Death on the Waterfront

by Robert Archer

  Stern said, more to himself than to the telephone, “Gas! Oh lord!”

  “What the hell are you muttering about? You sound like you were half asleep. I asked if you know the address.”

  “Yes.” Stern smiled grimly. “I know the address.”

  “Okay. In ten minutes.”

  “Okay.”

  Stern hung up and stood looking at the phone. Gas. But how? No one could have gotten into that locked apartment even during those two or three minutes when the downstairs door was left unguarded. Maybe it was suicide after all. “Suicide,” the small inner voice jeered. “Was Cosimo the kind of woman to commit suicide? Stop mooning, you dumb, dopey half-wit, and get down and face the music.”

  The flaming red truck of the city’s gas-emergency squad was double-parked with a squad car and an ambulance in the narrow street directly in front of the little brick house. Stern’s taxi pulled up behind it.

  “How’t hell am I gonna git outta here?” the taxi man wailed as Stern handed him a bill. “I can’t get around that thing, and this is a one-way street.”

  “Don’t you worry, Buddy,” Stern told him. “Hang around. There’s going to be a lot of fun here.”

  The taxi man looked shocked. “Fun? Somebody sick or croaked, and he calls it fun. You must be a reporter, mister.”

  “Wrong again,” said Stern. “I’m the victim.”

  The tiny living room of Cosimo’s apartment was a shambles. The door hung on one hinge. The windows had been opened by the quickest and most efficient method—a chair thrust through them—and most of the furniture had been tossed into a corner. The studio couch now occupied the center of the floor, and two men in white jackets, assisted by a perspiring policeman in shirt sleeves, were at work over the still form that lay on it. A bored-looking ambulance intern with a stethoscope dangling from his neck was watching them. A wheezy, whistling noise came from the group, but Stern was not sure whether it was made by the pulmotor they were operating or by the panting cop.

  “You’re standing in a draft,” Stern said to the cop. “You’re going to catch your death of cold.”

  The cop looked at him and said nothing, and Stern was ashamed of his stupid facetiousness. He couldn’t help it—it was the only way he could stifle that inner voice that kept saying over and over, “A woman is dead because you were too lazy to get out of bed.”

  Nicholson, followed by Sergeant Tripp and Detective Scanlon came through the door from the rear room. Nicholson looked pleased.

  “Hello, Stern,” he said. “Well, it’s suicide all right. It can’t be anything else.”

  “Sure,” said Tripp like an obedient echo. “It’s open and shut.”

  “All right. Let’s hear.” Stern sagged wearily against the doorjamb. “What makes you so positive?”

  “Because her fingerprints are on the gas cock.” Nicholson pointed to the gas radiator. “Hers and nobody else. Besides if anyone got into this place they must have crawled through the keyhole. Everything was locked up tighter than a jail cell.”

  “Uh-huh.” Stern shrugged himself upright and threaded his way across the room to the modernistic book shelves that had stood at the head of the studio couch the night before. On the flat painted top stood a glass of water, a squat medicine bottle, and an alarm clock, A spoon lay beside the bottle. Stern pointed to the objects without touching them.

  “She took cough medicine and set her alarm clock before she turned on the gas,” he said. “Maybe she wanted to be in good voice for shouting ‘Hallelujah’ when she woke up at seven-thirty in heaven.”

  One of the white-jacketed figures straightened and said sternly: “Were trying to save a woman’s life in here. Why don’t you flat-feet find some place else to do your snooping?”

  “Ain’t you noble?” said Scanlon. “You dumb bunny, that dame’s deader’n a mackerel.”

  “He’s right, Jack,” said the man who was still bending over Nellie Cosimo. “We’ve been working over her nearly an hour without a flutter. She’s gone, all right.”

  The hospital intern leaned over and applied his stethoscope. He pushed back the eyelids with his thumb and flexed one of the long bony arms, letting it drop back on the couch with a soft thud. “No soap,” he said conversationally. “Eyeball’s collapsed, and there’s a suggestion of rigor already. Probably started as soon as those windows were kicked in. Take my word for it; this woman was dead when you fellows got here.”

  The man who had first spoken lifted his shoulders in a slow shrug. Then he dropped them and nodded. The shirt-sleeved cop sighed lustily and began putting on his tunic. He filed out of the room behind the intern and the gas-emergency men. Nicholson shouted down the stairs to ask what was holding up the city medical examiner. Presently a new group of men—photographer, fingerprint experts, and a reporter or two—crowded into the room. Tripp started to chase the reporters and got razzed for his pains. “Look, Gargantua, get back into your cage.”

  Stern lifted a corner of the sheet and looked down at Nellie Cosimo’s dead face. His ears were ringing with that accusing inner voice. As he dropped the sheet his eyes traveled down to the floor beside the couch, and he stooped and picked up a small key attached to a piece of ordinary twine. He held the key up by the twine and examined it closely, his head twisting to one side as the bit of metal turned slowly. Nicholson came up and took the twine out of Stern’s hand.

  “Where’d you find that?”

  Stern indicated the spot with a nod.

  “How d’ya suppose it got there?”

  “If you ask those gasmen I imagine you’ll find they took it off her neck when they started to work on her.”

  “That’s right,” said Scanlon. “I noticed it there when I was trying artificial respiration.”

  “Let’s get out of here,” Stern said to Nicholson. “Let’s go somewhere where we can talk.”

  The police captain looked at him suspiciously. “You act damn funny,” he growled. “Like you had a guilty conscience or something up your sleeve. What’s it all about?”

  But Stern refused to say more until they were out of the house and seated in the back of the departmental car, leaving Sergeant Tripp to supervise the search of Nellie Cosimo’s apartment.

  “Now,” demanded Nicholson, cranking up the car window to keep reporters and curious bystanders from sticking their heads in, “spill it. You know something about this business I don’t. For one thing, I’d like to know how you spotted that medicine bottle and alarm clock so fast.”

  “First, let me ask a couple of questions.” Stern lit a cigarette, took one or two puffs, and pinched it out hurriedly as his breakfastless stomach began to rebel. “How did Scanlon find her?”

  “A cat.”

  A look of surprise, tinged with something a little like horror, came over Stern’s face. He repeated the word, “Cat!”

  Nicholson chuckled. “Sure, one of these big alley cats they have down here. Probably the old dame had been feeding it or something. Anyway, this cat comes along just about daylight and climbs the steps and starts rubbing against the street door. It miaowed a couple of times, but naturally Scanlon didn’t pay any attention until it put up its back and started backing away from the door like it was scared. Then it jumped off the steps and made a beeline out of there. Scanlon takes a look to see what scared it and finds the door open about a half inch and the hall smelling of gas. The cat had got a whiff, and he didn’t like it. Scanlon called Brumbaugh, and the two of ‘em went up and broke down the door and found the old girl. Scanlon sent Brumbaugh hotfooting it for a phone and started in on the first aid. That was maybe half an hour before the precinct got around to calling me.”

  “I called the precinct about two o’clock last night and asked ‘em to check up,” said Stern dully. “Did they do it?”

  “Scanlon said something about a prowl car coming around and stopping for a couple of minutes. Everything was quiet, and they went on.”

  “Oh lord, the dopes. I told them to try the door. If
they had they’d have smelled the gas, and she might have been saved.”

  “You called ‘em?” Nicholson sat up and stared. “How in hell did you know about the door?”

  “I left it open,” said Stern. “God help me, I forgot it.”

  “Well for the love of God——“ Nicholson stopped, speechless.

  “Wait a minute, Cap. Just one more question, and then I’ll tell you the whole thing. Did Scanlon or Brumbaugh leave that house uncovered between the time I left and the time the cat came along?”

  Nicholson began, “Look, son——“ But Stern insisted, “Did they?”

  “Hell”—Nicholson took out a handkerchief and wiped his face—“I don’t know what this is all about. I don’t know what time you left or what you were doing here but if either of those apes left his post for so much as a minute I’ll see that he pounds pavement the rest of his life.”

  “Okay,” said Stern. “That means there was just one time anyone could have gotten into that house without being seen.”

  He told Nicholson of his interview with Nellie Cosimo the previous night and of the events that followed. Several times the police captain tried to interrupt, but Stern would not let him. When the story was finally finished he said: “I take full responsibility for Scanlon and Brumbaugh leaving their posts. They really had no choice. I wish to God that was all I was responsible for.”

  “I don’t see what you’re breaking your heart over,” said Nicholson. He looked relieved, as though he had expected the story to be much worse. “You had no business to chase my men off the job, and they had no business to pay any attention to you, but we’ll skip that. And I wish I had a dime for every time I searched a house without a warrant or the tenant’s knowledge. But as far as saving that old dame from committing suicide, even if you could have, that’s nothing to cry about. We save ‘em every day, and they go right back and do it over again. It’s simpler this way.”

  “But don’t you see?” Stern explained wearily. “Cosimo didn’t commit suicide; she was murdered.”

  “You mean that clock and the medicine?” Nicholson laughed. “That had me going for a minute, too, but it’s easy to explain. Nellie was a little bit cracked—anybody could see that. She had no idea of suicide when she went to bed but in the middle of the night she wakes up melancholy and decides to end it all. That’s psychologically sound. I remember a case we had about a year ago that was practically the same thing.”

  “I mean more than the clock and the medicine,” said Stern. “I mean the gas. That’s one thing I knew that you didn’t when you first came. The gas was on when I left, and Cosimo had a cold and hated drafts. She must have left it on when she went to bed. So no one turned the gas on. What the murderer did was to turn the gas off. Then he waited a minute till the pipes were clear and turned it on again.”

  “What kind of dopes do you think the police are?” asked Nicholson. “You mean the gas was turned off at the meter to put the flame out and then turned on again. That would account for the locked door because no one would have to get into the room—only into the house. Don’t you think we thought of that? We didn’t take it seriously but we checked the meter just the same. It’s got cobwebs on it and hasn’t been tampered with for months.”

  Stern looked surprised. “You mean to tell me that meter wasn’t touched?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  For a full minute Stern was silent. As he thought, the set expression slowly relaxed until he looked almost happy. Nicholson, watching him curiously, was disturbed somehow by that expression.

  “So you see it was suicide and not murder this time,” the captain urged. “Trouble with you is you let theories get in the way of facts.”

  Stern took off his glasses and wiped them carefully. Without the glasses the owlish look was gone, and he became simply a very young man with pale, watery eyes. Then he replaced the glasses and looked at Nicholson.

  “All right, you win. It’s suicide, if you say so. So where does that leave us on the Riorden case?”

  Nicholson shifted uneasily in his seat. “No reason why it should leave us anywhere. Of course Cosimo may have known who killed Riorden, but that’s just idle supposition, and if she wouldn’t tell us before she certainly won’t tell us now, so we might as well stop worrying about it. And that typewriter frame you bright boys found is just supposition too. It might be the machine used to write that spy report, but we can’t prove it, and even if we could it wouldn’t tell us who the murderer is.”

  Stern interrupted with one of his seemingly irrelevant questions. “Why do you think she committed suicide?”

  “How would I know?” Nicholson said impatiently. “Maybe she had a guilty conscience or maybe she just went off her nut all of a sudden. Sometimes it happens that way with neurotic women, and she was certainly neurotic.”

  Stern remembered Nellie Cosimo’s mad, tortured eyes, glaring at him over her handkerchief, and the picture almost made Nicholson’s analysis convincing. However, he only said, “So we’re no closer than we were before.”

  “Not much. For instance, supposing the boys find somebody’s fingerprints in that basement...” He paused, chuckling. “They’ll find Jackson’s there and Gordon’s and yours, too, but supposing they did find others—what would it prove? Not a goldarned thing. The only thing we’ve got that we didn’t have before, as far as I can see, is this.” He held up the key Stern had found and dangled it from the end of its string while he scrutinized it. “Looks like a safe-deposit key. It’d be nice if we found a safe-deposit box with Murdock’s ten grand in it. That’s one place where I agree with you. I think you’ve got the right dope on Powers.”

  “Speaking of Powers,” said Stern softly, “do me a favor, will you? Hold him for a couple of days.”

  “What for?”

  “Well, for one thing, I want to talk to him.” He hesitated a minute, then continued. “Tell you what I’ll do: you hold Powers forty-eight hours, and I’ll make you a present of Riorden’s killer. Is it a bet?”

  “Still want to play detective, eh?” Nicholson pretended to be vastly amused, but he wasn’t fooling anybody. He was wondering how far Stern was right and he was wrong in the case.

  Stern grinned. “Okay, in forty-eight hours you can rib me all you want. I still say, is it a bet?”

  “Sure. I’ll hold him for you.” He laughed. “Funny thing. I can pinch a servant and hold him as long as I please, but when I go to pinch one of these water-front roustabouts that carries a union card you and the whole community jump down my throat. What’s the matter? Hasn’t a servant got any civil rights?”

  “He might have more if he’d join a union,” said Stern. “You got a good reason for holding Powers though. If anybody asks you it’s for his own protection.”

  “You damn liberals give me a pain,” Nicholson grunted. “You’re always doing something because you think it’s for the other fellow’s own good.”

  The doctor from the city medical-examiners’ office came down the stairs of the brick house, and Nicholson lowered the car window and called to him, “What did it look like to you, Doc?” he asked when the brisk, efficient-looking young man stood beside the car.

  “Carbon monoxide,” said the doctor dryly. “Characteristic symptoms.”

  “Could she have committed suicide?”

  “That’s your job. If you mean did I find anything indicating murder the answer is no. It could have been murder, accident, or suicide, depending on how the gas got into the room. You think somebody else turned it on?”

  Nicholson shook his head, and the doctor was about to turn away when Stern asked: “What was the medicine she was taking, Doc?”

  “Ordinary cough mixture, as far as I could tell. We’re having a sample analyzed, of course.”

  “Would it have anything in it to make her sleep?”

  “Possibly a small quantity of codeine or some other opiate. Not a lot, unless someone added it.”

  “But enough so that, once asleep,
she would not waken easily.”

  “Possibly. The analysis will give us the exact quantity.” The doctor refused to venture any further opinion on the subject, and in answer to another question dealing with the length of time Miss Cosimo had been exposed to the gas before she died he was equally vague. “That will be difficult to tell even in the autopsy. Some cases go out pretty quick, and I’ve known others exposed for as long as eight hours to recover. It depends on the individual and the circumstances and a lot of other factors.”

  “Would you make a guess on this one?”

  “I’d say about three hours, if I had to,” said the doctor sourly, “but it’s just what you said, a guess, and I’d deny it if anyone quoted me.” The doctor nodded and moved away. Nicholson grunted. “Well, let’s get back to work.” He led the way out of the car and up the steps.

  Back in Nellie Cosimo’s forlorn, tragic little house police routine ground methodically to its conclusion, yielding nothing beyond a few unidentifiable fingerprints subsequently explained by the known events of the night and early morning. Nicholson handed the small flat key to Sergeant Tripp and ordered an investigation of the possibilities it suggested. Then he turned to Stern.

  “Nothing more to be done here,” he announced. “Come on, I’ll drive you downtown.”

  Stern, staring absentmindedly at the short chain that dangled from the broken living-room door, seemed not to hear, and Nicholson testily repeated his invitation. Instead of answering, Stern said: “I don’t suppose there’s any chance that chain was unhooked when Scanlon broke in here.”

  Nicholson pointed. “You can see for yourself the screws are pulled half out of the catch on the doorpost. That wouldn’t happen unless the chain were up.”

  “Yeah,” said Stern. “Uh-huh.” But he remained staring at the door.

  “What the hell’s the matter with you?” exploded Nicholson. “You act like you had a bad case of shell shock. Are you coming or not?”