Bill Brown came around to the flat to show them the clothes he wore to work now. He was on Safes and Lofts now, he mentioned.
Mrs. Joe didn’t act dissatisfied or envious, though. “Thirty-two dollars at the best store in town wasn’t all that homespun tweed might’ve cost,” she said after he’d gone. “The price might’ve included a kid with a bullet in his spine. I like you better in blue, Joe.”
III
They met again over a dead man several years later. Their paths hadn’t crossed again until then.
Bill Brown looked him slowly up and down across the corpse. “So you finally got out of blues, Joe?” He said it as though he hadn’t really ever expected him to.
Greeley just grinned a little for an answer.
“Third-grader now, eh?” Brown went on.
“Yeah, just now. This is my first case.”
“Like I told you ’way back in the beginning,” Brown said patronizingly, “You’ve got to make your own chances in this game. Otherwise you just gather cobwebs off in some corner.”
So now it was a game, was it? It had been a racket to him once, Greeley remembered. Well, to him it still was what it had always been — his life’s work.
“I suppose you heard what I did to that Ingram business?”
“You tied it up in knots,” agreed Joe.
“But you’re only as good as your last case in this chain-gang.” Brown pointed downward to the floor, to what they were talking back and forth across. “I been praying for something like this to come along. It’s just what I need. It’s been over a year now. I’ll get another boost out of it sure as you live.” He actually rubbed his hands together above the corpse. Joe Greeley just looked at him inscrutably.
“I’m working with Bill Brown again,” he told Mrs. Joe that evening.
“You may as well save your energy,” she remarked mockingly. “The case is practically over already.”
But it wasn’t, by a long sight. It was a cast-iron, unbreakable witch of a thing.
The man’s name was Thomas Allroyd. He was an installment collector, and he had been found bludgeoned to death in the upper hallway of a seemingly respectable and even fairly high-class apartment house on the West Side.
The linings of his pockets told them a good deal of it before they’d done more than search the body. Namely: that he represented a firm marketing sun-lamps called the Sol-Ray Company, that he had visited all but one of the customers on his list (they could tell this by pencil checks next to the names), that he had already collected nearly three hundred dollars up to the time he was set upon and killed (they could tell this because monthly installments on the lamps averaged twenty-five dollars, and he had been to see about a dozen people), and that the money had been taken from him — therefore robbery motive — because he hadn’t turned it in at his home office, and his billfold was gone.
The rest should have been fairly simple, but as so often happens in these “fairly simple” cases, appearances were deceptive. The building was not the “walk-in” type, open to the first passerby who chose to enter; there was a doorman posted at the entrance. Which should have meant that anyone who had followed Allroyd in from the street would have had to pass the doorman’s scrutiny, state his business, and be remembered later. And that would have been an enormous help. Unfortunately it wasn’t anything of the kind, because the doorman insisted no outsider had entered at or around that time.
Allroyd had entered the premises at about four-thirty in the afternoon and his body had been found by one of the tenants about half an hour later. The doorman had not during that time left his post; this was substantiated by a woman tenant who had used him to air her dog at that hour, and at the same time had kept a watchful eye on her pet from the window.
The elevator was self-operative. There was a delivery entrance, but this too had been commanded by the doorman, and he was equally positive no deliveries had been made at or around that time. An exhaustive compilation was made of every grocery, laundry, dry cleaner, and whatnot patronized by every tenant in the building, and each and every employee of them, running into the dozens, was tracked down, questioned and cross-questioned. All were able to furnish satisfactory proof of their movements and whereabouts.
This narrowed it down to somebody who had been living in the house itself, and therefore had never entered or left the premises around that time. It was not, fortunately, an unduly large building. Again an exhaustive series of interrogations, from floor to floor and flat to flat, brought the police nowhere. Almost all the men in the various families, the wage earners, had been still at work. The doormen and their various places of employment, when checked, quickly eliminated them. Of those who hadn’t been out, one (a customer of Allroyd’s) was a doctor on the ground floor who used one of the firm’s lamps for his patients; he not only had his nurse to vouch for him, but also a patient whom he had been treating at the time. The second (again on the installment-man’s list) was a semi-invalid confined to a wheel-chair, and he too had an attendant. The party whom Allroyd had still to call on when he was slain, had been conveniently “out” all afternoon — possibly the collector was expected — but in any case the party had certainly been far from home until long past the hour when there was any danger of encountering the collector.
A fourth lamp was discovered in the house, belonging to a Mrs. Ruth Crosby. She was not down on Allroyd’s list because she had bought it outright. She kept late hours, she explained rather nervously, did a lot of entertaining, and needed it to pep herself up the following day. Her apartment was luxuriously furnished and, they discovered, she paid an exorbitant rent for it, nearly twice that of anyone else. Their scrutiny and interrogation seemed to make her strangely ill at ease; she was almost abject in her willingness to placate them, offered them drinks and fawned on them. Be that as it might, she had had two young women friends staying in the place with her the day of the murder, as well as a Negro maid, and all four had been fast asleep at the time it happened; they seemed to be late risers.
So they had gotten exactly nowhere, and fast. Everyone living in the house was exonerated, and no one had been seen to enter it from outside, and yet the man had certainly been slain and robbed in that upper hallway, while he was lingering there waiting for the customers who were “out” to return.
While all this was going on Greeley, being the lowest ranking man on the case and a newcomer to Homicide, had been given all the dirty work to do. The tedious drudgery of reconstructing Allroyd’s movements, step by step, from the time he’d first opened his eyes that last day of his on earth. This meant days on end of monotonous, repetitious interviews, asking the same things over and over. “What time did he come here that day? How long did he stay here?” And then counter-checking someone else’s statement against that, to see if it would hold up. In other words he built up a laborious time-table for the others to make use of, and it wasn’t a very thankful task.
“It’s somebody,” Brown kept insisting dogmatically, “who is down on that collection list of his. Somebody who knew what his job was, and therefore knew that in all probability he’d have a considerable amount of money on him by the time he neared the end of his rounds. Maybe they’d already gotten a glimpse of his receipts when he called on them themselves, and that worked up their appetite for a little lettuce. If we can’t figure out how they got into the building after him, then we can’t. Let’s skip that altogether, instead of letting it hold us up, and work it the other way around. Go back to it later, after we’ve already got our possibilities lined up, and fill it in. It may fall into place by itself. Now here’s what we want: somebody who owns one of those damn lamps, who Allroyd had already been to see that day, who’s plenty hard up for cash, and who can’t supply an airtight account of themselves from four to five that afternoon.”