Jonathan Craig - The Case of the Petticoat Murder

“They're not too healthful, at that,” I said.

“So now we can figure on another suspect.” He paused. “You know, I think maybe I could get to like this Thibault just as much as Burt Ellison.”

“It's a good thing you never started playing the horses,” I said. “You'd be betting the whole field, every race.”

“In our racket, that's not always a bad idea.”

“We'll kick it around a little more when I get back to the squad room. Has there been any other action at all, Stan? It's time we heard from Frank Voyce and those fifty cops of his.”

“Don't worry about Voyce. When he gets hold of what we want, we'll hear about it.”

“All right, then. I'll grab a bite and come in.”

“Tough you had the trip for nothing, Pete. Hurry home.”

I hung up, started to reach for a cigar — and then suddenly stood very still, with the cigar halfway out of my pocket.

The water was still running in the bathroom. But there was no other sound. No splashing noises, no scrape of shoesole or whisper of towel, no sound of movement — nothing but the hissing pound of water against the bottom of the basin and the steady, hollow gurgling of the drainpipe.

“Miller?” I said, crossing quickly to the bathroom door. Then, much louder, “Miller!”

There was no answer, and no sound other than the water.

I tried the door. It was locked.

I stood there for a moment, trying by sheer force of will to deny what I knew intuitively had to be. It could be a heart attack, of course; Stan and I found DOA's in bathrooms practically every other day. It could even be suicide, just as it had been the time one of Stan's and my suspects locked himself inside his bathroom and cut his throat.

But this was neither heart attack nor suicide, I sensed; this was something that had happened because a cop had been inexcusably careless.

“Miller!” I called once more; and then, getting as much leverage as I could with nothing to brace my shoulders against, I booted the door about six inches beneath the knob.

The door burst open on an empty bathroom and a wide-open window. I glanced inside the shower curtain first, just to make sure, and then went to the window and looked out.

The only way Miller could have gone was straight down. There was no ledge beneath the window, no way he could have climbed upward or to either side — nothing but the flat brick rear of the building and a sheer drop of at least twenty feet to the moonlit concrete of the alley below.

It was the kind of plunge no sane man would take unless his only alternative was almost certain death.

But Albert Miller had taken it. And he had not only lived through it; he had been able to walk away.

The phone rang, and I went out to answer it.

It was Stan Rayder again.

“Glad I caught you before you left,” he said. “There've been a couple of developments.”

“There sure have,” I said.

“What's with the doomsday voice? I just got some pix of Maurice Thibault, Pete. Barney Fells came in, and he remembered there was a picture of the guy in one of those Justice Department circulars they're always sending us. He dug it up out of the basement and—”

“You think this Maurice Thibault is a pretty hot suspect, do you, Stan?”

“What the hell gives with you, anyway, Pete? You got a wild hair somewhere? All I wanted to do was tell you about the pix and ask you if you'd pick up some coffee on your way back. Why so steamed?”

“Miller took a walk out the window,” I said. “While you and I were talking, he—”

“Is he dead?”

“No, but he's almost certain to be pretty badly hurt.”

“You mean he took a dive and… Jesus Christ!”

“So, if it's hot suspects we wanted, we've got one.” I said. “Now hang up, Stan, so I can call in an alarm.”

“You want me to come up there?”

“No. Stay where you are — and see if you can't use your head a little better than I did.”

“Hell, it could happen to anybody, Pete.”

“It didn't though,” I said. “It happened to me.”

WHEN I into the squad room at five the air was still hot and muggy with the stored heat of the day and the oscillating fan atop the file cabinet did little more than stir the papers on the desks and move the stale tobacco smoke from one part of the room to another.

Stan Rayder was sitting at his desk, sipping from a quart container of coffee and gazing thoughtfully out the window at the dense, dark-gray haze that passes for the first light of morning in New York City.

“Lovely city, New York,” he said as I sat down. “I wish I could see it.”

“Maybe you will someday,” I said. “Then you'll be ahead of all of us.”

“Is that what they call being enigmatic?” he said, extending the container toward me. “I wouldn't exactly say it's coffee, but it's hot.”

I got my mug from the bottom drawer of my desk, filled it from the container, and handed the container back to Stan.

“Talk a lot, don't you?” Stan said. “Regular chatterbox.”

“If I hadn't spent so much time talking to you on that phone…”

“That's what they're for, Pete. Talking. The guy wasn't a suspect when you were talking to me. He didn't start being a suspect until he took his swan dive. In other words—”

“In other words, I let him get away,” I said. “That's what it amounts to, any way you slice it.”

“Balls. So what've you done about it? I mean, aside from asking Communications to get out an alarm.”

“Well, the first thing I did was hit for that alley out back. There's only one way he could have got away from there, Stan, and that's through the alley and across a couple of courts to Riverside.”

“Any bloodstains?”

“Not a one.”

He nodded. “The damage must all be on the inside.”

“Communications has put all the hospitals on the watch-and-wait,” I said. “I think he must have made it as far as Riverside under his own power, and then taken a cab.”

“They checking the trip-sheets?”

“Yes. There's a cop at every cab garage. They'll check every sheet the minute the driver turns it in.”

“You think he might have holed in somewhere around there?”

“It wouldn't be easy. But if he did, the uniform men will flush him out.” I finished the last of my coffee and put the mug back in the drawer. “You said Barney came up with some pictures of Maurice Thibault,” I said. “Where are they?”

“He sent them over to Centre Street for copies,” he said. “You want to read the translation of that newspaper story?”

“I remember it,” I said.

“Which reminds me,” he said. “Barney Fells is still here, Pete.”

“At this hour? How come?”

“Hell, he spends half his life here, Pete. All he uses his home for is to store his clothes.” He paused. “He… uh… said he wanted to see you.”

“About Albert Miller?”

“Damned if I know, Pete.”

“If this is going to be a chew-out, I want to know.”

“He's a little bit steamed, Pete. Whether it's about Miller or not, I don't know.”

“Which way would you call it?” I said.

“Well…

“Well?”

“Miller,” he said.

I got up and walked out to the squad commander's six-by-six office and sat down on the straight chair beside his desk.

“You wanted to see me, Barney?” I said,

He scowled at me a moment, nodded almost imperceptibly, and then looked away from me and sat drumming a pencil eraser against the top of his desk. “I can think of a lot of people I'd rather see,” he said.

I didn't say anything. Barney had his own ways of backing into a chew-out, and squad-room protocol required his detectives to say nothing until asked for comment. I watched him, feeling a lot more sorry for Barney Fells than I felt concerned for myself.