“You didn’t actually watch him open it?”
“No.”
“And then?”
“Well, I’d no sooner got into the bedroom when I heard the shots. I almost died. I thought whoever had shot him would come in the bedroom and shoot me, too.”
“Why?”
“Because when he saw my clothes out there, he’d know I had to be somewhere around. He’d think I saw him shoot Larry, and he’d have to kill me too to keep me from telling.”
“You say ‘he.’ You hear a man’s voice?”
“Well, no. I... Well, naturally, I just assumed it was a man.”
“But now that you think back on it, there’s no reason to think it couldn’t have been a woman?”
“Well, no. I guess not.”
“How long was it before you went up on the roof?”
“Just a few seconds. Just as soon as I could move again.”
“Weren’t you afraid the killer might still be in the living room, or out in the hall?”
“I didn’t go out that way I went out the bedroom window and climbed up the fire escape.” She paused. “After that, all I remember is trying to yell for help. But I couldn’t say anything. Any words, I mean. All I could do was scream.”
“What do you do for a living, Miss Hagen?”
“Whatever I have to,” she said. “Sometimes I model a little. Sometimes I do other things.” She shrugged. “You know how it is.”
I looked over at Stan. “Feel like knocking on a few doors?” I asked. “Maybe some of the other tenants saw or heard something.”
“There aren’t any other tenants,” Miss Hagen said. “Larry was the only one.”
“In a house this size?”
“It belongs to Old Lady Gotrocks, herself. She’s in Europe. And if you want to meet a real nut, she’s your girl. You ought to see her apartment downstairs. She’s got it painted even crazier than this one is.”
“Let’s get a little information on Mr. Yeager,” I said. “He married?”
“No.”
“Divorced?”
“Not that I know of. He never said.”
“You know any of his family?”
“There isn’t any. At least, that’s what he told me.”
“What kind of work did he do?”
“He was an actor.”
The phone rang, and Stan walked over to answer it. “Hello?... Oh, hi, Barney... They did? Fine... He was, eh?... Yeah... uh-huh... Yeah, I’ve got it. Mrs. Reba Daniels, Paragon Apartments... You too, Barney, and many thanks.”
“What was that all about?” I asked as he hung up and returned to the hassock.
“Barney asked BCI for—”
“Asked who?” Miss Hagen said.
“The Bureau of Criminal Information,” Stan told her. “Barney is Pete’s and my boss, Miss Hagen. He asked BCI for checks on you as well as your Mr. Yeager.”
“How nice of him,” she said. “And what’d he find out?”
“About you, nothing,” Stan said.
“What about Yeager?” I asked.
“He had a yellow sheet. Not that it amounted to much. He got into a hassle with his wife once and—”
“Wife?” Miss Hagen said. “What wife?”
Stan ignored her. “This was way back in 1950, Pete. All that happened was that Yeager and his wife got into a pretty loud argument, and the neighbors called the police. Yeager was drunk and took a swing at one of the cops — which explains the yellow sheet. BCI figured we’d be asking for a check on the wife, too, so they went ahead and made one. Her first name’s Reba. Since she was married to Yeager, she’s been married and divorced a second time. A contractor named Arnold Daniels. She’s living at the Paragon Apartments, under the name of Reba Daniels.”
I wrote down the name and address and turned back to Miss Hagen. “Mr. Yeager in trouble of any kind?” I asked.
“Not so far as I know, he wasn’t.”
“He have any enemies?”
“Well... not enemies, exactly. He wasn’t getting along so well with Mr. Eads, though.”
“Who’s Mr. Eads?”
“He’s the man who wrote the play Larry was going to have a part in. Warren Eads. I don’t know what the trouble was, but Larry sure didn’t like him. I heard him blessing Mr. Eads out on the phone one day. I never saw Larry so mad in all the time I knew him.”
I put my notebook away and got to my feet. “That’ll do for now, Miss Hagen,” I said. “Stan, let’s see what we can find.”
Stan took the living room and I took the bedroom. I was just finishing up when Stan called from the living room. “C’mere a minute, Pete.”
He was down on his hands and knees, about two feet to the left of the hall door. “Take a look,” he said, pointing to a narrow, inch-and-a-half shard of green glass lying propped against the edge of the carpet. “Miss Hagen swears it wasn’t there when she vacuumed this room, just before she and Yeager started their little strip game.”
I knelt down beside Stan, picked up the shard, and turned it over in my fingers. “It’s a piece of lens from a pair of sunglasses,” I said.
“No sign of a struggle,” Stan said as he straightened up. “Not that that means there wasn’t one. It looks to me like the glasses belonged to the killer. Yeager probably opened the door, saw the gun, made a grab for it, and the killer’s glasses got knocked off and stepped on. Then the killer shot Yeager, picked up what was left of the glasses, and haul-tailed out of here.”
I slipped the green shard into my pocket and stood up.
“Miss Hagen, did Yeager have a safe-deposit box somewhere?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Why?”
“We didn’t find any personal papers,” I said. “You know where he had his bank account, if he had one?”
She moved one shoulder just enough to qualify as a shrug. “Beats me,” she said disinterestedly, leaning back in the chair to stare up at one of the colored mobiles rotating lazily against the ceiling. “The things I don’t know about that guy would fill a book. A big one.”
We were interrupted then.
There was a sudden blur of men’s voices in the foyer down below, and then the pound and creak of heavy feet coming up the stairs.
“I was beginning to wonder where everybody was,” Stan said, glancing at his wrist watch. “They must have come by way of Bluefield, West Virginia.”
“And from the sound of them, they brought half the cops in West Virginia with them,” I said.
Stan shook a cigarette from his pack, lit it, blew an almost perfect smoke ring ceilingward, and sighed softly.
“Well,” he said, “So now the fun begins.”
III
The fun began, all right. The first group of arrivals was soon followed by a second, and within ten minutes the small apartment was crowded with more than two dozen men, only about half of whom had any real business there. The others were visiting royalty from other precincts — lieutenants and captains, most of them — who had heard about the squeal and dropped in to say hello to one another.
While the Assistant Medical Examiner made his preliminary examination of the body, and the print men and photographers set up shop with their dusting powders and cameras, I got busy on the phone.
Hooking a finger beneath the flange of the handset, as Stan had done earlier, I called Headquarters and asked for the assignment of a squad of patrolmen to, search the neighborhood for the murder gun. Next, I asked to be switched over to BCI, and requested an expedited check on Warren Eads, the playwright with whom, according to Doris Hagen, Yeager had had some kind of feud.