by Otto Penzler
“It makes no difference to me if you’re the commissioner, himself. I have influential connections at City Hall, too. And my records are always open for inspection by authorized parties.”
“O.K. I’m an authorized party. I’ll have a look at any letters that’ve come in here the last week or so.”
The fat man waved vaguely at the row of green-painted files. “Help yourself. It would take me a couple of months to locate ‘em. I don’t file by dates.”
“I’ll make a start at it.” Teccard pulled out a steel drawer marked L. He ran his thumb along the tabs until he came to one with the letters LO, took out all the folders in that section. “How many letters you rake in, per day, mister?”
“You mean the preliminaries?”
“What the hell is a preliminary?” There was a folder with the name Mary Lownes at the top. It was empty, except for an envelope in Helen’s handwriting, addressed to Herald of Happiness— and a clipped-out advertisement.
Helbourne picked up a proof-sheet of a page. “Subscribers are allowed one free advertisement to each subscription, plus as many answers to other advertisements as they wish. Our only restriction is, these replies to ads must be addressed to the box-number of the Herald.” He pointed to one. “Any letters coming in, addressed to that box-number, are copied and sent along to the advertiser, no charge. Without the name or address of the sender, naturally.”
Teccard slid the folders back in place. “The old come-on. What do you tap them for giving out with the address?”
The proprietor of the Herald frowned. “Our fee is five dollars.”
“At each end of the transaction? Five from the snappy skirt who wants the address of some dope who’s given her a line of mush? And another five from the dope himself, if he wants to get in touch with her direct?”
“I don’t like the way you put it, Lieutenant.”
“Catch them coming and going, don’t you! Next thing you know, you’ll catch five years in the pen.” Teccard drifted toward the rack of pigeonholes. There were letters and folded carbon copies in most of them. Under each space was pasted a copy of some Herald advertisement.
Helbourne watched him sullenly. “I’m not responsible for what my subscribers do after I’ve performed an introduction.”
“Hell you aren’t! You’re wide open for prosecution. You were warned some New York crut has been rooking old maids from upstate, using you as a go-between.” There was a cubbyhole with two letters, over an advertisement reading:
YOUNG LADY OF BREEDING
seeks companionship of amiable, sober businessman, under fifty, with quiet tastes. One who would appreciate a better-than-average table and a comfortable home. Not wishing to be supported, as have slight means of own. Able and active, though slight spinal injury. Brunette, thirty-one, former trained nurse. Box LL27.
Helen was a brunette—the age and the references to the spinal injury and having been a nurse clinched it. Teccard reached for the letters.
The fat man caught his arm. “You’ll have to get a court order, if you’re going to ransack my mail, Lieutenant.”
Teccard disengaged the pudgy fingers. “One side, mister. A minute ago you told me to help myself. I am. You want any trouble, I’ll see you get plenty.” He crackled the letters open. The first one read:
Dear Miss Box LL27.
Your ad made a great deal of an appeal to me. I am a farmer, widower five years now, age forty-six. It’s a seventy-acre fruit farm, paying good, too. I have a piano, radio, Chevrolet, nice furniture. The part about better than average cooking appealed to me. Do you play the piano? Hoping to hear from you,
Very sincerely yours,
HERMAN SCHICHTE
Rural Route Six Pathanville. N.Y.
The lieutenant stuck it back in the pigeonhole. “Park your pants in a chair, mister. It makes me nervous to have anyone reading over my shoulder.”
Helbourne sat down. His mouth was open and he was panting as if he’d been climbing stairs. He kept rubbing his palms on his knees while he watched Teccard run through the other letter.
Your message in the Herald was like music heard far off over the water at night. Perhaps I am wrong, dear LL27, but I sense in your heart an aching desire for the finer things which life too often denies those best fitted to enjoy them. If I have understood you rightly, your appeal for companionship strikes a very sympathetic chord in my own soul. I am thirty-five, dark and, though no Adonis, not bad to look upon, I have been told. I have a comfortable business and am fond of travel, theater and books. Possibly you would care to write me so we could exchange photographs and perhaps—quien sabe—perhaps, some day, rings to symbolize even more than companionship!
With eager anticipation,
Your friend,
HAROLD WILLARD
971 East 88th Street
New York City
Teccard put the letter in his pocket. East Eighty-eighth wasn’t so far from the pier where that grisly bone had been found.
“This Harold Willard,” he said. “Let’s see the other letters you’ve had from him.”
Helbourne shook his head quickly. “That’s the only one. I never heard of the man before. I can’t keep track—”
“Yair. I heard that one. You recognize his signature?”
“No. Not at all.”
“You sent the copy of this drool along to Box LL27?”
“Not yet. It was going out today,” Helbourne said.
“Don’t send it. And don’t send out copies of any letters that come to you from New York City. Not until I’ve had a look at them. Understand?”
“Yes, sir.” Helbourne held his head sideways, as if he expected the lieutenant to take a punch at him. “Is there—ah—any cause for you to believe the writer of that letter—has been involved in these—ah—irregularities you are investigating?” Teccard stuffed a copy of the Herald into his coat pocket. “Only that he writes phoney as hell. You ought to have your butt booted for handling that kind of sewage. And if I find you’ve passed on any more of it, I’m coming back and rub your nose in it.”
T WAS dusk when the sedan reached the Twenty-third Precinct station house. Tec-card was glad to get out of the chill wind whistling across Harlem from the river. “Cap Meyer around?” he inquired of the desk sergeant.
“You’ll find him in the muster room, with a couple boys from Homicide, Lieutenant.”
Teccard strode into the back room. Four men stood about the long table under a green-shaded bulb. Three were in plain-clothes, the fourth was in uniform. There was a black rubber body-bag at the one end of the table, at the other a piece of wax paper with as grisly a collection as the Identification man had ever seen.
“What you got, Meyer?”
The captain turned. His face was a curious greenish-yellow in the cone of brilliance. “I wouldn’t know, Teccard. But whatever it is, you can have it.”
One of the Homicide men finished tying a tag to the third finger of a skeleton hand. “All we’re sure of, it was an adult female.”
His partner stripped off a pair of rubber gloves. “That’s all you’ll ever establish, for certain. Person who hacked this woman up was pretty tricky.” He indicated the cracked and flattened end of the finger bones. “Mashed the tips to prevent any print-work.”
Meyer tongued around his stub of cigar. “Wasn’t really necessary, though. The rats took care of that.”
The uniformed man spoke up. “All this mess had been dumped under the shore end of that Ninety-eighth Street pier, Lieutenant. There was a loose plank there, somebody must of ripped it up. It was near covered by muck, but we shoveled it out and used the hose on it, well as we could.”
“Including that thigh bone, we got everything but one foot now,” the first Homicide man said. “But it wouldn’t do any good to try a reconstruction. All the teeth were hammered out of that head, before it was dropped in the mud.”
Teccard bent over the yellowish skull, stained with dirty, grayish mold. “Parts of some fillings
left. Jaw still shows where she had some bridge-work done. We can check the dentists, up around Tannersville.”
Captain Meyer exclaimed: “You got a line on her, already?”
“Yair. Schoolteacher who thought she was coming to town for her wedding ceremony. ‘Till death do ye part.‘ It parted her, to hell and gone, didn’t it?” He turned away. “How about letting me have one of your men who knows the Eighty-eighth Street beat? In the nine hundreds.”
Meyer and the uniformed man looked at each other. The captain gestured. “Patrolman Taylor, here, had that beat up to a month ago. How long you need him?”
“Depends. Bird we’re after may have flown the coop already.”
“O.K. You’re relieved, Taylor. And if you have any trouble when it comes to putting the arm on the crut who did this,” the captain jerked his head toward the table, “do me one favor.”
The policeman touched the rim of his cap. “Yuh?”
“Shoot him a couple times where it’ll really hurt. All he’ll feel, if he goes to the chair, will be a few seconds’ jolt. Way I feel, that’d be letting him off easy …”
Out in the car, Taylor pulled a folded-up newspaper from his hip pocket. “That kid who found the leg this morning squawked all over the neighborhood. We warned him to keep his puss shut— but the papers got it just the same.”
Teccard didn’t read it. “They can’t print much, if they don’t know any more than we do, Taylor. What you know about number 971?” He pulled up half a block away.
The patrolman craned his neck. “Nine-seven-one? The old brick house? Nothing much. Just four- or five-buck-a-week furnished rooms. No apartments.”
“Who runs it?”
“Old dodo named Halzer. Him and his wife. They got 969, too—operate ‘em together. He’s harmless, stewed about half the time.”
“Yair? You ever hear of a guy, name of Harold Willard, in this parish?”
“Harold Willard. Harold Willard. I don’t recall it, Lieutenant. What’s he look like?”
“Dark, about thirty-five years old. That’s all we’ve got to go on. My guess is he fancies himself for a double of one of the movie stars. Likely to be a flash dresser.”
“I can’t seem to place him. Maybe he’s just moved in. They keep coming and going in a joint like this.”
“Yair. If he happens to be in now, we’ll keep him from going.”
“We can do that, Lieutenant. There’s no rear doors on this side of the block.”
“You go on ahead, then. Go into 969. Find out from Halzer what room Willard has. When you know, stand in the door of 969 and wait for me to come past. You can give me the high sign without anyone watching you from one of the windows next door,” Teccard explained.
“Check.”
“And after I go in, nobody comes out. I mean nobody. Until I say so.”
“Got you, Lieutenant.” The patrolman strolled away, idly twisting his night-stick.
Teccard stood on the curb, tamping out his pipe. He gazed curiously up at the lighted windows of 971. What kind of murderer could it be who took such care to hack his victim to pieces— only to attempt to hide all the remains in one spot? There had been other instances of dismembered corpses in the records of the Criminal Identification Bureau but, so far as Teccard could remember, limbs and head and torso had invariably been strewn far and wide, to prevent any reconstruction of the body. Was he up against one of those unpredictable, pathological cases of sadism—where mutilation gives the killer a diabolical satisfaction? That didn’t seem to match up with the carefully planned disposition of the victim’s funds …
Taylor’s club showed, in the areaway of 969. The lieutenant walked along, briskly.
“Third floor rear,” the policeman whispered hoarsely. “RoomJ.”
Teccard didn’t turn his head, or answer. He marched up the steps to 971. The front door was unlatched. There was a row of battered, black-tin mailboxes. He paused just long enough to make sure one of them bore a piece of paper with the penciled scrawl: Harold M. Willard. Then he went in.
The hallway smelled of cooking grease and antiseptic, the carpeting on the stairs was ragged. Somebody was playing a radio. A baby squalled. There was a sound of running water from a bathroom somewhere on the second floor.
Over the sill of room J was a thread of yellow light. Someone was moving about in the room, but Teccard, with his ear to the panel, heard nothing else. He transferred his gun from his left armpit to the right pocket of his coat, kept his grip on the butt.
He knocked and, without waiting, raised his voice.
“Telegram for Mister Willard.”
The movement behind the door ceased. There was a pause, then: “Slide it under the door.”
Teccard kept his voice high. “You got to sign a receipt, mister.”
“Shove your receipt book under, too. I’ll sign it.” The answer came from halfway down the door—the man inside was evidently trying to look through the keyhole.
“The book won’t go under. You want the telegram, or not?”
Another pause.
“Wait a second. I’m not dressed.”
“O.K.” Teccard tried to make it sound weary.
“Where’s the wire from?” The man had moved away from the door, but the tone was strangely muffled.
“We ain’t allowed to read telegrams, mister. If you don’t want to accept it—”
The door opened.
The man was in his underclothes. He stood sideways, so Teccard couldn’t get a good look at him. His black hair was rumpled, he held a towel up over his mouth and the side of his face, as if he’d just finished shaving.
“Is there anything due—” He reached out with his other hand.
The lieutenant stepped in, fast.
“Yair. You’re due, mister. Put down—”
There was a faint “Hunh!” from behind the door, the uncontrollable exhalation of breath when a person exerts himself suddenly.
Teccard whirled.
The blow that caught him across the top of the head knocked him senseless before his knees started to buckle!
CHAPTER THREE
MURDER IN ROOM J
AYLOR poured a tumbler of water over Teccard’s head. “Take it easy, now. Amby’ll be here any second.”
The lieutenant rolled over on his side. “Quit slopping that on my head.” The floor kept tilting away from him, dizzily. “Lemme have it to drink.”
The cop filled the glass from a broken-lipped pitcher. “You been bleeding like a stuck pig.”
Teccard paused with the tumbler at his lips. Was that a pair of shoes lying on the floor behind the patrolman? He shook his head, to clear away the blurriness. “Who in the hell is that?” he cried.
Taylor’s jaw went slack. “That’s the lad you was battling with. You fixed his wagon, all right!”
“I wasn’t fighting with anybody! Someone slugged me from behind that door, before I could even get my gun out.” The lieutenant got his elbows under him, propped himself up. The man on his back was T. Chauncey Helbourne— and his skin was a leaden blue.
The officer nodded sympathetically. “A crack on the conk will do that, sometimes. Make you forget what’s been goin’ on, when you snap out of it.”
Teccard felt of the back of his neck. His fingers came away wet and sticky, the ache at the top of his skull was nauseating. “I didn’t kill him, you dope!”
“Geeze! You had a right to drop him, didn’t you! He was resistin’ arrest, wasn’t he?”
Teccard crawled on hands and knees to the dead man’s side. There was an irregular dark blot on Helbourne’s vest, just inside the left lapel; in the center of the blot something gleamed yellow-red, under the naked bulb overhead. The lieutenant touched the fat man’s face. It was still close to normal body temperature.
“You got him first clip out of the box.” Taylor pointed to the gun on the floor, by the side of the iron cot.
Teccard stood up shakily, sat down again, suddenly, on the sagging edge o
f the cot. Taylor, the corpse on the floor, the barren furnishings of the room—all seemed oddly far away. He bent over to let the blood get to his head again. “Where’s the other gent who was in here? The one in shorts?”
The uniformed man squinted as if the light hurt his eyes. “The only lug I saw is this stiff, Lieutenant.”
Teccard closed his eyes to stop the bed from shimmying. “He let me in here. How’d he get downstairs, past you?”
Taylor put up a hand to cover his mouth, his eyes opened wide. “Now I swear to God there wasn’t a soul on them stairs when I come up. If there’d been a guy with his pants off—”
“How’d you happen to come up, anyway?”
“Why, geeze, Lieutenant. When this dame comes scuttling down to the front door, yelling for ‘Police’ naturally I hotfoot over from next door.”
“A woman? What kind of a woman?” Teccard demanded.
“Why, just an ordinary mouse like you’d expect to find in one of these joints. Kind of blond and plump—I don’t know.”
“What’d she say?”
“She says, ‘Officer, come upstairs quick. There’s a couple of men fighting and making a terrible racket right over my room.’ She says, ‘Hurry.r So I figure it’s you subduing this Willard and maybe needing a hand. I come up on the jump.”
Teccard started to shake his head, thought better of it. “Where is she now? Bring her here.”
The policeman pounded out in the hall, downstairs. He left the door open. There was an excited hum of voices from the corridor.
Teccard took a pencil out of his pocket, stuck it in the barrel of the pistol, lifted it off the floor. He wrapped his handkerchief carefully about the butt, broke his weapon. Only one chamber had been fired from the .38. The bullet hole in Hel-bourne’s chest would be about right for that caliber.
Taylor came clumping upstairs. “She put one over on me. That room underneath ain’t even occupied. And she’s scrammed, anyway.”
“So has the jerk who was half undressed.” The lieutenant put down the revolver, poured himself another drink of water. “That’s over the dam, don’t get gidgety about it. You were right, according to the way you figured it.”
