“Let’s check it, anyhow.”
He shrugged. “You’re the boss.”
“Phone the super and ask him to bring a ladder up here.”
Fifteen minutes later, I stood on the top of a stepladder, held firmly by Walt and the super, and threw a flashlight beam into the first of the two chimney stacks. There was nothing as far down as I could see. I climbed down to the roof, rearranged the ladder, and went up again to look into the second stack.
I found it had been plugged with cement, about four feet from the top. On the cement lay a large bath mat. I pulled the mat from the chimney and dropped it down to the roof. There was no knife in the chimney.
I climbed down, told Gus Brokaw he could return the ladder to the basement, and then Walt and I examined the bath mat. It was quite new, obviously had not been in the chimney long, and was stained with something that was almost certainly dried blood.
“Looks like the doc was right,” Walt said. “The Lawson girl got knifed in her apartment, and then the guy dragged her up here. But why in hell would he bring this thing along?”
“To keep from getting blood on his clothing,” I said.
“And on the floor along the way. He probably wrapped it around her, over the knife wounds.”
“Probably.”
“What I’d like to know is why he bothered bringing her body up here in the first place. And why would he go to the trouble of stuffing the mat in the chimney?”
“Why he brought her up here is anybody’s guess,” I said. “But the reason he wanted to hide the mat might be because he didn’t know we couldn’t lift prints off it. It’s pretty big, and it would be hard to wipe clean, and so he might have thought the chimney was the quickest way to play safe.”
“I see how he could have done it,” Walt said. “If he stood on that foundation the chimney rests on, and reached as high above his head as he could, he would have been able to push the mat across the top bricks toward the opening.”
“We’d better get the mat over to the lab. The guy probably took the knife with him. I don’t think he’d climb up on this side of the chimney and drop the mat inside, and then climb up on the other side and drop the knife. If he’d wanted to get rid of the knife, he would just have tossed it in after the mat.”
“You want me to take the mat to the lab?”
“We’ll ask them to send for it.”
9
We received the autopsy report at half-past four. Barbara Lawson had died from two stab wounds in the heart, one in the left ventricle and the other in the right auricle. The third wound, in her side, would not have been fatal, the knife having been deflected by a rib. She had not been under the influence of alcohol or narcotics at the time of death, and there was no evidence of a sexual assault. Fingernail scrapings showed ho body tissue, which meant she hadn’t tried to scratch anyone, and there were no indications that she’d suffered violence of any kind prior to the first knife thrust. The assistant M.E. had been unable to tighten up his original estimate as to the time of death, and it still remained at somewhere in the period between midnight and three A.M.
A few moments later we received the report from the Bureau of Criminal Identification. They’d checked Benny Thomas’ prints against those they’d lifted in the apartment, with no success.
And ten minutes later, a patrolman brought in the knife. At least we hoped it was the knife. It was a bone-handled snap-up knife with a six-inch blade. There were dark stains in the places where a knife would be difficult to wipe clean; and while very small amounts of dried blood are difficult to distinguish from certain other kinds of stains, the chances were fairly good that blood was what it was. The patrolman had found the knife in a manhole, near the intersection of Sixty-ninth and Columbus Avenue.
“You don’t see many switchblade knives with blades as long as that one,” Walt said. “Not any more.”
“It’s pretty worn,” I said. “Probably an old-timer.”
“It’d be almost impossible to trace, wouldn’t it?”
“Almost. We’d have to give it a try, though, if everything else dead-ended on us.”
Both the patrolman and I had been handling the knife by holding it with thumb and forefinger touching only diagonally opposite edges of the handle, to avoid superimposing our own prints on any that might already be there on the flat surfaces. I handed it back to him carefully and asked him to rush it to the police lab for a print job and an analysis of the dark stains. Then I entered his name and badge number in my notebook, so that later on I could make sure he got a paper in his personal file.
The next phone call was from the skipper.
“These reporters are giving me a bad time, son,” he said. “Give me something to get them off my back.”
I told him as much as I could, knowing he’d decide just how much to release to the press. Chances were he’d give the reporters all of it, with the understanding that certain items were off the record until he gave the green light.
“The realty company sent over another switchboard operator,” Walt said. “I saw him on my way up. He’s standing by down there, waiting for the officer to give up the board.”
I checked the time. “It’s almost five o’clock,” I said. “I think we might as well clear out of here. All the patrolmen are due for relief in a few minutes. This would be a good time to break camp.”
“That squad room’s going to be hard to take, after this place.”
“We’d better send somebody over to the morgue for an identification,” I said. “We might as well nominate the super. He’s handiest.”
“I don’t guess I have to ask who’s nominated to cart him over there and back.”
“That’s right. And kind of hurry it up, will you, Walt?”
“Any other little things I can do for you, before I die of hard work?”
“Uh-huh. Look up Lew and tell him to release everybody.”
“No stakeouts?”
“No.”
“After I bring the super back from the morgue, I go straight to the station house, right?”
“And bring some coffee along. I’ve got a hunch we’re going to have some action on that alarm for Benny Thomas, and we ought to be hearing from Kansas City any time now.”
We left the apartment and rode the elevator down to the ground floor. Walt headed toward the basement after Gus Brokaw, for the trip to Bellevue, and I crossed over to the switchboard. I told the officer posted there that Walt and I had decided to close up shop and that he could return to the station house to report out.
The new switchboard operator the realty company had sent out seemed very nervous. It was understandable. It was not only his first day on a new job, but he had to take over from a policeman in a house where a murder had been committed only a few hours ago. I explained to him that there would be incoming calls for Barbara Lawson’s apartment, and that such calls were to be routed to the detective squad room at the Twentieth Precinct station house. I gave him the phone number, and a little encouragement, which he plainly needed, and went out to my RMP car.
There was quite a crowd of people out front, and there would probably be a larger one soon, now that it was nearing quitting time in most of the stores and offices. And there would be the usual traffic problem caused by people driving past the apartment building just for a look at the front of it. But all this was out of my department. Both the congestion on the sidewalk and the additional traffic would be handled by the uniform squad as a matter of routine, just as the squad would handle any other problem.