The Body Looks Familiar (4 page)

EVENING PAPERS UNDER HIS ARM, Dave Corday went past the bowing doorman and into the Zebra House Bar. This was not the regular nightclub but a big anteroom off it; at night it was mostly used by people waiting for tables, but from five to seven it was a prosperous cocktail lounge.

The cocktail maitre d’ bowed low. “A table, Mr. Corday? We don’t often get honored this way.”

“Yes, I’d like a table, Ernest. Small one will do. I’m not expecting anyone.”

Palmer was not in sight, neither was Jim Latson. Dave Corday, a man not given to public drinking, had not changed his tastes; he was there to watch Latson squirm. It was an absolute certainty that the chief would show here, wanting to find out as soon as possible what Ronald Palmer was asking for his silence.

Hating Latson as he did, Corday still had a twinge of sympathy for him. They were both public figures, politicians in a sense, and blackmailers were, of all criminals, the only ones they feared.

Ernest himself brought the Bloody Mary Corday had ordered. He sipped it, looked at the paper. It would be something if the case against Ralph Guild stood up. One for the books.

He skimmed the stories in the big
News-Journal,
the tabloid
Tribune,
the conservative
World
and the reformer
Record.
It was a rare thing for the city’s papers to all be in agreement on anything. But this time they were: Ralph Guild was guilty.

The
Record,
trying for an angle, had a front-page editorial suggesting that room service men be licensed by the police, as hack drivers were. The
Trib
practically said that Hogan DeLisle—nobody used her real name—had been raped before she was shot.

His lawyer’s mind automatically went over that story a second time. They were smart at the
Tribune;
when you first read their stories, you thought you saw grounds for a libel suit; but they were masters of the alleged-possible-no-statement kind of writing.

Dave Corday wondered if there were courses in that kind of work in journalism school.

And this took him back to his own school days, the bitter days of his undergraduate life, when he had washed dishes and worked a laundry route to get through; the almost as hard times when, a G.I., he and Elsa had lived in part of a Quonset hut while the Veterans’ Administration helped him get his law degree.

Stop crying, Corday, he told himself. Those times weren’t so horrible. Elsa was wonderful, for one thing; she’d gotten jobs to augment the hundred and a quarter a month the government had allowed them; she’d cooked spaghetti and hamburger forty-one different ways—they had counted once—to keep them fed tastily and cheaply—she’d never complained.

What had gone wrong? At what step in their lives had he written a brief when he should have admired a new dress, said no when he should have said yes, done something when he should have done nothing?

There had been no big fight between him and Elsa. Just all at once, they were miles apart, drifted, and she was leaving him for Jim Latson. He remembered at the time thinking that Latson was a fool; no woman was worth what a divorce would cost the chief—

But there’d been no divorce. Instead, there had been a new girl for Jim Latson, a girl called Hogan DeLisle—ridiculous!—and Elsa had gone out of town, to die on Kansas City’s Skid Row.

She called me, Dave Corday thought. I couldn’t take her back—I’d have been laughed out of politics for that—but I should have helped her. With money, maybe—

And there was Jim Latson. His long legs carried him into the bar as they carried him every place; a man going where he was going on purpose. There was no accident in Jim Latson’s life. He controlled it, himself, and the people around him.

Dave Corday suppressed a grin. Life had caught up with Jim Latson. Oh, how it had caught up with him. Sooner or later all those little bits of evidence were going to come to light; the ballistics report on the gun should start it. You couldn’t tamper with those records; city regulations—put in by Latson himself—required all sworn personnel in the department to register their guns with the FBI.

Latson had seen him, was hard-heeling toward him, smiling. But, as he approached, Corday ticked off the case against him.

One, the bullets. Two, Latson’s fingerprints all over the DeLisle apartment (Latson had tried to cover that by frankly admitting that he had “dated” DeLisle). Three, the cruiser log placing Latson within six blocks of the Belmont at the time of the murder. Four—

“Hi, Dave! Ernest, a martini and a dividend for me, and another one of those things for Mr. Corday.”

“Yes, Chief Latson. If you’re through with those papers, Mr. Corday, I could remove them.”

“I’m through, Ernest. And switch me to a Tom Collins; I’ve had my vitamins.”

Ernest’s teeth were the whitest any man ever owned; his hair the smoothest. He gathered up the four papers, and was gone like a genie.

“I hate waiters,” Jim Latson said. “Always make me feel I should have changed my shirt.”

“You’re about to get your revenge on the Waiters’ and Stewards’ Union,” Corday said.

Latson laughed, his easy, thumb-on-the-world laugh. “Guild? That case is shaping up nicely. We got one setback: negative on the paraffin test. But I got a statement from the food checker at the Belmont; one of her duties was to see that no waiter left the kitchen without having his white gloves on. So we dug around, and there, by golly, were a pair of white gloves behind a garbage can; whataya know?”

“Paraffin positive,” Corday said. “And done without my crystal ball. I’ll bet I can tell you where you were this afternoon. Answer: the pistol range.”

“Yep,” Latson said. “Sure. Departmental regulation one-one-seven thirty-two: all officers will carry gun and badge at all times, on and off duty; one-one-seven thirty-three: each officer of the department will fire eighteen rounds of ammunition per month on the Police Club range, said ammunition to be paid for by the officer firing; and in the event that the score for said rounds shall average less than seventy, PPC standards, an immediate report shall be made to the Personnel Bureau, which will take steps to see that the officer firing this—”

Corday interrupted rudely: “That’s enough, Latson, that’s enough. You’re God’s great cop, aren’t you? You can recite the manual backwards, fire a hundred target, PPC, repair a police radio, take lab tests and—” he paused, swallowing, “and frame waiters.”

“What are you sore about?” Latson asked mildly. “You swung and you missed. Result—I’m building you up a case that’ll probably get you elected D.A. next term. Smith tells me he’s stepping up, the party likes him for governor… Ernest, if you’d let your hair grow, I’d marry you.”

The maitre d’ was setting up for a ceremony as intricate as a voodoo rite. In front of Jim Latson he placed a glass holding an ice cube; off to one side was a martini mixer, with the long glass stirrer cocked at its most alluring angle; on a little plate covered with a glass dome were two pimento-stuffed olives, two anchovy-stuffed olives, and two pickled onions.

Now Ernest dumped the ice cube into a little bucket, placed the bucket on the floor. He wiped the chilled glass with a spotless napkin, placed it back in front of Latson, gave the cocktail two slow stirs, and lifted the glass dome.

This was the time for a breathless pause; Ernest was duly breathless as his eyebrows raised at Jim Latson. The chief gravely pointed a little finger at one of the onions, and Ernest breathed again, the crisis past.

The onion went in the glass, was drowned in the almost colorless cocktail, and again the maitre d’ lost his breath. Jim Latson gravely lifted the glass, sipped, and smiled.

Ernest breathed, placed Corday’s Tom Collins in front of him briskly, removed the tomato-stained glass, and was gone.

Dave Corday gave a disgusted grunt.

“I still hate waiters,” Jim Latson said. “But I’m a guy believes in spreading sunshine as I go. You came here to watch Palmer blackmail me, didn’t you?”

Corday’s stomach knotted. Jim Latson was, at one time, all the things he hated most in the world. The ease with which the cop had gotten to the top of the department, the careless grace Latson showed with women, the social expertness with waiters, college professors, businessmen—they were all the things Dave Corday did not have and knew now he would never have. He said, “Yes. I wanted to see you suffer.”

Jim Latson laughed. “By the way, Dave, I have a little bad news for you. You know McCray, that con-man who’s out on bail? The case on him has fallen apart. Lack of clear identification. I’m sorry.”

Corday had been about to take a swallow of his Tom Collins. He set the glass down with a click. “McCray? That was Donald Munroe’s nephew he conned. I promised Mr. Monroe we’d send him away for ten years, make him pay the nephew back and—” He stopped, sick.

Jim Latson said, “Now, if I’d known that—Why, Dave, as I understand it, Mr. Munroe got you into the D.A.’s office in the first place… He’s about all the sponsor you have in politics, isn’t he? Why, that’s too bad.”

Dave Corday felt the blood pushing at his eyes. “Too bad? Too bad? He’s kicked in to the party funds every time I’ve asked him. You—”

Jim Latson laughed. “Take it easy, Dave. Drink your drink.”

Dave Corday gulped at the glass unhappily, then flushed as he realized he’d taken an order from Jim Latson.

Jim Latson said easily, “Don’t let it worry you. If you get a conviction on Guild, you’ll be made, a famous man; you won’t need a sponsor. There’ll be dozens of men waiting to back you for any office you want to run.”

Dave Corday was reminding himself of his training, his practice in thinking on his feet. He said calmly—though he didn’t feel calm—“You didn’t just do this to get me in trouble with Donald Munroe.”

“I didn’t do it at all,” Jim Latson said. “I’m a cop; I like to get convictions. But McCray’s lawyer, Steve Sigel, was too smart for me.”

Corday set down his glass so hard that some of the drink splashed over the top, though he’d drunk more than half of it. “Steve Sigel! That’s it. He’s lawyer for the syndicate, isn’t he? I wouldn’t doubt he was more than counsel, a big owner—”

“Easy, boy, you’re in a syndicate bar. They don’t like to be talked about.”

“They wouldn’t like one of their nightclub operators, Ronald Palmer, testifying against a man who’d done Steve Sigel a big favor, would they?”

“It must be wonderful to go to law school,” Jim Latson said. “How they train you! Everything comes out easy for a boy with a good education. Me, a little high school, and I was on my own. Yep. A little favor for the syndicate, and they’d make hamburger of one of their men who annoyed me—such as Mr. Palmer. After all, all he’s doing is saving me newspaper embarrassment. Since Guild is guilty, it doesn’t occur to Palmer that he’s withholding pertinent information in a murder case, thereby laying himself open to a charge of accessory after the fact, a serious felony. He’s just—”

Dave Corday slapped the table, but neither glass was now full enough to slop over; all he did was make a sharp sound that caused heads to turn at a couple of tables. “And at the same time, you louse me up with my sponsor.”

“Two birds with one stone,” Jim Latson said cheerfully. “My, that’s a pretty girl there.”

Despite himself, Corday looked. The girl was auburn-haired, and it looked natural. Dark blue eyes and a milkmaid complexion gave an overall Irish look. He said, “This isn’t the time or place to discuss girls. You killed Hogan DeLisle and, brother, you are not going to get away with it.”

Jim Latson suddenly dropped his light manner. “You really believe that, don’t you? But you killed her, pal. And she was my girl. And cops don’t take to having their girls killed. It wounds their
amour propre—
French phrase, meaning love of self—I may not have gone to college, but I read. It would hurt the party to hurt you, and I know enough to keep my friends in office. It saves you—You know something? The couple with that gal are Tommy Beale and his wife. He runs a small cab line. Whatya bet he’d be flattered if the deputy chief of police stopped by?”

Dave Corday said. “Your girl’s hardly cold, and you’re looking for another.”

“Ah, she’s cold enough now,” Jim Latson said. “You son-of-a-bitch.” He picked up his martini pitcher and his empty glass, and strolled toward the red-headed girl’s table.

BALLISTICS CAME IN FIRST. Dave Corday hardly had his mail in front of him when police headquarters called: Ballistics had the murder gun, had fired slugs out of it, and it matched.

Corday had trouble keeping his voice steady. This was it. This was the payoff. There was no way Jim Latson could get out of this one; the slugs would lead right to his registered gun. He said, “Where’d you find the gun?”

The lab officer over at headquarters said, “Routine. We asked all city workers to keep an eye open. A sewer inspector found it under a manhole on Fifth Street. No fingerprints, of course.”

“Serial number?”

“For what it’s worth. It’s a Skoda, they’re reasonably rare, but a lot of G.I.’s smuggled them home as souvenirs. It’s never been registered in this country, that we can find out. Of course, some states don’t have registration, and some are slow reporting to Washington.”

Corday leaned forward till the edge of his desk cut into his belly. “But it’s never been registered in this state?”

The ballistics man was probably thinking that the D.A. was a little slow this morning. He said, “That’s right, sir.”

Dave Corday said, “How about fingerprints from the apartment? I know, don’t tell me; they’ve gone to the FBI for a quick check. How about a long distance call to them? This office will pay for it.”

An unmistakable political tone came into the ballistics man’s voice. “I’m pretty sure Chief Latson phoned them this morning.”

It was barely nine o’clock. Jim Latson must be sweating to be on deck that early. Corday grinned, but not with too much gusto, and said, “Switch me to him.”

The phone clicked noisily, and Dave Corday held it away from his ear. When Jim Latson’s voice came on, saying, “Deputy Chief Latson,” he was oily. “Jim, it’s fine about the gun, isn’t it?”

“Fine?” Latson asked.

“Yep,” Dave Corday said. “It’s a Skoda. That’s a Czecho-Slovakian make, and our man is a Czech; it’s all closing in. Your man said you’d called the FBI lab about the fingerprints. Do they make them?”

“I’m sorry as hell,” Jim Latson said. “Dave, old boy, I don’t know how to tell you—we botched that. Not that we can’t straighten it out, but it makes the report a little long; they’re sending it on by collect day-letter. What happened was a whole batch of our personnel prints got in with the ones from the DeLisle flat; but I can tell you this…”

He went on. But Corday wasn’t listening. A cinch. A lead pipe cinch. Latson had fired the gun—probably one he’d palmed from an arrest, or maybe even one he’d had since the war—at the range, so it would look used.

Then all he had to do was get it down a manhole.

Dave Corday felt his legally trained mind take hold of the facts, start aligning them. It was a process he always enjoyed; as a boy, he had not been a very clear thinker; he had been inclined to daydream, and to leave out—as gaps in his daydream—all the difficult process of thought and reality.

So he knew that logical thinking was a thing he had bought, and bought hard, at law school.

The gun was not registered and the fingerprints were so confused that they would do no good; not only Latson’s were on the FBI report, but those of a half dozen other police officers who could not possibly be tied into the case.

Those were the facts; the lawyer’s mind deduced from them that the first fact, the gun fact or set of facts, was luck: Latson luck. Many a police officer keeps several guns: souvenirs of dangerous arrests, gifts from other peace officers, souvenirs of shooting matches. Latson had been wearing one of these, a light pistol, a Skoda, and he had probably been wearing it for no other reason than that its size would not bulk out his evening clothes. And Latson would be the last police officer in the world to take seriously the rule that all guns must be registered; Latson considered the law his servant and not his employer.

So much for that. The fingerprints were not luck. It had been Jim Latson, and no one else, who had messed up the mailing of the prints from DeLisle’s apartment.

Of course, if Dave Corday insisted, he could take over the return from the FBI and distinguish between Personnel Department photostats and those from the Homicide Squad camera… But he would have to warn Latson he was going to do that, and give the policeman plenty of time to botch up things better.

Latson was talking, had been talking. “You’ll have to ride this case out without fingerprints, Dave. One thing the Washington report does show: Guild was not among the prints. Some weirdies were, though, including a couple of telephone operators and the reports clerk out at the Park Precinct.”

Dave Corday reminded himself that he was a trained lawyer. The Guild case was a case. He said, “What a botch. Well, as you say, fingerprints hardly apply; he wore gloves.” He strengthened it: “He always wore gloves. We’ve got the checker’s word for that; room waiters had to put on white gloves before leaving the kitchen. Always.”

“Yeah,” Latson said slowly, “but we’d better soft pedal the sex angle. With gloves on, Dave? Bizarre, but unlikely.” His chuckle was genial.

Dave Corday managed a chuckle in return. “I see what you mean,” he said “The
Trib
would call her ‘The Immaculate Call Girl.’”

“It’s better with your shoes off,” Jim said, going on with the gag.

“Well, nothing’s happened to weaken our case, and that’s the big thing. Want to meet me at county jail, and we’ll talk to Guild together?”

“Sure, Dave, sure.”

Corday hung up and leaned back. It looked very much as though Ralph Guild was in for it… Well, a thief was a thief. He shouldn’t have taken the necklace. And that he’d done; people don’t give waiters a fifty-dollar piece of jewelry, and if they do, the waiter sells it for cash.

He glanced at the desk clock. Almost ten. A hell of a lot of paper work to catch up on before he met Jim Latson…

He found himself wondering how Latson had made out with the auburn-haired girl last night. What a guy…

Then, as his mind faded into his work, he forgot all about Latson. Once he was suddenly stabbed with a chilling, paralyzing feeling of loss that made his mind refuse to absorb the words he was reading.

He pushed back in his swivel chair, and realized that he was sad because Elsa was dead; he would never see her familiar walk come striding around a corner, never have her come back and tell him she was wrong, she should never have left him.

It was a good thing she was dead, he told himself. He would have made a fool of himself and taken her back. His position, his rise in life had cost him too much for him to throw it away doing a thing like that. He couldn’t afford to be laughed at, not ever. He had thought of that when she called him, and then it had been too late; he had no number to call back once he had hung up.

He shook his head and dived back into the papers carefully—conscientiously reading the reports from his subordinates, carefully and conscientiously passing up short summaries to the district attorney himself, his only superior.

At exactly five minutes of eleven, he pressed the button for his car, stood up, took a quick look in the little mirror in his breast pocket, and walked briskly but not hurriedly out to the car.

He did not carry any papers because he thought that officials who did paper work in the streets gave the appearance of being eager beavers. Bad.

But he did let his chauffeur—a patrolman assigned to the D.A.’s office—drive. There was no use in wasting his energy.

The driver put the car through the gate that said
Police Cars Only,
and parked in one of the four stalls reserved for the district attorney’s office. This put him right next to the press parking, and so he ran into Harry Weber of the
News-Journal
just coming out of the back entrance of the jail, lighting a cigarette and looking pleased.

The press was important; Dave Corday said, “Hi, Harry! How’s it going?”

“Dandy, Mr. Corday. Just fine.”

“You were with Cap Martin when they brought in Ralph Guild, weren’t you?” He watched, and he thought Harry Weber’s face changed; but the reporter didn’t ask him for a statement. Corday gave it anyway: “We’re going to hang that man, Harry.”

This brought a reaction. Harry Weber reached for the folded copy paper and the pencil: “Any developments, D.A.?”

“We have found the murder weapon.”

The reporter scribbled something without taking his eyes off Corday’s face. “Where?”

“In a manhole on Fifth Street.”

Weber said, “And it ties in with Ralph Guild?”

Corday cleared his throat and hated himself for doing it. It sounded like an old-time, Phogbound type of politician. “It is a Skoda, which is a Czecho-Slovakian make. Guild has confessed to being a Czech.”

“Want to give me a statement on that? If the gun had been a Luger, the murderer would have been German; Webley, English; Colt, a horse?”

Dave Corday felt his face reddening. “Of course I won’t give you any statement like that!”

Another car was pulling into the courtyard. Out of the corner of his eye, Dave Corday saw with relief that it was Jim Latson’s car. He needed reinforcements badly.

Harry Weber said, “Well, then, how about a statement that the gun doesn’t tie into Ralph Guild at all.”

“He’s a Czech!” Corday said.

“Which is of what significance in this case?”

“The gun is Czech, too. Surely—”

“Czech, Spanish, and Belgian pistols are the rule down on Skid Row,” Harry said. “Because they’re cheap.”

Corday’s temper slipped. He had been told in law school that that was the one thing no lawyer should ever indulge himself in: uncontrolled and uncalculated anger. “Young man, you can’t badger me!”

Jim Latson, followed by his patrolman-secretary, had ambled up. “Sounds like he’s doing it, Dave, old boy. Hi, Harry. Getting plenty?”

Harry Weber’s face lost that taunting grin. “Hello, Chief.”

And there it was again. Dave Corday was entitled to be called Chief, but no one ever gave him the courtesy; after all, he was Chief Deputy of the District Attorney’s office. It was a job calling for education, experience, tact, brains. Really, he rated higher than anybody in the police department; but no one ever thought so. The minute Latson appeared any place, any time, everyone turned to him. But a district attorney rated much higher.

“I’m just trying to get a howgozit on the Guild case,” Harry said.

Jim Latson said at once, “The District Attorney’s office is well satisfied that the department was justified in arresting Ralph Guild; but, mindful of his oath to protect the innocent as well as prosecute the guilty, Chief Deputy David Corday is not yet prepared to say that the evidence against Ralph Guild is complete.”

“You know I can’t turn that in, Chief,” Harry Weber said. “If I phoned that to the desk, they’d take the dime for the phone call out of my pay.”

“Okay,” Jim Latson said. “That’s what you get for heckling the D.A.’s office. If you’d been a good boy, you might have picked up a story. Come on, Dave.” And somehow he managed to leave Harry Weber unsatisfied but not angry. It was a pretty good trick.