“She didn’t call in to say she’d be late for work?”
“No, sir.”
“You know any of her friends?”
“No, I’m afraid I don’t.”
“You ever see her with a very small man — a guy with a broken nose?”
“No, sir. I’ve never met any of her friends. I’ve never seen her with anyone at all.”
“Not even her husband?”
“No, sir.”
I put my wallet back in my pocket. I was curious about why Dannion had become so upset when he saw my badge, but I had no justification to question him about it. His personal guilts and fears were his own — unless I discovered later that they were connected in some way with the job I was on.
“I guess that’s all, Mr. Dannion,” I said. “Thanks very much.”
“Is Mrs. Willard all right, sir? If she’s in any trouble... That is, she’s a very fine young woman, and if I can be of any assistance...”
“She’d be glad to hear that,” I said. “But this is police business, Mr. Dannion. I can’t discuss it with you.”
I went up the steps and climbed into the RMP car and headed back uptown toward the Bayless Hotel.
6.
At the Bayless, I discovered Leda Willard and her husband had checked out at eleven o’clock that morning. They’d left no forwarding address, but they had left a considerable amount of clothing. The manager had ordered this stored for them, under the assumption that they would contact him later with instructions for forwarding or other disposition.
I got a thorough description of both of them and went back to the station house.
Ben Muller was waiting for me. He’d taken the dead man’s prints to BCI, but BCI hadn’t been able to match them with any in its files. The man’s slacks, it seemed, hadn’t been tailor-made after all, which meant that tracing them would take some time. And the bootmaker who had made his shoes had since closed his shop and gone to Europe.
I sent Ben over to the Paragon Hotel to start checking Janice Pedrick’s alibi, and then I called Harry Fisher, a very good friend of mine who had once been a middleweight contender and was now writing a sports column for one of the tabloids. He knew everyone connected with the prizefight game, retired or active. I asked him if he’d go to Bellevue and see if he knew the dead man. He said he would be glad to. I gave him the phone number of the squad room, and asked him to leave a message if he should happen to call while I was out.
Then I got Headquarters on the phone and asked them to put out an alarm for the apprehension of Leda and Eddie Willard, and gave them the descriptions I’d got from the hotel manager. I asked for a run-through of the records to see if they had anything on either Willard or his wife, and then gave them Janice Pedrick’s name and description and asked for a run-through on her as well.
I had Headquarters switch me to the police laboratory and asked for a report from the tech crew that had worked the murder apartment with Ben and me. They had found several sets of fairly clear fingerprints, but none of the prints had checked out to prints already on file. They were still working, and would call me as soon as they came up with anything.
I was reasonably sure the assistant M.E. wouldn’t have had time to autopsy the body yet, but I called him anyway. He said that he had not been able to get the autopsy scheduled before ten o’clock the next morning, that he had tried to pull a few wires to get to it before then, but had been unable to work it.
I called the policewoman who had been with Janice Pedrick since her arrival at the station house. The policewoman said Janice had been an easy girl to talk to, but a difficult one to get anything out of. She reminded me she had a reputation for indirect questioning, and that if anyone got anything out of Janice it would be she.
I put the phone down, left a note in the message book to the effect that I would be back in twenty minutes, and went down to a restaurant on Fifty-third Street. I had two roast beef sandwiches and three cups of black coffee, and then went back to the squad room.
There was a note to call Harry Fisher on an extension at Bellevue Hospital. I called, and he told me that our dead man’s name was Teddy Connors. He said Connors had been a pretty fair featherweight in the middle 30’s, had retired with all his brains and most of his money, and had since taken an occasional flyer as a fight manager and promoter. Harry had seen him around only now and then in recent years, though he had once been a steady customer of the various bars around Madison Square Garden and St. Nicholas Arena.
I thanked Harry, made a tentative date for lunch the first day both of us had a free hour, and then called BCI back again. I gave them Teddy Connors’ name and asked for a run-through.
While I was waiting, I walked to the next room and searched the cards in the Eighteenth’s Known Resident Criminal File. These are the cards kept on file in the precinct where the criminal lives, no matter where he was arrested. It has his picture, his record, and the date his parole is up. In the event he was arrested with other individuals, these individuals’ names are listed on the back of the card. But there was no card for Teddy Connors.
I’d put off the paper work as long as I could, but now I sat down at a typewriter and filled out a Complaint Report form as thoroughly as I could, at this stage of the investigation, and then did the same with the other routine forms.
When I finished with the forms, I had gone as far as I could go. I had almost dozed off staring at the typewriter, so I went down to the corner and brought back a quart carton of black coffee.
I was sipping at it when Ben Muller came in.
“Any luck?” I asked.
“Maybe she took a walk, maybe she didn’t,” he said. “She checked out of the hotel when she said she did, but that’s as far as I got.” He reached for the coffee and drank steadily until he had finished a good half of it. “You want me to talk to her, Pete?”
“Nope. Let her think a while longer.”
He shrugged. “Suits me.” He sat down at his desk and put his head down on his arms. “Don’t wake me up unless I inherit a million bucks, Pete.”
The phone on my desk rang. It was Tom Volz, of the Tenth.
“We got something for you, Pete,” he said. “Eddie Willard.”
“Where’d you grab him?”
“We didn’t. He walked in.”
“The hell!”
“Sure did, Pete. About two minutes ago. He says he won’t talk to anybody but you. That’s fine with us. We got our own troubles.”
“We’ll be there before you can hang up,” I said.
“What’s the deal?” Ben asked.
“They’ve got Eddie Willard, over at the Tenth.”
He stood up, yawning widely. “Fine. Maybe we’ll get to bed some time this year after all.”
7.
The boys at the Tenth gave Eddie Willard and me the rear interrogation room to talk in. Willard had said he wouldn’t say a word if anyone else was in the room with us, and I’d left Ben shooting the breeze with Tom Volz. Neither Willard nor I sat down. He was about my height, but a lot thicker-bodied. He had a lot of dark hair and restless dark eyes that never seemed to blink.
“I’m going to give you this fast and hard and all in one piece,” he said. “I’ve heard of you a lot. I think I’ll get a clean shake.”
I nodded. “What’s on your mind, Mr. Willard?”
“I heard a rumble you were looking for Leda and me. I would have turned in up at your precinct, but I didn’t want to take a chance on getting tagged by some other cop before I got there.”
“Where’s your wife, Mr. Willard?”
“I’ll get to that. First I want to tell you that I’m doing this to save my own hide. No other reason. I’ve done a lot for Leda in my time, and now I’m through.” He paused a moment, biting at his lip. “Here it is, the whole thing. I just found out about Leda this morning, see? I’ve been married to her eight years, but I never knew until this morning just what a rotten woman she really was. The only reason I found out then is because she was scared crazy. She didn’t kill Teddy Connors, you understand. But she’d been fooling around with him, over at Janice Pedrick’s dump and all.”