Jonathan Craig - The Case of the Petticoat Murder

I walked back into the bar, looked up Nadine Ellison's number in the directory on the shelf outside the phone booth, and called it.

Stan Rayder's voice was very pleasant, very polite.

“Sorry, Stan,” I said. “It's only me.”

“Just my luck,” he said.

“You mind holding the fort alone?” I asked. “I'd like to head back to the squad room and get things rolling.”

“Good idea. We've got wall-to-wall brass here, and brass on top of brass.”

“Any new developments?”

“No. How about you?”

I filled him in on my sessions with Iris Pedrick and Eddie Dycer.

“So that's what our girl was doing,” he said when I'd finished. “Making a damn good living just renting out her workbench!”

“The body still there?”

“Yeah, but the M.E. is about to ship it to Bellevue.”

“Well, I guess that's just about it, Stan.”

“Say hello to the gang at the precinct,” he said wryly.

I hung up, left the bar, and walked down to the unmarked Plymouth sedan in which Stan and I had arrived.

On my way back to the station house I kept seeing Nadine Ellison's naked body twisting slowly on the steam pipe. Her killer could be in Miami by now, I reflected. Or in Los Angeles. Or he might be out over the Atlantic, halfway to Europe.

And then again, he might be quietly drinking beer in a Village bar just like the one I'd walked out of a few moments ago.

BY THE TIME I reached the detective squad room on the second floor of the station house, the clock over the speaker on the wall said twenty minutes of two. There were no reports in my In basket and no telephone messages on my call spike. Aside from a teen-age blonde girl handcuffed to a chair near the door, I was the only one in the room.

“You, too,” the girl said. She was wearing a sleeveless white blouse, skin-tight blue jeans, and cream-colored moccasins with yellow lacings. “You, too, Buster.”

“What?” I said.

“The same thing I told the other cops they could do. You can do it, too.”

“They giving you a bad time?”

“They're trying. They've got me in on a possession.”

“Tea?”

“No, damn it; 'H.' They think I was holding two decks of the stuff.”

“Well, were you?”

“Hell, no. It's nothing but powdered sugar.”

“Been doing a little cutting, have you?”

“I was going to bake a cake.” She shook her head contemptuously. “Possession! What a gas. All they can do to me is apologize.”

I went out to report to Acting Lieutenant Barney Fells, the Commander of the Sixth Detective Squad, but the little cubbyhole he calls an office was empty.

Back at my desk again, I sat down, lit a fresh cigar, and went to work.

My first call was to the Bureau of Criminal Information, to ask for checks on Nadine Ellison, Judy Bowman, Iris Pedrick, and Eddie Dycer. Then, while I waited for BCI to call me back I phoned the officer who had been in charge of that morning's line-up to ask whether he'd shown any loid-workers or sex offenders. It seemed to me that there were enough unusual factors in the homicide to suggest the possibility of a sex angle, and I wanted to touch all the bases.

The line-up officer told me he had shown no loid-workers, and that although he had shown a sex offender, the man had been jailed yesterday afternoon and kept there ever since.

Still waiting for BCI, I went through the arrest flimsies and the D.D. 104's — the Reports of Unusual Occurrences by Detectives. I didn't find anything. There'd been the usual number of arrests and unusual occurrences, but none of them seemed to tie in with the homicide.

Checking the flimsies and D.D. 104's was standard routine, of course, because sometimes a person will commit one crime, and then commit one or more other crimes in an effort to cover up the first. A man who has knifed another may have gotten blood on his clothing and steal other clothing to replace it. Or a man who has killed someone may try to get out of town in a stolen car, or mug someone in the subway to get money for train fare. If the second crime is committed in the immediate vicinity of the first, and can be related to it in some other way, the arrest flimsies and D.D. 104's can prove helpful indeed.

But this, apparently, was not one of those times.

“You got a cigarette?” the blonde girl said

“Sorry,” I said. “I use cigars.”

“You would,” she said, rubbing her wrist where the handcuff had chafed it. “Why'n hell don't you send up a smoke signal for your buddy-boys? I'm getting tired of waiting. And besides, this particular type chair is hard on a girl's ass.”

“Quiet down,” I said.

“You know what you can do,” she said.

The more I mulled it over, the better the possibility of a sex angle began to seem. People do weird things for sexual enjoyment; strangling themselves and others is only one of them. The idea, of course, is to stop just the other side of climax and just this side of death; but by the time that point is reached, the victim is often in such a state of excitement that he know longer recognizes it. In our years together, Stan and I had cut down a lot of them: men dressed in women's clothing, girls with their bodies covered with obscene words written in lipstick, men and women with stomachs bristling with needles or forearms livid with cigarette burns.

But if Nadine Ellison had died in a similar way, it had been someone else who had handled the petticoat and the rope.

I didn't want to tie up my own phone again, in case BCI should try to get through to me, so I went back out to Barney Fell's office to use his.

I called Ted Norton, a modus operandi expert in another department of BCI.

“It looks like you've caught yourself a dilly, Pete,” Ted said after I'd told him how we'd found Nadine's body. “Maybe some guy was playing along with that petticoat, just for kicks, and went too damn far.”

“It's just an outside chance,” I said. “But if it did happen that way, the most logical thing for him to do would be to simulate a suicide.”

“Uh-huh. Well, it sure as hell wouldn't be the first time. You get an alky count of her yet?”

“Not yet,” I said. “She had a bottle in the room, though.”

“Smell any on her?”

“No.”

“Sounds pretty good, Pete. If she wasn't dead drunk when the guy worked on her with that chemise—”

“Petticoat.”

“Petticoat, chemise — who cares? The point is, if she wasn't completely jugged when he was working on her, and if she hasn't got a single scratch or bruise on her to show she tried to stop him — well, what else could it be but that she was letting him do it, just for jollies?”

“We don't even know the cause of death yet, Ted.”

“Yeah. Well, even so, it looks pretty good.”

“How long'll it take to sift out the likely M.O.'s?”

“Not too long, Pete. Couple hours, at the outside. Now get off the phone so I can go to work.”

I hung up and walked out to my desk again. The arresting officers had taken the blonde narcotics suspect away, and in her place was Louis Lozeck.

“Hello, Mr. Lozeck,” I said.

“Mr. Detective Selby,” he said, and then sat smiling at me, bobbing his head happily, a harmless, pitiable old man with soft, gentle eyes, an enormous white mustache, and a yellowed, leathery face so completely and deeply corrugated with wrinkles that more than one press photographer took his picture almost every time he saw him.

Lozeck lived in terror of his sister-in-law, a woman who he was certain possessed the evil eye and bewitched him regularly. On the days when he found his sister-in-law's evil eye unbearable, he came to the squad room and sat there, smiling and nodding, until her sorcery lost some of its potency.