Jonathan Craig - The Case of the Petticoat Murder

“Yes, but—”

“That 'but' of yours keeps rearing up all the time. You know the trouble with you, Pete? You're a natural-born sucker for 'little ladies.'”

“Oh, sure,” I said. “Who's next in the line-up?”

“This Frenchman who knocked off his old lady and buried her in the flower bed. What we know about him is that he can speak any number of languages so well that the native-born folks can't tell the difference.”

“Was that in the clipping Nadine had translated?”

“No. It was in the same magazine along with the pictures we sent over to have copied. Anyhow, he's a pretty solid candidate. Stan says you and he think Nadine might have been blackmailing him. It's an easy idea to buy, and I'll buy a big piece of it.” He wrote on his pad for a while. “So here's Maurice Thibault. No novice in the murder game. Could be talking to you right now and you'd never guess he wasn't a native son. We can assume opportunity; and as for motive, a guillotine doesn't need any assuming at all.” He paused. “And now we come to Iris Pedrick who runs the antique store. She's the one with the boy friend and the sick husband. Right?”

“Yes.”

“And she gave you a line of bull about being real worried about her husband finding out about the boy friend.”

“She sold me, Barney,” I said. “Just because people want to have their cake and eat it too doesn't mean they like to hurt other people.”

“That isn't the point. The point is, who was she doing the real sweating about? Her husband, or herself?”

“Who knows?”

“This Nadine might have been shaking her down a little.”

“The same might go for all the other people who used her place.”

“True. And yet we have to stick with Mrs. Pedrick because she's the only one we know about. She and her boy friend, Eddie Dycer. You run Eddie and Iris through BCI?”

“Yes.”

“Well, keep an eye on those two, Pete. You never know.”

I nodded, thinking how tough it must be for Barney. More and more often of late he had been sitting down with the men on his squad for sessions like this one. It was the closest thing to working a squeal that his command and title permitted; but it was still a long, long way from the real thing.

“And this young guy that Nadine had such a big yen for,” Barney went on, really warming up now. “There's the guy to watch, Pete.”

“Marty Hutchins, Barney,” I said. “I checked him out, Remember?”

He frowned. “Yes, I remember now. Stan said he was shacked up all night with some kid in a hotel.”

“That's right.”

“Now where does that leave us, Pete? Who've we over-looked?”

“If you've overlooked anyone, it must be someone who just hit town five minutes ago.”

“Another one of your troubles, Pete, is that you don't use a wide-angle lens. You're always trying to whittle suspects down to just two or three.”

“I always try to whittle them down to just one,” I said.

“You better watch it, boy. A real smart one like you is likely to make lieutenant in less than five years.” He paused. “You just plain forgot that Bowman girl, didn't you?”

I grinned. “Barney, I didn't forget her. I simply—”

“Well, I haven't. Judy Bowman is the one who found the body — and that gives her a good ten-yard lead on everybody else. Half the time, the murderer turns out to be one of two people: the spouse, or the one who finds the body.”

“All right,” I said. “She lived within fifty feet of Nadine. She had opportunity, but no known motive. She checked clean at BCI. She ran out into the street yelling for a cop. This was at least six hours after Nadine died, and it may have been as many as ten. She was hysterical when we got there, and she very nearly got that way again while I was questioning her.”

“How come you're so sure this Judy Bowman wasn't acting?”

I shrugged. “Hysteria isn't acting, Barney.”

“Never sell the ladies short, Pete. So who else is there? It seems to me we're still missing somebody.”

He sat doodling on the scratch pad awhile, as if trying to think of anything we'd overlooked; then he tossed the pencil aside, glanced at his watch, and stood up.

“Well,” he said, “if I want to get home and eat and shave and clean up a little and still get back to work by eight o'clock, I'd better get a move on.”

I walked back out to the squad room with him. He waved to Stan, who was busy on the phone, and then paused in the doorway for a last look around.

“Pete,” he said, “may I give you some words of advice?”

“Sure, Barney. What are they?”

He turned to leave. “Get hot,” he said.

AS PULLED out the chair at my desk, Stan dropped the phone in its cradle. “Son of a bitch,” he said.

“What's up, Stan?”

“You know all the fussing around you did over that handbag we found in Nadine's strongbox?”

“What about it?”

“Pretty expensive bag, it seems. Worth about two hundred bucks.”

“You mean you've got something on it? That's what the phone call was about?”

He nodded. “It was Lost Property, Pete. They've just found out who it belonged to.”

“Who?”

“Son of a bitch.”

“Stan.”

“You can't beat Lost Property, Pete! Those guys've—”

“Stan, who did the bag belong to?”

“Edna Hardesty.”

For an instant, the name didn't register. “Who?”

“Edna Hardesty, Pete. That black-haired girl that gave us the cold eye when we asked her to let us talk to Dr. Campbell.”

“Oh, sure. Campbell's receptionist.”

“Little Miss Fish Eye.”

“Well, I'll be damned.”

“You see the way she had her ear in that intercom when we came out of Campbell's office?” he said.

“Sure. She didn't miss a word.”

“Maybe she didn't like the idea of anybody else even talking to the guy. You know?”

“Could be, Stan. But let's stick to what we know. How'd Lost Property pull it off?”

“They worked all night.”

“Yes, but how did they pull it?”

“Well, they started in with the manufacturer's code number inside the bag. The company that makes them is just a little one-horse outfit, maybe twenty guys in all, and the two brothers that own the shop work right along with everybody else. You know the kind of place?”

“All I know is that I wish you'd get on with it.”

“It's one of these outfits that does everything by hand. Every stitch and every cut is done that way. That's what makes those things so damn expensive.”

“I kind of suspected that all along,” I said. “But what about Lost Property?”

“They get one of these brothers out of bed and talk to him a while. It turns out he's a real nice guy, so he takes them down to the office, just like that guy at the Joyner Translation Bureau did with me, and gives the boys a look at the records.”

“And the records showed that Edna Hardesty bought—”

“You're getting ahead of the game, Pete.”

“All right,” I said. “Go ahead.”

“Well, what the records usually show are exactly what bags go to any given outlet. They number the bags with consecutive serial numbers, and they keep a record of what goes where, just like banks do with new bills sometimes. So all they have to do is look at a bag's serial number and they can tell you where it was sold, and when the store got the shipment, and so on.”

“And?”

“And the only exception is when somebody's knife slips, or somebody makes a slip some other way. They inspect every bag four times, and if it isn't perfect, it doesn't go out. They cancel that serial number and sell the bag to their employees for just what it cost in the way of raw material. They're culls, and the employees can buy them for maybe fifteen or twenty bucks, depending on what kind of leather it is. The point is, there's never anything really wrong with these bags; it's usually some little thing that nobody but an expert would even notice.”