“I didn’t say he wasn’t in. I said he didn’t answer his door.”
Flack leaned forward. Very slowly he removed the debris of the cigar from his mouth and put it in the glass tray. “Go on. Make me like it,” he said, carefully.
“Maybe you’d like to run up and look,” I said. “Maybe you didn’t see a first-class ice-pick job lately.”
Flack put his hands on the arms of his chair and squeezed the wood hard. “Aw,” he said painfully, “aw.” He got to his feet and opened the desk drawer. He took out a large black gun, flicked the gate open, studied the cartridges, squinted down the barrel, snapped the cylinder back into place. He unbuttoned his vest and tucked the gun down inside his waistband. In an emergency he could probably have got to it in less than a minute. He put his hat on firmly and jerked a thumb at the door.
We went up to the third floor in silence. We went down the corridor. Nothing had changed. No sound had increased or diminished. Flack hurried along to 332 and knocked from force of habit. Then tried the door. He looked back at me with a twisted mouth.
“You said the door wasn’t locked,” he complained.
“I didn’t exactly say that. It was unlocked, though.”
“It ain’t now,” Flack said, and unshipped a key on a long chain. He unlocked the door and glanced up and down the hall. He twisted the knob slowly without sound and eased the door a couple of inches. He listened. No sounds came from within. Flack stepped back, took the black gun out of his waistband. He removed the key from the door, kicked it wide open, and brought the gun up hard and straight, like the wicked foreman of the Lazy Q. “Let’s go,” he said out of the corner of his mouth.
Over his shoulder I could see that Dr. Hambleton lay exactly as before, but the ice-pick handle didn’t show from the entrance. Flack leaned forward and edged cautiously into the room. He reached the bathroom door and put his eye to the crack, then pushed the door open until it bounced against the tub. He went in and came out, stepped down into the room, a tense and wary man who was taking no chances.
He tried the closet door, leveled his gun and jerked it wide open. No suspects in the closet.
“Look under the bed,” I said.
Flack bent swiftly and looked under the bed.
“Look under the carpet,” I said.
“You kidding me?” Flack asked nastily.
“I just like to watch you work.”
He bent over the dead man and studied the ice pick.
“Somebody locked that door,” he sneered. “Unless you’re lying about its being unlocked.”
I said nothing.
“Well I guess it’s the cops,” he said slowly. “No chance to cover up on this one.”
“It’s not your fault,” I told him. “It happens even in good hotels.”
11
The redheaded intern filled out a DOA form and clipped his stylus to the outside pocket of his white jacket. He snapped the book shut with a faint grin on his face.
“Punctured spinal cord just below the occipital bulge, I’d say,” he said carelessly. “A very vulnerable spot. If you know how to find it. And I suppose you do.”
Detective Lieutenant Christy French growled. “Think it’s the first time I’ve seen one?”
“No, I guess not,” the intern said. He gave a last quick look at the dead man, turned and walked out of the room. “I’ll call the coroner,” he said over his shoulder. The door closed behind him.
“What a stiff means to those birds is what a plate of warmed-up cabbage means to me,” Christy French said sourly to the closed door. His partner, a cop named Fred Beifus, was down on one knee by the telephone box. He had dusted it for fingerprints and blown off the loose powder. He was looking at the smudge through a small magnifying glass. He shook his head, then picked some thing off the screw with which the box had been fastened shut.
“Gray cotton undertaker’s gloves,” he said disgustedly. “Cost about four cents a pair wholesale. Fat lot of good printing this joint. They were looking for something in the telephone box, huh?”
“Evidently something that could be there,” French said. “I didn’t expect prints. These ice-pick jobs are a specialty. We’ll get the experts after a while. This is just a quickover.”
He was stripping the dead man’s pockets and laying what had been in them out on the bed beside the quiet and already waxy corpse. Flack was sitting in a chair by the window, looking out morosely. The assistant manager had been up, said nothing with a worried expression, and gone away. I was leaning against the bathroom wall and sorting out my fingers.
Flack said suddenly: “I figure an ice-pick job’s a dame’s work. You can buy them anywhere. Ten cents. If you want one fast, you can slip it down inside a garter and let it hang there.”
Christy French gave him a brief glance which had a kind of wonder in it. Beifus said: “What kind of dames you been running around with, honey? The way stockings cost nowadays a dame would as soon stick a saw down her sock.”
“I never thought of that,” Flack said.
Beifus said: “Leave us do the thinking sweetheart. It takes equipment.”
“No need to get tough,” Flack said.
Beifus took his hat off and bowed. “You mustn’t deny us our little pleasures, Mr. Flack.”
Christy French said: “Besides, a woman would keep on jabbing. She wouldn’t even know how much was enough. Lots of the punks don’t. Whoever did this one was a performer. He got the spinal cord the first try. And another thing—you have to have the guy quiet to do it. That means more than one guy, unless he was doped, or the killer was a friend of his.”
I said: “I don’t see how he could have been doped, if he’s the party that called me on the phone.”
French and Beifus both looked at me with the same expression of patient boredom. “If,” French said, “and since you didn’t know the guy—according to you—there’s always the faint possibility that you wouldn’t know his voice. Or am I being too subtle?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t read your fan mail.”
French grinned.
“Don’t waste it on him,” Beifus told French. “Save it for when you talk to the Friday Morning Club. Some of them old ladies in the shiny-nose league go big for the nicer angles of murder.”
French rolled himself a cigarette and lit it with a kitchen match he struck on the back of a chair. He sighed.
“They worked the technique out in Brooklyn,” he explained. “Sunny Moe Stein’s boys specialized in it, but they run it into the ground. It got so you couldn’t walk across a vacant lot without finding some of their work. Then they came out here, what was left of them. I wonder why did they do that.”
“Maybe we just got more vacant lots,” Bell us said.
“Funny thing, though,” French said, almost dreamily. “When Weepy Moyer had the chill put on Sunny Moe Stein over on Franklin Avenue last February, the killer used a gun. Moe wouldn’t have liked that at all.”
“I betcha that was why his face had that disappointed look, after they washed the blood off,” Beifus remarked.
“Who’s Weepy Moyer?” Flack asked.
“He was next to Moe in the organization,” French told him. “This could easily be his work. Not that he’d have done it personal.”
“Why not?” Flack asked sourly.
“Don’t you guys ever read a paper? Moyer’s a gentleman now. He knows the nicest people. Even has another name. And as for the Sunny Moe Stein job, it just happened we had him in jail on a gambling rap. We didn’t get anywhere. But we did make him a very sweet alibi. Anyhow he’s a gentleman like I said, and gentlemen don’t go around sticking ice picks into people. They hire it done.”
“Did you ever have anything on Moyer?” I asked.
French looked at me sharply. “Why?”
“I just had an idea. But it’s very fragile,” I said.
French eyed me slowly. “Just between us girls in the powder room,” he said, “we never even proved the guy we had was Moyer. But don’t broadcast it. Nobody’s supposed to know but him and his lawyer and the D.A. and the police beat and the city hall and maybe two or three hundred other people.”