MAX GOLD’S keen, black eyes never left my face. If I had anything to give away, he was going to get it. I don’t know what he was thinking. I don’t know what I was thinking, either.
If he had planned to throw a surprise into me, he had succeeded admirably. I stood there blinking at him, my mouth open and my brain refusing to function. A girl named Ethel Brower—a girl I’d never heard of in my life—dead in my apartment. Murdered. The thing was fantastic. The deposit of one hundred thousand dollars to my account in the bank had been fantastic, too, but not this way.
He waited patiently while I did the conventional things. I moistened my lips. I looked at Dana and she looked at me. I tried to say something and the words stuck. I sat down in a chair. It was his voice which punctured the silence. He said, “I didn’t mention it before, but I’m on the homicide squad.”
That made everything just dandy. It made me feel fine. If I’d been guilty, I couldn’t have felt any guiltier.
He said, smoothly, “You still don’t know her?”
“No.” The word came out suddenly, like a cork being popped out of a champagne bottle.
“You haven’t been to your apartment tonight?”
“No.”
“Not even for a few minutes after you finished dinner?”
The answer was still No.
It was Dana who did the first talking for the pair of us. “He’s been with me all evening,” she said. “We haven’t been near his apartment.”
“You and him . . .” Gold’s voice was flat. “You’re sweethearts. You alibi him and he alibis you. I’d like it to be better than that.”
I realized suddenly that Dana was caught right in the middle of this mess. I said, “Look, lieutenant: She wasn’t anywhere near that apartment. She doesn’t know anything about it.”
“About what?”
“This girl; this Ethel Brower.”
He said to Dana, “You never heard of her, either?”
“No.”
“Doesn’t it strike you as queer she’d pick the apartment of a perfect stranger to get murdered in?”
I made an effort to pull myself together. I’m a big boy, and I can look after myself under ordinary circumstances. But I had been thoroughly shaken by this cold, impersonal man with the piercing eyes and the curly black hair.
I said, “Would you mind telling me what happened? And how you heard about it?”
He thought that one over. He said, “Your apartment house is pretty big, Douglas. Have you ever left an order that the package-room could put things inside if you weren’t there?”
“Yes.”
“Well, that’s how they found out. The boy from the grocery store delivered some stuff for you. You weren’t there. He took it to the package-room. The package-room boy telephoned your apartment. No answer. He told the night superintendent. They went up together. They went in. The place was dark, so they switched on the ceiling light. They seen this girl—this Ethel Brower—in that gray chair you got near the reading light. She was fast asleep. Only she looked kind of funny. The super took another look. He seen right away that she was dead as a mackerel. It wasn’t until after he reported it and our medical examiner got there that we found out how she died. She’d been strangled. And I suppose you’re still surprised, aren’t you?”
Dana reached over and took my hand. I said to the detective, “Are you arresting me?”
“Nope. Not now, anyway. I’ll come clean. We ain’t got a thing on you except it happened in your apartment. We wouldn’t want you to be going off on another trip right away, but we don’t like to arrest anybody if we can’t make it stick.”
I said, “Thanks.” And I meant it. This was my first experience with New York policemen; and if Max Gold was a sample, I liked ’em. He was a hard, efficient man doing a job.
He said, “I’d like you to go over there with me, Douglas. You too, Miss Warren, if you don’t mind.”
“I don’t mind.” Dana stood up before I could argue against it. She smiled at me. “I know it won’t be pleasant, Kirk. But I think the lieutenant wants me . . .”
“Yes, Miss. Maybe you might recognize her. She ain’t bad to look at. Sort of asleep-looking, like I said. At first we thought maybe it was a natural death.”
“You’re sure it wasn’t?”
“We’re sure.”
I said, “But if she was strangled there must be fingerprints on her throat. They would prove . . .”
“Sorry. It doesn’t work out that way. We get fingerprint traces off a dead body, but there ain’t enough characteristics left to identify ’em. It’s something we ain’t solved yet. But the minute somebody dies, the fingerprints on the flesh ain’t any better than if they wasn’t left there in the first place.” He got up, put his hat on. “If you’ll come along with me . . .”
There was a car parked a short distance down the street from the club. It was a plain black sedan. Lieutenant Gold held open the door, then joined us in the back. To the driver he said, “On your way, Joe. Back to the apartment.”
Dana and I huddled together. We didn’t say anything, but I knew she was thinking as hard as I was, which was plenty hard.
Too much was happening too fast. There were too many questions and too few answers. The hundred thousand dollars in my name at the bank commenced to frighten me. I believed that it was connected with the dead girl in my apartment. It couldn’t be coincidence. I said, “Whoever it was: I wonder why they picked on me.”
“Yeah.” That was Max Gold speaking. “I been kinda wondering that, too.”
Only once more did he speak during our trip to the West Side. He addressed Dana. “On account it’s murder,” he said, “I got to ask personal questions: Even if you ain’t living with your husband, wouldn’t you figure him to get sore if he thought you were playing around with Mr. Douglas here?”
She shook her head. “I don’t mean a thing to Ricardo. I’m just his dance partner. He knows all about Kirk and me.”
Max said thoughtfully, “But with a name like that. You know, hot Latin blood . . .”
“He was born and raised in Brooklyn.”
“I thought that was a gag.”
“It’s the truth.”
“Then the name is a phoney?”
“No. His father was Puerto Rican.”
“Then we could say his blood might be half hot, huh?” Max chuckled dryly. “He could maybe of been madder than you think. He could maybe of seen this dame going to Douglas’s apartment and followed her in, thinking it was you . . .”
I said sharply, “That’s ridiculous. If he’d been that kind of a person, he’d have done something long ago. Besides, you can’t strangle a woman without knowing who she is—or isn’t. And what’s more, you don’t believe it yourself.”
“I didn’t say I did. Me, I just try to find out.”
We reached the apartment house. There were no police cars, no policemen. The doorman looked at me peculiarly and the elevator man was obviously in on the know. The hallway was empty. It was all very tranquil.
I unlocked the door and let them in. A huge man blocked our entrance. Then he recognized Max Gold and said, “Hi, lieutenant.”
Gold nodded. “Any telephone calls since I been gone?”
“No.”
“Fingerprint boys and D.A. men all finished?”
“Long ago.”
“Okay . . .” Gold led the way. Dana and I followed, pressing each other’s hands.
The room looked just as it had when I’d left, except that on the floor near the kitchenette was a box of groceries. Just a box of groceries and a very ordinary-looking girl asleep in the chair by the reading light. I didn’t have to look twice to realize that she wasn’t ever going to wake up.
Max Gold stood against the wall. He was watching Dana and me. So was the man who had been guarding the apartment.
I stared at the dead girl. My guess at her age would have been the very early thirties. She was about Dana’s height. She was thin. She had dark hair. I couldn’t tell what color her eyes were because they were closed. I couldn’t see any signs of violence or any bruises on her throat.
She was wearing a black cloth coat with a heavy fur collar which could have been fox or skunk. It was open, and I could see the dark brown dress underneath. She had on a brown hat. Her legs were encased in sheer stockings which looked like nylon, and her feet were swallowed up by galoshes. She wasn’t pretty and she wasn’t homely. She looked like the sort of girl you could see a hundred times and never remember. I tried my best to place her and met with no luck. I turned to Max Gold and said, “As far as I can remember, I never saw her before in my life.”
Dana said, “Neither did I.”
Max sighed. “The night super never saw her before, either. Nor the package-room boy. Nor the doorman. Nobody knows her. Or why she came here. Especially me.”
I asked, “How did you know her name?”
“The bag. We went through it. Social security card. A credit tag from a department store. A letter from some girl friend in Moline. It didn’t tell us a thing except her name and address. But we’d still like to know what she was doing here.” He stared at me. “And I also been wondering how she got in.”
I said, “So have I.”
Max sighed. “I guess we’ll cart her off to the morgue.” He said something to the big plainclothesman and that gentleman started telephoning. I said, “What happens now?”
“About what?”
“Me.”
“Nothing. You ain’t under arrest, if that’s what you’re asking. There’ll be an inquest. The District Attorney’s office will probably talk to you. Maybe that’ll lead to the Grand Jury. It usually doesn’t unless the D.A. thinks he’s got something solid to work on.”
“Then I’m not under suspicion?”
“Sure you are. You and Miss Warren both. You gotta be. That doesn’t mean I think you did it. But I can’t get it out of my mind that you’re both mixed up in it.”
“Will it be in the newspapers?”
He nodded. “That’s another thing that can’t be avoided. Also, it might help. Publicity sometimes uncovers a lot of angles we couldn’t find. But for the present Miss Warren will be kept out of it. It ain’t her apartment, and even though the boys are probably lousy with her fingerprints we won’t pay too much attention to that, because you admit that she drops in here lots.”
I thanked him. He was being damned decent. I went into the kitchen, poured a drink of brandy. Dana said No when I offered it, so I made her swallow it. Gold and the other cop compromised for a bottle of beer each.
We didn’t do much talking while we waited for the morgue wagon. I turned Dana’s chair around and did the same with mine, so we wouldn’t have to stare at Ethel Brower.
They finally took her away. Max told us good night. He suggested I let him know if I ran across anything. I didn’t know what he was thinking, and I wasn’t so sure I wanted to know.
For all his cordiality, for all my innocence: I was afraid.
The way I looked at it, he couldn’t help thinking that I had killed Ethel Brower. He was digging patiently for evidence to use against me. All I had was breathing time.
That seemed to check it up to me. I sat down. Dana came and sat on my lap. She put her arms around me. She started to cry.