It clicked in my ear. I hung up, slow motion, and sat for a moment. He was being picturesque himself. Either he intended to dig in and work on it, in which case he should have insisted on my coming home immediately to help, or he did not intend to, in which case he should have beefed about my fraternizing with our ancient enemies.
“You know,” I told Purley, “eccentrics are such interesting people.”
“Not to me,” he objected. “Every goddam murderer I’ve ever seen was an eccentric.”
By the time he had finished two full portions of fried clams with trimmings, two steins of ale, and two pieces of apple pie with cheese, I was fairly well caught up on the routine aspects. There had been no tails on any of them Thursday night, including Andy Fomos. Within five minutes after getting my phone call Purley had started twenty men checking on them, some by phone and some in person, covering everyone who had been at the meeting at Wolfe’s office, not excluding Nathaniel Parker. Though four of them, including Parker, apparently had alibis—still being investigated—no one was conclusively eliminated, and no one was conclusively indicated.
On that Purley had a comment. When I got the phone call from Sarah Jaffee, if I had called Purley at once, and if he had jumped on it and had not only sent a man to Eightieth Street but had also immediately started the check on all concerned, we would now have the strangler. I agreed—but, I asked, if I had called him at once, would he have jumped on it; and he had to admit he wouldn’t, chiefly because there was no known motive for any of them to kill Sarah Jaffee. Even if I had told him about the threat of Sarah’s applying for an injunction, it would be stretching it thin to suppose one of them would murder her for that.
As for the alibis, whether they stood up or not, the law felt the same as Wolfe when he told Viola Duday that while she might not have committed the crimes there was no reason why she shouldn’t have contrived them. Purley said they had twenty-six men, the ones best qualified for that chore, trying to find a connection between one of the suspects and a death jobber. It was simpler in a way, but also harder in a way, because they were after a strangler, not a gunman.
They hadn’t found a hackie who had taken a fare, between midnight and 1:45, to the address on East Eightieth or the immediate neighborhood, or from there after two o’clock. They were still looking, but the chances were slim. There was a subway station only three blocks away.
The name of the night man was William Fisler. My appraisal had been sound; he was a dope. At first he had maintained that from 12:30 to 1:45, the period during which the murderer must have got in and up to the apartment, he had been right on the job every minute, on guard near the front entrance, except for a couple of elevator trips with known tenants; but when he realized that if he stuck to that he was allowing the murderer, for entry to the building and the stairs, only the times of the brief elevator trips, he did a full flop and practically stated that he had been so busy downstairs with sandwiches and coffee that he had hardly seen the front entrance at all. His position was approximately the same for the period from 1:58 to 2:23, during which the murderer must have descended the stairs and made his exit to the sidewalk, and on away. He did admit that around a quarter to two he had been out on the sidewalk with the door to the building standing open, because he had to; Sarah’s statement to me on the phone that that had been the situation when she and Parker arrived in a taxi had been corroborated by Parker.
Parker’s alibi was airtight. Sarah had told me that he had not entered the building with her; the night man verified it; and the taxi driver, who of course had been found, and who had taken Parker on home, had testified likewise.
The murder itself presented no problem. Having got himself in, the murderer had selected the bronze tiger and the Venetian blind cord as the proper tools, and concealed himself in the closet. If his plan had been to attack her at once when she entered, he had been forced to abandon it by the fact that the night man was there, letting her in. She had gone at once to the phone in the living room to call me, and of course that was no place for an act of violence, by a phone with the line open. When he heard her steps coming to the foyer, either he didn’t know she had left the line open, or he couldn’t resist so near a target, or he was afraid she was going outside; anyway, he struck. That done, he left, took the stairs down, and either found the main hall deserted and went out that way, or continued down to the basement and departed by the service alley.
No fingerprints found in the apartment had been those of any of the suspects. There had been none on the bronze tiger, and none on the knob of the closet door.
They were hunting a motive. Whereas with Priscilla Eads the motive had been as plain as the nose on a face, and fitted all five faces, with Sarah Jaffee there was none at all. For one of them to kill her, or have her killed, on account of the threatened injunction would have been batty, and none of those five was anywhere near batty. So finding a motive for any one of them would have been a big help, and that was a major objective of the supplementary questioning. Two of the five hours Cramer had spent with Helmar, me present, had been devoted to a thorough and fine-tooth review of his association with Sarah Jaffee from the beginning to the end.
Purley unquestionably briefed me. It didn’t look as if he was holding anything back, and I was touched. Therefore, when the waiter brought the check and he insisted on splitting it, and during the debate he made a crack about city dicks not starving, I made it a point of honor because I got what was eating him. He knew that my take-home pay, considering that my home was with Wolfe, was at least four times his, and he wasn’t going to sponge fried clams off of any goddam plutocrat. So I had to tell him I had invited him and my honor was at stake.
We parted outside, him going west and me heading for Leonard Street. I had my pick of Fomos or Pitkin, and on the way I voted for Pitkin.
Chapter XV
At five o’clock Saturday morning I sat in a room at Leonard Street, reading papers from a folder. Pitkin had been sent home half an hour previously, from another room. This was the room where all reports and documents bearing on the three stranglings, either originals or copies, were being collected and held, and the report I was reading was about the movements of Jay Brucker during the rest of Thursday night after he left the meeting at Wolfe’s office. The correctness of some of his statements seemed to be in question, and I was trying to find a basis of an opinion on whether, instead of going home to Brooklyn as he claimed, he had actually gone to Sarah Jaffee’s apartment on Eightieth Street or to Daphne O’Neil’s apartment on Fourth Street.
A voice said, “Hey, Goodwin, better knock off.”
An assistant DA and two clerks were in the room, sorting and arranging the papers and folders, and the voice was the assistant DA’s. I yanked myself up. I had been two-thirds asleep. It was silly to pretend I could sit there and read.
“There’s a room down the hall with a couch,” one of them said, “and no one will be in it today. It’s Saturday.”
I would have given a million dollars to be on a couch, so I decided against it. I arose, announced that I was going for a walk and would be back before long, and beat it emerging from the building to the sidewalk, I got a shock—it was daylight. Dawn had come, and that helped to wake me and changed my outlook. I stood at the curb, and when a taxi loomed before long, headed uptown, I flagged it and gave the driver the address I knew best.
At that time of day we had Manhattan all to ourselves. West Thirty-fifth was empty too as I paid the hackie and climbed out. Since the chain bolt would of course be on the front door, instead of mounting the stoop I went down the four steps to the area door and pushed the button. It buzzed in the kitchen and Fritz’s room. There were sounds from within, a door opening and footsteps, and Fritz gave me a look through the peep-glass and then opened up.