“No, sir. Can I ask... I mean, has anything happened to her?”
“She’s dead.”
He looked at me for fully half a minute while the color seeped slowly from his face and the little boy’s eyes grew smaller and brighter. “Jesus...” he said softly.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
It took him a while to get the words out. “Roy. Roy Jackman.”
“Did Miss Lawson seem like a pretty nice person to you, Roy?”
He rubbed the back of his hand across his forehead, as if to wipe the sweat from it, but I noticed that the wrist also brushed across his eyes, and I thought I knew the reason for it.
“She was the best,” he said. “I looked forward to coming over here every day. How did she die?”
I told him.
It was a long time before he got control of himself. There wasn’t much on the surface, but I knew there must be plenty going on inside.
Suddenly his body stiffened and he sat up straight in his chair. “You know something?” he said, almost challengingly. “You know how she was? Well, I’ll tell you. You might think I don’t realize how I look to other people, but you’re wrong. I do know. I know too damn well. But you think Miss Lawson ever let on I wasn’t the best-looking fellow she ever saw? Not Miss Lawson. Why, the first time she opened her door and saw me, she smiled at me just like I looked like anybody else. Most people try to hide it — the way my face makes them feel, I mean. But she wasn’t hiding anything. You know why? Because she didn’t even think about it. She didn’t even care! She...” He broke off, got to his feet so abruptly that he almost tripped, and headed for the door.
I let him go. I started once to call to him to take his flowers, but I thought better of it. I listened to him running down the corridor to the elevator, wondering if my own first thoughts about him had shown in my face. It left me feeling a little uneasy, a little guilty.
6
Walt Logan called at five past twelve.
“I’m phoning from a drug store, Steve,” he said. “I can’t raise that Tyner girl. I hammered on her door for ten minutes, off and on.”
“That’s funny. She said she’d be home all day.”
“Well, she changed her mind.”
“What kind of building does she live in?”
“One of those converted brown-stones. No desk, no switchboard, no elevator, no anything.”
“All right. We’ll forget her for a while.”
“You wan t me to come back now?”
“No. Grab a bite to eat, and then go over to the Corbett Brothers Realty Company. That’s on Sixth, in the Townley Building. You know where it is?”
“Yeah.”
“Corbett Brothers owns this house here, and hires the switchboard operators. I called them to ask about Benny Thomas—”
“He hasn’t shown up yet?”
“No. And Corbett Brothers wouldn’t give me any information on him over the phone. But they’ll give it out fast enough if you go over there in person. Nobody around here even knows where the guy lives. If you can get his home address, you’ll have a start.”
“What’s Benny’s last name again?”
“Thomas.”
“Check. When are you going out to eat?”
“Right now. But I’ll leave somebody here on the phone, in case you want to buzz me.”
“Okay, Steve. I’ll try to bring Benny back alive for you.”
I hung up, left the apartment, and went down the fire stairs floor by floor until I found the sergeant in charge of one of the two radio units. I told him I was going out for a sandwich and that I wanted him to stay in Barbara Lawson’s apartment until I got back. He would answer the phone, take down all messages, and explain my absence to the skipper if he should happen to call for a progress report. The sergeant told me the apartment-by-apartment questioning was coming along in fine shape and that it should be completed before one o’clock. I asked if he wanted me to bring him a sandwich and some coffee from the restaurant, and when he said no, I started down the stairs again.
But I kept thinking about Edward Henderson. I’d had too little time to question him, before the arrival of the policewoman and the assistant M.E. I stopped where I was and turned back up the stairs again. The uniform men had finished questioning the tenants on the top floor, but there was a chance Henderson had not yet left his apartment. And if he had, it would give me an opportunity to make a search.
Henderson didn’t answer my knock. I waited about half a minute, then tried again, and when he didn’t answer the second time I got out my celluloid and let myself inside.
I made a very rapid search. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular — though the knife that had been used to kill Barbara Lawson was always in the back of my mind, of course — and I limited myself to a quick circuit of the apartment and a hurried thumbing-through of papers and letters in the writing desk.
I didn’t find anything that could tie Henderson in more closely with the dead girl. The only thing of interest in the desk was a sizable stack of pornographic pictures, but none of the pictures were of Barbara Lawson, and the only really unusual thing I’d found in the apartment was the sunlamp arrangement Henderson had rigged up in his bedroom. On the side of the room opposite the regular bed, he’d placed an army cot. The cot was covered with a white rubber sheet, and there was a thick pillow in a white rubber pillow case. Suspended directly over the middle of the cot hung one of the most expensive-looking sun lamps I’d ever seen outside of a health club. At the foot of the bed stood a television set, arranged so that Henderson could lie on the cot, absorb the rays from the sun lamp, and watch television programs. A metal footlocker lay on its side next to the cot, and on top of it were several fishing and hunting magazines, three pipes, a tobacco humidor, and two large, neatly folded blue towels.
I let myself out of the apartment, walked to the elevator, and let the patrolman take me down to the street.
I stopped at the first eating place I came to, a small cafeteria, and bought two beef sandwiches and a cup of coffee. I took the tray to a table with only two other diners at it, and sat down. I’d just started the first of the sandwiches when a thought struck me. If the dead girl had been a model, then it stood to reason that many of her friends and acquaintances would probably be in the same or related lines of work. If Ann Tyner, the girl who’d called Barbara, happened to be a model too, the chances were that she would subscribe to some telephone answering service. Almost all professional people did, and free-lance professionals, such as models, almost invariably did.
I finished the sandwiches and coffee in a hurry, and then went back to the phone booth at the rear of the cafeteria. I dialed Ann Tyner’s number, and got an answer before the second ring.
It was an answering service, and I was informed that Miss Tyner had told them she could be reached at Borden, Webb and Martin, an advertising agency between Forty-seventh and Forty-eighth Streets on Madison Avenue.
I lit a cigarette, mulling things over in my mind. I didn’t much like the idea of going down to the advertising agency to talk to Ann Tyner; but on the other hand, Walt and I had come up with nothing so far to indicate that the dead girl had any enemies or that there’d been anyone in her life who might have had sufficient motive to kill her. She could have been murdered by almost anyone in New York, of course, and for almost any imaginable reason — but what we were looking for was someone who had a reason to do it. We needed to find someone who knew her, and knew her well. So far, we hadn’t found anyone who could tell us even as much as her next of kin.