Jonathan Craig: The Case of the Petticoat Murder

ACCORDING to the classification the desk officer had entered on the UF 61 form that had brought us to this one-room basement apartment on Bleecker Street, the squeal was an “apparent suicide.”

The classification was wrong.

This was no “suicide,” apparent or otherwise.

This was murder.

Even by Greenwich Village standards, the apartment was a small one. There were a few vivid water colors on the white brick walls, a pair of almost man-size oriental dragons embroidered in orange on the black wall-to-wall drapes opposite the hall door, and, scattered about the slate floor, a half-dozen straw mats decorated with Aztec masks and symbols in black and red. There was very little furniture. Ranged in front of the drapes were a Hollywood bed with a quilted black spread, a nightstand supporting a telephone and an ash tray, and an old-fashioned dresser with claw feet and a large oval mirror. In the middle of the room were two black leather club chairs and a red hassock grouped about a cocktail table fashioned from a cobbler's bench. That was all.

My detective partner, Stan Rayder, was down the hall, trying to calm the girl who had discovered the body and run screaming into the street in search of a patrolman. Colleen Kelly, the young policewoman who had been sent to search the body, sat on the far side of the bed, her face pale and her hands clasped tightly in her lap, trying hard not to show what she felt at the sight of the dead girl hanging from the steam pipe overhead. She was new on the job, and it was tough that her first real introduction to it had to be such a rugged one.

I took out my pencil, changed the classification on the UF 61 from apparent suicide to homicide, and then stepped close to take another look at the body.

It twisted a slow inch to the right, hung motionless for a moment, and then, just as slowly, moved back again. The girl's feet cleared the floor by about six inches, which put her face on a level with my own.

As best I could judge, she had been somewhere between twenty and twenty-three, a fairly tall girl with shimmering black hair, a full-blown, narrow-waisted body and very long, very beautiful legs. She wore sheer nylons, rolled high on her thighs, and small black pumps with unusually high heels.

That was all. Above the taut round garters at the tops of her almost hip-length stockings, she was stark naked.

“Why don't you cut her down?” the policewoman said suddenly, not looking at me. “It's just terrible, leaving her hanging there like that.”

“We have to wait for the Medical Examiner, Colleen,” I said. “Until he gets here and gives us the green light, we can't even touch her.”

Her eyes held a sheen close to tears. “It's awful, just the same,” she said. “I just can't understand it.”

“The M.E. is supposed to see the body exactly the way it was found,” I said. “It's very important.”

“I didn't mean that,” she said. “I meant I can't understand why such a pretty girl should want to kill herself.” She shook her head. “Why, she's hardly out of her teens.”

“She didn't,” I said.

Collen glanced at me sharply. “What?”

“She didn't kill herself,” I said. “She was murdered.”

Colleen's lips formed the word silently, then said it aloud. “Murdered?”

I nodded. “Somebody rigged it to look like suicide,” I said. “The girl was dead before she was strung up.”

She stared up at the swaying body incredulously. “But — but how do you know?”

“It's just a matter of seeing enough of them,” I said. “Come on over a little closer and I'll show you.”

She got to her feet, hesitated for a moment, then set her chin and walked over to me, her face more pale than ever.

“I'm trying,” she said. “Honestly I am.”

“You're doing fine,” I said. “It takes a little getting used to, that's all.”

“I guess I just never realized…”

“I know how it is,” I said. “Now the first thing wrong in this setup is her face. If she'd died on the end of that piece of clothesline, she'd be a damn sight less pretty than she is now. Her face would be swollen, and it'd be any color from pink to purple. In any case, it'd be something you wouldn't want to look at any more than you had to.”

Colleen was up on her toes, peering at the girl's face intently. “She looks almost — natural,” she said.

“Take a close look at her throat,” I said. “Notice how white the skin is?”

“Yes.”

“'Well, it wouldn't be if she'd been alive. A rope almost always ruptures a lot of small blood vessels, and they show up as little black and blue marks along either side of the noose. But the blood had already drained out of this girl's face and throat, so there was nothing to show.” I paused. “But that doesn't always happen. If a person is choked to death with, say, a towel, or something else that's pretty wide and soft and hasn't any hard edges, the black and blue marks might not be there at all.”

Colleen leaned back to look up at the end of the rope tied to the steam pipe. “How about the fibers?” she asked. “In training, they told us that if fibers were scuffed in the direction of the body, it meant someone else had pulled the body up there.”

“They weren't,” I said. “The fibers were scuffed away from the body, the way they should be.”

“Oh?”

“There's about a foot and a half of slack rope up there,” I said. “But whoever killed her knew about fibers too. He must have done one of two things. Either he held her body in his arms and climbed up on something while he tied the rope to the pipe, or he hauled her up there with one rope, tied her to the pipe with the rope that's there now, and then untied the other rope and took it with him.”

She stepped a little closer to the dead girl, and then walked all the way around her, searching the naked body carefully with her eyes.

“There isn't a single mark on her anywhere,” she said. “How was she killed?”

“I don't know,” I said.

“Can you tell when it happened?”

I shrugged. “That's up to the M.E.,” I said. “My guess is that she was killed somewhere between six and eight hours ago.”

She looked at me questioningly.

“I'm going by the extent of the rigor mortis,” I said. “In hot weather like this it usually begins within three to five hours, starting in the jaws and working steadily down the body. It takes anywhere from eight to twelve hours to become complete, depending on how healthy she was, how much alcohol she may have taken aboard, how emotionally wrought-up she was at the time of death and so on.”

“How far has it reached?”

“It's down to her hips,” I said. “That's why, as a very rough guess, I'd say she's been dead for about six or eight hours.”

“Rough guess is right, Pete,” a man's voice said from the doorway. “Rigor mortis is tricky stuff, any way you hunch it.” It was my partner, Stan Rayder.

“You got any better guesses, Stan?” I asked. “If you have, Colleen and I will be mighty pleased to hear them.”

“I'm the kind of man likes to keep things to myself,” he said, walking over to us. “And besides, Detective Selby, this is your squeal. You're carrying it all the way, rigor mortis and all.”

Stan and I, like most other precinct detective teams, divide our shifts so that one of us acts as detective-in-charge for the first half of the tour, and the other for the second. And since our simulated suicide had hit the squad room at a few minutes past eleven, during my half of the shift, I would be in charge of the investigation and responsible for all the attendant paper work, while Stan would act as my assistant. Both of us would, of course, be taken off the regular duty roster and assigned to the case full time.