Untidy Murder Read online

  The machine had started. It was moving slowly, now. As a machine, it would never gain much impetus. It was its nature to be slow and methodical—and thorough. It, too, ground exceeding fine.

  In a sense Lieutenant William Weigand, as representing Deputy Chief Inspector O’Malley—who in turn represented the police commissioner, the mayor, the people of the city—was at the controls of the machine. But the controls needed little adjustment. In other words, there was little he could do. Of course, he could try to sleep.…

  He tossed the papers he had been looking at into a basket. One missed and fluttered aside. He picked it up, started to toss it again toward the basket, and stopped, because his eyes caught several words on it. “Says a coupe, picture of head on hubcap. (Indian head from description; car probably Pontiac.)” It was the report of the woman who thought she had seen a man’s body stuffed into the rear of a car in a numbered street between First and Second Avenues.

  I saw a coupe that was probably a Pontiac, Weigand thought. Today, some time—at some time that night—

  Then it came to him. It was when he had been lucky, driving home. A car had pulled out and left him a place to park, and he had mildly blessed its driver—the driver of an elderly coupe, probably a Pontiac—leaving a spot a few feet from the house in Thirty-seventh Street, at a time which fitted.

  6

  SATURDAY

  1:10 A.M. TO 1:30 P.M.

  It was an old law tenement, waiting to fall down. It went up five stories, and you went up by a narrow wooden stairway, breathing air thick with old smells—the smell of food which must have died in cooking, the reek of toilets which opened on the dark corridors, that master odor which was none of these but included all of them, and was poverty and over-crowding made sensible. The old tenement was filled with people, and by one-thirty that morning most of them were awake. They were awake and answering questions, and shaking heads, and looking with bewilderment—and fear too—through eyes sticky with sleep.

  It was over-peopled. It was confusing. It was hard to narrow it down.

  “Look for an empty one,” Bill directed. “Probably it’s empty—now.”

  They found an empty one in the rear of the second floor. It was empty but it had been, in a fashion, occupied. There were a few straight-backed chairs; there was a cot, with springs broken, and a dirty blanket over the springs. There was a single electric light hanging from a cord in the middle of the main room; there was a smaller room opening off that room, and it was unfurnished. The place shouted “hide-out” to Bill Weigand, and to Mullins and the precinct men. They took out the little bulb in the dangling socket and put in one that lighted the room harshly, almost cruelly. They went over the room.

  Dorian, if she had been there—been there alive—might have left something; she would almost certainly have tried to leave something. If she had been alive and conscious, and free to move, she would have tried to leave something which would count as a message. But there were too many if’s. And there was nothing. There was nothing on the bare wood floor, which sloped so sharply toward one wall, showed so clearly which way the old building was planning to fall when finally it was too old and tired to stand. There was nothing on the chairs; nothing on the cot. Bill Weigand watched Mullins and a precinct man search; watched them not touch anything except the blanket on the cot, as they searched.

  Bill stood for several minutes before he realized that the man with the drawn face at whom he was looking was himself, reflected. He crossed the room quickly then, to the un-framed mirror held with bent nails to the wall. He looked at it without touching it, and turned to a precinct man at the door.

  “Print that first,” he said, and pointed. “Print it now.”

  The fingerprint man dusted it and the powder slid down the glass. But in some places the powder adhered, and the prints of fingers showed up. Some of the prints were clear, some were only the vague suggestions of prints. The clearest were in the center of the mirror, and they were very clear—the four fingers of a hand held with the fingers pointing up, the print of the thumb to the left, as you faced the mirror, and below them. It was as if somebody had pressed four fingers and a thumb there, planning that prints would be left.

  They were prints of slender fingers. Bill looked at them and tried to remember. He was almost certain that he did. This was the right hand; there should be a distinctive sworl on the index finger; crossing it there should be the narrow, almost invisible, line of a tiny scar. The sworl—yes. The scar—it was not so certain.

  “Is there a line through there?” Bill asked the fingerprint man. “The mark of a little cut?”

  The man looked; he leaned his head to the side and looked along the surface of the glass. He nodded slowly.

  “I think these are my wife’s prints,” Bill said. “Shoot them first; send them along. We’ve got hers on file.”

  They shot first the prints on the glass. At a nod from Weigand, Mullins took the plates and, not needing to be told, went through the night in a radio car with red lights blinking and siren wailing. Bill watched a little longer and went out of the old tenement. Already, inconspicuously, men were watching the building. There would be more men watching in the rear; it was sewed up tight. If anybody came back to the hide-out on the second floor, he would walk into trouble.

  It was all that needed to be done there. Now the machinery, fed this new data, would adjust itself, go on grinding. The controls had been shifted a little. Now you waited.

  Back at his office, Bill did not wait long. He picked up the telephone when it rang, listened, said, “Yes, I thought so,” and put it down. Now, to a point, another trail had opened. The prints were Dorian’s. She had been in the room. She had been alive and conscious and, at least to a degree, free to move. She had managed to put her fingers against glass, press them there, and so leave a message as clear, as easily deciphered, as if she had found the chance to write it down in words. She told them she had been there; probably she could, at that moment, have told them no more, even if she could have written down clearly all she knew.

  They were a step beyond where they had been. Dorian no longer dropped from sight at Bonwit’s, or as she left a taxicab and ran up a short flight of brownstone steps, with a taxi driver watching, in admiration, her long slim legs. Now she was in sight in a bare little hide-out in an East Side tenement. Now, at some time in the past, she was alive there.

  It was hard for Bill Weigand, adding this new fact to those he had, to be sure how much of the sum was based on hope and fear, how much on experience and logic. But he thought, trying very hard to think of this lost girl as if she were not Dorian, but someone whose name he knew only, that the chances were the girl was still alive—or had been alive when she left the hide-out. There was nothing there to indicate that it had been the scene of violence—of violent death. Murder does not need to leave traces, but usually it does. It looked as if the men who had Dorian were men who used guns. They had not used them in the hide-out. This was not a great deal, and this was to be expected. Still, it was something.

  The police machinery—speeded a little by anger; hurrying because one of its own was concerned—ground out facts. At twenty-three minutes after two, Mullins brought the facts to Bill Weigand. By that time they had already been fed back into the hopper of the machine.

  There were many fingerprints in the room in the old tenement. Some of them seemed almost as old as the building; others were more recent. And, besides Dorian’s, two sets had been identified.

  A man named Tony Farno had been there. He had been a licensed private detective from 1934 to 1939; his license had been revoked in September of 1939 when he was found to have participated in a divorce raid which appeared to be a shake-down. He had not, however, been prosecuted. He had, properly speaking, no police record. He was merely out of a license. He had applied to have the license reinstated and then, in February of 1942, failed to appear to press his application. He was reported to have enlisted in the Army. (His prints had gone to Washin
gton, with information requested.) He was the owner of a 1938 Pontiac coupe. (The Motor Vehicle Bureau, responding to an emergency appeal, had found this in its records.)

  A man named Oscar Piper had also been in the room. The machine had ground out fewer facts about Piper. He had a record, if you could call it that. He had been a juvenile delinquent at the age of fifteen; he had been one of a gang which stole lead pipe from a boarded-up tenement building. He had been sent to the reformatory, and must several years ago have been let out. The machine would check.

  “Wanted for questioning,” the teletypes said, and went on with names and descriptions. “The above men are wanted for questioning in connection with the kidnaping of Mrs. Dorian Weigand, wife of a police officer, repeat, wife of a police officer.” The teletype clattered its message in a good many places. One of them was the New York office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

  (“Right,” Bill Weigand said into the telephone in his office. “Yes, Jimmy—my wife.” He listened. “I don’t know,” he said. “Thanks, anyway. I know you will. We can use it.” He listened again. “I hope to God they have gone over a state line,” he said, and his voice was savage.)

  The police machinery had names to work with now, and a license number. A woman leaning out of a tenement window, looking at nothing and for nothing, had seen something which made her wonder. She had not let it rest there, although a hundred times to one she would—anyone would—have let it rest there. A desk sergeant had listened to her and made a report. Bill Weigand, thinking of something else, had had a word jump off paper at him. So now they had names to work with, and a string of digits.

  And—they were really no nearer, because men had names. The numbers would have helped some hours ago; the chance that they would help now still existed, but it was weaker. Now they might be anywhere, in any direction; now they were off an island; now it would be slow.

  They knew what these men called themselves, and what others called them. They knew that one of them had once been employed in following women and men whose behavior might be irregular. (“Subject met tall dark man; went to apartment at—East Fifty-ninth Street with him. Remained three hours.”) They knew that the other had once stolen lead pipe. But they did not really know who these men were, where they fitted. The police machine could not tell them that; such matters were beyond the machine.

  They might be lucky. But if they were not—Bill Weigand thought, looking at nothing, drumming his fingers on the desk—the other way was still the best. Find out why these men had wanted Dorian, find out whom she really endangered—then you would not have to look everywhere. Then you could begin looking somewhere. And then—

  “Look, Loot,” Mullins said, “you can’t do anything now. Why don’t you knock off a few hours? On account of—”

  “I know,” Bill said. He looked at Mullins and smiled faintly. “Right, sergeant,” he said.

  Bill slept restlessly on a cot in the office. A nightmare slept beside him.

  She had lain awake for a long time trying to figure things out, trying to make them come to sense. Wakefulness would in any case have been easy, almost obligatory. If she had been unafraid, if she had been confident, if the puzzle had not ridden her, she still would have lain awake for hours on the rough boards of the little garret, would still have fallen into restless dozing only when light began to come through the latticed ventilators at either end of the prison she was in.

  They had put her there, she thought, a little after ten o’clock the night before, when they had debated for some time what to do with her. There were not many alternatives. It was a little house—a square living room, a small bedroom and a bedroom even smaller, a kitchen about the size of the smaller bedroom, this storage attic. The doors of the bedrooms fastened with wooden latches which could not be secured; the windows were merely simple windows, through which anyone could step to the ground outside. It was badly designed as a prison. Farno grumbled about it unhappily, seemed obscurely to add it to the account against Dorian, before he found the trapdoor in the ceiling. They had been about ready to tie her up when they found the trapdoor.

  It was obvious that they wanted to avoid tying her up if they could discover some other way to hold her. It was obvious—it grew very obvious—that Farno, particularly, did not want to touch her unless he had to. He had changed in that respect, and forced Piper to change, since they had left the little room in the city. They were both very careful of her now, as if she might break. She had, she thought, become a responsibility which the two men accepted uneasily; she was something which might explode and injure them. That was the way it was, clearly—they were careful not to do anything which might hurt her, not because they had any special inclination against hurting her, but because she might, if jarred, go off.

  “This is a hell of a place,” Farno had said, just before he found the trapdoor.

  “Whose idea was it?” Piper said. “Just remember that, pal.”

  He spoke bitterly; the word “pal” was an epithet.

  “You know who’s after us now, don’t you?” Piper said. “You know what you got us into?”

  Farno told him to shut up, and Piper did shut up. They were both frightened, Dorian thought, but there was a kind of gloating superiority mixed with little Piper’s fright. It was Farno, apparently, who had slipped up. She did not know how he had slipped up. She thought about it and guessed. She guessed that they had brought her across a State line, either into New Jersey or Connecticut. (It could hardly be farther.) So who was after them now would be the FBI. She could appreciate their discomfort. She could appreciate also why they were now so very anxious not to hurt her, and why they would rather not even tie her up.

  But they had been going to when Farno saw the trapdoor. He got on a chair—there seemed to be no ladder—and pushed the door up. It was weighted somehow, so went up slowly and stopped moving when he stopped pushing. He got a box and put it on the chair and then he could get his head and shoulders through the opening. He looked one way, turned on the box and looked the other. Then he got down and looked at her.

  “That’ll do,” he said. “You won’t get out of there.” He motioned toward the chair with the box on it. “Let’s see you jump, lady,” he said. Both of them looked at her and waited. They did not move toward her, but they did not need to. If she refused they were ready, clearly, to take the chance she might “go off” if touched. She climbed onto the chair and the box and could, by standing on tiptoe, get her elbows anchored on the floor above.

  “Want we should push?” little Piper said, and his voice was unpleasant. She did not answer, but she jumped. She caught herself with her elbows, managed to tip forward onto the floor above, managed to wriggle up. The dust was thick; her dress caught on something and she heard it rip, but they had not touched her. The rest did not matter.

  She did not say anything when she was lying on the dusty floor of the attic. She merely waited. Light came through the opening and then was diminished when Farno again put his head and shoulders through and looked at her.

  “Sleep tight, see?” he said, and his head and shoulders disappeared. He pulled the trapdoor down after him. She heard the sound of a catch, making the door fast from below.

  At first it seemed completely dark after the door closed. In her brief glimpse before she had jumped she had seen that the attic was very low and now she found that, sitting on the floor, she could touch the ridgepole of the house with her hands, and the sloping roof on either side. She could not stand up, obviously; she had more room than she had had in the car trunk, but that was all. Dust was in her nose and she sneezed. She felt cramped and frightened, felt the roof pressing down on her, and fought off that feeling. It was not really a frightening prison; it was merely a dull prison. She was locked in the storage space of what was, she thought, a weekend cabin—locked up in dust, with discarded rubbish, undoubtedly with spiders and probably with mice. She had scraped herself a little climbing in, her jaw ached and her head ached, but she was not re
ally hurt.

  She sat a moment and found that as her eyes adjusted to the darkness she could see dimly. There was a small, apparently barred, square of something which was almost, not quite, light in front of her—down at the end of the narrow prison. She moved down toward it, at first crouching, then, when that seemed wrong, on hands and knees. She came to the end of the attic and the triangular wall was pierced by a square ventilator. The ventilator was slatted; in addition there was a kind of hood built over it, obviously to keep out slanting rain. Inside it was screened. But air did come in it, and a little light—a little of the luminosity which is not quite light and which is never altogether absent on a clear night. She tried to see out of the ventilator, but the way the slats were slanted, and the fact that it was just under the ridgepole, made that impossible.

  She turned, with her back to the ventilator, and saw another dim square of luminance at the far end. It was perhaps thirty feet away. That was the other terminus of her prison. At least she would have air. But if they kept her there tomorrow, kept her there with the sun beating on the roof, the heat would be almost unbearable. Now it was not hot. Cool night air moved through the elongated doghouse in which they had locked her and now, she thought, they were not going to do anything more to her, at least for the time. She had merely been filed for safekeeping.

  She listened and heard the two moving below, and heard their voices, but she could not determine what they were saying. Then she heard a door slam and, a little later—this time through the ventilator—a car start up. For a moment she thought they had left her there—and she thought, give me time enough and I’ll get out!—and then she heard one of the men moving around again below. One of them had gone somewhere, then, leaving the other on guard. Farno had gone, at a guess, leaving Piper. She wished it were the other way. She crawled back to the trapdoor and felt over it, looking for a latch of some kind—a catch which would prevent the man below from raising it. Then she realized there would be no latch because in the ordinary course of use there would be no need to make the trapdoor fast from the attic side. There would be—there was—merely a handhold.