Inspector Queen’s Own Case (12 page)

“When the building's empty, eh? Nothing like a deserted office building for a little get-together, I always say.”

“With me murder is strictly sucker.” Finner was breathing noisily. “If I pull this off for you, Inspector, no crossup? I got your word?”

“No deals, Finner. But co-operation never hurt anybody.” Richard Queen looked down at Jessie Sherwood. “That's it, Miss Sherwood. Thanks for the make.”

“The make?” Jessie said, bewildered.

“The identification.” He poked her to her feet. “You come through for me Saturday afternoon, Finner.”

Finner nodded sadly.

Jessie phoned Richard Queen Friday morning from Gloria Sardella's apartment to say that she would be busy all day getting her friend off on the cruise and herself settled. When he pressed her to meet him for dinner Jessie hesitated, then asked him to phone her later in the day. He called promptly at five o'clock and she said she was so fagged she would be poor company. She was going to make a sandwich and go to bed. Did he mind very much?

“Seems to me I haven't seen you for years,” he complained.

Jessie laughed uncertainly.

“It's been a long day, and it's going to be a longer evening,” he said. “At least let me take you to breakfast tomorrow morning.”

“Make it lunch,” Jessie said, “and it's a date … I admit I'm a little nervous about tomorrow, Richard. Maybe having to shake the hand that pressed the pillow over Michael's little face …”

“Not much chance of that.”

“What do you mean? Finner said——”

“I know what Finner said,” he retorted. “That guff about getting them down to his office Saturday was a stall. Finner wants time to put the screws on them, see what information he can squeeze out of them.”

“But if he doesn't produce them tomorrow——”

“He'll either produce them or he'll produce their names. In the end, A. Burt Finner will protect A. Burt Finner. What time tomorrow, Jessie?”

“Make it one-ish.”

“That late?” He sounded dismayed.

“Why, your appointment isn't until four o'clock. How many hours do you usually take for lunch?”

He hung up, feeling deserted. He had spent most of the day down at Centre Street, wandering into the Squad Room, leafing through recent copies of
General Orders
to see who had been cited, commended, promoted—gabbing with old cronies in the Central Office bureaus and squads in the Annex at the corner of Broome Street. They had been glad to see him, but he had come away miserable. Friday was the working officer's busiest day of the week, and he had had the sickening feeling that he was in the way.

The Queen apartment was no sanctuary. It seemed to him dull and empty.

What did men on the shelf
do
with their days and nights? the old man wondered. How many newspapers could you read? How many movies could you see? How many hours could you spend on a Central Park bench watching cooing humans and pigeons? How long could you hang around men you'd worked with who were still active, before you got into their hair and they began to show it?

Richard Queen went to bed Friday night at a quarter past nine, wishing fiercely it were four o'clock Saturday afternoon.

He muttered: “Now I don't know what I'm going to run into. You remember what I told you.”

“But
why
can't I go in with you, Richard?” Jessie whispered.

“We're tangling with a lot of unknowns. The chances are Finner's in there all alone, but a detective's life is full of surprises.”

“I'm some assistant,” she said disconsolately.

“You listen to me, Jessie. I'll go in and you'll wait here at the end of the hall. Keep the cage slide open so the elevator can't get away from you, just in case. If I think it's all right, I'll signal you from the doorway. Otherwise stay out of sight. If you hear anything that sounds like trouble, get out quick.”

“You just watch me!”

“You hear me, Jessie?”

“You'd better go.”

“You won't forget?” He looked up the corridor. “If you got hurt, Jessie, I'd never forgive myself.”

“Funny,” Jessie said with a shaky laugh. “I was just thinking the same thing.”

He stared at her. Then he grinned, pressed her hand, and walked quickly up the hall.

She saw him stop before 622, put his ear to the door. After a moment he straightened and knocked. He immediately tried the door. It gave, and he went in.

The door did not close at once.

But then, suddenly, it did.

The office building made a pocket of silence in the noisy world.

The door stayed closed.

Now don't be a goop, Jessie told herself. This is the kind of thing he's done all his life. He couldn't have become a veteran police officer without learning how to handle violence. Anyway, there's nothing to be afraid of. The fat man is certainly harmless; he'd run like a rabbit rather than risk his skin. The other … the others, whoever they are … they're probably more scared right now than I am.

But her heart kept galloping.

He'd been so awkwardly high-spirited when he called for her at Gloria's, and over lunch. Like a boy on a heavy date. And looking so spruce. He'd pressed his suit and his tan-and-white shoes gleamed. And he'd shown up with a corsage of mignonette for her.

“The florist thought I was crazy,” he had said, embarrassed. “Seems nobody buys mignonette for corsages any more. But I remember how my wife used to love it …”

She had not had the heart to tell him that the greenish mignonette was just the wrong thing for the green linen suit she was wearing. Or that a woman wasn't necessarily thrilled by being given flowers loved by a dead wife, even one dead thirty years. She had exclaimed over the corsage while pinning it on, and then she had gone into Gloria's bedroom and changed her hat, with which the mignonette clashed, too.

The trouble is, Jessie thought, it isn't really me. It's just that he's rediscovered the world of women.

In the solitude of Gloria Sardella's two disordered rooms yesterday, the dismal thought had come to her like a headache. Any woman could have done it. Any woman could still do it. Any other woman …

What was going on in there?

Jessie strained. But she could hear nothing except the tumult of the 49th Street traffic.

She had spent a miserable day and night examining herself. How could she have maneuvered herself into a sublet apartment in New York … New York, which she loathed! … into an adventure with a man she hardly knew? And that call from Belle Berman—“What's this I hear about you and some
man
, Jessie?” Gloria, of course, who had met him Thursday after the visit to Finner's office. And Gloria's probing afterward … Endlessly Jessie had debated phoning him to say it was all a mistake, they were both too old for this sort of thing, let's part good friends and I'll go back to my bedpans and catheters and you to sunning yourself on a beach …

Oh, I oughtn't to be here! Jessie told herself. I ought to be coming onto a maternity case, checking the chart, being oh so cheery to Mrs. Jones, wondering if my feet will hold out till the midnight relief while she yakkety-yaks about her nine hours of labor and how she'll make that husband of hers pay through the nose for what she's been through …

He was in the hall
.

Jessie started. She hadn't even heard the door of 622 open.

He was standing in the hall and he was beckoning to her.

Jessie hurried to him.

He was all tightened up, careful. His eyes had a tight careful look, too. He had the door open no more than an inch, his hand on the knob holding it that way.

“Yes, Richard?” Jessie whispered breathlessly. “It's all right for me to go in?”

“That depends on you, Jessie.” Even his voice was on the alert. “On how much you can take.”

“What? Isn't Finner in there?”

“He's in there, all right. He's dead.”

3.

AND THEN THE LOVER

The fat man looked different dead. He looked like a jumbo balloon with the air leaking out. He was wedged in the swivel chair, head flopped over, flippers dangling. The chair was half turned from the desk, as if he had been struggling to get up. His whole left side was soaked with blood.

The metal handle of a knife stuck out of his chest. Jessie recognized it as the handle of the steel letter-knife she had seen on his desk Thursday.

“Stay where you are, Jessie,” Inspector Queen said. He had shut the door. “And hold your purse with both hands. That'll keep them out of trouble. You don't have to look at him.”

“I've seen a homicide case or two in my time,” Jessie said. She was holding on to her purse for dear life.

“Good girl.”

He went around the desk, looked under it, rose, looked out the window.

“It's a cinch nobody saw anything.” The vista from the window was a tall blank wall, the rear of a photoelectric plant on the next street.

“Key-ring on the floor behind the desk. Torn from loop on his pants. Key still in the lock of the filing cabinet. Somebody was in a hurry, Jessie. But careful, careful.”

“Maybe we ought to——”

“Don't move from that spot.”

Forty-eight hours ago the fat man had been sitting in that same chair, wearing the same suit and a shirt just as gray with damp, and now it was half-dyed with his heart's blood and he looked like nothing so much as a Macy's Thanksgiving Day balloon with the paint running and a knife stuck in it. So there would be no more under-the-counter arrangements for babies, and the unmarried mothers would have to seek elsewhere. And how many satisfied customers would read about the fat man and look at their wives or husbands and clutch their purchases tight? And would Mrs. A. Burt Finner erect a headstone saying HUSBAND AND FATHER and weep for the vanished provider? And how many nightclub girls would shed a blackened tear over the baby-made five-dollar bills that would invade their nylons no more?

Jessie stifled an impulse to laugh.

The Inspector wrapped a handkerchief around his right hand and went to the swivel chair again and leaned over Finner. When he drew up straight there was a wallet in his swathed hand. He flicked it open.

“Crammed with bills, Jessie.”

He put the wallet back as carefully as he had taken it out.

“Not robbery.” Jessie's voice was as tight as his had been.

“No.”

He looked over the top of the desk. There was an afternoon newspaper folded back to the sports section, a well-pen, a telephone with a memorandum pad clipped to it, a pack of filter cigarets almost empty, a pocket lighter, and a cheap glass ash tray with chipped corners. The ash tray was filled with half-smoked butts and ashes. The old man squatted to desk level and squinted along the surface of the memo pad. Then he turned some of the butts in the tray over with one fingernail.

“Nothing written on a torn-off sheet of pad. No lipstick on any of the butts. And the basket under the desk is empty except for an empty cigaret pack, same brand as this one. All Finner's. This was a cool operator, Jessie. Clue-conscious.”

“How about the desk drawers?” Jessie wet her lips.

He grinned. “I'll leave those to Homicide. Finner wouldn't have kept anything in this desk. No locks on the drawers.” He glanced at her. “Just at a guess, Jessie—seeing that you're in the respectable branch of this business—how long would you say he's been dead?”

“That's very hard to say.”

“Say it anyway.”

“It's a hot day. The window is shut … At the least, I'd have to touch him.”

“Without touching him.”

“I've handled dead bodies, Richard. I'll do it.”

“Without touching him.”

“Not long.” Jessie considered. “From the appearance of the blood maybe an hour. I don't know. I could be way off.”

He placed the back of his left hand lightly against the dead man's cheek, nodded. Then he went over to the filing cabinet and tugged at the handle of the top drawer. The drawer slid out with a rasp that made Jessie's teeth ache.

The drawer contained file envelopes with identifying plastic tab holders containing white slips of cardboard on which names had been hand-printed in red ink. The first envelope in the drawer was marked
ABRAMSON,
the last
DUFFY.
He shut the top drawer and opened the drawer below it. The file envelopes were separated slightly about two-thirds of the way in. The tab on the exposed envelope said
HYAMS.
The tab on the envelope immediately preceding it said
HUGHES.

There was no envelope in between.

“No Humffrey,” Richard Queen said softly.

“Maybe the names on the tabs are of the mother,” Jessie mumbled. “Not the adopter.”

He looked at her. “You're a smart woman, Jessie.” He checked a file at random, using his swathed hand. “However, you're wrong. The names are of the adopters.”

He replaced the file and ran his eye over all the tabs on the envelopes. He shut the drawer and checked the tabs of the third drawer, then of the bottom one.

He shut the bottom drawer and rose.

“No doubt about it, Jessie. Finner's kill is tied in with the Connecticut case. Finner used our Thursday visit to try to screw some inside information about Michael's death out of one or both of the real parents. So they've shut his mouth about the parentage and walked off with the whole file on the case. Finner probably was the only outsider who knew at least who the mother was, the hospital Michael was born in, and every other fact that might have led to an identification.”

“The same one who murdered the baby,” Jessie said slowly. “That means we're on the right track.”

“We're stranded on a siding in Podunk,” Richard Queen said grimly. “With the contents of that envelope destroyed we're at another dead end. The question is, where do we go from here?”