The James Michael Ullman Crime Novel

by James Michael Ullman

  Nightingale and his lawyer dashed to the stairs. The press broke into a run after them. Sonny had a good start, but he’d picked up a lot of weight since his fullback days and was trapped on the main floor, just before he reached the revolving door to the street.

  Slowly, he backed toward the wall. Although nearly forty, his features were still boyish and he wore his dark hair crew-cut style.

  “You guys,” he said angrily, “heard what happened at the he test. I didn’t kill her, I don’t know who did, I don’t know what was in the envelope, so leave me alone.”

  The questions began.

  “Didn’t she tell you where she got all that money?”

  “What about the Mystery Woman? You ever meet the dame?”

  “Sonny, what was Irene like to live with? Did she…?”

  Nightingale edged toward the door. “I’m warnin’ you. My wife’s had a collapse, and this is ruinin’ my business. If you don’t lay off, I’ll pop someone.”

  A few feet from Nightingale, a photographer’s strobe light flickered. Snarling, Sonny tore the camera from the photographer’s hands. He raised it high over his head, an action snapped by all the other photographers, and slammed it to the floor.

  Nightingale’s attorney grabbed his arm. “Come on…”

  The owner of the smashed camera said, “You stupid bastard. You think I like takin’ pictures of slobs like you? That’ll cost you three hundred bucks.” Sonny balled a fist, but the attorney hustled him outside. A large segment of the press followed. Charles Dawes Ducey and I hung back.

  “There,” I said slowly, “goes the chief suspect. Only if he passed a lie test he’s not a suspect any more. I’ve heard of people beating the lie box, but I guess it doesn’t happen often.”

  “No. And it doesn’t leave Moberg much to go on.”

  “Speaking of Moberg, where is he?”

  The little police reporter gave me an odd look. “You’ve been keeping yourself scarce lately, haven’t you. What you been up to?”

  “I’ve been talking to people on Alexander Boulevard, Irene’s old neighbors. And to some old friends of Nightingale’s.”

  “Well, you should hang around here more. Tell you what. Ill phone the desk. Then well go for a little ride—and I’ll let you in on the best-kept secret in this case so far.”

  * * * *

  Deuce hunched over a pressroom telephone, his hand cupped over the mouthpiece. He spoke so softly that unless you were within a few feet, you couldn’t hear what he was saying.

  While I waited I reviewed my notes on what I’d learned about the Irene Bowser who had lived on Alexander Boulevard. The facts had fallen into place quickly after Moberg’s announcement had been relayed Friday night on the television set in The Rooster. Actually, the police had known early Friday that Irene Brown was Irene Bowser. The disclosure had been withheld while detectives questioned some of Irene’s Alexander Boulevard neighbors, after which they picked up Sonny Nightingale and hustled him downtown for his first interrogation.

  The Alexander Boulevard apartment was a cut above the Grace Street flat where Irene had lived as Irene Brown. Like the Grace Street unit it was furnished, but it was larger and in a better-maintained building. The neighborhood was old but respectable, its population in a middle-income bracket. As on Grace Street, Irene didn’t discuss her past with her neighbors, but in the seven years she lived there she became well known to most of the shopkeepers near her apartment. They had good reason to remember her, and so did her landlady. One day before Irene Brown moved into the Grace Street flat, Irene Bowser had been locked out of the Alexander Boulevard apartment for nonpayment of rent. When locked out, she had also been in debt to most of the local merchants.

  Police believed these unpaid bills explained why Irene changed her name from Bowser to Brown. She was trying to forestall collection agencies. Of course a good skip tracer could have tracked her to Grace Street, but the bills were so small the merchants just wrote them off as bad debts. Besides, most of the merchants liked Irene, and their faith in her proved justified. For months they heard nothing from her but then every few weeks one of the merchants would get an envelope in the mail with the full amount owed and a note: “Sorry you had to wait for this. Thanks for your patience. Irene Bowser.”

  By the date of her murder, Irene had repaid all but a few debts. Her Alexander Boulevard landlady, a Mrs. Hawkins, hadn’t called a skip tracer because she’d impounded most of Irene’s clothing, several closets full of gaudy coats and dresses and a fur piece or two. She sold the stuff later for almost as much as Irene owed. The landlady was no help in reconstructing Irene’s background, though. Irene had already been living in the building when she and her husband bought it. So again, Irene’s history seemed to begin on the day she moved in.

  When she first appeared in the Alexander Boulevard neighborhood, Irene had plenty of money. A few days after she rented the apartment she went to a local bank, handed an officer ten $1,000 Treasury certificates, and asked him to sell them and open a savings account with the proceeds. The source of Irene’s mysterious wealth nine years earlier was now of interest to the police, as it had been to Irene’s neighbors at the time. Irene never worked when she lived on Alexander Boulevard. For nearly two years, she was a woman of leisure.

  The neighbors thought maybe she was a moderately endowed heiress, living off the income from an estate. During the day she poked around in shops, went to movies, or stayed in her apartment reading magazines or watching television. Evenings, she hung out in cocktail lounges. It was an indolent, useless life, and Irene, according to old-timers, seemed melancholy. At times the dark-haired Mystery Woman who visited her on Grace Street came around to see her on Alexander Boulevard, but again descriptions of the woman varied. Irene’s fondness for children was also noted. She was frequently seen playing with a toddler in a nearby park.

  Financially speaking, Sonny Nightingale, who became Irene’s protector, came along at the right time. Near the end of her second year in the neighborhood, her bank balance was down to about a thousand dollars. She began asking discreetly, here and there, if anyone knew of a nice job for a girl who really didn’t have much experience doing anything. But she stopped asking after she met Sonny, who had just divorced his second wife.

  Predictably, the meeting took place in a bar, where they drifted into conversation, as strangers do. Sonny lowered his head and whispered something, apparently of a suggestive nature. Irene stiffened and gave a curt reply. Sonny leaned back, chuckled, and uttered a quip. The bartender who told me the story didn’t hear the quip, but Irene thought it very amusing. Despite her anger at Nightingale, she burst into laughter.

  Sonny snapped his fingers for two more drinks. “Okay, so I got out of line. But do you blame me? Lady, you shouldn’t wear such tight dresses. You give a guy the wrong impression.”

  “You’re cute. But if you don’t mind, I’ll buy my own drinks.”

  “Not here you won’t. This guy’s one of my customers—everything I spend is deductible. Seriously, I apologize. I just got divorced again. A divorced guy sort of loses perspective. He thinks every dame he sees in a bar can be had. At that, I oughta watch myself. You know how vulnerable a guy can get when he’s on the rebound.”

  Irene said, “You know something? I’m sort of on the rebound too.”

  “From what?”

  “I’d rather not discuss it”

  “Okay—and I’ll never ask again, provided you never ask about my ex-wives.” They touched glasses. “From now on with us it’s just a lot of laughs. Never anything serious, and not a word about the past. My name’s Sonny. What’s yours?”

  And that’s how it was, a lot of laughs, and of course the relationship soon became more than platonic. Sonny began spending nights in her apartment, paying her rent, buying the food and sending her to stores where she bought clothes on his charge account. It was a conveni
ent arrangement. For all practical purposes he had a wife, but on the other hand he had no legal obligations toward her, which suited him fine. As for Irene—well, it was obvious to everyone but Sonny that she really loved the guy.

  For four years Irene went on pretending to have a lot of laughs, agreeing with Sonny that theirs was an ideal relationship, but finally she suggested, at first indirectly, that they marry and have babies. Sonny ignored the hints. Irene made them more direct, whereupon Sonny dumped her. A few months later he married the daughter of his best customer.

  A woman who lived across the hall from Irene told me what happened next.

  “She couldn’t believe it. She’d always been so sure Sonny would come around to marrying her. Frankly, she was terribly naive. Not inexperienced. From little things she said, I gathered she had plenty of experience, if you get me. But she was positive Sonny would marry her and buy her a house in the suburbs, where she’d raise a family while she was still young enough. After Sonny dropped her, though, Irene cracked up. Day after day, she sat around her apartment, drinking. Then she fell behind on the rent and couldn’t pay her other bills. I saw her the morning Mrs. Hawkins threw her out Irene said, ‘I’ve been a damn fool, haven’t I? It’s kind of late—I’ve been a bad girl all my life, but maybe I can still straighten out…’ Mrs. Hawkins let her keep one suitcase. Irene carried that to the corner and got on a bus and nobody around here ever saw her again.”

  Deuce tugged at my sleeve. “Come on, kid. The desk just released me, let’s take off.”

  We went in Deuce’s Thunderbird. It was a tradition in that town that police reporters drive flashy cars. Deuce got a new Thunderbird each year, equipped with a radio that kept him in communication with the desk.

  Since it was Sunday afternoon, the business district was strangely empty. Deuce turned onto a boulevard leading to Irene’s Grace Street neighborhood.

  “Murray Hale,” I said, “would have a fit if he knew you were hauling me around.”

  “I guess he would. But what he doesn’t know won’t hurt him. Ames—in Irene’s apartment, the night of the murder, I warned you not to take any guff from anyone when you were questioned, remember?”

  “I do.”

  “I did that because, just before you showed up, one of Moberg’s men theorized that maybe you killed Irene.”

  “He’s not the only one. When I got home that night, a state’s attorney’s man named Jax was in my apartment. He voiced the same theory.”

  “Herman?”

  “You know him?”

  “We all know Herman. He hates reporters. We call him Herman the Vermin. He’s a nasty case. Before the police scandal, he was a sergeant in the Commissioner’s office. He just missed getting caught in the scandal himself. Some of his best pals were involved, but he covered himself better and had a lot of political clout. After the scandal he was transferred to an outlying precinct, but he finagled his way back downtown in ’53, as a homicide lieutenant A few years later he resigned and formed a private detective agency. When the current D.A. got elected, he used his clout to arrange an appointment as an investigator. You say he questioned you about Irene’s murder?”

  “Not questioned, exactly. First he tried to scare me by accusing me of the crime. Then he backed off and went on a fishing expedition, trying to learn if Irene told me more than I’d said in my statement.”

  Deuce seemed worried. “I don’t get it. As you know, relations between the D.A. and the Express are lousy. In fact Jax’s appointment as investigator was one of the things we rapped the D.A. for when we opposed his re-election. Jax never divested himself of the agency and we found he spent as much time working for it as he did for the taxpayers. But I do have a few sources in the D.A.’s office, and none of them mentioned Jax’s working on the Irene case. In fact nobody ever does know what Jax is working on, including the D.A. All they know is Jax’s friends can deliver a certain ward every election…”

  Deuce turned down a side street two blocks from Irene’s Grace Street apartment and parked in front of an old frame house surrounded by an unkempt, weed-infested lawn.

  “Anyhow,” he said, “you didn’t kill Irene, did you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Fine.” He nodded to the old house. “We go there.” He led me around the side of the house to the back yard. A lot of people waited for us. Lieutenant Moberg was one. Other detectives hovered at strategic positions. Also in view were a fat, dark-haired woman in her late thirties; a dark-haired girl of about twenty who wore the briefest of halters and very snug shorts; two pot-bellied, middle-aged men sprawled in lawn chairs, and a small boy, four or five years old.

  Deuce cleared his throat. “Ames, we’ve kept it out of the papers, but the police have an eye-witness who saw Irene’s killer leave her apartment.”

  “The eye-witness,” Moberg drawled, coming closer, “was on the sidewalk in front of the building when the killer ran out. The killer was in such a hurry that he knocked the eye-witness down.”

  I said, “What’s going on?”

  Moberg kneeled, grabbed the boy under the arm-pits and swung him up. “Okay, Bobby. Is that the mean man who knocked you over?”

  Solemnly, Bobby stared at me. Finally he said, “I dunno.”

  * * * *

  The fat woman poured me a glass of beer. She told me her name was Mrs. Arch Boone, and that one of the pot-bellied men was her husband and the other was her brother, Luke. Bobby was her son; the girl in tight shorts was her daughter, Babette.

  “I just knew,” Mother Boone said consolingly, “you weren’t the one. You have such an honest face. You’re a writer?”

  “Yes.” Deuce and Moberg were off under a tree, and Deuce was saying angry things. “I work for Metropolis magazine.”

  “We’ve met a lot of reporters. Fine gentlemen. I wish they’d put our pictures in their papers, but the lieutenant says they shouldn’t. He’s afraid if the murderer reads about it, he might try to hurt Bobby.”

  “Probably he would.”

  “I don’t think so. I don’t think Bobby knows who or what he saw any more. The lieutenant has been showing us pictures for two days. Burglars, sex offenders, prowlers, all sorts of horrible people, and all Bobby says is, ‘It ain’t him,’ or ‘I dunno.’ By the way, what does your father do?”

  “Do?”

  “Yes. There was a Mr. Ryker here, and his father owns department stores. I never realized the press included so many influential people.”

  “My father runs a small hardware store now, in Florida.”

  Mother Boone looked at Babette, who had been staring at me with disconcerting interest “Just hardware.”

  Deuce took me to his home for dinner. He lived in a big suburban tri-level. We pulled into the driveway and he asked, “Surprised?”

  “A little.”

  “Newspaper salaries are better than they used to be. Of course I’ve got a monster-sized mortgage, but who hasn’t?”

  Inside, I encountered more surprises. Deuce had a tall, beautiful, copper-haired wife and six children, with a seventh on the way, and was a member of an elementary school board and a candidate for village trustee. No wonder he never hung around Eddie’s.

  After dinner, Deuce drove me back to the Bureau. “Pete, I’m sorry about that stunt—it was Moberg’s idea. He asked me to lure you out there.”

  “Don’t apologize. But how can the police be sure Bobby really saw Irene’s murderer? Children of that age like to invent stories.”

  “A woman saw it happen. She was about a half block away when a man ran from Irene’s apartment building and knocked Bobby down. For a few seconds he just stood and stared at Bobby. Bobby stared back and then began hollering his head off. The man walked away in a hurry, toward Riverfront Park.”

  “Couldn’t the woman describe him?”

  “Not very well. Her vision is poor, bu
t when she saw the child knocked down, she ran over to see if he was hurt. In general, though, her impression of the man tallies with what Bobby said. The guy was in his shirt sleeves, carrying a big shopping bag.”

  “Shopping bag?”

  “Yeah, he had it under his right arm. That was at about 6:45 p.m. The police checked every occupant of Irene’s building and learned no man in his shirt sleeves walked out with a shopping bag at that time, so they’re pretty sure the man was the killer. Bobby claims he got an excellent look at the man’s face and would know him if he saw him again, but Moberg’s beginning to doubt it. Bobby says it was a big guy—but then, to Bobby anyone’s big, even a runt like me.”

  “Well, at least Bobby established something. We know now that the murderer was a man. But I don’t understand the bit about the shopping bag. Irene’s envelope wasn’t that large.”

  “There was a lot more than an envelope in the bag. Bobby and the woman both said it was very bulky. In a way, that supports the theory Hargrove’s been quoting in the Journal—that a psychopathic prowler killed Irene. The bag could have contained items of Irene’s clothing, and the police have no way of telling for sure if anything’s missing from her apartment. Ames—did they call you as a witness at the coroner’s inquest tomorrow?”

  “Yes.”

  “Moberg asked me to remind you—not a word about Bobby, please, especially from the witness stand. The place will be packed.” Wryly, Deuce smiled. “It’s too bad Moberg can’t question everyone in the crowd. I’ll bet the notion that Irene might have told you more than you let on has occurred to the killer, too. If he doesn’t have to work tomorrow, he’ll probably be at the morgue to hear what you have to say.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Wanda Stashonis, the associate editor of Metropolis magazine, had a face that could have belonged to a fullback. Her nose was broad, her mouth was wide and a deep cleft split her chin. Somehow though, her face, topped by an unruly hank of hair the color of straw, was oddly appealing nonetheless. Her cheeks were red and her expression was somber, like that of a child contemplating what she didn’t quite understand.