But why? Why on earth would she wipe the glasses? Wearing gloves, her fingerprints wouldn’t have been on them, and it would have been expected for Falcone to leave his own prints on his glass. Unless there really had been another man there? Could it be that the girl had opened the fire door in the hallway to let in an accomplice who had climbed the fifteen floors on foot? And if so, what had Falcone been doing at the moment? Cheerfully mixing drinks for the two and forgetting to make one for himself? Mysteriouser and mysteriouser, he thought, and reached for one of the glasses. A mickey, of course, could explain much.
He brought the glass to his nostrils and then took it away, staring through it. Whoever had wiped the outside had not bothered with the inside — possibly, he surmised, because a young lady is a bit more fastidious with gloves where smelly liquids are concerned, than with mere dry fingerprints. He looked thoughtful; that, at least, seemed to indicate an amateur, and while amateurs usually ended up getting caught more quickly than professionals, amateurs rarely knocked off top mob people.
He brought the glass back to his nose and sniffed. Scotch in this glass; good, plain scotch taken straight as good scotch — as opposed to gin — should be taken. If there was any chloral hydrate or any other knockout in this, its odor escaped him. Still, that’s what the lab was for, if the remaining few drops were sufficient for the purpose. Although, of course, there was always Pete Falcone’s stomach to play with; that should tell them something. He set the glass down and picked up the other; this one still had a major portion of its contents intact. He brought it to his nose, sniffing, and then wrinkled his face at the odor. Good God, there ought to be a law against ruining good liquor! There was the faintest touch of gin discernible behind the stronger brandy odor and the sweetness of the Cointreau; the vodka and the vermouth, naturally, would have been hidden in such a conglomeration. And anyone who would drink this bomb, of course, would be able to be given any number of mickeys without tasting them. But, damn it, don’t tell me that Falcone drank this perfumed garbage, the lieutenant thought, and that the girl took her scotch straight! Well, if he didn’t find out sooner, the autopsy would tell. If Falcone was the one with the weird taste in drinks, Reardon felt sorry for the autopsy pathologist; he was probably going to get a secondhand jag when he sliced open the corpse. He set the glasses back on the table and turned to the lab man.
“How you doing?”
“All done, Lieutenant.” The man was packing his kit. “Clean as a whistle. If he tried to hold back, somebody cleaned up after him.” He sounded almost happy about it, as if admiring that someone’s forethought.
“These glasses,” Reardon said. “I’d like you to take them down to the lab with you. I want an analysis of the contents. There’s plenty in this one, but the other only has a drop or two, if that’s enough for you people.”
“More than enough,” the lab man said happily. “With the modern stuff we have now, we could probably have gotten a good idea even if they’d been wiped clean inside, too. Spectographic—”
“Just so we find out,” Reardon said shortly. He was in no mood for a lecture on forensics, and besides, he wasn’t so sure he was happy with all the new, modern equipment they had in the laboratory these days. The way they were developing new gadgets, pretty soon they wouldn’t even be needing lieutenants. Not that that would make Jan unhappy. He looked around the large room one last time before leaving; the room looked back at him calmly, neatly.
Why in the hell hadn’t there been a struggle?
Thursday — 12:10 a.m.
“So she was a doll,” Reardon said patiently. “What kind of a doll do you mean? I mean, did she say ‘mama’ — or, rather, ‘papa’ — when some guy picked her up? What I’m really getting at is, what did she look like, for instance?”
“I’m telling you.” The bartender in the Cranston cocktail lounge looked aggrieved. He stopped drying the glass in his hand, inspected it against the brighter light beneath the counter, and then carefully set it in its place on the shelf there. “She was a doll.”
“We’ve established that.” Reardon’s patience was not endless and his tone indicated it. “Tell me different things about her, like how tall she was, and did she have two heads, and was her left leg in a cast? Things like that.” He leaned forward confidentially. “We’d like to find her and talk to her, you see? A description would help. Unless,” he added brightly, “you happen to know her name and address.”
The bartender reached for another dirty glass and swished it in the soapy water of the bar sink. When he spoke he sounded slightly offended, as if his judgment in women had somehow been impugned.
“No, I don’t have her name and address on account of I never seen the dame before, but like I’m trying to tell you, she was a real dish. Tall? Hard to say, she come in when I was at the other end, and when she and Mr. Falcone left, I was ringing something up. But you can get an idea just from how they sit, and I’d put her as pretty tall. Maybe five-six, or even five-seven. And the one head she had was plenty, she didn’t need no two. Long dark brown hair, the kind that sort of swishes when she turns her head quick — like in those TV shampoo ads, you know. Hair half over her face — remember Veronica Lake? And a cute nose. Wearing cheaters, so I couldn’t see her eyes, but my guess is they’re dark, same as her hair, you know. Good teeth, I remember them. Big-chested babe, too. Built like a brick pool table.”
“You’d know her if you saw her again?”
“Know her? Would I know Elizabeth Taylor if she come walking in the door? You don’t forget a babe like that. They’re too few and far between.” He suddenly frowned, the glass in his hand temporarily forgotten. “Why? You cops think she pushed Mr. Falcone out that window?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Reardon said. “It’s customary in the police department, though, to want to talk to the last person to see a future corpse. I’m just following the practice.” He looked at the man curiously. “Why? Do you think he jumped?”
“Who? Mr. Falcone? Why should he jump? Especially with a babe like that in his apartment?”
“Maybe she didn’t go along with his ideas,” Reardon suggested.
The bartender stared at him in amazement. “A babe who goes to his pad this hour of the night? Besides, what if she changes her mind, a guy jumps out the window over this? Especially a guy like Mr. Falcone, he can get all the dames he wants, anytime? Sure, this was a dish, but she wasn’t the last dish in the world.”
Stan Lundahl was seated on the next stool, quietly taking notes. He had seen to the loading of the body into the meat wagon while the lieutenant had been upstairs. He paused while the bartender put down the glass he was drying and went to attend to the drink order of one of the waitresses and then prepared to continue with his notes as Reardon got back to his questioning.
“What I’m trying to get at,” Reardon said evenly, “is would you know this dish of yours if she came in here with flats on, instead of four-inch spike heels, and if she wasn’t wearing a wig, or didn’t have all that padding in her bra? And if she took off those dark glasses and her eyes were polka-dot instead of brown?”
For several moments the bartender stared at him; then he sighed.
“I ain’t saying you’re wrong,” he said, and there was genuine sorrow in his voice that such things could be. “I seen a couple of babes, you take off the store-boughten stuff and they’d scare a crocodile to death. But this babe was a looker, I tell you, even if all that junk was put on. You can tell.” He thought of a better argument. “Mr. Falcone picked her up, didn’t he? And he never picked up no pigs.”