he said. “Go ahead.”
“Suppose you take it from the beginning, Miss Hagen,” I said. “Tell us exactly what happened.”
She took a deep breath, shifted her position in the chair slightly, and crossed her legs the other way. Her skirt rode up another couple of inches, and stayed there.
“Well,” she said, “there was this knock on the door. The front door downstairs stays open all the time. So anybody who wants to come up here, well all he has to do is do it.”
“When was this?” I asked.
“Just before it happened. About ten minutes of noon.”
“Where was Mr. Yaeger at the time?”
“Here, in the living room. I was in here, too.”
“I thought you told us you were in the bedroom.”
“That was later. When this knock came, I was in here with Larry.” She paused. “Look — you said tell you exactly what happened, right?”
I nodded.
“All right, then. I’d been doing... well, like a strip. It was a little game we played sometimes. What we’d do, we’d have a drink together, and then I’d take my dress off. And then we’d have another drink, and I’d take off something else. And so that’s what we were doing this morning when somebody knocked on the door. I went out to the bedroom because I didn’t have anything on. And poor Larry — he went to the door to open it.”