I turned to Ben. “See if you can find any identification on him,” I said. “And then look up a phone and tell them what we’ve got here.”
He nodded and walked back toward the corpse.
I studied the woman’s face a moment. She’d lived a lot of years the hard way, I could tell. It was all there in her face. And it was there in her voice too, if you listened for it. Just as the indications of lying were there. Even the best confidence men in the country are troubled with a dry throat when they lie, though they’re usually very skillful at covering it up. Mrs. Pedrick wasn’t skillful at all. Her voice had grown increasingly husky, and she was swallowing a lot more than was normal.
“Why don’t you start telling the truth?” I asked.
“Listen, you! I—”
“Just take it easy,” I said. “In the first place, I’m tired of listening to nothing. And in the second place, this isn’t suicide. It’s murder.”
She took a half step back from me, and one hand darted up to her throat and stayed there. “Murder!” she whispered, and the word had the right ring of astonishment to it.
I nodded. “He was already dead when he was strung up there, Miss Pedrick. Does that give you another slant on things?”
She glanced about her for something to sit on, and finally moved to a stack of newspapers and sat down on that. “Lord,” she said.
“You still claim you don’t know him?” I asked.
She took a long time to answer. “No,” she said at last. “No, I don’t know him. I was telling the truth. I never saw him before in my life.”
“But you do have a pretty good idea how he got into your apartment, don’t you?”
She moistened her lips, glancing along her eyes toward the mattress.
“Well?” I said.
“If — if I tell you, can you keep my name out of it? Can you make it look as if you found out from someone else?”
Before I could answer her, Ben Muller came up. “No luck, Pete,” he said. “Somebody clipped his wallet. There isn’t even any loose change in his pocket. No tie pin or wristwatch, either. We’ll have to get a make on him some other way.”
I nodded. “Nose around a little. See if you can find anything.”
“Okay. Want me to call the lieutenant first?”
“Yeah, I guess you’d better.”
He moved away again and I turned back to Miss Pedrick. “You said you wanted us to keep your name out of it,” I said. “Who are you afraid of?”
She got to her feet slowly and stood there a moment while she rubbed the back of her hand across her forehead. “It’s so close in here,” she said. “Can’t we talk outside? I don’t want to go out in the street, but there’s sort of a little court out back. Can we go out there?”
I nodded, and then followed her through a narrow corridor and out a door into a walled-in area about twelve feet square.
“This is better,” she said. “At least we can breathe out here.”
“Better start again,” I said. “And this time, tell the truth.” I gave her a cigarette, lit it for her, and then lit one for myself.
“It’s one of Leda’s friends,” she said. “It has to be. There’s no other answer.”
“Who’s Leda?”
“A girl friend of mine. She — well, she was here last night. She came by the bar where I work and asked me if she could borrow my apartment, and I said all right. She had a date with someone, you see, and she wanted a place where they could be alone.”
“When was this?”
“Last night — about eight o’clock.”
“All right. Go on.”
“Well, it wasn’t the first time I’d done that. Leda always gave me ten dollars, so I could get a hotel room and have a few dollars left over. She couldn’t go to a hotel room herself, because she was afraid her husband would get wind of it. He has two or three different businesses going for him, and he knows just about everybody. He gets around a lot, and so do his friends. Leda was afraid to take a chance on a hotel or a furnished room.”
“But she didn’t mention the name of the man she had the date with?”
“No, she didn’t. She’d never done that any of the other times, either.”
“She borrow your apartment often?”
“I guess you’d call it often. Sometimes she’d ask to use it a couple of times the same week, and then maybe I wouldn’t see her for a week or ten days.”
“You think it was always the same man, or different men each time?”
“I couldn’t say. I never felt like being too inquisitive, if you know what I mean.”
“You make a habit of that?”
“Of what?”
“Of loaning your apartment out to your girl friends. At ten dollars a night, and with a hotel room costing you only three or four, that could turn into a pretty profitable sideline.”
Her eyes moved away from mine. “You’d find out anyhow, wouldn’t you?”
“You know we would.”
“Well, what was the harm in it? If I hadn’t accommodated them, they’d have gone somewhere else, wouldn’t they? Listen. If a woman’s going to play around, she’s going to play around. It was better they did it in a safe place than—”
“All right,” I said wearily. “About this Leda, now. What was the arrangement supposed to be?”
“Why, just the same as it always was. I gave her my key, and told her I wouldn’t be home before three or four o’clock this afternoon.”
“How’d she get the key back to you?”
“She didn’t. Not personally, that is. She always hid it in a crack in the stonework over the basement door. The one that leads up to the street.”
“That’s pretty high. She a tall girl like you?”
“Yes. She used to work in chorus lines, just like I did.”
“You known her long?”
“Yes. A long time. About — oh, about fifteen years.”
“And when you came home this afternoon you found the key where you expected it to be?”
“No. It wasn’t there. I got a passkey from the landlord.”
I took out my notebook. “What’s Leda’s full name, and where does she live?”
4.
She hesitated. “Listen, officer... Isn’t there some way you can keep me out of this? I’ve known Leda half my life. I think the world of her. So long as I thought that man had killed himself, I was willing to bluff through a story to protect her. But if it’s murder, I—”
“It isn’t Leda you’re worried about,” I said. “You might as well level with us. You’ve been around enough to know that the more you cooperate with cops, the easier it’ll go.” I paused. “All right, so who is it you’re afraid of?”
“If you were in my place, you’d be afraid of him too. He — he used to be a hoodlum. Maybe he still is, for all I know. He’s mean — mean all the way through. He beat up one of his best friends once, just because the guy danced with Leda a couple of times too often. Once he knocked a man unconscious, just because he brushed against Leda on the street.”
“You still haven’t told me who,” I said.
“Leda’s husband. Eddie Willard.”
I wrote the name down. “Where do they live, Eddie and Leda?”
“You haven’t promised to—”
“I can’t promise anything,” I told her. “I’ll do what I can for you, yes — but I can’t commit the police department that way. You should know that.”
She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “They live at the Bayless.”
“That an apartment house or a hotel?”