Her name was Marie. She was twenty-three years old.
She was very lovely. Too lovely to live.
Her ambition was to be a great singer. Meantime, she worked as waitress in a night club.
Roses were sent to her on the day of her death. Two dozen of them, long-stemmed American Beauties.
She died because someone loved her too much.
And her murderer went to prison.
That, in short, is the story of Marie.
It sounds like a very simple little story, doesn’t it. And a tragic one. It also sounds like fiction, the sort of fiction a gifted short story writer might dream up in a melancholy moment. But there’s a well known saying about truth and fiction which you know as well as I do, so I won’t quote it here.
Detroit, Michigan, in June, 1945, was a city teeming with war workers an overcrowded city where living space was at a premium, and every restaurant and night club was jammed to the doors. Marie Beavers, as she called herself then, had the good fortune to have a pleasant room in a lodging house, where the landlady didn’t object to the odd hours required by her job.
It was seldom that Marie got off duty before two in the morning. So, when a box of flowers was delivered for Marie in midevening, the landlady decided to place them in her room as a surprise. She gasped with admiration as she opened the box. Roses! And such a lot of them!
She arranged them beautifully in a vase and, taking her keys, carried them into Marie’s neat and attractive first floor room. She switched on the light.
Suddenly the vase dropped to the floor and shattered. The roses fell in a bedraggled, pathetic little heap. A tiny white envelope fluttered, like a tired butterfly, to fall, unnoticed, under a table. And the kindly landlady rushed to the telephone to call the police.
“I saw her arm, under the bed,” she gasped, moments later, to Detective Raymond of the Homicide Squad. “It looked,”—she swallowed hard—“it just looked dead.”
The police officer looked around the room. The bed was neatly made. The dressing table was neat as a pin. Everything was in immaculate order, save for the broken vase and the scattered roses on the floor. And the body of Marie.
She had been strangled, the medical examiner said, by a man’s handkerchief shoved down her throat. Her once beautiful face had been badly beaten. Her nose had bled, and there were bloodstains on her white blouse. And she had been dead for three or four days.
It seemed incredible to Detective Raymond that her body had not been discovered before. The landlady stated that the last time she had seen lovely Marie had been on Tuesday—and this was Friday evening.
It was the landlady who offered an explanation. Marie always liked to do up her own room, instead of having the maid in. And because of the hours she worked, she always came in late, and almost always left the house as soon as she got up the next day. Under those circumstances it wasn’t surprising that sometimes she wasn’t seen for days at a time, or that no one would worry if she appeared to be missing.
“Marie was one of the sweetest girls I ever knew. She wanted to be a night club singer. She worked where she did as a waitress, hoping she would get a break someday. Marie was so friendly to everybody, she was always so cheerful. A good tenant, too. She worked steadily, and always paid her rent on time …
“Men friends? Of course she had men friends. A lovely girl like Marie? One of them came to see her last Tuesday.”
The landlady paused suddenly.
“Who was he? What did he look like?”
“I don’t know who he was. He was young and good-looking. Tall, with dark hair and a dark complexion. Just a nice young man. They sat on the porch swing and talked, rather seriously. I couldn’t hear what they said. I was busy with housecleaning. After a while they walked around to the side entrance—that’s the one Marie Beavers always used—and went into her room. A little while later I knocked on the door but no one answered. I supposed they’d gone.”
She frowned. “There was one other thing.”
“Yes?”
“I had to go out into the yard on that side of the house. Marie Beavers had reported a screen loose on one of her windows. The same young man was standing there, looking out. I asked for Miss Beavers. He told me she’d gone on an errand to the corner store, and would be back in a minute. Then later, just a few minutes later, when I knocked, there was no answer.”
That was the last the landlady had seen of Marie Beavers or her mysterious admirer.
Meantime, police technicians were searching the room. Everything pointed to Marie’s fastidiousness, her love of neatness. There were not many clothes in her wardrobe, but they were well-chosen, and exquisitely cared for.
There wasn’t a fingerprint in the place—except those of Marie herself.
There were a few clues, however. A tiny, leather-bound notebook, containing the names and addresses of dozens of men, some in Detroit, some in other cities—particularly, Chicago. There was a thick package of love letters. There were affectionately autographed photographs of men.
By that time police officers had learned that she had been married, that her real name was Ethel Marie Berridge. Marie Beavers was the name she had used in her job.
A girl too lovely to live and too young to die—a girl who loved gaiety and laughter, who received affectionate letters from a host of men friends—
It was Detective Raymond who found the pitiful little white envelope that had come with the roses. The card read, “To my sweetheart. See you tomorrow. A.”
There was a letter from “A,” too.
“I can’t tell you how happy I am to know you gave the sailor the air. You know how crazy I am about you. You’re all I can think about. Don’t forget our date Saturday.”
But the letter—and the roses—had been sent after Marie was dead!
Red herrings? Could be, the police decided. The killer would have known that Marie’s sweethearts would be investigated. He could have sent the letter and the two dozen red roses to make it appear that he was innocent.
None of the names in the little address book matched the card or the letter.
Inspector John Whitman, of Homicide, went back to his office with the little address book, and the thick packet of letters. He knew he was set for a long, weary job.
Reading old love letters is not as much fun as you might think. Most of the letters written to Marie were from wildly infatuated men, a number of them contained proposals of marriage. Evidently, from the contents of the letters, Marie had given all of them the well-known brush-off. She hadn’t wanted to become too seriously involved with anyone.
There were a number of letters from someone who appeared to be a sailor. But he, like some of the others, had stopped writing a few months before, when Marie had apparently lost interest in him.
But there were no letters from Marie’s husband. A notation in the address book indicated that he was a member of the merchant marine. Had he been killed? Had there been a divorce?
While Whitman read through the letters, Detective Raymond had gone to the night club where Marie had worked as a waitress. There he learned that she had not reported for work since Monday night—which checked with his theory that she had been murdered late Tuesday afternoon.
But he learned little more, either from the proprietor or the other waitresses. Marie had been a reliable employee, and well-liked by everyone. She had a lot of boy friends. She’d left Monday night with one of them—a tall, dark-haired young man with a deep tan.
Marie never talked much about herself. The other girls knew that she’d been married and was separated from her husband, but that was about all.
“She had a lot of men friends, but she wasn’t serious about any of them. If they started getting jealous, she’d get bored with them and give them the air.”
No one had ever heard her mention a name anything like the one on the card that had come with the two dozen red roses.
Meantime, Marie’s husband had been located in Columbus, Ohio. Detective Raymond lost no time getting there to interview him. He found a tall, clean-cut young man who was obviously upset and disturbed.
“I haven’t seen Marie for months. We didn’t stay married long. It was just one quarrel after another.
“I thought Marie was going to get a divorce after she left me. But I never was served with the papers. I was on the high seas most of the time and I just got home a few weeks ago. I didn’t have anything to do with this.”
Police checked on his movements and were convinced that he could not have left the city during the time in which Marie must have been murdered.
Suspect Number One was off the list.
The sailor? He was located without much difficulty, and he fitted the description of the tall, handsome, dark-haired young man who’d been seen looking out from the window of Marie’s room on the day of her death. Indeed, his photograph was identified by Marie’s landlady and by the waitress who had seen Marie leaving with a “date” the night before her murder.
He was stationed at Great Lakes Naval Training Station near Chicago, and it turned out that he had been on furlough at the time Marie was killed.
But police inquiries revealed that the handsome young sailor, who readily admitted having been one of lovely Marie’s admirers, had been in St. Louis, Missouri, miles away from the scene of the crime, at the time of her death.
Suspect Number Two was also now off the list.
And the police were left with the two dozen red roses.
That was a matter of checking with florist shops. It didn’t take long. The detectives had the name of the shop from which the roses had been sent. Who had sent flowers to Marie?
The detective assigned to this angle of the case returned with a frightened little man somewhere in the middle thirties, slender, slightly bald, and wearing thick eyeglasses. No one could have been less like the description of the man who had been seen with Marie in the last hours of her life.
“Yes, I knew Marie. We were good friends. I am a teacher of singing. I had been giving lessons to Miss Beavers for about three months. I was greatly attached to her; I hoped she would marry me.”
Yes, he had sent the roses, and the letter. He had been giving singing lessons all day Tuesday. The police checked his alibi. The unhappy little man was completely in the clear.
That explained the two dozen red roses. And—
Suspect Number Three was now off the list.
But in the meantime, police had been combing the neighborhood, armed with a description of the man who had been seen with Marie.
A bartender remembered someone who looked like him.
“Sounds like a kid who was in here Tuesday afternoon. He said he was staying in a rooming house.”
A landlady said, “Why, that could be the young fellow who rented a room from me. He left after three days and said he was going out of town, but he didn’t—because the very next day I saw him going into another rooming house down the street.”
And there another landlady remembered the handsome young man who “moved in a week ago tonight and left, without giving me notice, the next day. But he did give me the name of a war plant where he was working.”
For hours the officers pored over photographs of workers at the plant. And here is perhaps the most curious fact in the story of the murder of lovely Marie, who received two dozen red roses three days after she was dead.
For purposes of comparison, the police used a photograph of the young sailor who had already been exonerated in the case! Several people who had seen Marie with the dark-haired young man had identified the photograph as a likeness of the man who had been with her. Yet, there was no doubt of the sailor’s innocence. Remember that, folks, in case you—Heaven forbid—ever have the job of identifying a suspect!
At last one of the officers pointed to a photograph of one of the war workers and said, “There it is.”
The resemblance between the two photographs was amazing.
Yet one man was innocent, and the other proved to be guilty.
A quick check of the factory records gave the police the name. Leo Pascarella.
“He quit without notice, one day last week.”
Police in five states were immediately notified. But four days went by before a furtive call came to headquarters, from a town I near Detroit. “I know where you can find Leo Pascarella.”
This proved to be the end of the long chase. The tall, dark-haired young man was brought into police headquarters at three in the morning. He was ready to talk.
“She made me mad. That’s why I killed her. I’d known her for six weeks. We’d been going together steady. That afternoon we sat on her front porch and talked. I wanted her to run away with me. Late that afternoon we went into her room and she told me she had a dinner date with someone else that night….
“I had a gun with me, and I threatened her with it. She started for the door, saying she was going to get the police. I grabbed her. She started to scream. I stuffed my handkerchief into her mouth to keep her quiet. Suddenly she stopped struggling …
“Then her landlady was at the window. I told her Marie had gone out. After she went away, I put Marie under the bed …”
There are a few people in Detroit who will never look at red roses again without remembering Marie, who was too lovely to live.