by Ed McBain
“That’s all right, George,” Jeanine said, smiling.
“But believe me, they are the sweetest, gentlest people in the world,” Pimm said. “Well, look, we came out of El Convento, that’s a hotel down there in the heart of Old San Juan, we came out of there one night after the dinner and floor show—wonderful floor show, by the way—and oh, it must’ve been after midnight, wasn’t it after midnight, honey?”
“Oh, yes, easily after midnight,” Jeanine said.
“Now, can you imagine walking in the Puerto Rican section of this city after midnight? Along the Spanish stretch of Culver Avenue, say? After midnight? No reflection on the work you fellows do,” Pimm said, “but that’d be taking your life in your hands, am I right?”
“Well, all slum areas are pretty much alike,” Carella said. “I wouldn’t want to walk along Ainsley after midnight, either.”
“George is even afraid of walking downtown on Hall Avenue,” Jeanine said, and smiled.
“That’s not true,” Pimm said. “Hall Avenue is perfectly safe. Isn’t it perfectly safe?” he asked Carella.
“Well, there’ve been muggings in good neighborhoods too. But I guess Hall Avenue is fairly safe.”
“Anyway, that’s not my point,” Pimm said. “My point is, there we were in the heart of Old San Juan, walking the streets after midnight, Jeanine all dolled up, both of us surrounded by Puerto Ricans, the only tourists walking around down there so late at night, but were we afraid anything would happen? Absolutely not! We felt perfectly safe, we felt those people meant us no harm, were in fact glad to have us there and anxious to make us welcome. Now, why should that be?”
“Why should what be?”
“Why should they come to this city and start throwing garbage out the windows, and start living like pigs, and taking dope, and selling their sisters, and causing trouble everyplace? Why should that be?”
“Maybe they’re better hosts than we are,” Carella said.
“Huh?”
“Maybe if we made them feel safe, things would be a little different.”
“Well, anyway,” Pimm said dubiously, “it’s a beautiful island.”
“Tell them about El Junque,” Jeanine suggested.
“Oh, yeah, El Junque, that’s the rain forest. You go into this enormous forest—”
“A jungle, really,” Jeanine said.
“Right, a jungle,” Pimm said, “this is the forest primeval,” he quoted, “and—”
“Mr. Pimm,” Carella said, “I know you’re anxious to get on with your unpacking, and this is probably an inconvenient time—”
“No, no, not at all,” Pimm said, “we can unpack while we talk, can’t we, Jeanine?”
“Oh, sure, there isn’t much more to do, anyway.”
“Well, we don’t want to take up too much of your time,” Carella said. “We were wondering if you’d heard anything about the Leyden murders while you were south.”
“Yes, it was in the newspapers. Terrible thing,” Pimm said.
“Terrible,” Jeanine repeated.
“Did you know them well?”
“As well as you get to know anybody in an apartment house,” Pimm said. “You know the old cliché. People can live next door to each other for years without ever knowing each other’s names.”
“Yes, but you did know the Leydens?”
“Never been in there, if that’s what you mean,” Pimm said.
“Well, George, we’ve only lived in the building a year.”
“Little more than a year,” Pimm said.
“And you’ve never been inside the Leyden apartment?”
“No, never.”
“Well, I was in there once,” Jeanine said.
“When was that?”
“She was sick one morning. I met her downstairs doing the laundry. In the basement. She looked awfully pale, I thought she might faint or something. So I came upstairs with her into the apartment. She got sick in the bathroom.”
“When was this, Mrs. Pimm?”
“In April, I think it was. Yes, it was a little after the beginning of April.”
“When you say she got ‘sick’ in the bathroom, do you mean—?”
“Yes, she threw up.”
“She was pregnant, wasn’t she?” Pimm asked. “Isn’t that what Mrs. Leibowitz said?”
“Yes, later on we found out she was pregnant. Mrs. Leibowitz told us she lost the baby. That’s our next-door neighbor.”
“Yes, we’ve met her,” Kling said.
“A nice lady,” Pimm said.
“She’s deaf,” Jeanine said.
“Well, a little hard of hearing,” Pimm said.
“But aside from that one time in the apartment—”
“That’s right,” Jeanine said.
“…you were never in there, never really friendly?”
“That’s right.”
“Nor did she visit you.”
“Well, they kept to themselves, you know. He was on the road a lot, he’s a traveling salesman, you know…”
“Yes.”
“…sells heavy machinery, I think.”
“Tractors,” Jeanine said.
“That’s right.”
“Yes.”
“So he was hardly ever around, you know, gone for months at a time.”
“I’d see her down in the basement every now and then,” Jeanine said. “Or in the elevator. You know. Like that.”
“She was a nice girl,” Pimm said. “Seemed to be, anyway.”
“Yes,” Jeanine said.
“Introduced me to her brother once,” Pimm said. “Nice fellow, too. Met them coming out of the apartment one day.”
“Her brother?” Carella said. He had just remembered with a chilling suddenness that Gloria Leyden had described her daughter-in-law as an only child. She was an only child herself, you know, but she had these thousands of cousins scattered all over the countryside.
“That’s right, her brother,” Pimm said.
“What’d he look like?”
“Tall fellow, very good-looking. Blue eyes, dark hair. Nice fellow.”
“What was his name? Did she say?”
“Harry, I think.”
“No,” Jeanine said.
“Wasn’t it Harry?” Pimm asked.
“Wally,” Jeanine said. “It was Wally.”
So now the closet door was open, and as usual there was a skeleton hanging in it. The skeleton was a familiar one, it bored Carella and Kling to tears. Oh, how they hoped for an original slaying once in a while, a well-conceived murder instead of these sloppy run-of-the-mill crimes of passion that were constantly being dumped into their laps. Oh, how they longed for a killer who would knock off somebody with a rare untraceable poison. Oh, how they wished they might find a body in a locked windowless room. Oh, how they wanted somebody to scheme and plot for months on end and then commit the perfect homicide that everyone would think was suicide or something. Instead, what did they get? They got Andrew Leyden, cuckold of the month, working his little heart out in California and environs while Rosie dallied with her lover. They got Walter Damascus, womanizer supreme, with his Mandy downtown and his Rosie uptown, who for whatever twisted reasons of his own decided he would knock off both his uptown mistress and her husband. Walter Damascus, who had committed murder crudely and brutally and then oh so cleverly rigged the second murder to look like suicide—a clumsy ruse that would be detected the moment any apprentice cop found the ejected shotgun shell. That was what they got. They got a crazy bastard who made love to Mandy downtown in his pigsty apartment, asked her to drive him uptown to his “poker game,” blasted Rosie and Andy, and then went into the john to shave with the dead man’s razor.
They never got the interesting cases.
Meyer and Hawes go
t all the interesting cases.
The interesting thing about the Margie Ryder case was that there seemed to be no motive. The other interesting thing was that it was very neat for a stabbing. When somebody starts stabbing another person, there’s a certain je ne sais quoi that takes over, a rhythm that’s established, a compulsive need to plunge the blade again and again, so it shouldn’t be a total loss. It is not uncommon in stabbings to find a corpse with anywhere from a dozen to a hundred wounds, that’s the thing about stabbings.
Margie Ryder was stabbed only once.
Once is enough, you may say, because after all if you’ve seen one kitchen knife being plunged into your chest, you’ve seen them all. But it was this very lack of multiple wounds that ran contrary to what the police had come to expect in all the dreary little knifings they encountered every day of the week.
Nothing had been stolen from the Ryder apartment, nor had the woman been molested. Discounting burglary then, and discounting rape, the bartender Jim Martin seemed to have a point when he suggested that the killer had to be somebody Margie knew. Well, most of the people she’d known had been at a party thrown by the guitarist Luis-Josafat Garzon, and she had left that party alone, and had then proceeded to Perry’s Bar & Grille on DeBeck Avenue where, according to Martin’s volunteered information, she had been in conversation half the night with a stranger. That stranger had returned later to ask her name, and then might (oh boy, what a big might) have remembered it, and gone to her apartment, and been let in by Margie, and had stabbed her. Why had he forgotten her name to begin with? And what caused him to remember it again? And why had she let him in at four in the morning? Interesting, right? Meyer and Hawes got all the interesting ones.
But the most interesting thing about it was the lack of motivation. It almost seemed—and this was very puzzling—it almost seemed as if the man, the stranger become acquaintance, had gone there specifically to kill her. There were no signs of a struggle, there was no torn clothing or toppled furniture, no indication that there had been a violent argument, nothing even in the stabbing itself to indicate the actions of a man gone berserk, a man unable to control the terrible destructive power of a plunging blade. Everything was neat and simple, Margie in basic black and pearls, the knife sticking out of her chest, the single stab wound.
Neat.
Simple.
Interesting.
It stank.
On Monday afternoon, everything almost cracked wide open.
The bank teller called at 4:00 P.M. Steve Carella took the call. The teller explained that he had first called Police Headquarters to ask who was handling the Leyden case he’d been reading so much about in the newspapers. Headquarters had informed him that Detectives Carella and Kling of the 87th Precinct were handling the case, and then had belatedly asked the teller what his name was, and he had said Derek Heller, and then had given his address and telephone number at their request, and had asked whether he might talk directly to either of the two detectives handling the case. The man at Headquarters had grunted and grumbled and then reluctantly told Heller to call Frederick 7-8024, which he was doing now.
“Are you Detective Carella?” he asked.
“I’m Detective Carella.”
“How do you do? Mr. Carella, I think I have some information that might help you.”
“Regarding the Leyden case?”
“Yes, sir, regarding that case,” Heller said. “I’ve read an awful lot about it in the newspapers, which is why I’m calling.”
“Yes, Mr. Heller?”
“I’m the head teller at Commerce of America. We’ve got seven branches in the city, including one uptown on Ainsley Avenue, which is in your precinct.”
“Yes, Mr. Heller?”
“I work at the branch on Aley and Harris, all the way downtown here.”
“Yes, Mr. Heller?”
“I’ll have to give you this in sequence because it only came to my attention through a coincidental series of events.”
“Take your time, Mr. Heller.”
“Well, we close at three o’clock, as you know, and one of our tellers was having some difficulty proving his drawer. He was a dollar and thirty cents short, nothing to get terribly upset about, but he’s a new teller, and well, these things happen. In any event, he asked my assistance, and we began going through the drawer—the cash, the checks, all of it. That was how I happened to notice this one check. Mind you, I wasn’t looking for it. I was looking for that dollar-thirty discrepancy.”
“Yes, go on, Mr. Heller.”
“The check I’m talking about was made out to cash.”
“For how much?”
“Two hundred dollars, and drawn on our bank. That is to say, the checking account is one of ours.”
“Yes, Mr. Heller?”
“It is, in fact, one of our regular checking accounts, as opposed to our special checking accounts. With the special accounts, as you may know, there is a small charge for each check written. Our regular accounts, on the other hand—”
“Well, what about this particular check, Mr. Heller?”
“It was drawn to the account of Rose and Andrew Leyden of 561 South Engels Street in Isola.”
“Well, why do you find that unusual, Mr. Heller?”
“I don’t. The check is dated October sixteenth, and I know that Mr. Leyden wasn’t killed until October twenty-eighth, so there’s nothing unusual about it coming in to be cashed at this time. I’m talking about the endorsement. That’s what’s unusual.”
“What do you mean?”
“The man who endorsed the check forged Andrew Leyden’s signature.”
Edward Graham, the teller at the Aley and Harris Streets branch of Commerce of America, was a frightened young man who was afraid he would lose his job. Derek Heller kept assuring him he had done nothing wrong, but the presence of two detectives fairly sent him crawling into the vault, and they and Heller had a difficult job trying to calm him down. Heller was a thin, distinguished-looking man of about thirty-eight, wearing a gray suit and black tie. There was an inkstain on the collar of his otherwise immaculate white shirt. He spoke softly and earnestly to Graham, who finally gained control of himself, at least enough to answer the questions Carella and Kling put to him.
“What time did this man come in, Mr. Graham, would you remember that?”
“Yes, it was just before noon.”
“Would you remember what he looked like?”
“He was a tall man, good-looking, well-dressed.”
“What color hair did he have?”
“Dark.”
“And his eyes?”
“I don’t remember.”
“What happened, can you tell us exactly?”
“He gave me the check, and asked for the money in tens.”
“Did you pay him?”
“First I asked for identification.”
“Did he show any?”
“Yes. His driver’s license.”
“A driver’s license made out to Andrew Leyden?”
“Yes.”
“Did the signature on the license match those on the check?”
“Yes.”
“So you paid him.”
“Well, no, I called the main branch first.”
“Why’d you do that?”
“Because this was a check made out to cash, and the payer was also the endorser. So I wanted to make sure there were sufficient funds in the account to cover the withdrawal.”
“And were there?”
“I was told there was a balance of three thousand one hundred sixty-two dollars and twenty-one cents in Mr. Leyden’s account.”
“So did you then cash the check?”
“Yes, sir, I did.”
“Mr. Graham, don’t you read the newspapers?”
“I do.”
>
“Didn’t you see anything about the Leyden murders?”
“Yes, I did. I’ll tell you the truth, though, I never made a connection. I mean, I knew the name Andrew Leyden, and I knew this check was signed and endorsed by Andrew Leyden, but it just never occurred to me they might be one and the same person. I’m sorry. It just never crossed my mind.”
“Thank you, Mr. Graham,” Carella said.
Outside the bank, Kling said, “So what do you think?”
“I think we now know why Damascus went back to the Leyden apartment Saturday.”
“Why?”
“To get Leyden’s checkbook. Don’t you remember Leyden’s wire to the company? It asked his wife to send him a fresh checkbook and specifically mentioned it was in the top drawer of the dresser. Damascus must have known that too.”
“How could he have?”
“He was Rose Leyden’s lover, wasn’t he? The way this looks to me, he probably spent more time in her apartment than he did in his own. He must have had free run of the place whenever Leyden was on the road. So wouldn’t he have been familiar with the contents of that dresser?”
“Then why didn’t he grab the checkbook the night he killed them?”
“Because he panicked and ran.”
“But he didn’t panic and run. He used Leyden’s razor, remember?”
“Who says he used it that night? He was her lover, Bert, in and out of that apartment constantly. He may have used the razor any number of times.”
“Yeah, but hold it just a second,” Kling said. “If Damascus needed money, why didn’t he go back to his own apartment where he’d left a perfectly good uncashed check from The Cozy Corners?”
“Because he knows we’re looking for him. Besides, that check is only for a hundred ten dollars and seventy-nine cents.”
“So? The one he cashed today isn’t for a hell of a lot more.”
“The first one he cashed,” Carella said.
“You think there’ll be more?”
“I think he’ll milk the account dry before he takes off for wherever he’s heading.”
“Then you think he killed them for the money? A measly three thousand bucks?”
“I know people who’ve killed people for a measly nickel,” Carella said, and nodded. “My guess is that tomorrow morning bright and early, Damascus’ll start hitting all the other branches of Commerce of America, cashing small checks in each of them.” He nodded again, briefly. “Only this time, we’ll be ready for him.”
