David Alexander - Masters of Noir - Volume 2

Before I could answer her, Ben Muller came up. “No luck, Pete,” he said. “Somebody clipped his wallet. There isn’t even any loose change in his pocket. No tie pin or wristwatch, either. We’ll have to get a make on him some other way.”

I nodded. “Nose around a little. See if you can find anything.”

“Okay. Want me to call the lieutenant first?”

“Yeah, I guess you’d better.”

He moved away again and I turned back to Miss Pedrick. “You said you wanted us to keep your name out of it,” I said. “Who are you afraid of?”

She got to her feet slowly and stood there a moment while she rubbed the back of her hand across her forehead. “It’s so close in here,” she said. “Can’t we talk outside? I don’t want to go out in the street, but there’s sort of a little court out back. Can we go out there?”

I nodded, and then followed her through a narrow corridor and out a door into a walled-in area about twelve feet square.

“This is better,” she said. “At least we can breathe out here.”

“Better start again,” I said. “And this time, tell the truth.” I gave her a cigarette, lit it for her, and then lit one for myself.

“It’s one of Leda’s friends,” she said. “It has to be. There’s no other answer.”

“Who’s Leda?”

“A girl friend of mine. She — well, she was here last night. She came by the bar where I work and asked me if she could borrow my apartment, and I said all right. She had a date with someone, you see, and she wanted a place where they could be alone.”

“When was this?”

“Last night — about eight o’clock.”

“All right. Go on.”

“Well, it wasn’t the first time I’d done that. Leda always gave me ten dollars, so I could get a hotel room and have a few dollars left over. She couldn’t go to a hotel room herself, because she was afraid her husband would get wind of it. He has two or three different businesses going for him, and he knows just about everybody. He gets around a lot, and so do his friends. Leda was afraid to take a chance on a hotel or a furnished room.”

“But she didn’t mention the name of the man she had the date with?”

“No, she didn’t. She’d never done that any of the other times, either.”

“She borrow your apartment often?”

“I guess you’d call it often. Sometimes she’d ask to use it a couple of times the same week, and then maybe I wouldn’t see her for a week or ten days.”

“You think it was always the same man, or different men each time?”

“I couldn’t say. I never felt like being too inquisitive, if you know what I mean.”

“You make a habit of that?”

“Of what?”

“Of loaning your apartment out to your girl friends. At ten dollars a night, and with a hotel room costing you only three or four, that could turn into a pretty profitable sideline.”

Her eyes moved away from mine. “You’d find out anyhow, wouldn’t you?”

“You know we would.”

“Well, what was the harm in it? If I hadn’t accommodated them, they’d have gone somewhere else, wouldn’t they? Listen. If a woman’s going to play around, she’s going to play around. It was better they did it in a safe place than—”

“All right,” I said wearily. “About this Leda, now. What was the arrangement supposed to be?”

“Why, just the same as it always was. I gave her my key, and told her I wouldn’t be home before three or four o’clock this afternoon.”

“How’d she get the key back to you?”

“She didn’t. Not personally, that is. She always hid it in a crack in the stonework over the basement door. The one that leads up to the street.”

“That’s pretty high. She a tall girl like you?”

“Yes. She used to work in chorus lines, just like I did.”

“You known her long?”

“Yes. A long time. About — oh, about fifteen years.”

“And when you came home this afternoon you found the key where you expected it to be?”

“No. It wasn’t there. I got a passkey from the landlord.”

I took out my notebook. “What’s Leda’s full name, and where does she live?”

She hesitated. “Listen, officer... Isn’t there some way you can keep me out of this? I’ve known Leda half my life. I think the world of her. So long as I thought that man had killed himself, I was willing to bluff through a story to protect her. But if it’s murder, I—”

“It isn’t Leda you’re worried about,” I said. “You might as well level with us. You’ve been around enough to know that the more you cooperate with cops, the easier it’ll go.” I paused. “All right, so who is it you’re afraid of?”

“If you were in my place, you’d be afraid of him too. He — he used to be a hoodlum. Maybe he still is, for all I know. He’s mean — mean all the way through. He beat up one of his best friends once, just because the guy danced with Leda a couple of times too often. Once he knocked a man unconscious, just because he brushed against Leda on the street.”

“You still haven’t told me who,” I said.

“Leda’s husband. Eddie Willard.”

I wrote the name down. “Where do they live, Eddie and Leda?”

“You haven’t promised to—”

“I can’t promise anything,” I told her. “I’ll do what I can for you, yes — but I can’t commit the police department that way. You should know that.”

She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “They live at the Bayless.”

“That an apartment house or a hotel?”

“Hotel. It’s at the corner of West End Avenue and Sixty-second Street.”

I made a note of it. “What hotel did you stay in last night?” I asked.

“The Paragon, on West Fifty-fourth.”

“I know where it is. It’s just down the street from the station house. What time did you leave there?”

“Well, their check-out time’s a little earlier than it is most places. At one o’clock. I — let’s see — I guess I checked out about noon.”

“And then what did you do?”

“I took a walk.”

“Where?”

“Oh, just around. I walked over to Fifth Avenue, and up Fifth to Central Park. I went to the zoo, and watched people rowing boats on the lake a while, and then I sat down on a bench and tried to get a little sun.”

“You walk home from Central Park?”

“Yes. Why?”

“You see anyone you knew?”

“On my walk? No.” Her eyes suddenly grew round. “You don’t think I ...?”

“I have to ask questions,” I said. “Then I have to check them out.” I took a final drag on my cigarette and flipped it away. For some reason I kept thinking about those filthy mattresses back inside. A cop sometimes turns up a lot of muck in the course of an investigation, and sometimes the stench of the muck stays with you far longer than the memory of the investigation. I had a feeling I’d be recalling those sweat-soured mattresses for a lot of years to come.

Janice Pedrick shifted her position slightly, and as she did so I noticed the play of muscles through the hard, dancer’s body. She was a large girl, and a strong one. She would be physically capable of handling a small man the size of the corpse. She would have had no trouble at all stringing him up. On the other hand, the dead man had apparently been a prizefighter, supposedly capable of taking care of himself. And the girl showed no signs of having been in anything like a fight. There were no bruises or scratches, and none of her fingernails had been broken. If she’d been a party to his murder, I reasoned, she had either caught him while he was drunk or drugged — which would come out at the autopsy — or she had had help.

But there was the factor of her alibi — if it was one. I’d heard at least a hundred different suspects tell me the same tale. That walk through Central Park, with stop-offs at the zoo and lake and park bench, had worn pretty thin over the years.