Корнелл Вулрич - A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

But I could have saved my breath, it was like talking to the walls. They had their suspect in the bag and were going to see that he stayed there. They shook their heads pityingly at me and went on out to break the glad news to the chief. I went in to Fraser again and sent the cop out of the room. His hair was all down over his face and he was just staring out under it without seeing anything. I couldn’t help feeling sorry for him, but I didn’t let him know it.

“What’d you do that for?” I said quietly.

He knew I meant signing that cheesy confession. “It’s no fun when they jab cigarette butts up under your armpits.”

“Can that.” I gave him a hard look. “I don’t want to hear about your troubles. If there’s anything yellower than killing your wife, it’s saying you did it when you didn’t. Now try to snap out of it and act like a man even if you’re not. I want to ask you something.” I called the cop and told him to bring him in a cup of coffee. While he was slobbering it all over the front of his shirt and sniffing into it I said: “You told me you’ve got an unmarried sister. She blond?”

“Yeah,” he sobbed, “like me.”

“Where can I get hold of her?”

“She don’t live here, she’s up in Pittsfield, Mass., with my folks.”

“How’d she get along with your wife?”

“Not so hot,” he admitted.

I let him alone after that. “Put him back in mothballs,” I told the cop.

In the chief’s office the two half-baked rookies were all but doing a war-dance around their embalmed confession, while the chief read it over through his glasses. Embalmed is right, it smelled out loud.

“You showed up smart on that last case,” the chief said to me sourly.

“Why, it hasn’t broken yet, I’m still with it,” I said quietly. “That guy in there, Fraser, didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“Who did?”

“A Mrs. Drew,” I said. “I’ll show her to you as soon as I can. G’night.”

I ran up a big bill by calling Pittsfield, Mass., long-distance, but it didn’t take me long to find out all I wanted to know about Fraser’s sister. Which was simply that she wasn’t there. The last anyone had seen of her had been the night before, waiting around the depot for a train. I wondered if even a girl from Pittsfield would be dumb enough to think she was disguising herself by changing her hair from blond to dark — still, you never can tell. Every once in awhile one of those 1880 twists crops up in a 1935 case. Apart from that, I found out there wasn’t anyone named Drew in the whole of Pittsfield.

Even so, I had a pretty good set-up after just twenty-four hours’ work. I had the two angles of the triangle now — the two women — Fraser’s wife and sister. All I needed was a third angle, the man in the case. And that wasn’t Fraser, he was just the fall guy in this.

Who the guy was, that had smoked in the clothes-closet and then stepped out to turn Mrs. Fraser’s head into caviar, wasn’t going to be any cinch. Starting from scratch I had this much on him: both the super and Mrs. Katz had lamped him on his way out, which wasn’t much but it was better than nothing at all. In addition there was one other little thing I didn’t need to be told by anybody. I was as sure as though I had been present at his christening that his name was going to turn out to be Drew, the same as the lady who was down on the insurance policy as beneficiary. But that was only a detail. He could call himself Smith for all I cared just as long as I got hold of him. As far as Fraser’s sister was concerned she could keep. The point being that wherever Drew was, Mrs. Drew wouldn’t be very far away. And if the Fraser girl happened to be Mrs. Drew, with or without benefit of clergy, that was her tough luck.

The first thing I did was to get hold of the super and Mrs. Katz, one at a time, and quiz them to get a rough idea of what he had looked like. It took hours and used up thousands of words, because neither of them were exactly Einsteins, but I got a couple of interesting facts out of them. The super, who had been all the way across the court from him, could only contribute that on his way out he had taken the woman who was with him by the arm to help her manage the two very low, harmless steps that led down to the sidewalk level. Mrs. Katz, who had been waiting to go in the elevator as they came out, enlarged on this trait of gallantry he seemed to possess.

“Well, one thing, he was no loafer,” she said approvingly. “I had my arms full with bundles, so what does he do, he turns and holds the elevator door open for me, I should go in.”

Darned polite, I said to myself, for a guy who had just committed a murder. Politeness must have been an awfully strong habit with him, a hangover from whatever line of business he was in. Mrs. Katz was certainly no spring chicken, and I’ve seen better lookers. Who, I asked myself, is trained to be polite to women of all ages, no matter what they look like? Who has to be, in order to earn a living? A gigolo. A headwaiter. A floorwalker in a department store. An automobile salesman. A hairdresser—

Sure. I might have known that from the beginning. Hair seemed to have a lot to do with this. This woman had gone in there blond and come out brunette. I’d found a lot of blond hair cut off in a hurry in the incinerator, without any blood on it. This unknown guy had been up there at the time, although nobody saw him go in. And he’s so used to handing out the oil to his customers that even when he comes out with that butchery on his conscience, he instinctively holds the door open for one woman, elaborately helps the other down a two-inch step. What you might call a reflex action. And to cinch the whole thing, there was that crumpled lid of a cardboard box that had been thrown down the garbage chute; the one that said Sylvia, Hairdresser on it.

That gave me a pretty good idea of how he had employed his talents up there in the flat, apart from mangling Mrs. Fraser. But all the same it took my breath away, left me with a hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach. The guy must be a monster. Was it possible for a human being to batter one woman to death and then right on top of that, in the very next room, calmly sit down and go to work giving his accomplice a quick treatment to change the color of her hair?

He must have said: “Anyone see you come in?” She must have said: “I had to ask the superintendent where it was.” He must have cursed her out for being ninety-nine kinds of a fool, then said: “Well, I took a chance on someone spotting you. I brought something that’ll fix it so they won’t know you as you go out.”

Well, I could fix it so nobody’d know either one of them this time next year, and I wasn’t wasting any more time about it either. I looked up Sylvia’s in the directory, and luckily there were only three of them to buck. If it had been Frances or Renee I would have had half a column to wade through. Nothing doing with the first two; I got to the third a little before five in the afternoon.

It was a whale of a place. Twenty-two booths going full-blast and a lot of steam and perfume and cigarette smoke all mixed up. It gave me the creeping willies to be in there, especially after somebody’s face with black mud all over it nearly scared me out often years’ growth. I stayed close to the door and asked to see the proprietor. It turned out Sylvia was just a trade-name and the proprietor was a man after all. He came out rubbing his hands; maybe he was just drying them off.

“You got anybody named Drew working for you?” I said.

“No,” he said, “we had an expert named de la Rue here until the day before yesterday, but he isn’t with us any more.”

That interested me right away. “Come again, what’d you say the name was?”