I made a face. “One of those. I’ve had that kind of neighbor.”
“I don’t think even Fred really liked him, although he was always making excuses for him. I doubt their partnership would have lasted so long if they hadn’t been brothers-in-law,” he added matter-of-factly.
I gave him a surprised look. “They were brothers-in-law?”
“Sure. Mr. Benjamin is — was married to Fred’s baby sister. She’s not a baby now, of course. She’s about forty, but she’s twenty-one years younger than Fred. She was just an infant when their parents died, and he raised her. She’s more like a daughter to him than a sister. He never married himself, so Paula and her two kids are all the family he has. He’s absolutely crazy about the baby.”
“The baby?”
“Paula had another baby just a couple of years ago. She also has a boy around twenty in the army.” The phone at the rear of the pawnshop rang. As Mr. Jacobs went to answer it, I wondered if anyone had bothered to phone the widow that she was a widow.
The pawnbroker lifted the phone and said, “Jacobs’ Small Loans.” After a pause his voice raised in pitch and he said, “Where are you, and what’s your excuse this time?” There was another pause, then, “That’s supposed to be an excuse? You get here fast as you can! You hear?”
He slammed down the phone and came back to where I stood near the door. “My nephew,” he said in an indignant tone. “He stayed overnight with a friend and overslept, he says. More likely he was in an all-night poker game and just got home. Good for nothing, he’ll be, all day.”
I made a sympathetic noise, thanked him again and left.
The young cop was still guarding the entrance to the jewelry store when I went by, but the crowd of curious onlookers had thinned considerably. It wouldn’t disperse completely until the body was carried away, though, I knew. There are always a few morbid people in every crowd who will hang around forever on the chance of seeing a corpse.
Down near the end of the block on this side of the street I spotted Phil Ritter coming from one shop and entering another. At his apparent rate of progress it looked as though it wouldn’t take him long to finish both sides.
Amelio Lapaglia was cutting a man’s hair all the time I talked to him. He had been cutting hair when he heard what he assumed was a backfire too, he said. He hadn’t noticed the time, but it had to be just after nine, because he had just opened for business and had just started on his first customer.
His customer must have heard the shot too, he said in answer to my question, but neither of them had mentioned it.
“Aroun’ here trucks go by all day long,” he said. “You hear bang like a gun maybe two, three times a day.”
He hadn’t noticed anyone pass his window immediately after the shot, he said, but then he had been concentrating on cutting hair.
I didn’t bother to ask him about his feud with the dead man, because it had no bearing on the case. He certainly hadn’t been the bandit.
When I got back to the jewelry store, Art Ward had finished both his picture taking and his dusting of the cash registers. He reported there were no fingerprints on either register good enough to lift, which didn’t surprise me.
I told the lab technician he could go, then went back to give the corpse a more detailed examination than I had before. Aside from discovering that the bullet hole was squarely in the center of his chest, I didn’t learn anything new from my examination.
Then I asked Bruer for the duplicate of his bank deposit slip. After adding the hundred dollars which had been in the registers to the amount shown on the slip, the sum stolen came to seven hundred and forty dollars in cash and two hundred and thirty-three in checks. The jeweler said this represented a full week’s gross receipts.
From Fred Bruer I got the phone number of the doctor who had examined the body and phoned to ask him to mail a report to Dr. Swartz, the coroner’s physician. After that I had nothing to do but wait for someone to come for the body and for Phil Ritter to finish.
While waiting I asked Bruer if he had phoned his sister.
He looked startled. “I... I never even thought of it.”
“Probably just as well,” I said. “The phone isn’t a very satisfactory way to break news like this. She should be told personally. I’ll handle it for you, if you want. I have to see her anyway.”
“You do?” he asked in surprise. “It’s routine in homicide cases to contact the next of kin, even when it’s open-and-shut like this one. What’s her address?”
He hesitated for a moment before saying, “She lives down on the south side, but she’s staying with me in my apartment on North Twentieth at the moment. This is going to hit her awful hard, Sergeant, because she and Andy were having a little squabble. It’s terrible to have somebody close to you die when things aren’t quite right. You have trouble forgiving yourself for having a fight at that particular time.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “I understand.”
I asked for his address and wrote it in my notebook.
A couple of morgue attendants came for the body before Phil Ritter completed his survey, but he returned only minutes later.
“Nothing,” he reported. “Nobody saw the bandit come in here, leave here, or walking or running along the street. If anyone aside from the two next-door neighbors heard the shot, he paid no attention to it and can’t remember it.”
There was nothing more to be done at the scene of the crime. I dismissed Sergeant Ritter and his partner, and took off myself.
The apartment on North Twentieth was on the first floor of a neat, modern brick building. A slim, attractive brunette of about forty answered the door.
I took off my hat. “Mrs. Benjamin?”
“Yes.”
I showed my badge. “Sergeant Sod Harris of the police, ma’am. May I come in?”
She looked startled. “Police? What—” Then she stepped aside and said, “Certainly. Please do.”
I moved into a comfortably furnished front room and she closed the door behind me. A plump, pretty little girl about two years old sat in the center of the floor playing with a doll. A red-haired man in his mid-forties, with wide shoulders and a homely but cheerful face, sat on a sofa making himself at home. He had his shoes off, his suitcoat was draped over the back of the sofa, his tie was loosened and his collar was open. A glass with some beer in it and a half-empty bottle of beer sat on the cocktail table before the sofa.
The man rose to his feet. The little girl gave me a sunny smile and said, “Hi, man.”
I smiled back. “Hi, honey.”
The woman said, “Robert Craig, Sergeant—”
“Harris,” I said. “Sod Harris.” Robert Craig held out his hand. He had a firm grip.
“And this is my daughter, Cindy,” Mrs. Benjamin said proudly, looking at the child almost with adoration.
I smiled at the little girl again and got a big return smile. I could understand how her uncle would be crazy about her. I was a little crazy about her myself, and I had just met her.
Mrs. Benjamin said, “What can I do for you, Sergeant?”
“I’m afraid I have some bad news, ma’am.” I glanced at the child. “Maybe she’d better not hear it.”