False Negative (Hard Case Crime) (6 page)

“Give it a shot.”

Day hesitated before opening his door and letting Jordan in ahead of him. “The victim was ID’d by her husband.”

“What took him?”

“The couple had stopped living together, but they talked several times a week. When he couldn’t reach her, he went to her place on North Carolina Avenue.”

It was good information that Jordan didn’t think he’d have gotten at the restaurant. He looked at Day as though Day was wasting his time.

“The papers were on the doorstep...the mailbox was full... he let himself in, but didn’t see anything out of the ordinary... till he noticed the drawing of the dead girl in the
Press
.”

The pauses were becoming longer, invitations for Jordan to pick up his marbles and go. He pulled up a chair. “The husband have a first name?”

“In a few days I’ll call back all the reporters for another heads-up.”

“All of us are here now,” Jordan said. “Van Pelt was pinch-hitting.”

Day gave him a sour look. Jordan decided that van Pelt was entitled to part.

“Susannah Chase’s husband is Hub Chase.”

“Should I know him?”

“He does some pinch-hitting, too. For the Newark Bears. He’s an outfielder, a .300 hitter with some power.”

“You like him for killing her?”

Day shook his head.

“How come? The husband’s always guilty till proven innocent. Estranged husbands are the gold standard of homicide suspects.”

“He was with his club at the time of the murder.”

“This much I do know about minor league baseball,” Jordan said. “The season ended two months ago.”

“The Bears were barnstorming with the Havana Sugar Kings. Hub’s teammates, coaches, manager, a batboy, several batting practice pitchers, and about two hundred thousand fans will swear he was playing ball in Cuba while his wife was getting
herself strangled. He says he still loved her. If it’s okay with you, I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt.”

Jordan scribbled in his notebook. When he looked up, Day was watching the door.

“I talked to the Chase broad’s sister,” Riley said as he came in. “Nice piece of tail, but she doesn’t have anything we don’t—” His expression changed several times before settling on a sorry look that was entirely for Jordan. “What’s he doing here?”

“Don’t mind him,” Day said. “I’m tossing him a few bones.”

“Yeah, but why?”

“It’s the price for having him say nice things about us in the
Press
.”

“You won’t get much,” Riley said. “He doesn’t work there any more. You didn’t hear they canned him for making stuff up?”

Day’s hand slapped against his side. To Jordan it almost looked like he was going for his gun. Not to shoot the messenger.

“I’m covering the case for another publication,” Jordan said.

“What other?” Day said.

“It doesn’t make a difference. The story’s the same.”

“Don’t tell me what makes a difference to me,” Day said.

“
Real Detective
magazine.”

“Those rags don’t print anything real,” Riley said. “They’re whaddayacallit, fiction.”

“I’m just as careful with the facts.”

“What’s that worth?” Riley said.

“I’m not giving up on a good story because you don’t approve of the publication I work for.”

“A writer for one of those magazines came through right before the war,” Day said. “He picked a young cop’s brains on a big murder, and stiffed him for the pictures. It cost the cop his job, and I should know. He was my old man. Get out of my sight before I toss you in a cell.”

“This isn’t Russia. You can’t threaten me.”

“It is till I stand corrected. Who’s going to read me the First
Amendment riot act now that you don’t have the
Press
behind you? A fancypants New York editor?”

Jordan didn’t have answers but was ready to argue. Riley hauled him out of his seat with an arm bent behind his back, and he was waltzed down the corridor smoothly and without a lot of pain except when he struggled hard. Outside, in the fresh air, it didn’t seem like a bad argument to have lost.

Jordan swung back around Atlantic City for the road through the salt marshes to Brigantine. Summer’s grassy tangle had decayed into muck, and he lit up against the rotten egg smell. On the horizon, the picturesque Brigantine lighthouse, erected as a tourist draw, warned the new money toward Cape Cod and the east end of Long Island. Jordan, without money of any kind, shied away from the sticky bungalows thrown up in the pre-Depression boom and reshuffled by the mortgage companies ever since.

He kept the Hornet pointed down the center of oceanfront streets where the pavement showed beneath drifting sand. The Rusty Scupper, in the former Brigantine casino, looked to be a greasy spoon with airs. The stop sign at the corner was the best reason to stop. Half a dozen cars in back seemed too many for late November, made him wonder if everyone was looking into murder till the beaches opened.

He got as far as the cigarette machine before a woman poked her head out of the kitchen and said, “Sit anywhere, Hon.” He followed her back through the swinging doors while she looked at him as if he’d tied a handkerchief over his face and shown a gun. “Anywhere,” she said, “does not include here.”

Flashing his press card, something he never did when he was working on the paper, he felt like a high school kid buying beer with a phony license.

“I don’t suppose you’re the restaurant critic,” the woman said. She grabbed a Pyrex pot, and brought Jordan to the booth with the best lighthouse view. “I’m Horty Miller.”

Her hair was the color of the coffee she put in his cup as he
began adding cream. He couldn’t guess her age. She wasn’t old, a tired woman who had quit being young when she ran out of steam. She lit a Herbert Tareyton from his Lucky, and coughed trying to fill her lungs. “I was beginning to think no one gave a damn Suzie’s dead,” she said.

When he was a young reporter Jordan hated interviewing the friends of murder victims. Homicide’s collateral damage, they’d suffered enough without being laid bare. But most wanted to talk, to set the record straight about a loved one caught up in a horrific crime, or else to cry on the public’s shoulder. The others he peppered with questions sharpened in previous tragedies to elicit the heart-tugging narratives his readers demanded.

“Did you know Mrs. Chase well?”

“I’m sorry. Who?”

“I asked if you were good friends with Mrs.—”

“Are we talking about the same person?”

“How many Susannah Chases are there at the Rusty Scupper?”

“Ours wasn’t married.” Horty Miller puffed her cigarette, and waited for Jordan to admit his mistake.

Jordan didn’t make mistakes with questions. Those that went off-track brought answers that didn’t always make for the stories he tried for, but occasionally provided headlines. He tasted his coffee while he waited for another shoe to drop.

“She never told me about being married,” Horty said. “She was a bright girl, Suzie. You wouldn’t think she’d forget having a husband.”

“She was separated from Mr. Chase.”

Horty shook her head. “It wouldn’t have helped.”

“What wouldn’t?”

“Being separated. It’s a disqualifier right off the bat, beautiful as she was.”

“I don’t get you.”

“Suzie was in Atlantic City to be Miss America,” Horty said. “She was a former Miss Teenage Garden State and Miss
Monmouth County. The next step was Miss New Jersey. She wanted to be a dancer, or a flight attendant if that didn’t work out for her. Married women aren’t allowed into the pageant. If she was ever somebody’s wife, she didn’t mention it at Rusty’s.”

“She was working here to support herself while she competed in beauty contests?”

“She was learning to dance, to sing a little, to apply makeup and work on her posture and smile, what they call her presentation. Every waitress, hostess, counter girl, if she’s not too bad-looking, the restaurant’s just a second job.”

Jordan turned around in his seat.

“We’re out of beauty contest material at the moment,” Horty said. “Girls like those don’t fall off trees, you may have noticed. We’ve got a summer waitress studying shorthand, and two that are starting up a door-to-door skin care business. Suzie was our only Miss America candidate.”

“She never let on there might be a husband in the background?”

“Suzie had her share of admirers, and some she was more inclined toward than others. I’d have to see her husband to know she wasn’t passing him off as a good friend.”

“She had lots of good friends?”

“You saw how she looked.”

“Not before she died.”

“Her picture ran large in your paper,” Horty said. “A girl that looked like her, how bad could she be starving for men?”

“Who were they?”

“Think I kept tabs?”

Jordan shook his head, but said, “Let’s say you’d wanted to.”

“I’d take notice who picked her up after work, which would be mainly older gents in youngish clothes with promoter written all over them. The line formed on the left.”

These were not questions he would have asked working for the
Press
. They were scattershot, and produced answers that
weren’t useful to a news story. A homicide detective might lead with them. But Ed Pelfrey didn’t pay more for solving a case than for writing it from clips. Jordan didn’t know what he’d do with the information Horty Miller gave him, but he wanted to hear everything she knew.

“Did you get any names?”

“The state police, they didn’t bother here,” she said. “How come it’s a reporter doing all the asking?”

The question was as good as those he had for her. Her anger wasn’t for him. Not too much.

“I don’t know that Suzie got all their names, and some she did get, who’s to say how real they were? Miss America’s that kind of business. You get forty-eight...I almost forgot there’s some from the territories...you get that many gorgeous young girls together in their bathing suits that you can make a buck off of in addition to something else you might want from them, names get lost.”

“What do you remember of the last time you saw her?”

“I can’t tell you exactly what I did last night.” Horty poked a finger against the side of her head. “I’m sorry for not being more helpful. I figured when the reporters came, they’d want to know did she like good music and how many kids did she want. They wouldn’t need me to break the case.”

Jordan nodded. He hadn’t thought he’d have to solve the murder either.

“Was there one man in particular interested in her?” he said. “Did she sign with a manager, or tell you someone had made a proposition—a proposition to advance her career?”

“If there was, she kept it to herself.”

A girl with a soiled apron over her waitress outfit smiled at Jordan as she tapped Horty on the shoulder.

“We need you in back,” she said. “Now. One of the ovens keeps flaming out, and Pasquale, he’s ready to quit on the spot.”

Jordan sipped his coffee. Horty Miller was wrong about the Rusty Scupper’s staff. The girl had his vote for Miss Congeniality.

“Got to go,” Horty said to him. “If you want to talk more, come around any time in the next thirty years.”

“Thank you for your help, Miss Miller.”

“It’s Mrs. Miller,” she said. “I got made a proposition once, too, to advance my career.”

Always in Jordan’s mind were the things he planned to do if he ever found time. Now the time was his, and he was afraid of becoming lost in it. A talk with Hub Chase about his late wife might eat up several hours. But if Chase was smart (or at least not flat-out stupid) he was far from Atlantic City, where he would be hounded by the police, and one out-of-work reporter with time on his hands.

Jordan went home for a beer and to type his notes. His handwriting was illegible code, and today he seemed to have forgotten the key. He put together a rough typescript of his conversation with Horty Miller, and then compared the new information to what was in the clips, and studied the pictures that ran with them in the
Press
.

Suzie Chase was too good-looking to be Miss America. Miss Americas were the breed standard for the earnest wholesomeness Jordan believed was best left to kindergarten teachers, homecoming queens, and rodeo cowgirls for whom high-breasted, long-legged sauciness were professional poison. He imagined her as never having an awkward moment or looking less than enticing, from the genus of the magical creatures he’d worshipped in high school, but whose magic ran out on a cold beach at twenty-two. The credit line for all three photos was PixleyPix. Pictures of murder victims usually came from the reporter, who obtained them from the family. He wondered if someone at PixleyPix knew the Chases and could give him a lead to finding Hub.

PixleyPix Photographic Agency, Inc. was in the yellow pages with an address on New York Avenue. On the eighth ring the
phone was lifted from the hook. Jordan heard it bounce against a bare floor, and then an unintelligible mutter before, “Pix.”

“My name is Adam Jordan. I’m trying to—”

“I know who you are,” a man said. “What can I do for you?”

“I don’t know who
you
are,” Jordan said.

“Charles Pixley.”

“I’m following the Chase killing in Little Egg Harbor. Where did you get your pictures of Susannah Chase, Mr. Pixley? Were you acquainted with her?”

“Call me Pix. Actually,” he said, “I’m acquainted with Rollo.”

“Who?”

“Roland Peter van Pelt,” Pixley said, “only don’t call him that without putting up your dukes. He’s a fair newshound himself. Not as aggressive as you in ratting a story, or what I’d call a literary stylist, but improving. He told me how he got your job. The
Press
gave you a raw deal, Jordan. Even Rollo thinks so.”

Jordan didn’t care what van Pelt liked to be called, or how to defend against him, or Pixley’s opinion of his abilities as a reporter. He didn’t care that van Pelt’s name put him in a lousy mood, and was very aware of it.

“You haven’t answered my questions.”

“You didn’t let me,” Pixley said. “Rollo figured the
Press
would pay well for shots of the dead girl’s roommates at their place, and he lobbied to use me instead of a staff shutterbug. The girls were blech. I looked around the apartment, saw the photos, and swiped them. Naturally, they’ll be returned—”