by John Roeburt
Jo-Anne getting into hot water over her practical jokes. And me making like a boy scout and getting her out. Just like old times long ago in school, before Ken and Julia and jail. “I’ll never send you away,” I said, “remember? How about vice-versa?”
“But the police.”
“Remember?”
“I remember, Jase. I’m cold. Just hold me, that’s all. Hold me, hold me, hold me—God, poor Phyllis.”
She was having the shakes suddenly. Shakes, shivers, rattling teeth. I tried to warm her but it was no good. I put my damp trenchcoat aside and draped my jacket across her shoulders, but that didn’t help either. I found the phone and called the police.
She was still shaking and chattering when they came. The first to arrive was the two-man team of a prowl car which happened to be in the neighborhood and probably got alerted via its squawk box. The sergeant had a dour face and a body so thin the police overcoat looked like a tent. His partner adjusted the ear flaps of his cap, then took the whole contraption off his head and scratched at thinning, sandy hair. “Did you say murder?”
“Inside,” I told him, and waited.
The sergeant tried to comfort Jo-Anne by giving her the there-there-everything’s-going-to-be-all-right-now line, but she kept right on crying like she’d forgotten how to do anything else.
The sandy-haired cop returned from the living room. “It’s a floater, Jimmy,” he said in a flat, awed voice. “We’d better call in.”
Sergeant Jimmy nodded, and I offered sandy-hair a cigarette. He got it lit on the second try with trembling fingers, and even if all the detective stories you ever read tell you that a prowl-car crew makes like a couple of hawkshaws, don’t you believe it. Where homicide’s involved, they suddenly become uniformed messenger-boys, because this business of homicide is specialized.
I knew, because the man who might have been my father-in-law but was my brother’s father-in-law instead was a detective lieutenant at Homicide Squad, Manhattan West, which works out of the West 20th Street Precinct. I began to hope Pop Grujdzak would be home in bed snoring the night away, but since he’d always favored the swing shift I had my doubts.
Sergeant Jimmy was saying, “Here’s where we break up a mess of all-night domino games. You go downstairs and call in, George.” George went. I knew that the call would go to George’s local precinct, to the police medical examiner, to the crime photographic bureau and to one of Manhattan Island’s two murder teams, Homicide Squad, Manhattan West, where Pop Grujdzak worked.
“Let’s go into the kitchen,” Sergeant Jimmy said. Between us, we got Jo-Anne to her feet. Sergeant Jimmy drew her a glass of cold water and said nothing when I spiked it with rye. We watched her drink it down without blinking, then I stared at the cracked plaster above the stove and the grease stains on the white wall and the clock-radio on one side of the Formica table while Sergeant Jimmy asked some routine questions and did some scribbling on a pad so he’d have something to show the boys from Manhattan West.
“Did she live alone?”
“No. With Jo-Anne Stedman here.”
“And she was?”
“Phyllis Kirk.”
“Family?”
“Ask Jo-Anne.”
Jo-Anne went on crying, silently.
“What happened to your head?”
“A guy came running out and slugged me.”
“See him?”
“Uh-uh.”
“The girl see him?”
“Search me.”
“What’s your name?”
“Jason Chase.”
“Relative?”
“Friend of Miss Stedman.”
“Where do you work?”
“Unemployed.”
Sergeant Jimmy chewed on his pencil, considering. “Care to explain that?”
“Prison,” I said. “I just got out.”
The way he was chewing, he’d need a new pencil soon. “What for?”
“Rent gouging and other equally well-thought-of real estate practices.”
“You trying to be funny?”
“Truth, Sarge.”
“How long?”
“Two years.”
“A lot of gouging.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“He’s all right,” Jo-Anne said with utterly no expression. I hadn’t thought she was listening. “We spent the whole night together in his hotel room.”
“Well, now,” said Sergeant Jimmy. Jo-Anne was a looker, harlequin glasses or no. It would be something to tell the boys at the precinct. “What time did you get here?” asked Sergeant Jimmy.
“After three.”
“The door was open,” Jo-Anne told him. “Phyllis always locks it. Someone ran at us in the darkness and hit us. I didn’t see him.”
“Miss Kirk get along with people?”
“Yes,” Jo-Anne said. “She’s—was—easy-going. Never argued about anything.”
“No enemies?”
“She never told me of any.”
“What did she do?”
“Research assistant for Dr. Coleman Kincaid over at the University.”
Sergeant Jimmy stood up and rubbed his bony hands together. He probably had visions of Communist, subversives. “Doing government work?”
“Afraid not,” I said.
“Sociology,” Jo-Anne told the sergeant.
“Oh.” Sergeant Jimmy’s stomach grumbled and he looked at Jo-Anne in embarrassment. “Heck,” he said.
Jo-Anne went to the sink and washed her face, drying it with a dish towel hanging on a chrome rack on the door of the broom closet. “I’ll make some coffee if you want. Instant stuff.”
“Do that,” I said. She hadn’t said a word to the cops about her practical joke.
Jo-Anne had started pouring the coffee when the doorbell rang. After four in the morning, it would be either the milkman or cops. I was not betting on Louis Pasteur’s boy. We all deserted the kitchen for the front door.
“Police Medical Examiner,” the stocky man with rimless glasses and a doctor’s satchel told us. “This the right place?”
“Come in.”
For a while I watched him scurry about Phyllis Kirk’s body on all fours like a spider, then I returned to the kitchen.
Buzz went the doorbell again.
This time it was three men from the photographic bureau. Complete with cameras, flash attachments and light-meters. “Hello, Sidney,” the M.E. greeted one of them, scurrying back into the foyer. “She’s in there.”
Sidney yawned, revealing crooked yellow teeth. “Out of bed they got me,” he said, and led his safari into the living room.
These were the specialists and murder was their stock in trade. Sergeant Jimmy might be a novice, but not these boys.
And certainly not Pop Grudjzak, who tried his thumb on the doorbell next. He entered, stared at me, and something behind his small eyes under the jutting ridges of his brows went silently click, click, click and the thin lips hardly moved but he said, “Jason Chase,” clearly and distinctly in a way which would have made his elocution teacher happy.
Detective Lieutenant Emil Grujdzak, called “Ears” by the underworld but not to his face, was a huge man. Not fat, just big all over, with a bald dome of a head and ears like taxicab doors someone forgot to close. All the features of his face—the shrewd small eyes under craggy brows, the miniature flat nose which belonged to a bantam-weight and not a heavy, the round pursed lips—could have fit easily on one hemisphere of a good-sized orange. But the rest of Pop Grujdzak was huge.
“Jason Chase,” he said again, through still-pursed lips. His voice was a deep rasp, but not loud. In the old days, Julia had told me, a thug had socked him one in the Adam’s apple and he hadn’t been able to talk so good since then. “I didn’t know you were out.”
“I’m out,” I said. “How’s the family?”
He ignored me and turned to Sergeant Jimmy, who’d come trotting out into the foyer when he heard Pop Grujdzak’s rasp. “I see th
e M.E. and the pinup detachment are here.”
“Yes, sir, Lieutenant. I’ve made a preliminary investigation for you, and—”
“Thank you.” Pop Grudjzak took the sergeant’s pad, scanned it and said, “Thou shalt not kill…Thou shalt not commit adultery. It looks like you’re using one to alibi the other, Chase.” Pop was a frustrated revivalist, I’d always thought. Most homicide cops rarely make moral judgments, but Pop made them all the time and quoted the Bible so you couldn’t argue with him. He thought he could cure the disease of murder by rubbing people’s noses in it.
“Suppose you leave Miss Stedman out of this,” I said. Pop’s two assistants, both in plainclothes as he was, had gone inside to examine the body and the murder scene. Pop’s specialty was people. Living people. “Well, now,” he told me, “I can’t very well do that, can I? She was the dead girl’s roommate, according to the sergeant. She found the body. She provided you with an alibi.”
“Since I never met Miss Kirk and have no motive, I don’t see why I need an alibi.”
“Miss Stedman,” Pop said, “what kind of work were you and the deceased doing for this Dr. Kincaid?”
Jo-Anne had followed Sergeant Jimmy from the kitchen. “Interviewing people.”
“Interviewing like Kinsey?” He snapped the words out electrically.
“Something like that. But how—”
“I read about Dr. Kincaid in the papers. Tell me, Miss Stedman, could someone have changed his mind about the interview and wanted his life story back?”
“We’d have given it to him in that case,” Jo-Anne told him. “This work is entirely voluntary.”
“Would some of the material have been embarrassing?”
“Very.”
“It was kept under lock and key?”
“Coded.”
“Where?”
Jo-Anne gulped air and leaned against me. She was cold all over. “At the laboratory and at Dr. Kincaid’s home in Putnam County.”
“Listen, Pop,” I said. “She’s had a shock, so why don’t you leave her alone for the time being?”
“It’s Lieutenant Grujdzak, Chase. I’ll tend to my own business and expect you to do the same. Anywhere else, Miss Stedman?”
“Not ordinarily.”
“What do you mean, ‘not ordinarily’?”
“Well, just not.” Jo-Anne’s voice was pitched nervously high and came close to breaking now.
“Now, miss.”
“She told you,” I said.
“Chase.”
“She needs rest, Lieutenant. Why don’t you have the M.E. look at her?”
“Chase!”
“Hell, leave her be.”
“Chase!”
Rasp, rasp, rasp.
“Leave him alone,” Jo-Anne sobbed. “He’s got nothing to do with this.”
“Prove it”
“I already said I was with him—”
“In bed, yes,” Pop rasped. “You could be alibi-ing each other.”
“He has no interest—”
“Miss Stedman,” said Pop’s voice. His eyes slid shut. “Suppose you let me decide that.”
“I know all about you, Mr. Grujdzak,” Jo-Anne said. “How you didn’t want Jase to go near that precious daughter of yours, or Jase’s brother, either. They weren’t good enough. No one was good enough. She had an Electra complex a mile long and you liked it fine. You liked it even better when Jase went to jail, but she married his older brother. You’d like to get back at Jase for that, too, wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you?”
“My dear Miss Stedman, I’m not being interrogated here, you are. And your ex-convict friend.”
“Then listen to me. Last Saturday I took some of Dr. Kincaid’s papers for his book from the University laboratory and brought them here. Doc is absent-minded and a worry wart so we thought—”
“Who is we?”
“Phyllis and I. We thought it would be a great joke.
“A great joke…”
“You don’t have to, Jo,” I said. “He can’t pin this one on me even if he wanted to. They saw me at the hotel. They saw both of us. The room clerk.”
“That’s all right,” Jo-Anne said. “We kept the papers here and Doc got frantic, looking all over. We kept on laughing behind his back. Maybe it wasn’t funny, like a hotfoot that ruins a good pair of shoes, but once we started, we didn’t want to stop.”
“And where are the papers now, Miss Stedman?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know where. They were stolen. Whoever killed Phyllis…stole them,” Jo-Anne finished lamely.
Pop Grujdzak lit a cigarette and let the smoke trickle through his nose. “Practical joke,” he said. “Some practical joke. Maybe the law won’t see it this way, Miss Stedman, but you are as guilty as the man who sneaked up behind your roommate and split her skull open. In the eyes of the Lord you are guilty of murder. Of murder, Miss Stedman.” The revivalist fire was in his eyes, burning bright but ugly.
I said, “She doesn’t have to take that.”
The M.E. scurried out into the foyer, closing his satchel. “I’ll send for the meat wagon to take her to the morgue, Lieutenant. Her skull was crushed between two and three A.M., maybe a little later. No signs of struggle, so it probably came as a surprise to her.”
Pop nodded his bald dome. “Tell me, Miss Stedman, if someone got hold of those papers, could he use them for blackmail?”
“You mean to blackmail Dr. Kincaid?”
“No. The people you interviewed.”
“Not unless the code could be broken. It’s a safeguard always used in this type of research.”
“Who knows the code?”
“Phyllis knew it. I know it, and Dr. Kincaid.”
“Who else was aware you had the papers here, besides Chase?”
“No one. And Jason didn’t know. That’s the truth. Not until I told him about it at his hotel.”
“Then he did know.”
“We came straight here together and found Phyllis…dead.”
“Maybe she told someone, then. Incidentally, how do you know the papers are missing?”
“She found this,” I said. I took the sheet of paper from my pocket. Page 768, it said in the upper left-hand corner. It was filled with typed letters in meaningless combinations, but strung together like words in sentences and paragraphs. Someone had scrawled a telephone number in pencil on the reverse side. It was a Plaza exchange and I memorized it before surrendering the paper to Pop Grujdzak.
“What’s this number?” Pop asked Jo-Anne.
She looked at it. “I don’t know, but it’s Phyllis’ writing, I think.”
“Interesting,” said Pop. He stalked inside to the living room and sprawled his big frame on the orange chair, watching his team at work, watching the photographers retrieving their flash bulbs from the floor, giving the huddled corpse we could hardly see from out here in the foyer a quick examination.
“If they could break the code,” Pop said to Jo-Anne. “Yes. They could use it for blackmail, then.”
“We got more fingerprints,” one of Pop’s assistants said. “All over the place.”
“Fine. Chase’s will be on file with the Bureau of Criminal Identification. Won’t they, Chase?”
“Yes.”
“You can go now, in that case. But stay where we can keep in touch.”
“I’m at the Madison Square Hotel,” I told him.
“Registered under your own name?”
“That’s right. Listen,” I said, “if she’s the only one besides Kincaid who knows the code, Jo-Anne might be in danger.”
“Don’t tell me my business.”
“Don’t worry about me,” Jo-Anne said hurriedly. “I’ll stay with Dr. Kincaid and his family up in Putnam.”
“They’ll be guarded by a plainclothes team if the Putnam County sheriff approves, Chase. Satisfied?”
I said I was but wondered why Pop had bothered to tell me.
“Just so you don’t get any idea
s,” he went on. “They’ll be guarded around the clock.”
“Maybe you’d better book me,” I challenged him.
“Maybe we’d better let you run around instead, Chase. So you can keep looking for trouble. The sooner you get back in jail, the better I’ll like it. And that no-good brother of yours, my son-in-law.”
Well, I couldn’t argue with him. Ken had been guilty of a crime and I’d taken the rap for him.
“You’re free. A free man. Go out and celebrate. Go ahead, why don’t you? But count the days, Chase. We’ll get you. Sneeze in the subway and we’ll get you for spitting.” His raspy voice had lowered to a whisper now. It sounded like he had cancer of the throat; I wondered how many people would have minded. “Raise your voice and it’ll come out assault. Pass a red light and we’ll get your license for it. I’ll see you, Chase. I sure will.”
They were mean, empty threats. Pop Grujdzak was a homicide lieutenant and probably wouldn’t see me again unless I bumped into another corpse. Or stuck my nose into police business by calling that Plaza phone number.
“One more thing, Chase. I don’t want you bothering my daughter, understand?”
I grinned at him and stared him down. “Are you kidding? She happens to be my sister-in-law.”
“I mean my other daughter.”
“Who? Oh—you mean Stephanie? Why, she’s a—a kid. I hardly know her!”
Jo-Anne stood on tiptoe and pecked at my lips. I said, “I’m going to call Dr. Kincaid’s place later today. Where is he, Mahopac?”
“Mahopac.”
“You better be there, Jo. Don’t get loose, as the officer said. Stay close to home till this thing blows over.”
“I’ve got to know.”
“Jo,” I said.
“You heard him, Jase. I’m guilty, morally. He said so.”
“What does he know about it? Just stay put.”
“Goodbye, Jase.”
I headed for the door.
Chapter Three
At the hotel, I took a few hours of sleep and a shave, then tried my luck in the coffee shop downstairs. Sipping coffee, I meditated on that Plaza Number.
Hell. I’d call the number later in the morning and see which branch of Murder, Inc. answered. But first I’d visit my brother and his loving wife at home.
