Lawrence Block: Masters of Noir: Volume 1

The cheap furnished room in the brownstone where the girl had been murdered was so cramped that it was hard for Walt and the assistant M.E. and me to keep out of each other’s way. The photographer and the other techs had finished half an hour ago and gone back to the station house. I’d put a patrolman at either end of the third-floor corridor to keep the crowd back. From the noise that came up both the front and back stairs, it seemed that half of New York’s west side must be down there.

The building super was talking to the two ambulance attendants in the hallway just outside the door. He was beginning to rub on my nerves. The M.E. had stripped the girl, of course, and the super was trying his damnedest to get a clear gander at her.

“Relax, Jacobson,” I told him. “You’ve seen young girls before. Wait for us down the hall.”

He gave me a hard look, but he moved away.

The M.E. pulled the sheet up over the girl’s body. “That’s it,” he said.

I motioned for the ambulance attendants to take her away. When the body was gone, and I’d shut the door, the M.E. sat down on the side of the bed and lit a cigar.

“She had a lot of living left to her,” he said. “She was about eighteen, I’d say. No older.” He shook his head. “Damn shame.”

“You find anything besides those lumps on her jaw?” I asked.

“Not a thing, Dave. I won’t know for sure till I post her, of course, but right now I’d say the cause of death was a fractured skull.”

“Those bumps didn’t look so bad though,” Walt said dubiously.

“That doesn’t mean much,” the M.E. said. “When a person’s hit hard enough on the chin, the force of the blow is transmitted to the point where the jaw hinges on the skull. That causes a fracture, and a lot of times it’s fatal. The brain’s a semi-solid, Walt, and it doesn’t take much to damage it, or even tear it away from the skull altogether.”

I nodded. “The skin wasn’t broken, so the murder weapon was probably somebody’s fist. And besides, if the killer had used a club or something, say, he’d have hit her almost anyplace else but on the jaw.”

The M.E. took a deep drag on his cigar. “How’d you boys make out?”

“No good,” I said.

“No identification at all?”

“Not a bit.”

“That’s odd.”

“Yeah,” Walt said. “The only clothes in the room were the ones she had on. Nothing in the closet, not even a suitcase. And nothing in the dresser. No letters. No anything. She must have used this room for something else besides living in it. We did find a purse, but there wasn’t any identification in it. If she had any identification at all, then it must have been in a wallet, and somebody took it along with him.”

“You’re sure she wasn’t attacked, Doc?” I asked.

“I can’t be positive until I get her downtown, Dave. But I’d say no. There’s no evidence of that at all. Her lipstick was a little smeared, you noticed, so she’d probably been kissing somebody. But I don’t think there was anything more than that.”

“I’ve got a hunch this is going to be one of the tough ones,” Walt said. “It just smells tough, if you know what I mean.”

The M.E. got up and walked to the door. “Well, the sooner I get started on the autopsy, the sooner I’ll know whether I can give you any more help.”

Walt went over to the open window and sat down on the sill. “You got any ideas, Dave?” he asked.

“Just the shoes,” I said.

“The shoes? What about them?”

“The rest of her clothes are going to be hard to trace,” I said. “They’re nice enough, but they’re just like a million other garments. They aren’t expensive, and all they’ve got in the way of labels is the manufacturer’s name. They could have been bought in any of a thousand places, all over the country. But the shoes are something else again. They’re Jules Courtney shoes, and that makes them just about the most expensive shoes she could buy.”

“So?”

“They can be traced. The Jules Courtney outfit stamps all their shoes, not only with their trade name but with the name and address of the retailer to whom they’re shipped. This girl’s shoes were bought at a store in Atlanta, Georgia, Walt.”

“Fine. Nothing like an out-of-town corpse on your hands.”

I moved toward the door. “Let’s take another crack at that super.”

We left a patrolman in the murder room and took the super down to his living quarters in the basement.

He was middle-aged, surly, and about half drunk. “I told you guys I don’t know nothing about the girl,” he said. “She come in looking for a room last Friday. She paid me a week in advance, and that’s all I see of her.”

“You told us before that you didn’t know her name,” I said. “How come? You had to sign a receipt for the rent, didn’t you, Jacobson?”

“Receipt? Hell no, I don’t sign no receipts. It’s too much trouble. If people don’t like the way I run this house, then they can go live someplace else.”

“She didn’t even tell you her name?”

“I told you once. No. She asked me for a receipt, and I said no dice — so what’d I care what her name was?”

The wall behind Jacobson’s bed was covered with photographs torn from magazines and newspapers. Nothing but girls. Some in bathing suits and some nude. Walt walked over to look at them.

“Kind of like the ladies, eh, Jacobson?” Walt said.

“All right, so I like girls. Who doesn’t, for God’s sake?”

“We’ve talked with the other people on the third floor,” I said. “Nobody knew the girl at all. Nobody had seen her. They’d never even heard her in there. She have any company, so far as you know?”

He shook his head. “As long as the tenants don’t bust up the furniture, I don’t ask no questions. I don’t spy on them. I just plain don’t give a damn what they do. Maybe she had company, maybe she didn’t; I don’t know.”

“You mean to say you had a girl living in your house almost a week, but you never saw her but once, and never heard any of the other tenants say anything about her?”

“That’s right. How many times do I have to tell you?”

“How about when you took towels and linen up there?”

“Towels and linen ain’t due till tomorrow.”

“Where were you last night?”

He moistened his lips, staring at me. “You got nothing on me, copper.”

“Answer the question,” I said.

“You going to take me down?”

“I’ll damn well take you down if you don’t open up.”

“I ain’t saying till I have to.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“The people I was with — well, I don’t want to cause no trouble.”

“How would you cause them trouble?”

“If their husbands knew I’d been with them, there’d be trouble.”

“These are two married women, you mean?”

“Yeah.”

“ Two of them, Jacobson?”

“Yeah.”

“Come on,” I said. “We’re going down to the station house.”

“Now, wait a minute. You can’t—”

“I’m tired of fooling with you. On your feet.”

He chewed at his lower lip a moment, glaring at me balefully. “All right. What the hell. I was in the first floor rear with Mrs. Cressy and Mrs. Austin. Their husbands work at night, up in Queens someplace. I was there all night.”

The M.E. had told us the girl had been murdered about midnight, give or take an hour either way.

“Listen,” Jacobson said, “if Cressy and Austin find out I was up there, they’ll—”