“Well, in a case like that…”
“You see? Remember that, Pete. Any time you've got to decide on something, one way or the other, just pretend you have to bet your life on being right. It'll cut through all the ifs and maybes and on-the-other-hands just like they weren't even there.”
“I'm sure that's very sound advice, Stan,” I said, “but—”
“Damn right. You just try it next time; you'll see.”
“I will. But even so, Stan—”
“Didn't you tell me that woman down at the antique shop — what's her name? — Pedrick. Iris Pedrick. Didn't you tell me the prowler that walked in on her in Nadine's apartment that night had some kind of accent? She said he just stood there for a while with this flashlight in her face and kind of talking to himself in some kind of foreign language. Right?”
“Yes, but what's a foreign language in New York, Stan? You can't walk more than two blocks without hearing half the foreign languages there are. And as far as just plain accents go… My God, how long've you been around this town, anyhow?”
“Long enough to know a girl like Nadine Ellison doesn't pay to have an eight-year-old newspaper clipping translated just for the fun of it. And she kept it in her strongbox, too, don't forget.” He paused. “That Pedrick woman have any idea at all what kind of language this guy was using?”
“She thought it might be Slavic,” I said. “But that's as close as she could come.”
“Slavic, eh? Well, that could be a lot of things, but it sure couldn't be French.” He paused. “You say she just thought? She wasn't sure?”
“Slavic was the best she could do,” I said. “But now that I think about it, Stan, I'm beginning to wonder how a man's French — or any other language, for that matter — would sound if he'd just raised his knife to kill a woman he thought was Nadine Ellison, and then suddenly realized the woman he was about to kill wasn't Nadine after all.”
“Maybe I don't hear so good any more,” Stan said. “How was that again, Pete?”
“A man in that position would be downright stunned, Stan. He'd be wondering just what had happened, and maybe mumbling to himself while he tried to figure it out. He'd be so choked up that his voice and tone and inflection would be completely changed. Chances are, whatever came out of his mouth would sound like just about anything you cared to call it.”
“Go, man,” Stan said, laughing. “Go! Go! Go!”
“What's the matter? You think it couldn't happen?”
“You kidding? I'm with you all the way, Pedro.”
“Well, it gives us something to hunch with, anyhow. If this Maurice Thibault did make it to this country, and if Nadine did tumble to him and start blackmailing him, it's easy to see why he'd show up some night with a knife.
“You know it,” Stan said. “Those guillotines give me the crawling sweats, just to think about them.”
“They're not too healthful, at that,” I said.
“So now we can figure on another suspect.” He paused. “You know, I think maybe I could get to like this Thibault just as much as Burt Ellison.”
“It's a good thing you never started playing the horses,” I said. “You'd be betting the whole field, every race.”
“In our racket, that's not always a bad idea.”
“We'll kick it around a little more when I get back to the squad room. Has there been any other action at all, Stan? It's time we heard from Frank Voyce and those fifty cops of his.”
“Don't worry about Voyce. When he gets hold of what we want, we'll hear about it.”
“All right, then. I'll grab a bite and come in.”
“Tough you had the trip for nothing, Pete. Hurry home.”
I hung up, started to reach for a cigar — and then suddenly stood very still, with the cigar halfway out of my pocket.
The water was still running in the bathroom. But there was no other sound. No splashing noises, no scrape of shoesole or whisper of towel, no sound of movement — nothing but the hissing pound of water against the bottom of the basin and the steady, hollow gurgling of the drainpipe.
“Miller?” I said, crossing quickly to the bathroom door. Then, much louder, “Miller!”
There was no answer, and no sound other than the water.
I tried the door. It was locked.
I stood there for a moment, trying by sheer force of will to deny what I knew intuitively had to be. It could be a heart attack, of course; Stan and I found DOA's in bathrooms practically every other day. It could even be suicide, just as it had been the time one of Stan's and my suspects locked himself inside his bathroom and cut his throat.
But this was neither heart attack nor suicide, I sensed; this was something that had happened because a cop had been inexcusably careless.
“Miller!” I called once more; and then, getting as much leverage as I could with nothing to brace my shoulders against, I booted the door about six inches beneath the knob.
The door burst open on an empty bathroom and a wide-open window. I glanced inside the shower curtain first, just to make sure, and then went to the window and looked out.
The only way Miller could have gone was straight down. There was no ledge beneath the window, no way he could have climbed upward or to either side — nothing but the flat brick rear of the building and a sheer drop of at least twenty feet to the moonlit concrete of the alley below.
It was the kind of plunge no sane man would take unless his only alternative was almost certain death.
But Albert Miller had taken it. And he had not only lived through it; he had been able to walk away.
The phone rang, and I went out to answer it.
It was Stan Rayder again.
“Glad I caught you before you left,” he said. “There've been a couple of developments.”
“There sure have,” I said.
“What's with the doomsday voice? I just got some pix of Maurice Thibault, Pete. Barney Fells came in, and he remembered there was a picture of the guy in one of those Justice Department circulars they're always sending us. He dug it up out of the basement and—”
“You think this Maurice Thibault is a pretty hot suspect, do you, Stan?”
“What the hell gives with you, anyway, Pete? You got a wild hair somewhere? All I wanted to do was tell you about the pix and ask you if you'd pick up some coffee on your way back. Why so steamed?”
“Miller took a walk out the window,” I said. “While you and I were talking, he—”
“Is he dead?”
“No, but he's almost certain to be pretty badly hurt.”
“You mean he took a dive and… Jesus Christ!”
“So, if it's hot suspects we wanted, we've got one.” I said. “Now hang up, Stan, so I can call in an alarm.”
“You want me to come up there?”
“No. Stay where you are — and see if you can't use your head a little better than I did.”
“Hell, it could happen to anybody, Pete.”
“It didn't though,” I said. “It happened to me.”
Chapter Sixteen
WHEN I into the squad room at five the air was still hot and muggy with the stored heat of the day and the oscillating fan atop the file cabinet did little more than stir the papers on the desks and move the stale tobacco smoke from one part of the room to another.
Stan Rayder was sitting at his desk, sipping from a quart container of coffee and gazing thoughtfully out the window at the dense, dark-gray haze that passes for the first light of morning in New York City.
“Lovely city, New York,” he said as I sat down. “I wish I could see it.”
“Maybe you will someday,” I said. “Then you'll be ahead of all of us.”