Seduction of the Innocent (14 page)

“Well,” he said thoughtfully, his arms folded, an ankle over a knee, “there’s no shortage of those in a hotel. You’re saying this person knew enough to try to slow down the rigor process and foul up the coroner, and what? Give himself an alibi?”

“Or herself. Certainly muddy the waters.”

“But this mastermind didn’t know about lividity.”

I shrugged. “Lots of people don’t. I think our killer is clever, even cute, but...”

His hand was up; if he’d had a whistle in his mouth, he’d have blown it.
“Our
killer?”

I raised both hands in surrender. “Your killer. I’m just the guy who found the body.”

“Not the first time. Not even the first time in this hotel.”

“Granted, which speaks for my expert status. Mine is an informed opinion, Captain. I think our killer learned about science reading mystery novels and, well, comic books. He or she picked up on slowing down the body’s decomposition by cooling it off, but never learned the lividity lesson. But I think there may be even more to it than that.”

“Isn’t that enough?”

Before he got there, I had opened the
Dick Tracy
comic book to the one-page mystery feature about the man hanged to death in a room without furniture. Though I’d already touched the comic, I’d taken care thereafter not to add any more fingerprints. I used a crystal inkwell to hold the comic book open to the specific page.

“Check this out,” I said.

“What?”

“Just do it. Don’t touch it, though. Eyeballs only.”

He seemed mildly irritated, but got to his feet and leaned over the desk.

“Jesus,” he said, his baby-blue eyes tilting up at me. “Where did you find this?”

“Right here on the blotter. On top of this stack.” I indicated the pile of horror and crime comics that were apparently evidence the late doctor had collected for his anti-comics crusade. That particular comic was a new kind of evidence now.

“I touched it,” I admitted, “before I knew it might have any significance. You have my prints on file to check against any you find. The pulp paper inside won’t be helpful, probably, but that slick cover may be.”

He sat slowly, almost collapsing into the chair. “What the hell does this mean?”

“It’s your case, remember? Your killer.”

“Spare me the clowning. You’ve had time to think about it. And you’re part of this nutty comic-book crowd.”

“More like comic-strip crowd, but yeah, I think I may have some insights for you. My gut instinct is that somebody staged that suicide with a couple of things in mind. First, if the Homicide Bureau calls it a suicide, no problem. The killer moves on with his or her life.”

“But this is a cute, clever killer, you said.”

“Yeah. This thing has...levels. The first level is, maybe it gets written off as suicide. Second level is, maybe somebody tried to cool off the body by opening the balcony doors onto an unseasonably cold night, plus piling a ton of ice under the dead man.”

“So where does the comic book come in?”

“It’s the third level.”

“Purpose being...?”

I shrugged. “I figure it for a plant. Somebody official notices this prominently placed funny book on the dead man’s desk, and now the Homicide Bureau is taking seriously the possibility that an ice block was used in a very sadistic kill. Suddenly you’re looking for a maniac with an ice block, in the Waldorf Hotel! Pretty funny.”

“Hilarious.”

“But there’s another level. A fourth level—if you boys buy the ice block notion, then you start to think the killer is a comic book reader. Maybe one of the kids Frederick worked with. Just last night, I saw a teen hoodlum pull a knife on Frederick at his Harlem clinic.”

“Christ, why didn’t you mention that?” He was fumbling for his notebook and pencil. “What’s the kid’s name?”

“Ennis,” I said. “That’s all I know, but it’ll be easy enough to track.”

He was writing that down. He flashed me a smile that was almost a sneer. “Of course, suspect number one is going to be your buddy, Bob Price.”

“Bob’s not my buddy exactly. We were friends as kids. We have mutual business interests as adults. But I do know him well enough to say that I can’t see him as a murderer.”

“Plus there’s some young cartoonist who threatened Dr. Frederick at the hearing...”

“Will Allison,” I said. Why hide it? “I can probably get you contact info. Anything to make your job easier, Captain.”

He sighed. Tucked the notebook away, and leaned back. Crossed his arms and narrowed his eyes and said, “Okay, I don’t mind having you conduct your own parallel investigation, as long as you keep me informed.”

“Who said I was going to investigate? But, all right—sure, as long as you do the same.”

His grin was almost as rumpled as that raincoat he’d dumped out on the sofa.

A Negro plainclothes dick, Sgt. Jeffords, stuck his head in. “Captain? We informed the chief house detective of the circumstances, as you instructed. And he’s here now. Would you like a word with him?”

“Send him in,” Chandler said. His eyes found me. “Maybe you better step out, Jack.”

“No thanks,” I said, leaning back in the swivel chair. “We’re keeping each other informed, remember.”

He made a face, but nodded.

“Jack Starr!” Bill Griffin said, coming in, grinning. “Don’t tell me you found another body? If I were Chandler, I’d check your damn alibi.”

He was a skinny five-nine nondescript character in a nondescript brown suit and hat—the perfect guy for the house dick job at any hotel, but at the Waldorf he was in charge of a small army of ten detectives.

“Treating Jack like a suspect is not a bad idea,” Chandler said to Griffin, getting up, shaking the man’s hand.

Then the Homicide man sat and so did Griffin, over on the patient’s couch. The skinny dick took off his hat and began turning it like a prospector panning for gold. But he already had some gold for us.

“When I heard the suspicious-death victim was Dr. Frederick,” Griffin said to Chandler, who’d angled his chair toward the house dick, “I thought I better talk to you.”

Chandler’s eyebrows went up. “Oh?”

Griffin nodded. His face was so ordinary, you could see him Monday and not identify him in a line-up Tuesday. “I may have a suspect or two for you. If this
is
a homicide.”

“It may be a suicide,” Chandler said, “but homicide is a strong possibility. Of course, we won’t make that determination until the coroner’s findings come in. And even
that
isn’t for public consumption, okay, Bill?”

“Sure, Pat.”

They were on a first-name basis now. Not a surprise—Bill Griffin was an ex-New York cop, as were virtually all the house dicks in town.

“There was a kid last night,” he said, wheeling the hat, “a scruffy little nigger kid?”

I said, “I thought you called them Negroes at the Waldorf, Bill.”

“Hey, it was a colored kid, black as the ace of spades, rose by any other name. He was millin’ around the lobby. Finally, he went to the desk and said he wanted to see ‘Doc Frederick.’ The desk clerk said he’d check with the doctor, but really he called me.”

I asked, “You were on duty, Bill?”

“Yeah. I work the occasional night. Even big chiefs gotta make like an Indian, y’know, now and then. Anyway, I haul the Negro kid’s ass into our office and we frisk him and he has a goddamn
switchblade
on him. These punks! I still got it, if you want it, Captain. The kid was a handful, and kept saying he had to see Frederick, that it was important. Guess what? We showed him to a rear exit and said if we saw him around here again, we’d be turning his black ass in to the cops.”

Chandler said, “When was this?”

“I logged it. I can check. I was on till midnight, so it had to be before that.”

The timing should have been crucial, but I wasn’t sure it was. After all, if the ice trick—whether cubes or block— really had screwed up time of death, the notion of anybody needing, or having, an alibi became problematic to say the least.

Chandler asked, “Did you get the kid’s name?”

He nodded. “Ennis Williams.”

Chandler glanced at me and I nodded.

“He gave us an address, too,” Griffin said. “Harlem someplace. I can get that for you, too.”

“Sounds like he was cooperative,” I said. “Before, you said he was a handful.”

Griffin shifted on the edge of the couch, stopped turning the hat in his hands. “Yeah, funny thing—he was fine with answering questions, but he got worked up when we wouldn’t let him see Frederick.”

“Did he say why he wanted to see the doctor?”

“That’s the funny thing. He said he wanted to apologize! Apologize for what?”

Again Chandler glanced at me. Did we have a murder suspect, or a kid who regretted waving a knife around at the clinic?

“Then there’s this other guy,” Griffin said, “but it wasn’t last night. It was night before last. That was a full-blown incident, lemme tell you.”

“So tell me,” Chandler said.

“Dr. Frederick called me, or anyway my office. I wasn’t on that evening. One of my guys, Ron Matthews? Had to go up there to the doc’s suite where this wild man was pounding on the door. My guy Ron says this character was seven sheets to the wind, yelling about ‘killing that lousy bastard,’ and when Ron tried to walk him away from there, started shoving him. The son of a bitch took a swing at Ron.”

“This ‘son of a bitch,’” I said. “Did you call the police and have him arrested? That sounds like assault.”

“Well,” Griffin said, and he gave Chandler an embarrassed grin, “that’s the thing. Ron’s a big guy himself, and when the guy swung and missed, Ron decked him. So, technically, we hit the guy, and, hell, you both know what kind of red tape we’d get wrapped in if we called that in. So Ron just hauled the bum’s drunken ass out and threw him in the alley.”

“Who was this guy?” Chandler asked.

Griffin got out a small spiral notebook and thumbed it a page or two. “Name’s Pine. Pete Pine.”

“Hell you say,” I said.

Chandler looked sharply at me. “Know him? Who is he?”

“A cartoonist,” I said.

What I didn’t mention was that he drew the
Crime Fighter
comic strip spun off from the Levinson Publications comic book of the same name.

A comic strip syndicated by Starr.

Cabs are always lined up outside the Waldorf, and for half a buck the doorman helped us into one. Sylvia was heading back down to the Village. Like the late Dr. Frederick, she had afternoon patients to attend to; unlike him, she’d be keeping those appointments. I made my own appointment with her for supper tonight, and tagged along for eighteen blocks or so, getting out at East 32nd Street, leaving three bucks with the cabbie to cover the whole ride.

Soon I was standing before an unimposing nineteen-story office building that was home to the twelfth-floor offices of Levinson Publications.

The comic book firm’s office space was modest, typical glass-and-wood quarters—just a reception area and private sanctums for Levinson himself and his two editors, who were also writer/artists. No bullpen of artists—the rest of the ink slingers, and script scribblers, worked at home.

The receptionist was a busty blonde of maybe thirty-five in a pink sweater and red shift skirt. Pretty if pock-marked, she had the haggard look of the constantly pursued.

Levinson was rarely there, so that pursuit was no doubt the work of those editor/writer/artists—Charles Bardwell and Pete Pine, two skirt-chasing, boozing brawlers, tenement-spawned Dead End Kids not quite grown up, like the Bowery Boys in the movies.

A similar group called “Little Tough Guys” were, not coincidentally, the sidekicks of Bardwell and Pine’s costumed hero, Crime Fighter. Bardwell, a big bossy guy, had his own sidekick in the pint-sized but muscular Pine. The latter’s bad behavior was a source of amusement for the former, who egged him on at every opportunity.

The reception area itself was small and drab, with blow-ups of garish color covers of Levinson publications screaming in the otherwise characterless space. These framed oversized covers
—Fighting Crime, Crime Fighter, Crime Can’t Win, G-Man Justice
—would have been right at home with the exhibits at yesterday’s Senate hearing.

“Is Pete in?” I asked the receptionist, whose name was Ginny. Her makeup was both heavy and haphazard. “Jack Starr to see him.”

“I remember you, Mr. Starr,” she said, with a faint smile, as if she were recalling the long-ago day when she still could stand men. “Mr. Pine ain’t been in today. Or yesterday or the day before, neither.”

If you wanted a receptionist who didn’t say “ain’t” in this town, you hired one with a smaller bosom and stronger defenses.

Pine not being there probably meant he was still on the binge that had included his rampage at the Waldorf, looking to get at Dr. Frederick. That this hot-headed little booze-hound drew the comic-strip version of
Crime Fighter
for Starr Syndicate meant he was to some extent my responsibility. I had bailed him out of the drunk tank at the Tombs three times this year, and it was only April, remember.

“Well, is Mr. Levinson in?”

“Mr. Levinson is in Europe. With his wife.”

“When will he be back?”

“Not today. June maybe?”

Levinson’s absence came as no surprise, either. He was just the bankroller around here, a far-left character branded a Commie by one and all, though his comic-book line had made him a ridiculously successful capitalist. He had done three months for not naming names to HUAC, back in ’46, so no wonder he didn’t care to be in town for the Senate hearing into the evils of comic book publishing.

Still, Levinson was a nice guy, smart and shrewd, and he even cut his two top men, Bardwell and Pine, in on the profits
(Fighting Crime
alone sold three million copies a month). Consensus in the comics field was that all the publishers should be Commies, if Lev was any example. Not that these drab digs reflected the boss spreading the wealth.

“Mr.
Bardwell’s
in,” Ginny said, with eyes deader than Dr. Frederick’s.

I hadn’t asked if he was. That was because I liked the idea of going into Charley Bardwell’s office about as much as this receptionist probably did. But I needed to talk to
somebody
here besides the ill-used Ginny.