David Alexander - Masters of Noir - Volume 2

The tech crew was going about its business with even greater speed than usual, and the expressions on the men’s faces showed that the sooner they finished the better they’d like it.

Bill Marcy, the beat cop who’d been waiting for us at the street door, nodded toward a woman who stood leaning up against the far wall.

“Her name’s Janice Pedrick,” Bill said. “She goes with this dump.”

“She the one who called you?” Ben asked.

“Yeah.”

The woman was smoking a cigarette, watching us sullenly. She was very tall, close to six feet, I’d say and somewhere between thirty and thirty-five. She had short blonde hair, dark at the roots, and while she wasn’t especially pretty, her figure made up for it.

“Who found him, Bill?” I asked.

“She did.”

The woman dropped her cigarette to the floor, left it smoldering there, and turned to watch the photographer adjust his camera for another shot.

Les Wilbur, the assistant M.E., nodded to Ben and me and motioned us over to the man hanging from the water pipe.

“I remembered the blasting you boys gave me last time I cut down a DOA, Pete,” he said wryly. “This time, I left the guy hanging for you.”

I nodded. “It’s usually best, Les.” I stepped close to the corpse. His feet cleared the floor by only a few inches, but I could still look down slightly when I looked at his face. He had been in his early forties, I guessed, a very small man who couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and ten or fifteen pounds. His sport shirt and slacks were expensive-looking, and his shoes obviously had been made by hand. His nose was badly flattened and there was a heavy tracery of scar tissue around both eyebrows.

“A fighter,” Ben said. “Most likely a pro. You sure as hell’d have a hard time getting that marked up, just mixing it in back alleys.”

I glanced at the doctor. “How long would you say he’s been strung up here, Les?”

He pursed his lips thoughtfully. “Call it six to eight hours.”

“That’s a lot better than M.E.’s usually do,” I said.

He smiled. “Well, this one’s pretty easy, Pete. Rigor mortis usually begins within three to five hours, starting in the jaws, and takes anywhere from eight to twelve hours to become complete. In this case, the RM has progressed only to the hips. That would put the time of death at from six to eight hours ago.”

I glanced at my watch. “That would mean he suicided between ten-thirty and twelve-thirty.”

“Okay to take this guy down now, Pete?” Ben asked.

I looked over at the photographer. “You finished?”

He nodded, and I pulled a straight chair over to a position beneath the body, climbed up, and untied the clothesline from the pipe. I carried the body to one of the mattresses on the floor, put it down, and then untied the noose from the man’s neck. I paid particular attention to the way the rope fibers had been scuffed. If they had been scuffed toward the body, I would have known that someone had thrown the rope over the pipe and dragged the body up — which would have meant our suicide wouldn’t have been a suicide at all.

But, although there was nothing suspicious about the rope fibers, there was something else very wrong. I noticed it the instant I bent down to look closely at the dead man’s neck.

The rope had left a deep, purple collar around his neck, and if he had died from the rope there would have been small black-and-blue marks around the collar’s lower edge. Such marks are caused by the bursting of tiny blood vessels.

There were no such marks — and that meant our man had not been alive when he was hanged. It meant we had a murder on our hands.

Les Wilbur noticed the absence of black-and-blue marks at the same moment I did. “Looks like you boys are in for more than you bargained for,” he said.

Ben stood frowning at the dead man a moment, and then he glanced over toward the woman. “Let’s get started, Pete,” he said.

We walked over to the woman. She had lighted another cigarette. She left it dangling from the side of her mouth as she crossed her arms across her chest and stared at us.

“You Miss Pedrick?” I asked.

She let a little smoke trickle from her nose. “That’s right.”

“This your apartment?”

“If you want to call it that.”

“Who’s the dead man?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“A man’s found hanged in your own apartment, and you don’t know who he is?”

“That’s what I said. You hear pretty well — for a cop.”

“When did you find him?”

“Why, the minute I got home. When’d you think?”

“How long ago was that?”

“Just a couple seconds before I went out after that cop over there. About an hour ago, I guess. I don’t have a phone, so I had to go out after a cop.”

“And you haven’t any idea who the man is?”

“I told you I didn’t. I don’t know him from Adam.”

“How long had you been out of your apartment?”

“Since last night.”

“About what time?”

“Oh, about nine o’clock, I guess. Somewhere around there. Better say nine-thirty.”

“You keep your door locked, don’t you?”

“Sure. But it’s a cheap spring lock. Anybody could open it.”

“Is that the way you figure it?” I asked. “I mean, that he broke in and—”

“Look mister,” she said. “I don’t figure anything. All I know is that he got in here somehow and knocked himself off. I don’t try to figure any further than that, because I don’t have to. I haven’t been here since last night, and I can prove it. I never saw the guy before, and you can’t prove I did. Maybe he broke in to see what he could steal, and then all at once he decided to hang himself. How should I know what happened? And who cares, anyhow?”

I turned to Ben. “See if you can find any identification on him,” I said. “And then look up a phone and tell them what we’ve got here.”

He nodded and walked back toward the corpse.

I studied the woman’s face a moment. She’d lived a lot of years the hard way, I could tell. It was all there in her face. And it was there in her voice too, if you listened for it. Just as the indications of lying were there. Even the best confidence men in the country are troubled with a dry throat when they lie, though they’re usually very skillful at covering it up. Mrs. Pedrick wasn’t skillful at all. Her voice had grown increasingly husky, and she was swallowing a lot more than was normal.

“Why don’t you start telling the truth?” I asked.

“Listen, you! I—”

“Just take it easy,” I said. “In the first place, I’m tired of listening to nothing. And in the second place, this isn’t suicide. It’s murder.”

She took a half step back from me, and one hand darted up to her throat and stayed there. “Murder!” she whispered, and the word had the right ring of astonishment to it.

I nodded. “He was already dead when he was strung up there, Miss Pedrick. Does that give you another slant on things?”

She glanced about her for something to sit on, and finally moved to a stack of newspapers and sat down on that. “Lord,” she said.

“You still claim you don’t know him?” I asked.

She took a long time to answer. “No,” she said at last. “No, I don’t know him. I was telling the truth. I never saw him before in my life.”

“But you do have a pretty good idea how he got into your apartment, don’t you?”

She moistened her lips, glancing along her eyes toward the mattress.

“Well?” I said.

“If — if I tell you, can you keep my name out of it? Can you make it look as if you found out from someone else?”