He smiled and was gone.
When he arrived at Seventh Avenue and 50th Street, the Hotel Adler was still cordoned, sawhorses holding back a gathering crowd. Two uniformed officers stood in front of the closed glass doors listening to the loud arguments of three men who were apparently reporters demanding entrance.
"No one gets in," one of the cops said in a remarkably placid voice. "But no one. That's orders."
"The public has a right to know," one of the men yelled.
The officer looked at him pityingly. "Hah-hah," he said.
The Chief plucked at the patrolman's sleeve. "I am Edward X. Delaney," he said. "Sergeant Boone is expecting me."
The cop took a quick glance at a piece of scrap paper crumpled in his hand.
"Right," he said. "You're cleared."
He held the door open for Delaney. The Chief strode into the lobby, hearing the howls of rage and frustration from the newsmen on the sidewalk.
There was a throng in the lobby being herded by plainclothesmen into a single file. The line was moving toward a cardtable that had been set up in one corner. There, identification was requested, names and addresses written down.
This operation was being supervised by Sergeant Broderick. When Delaney caught his eye, the sergeant waved and made his way through the mob to the Chief's side. He leaned close.
"Fifth floor," he said in a low voice. "A butcher shop. An old couple next door heard sounds of a fight. The old lady wanted to call the desk and complain; the old geezer didn't want to make trouble. By the time they ended the argument and decided to call, it was too late; a security man found the stiff. I swear we got here no more than a half-hour after it happened."
"Decoys?" Delaney asked.
"Two," Broderick said. "A hotel man in the pub, one of our guys in the cocktail lounge. Both of them claim they saw no one who looked like the perp."
The Chief grunted. "I better go up."
"Hang on to your cookies," Broderick said, grinning.
The fifth floor corridor was crowded with uniformed cops, ambulance men, detectives, the DA's man, and precinct officers. Delaney made his way through the crush. Sergeant Boone and Ivar Thorsen were standing in the hallway, just outside an open door.
The three men shook hands ceremoniously, solemn mourners at a funeral. Delaney took a quick look through the door.
"Jesus Christ," he said softly.
"Yeah," Boone said, "a helluva fight. And then the cutting. The ME says not much more than an hour ago. Two, tops."
"I'm getting too old for this kind of thing," Thorsen said, his face ashen. "The guy's in ribbons."
"Any doubt that it was the Ripper?"
"No," Boone said. "Throat slashed and nuts stabbed. But the doc says he might have been dead when that happened."
"Any ID?"
Sergeant Boone flipped the pages of his notebook, found what he was seeking.
"Get a load of this," he said. "His paper says he was Nicholas Telemachus Pappatizos. How do you like that? Home address was Las Vegas."
"The hotel security chief made him," Thorsen said. "Known as Nick Pappy and Poppa Nick. Also called The Magician. A smalltime hood. Mostly cons and extortion. We're running him through Records right now."
Delaney looked through the doorway again. The small room was an abattoir. Walls splattered with gobbets of dripping blood. Rug soaked. Furniture upended, clothing scattered. A lamp smashed. The drained corpse was a jigsaw of red and white.
"Naked," Delaney said. "But he did put up a fight."
The three men watched the Crime Scene Unit move about the room, dusting for prints, vacuuming the clear patches of carpet, picking up hairs and shards of glass with tweezers and dropping them into plastic bags.
The two technicians were Lou Gorki and Tommy Callahan, the men Delaney had met in Jerome Ashley's room at the Hotel Coolidge. Now Gorki came to the door. He was carrying a big plastic syringe that looked like the kind used to baste roasts. But this one was half-filled with blood. Gorki was grinning.
"I think we got lucky," he announced. He held up the syringe. "From the bathroom floor. It's tile, and the blood didn't soak in. And we got here before it had a chance to dry. I got enough here for a transfusion. I figure it's the killer's blood. Got to be. The clunk was sliced to hash. No way was he going to make it to the bathroom and bleed on the tile. Also, we got bloody towels and stains in the sink where the perp washed. It looks good."
"Tell the lab I want a report on that blood immediately," Thorsen said. "That means before morning."
"I'll tell them," Gorki said doubtfully.
"Prints?" Boone asked.
"Doesn't look good. The usual partials and smears. The faucet handles in the bathroom were wiped clean."
"So if she was hurt," Delaney said, "it wasn't so bad that she didn't remember to get rid of her prints."
"Right," Gorki said. "That's the way it looks. Give us another fifteen minutes and then the meat's all yours."
But it was almost a half-hour before the CSU men packed up their heavy kits and departed. Deputy Commissioner Thorsen decided to go with them to see what he could do to expedite blood-typing by the Lab Services Section. In truth, Thorsen looked ill.
Then Delaney and Boone had to wait an additional ten minutes while a photographer and cartographer recorded the scene. Finally they stepped into the room, followed by Detectives Aaron Johnson and Daniel Bentley.
The four men leaned over the congealing corpse.
"How the hell did she do that?" Johnson said wonderingly. "The guy had muscles; he's not going to stand there and let a woman cut him up."
"Maybe the first stab was a surprise," Bentley said. "Weakened him enough so she could hack him to chunks."
"That makes sense," Boone said. "But how did she get cut? Gorki says she bled in the bathroom. No signs of a second knife- unless it's under his body. Anyone want to roll him over?"
"I'll pass," Johnson said. "I had barbecued ribs for dinner."
"They may have fought for her knife," Delaney said, "and she got cut in the struggle. Boone, you better alert the hospitals."
"God damn it!" the sergeant said, furious at his lapse, and rushed for the phone.
Delaney hung around until the ambulance men came in and rolled Nicholas Telemachus Pappatizos onto a body sheet. There was no knife under the body. Only blood.
The other detectives went down to the lobby to assist in the questioning. Delaney stayed in the room, wandering about, peeking into the bathroom. He saw nothing of significance. Perhaps, he thought, because he was shaken by the echoes of violence. Tommy Callahan came back and continued the Crime Scene Unit investigation.
He pushed the victim's discarded clothing into plastic bags and labeled them. He collected toothbrush, soap, and toilet articles from the bathroom and labeled those. Then he popped the lock on the single suitcase in the room and began to inventory the contents.
"Look at this, Chief," he said. "I better have a witness that I found this…"
Using a pencil through the trigger guard, he fished a dinky, chrome-plated automatic pistol from the suitcase. He sniffed cautiously at the muzzle.
"Clean," he said. "Looks like a.32."
"Or.22," Delaney said. "Gambler's gun. Good for maybe twenty feet, but you'd have to be Deadeye Dick to hit your target. Find anything else?"
"Two decks of playing cards. Nice clothes. Silk pajamas. He lived well."
"For a while," Delaney said.
He left the death room and took the elevator to the lobby. The crowd had thinned, but police were still quizzing residents and visitors. Out on the sidewalk, the mob of noisy newspapermen had grown. In the street, two TV vans were setting up lights and cameras.
Delaney pushed through the throng and crossed the avenue. He turned to look back at the hotel. If she came out onto Seventh, she could have taken a bus or subway. But if she was wounded, she probably caught a cab. He hoped Sergeant Boone would remember to check cabdrivers who might have been in the vicinity at the time.
He walked over to Sixth Avenue and got a cab going uptown. He was home in ten minutes, double-locked and chained the door behind him. It was then almost 2:00 a.m.