“Are your units condos?”
“No, sir. Each apartment is leased on a standard one-year contract.”
A delivery man parked a hand truck loaded with groceries next to the desk and signed in while Overbeck called a tenant to announce his arrival.
“Could we maybe move a little farther from the public eye?” suggested Fernsall.
He used a key to admit Auburn and Dollinger to the inner lobby. The floor was carpeted here and the lighting more subdued, except above the mail rack next to the elevator.
Fernsall led them to the office, which adjoined his own apartment.
“Could I get a complete list of the tenants from you?” asked Auburn.
“Sure. Give you a printout in five minutes with apartment numbers, Social Security, home and business phones, and dates of first occupancy.”
“That would be a big help, but there’s no hurry. What can you tell me about Sleate?”
“If you’ve ever read one of his columns, you know about as much as I do. He hardly ever left his apartment, and I’ve probably talked to him face to face about five times in the past eight years, which is how long he’s lived here.” Fernsall was clicking icons on a computer screen. “Stuffy, self centered, sarcastic.”
“Problems between him and other tenants?”
“Not that I know of. Like I said, he stayed put up there, and the only other apartment on the top level has been empty for a couple years. The rent’s higher because they’re penthouse units, and it’s a long ride in the elevator.”
“Have you been here all morning?”
“Yes, sir, and all night, for that matter.”
“Did you or anybody else hear anything in the building that could have been a gunshot? Just to help fix the time . . .”
Fernsall chuckled almost hysterically. “Lot of shooting going on around here lately,” he said. “You wait a minute and you’ll hear it for yourself. Billy the Kid and Jesse James just staggered back from lunch.”
“I’m sorry?”
“We’re remodeling a vacant unit on the seventh floor. The carpenters use some kind of a gun to drive nails into the concrete. Stands your hair on end till you get used to it.”
Auburn, who had held a construction job for several months between dropping out of college and entering the Police Academy, knew exactly the sort of cartridge nailer he was talking about.
“Anybody else in the building this morning besides tenants? Housekeeping or maintenance people?”
“Housekeeping does the lobbies and the stairs on Tuesday and Thursdays. Maintenance contractors only come in when we need them.” Fernsall lifted two pages from the computer printer and handed them to Auburn.
“Thanks. That helps.” He folded the list of tenants, put it in his pocket, and turned to leave the office.
“Hey, okay if I come up with you?” asked Fernsall.
“We’ll ask you to stay away from the scene until an evidence technician has gone over it,” said Auburn, and immediately wondered if he had achieved a suitable tone of authority for a prospective police lieutenant.
While Auburn and Dollinger were waiting for the elevator, Overbeck admitted Nick Stamaty, the investigator from the coroner’s office, to the inner lobby. Stamaty shifted his field kit and camera case and straightened his windblown hair. “Didn’t see the van outside,” he said. “You chaps here alone?”
“The coast is clear for the moment,” Auburn assured him. Stamaty correctly interpreted this to mean that the evidence technician from Public Safety had not yet arrived to complicate his examination of the scene.
When the gong rang they crowded into an open brass cage, which climbed from level to level at the dragging pace of an overloaded freight elevator. Each drew his own foreboding conclusions from the shrill grating and the series of metallic thuds that accompanied their passage.
On the top floor they stepped into an austere and chilly passage filled with the pungent reek of stale tobacco smoke and the blare of a radio. A young woman wearing a uniform like Overbeck’s stood at parade rest with her back to an uncurtained dormer window. Auburn and Stamaty showed identification, but Officer DiPalma, recognizing Dollinger, was already unlocking one of the doors that faced each other across the passage.
Inside Sleate’s overheated apartment the stench of cold cigarettes was stronger and the radio was louder. Auburn recognized the habitual bleat of one of the announcers on the local public radio station as he lisped the names of an Italian composer and a French pianist. Nobody touched the radio. If the killer had turned up the volume to cover the sound of a gunshot, that knob might bear a crucial fingerprint.
The room they had entered from the corridor wore the forlorn and inhospitable appearance of a crusty old bachelor’s sanctum. Pieces of furniture that might have been antiques but were probably just old lay in shadow, except where the glare of the early spring afternoon flooded in at a dormer window like the one outside in the corridor. On a big mahogany desk in front of the window, a litter of papers half concealed a pen holder, a candlestick telephone in old ivory with gilt trim, and an ashtray overflowing with blue, pink, green, and yellow cigarette butts.
The body of Conrad Sleate, looking fragile and wasted, lay back in a heavily padded chair drawn up to the desk. Even in death he seemed to have struck a pose of effete egotism, his eyes half open, his lined face set in a defiant scowl, his chin jutting forward with its small goatee poised like the tip of an artist’s brush. A single bullet wound in his left temple had hardly bled and showed no contact charring or powder tattooing.
Stamaty put down his field case just inside the door and started taking pictures. Dollinger left to resume patrol duty.
The guard looked in from the corridor. She was an athletic twenty-five—rugby, not badminton—with shingled, licorice-black hair, coffee-brown eyes, and a wannabe-sultry Latin look.
“Can I get a statement from you, Ms. DiPalma?” asked Auburn.
“Tonia. Sure. I had just started my one o’clock rounds. We ride the elevator up here to the top and then take the steps down from floor to floor, checking doors, looking for burned-out exit lights, sniffing for gas leaks, watching for people who don’t belong here . . . But we’ve never checked the door of this apartment because it was never locked during the daytime.”
“Were you acquainted with the tenant?”
“I talked to him once, about six months ago, when we had a fire inspection.”
“So what happened this afternoon?”
“As soon as I got out of the elevator I heard the radio and I found this door open.”
“Wide open?”
“About like it is now. I could see from outside that he was lying back and not moving. I stepped in just far enough to see the gunshot wound and be sure he was dead. Then I came back out here in the hall and called the other guard on my cell phone. We don’t carry weapons, and for all I knew, the killer was still in there. After Officer Dollinger got here we went through the whole place looking for a weapon and being sure nobody was here.”
“Did you touch anything inside the apartment?”
She twitched her head in a brief sign of negation as if the question were so impertinent as to be beneath her notice.
“Did you sign in a Gayle Van Till around noontime today?”
“Overbeck, the other guard, signed her in right before he went on his lunch break, but I saw her leave by the back way.”
“Did you talk to her?”
“No, but I knew who she was because she was here one day last week.”
“Anything unusual about the way she acted today?”
“No. I only saw her for a second.”
“Do you leave the building for lunch?”
“No. We take turns eating in a staff locker room on the main floor. Do you need me here for anything else?”
“Is this other apartment locked?”
“Yes. It’s vacant.”
“Can I ask you to unlock it too? Our evidence tech will want to look aroun
d in there. You’ll be on duty till when?”
“Four.”
Stamaty was making a scale drawing of the room on graph paper. In a corner, almost within reach of the desk, stood an ancient cabinet of imposing dimensions. Its twin doors of inlaid wood were swung wide open to reveal a capacious interior with dark green shelves of thin-gauge metal. Decades of use had rubbed the paint away from the edges of the shelves, which were now conspicuously empty except for traces of dust. Auburn examined the cabinet door fastenings carefully. He possessed a set of professional lock picks but didn’t carry them on duty because he didn’t want to be faced with the temptation, day in and day out, to use them under inappropriate circumstances. He had nonetheless acquired enough proficiency at opening locked desks and cabinets to recognize that this one would have offered no difficulties to a practiced and determined operator.
By now the room was flooded with the honking winds and squawking viols of a baroque ensemble. Suddenly, from somewhere below them, three sharp detonations in succession resounded at intervals of a couple of seconds. Stamaty, a former police officer, froze in his tracks.
“Don’t panic,” said Auburn. “That’s a cartridge nailer. I hope.”
Stamaty had already gone back to his drawing. “I saw their truck in the alley.”
Auburn began a tour of the apartment, scrutinizing everything but touching nothing. A grungy kitchen where the aroma of gourmet coffee nearly overwhelmed the smell of cigarette smoke, a sybaritic bedroom with a plasma TV, a second bedroom with the radiator turned off and dust everywhere half an inch thick. What had been intended as a formal dining room now served as a storage space for odd pieces of furniture, piles of old newspapers, and carton upon carton of Sir Walter Pastel Ovals.
There were unmistakable indications that somebody had searched the entire apartment within the past few hours.
A door led out from the dining room to the roof, or at least to a section of it delimited by a parapet of brick and stone. Auburn stepped out into a buffeting wind to examine the penthouse area, of which Sleate had apparently made little or no use. The only signs of prior human presence were a pair of rusty iron garden chairs and the ruins of a wooden structure of some kind that had once been erected against the outside wall of the apartment.
He followed the parapet from that point around three sides to where it ended at a battery of air-conditioning condensers, beyond which stood the enclosure for the elevator machinery. Across a wide gulf he could see a similar rooftop space outside the other eighth-floor apartment. Travel between the two spaces would clearly have been impossible except for Batman, Spider-man, or some similar creature of fantasy.
Down below, the wind shook traffic signs and whipped waste paper along the gutters. A parking lot for tenants, its spaces protected by a corrugated metal roof, occupied the northern part of the block. In a blind alley almost directly below him he saw Stamaty’s van parked behind the construction workers’ truck. From a second van that had just joined the row, a man emerged whom Auburn recognized immediately, from a hundred feet straight up, as Kestrel from the forensic lab.
Even if his identity hadn’t been obvious from his driven manner as he gathered equipment at the rear of the van and his pogo-stick gait as he started for the building, the fact that he stooped down in mid-career and picked up something from the ground was a dead giveaway. Kestrel was a compulsive sample collector. In fact, he probably owed his vocation to a little boy’s yearning, never outgrown, to be at one with his environment by carrying around big chunks of it in his pockets.
Auburn stepped inside and closed the door tightly against the wind. “Hey, Nick. You better prepare to reconfigure your parameters.”
Stamaty, in shirtsleeves and rubber gloves, was kneeling next to the body of Conrad Sleate. “I assume that means Kestrel is on his way up.”
“You assume correctly. At least maybe he’ll turn off the radio.”
“Sure, after measuring it and weighing it and phoning in the serial number to the FCC.”
Moments later, Kestrel entered the crime scene by thrusting his nose in through the doorway as if testing the atmosphere and then following it in. He put down a heavy kit and unslung his camera. “Weapon?” he asked, by way of greeting to Stamaty and Auburn.
“Not here.”
“Anybody check at the bottom of the chute?”
Auburn had noticed a metal hatch in the wall next to the elevator labeled SECURELY BAGGED PAPER TRASH ONLY—NO GLASS, PLASTIC, METAL, FOOD, OR HAZARDOUS WASTE.
“Not yet.”
“The weapon could be down there.” Kestrel still stood just inside the doorway, rubbernecking to get his bearings. “Also some or all of the articles out of that cabinet. Somebody here hard of hearing?”
Without waiting for a reply he stepped to the wall and with a deft tweak of his toe loosened the plug of the radio cord in its outlet. Above the sudden silence they could now hear the wailing of the wind and the hiss of the steam heat.
Stamaty, whose jurisdiction as a representative of the coroner began at the skin of the deceased, quietly gathered up his paraphernalia and abandoned the field to his opposite number from Public Safety.
Auburn had always gotten along with Kestrel, who was also a sergeant, by giving him plenty of room and not taking personally his bitter jibes and autocratic style. Just now he was wondering what it would be like to outrank this compulsive and iron-willed individualist.
The vague rumble of remodeling activities now audible on the floor below, and the occasional uninhibited scream of a power saw, reminded Auburn that he needed to interview the construction workers. In the corridor he met J. C. Pulfresh, a local attorney notorious for his outlandish courtroom antics and tasteless advertising, just getting off the elevator. Auburn would have recognized him even if the two of them hadn’t wrangled a few times in court because Pulfresh’s ruddy complexion and sagging jowls decorated the back cover of every telephone directory in town.
“How did you know he was dead?” he asked.
“I didn’t know till I hit the security desk downstairs. You’re not thinking suicide, are you? Because that thing about scorpions stinging themselves to death is a myth.”
“Did you have an appointment?”
“For two o’clock. When I heard he was dead I came right up to take charge of his papers and personal effects.”
“You’ll have to talk to Stamaty about taking charge of anything. A homicide victim’s remains and personal effects become the property of the coroner until identity and cause of death have been established.” Pulfresh knew that perfectly well, and Auburn knew that he knew it.
“ID is no problem. I can take care of that right now.” He made as if to push past Auburn toward the open door of Sleate’s apartment.
“I’ll have to ask you to remain outside here until our evidence technician has finished going over the scene. Let me get Stamaty out here to talk to you.”
Inside the apartment Kestrel was dislodging clumps and clouds of ageless dust from radiator enclosures in a vain search for the murder weapon. Auburn found Stamaty in the bathroom cataloguing a vast collection of medicine bottles.
“Pulfresh is out in the hall, Nick,” he said. “He wants to take charge of Sleate’s effects.”
“He tries that on me at least once a year. Funny how few of his clients die in their beds.”
Pulfresh was examining the view from the dormer window and humming in a minor key. He offered Stamaty one of his fat and highly mobile hands, which resembled the flippers of a seal. “You won’t find a driver’s license,” was his opening remark, “because he never had one.”
“What can you tell me about his health?” asked Stamaty.
“His health? Rotten, according to him. Been at death’s door for years but hated doctors. Swallowed tons of herbal garbage that he bought from mail-order houses. Smoked like a volcano and ate like a fruit fly. Hey, I’d like to get hold of all his papers as soon as possible.”
Stamaty knew not only th
e rules of the game Pulfresh was playing but also all the moves and countermoves. “On behalf of the next of kin?” he asked.
“There’s no next of kin. I’m the executor of his estate, according to a will he made a couple of years ago. Notice I said executor, not administrator. That means I’m not a legatee. Not that his estate amounts to more than five or ten grand.”
“Something special about those papers?”
“Well, you figure it out. My main job as Sleate’s legal counsel has been keeping him out of court the past twelve years.”
“Somebody seems to have solved that problem for you. But whoever did that cleaned out his files, except for the dust.”
Auburn took the stairs rather than the elevator down to the seventh floor. In the process he ascertained that access could be gained from the stairway to at least the top two levels without a key. The apartment unit directly below Sleate’s had been gutted to the bare concrete and was now being reframed with steel studs. Sheets of drywall, rolls of insulation, and spools of wire were piled shoulder-high in the middle of the living room.
Fernsall hadn’t been kidding when he said the carpenters had staggered back from lunch. Both were slightly lit, and they behaved as if they were auditioning for a nightclub act. Even the news that a murder had been committed that morning on the floor above didn’t put much of a damper on their clowning.
The one with a mustache like a wind-tumbled haystack assured Auburn that they probably wouldn’t have heard a cannon going off upstairs. “I wear earplugs, and my buddy’s deaf ’cause he can’t never find his earholes to put the plugs in.”
“Hey, Orrie, I can hear you running your mouth pretty good right now,” retorted his partner from the top of a ladder. “Don’t mess with me . . . this here saw is as sharp as a hammer.”
Auburn asked about the cartridge-powered nail gun.
“We don’t use no cartridges,” quipped the one on the ladder. “You have to be twenty-one to buy ’em.”
Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine Page 11
