I nodded and opened the door.
“Barney, have you a picture of your daughter?”
Taking out my wallet, I showed her Ruthie's laughing face. She said, “What an adorable child.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Turner.”
“I wish you'd call me Betsy. Mrs. Turner sounds so... jarring.”
“Best we keep it jarring, for the time being. Good night, Mrs. Turner.”
“Good night, Barney.”
In the lobby downstairs I asked the hall man if there was a public phone and he showed me one back of a door that led to the service entrance. I kept the door open as I dialed, had a clear view of the lobby. I told my baby sitter, “This is Barney Harris. Looks like I'm stuck for a brace of hours. May, can you do me a favor and sleep over on the couch? Sure, ask your folks if it's okay. How's Ruthie doing? Oh, I'll probably be home around... three or four in the morning. You bet, overtime is double pay. Look, you go downstairs and ask your folks and I'll call back in about five minutes.”
I hung up and lit a cigarette, wondered if it would be smart to chat with the hall man. But he wouldn't tell me anything about Mrs. Turner. Probably the first thing the cops checked was what she was doing on the night of the murder.
An old couple came in and talked to the hall man as they waited for the elevator. I finished my butt and called back and May said her folks didn't like her staying out all night. I told her I'd phone them. Instead I phoned Cy O'Hara, asked him if he could baby-sit. He told me, “Look, Barney, it's near nine now and I'm to hell and gone across the Bronx. Besides, I'd have to wait till the wife came home from the movies. Probably wouldn't get there before 3 a.m. myself.”
“I just thought maybe you could leave now. See you at the office.”
“Sorry, Barney.”
“Forget it. I'll get somebody. See you tomorrow, Cy.” I couldn't blame anybody for turning me down—being single I could never return the baby-sitting favor. I got the Weiss number from information and spent ten minutes convincing May's mother that this was an emergency and after all, the kid was in the same apartment house and what could happen to her? She finally said all right, but just this once. Said she'd go up and see that May was comfortable.
I went out and sat in my car, got some jazz on the radio. It wasn't hard to spot the Turner windows—not with all those slashing colors. Waiting is the thing a detective does the most of and I killed time by going through the papers in my pockets, tearing up the ads, the old bills, a letter asking if I was interested in a “Perfect Man” and weight-lifting contest at a Brooklyn YMCA; I was way out of shape for contest lifting, and maybe getting too old.
Mostly couples went into the apartment house, and a few men who somehow didn't look like “lovers.” At ten-thirty the lights in her living room went out, then I saw her pulling down the blinds of her bedroom, and soon that light went out.
At 3:20 a.m. I drove home. Betsy Turner hadn't gone out, nor had the lights been turned on again. She hadn't been waiting for a man. That meant she'd dolled up in that sexy outfit for me.
And like the rest of the case, that didn't make any sense.
THE ARMY didn't make Martin Pearson a hustler—the war did. In an interview in the Syracuse Tribune, Pearson's mother, Mrs. Francine Pearson, blamed the army:
I'll never believe Martin is a murderer. Our family has lived here since the days of 1776 and not a single Pearson has ever been in trouble with the law—for any reason whatsoever. My Martin was raised as a sober, hard-working boy, but after those three-and-a-half years he spent in the army, he came home different. He was still a fine boy but it seemed to me his eyes were restless, always searching for something. He never seemed to look a person in the eyes any more.
But the army only taught a comparative few how to work an angle, while war made scrounging the main occupation of most of the world's population—scrounging for food, the fast buck, the fast lira or franc: hustling for life itself.
Pearson was born on a small farm some twenty-four miles from Syracuse, New York on August 25, 1920. The farm was four miles from the “town” of Bay Corners, which consisted of a feed store, a garage, and a general store run by one Andrew Marsh. The rear of this store was also the movie house with several rows of wooden benches. Twice a week (and every night during July and August) Mr. Marsh squeezed his barrel body into his homemade projection booth and ran his old 16mm projector. Farmers supported Bay Corners the year around, but in the summer passing motorists and the campers at a near-by lake gave Marsh a boom business.
Martin was the fourth child and received little attention from the rest of the family. As soon as he was big enough, he did his share of the farm work. When he was twelve years old a small incident changed his entire life. Mary Marsh—the plump ten-year-old daughter of the general-store owner—sported a new bike, the result of selling twenty-five subscriptions to a farm magazine.
Martin also wanted a bike and knowing she had covered all the people in Bay Corners (fifty-seven according to the last census) he spent the snow-free days of the winter tramping from farm to farm. By spring he had twenty-five subs and sent away for the bike. Two weeks later the rural mailman handed Martin a large package, although obviously much too small for a bicycle. An enclosed letter stated that there had been a misunderstanding on Martin's part—the bicycle was given for a hundred and twenty-five subscriptions. For his twenty-five subs they were sending him a box camera, three rolls of film, and a developing kit. The magazine sincerely hoped this would be satisfactory-
It wasn't. In a rage Martin accused Mary Marsh of lying. She said, “Honest, I thought it was twenty-five subs. Poppa sold them for me at the counter and I never did know how many he got. Gee, Marty, nobody here ever had a camera, except the summer people.”
Martin was still angry but he took pictures of his father and mother on a sunny day, developed them in the barn at night— carefully following the instruction booklet—and his folks and brothers stared at the hazy snapshots with awe. Martin realized the camera made him a person of importance, began spending his extra dimes for photo supplies and booklets.
By the time he graduated from high school at eighteen, Martin had a second-hand press camera and was making a few dollars a week cycling from farm to farm, doing “portraits” of the farm families. Mary Marsh was about to enter Teachers Normal College at Oswego, and had grown to be a squat young woman whose only beauty was her “clear skin.” There weren't many young people in Bay Corners and it was understood Mary and Martin were “going steady,” mainly because Martin hung around Poppa Marsh's theater, seeing each movie over and over, trying to understand the technique of motion pictures. Martin suggested she ask her father if he could set up a “portrait studio” in the store during the summer months, use the theater for a dark room during the day. For rent Martin offered 30 per cent of the take. Mr. Marsh settled for 50 per cent and Martin was in business with some badly lettered signs in the store window.
Martin would hang around the summer campers, quietly taking candid shots of them swimming and horsing around, return the next day with enlargements in cardboard frames. The happy campers gave him from three to five dollars a picture and during the summer he made almost four hundred dollars. Mr. Marsh hinted Martin would be welcome as a son-in-law and it was decided they would be married as soon as Mary finished college.