Thirteen
The two detectives sent over from the Twelfth were Dave Horowitz and Danny O’Neil. I knew Horowitz, but I’d never worked with O’Neil before. In this city, the precinct detectives catching a homicide squeal are the ones who follow the case through to its hopefully successful conclusion. But the Homicide Division is notified nonetheless, and depending on the location of the crime, two men from either Upper or Lower Homicide arrive at the scene sometime after the investigating detectives have had a chance to do some preliminary work. The Upper and Lower are geographical determinations rather than qualitative judgments, the city being divided into halves where it concerns murder. The Homicide boys hadn’t yet arrived by a quarter past midnight, when I reached the funeral parlor on Sixth and Stilson. Their absence wasn’t keenly mourned. I had never got along with Homicide while I was on the force. In my estimation, Homicide cops are featherbedding duplicators, Players of a sort. Just outside the back door of the funeral parlor, I talked to Horowitz and O’Neil. The body of Peter Greer, the slain mortuary employee, had already been photographed and taken to the morgue for mandatory autopsy.
“Find anything out here besides the crowbar?” I asked.
“Just this.” Horowitz said, and took an evidence envelope from his pocket and shook out a piece of jewelry onto a handkerchief in his other hand.
“What is it?” I asked. “Jade?”
“Looks like it.”
“The old lady’s?”
“No.”
“You asked her?”
“We asked her,” O’Neil said.
O’Neil was much younger than Horowitz and a lot less eager to cooperate with me. I could perfectly understand his probable line of reasoning. He was out here breaking his back for two hundred seventy-five dollars a week, and I was pulling down millions (ha!) with my private investigations. If he and Horowitz cracked this homicide, O’Neil wanted whatever was coming to him, without any of the glory going to a retired cop. He hadn’t asked for my help or my hindrance, and he wasn’t welcoming either now. Horowitz, on the other hand, was a man in his early fifties who’d been on the force long enough to realize he wasn’t going to be Commissioner one day, nor even Chief of Detectives. He was a smart, hard-working Detective Second, and he knew how good (and modest) I was, and he knew that if I came up with anything that helped him to crack this, he and his partner would be the ones who got the commendations and/or promotions—not me.
“Can I get a better look at that?” I said.
“Sure,” Horowitz said, and we moved closer to the light.
The pendant was oval-shaped, the jade set into a delicate silver frame that hung on a broken silver chain. The surface of the jade was carved with a bas-relief profile that looked Egyptian. Horowitz carefully turned the pendant over with one corner of the evidence envelope. The back of the pendant was silver, an extension of the frame into which the jade was set. The silver was engraved in delicate script lettering that read:
“Make anything of it?” I asked Horowitz.
“Not yet,” he said.
“Any female corpses inside there?”
‘Two of them,” he said.
“I know just what you’re thinking,” O’Neil said. “Maybe this dropped off one of them when they were being carried in. You’re wrong, Smoke. I already talked to the director here. The two lady stiffs are Janet Muehler and Sally D’Amiano.”
“Did you get a name for the one that got away?”
“Huh?”
“The corpse that was stolen.”
“Oh. Yeah,” O’Neil said. “Guy named John Hiller.”
“Age?” I said, and took out my notebook and was ready to start writing when I realized O’Neil wasn’t about to start talking.
“Am I supposed to give him all this stuff?” he asked Horowitz.
“Why not?” Horowitz said, and shrugged rabbinically.
“Suppose he fucks up the case?” O’Neil said.
“He won’t,” Horowitz said.
“He was thirty-seven years old,” O’Neil said reluctantly.
“How tall?”
“Five-eleven.”
“Weight?”
“A hun’eighty, a hun’ninety.”
“Color of hair?”
“Brown.”
“Eyes?”
“Brown.”
“Any blood on the table in there?”
“No. Why?”
“I’m trying to find out whether or not Mr. Hiller had been embalmed.”
“Then whyn’t you just ask?” O’Neil said. “No, he was not embalmed yet. That’s probably what Greer was about to do when the killer walked in on him. He was about to embalm the goddamn body.”
“This old lady who tussled with the killer…did she give you a description of him?”
“All she said was he was big and husky.”
“White or black?”
“White.”
“What was he wearing?”
“Some kind of cap, learner jacket, she couldn’t tell whether it was black or brown.”
“What’s her name?”
“I don’t think we ought to tell him that, Dave,” O’Neil said.
“Why not?” Horowitz said.
“It’s one thing us talking to him, it’s another he goes around questioning witnesses. We ever get this thing to court, I don’t want the case thrown out because he was sticking his nose where it dint belong.”
Horowitz shrugged again. “Maybe he’s right, Ben.”
“Okay,” I said. “However you want it. It’s your ballpark.”
A black unmarked sedan pulled to the curb. I knew before anyone got out of it that the boys from Lower Homicide were on the scene. Homicide boys seem to prefer black; it immediately announces their preoccupation. Both of them came into the alley, saw the shields pinned to the breasts of the topcoats O’Neil and Horowitz were wearing, and looked for identification on my coat. One of them asked who I was; I took out my shield and showed it to him. He was eagle-eyed enough to spot the minuscule blue-enameled “Retired” in parentheses under the “Detective-Lieutenant.”
“That ain’t worth shit,” he said. “With that and thirty-five cents they’ll let you in the subway.”
“What are you doing here?” the other one said.
“He’s a friend of mine,” Horowitz said.
“Yeah?” the first one said. “Well, run along, friend. There’s been a murder.”
“Goodnight, gentlemen,” I said, and walked out to the lighted sidewalk, and began looking for an open bar, or drugstore, or any place with a telephone directory.
Fourteen
I wasn’t out to get a beat on Horowitz and O’Neil, but I knew they’d be occupied at the scene for at least another hour, and by that time the Natalie Fletcher whose name had been engraved on the back of the pendant might have disappeared to Nome, Alaska. I knew, of course, that the pendant might have been dropped by anyone, and not necessarily by the man who’d stolen another corpse and killed a mortuary employee in the bargain. In fact, it seemed unlikely that the killer—described as a man by the old lady who’d struggled with him—would have been wearing a distinctively female piece of jewelry around his neck. But the chain had been broken, and the possibility existed that it had been torn from his neck while he and the old lady did their waltz and the dog nipped at his heels.
There was almost a full column of Fletchers in the phone book, but only one Natalie Fletcher. Her address was listed as 420 Oberlin Crescent, about two miles further uptown. I drove Maria’s Pinto up Claridge Avenue, almost deserted at this hour of the morning, and reached Natalie Fletcher’s building at one a.m., which is a very good time to question people, especially if they’re murder suspects. I climbed three flights of stairs to the apartment indicated on the lobby mailbox. Outside her door, I put my ear to the wood and listened. Cops, retired or otherwise, always listen before knocking on a door. It’s often difficult to understand conversations heard through layers of wood, but different voices are discernible and (provided everyone in the room is speaking) the listening cop can get a pretty good idea of what’s waiting for him behind a closed door. The only thing waiting behind Natalie Fletcher’s door was silence.