David Alexander - Masters of Noir - Volume 2

I had Headquarters switch me to the police laboratory and asked for a report from the tech crew that had worked the murder apartment with Ben and me. They had found several sets of fairly clear fingerprints, but none of the prints had checked out to prints already on file. They were still working, and would call me as soon as they came up with anything.

I was reasonably sure the assistant M.E. wouldn’t have had time to autopsy the body yet, but I called him anyway. He said that he had not been able to get the autopsy scheduled before ten o’clock the next morning, that he had tried to pull a few wires to get to it before then, but had been unable to work it.

I called the policewoman who had been with Janice Pedrick since her arrival at the station house. The policewoman said Janice had been an easy girl to talk to, but a difficult one to get anything out of. She reminded me she had a reputation for indirect questioning, and that if anyone got anything out of Janice it would be she.

I put the phone down, left a note in the message book to the effect that I would be back in twenty minutes, and went down to a restaurant on Fifty-third Street. I had two roast beef sandwiches and three cups of black coffee, and then went back to the squad room.

There was a note to call Harry Fisher on an extension at Bellevue Hospital. I called, and he told me that our dead man’s name was Teddy Connors. He said Connors had been a pretty fair featherweight in the middle 30’s, had retired with all his brains and most of his money, and had since taken an occasional flyer as a fight manager and promoter. Harry had seen him around only now and then in recent years, though he had once been a steady customer of the various bars around Madison Square Garden and St. Nicholas Arena.

I thanked Harry, made a tentative date for lunch the first day both of us had a free hour, and then called BCI back again. I gave them Teddy Connors’ name and asked for a run-through.

While I was waiting, I walked to the next room and searched the cards in the Eighteenth’s Known Resident Criminal File. These are the cards kept on file in the precinct where the criminal lives, no matter where he was arrested. It has his picture, his record, and the date his parole is up. In the event he was arrested with other individuals, these individuals’ names are listed on the back of the card. But there was no card for Teddy Connors.

I’d put off the paper work as long as I could, but now I sat down at a typewriter and filled out a Complaint Report form as thoroughly as I could, at this stage of the investigation, and then did the same with the other routine forms.

When I finished with the forms, I had gone as far as I could go. I had almost dozed off staring at the typewriter, so I went down to the corner and brought back a quart carton of black coffee.

I was sipping at it when Ben Muller came in.

“Any luck?” I asked.

“Maybe she took a walk, maybe she didn’t,” he said. “She checked out of the hotel when she said she did, but that’s as far as I got.” He reached for the coffee and drank steadily until he had finished a good half of it. “You want me to talk to her, Pete?”

“Nope. Let her think a while longer.”

He shrugged. “Suits me.” He sat down at his desk and put his head down on his arms. “Don’t wake me up unless I inherit a million bucks, Pete.”

The phone on my desk rang. It was Tom Volz, of the Tenth.

“We got something for you, Pete,” he said. “Eddie Willard.”

“Where’d you grab him?”

“We didn’t. He walked in.”

“The hell!”

“Sure did, Pete. About two minutes ago. He says he won’t talk to anybody but you. That’s fine with us. We got our own troubles.”

“We’ll be there before you can hang up,” I said.

“What’s the deal?” Ben asked.

“They’ve got Eddie Willard, over at the Tenth.”

He stood up, yawning widely. “Fine. Maybe we’ll get to bed some time this year after all.”

The boys at the Tenth gave Eddie Willard and me the rear interrogation room to talk in. Willard had said he wouldn’t say a word if anyone else was in the room with us, and I’d left Ben shooting the breeze with Tom Volz. Neither Willard nor I sat down. He was about my height, but a lot thicker-bodied. He had a lot of dark hair and restless dark eyes that never seemed to blink.

“I’m going to give you this fast and hard and all in one piece,” he said. “I’ve heard of you a lot. I think I’ll get a clean shake.”

I nodded. “What’s on your mind, Mr. Willard?”

“I heard a rumble you were looking for Leda and me. I would have turned in up at your precinct, but I didn’t want to take a chance on getting tagged by some other cop before I got there.”

“Where’s your wife, Mr. Willard?”

“I’ll get to that. First I want to tell you that I’m doing this to save my own hide. No other reason. I’ve done a lot for Leda in my time, and now I’m through.” He paused a moment, biting at his lip. “Here it is, the whole thing. I just found out about Leda this morning, see? I’ve been married to her eight years, but I never knew until this morning just what a rotten woman she really was. The only reason I found out then is because she was scared crazy. She didn’t kill Teddy Connors, you understand. But she’d been fooling around with him, over at Janice Pedrick’s dump and all.”

“Did she have any part in the killing?” I asked.

“Not exactly. Bucky Sullivan killed him. Here’s the way it went. Leda was working for a guy down in the Village, a jeweler. This guy was trying to make time with her, and she kind of led him on because he slipped her a few extra bucks now and then. Anyhow, this guy — Dannion, his name is — had been knocking down on his income tax. Every time someone paid cash for something, he’d stash the money in his safe. God knows how long he’d been putting it away, but one night he got half crocked and told Leda about it. He said there was twenty thousand in the safe — and when she didn’t believe him, he showed her.”

I lit a cigarette and leaned up against the edge of the table. I didn’t say anything.

“Well, Leda had been fooling around a lot with this goddamned Teddy Connors,” Willard went on. “Connors had dropped a word now and then that made her think he might be able to do something about that twenty grand. She put it up to him, and sure enough Connors gets Bucky Sullivan, a guy he used to spar with in the old days, and the two of them went over to the jewelry shop and hit it. They got the dough all right, but Connors — he saw a chamois bag in a corner of the safe, and he took that along too, without saying anything to Bucky about it.”

“What was in the bag?”

“Sapphires. About a dozen of them. Worth a lot more than diamonds. Anyhow, this jeweler reported the stones missing, and called the insurance company. But he didn’t say anything about the money, because he was afraid to. He got into the country illegally, about fifteen years ago, and he knew that if the feds heard about that twenty grand and started smelling around, he might be deported.” He took a deep breath. “Well, the insurance company wasn’t getting anywhere. Finally they let it out in the right places that they’d pay a flat four grand for return of the stones, and no questions asked. When Bucky Sullivan got the rumble, he knew what Connors had pulled. It made him sore as hell, to think his old buddy had held out on him, and he went on the prowl.”

“And caught up with him at Janice Pedrick’s place?” I said.

“That’s right. Leda and Connors had been shacked up there all night. This morning, Connors went out for some cigarettes. That’s when Bucky saw him. He trailed him back to the apartment. He had a gun, and he forced Connors to let him in with him. He told Connors he’d let him go if Connors gave him the rocks, but Connors couldn’t do that.”