“Did you find any fingerprints?” I asked.
“Nary a one, if I know what you mean. Plenty of the deceased – I took his prints at the morgue. Some of yours. A lot of old ones, but you can’t do anything with them.”
“Any on the telephone?”
“Not a one. Somebody must have wiped it clean, probably the deceased.”
“Probably.” I was tired of arguing. He shut up his case and reached for the lamp and I stepped into the hall. The light clicked out and he came out the door.
“Sticky,” he said.
“What’s sticky?”
“The pull-chain on the lamp. Some sort of crap on it.”
I heard quick steps on the west stairs and turned to see Haggerty come round the turning and trot up the last flight.
“Hello, professor. Are you finished, Sylvie?” he said. “Two bits you didn’t find anything.”
“That’s right,” Sylvie replied. “If that guy was murdered, he was murdered by a ghost and the ghost wore gloves.”
“He wasn’t murdered, Sylvie,” Haggerty said. “Was he, professor? The girl heard him jump, she was right there, and there wasn’t anybody else there. Why the hell he didn’t leave a suicide note and save us all this trouble–”
“Is the main thing in a murder case to save trouble?” I said.
“For Christ’s sake, are you still harping on that?” Haggerty spoke with real surprise which he exaggerated. “Better cut it, professor. Your boss doesn’t like it.”
“My boss?”
“I was talking to old man Galloway. He’s got a peeve on you for raising a rumpus about nothing.”
“Do I go home now, Sarge,” Sylvie asked.
“Why not? Go ahead home. I’ll stay here all night and argue with the professor about whether there’s a fourth dimension. A very interesting subject.”
“Good night,” Sylvie said and started down the stairs lugging his case. Haggerty stood showing his yellow teeth in a patronizing leer.
I wanted to tell him that he was acting pretty cocky for a dumb cop that didn’t know one of his most important body openings from an excavation in the earth. But I also wanted his co-operation and I let him leer.
“Look, Sergeant,” I said, “I’m not trying to set myself up as a detective and I’m ready to admit that you have all the apparent facts on your side. But I’m not satisfied that this was suicide, and I knew the dead man better than anyone else. If it looks like suicide, it means that Alec Judd was murdered by some very clever people.”
“You’re wrong.” There was a whining note in his voice that made him sound tired. “My God, professor, I said I’d leave Shakespeare to you.”
“If I’m wrong I’m a nuisance and damn fool,” I said. “But I think I’m right. Will you help me get some information?”
“What information?”
“Information on the movements of a woman who could have killed Alec Judd.”
“What makes you think so?”
“It’s a long story. But all I want to know is whether she had an alibi for the time of his death.”
“Where would her alibi be?”
“She’s registered at the Palace Hotel. It should be easy to find out if she was there at midnight.”
“What’s her name?”
“Ruth Esch. E-S-C-H.” I shifted my feet and the coins in my trousers pocket rattled. They clinked like thirty pieces of silver.
“Description?”
“Tall, red hair, green eyes, good features, thirtyish. Slight German accent–”
“You’re not one of these Germanophiles, are you?” Haggerty said, squinting up at me.
“Do you mean Germanophobe, German-hater? No, I’m not.”
“Galloway said something.” He looked at me out of the corner of his eye as if he was playing with the notion of having an idea. “Who is this dame?”
“A German refugee who just came to this country. She used to be – a friend of mine.”
“Lovely circle of friends.” Suddenly he spoke in a loud voice with a rasp in it, like a man who has decided that there is no risk in getting tough and is overdoing it:
“Why should I check up on your floozies for you, professor? I’m no private dick. And you better drag your face out of other people’s business or you might get into bad trouble.”
I said: “So you’re nasty as well as stupid. I didn’t know you were as complex as all that.”
I left him standing in the hall and went down the west stairs to the basement and out the back door. I started home to get my car with anger tingling in my legs.
Crossing the dark campus, I saw one lighted face of the tower clock through the trees. 2:25. I felt late and old. The anger ran out of me like hot water and left my blood cold and sluggish. I thought of Ruth and my stomach felt bruised by disappointed hope. If Ruth had turned her coat, I could trust nobody alive. But I had to find out about her.
There was a movement in the shadow of a tree, and I saw green eyes burning at me like metallic fire. My breath stopped in my throat and I peered into the darkness for the green-eyed woman.
I found my voice and said, “Who’s that?”
A cat stalked out from under the tree and fawned against my leg. I stepped over it and walked on, restraining an impulse to kick it to death.
The back of my neck was still crawling when I got my sedan out of the apartment garage. The streets were deserted and I stepped hard on the accelerator as I circled the campus, because it helped to give me back a feeling of control over things. In less than five minutes I was parked around the corner from the Palace Hotel.
I got out and went around the corner and into the hotel. The lobby was dim and the brown leather armchairs sat in the corners like broad-shouldered, headless old men. But there was a bright light over the main desk and a young man with carefully parted fair hair sat behind it like a saint in a lighted embrasure or a dummy in a show-window. A bellhop leaning against the wall by the elevator doors stirred like a reptile at a touch of the sun when I came in the door.
He saw that I had no suitcase and went to sleep again against the wall.
When I walked up to the desk, the night-clerk got up and spread his hands wide on the top of it as if it was going to be his personal gift to me.
“What can we do for you, sir?” he fluted.
“Miss Ruth Esch is staying here, I believe. I’d like to speak to her.”
“It’s very late. Perhaps I could take a message?”
“This is important. Will you ring her room, please.”
He turned and looked at the key board and turned back to me. “I’m sorry, sir, she seems to have gone out. Now, let me see, I think she went out not long ago. Yes, not very long ago.
“Did she check out?”
“No, sir. She simply went out, perhaps for a walk. She seems quite a restless young lady.”
“I’ll wait,” I said.
“Very well, sir. But she left no word as to when she’d be back.”
“Thanks.”
I sat down in an armchair by a pillar where I could watch the door, and lit a cigarette. I usually smoke about two cigarettes an hour, but this was the first cigarette I had remembered to smoke since midnight. It tasted dirty and I pushed it into a jar of sand beside my chair.
There was a clang of metal behind me and I looked towards the elevator. A pair of brass doors parted in the middle and a man with a shabby purplish-brown suit, a red tie and a pink face stepped out of the lighted elevator, as if from a picture painted by a color-blind painter.
He saw me and sauntered across the carpet towards me and sat down in the chair at my elbow.
“Good evening,” I said.
“Good evening,” he said. “I guess it’s good morning. What a life.” He yawned and tapped his wide mouth with elephantine delicacy and stubby fingers. He took off his limp brown fedora and mopped his bald head with a purple silk handkerchief. He put it back in his pocket and arranged it carefully with one corner showing.