Masters Of Noir Vol Ii Part 6

The woman was smoking a cigarette, watching us sullenly. She was very tall, close to six feet, I'd say and somewhere between thirty and thirty-five. She had short blonde hair, dark at the roots, and while she wasn't especially pretty, her figure made up for it.

"Who found him, Bill?" I asked.

"She did."

The woman dropped her cigarette to the floor, left it smoldering there, and turned to watch the photographer adjust his camera for another shot.

Les Wilbur, the a.s.sistant M.E., nodded to Ben and me and motioned us over to the man hanging from the water pipe.

"I remembered the blasting you boys gave me last time I cut down a DOA, Pete," he said wryly. "This time, I left the guy hanging for you."

I nodded. "It's usually best, Les." I stepped close to the corpse. His feet cleared the floor by only a few inches, but I could still look down slightly when I looked at his face. He had been in his early forties, I guessed, a very small man who couldn't have weighed more than a hundred and ten or fifteen pounds. His sport s.h.i.+rt and slacks were expensive-looking, and his shoes obviously had been made by hand. His nose was badly flattened and there was a heavy tracery of scar tissue around both eyebrows.

"A fighter," Ben said. "Most likely a pro. You sure as h.e.l.l'd have a hard time getting that marked up, just mixing it in back alleys."

I glanced at the doctor. "How long would you say he's been strung up here, Les?"

He pursed his lips thoughtfully. "Call it six to eight hours."

"That's a lot better than M.E.'s usually do," I said.

He smiled. "Well, this one's pretty easy, Pete. Rigor mortis usually begins within three to five hours, starting in the jaws, and takes anywhere from eight to twelve hours to become complete. In this case, the RM has progressed only to the hips. That would put the time of death at from six to eight hours ago."

I glanced at my watch. "That would mean he suicided between ten-thirty and twelve-thirty."

"Okay to take this guy down now, Pete?" Ben asked.

I looked over at the photographer. "You finished?"

He nodded, and I pulled a straight chair over to a position beneath the body, climbed up, and untied the clothesline from the pipe. I carried the body to one of the mattresses on the floor, put it down, and then untied the noose from the man's neck. I paid particular attention to the way the rope fibers had been scuffed. If they had been scuffed toward the body, I would have known that someone had thrown the rope over the pipe and dragged the body up-which would have meant our suicide wouldn't have been a suicide at all.

But, although there was nothing suspicious about the rope fibers, there was something else very wrong. I noticed it the instant I bent down to look closely at the dead man's neck.

The rope had left a deep, purple collar around his neck, and if he had died from the rope there would have been small black-and-blue marks around the collar's lower edge. Such marks are caused by the bursting of tiny blood vessels.

There were no such marks-and that meant our man had not been alive when he was hanged. It meant we had a murder on our hands.

Les Wilbur noticed the absence of black-and-blue marks at the same moment I did. "Looks like you boys are in for more than you bargained for," he said.

Ben stood frowning at the dead man a moment, and then he glanced over toward the woman. "Let's get started, Pete," he said.

We walked over to the woman. She had lighted another cigarette. She left it dangling from the side of her mouth as she crossed her arms across her chest and stared at us.

"You Miss Pedrick?" I asked.

She let a little smoke trickle from her nose. "That's right."

"This your apartment?"

"If you want to call it that."

"Who's the dead man?"

She shrugged. "I don't know."

"A man's found hanged in your own apartment, and you don't know who he is?"

"That's what I said. You hear pretty well-for a cop."

"When did you find him?"

"Why, the minute I got home. When'd you think?"

"How long ago was that?"

"Just a couple seconds before I went out after that cop over there. About an hour ago, I guess. I don't have a phone, so I had to go out after a cop."

"And you haven't any idea who the man is?"

"I told you I didn't. I don't know him from Adam."

"How long had you been out of your apartment?"

"Since last night."

"About what time?"

"Oh, about nine o'clock, I guess. Somewhere around there. Better say nine-thirty."

"You keep your door locked, don't you?"

"Sure. But it's a cheap spring lock. Anybody could open it."

"Is that the way you figure it?" I asked. "I mean, that he broke in and-"

"Look mister," she said. "I don't figure anything. All I know is that he got in here somehow and knocked himself off. I don't try to figure any further than that, because I don't have have to. I haven't been here since last night, and I can prove it. I never saw the guy before, and you can't prove I did. Maybe he broke in to see what he could steal, and then all at once he decided to hang himself. How should I know what happened? And who cares, anyhow?" to. I haven't been here since last night, and I can prove it. I never saw the guy before, and you can't prove I did. Maybe he broke in to see what he could steal, and then all at once he decided to hang himself. How should I know what happened? And who cares, anyhow?"

I turned to Ben. "See if you can find any identification on him," I said. "And then look up a phone and tell them what we've got here."

He nodded and walked back toward the corpse.

I studied the woman's face a moment. She'd lived a lot of years the hard way, I could tell. It was all there in her face. And it was there in her voice too, if you listened for it. Just as the indications of lying were there. Even the best confidence men in the country are troubled with a dry throat when they lie, though they're usually very skillful at covering it up. Mrs. Pedrick wasn't skillful at all. Her voice had grown increasingly husky, and she was swallowing a lot more than was normal.

"Why don't you start telling the truth?" I asked.

"Listen, you! I-"

"Just take it easy," I said. "In the first place, I'm tired of listening to nothing. And in the second place, this isn't suicide. It's murder."

She took a half step back from me, and one hand darted up to her throat and stayed there. "Murder!" she whispered, and the word had the right ring of astonishment to it.

I nodded. "He was already dead when he was strung up there, Miss Pedrick. Does that give you another slant on things?"

She glanced about her for something to sit on, and finally moved to a stack of newspapers and sat down on that. "Lord," she said.

"You still claim you don't know him?" I asked.

She took a long time to answer. "No," she said at last. "No, I don't know him. I was telling the truth. I never saw him before in my life."

"But you do have a pretty good idea how he got into your apartment, don't you?"

She moistened her lips, glancing along her eyes toward the mattress.

"Well?" I said.

"If-if I tell you, can you keep my name out of it? Can you make it look as if you found out from someone else?"

Before I could answer her, Ben Muller came up. "No luck, Pete," he said. "Somebody clipped his wallet. There isn't even any loose change in his pocket. No tie pin or wrist.w.a.tch, either. We'll have to get a make on him some other way."

I nodded. "Nose around a little. See if you can find anything."

"Okay. Want me to call the lieutenant first?"

"Yeah, I guess you'd better."

He moved away again and I turned back to Miss Pedrick. "You said you wanted us to keep your name out of it," I said. "Who are you afraid of?"

She got to her feet slowly and stood there a moment while she rubbed the back of her hand across her forehead. "It's so close in here," she said. "Can't we talk outside? I don't want to go out in the street, but there's sort of a little court out back. Can we go out there?"

I nodded, and then followed her through a narrow corridor and out a door into a walled-in area about twelve feet square.

"This is better," she said. "At least we can breathe out here."

"Better start again," I said. "And this time, tell the truth." I gave her a cigarette, lit it for her, and then lit one for myself.

"It's one of Leda's friends," she said. "It has to be. There's no other answer."

"Who's Leda?"

"A girl friend of mine. She-well, she was here last night. She came by the bar where I work and asked me if she could borrow my apartment, and I said all right. She had a date with someone, you see, and she wanted a place where they could be alone."

"When was this?"

"Last night-about eight o'clock."

"All right. Go on."

"Well, it wasn't the first time I'd done that. Leda always gave me ten dollars, so I could get a hotel room and have a few dollars left over. She couldn't go to a hotel room herself, because she was afraid her husband would get wind of it. He has two or three different businesses going for him, and he knows just about everybody. He gets around a lot, and so do his friends. Leda was afraid to take a chance on a hotel or a furnished room."

"But she didn't mention the name of the man she had the date with?"

"No, she didn't. She'd never done that any of the other times, either."

"She borrow your apartment often?"

"I guess you'd call it often. Sometimes she'd ask to use it a couple of times the same week, and then maybe I wouldn't see her for a week or ten days."

"You think it was always the same man, or different men each time?"

"I couldn't say. I never felt like being too inquisitive, if you know what I mean."

"You make a habit of that?"

"Of what?"

"Of loaning your apartment out to your girl friends. At ten dollars a night, and with a hotel room costing you only three or four, that could turn into a pretty profitable sideline."

Her eyes moved away from mine. "You'd find out anyhow, wouldn't you?"

"You know we would."

"Well, what was the harm in it? If I hadn't accommodated them, they'd have gone somewhere else, wouldn't they? Listen. If a woman's going to play around, she's going to play around. It was better they did it in a safe place than-"

"All right," I said wearily. "About this Leda, now. What was the arrangement supposed to be?"

"Why, just the same as it always was. I gave her my key, and told her I wouldn't be home before three or four o'clock this afternoon."

"How'd she get the key back to you?"

"She didn't. Not personally, that is. She always hid it in a crack in the stonework over the bas.e.m.e.nt door. The one that leads up to the street."

"That's pretty high. She a tall girl like you?"

"Yes. She used to work in chorus lines, just like I did."

"You known her long?"

"Yes. A long time. About-oh, about fifteen years."

"And when you came home this afternoon you found the key where you expected it to be?"

"No. It wasn't there. I got a pa.s.skey from the landlord."

I took out my notebook. "What's Leda's full name, and where does she live?"

She hesitated. "Listen, officer ... Isn't there some way you can keep me out of this? I've known Leda half my life. I think the world of her. So long as I thought that man had killed himself, I was willing to bluff through a story to protect her. But if it's murder, I-"

"It isn't Leda you're worried about," I said. "You might as well level with us. You've been around enough to know that the more you cooperate with cops, the easier it'll go." I paused. "All right, so who is it you're afraid of?"