Jonathan Craig: The Case of the Petticoat Murder

“Damned shame,” Stan said, gazing at the dead girl with as much surprise as if he'd just that instant discovered she was there. “They don't come much prettier than this one, Pete — that's for sure.”

Stan's appearance and facial expressions are misleading — as many a sorry but wiser criminal can attest. While most cops look like cops and nothing else, Stan does not. He's a lanky, soft-spoken, bookish-looking man with gray eyes, a sprinkling of premature gray at his temples, and a habitual expression of mild and polite surprise. The truth is that he is one of the least easily surprised men I ever met; and his thinness is of the steel-spring kind. Stan can disarm and flatten another man before he has any clear idea of just what is happening to him.

He glanced at his watch and frowned. “I think maybe we'll be able to get something out of the Bowman girl now,” he said.

Judy Bowman, the girl who had found the body, had at first been too hysterical to tell us anything more than her name. Her apartment at the far end of the hall was the only other apartment in the building, a rickety, two-story frame structure that housed what appeared to have been a specialty store on the second floor.

“Good,” I said. “I'll see what she has to say.”

“Better take this with you,” Stan said, removing a small deckle-edged photograph from his pocket and handing it to me. “This was stuck in the frame of her mirror; I figured I'd better filch it before the reporters got here and beat me to it.”

I studied it. It was a 2 1/4 x 2 1/4 snapshot of the murdered girl and a good-looking, ruggedly built young man in a short-sleeved sport shirt. They were seated on a bench that reminded me of the ones in Central Park. The man had his arm around the girl, and they both looked very happy.

“Thanks,” I said. “I'll see if Miss Bowman knows the guy.”

“You want me to give the place a toss?”

“Yes,” I said. “Start with the dresser, and watch out for prints.”

“A good thing you reminded me,” Stan said seriously. “I'd never have thought of that.”

The Policewoman had been standing quietly by, glancing from one to the other of us reprovingly, as if she resented the way we were talking. “May I go now?” she asked, a little cooly. “After all, the girl isn't wearing any clothes. What is there for me to search?”

“You look in her shoes?” I asked.

“No, I didn't. But—”

“Take a look,” I said. “Stan and I can't go even that far.” I turned toward the door. “If there's nothing there, put down on your search form that the body was nude except for shoes and stockings, and that your search turned up no money or jewelry.”

“Is that all?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said, “but make sure you put that down about money and jewelry. Relatives have been known to accuse the police of appropriating such things.”

“They wouldn't!” she said.

“Wouldn't they?” Stan said wryly, bending down to start work on the dresser. “People will do anything, Colleen. That's why when we take, say, a platinum ring with a diamond off a DOA, we're always careful to describe it on the search form as a 'white stone in a white metal setting.' That way, we buy a little insurance. Not much, maybe, but it's the best we can do. The ring might not actually be what it looks like, you see; but if we wrote it up that way, the relatives would be able to put in a claim and make the city come up with the difference.”

“Even if you could show them the ring you took off the body?” Colleen asked.

“Even so,” I said. “What counts is what you put down on the search form — not what you say later.”

Colleen leaned over to remove the dead girl's shoes, and I went down the hall to talk to Judy Bowman.

THE BOWMAN GIRL'S apartment was not much larger than the one I had just left. It contained a frayed studio couch, a rattan chair with a sagging bottom, an ancient spindle-backed rocking chair with gargoyle hand rests, a three-tier bookcase filled with ceramics, and a professional-looking potter's wheel in the exact center of the floor. At the rear of the room, partly hidden by a Chinese screen plastered with bullfight posters, were a small refrigerator, a sink not much larger than the average wash basin, and a square metal table with a two-burner hot plate at one end and a cut-glass vase of yellow roses at the other. Aside from a faded afghan above the studio couch and an oval throw rug midway between the couch and the rocking chair, the walls and floor were bare.

Judy sat at one end of the couch, high heels close together on the floor, a tiny, very pretty girl with shoulder-length light-brown hair and enormous dark-brown eyes. She was wearing an off-the-shoulder peasant blouse that seemed a little tight for her and a short pink skirt with a high snug waist topped by a wide leather belt. She kept tugging absently at the hem of the skirt, trying to keep it down over her knees, but she wasn't having much luck. When I'd come into the room, she had glanced at me expressionlessly, and then looked away again, as if I hadn't registered at all.

I drew the rocking chair a little closer to the couch and sat down. “My partner tells me you're feeling a little better now,” I said.

She fixed her eyes on a point about two feet to the left of my head and nodded vaguely. “I–I guess so,” she said. “You probably think I made a fool of myself.”

“Not at all,” I said.

“It's just that it was the first time anything like that ever happened to me,” she said. “I mean, it's the first time I ever saw anything like that.”

There was a young-girl breathlessness in her voice that made me wonder whether she might not be even younger than I'd thought. “How old are you, Miss Bowman?” I asked.

“It's Mrs. Bowman,” she said. “Why do you ask?”

Just sort of trying to break the ice a little,” I said, making it friendly.

“I'm eighteen,” she said. “Did you think I was younger?”

“I hadn't really thought about it,” I said.

“Just because I acted the way I did when I found her hanging there, you think I'm a child.” She seemed suddenly on the point of tears. “Well, I'm no child, Mr… What did you say your name was?”

“Selby.”

“I'm no child, Mr. Selby. I finished two years of college by the time I was sixteen. If I hadn't been such an idiot to get married when I did, I'd have a college degree at an age when most girls are just graduating from high school.” Her full lips paled a little, and I realized for the first time that she wore no makeup of any kind. “Just because I'm small, why does everyone have to treat me like a baby?”

I'd seen too many cases of hysteria not to recognize the symptoms. She'd been hysterical once, and now she was on the thin edge again. It could go either way, and the trouble was that I could do nothing about it.

I did all I could do; I sat and waited. It was touch and go for about thirty seconds; then, slowly, the color came back to her lips and her eyes lost their unnatural brightness. There was a thin film of perspiration on her forehead now, and she looked away from me embarrassedly.

“Okay now?” I said.

She nodded. “Yes.”

“Your husband at work, Mrs. Bowman?” I asked.

She frowned. “We don't live together any more.”

“You live alone, then? No roommate?”

“No.”

“You know the girl down the hall pretty well, did you?”

“I knew her. I really didn't know her well.”

“What was her name?”

“Nadine. Nadine Ellison.”

“She married?”

“I don't think so.”

“But you're not sure?”

“If she was married, she never said anything about it.”