The Corpse Next Door

by John Farris

  I picked a couple of bugs out of the hair on my forearms, said, “I don’t have time to wade through all that, Hugo. Give me a summary.”

  The coroner settled back against the door frame, his damp hands feeling each other. “Well, he’s been dead six months to a year. That’s about as close as I can narrow it down.”

  “He’s been dead nine months,” I interrupted. “He checked into the Crown Hotel last October, stayed two days, checked out. He left his bag with the hotel people, but never came back for it. He disappeared completely. Into a trunk in Smithell’s basement.”

  Hugo nodded. “The carving knife in him probably cut the hepatic vein. I can’t be sure. There wasn’t much to him. Just a dried bag of bones. Bacteria in the colon took care of his insides. Total decomposition was prevented because the trunk was in a nice dry place near the furnace. An interesting case of mummification.”

  Phil hung up the phone and came over to my desk. He flipped over a few pages of the pad he had been scribbling on, slipped on his reading glasses. Sweat drops clung to the underside of his bristly chin.

  “Here’s what I got,” he said eagerly. “Veilleux was a guard at Industrial National Bank. Had been since 1937. He continued to work there after the embezzlement three-and-a-half years ago. Eight months later, after the hue and cry had died down, he quit his job. Said he was going into business for himself. Instead, he left Troy. Nobody there has heard a word from him since. He was the loner type, no close friends, lived simply. He wasn’t acquainted with Olson other than to nod good-morning to him.”

  “Looks like he had a lead nobody else knew about,” I said. “I guess we’ll never find out what it was. So he left Troy, and patiently tracked Olson for almost three years.”

  “What was his angle?” Phil wondered. “Blackmail? Or did he want what was left of the loot for himself? If he wanted the reward money all he had to do was tip the FBI and let them do the work.”

  I shrugged. Hugo said, “Who did the job on this Veilleux?”

  “Leland Smithell. That was the name he used in Cheyney. But Smithell was really Richard Olson, a minor vice-president with the Industrial National Bank in Troy, New York. He managed the theft of approximately forty thousand bucks and absconded. Bank officials didn’t know about it for three days. The trail was cold when the FBI took over. The case is still open. At least, it was until tonight.”

  I handed Hugo some of the clippings Smithell had meticulously saved. “Compare those newspaper photos of Richard Olson with the pictures of Smithell. They don’t look too much alike at first glance, but notice the shape of their heads, facial contours, the prominent ears. We phoned the FBI in St. Louis. They’ll make the final decision.”

  Hugo nodded, looking at the pictures, then leafing through the newspaper accounts of the embezzlement.

  “You think Veilleux tracked Smithell all the way to Cheyney?”

  “Apparently. He may have threatened to expose Smithell if Smithell didn’t pay off heavily. Smithell wouldn’t give up his new life easily, after all the trouble he went to. He must have used the first weapon that was handy, a carving knife from the kitchen, and stuffed the body into that trunk. Then he discovered getting a body out of that neighborhood wouldn’t be easy. So he left it where it was. The hot dry air in the basement through the winter kept the corpse from smelling very much. He kept the storage room locked. Veilleux was as safe from discovery there as he would be anywhere.”

  Hugo replaced the clippings and pictures on my desk. “Where’d you dig up these?”

  “In a suitcase beside the trunk. The suitcase probably held the money at some time or other.”

  “Sort of a dead end after all, isn’t it? With Smithell, uh, Olson, already dead?” Hugo looked at his watch. “Four-fifteen. Guess I’ll say good night. I’ve already lost four hours’ sleep on this thing.” He put his hand in front of his face to stop a yawn and drifted out.

  Phil, watching him leave, said, “That’s one thing about Hugo. A simple explanation always makes him happy.” He sat on the edge of my desk and picked up the match folder I had found in the storage room. “‘Quality Plumbers. No job too small or too large. We do only A-1 work.’ So who gives a damn?” He dropped the match book back on the desk. “What did you find out from them, Bill?”

  “One of their boys replaced that leaky L-joint which caused the corrosion on the lock. The work was finished a couple of days before Smithell was murdered,” I said, trying to massage the ache from my eyes. “I talked with the plumber who made the repair. He said Smithell stayed with him every second, then locked the door carefully when he left. He also says there was no suitcase in the room.”

  “So it seems Smithell could have brought the money in the suitcase, then,” Phil said. “I wonder how much?”

  I put my hand on the folder containing Smithell’s bank books and account statements—his financial history in Cheyney. “We’ve accounted for something less than twenty-six grand. You can start guessing from about fifteen thousand dollars on down.”

  “What do you think he did with that fifteen? He didn’t make any deposits in either account during the two days between the plumber’s visit and his death. Nordin Kaylor says business has never been better, so he didn’t need quick money for any crisis there. Maybe there wasn’t any money in the suitcase. Maybe he spent it long ago.”

  “Then he didn’t need to hide the suitcase while the plumber was there. Unless on account of those press clippings. But why would he cache his press clippings in an otherwise empty suitcase? I think the man was an egoist. He’d want some of the money around where he could get it out and look at it now and then. Just to remind himself how clever he’d been. Like the clippings. Symbols of his master mind. He sure as hell didn’t need to spend it. Not with the monthly dividends he received for his share of Kaylor’s automobile business.”

  Phil chuckled, cleaned his glasses with a wrinkled handkerchief and put them away. There were heavy dark moons under his eyes. “Now you’ve lost me. Most of that psychology stuff is too deep for me. You must have had a lot of it.”

  “Three semesters. I quit school after my sophomore year.”

  “What for?”

  “So I could be a cop, of course.”

  Phil snorted politely. “And I suppose you’ve never regretted it?”

  His tactless questions irritated me slightly, like dirt under my fingernails, but I was too tired to evade them. “Sure, I’ve regretted it. I’ve had nine years to regret it. I was just a kid then. I wanted excitement. Instead of riding out the dull spots like most kids I quit, and picked up my badge. Christ, look around you, Phil. For headquarters, we’ve got the oldest public building in this town. The floors are buckled. The walls are grimy. The lighting is bad. The whole place smells like a waterfront mission. There aren’t enough fans to go around so in summer the heat bakes the juice out of us. And the man I work for doesn’t make things any nicer.” I decided I was talking too much and put a cigarette into my mouth, then removed it and dropped it in the wastebasket. My hands were restless. “That’s enough bitch session for one evening,” I said. “Let’s get back to work.”

  Phil thumbed aimlessly through the account books. “I don’t suppose there was much chance Smithell was being blackmailed,” he said.

  “Look what happened to Veilleux.”

  “Yeah.” Phil slid off the desk and went to the window. It had become perceptibly lighter outside as dawn neared. The air was cooler and the bug swarms around the light globes had thinned. For me the best part of the day was coming, early morning with sunlight a pale wash on the faces of the buildings, coming through the high windows to slant orange against the dirty walls. For me dawn was the dispatcher nodding sleepily as the speaker issued a broken crackle of static, the long walk past the cleared benches and down swabbed halls, the cup of coffee next door and the feel of stubble on my chin. It was the time for forgetting, for pushing back into a far place of mind the long dreary hours and the shambling people, and the hope
lessness they wore along with their shoddy clothes.

  Phil picked up the phone and dialed. He put one foot on the radiator and rested one elbow on the butt of the revolver he wore on his belt.

  “Russ? What are you guys doing? You haven’t found anything yet?” A pause. Then Phil looked at me, curled a hand over the mouthpiece. “No sign of any money anywhere else in the house.”

  “Call ’em off. They’ve been out there two hours.”

  “Okay,” Phil said. “You guys come in. Lock up tight.” He hooked the receiver.

  “Well, what the hell did Smithell do with the money?” he said.

  He was looking at me, not hopefully, but with a tired grouchy expression as if he had been asking questions like that forever and no one had ever bothered to answer. This time I had an answer. I could have forgotten then what I had learned in the past two hours, what must be true. The rest of the money would never be accounted for, and we would be subject to the fishy eye of the Federal men for a couple of days before they departed. Maybe we wouldn’t find the money anyway. It would make things a lot easier, if I just forgot. After nine years as a cop and far too many compromises with myself I didn’t shine very brightly any more, but if I tried to ignore the reasons that the money was gone there would be nothing left of me at all. I knew. As I looked at Phil to tell him I felt a small warning that I had never really known trouble before compared to what was going to come and, in a way, I was glad of it.

  “I don’t think he did anything with it,” I said. “Someone stole it.”

  Phil looked strangely at me. “You think Jimmy Herne knew about the money?”

  “Maybe. If he knew about it, sooner or later maybe he’d make up his mind to steal it. Thinking about all that cash in the basement could wear away his resistance.”

  Phil cleaned wax out of one ear with his little finger. “But why would he bother with those other trinkets—the watch and the cuff links, the small change from Smithell’s wallet—when he had that much money in his hands? And would he have to kill Smithell to get into the storage room?”

  “That’s what I mean.”

  Phil came back to my desk. “He could have broken in, or got the key some night when Smithell was asleep, and blown town with the suitcase. With a few hours’ head start he could have been halfway to Mexico before Smithell woke up.” His eyes were troubled.

  “Sure. But if I knew Smithell,” I said, “and I knew about the money in the basement, I’d wonder about it, wonder why it was there. I might decide he came by it illegally. In which case, some of it might as well be mine. If I underestimated Smithell, as a lot of people did, I’d put it up to him, not knowing he can react in a nasty way under such circumstances. To my surprise I might be forced to defend myself and hit him too hard, so that he died. So the money would be mine by default but now I would have another problem—murder. Knowing all about Jimmy Herne I would take Smithell’s watch and pocket money and other things and set the kid up for a frame. Then I would grab the money and leave. I’d realize there would be a good chance Jimmy would run like hell when he found Smithell’s body. Even if he stuck it out Jimmy would have a tough time with the cops. In time he might even be persuaded to confess to something he never did at all.”

  I watched Phil, to see how he would receive it. I thought I knew him as well as anybody could. Long ago he must have accepted with a kind of bewilderment the savage world which didn’t want him or his law and had gradually evolved into a cop who worked hard and competently, for no good reason. Like others, he felt pity sometimes, and anger sometimes, but always with some detachment. His face got dirty and sweat trickled down his back and his feet ached, as with other cops, and he felt irritation with his job now and then and dreamed of the ten days off each year and casually despised most politicians. He had found the pace that was suitable to him and had followed it. He wasn’t a do-gooder, or a trouble-maker, or a tough guy. He wasn’t particularly ambitious. We got along with each other, without affection, neither of us finding anything of interest in the other. We got along, and I thought I knew the book on him.

  But now there was something in his eye, a coldness, a forming anger he probably wasn’t even aware of yet. Maybe he never would be. But it was an indication, something on which to base the dissatisfaction I had noticed in him lately. There was something changing in him and maybe it was at the worst possible time, so close to retirement.

  “You don’t think Jimmy killed Smithell?” he said cautiously, knowing the way the trouble would breed, because it had been seeded deep and long ago. But there remained that something in his eye, that cold slow anger, as if he could see Jimmy Herne lying dead in the jail.

  I said, “Jimmy never killed anybody. He’s not even responsible for his own death.”

  He took out a cigarette and lit it. There was a tremor in his hands that he stilled. He screwed his face tight around the cigarette, puffing quickly.

  “What do we do now, Bill?”

  “We’ll have to tell Gulliver.”

  “He went home half an hour ago. Are you going to wake him up to tell him?”

  “I guess not. In the morning, after I get some sleep. I’ll be able to think better.”

  The tremor he had quieted seemed to have spread inside him, so that he sat with a look of effort on his face. It seemed as if there still remained something to be said, and we both knew it.

  “You want me to go with you?” he muttered.

  “You want to go?”

  He didn’t answer me. He didn’t look at me.

  “It’s my responsibility,” I said heavily. “I’ll tell him.”

  “Your responsibility,” Phil said derisively, dropping the cigarette on the floor and crushing it with his foot.

  “He was only doing what he thought was right. He thought Jimmy was guilty.”

  “Do you think you’re going to change his mind?”

  “I’ll tell him what we found out. He can’t overlook it.”

  Phil said bitterly, “Quit kidding yourself. You know what’s going to happen.”

  “Go on home, Phil,” I said wearily.

  I heard him walk, alone, down the hall, stop at the water cooler, and drink.

  I POUNDED ON THE SCREEN DOOR OF THE ROOMING HOUSE AT 62 Davis Street for two minutes before a skinny character wearing a pair of striped shorts and nothing else came loping down the stairs, scowling fiercely.

  “Whadda hell you want?” he said. “We got people tryna sleep in here and you waken ’em up.”

  “I want to see Stella.

  “You crazy? You know what time it is? It ain’t even five o’clock yet!”

  “I know what time it is.” I used the badge, although I didn’t want to. “Get her up.”

  “Aw,” he muttered, “cop. Crappo.” He unhooked the screen, yawning. “You waid down here an’ I’ll get her.”

  I waited just inside the hall. I could hear her coming down the stairs, rapidly at first, as if she were taking the steps two at a time, then slower. In the dim hallway she seemed like a shadow until her head moved slightly and clear gray light from the open door showered over the ruffled blonde hair and one cheek.

  “Bill?” she said, and I didn’t answer right away because I was having some funny trouble with my breathing. She walked closer to me, until I could see her face.

  “Bill, did you change your mind about—”

  I raised my hand and took hold of one arm gently. “No. I didn’t come to arrest you.”

  I could have drawn her to me, then, but I waited just too long and she pulled away from my hand, turning her face away from the door. There was no expression in her eyes.

  Inside me I felt a hard spot of hopeless anger. I thought, what’s the use? I can’t tell her about Jimmy. I don’t know why it matters, because she’s no damn good, but I can’t tell her and watch her indifference harden into hate.

  “I guess you got into trouble because of me,” she said.

  “We had some talk about it. I won my point.”
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  “Thanks, Bill. Was there something else . . .?”

  “We did a lot of checking last night. We found out that Smithell was a bank employee a few years back. He had another name then. He skipped out with about forty thousand bucks and eventually turned up in Cheyney. The man in the trunk tried for a long time to find Smithell. When he did, he was killed.”

  I couldn’t get myself to go on and give her my theory about Jimmy having been framed.

  But she was just tired enough to accept what she had heard without too much astonishment. Her lips curved slightly. “Funny, isn’t it? Everyone thought it was so noble of him to take a chance with Jimmy. A poor kid whose greatest offense was pilfering. But Smithell was a bank robber and a murderer, you tell me—and everybody thought he was so wonderful.” She looked at me soberly. “I have to go back to bed, Bill. I have to be at the cafe at seven.”

  This time I caught her and held her as close to me as her resisting body would allow.

  “Some day,” she said deliberately. “I’m going to make you understand about Jimmy. I’ll prove he killed no one. I’ll prove you cops killed him.”

  “Oh,” I said. “So that’s it.”

  She twisted violently away from me, hair flopping over her forehead. “Let me alone,” she said in an ugly voice. “Go away.”

  “You won’t let him die. You have to hate me, because you think I could have done something. But—”

  She turned and walked away from me, toward the stairs, ducking her head slightly to one side as she pushed hair off her forehead.

  I followed her. “Stella!”

  She turned on the stairs and looked at me. I couldn’t see her face well. I thought I saw contempt there. And I thought I saw something else.

  I slammed the screen door on my way out. Hard.

  Why did she have to feel sorry for me?

  5

  GULLIVER was in his office next morning when I came in with four hours’ sleep, a fresh shave and an old bird’s nest in my mouth that two cups of hot black coffee hadn’t disturbed.

  I knocked once on his door and was invited in. Gulliver was seated behind his desk and there was somebody in a chair facing him. Gulliver looked at me for about one second and lifted a finger, which meant I was to stay out of the way and keep my mouth shut.