“Put one officer to work on each floor,” I said. “Start with the top ones, and work down. I’ve already talked to Henderson, so they can skip him. Tell them to make the routine pitch. We might as well operate out of this apartment, so tell them the number and make sure they understand they’re to call here the minute they come up with anything.”
“When can the tenants leave?”
“As soon as the officers have finished talking to them. Tell all the boys to keep an eye out for the knife.” I thought a moment. “Maybe you’d better make one exception, Walt. Have a cop go down to the basement and make a thorough search for the knife down there. Have him check the back yard, all trash cans, and so on. And ask him to check all the manholes within two blocks of here. That’ll take him some time, but if he should finish before the others have questioned all the tenants, you can put him to work helping them.”
Walt grimaced. “Here’s where I make some cop an enemy of mine.”
“And on the other hand, he might find that knife and get a nice piece of paper in his record.”
“Okay. I’ll get started.” He glanced about the apartment again as he opened the door. “This is the way everybody should live, Steve. You and me and everybody.”
“It’s a little frilly for the likes of you, Walt,” I said.
“I could get used to it. You ought to see the trap Florence and I are living in now. Compared to this place, it’s just a hole in the wall. I’d like to try this for a change.”
“But think of the interesting life you lead. Think of all the adventure.”
“Ha!” he said, and went outside.
4
I didn’t spend much time on Barbara Lawson’s living room. I moved the furniture around enough to look under it, and I searched beneath the cushions on the twin sofas and the two deep chairs, but that was about the extent of it. There was a thick wall-to-wall rug, but there were no stains of any kind on it. Only a professional could have cleaned stains from a rug like that, and I was pretty sure that Miss Lawson had never lain on it or been dragged across it.
The bedroom took me a little longer. There was a large color photograph of the girl on one of the walls, with several smaller photographs of her arranged around it. There were no other photographs or pictures of any kind. I took a good look at the large color job. She was beautiful, all right, and of course the photograph was truer to the way she’d really looked than the face we’d seen on the roof.
The bed was made up, with a negligee thrown across the foot of it. The negligee looked like pale green mist. There were mules on the floor beside the bed, and a fashion magazine lay beside them. I looked beneath the bed, then walked to the dressing table and started going through the drawers. I wasn’t interested in bottles and the usual paraphernalia you find around dressing tables. I was looking for letters, photographs — things like that.
But I didn’t find any. You could search through the table for a week, and all you’d find out was that it belonged to a woman. You’d never find out which one.
I went through the two large closets, looking in every coat and suit pocket I came to. I found two sticks of gum and some small change, and that was all.
The kitchen gave me even less. There was very little food, either on the shelves or in the refrigerator, but there was a fine supply of very good liquor. And while there were no pots and pans, there were any number of mixed-drink glasses, some with shapes I couldn’t remember seeing before.
I took a fast look at the bath, and then crossed to a small room which was fitted out in a lady’s version of a den. There was a large leather reclining chair, a shelf of books, mostly autobiographies, and what must have been a hundred or so pictures of Barbara Lawson. Some were framed covers from magazines, and some were crayon and water colors, but most were photographs. All of the work was professional, and all of it was good. Most of them showed an even younger Barbara than the large color photograph in the bedroom. If she’d been beautiful when she died, she had been more than that when she was a little younger.
There was a long table on the side of the room opposite the bookshelf, covered with neat stacks of fashion and beauty magazines. There was a drawer in the table, and I opened it. I found a sewing kit and a flat wooden box about a foot wide and eighteen inches long. The box was locked, so I went back to the bedroom, got a bobby pin, and opened it. It contained a bank book and the stub section of a checkbook. The bank book showed no deposits had been made during the last ten months, and the checkbook stubs showed that the last check, entered about a week ago, had reduced the balanced in the account to $80.45.
I reached back into the drawer, felt around, and came up with three folded billheads. All three were from top stores, all for amounts between two and three hundred dollars, and one of them had the word Please! handwritten in red ink beneath the amount due. I put the book and stubs and billheads back in the wooden box and returned it to the drawer.
There was a knock at the hall door.
It was the chief of the tech crew. “We’re through up there, Steve,” he said. “This the girl’s apartment?”
“Yeah.”
“You want us to start in here now?”
“Might as well. You do any good for us on the roof?”
He lowered his heavy kit to the floor and shook his head. “Afraid not. There isn’t anything up there that’d take a print, except the chimney. Those are glazed bricks, and usually they take a nice print.” He shrugged, mopping at his forehead with a handkerchief. “God, it’s hot.”
“No prints on the bricks?”
“Nope. Few partials, but they were old as hell. There was a wine bottle lodged down between the two sections of the chimney, but it’d been there long enough to pick up a scum. No prints on it. We checked, just to get it down on the report. The only prints we got, Steve, are the ones we took off the girl’s fingers.” He turned back toward the corridor. “Well, I’ll tell the gang to come down here and get started.”
“All right. Walt and I are going to use this as headquarters, but we’ll stay out of your way.”
He grinned. “We’ll do the same for you.”
The phone rang. It was the officer I’d posted on the switchboard.
“The super just came in,” he said.
“Good. Ask the officer on the elevator to bring him up here, will you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You hear anything interesting on that board?”
“No, sir. Lots of calls to explain why people will be late to work, and a couple to the newspapers to complain about police methods. That’s about all.”
“Uh huh. Well, call me if that switchboard operator shows up.”
“Yes, sir.”
The tech chief and his crew came into the apartment and went to work, and a few moments later Walt Logan came back to report that he’d assigned a patrolman to search for the knife, and that all the other officers, except the ones we’d posted, were questioning the tenants on the top three floors.
“Listen, Walt,” I said. “I’m getting tired of waiting for that switchboard operator. The super’s wife says he has a habit of showing up late, but this is too damned late.”
“You think maybe he’s got a real good reason this time, Steve? Like a dead girl, for instance?”
“Could be, I guess. But I want to see that guy bad, Walt. Those switchboard people know everything that’s going on around a place like this. They see people coming in and going out, and they listen in on calls all the time. Of course, this guy wasn’t on duty at the time the doc says the homicide took place, but he’ll still know a lot about the girl’s habits and acquaintances. If her killer came in before midnight, chances are the operator will remember him.”