To make a long story short, he had been pleased to see she did not bolt her drink, which indicated to him she could hold her liquor — a vital point, since in the Falcone pleasure palaces there was no cold tea served in the guise of Chivas Regal — she was intelligent, with a sense of humor, and a deep, husky, almost mannish voice that made little icy fingers run up and down Pete’s spine. Nor was she at all unwilling to see the marvelous view from the heights of Pete’s fifteenth-floor bachelor apartment, even though the fog, unfortunately, was bound to be somewhat of a deterrent. Pete had signed the bar check with a slight flourish, winked at the bartender (and later at the elevator boy) and taken the young lady toward his apartment, while visions of sugarplums danced in his head.
Some fifteen minutes later the desk clerk at the Cranston Hotel had been rudely shocked by an angry passerby who came in and brusquely announced that some bloody fool — and he did mean bloody — had either jumped or fallen from one of the upper floors and had damned near brained him. The room clerk, forced against all his instincts to investigate, had pronounced the body to be that of Mr. Porfirio Falcone, after which he became violently sick to his stomach, and had to be escorted home.
Of the lovely girl both the bartender and the elevator operator had seen accompanying Mr. Falcone toward his room, there was no sign.
Wednesday — 11:45 p.m.
Lieutenant Reardon stood in the middle of the large, beautifully appointed living room and studied the luxury about him, consciously comparing it with his own poor flat. Maybe Jan was right, he thought, studying the pictures, the sculpture, feeling the ankle-deep pile of the oyster-white rug beneath his feet; maybe the other half lives better and maybe police work not only is dangerous, but also it may not be the best profession through which to reach these heights. But would Jan agree to my doing what Pete Falcone did for a living? Highly dubious, he thought, and wiped away his smile, walking toward the large open window.
The view from the casement was, indeed, a lovely one, fog and all; in fact, the fog seemed to enhance it. The Golden Gate Bridge seemed to rise from the mist of the bay like a phantom structure, its cables shimmering mysteriously in the dim lights from the towers, all of the bridge independent of land, seemingly floating in the fog; below, the spaced street-lamps of the Presidio marked the winding tree-lined avenues with faintly glowing curves. It occurred to Reardon that the fog was clearing; from the height of the apartment the sky could be seen through the wispy haze, the moon brushing aside the mist, the stars picking holes through it. He sighed and turned to the man bent over the windowsill, dusting it for fingerprints.
“Anything yet, Charley?”
“Nothing yet, Lieutenant.”
The lab man was cheerful, but then, Reardon thought, he’s only been on duty several hours and not eighteen, like me. He wasn’t even sure why he had asked for this check; the girl, according to the elevator operator, had been wearing gloves, and in any event she hadn’t been the one to go through the window — Falcone had. And it would scarcely prove very much to find his own fingerprints in his own apartment. Still, there was always the possibility that Pete Falcone had not particularly wished to go through the window, and may have attempted to hold back, and the marks of desperate fingers scrabbling for purchase on the window’s edge could well support a charge of murder. On the other hand, Pete Falcone, while no giant, still was large enough to prevent a girl from tossing him to his death — or at least he should have been. Reardon watched the technician for a few more moments and then wandered through the rest of the apartment.
There had obviously been no time for Pete Falcone to put his vaunted skills into practice, and the bedroom quite logically remained pristine, its huge circular bed neatly made, the pillows puffed up beneath a brocaded spread. Reardon noted the inviting nudes that made up the pictorial presentation on the paneled walls, as well as the profuse use of reflective surfaces, and then walked on through to the bathroom. Again he found an unsullied room, the towels in the rack all neatly folded and hanging in place, even as the room maid had deposited them. The only conclusion Reardon could draw from this was that either (a) Falcone hadn’t washed his hands before dinner, which made him out to be a slob; or (b) the maid had cleaned up since, although in that case one would have thought she would also have turned down the bed; or (c) Falcone hadn’t been in his apartment before meeting the girl in the bar. Since none of the three made the slightest difference to the case that Reardon could see, he promptly put them out of his mind, returned to the hallway, and thence to the kitchen.
The only apparent use this room was ever put to was to furnish ice cubes, and an empty tray stood in a small puddle of water on the counter. Otherwise the tiny pullman-type room was clueless, or at least to Reardon at the moment. Maybe the answers are all here and I’m just too tired to see them, he said to himself, and yawned as if to excuse himself. A kitchen in a hotel apartment! Ah, well, who said crime doesn’t pay, or that the wages of sin were death? The sudden memory of the body on the sidewalk returned and he shook his head at his own obtuseness and went back to the living room.
The two glasses remained on the coffee table, where he had first seen them, flanked on one side by an open ice bucket with the dwindling cubes floating in their own juice, and on the other side by a series of bottles. There had obviously been time for Falcone to at least make a drink and begin his pitch, even if the best he had gotten out of it had been the worst. Reardon suddenly frowned and stared at the bottles; there was one each of scotch, gin, vermouth, brandy, Cointreau, and vodka. My God, he thought, I must be tired; I should have seen those before. Had it been a party? Still, there were only the two glasses, and the elevator operator had assured him that entrance to the floors, except through the medium of his cab, was impossible. The fire doors, he had sworn, could only be opened from the inside, and Mr. Falcone sure wasn’t going to be opening any fire doors to any stairwells to let in any strangers when he had a piece of meat with him like he had tonight! Then how account for the multiplicity of bottles? Had Falcone been showing off the full extent of his alcohol arsenal? But surely he must have many more: crème de menthe, bourbon, rye... He glanced in the direction of the window.
“Hey, Charley — you checked these glasses, didn’t you?”
“Sure, Lieutenant. First thing I checked. They’re clean.”
Reardon stared. “Both of them?”
“That’s right, Lieutenant. They’ve been wiped off good.”
Reardon looked around, searching for a towel or a cloth of some sort which might have been used and discarded, but there was nothing in the room that looked as if it might have served the purpose. And the towels in the bathroom, he recalled, were all neatly in place and unwrinkled, and the kitchen hadn’t had a towel. If the glasses had been wiped, then, the chances were the young lady had done it with her gloves or a handkerchief, or — if with anything else — she had removed it herself.