Parker 09 The Split (7 page)

In one of the most bizarre slayings in city history, police reported last night the discovery of the nude and brutally murdered body of Miss Ellen Marie Canaday, 22, in the bedroom of her apartment at 106-12 Longmans Avenue. Miss Canaday had been fatally stabbed through the chest with an ornamental sword which had been hanging on her apartment wall (photos, page 7).

The suspected slayer, was still on the scene when police arrived at the murder apartment, made his escape and is still at large.

Miss Canaday, a model, had lived alone at the Longmans Avenue address about one year. Since the front door had been forced, it is assumed her attacker was not known to her, although police do not discount the possibility of a personal quarrel as a motive in the case.

Detective Lieutenant Albert Murphy, in charge of the investigation, stated the similarities between this slaying and the so-called Strangler murders in the Boston area were too few and minor to imply any necessary connection with those crimes, though Boston police authorities have expressed interest in the investigation of the Canaday case.

Murphy also announced expectation of the early recapture of the man believed to be the slayer (description and artist's rendering of suspect on page 7).

No comparable slaying has occurred in the local area since 1949, when three Norwegian sailors ...

Parker stopped reading at that point, scanned down the rest of the story to he sure there wasn't anything else in it he wanted to know, and then switched over to page seven.

The artist's drawing was rotten. It looked just a little like the face Parker used to wear, before he'd had plastic surgery done a year ago, but it didn't look anything like the face he had now.

The written description, in a box beside the bad drawing, was accurate as far as it went, but it didn't go very far. Women and children were obviously eliminated by it, but it still left a hell of a lot of men in the running, all of whom fitted the written description and none of whom - including Parker - looked like the artist's rendering.

In addition to the drawing and description, there were three photographs on the page. One showed Ellie's bedroom, with the body removed. One showed a uniformed cop looking blankly at the sprung front door that Parker had kicked in. And one showed a plain-clothes cop holding the sword out in front of himself and looking at it as though he wondered what the hell it was and why he was supposed to be holding it.

Under this last photo was the caption:

Detective Third Grade William Dougherty studies murder weapon for clues. Sword, taken by slayer from apartment wall, had been wiped clean of all fingerprints.

The way the world usually worked, Detective Lieutenant Albert Murphy, the one who'd been quoted all over the place in the main story about the killing and who was listed as being in charge of the investigation, wouldn't know a damn thing about the murder or the investigation or anything else. The way the world usually worked, it was Detective Third Grade William Dougherty who would really be running the case and would know what was going on.

Parker folded the paper and put it down on the table. He was sitting in a luncheonette downtown, not far from where he'd left the truck four days ago. The noon hour rush would be starting in a little while, but right now the place was almost empty. The walls were beige and the booths were green.

There was an untouched cup of coffee on the table beside the paper. Parker looked at it, shook his head, and left coffee and paper both on the table as he got to his feet and walked to the telephone booths in back.

The phone books were on a slant-top table beside the booths. Parker looked in the local white pages and found only one William Dougherty listed, with the address 719 Laurel Road and the phone number Lloyd 6-5929. This was probably the right one, but it would be best to check.

He stepped into the booth and dialed. A woman answered on the third ring, and Parker said, 'Detective Dougherty, please.'

'Oh, he's at work. Call him at headquarters.'

'Yeah, I'll do that.'

Parker hung up, left the booth, and up front at the cashier's cage got directions to Laurel Road. He paid for the coffee he hadn't drunk, picked up the Buick from the no-parking zone out front, and headed away from downtown.

Laurel Road was in a section that should have been a suburb but wasn't. The city government, seeing all those taxable middle-income and upper-income people moving just outside the city limits into an area called Twin Knolls, simply shifted the city limits around a little, and very quietly Twin Knolls became a part of the city and its tax structure. The middle and upper-income people promptly moved farther out, and lower-middle-income people like plainclothes detectives moved into Twin Knolls in their place.

Laurel Road was never straight. It curved away from a curving street called Camelia Lane, and kept right on curving, sometimes to the right and sometimes to the left. It looked like somebody's impression of a barber pole.

For the first few blocks, the widely spaced houses were large, sprawling affairs, split-level ranches with cantilevered sun decks over the carports. After five or six blocks, as the road meandered between more recent constructions, the houses began to get smaller and less ambitious, showing the result of city status. Shrunken flat-roofed ranches and narrow Cape Cods were clumped on smaller, less-landscaped lots.

Number 719 was far in, nearly at the end of it all. Two blocks farther on, Parker could see where the finished buildings petered out, and a half-completed house stood at the farther limit like a leafless tree.

He drove on by 719, glancing casually at it on the way by. It was a Cape Cod, with an A roof slanting front and back. A playpen was on the scraggly lawn, and the garage doors gaped open, exposing an empty interior. The curtains in the dormer window upstairs showed that the attic had been finished off into a room or rooms, which implied more than one child for Detective Dougherty.

Parker drove down to the end, where no work was being done on the half-completed house. He made a U-turn there, parked the Buick, and got out to walk over and look at what was done of the house.

There was no one working here today at all. Some clapboard siding had been put on, but mostly the exterior and interior walls of the house rose only as widely spaced studs of clean, new wood. This would be a Cape Cod when it was done; at the moment a ladder led to the upper floor in place of the staircase that hadn't yet been built.

Parker climbed up the ladder and looked around. This would be the attic. No internal partitions had been erected at all, but a full plywood flooring had been put down.

Sitting on a sawhorse over by the edge of the building, Parker could look down along the two blocks intervening and see Detective Dougherty's house and garage and driveway.

Parker lit a cigarette and waited.

Four

It was a DeSoto, six or seven years old, that finally made the turn into the driveway of 719 Laurel Road. It rolled on into the garage, and Parker got to his feet and stretched.

It had been a longer wait than he'd figured. If Dougherty was running the murder investigation, he'd been on duty since at least midnight last night, but here it was almost four o'clock in the afternoon before he got home.

Driving a DeSoto. In a year or two, if he kept saving his pennies, he could trade up to an Edsel. And after that a Studebaker.

The sun was turning red off to Parker's right. Shadows were long, and yards and walks were deserted. Half an hour ago there'd been a flurry of homecoming schoolchildren, and in about an hour there'd be another flurry of home-coming fathers, but for now Laurel Road was empty.

Parker climbed back down out of the half-house and across the planks and dirt to the street. He left the Buick where it was and walked down the two curving blocks to 719. He went up the walk and rang the front doorbell. The lawn here was in bad shape, and the aluminium storm door had an aluminum D in the middle of it. Detective Dougherty's wife opened the front door. Parker knew it was the wife because Dougherty surely couldn't afford a maid. She looked at him, faintly worried, faintly apologetic, faintly distracted, faintly present: the manner of the little housewife to the stranger at the door.

Parker said, 'I want to talk to Detective Dougherty.' Now she was more worried, more apologetic. 'I don't think -'

He knew she wanted to get across the facts that her husband was sitting down to warmed-over roast and planned to go straight to bed after that, but she didn't know how to say it all in the blank polite bloodless phrases to which the circumstances had her limited. He broke in while she was hunting around for more words, and told her, 'It's about the case he's on, the Ellen Canaday case. You tell him that.'

Now she had something specific to do, she was obviously relieved. She said, 'Wait here, please,' and shut the storm door. But she was afraid of offending him somehow, so she left the inner door open, and Parker could look-directly into a small living room bulging with sofa and littered with copies of The Saturday Evening Post.

He waited a couple of minutes, and then Detective Dougherty himself came to the door. He was no more than thirty, but he had all the style of fifty; dressed in his undershirt and trousers and a pair of brown slippers, carrying a rolled napkin in his left hand, walking with the male approximation of a woman in late pregnancy. He wasn't stout at all, but he gave an impression of soft overweight. His round face was gray with lack of sleep and the need of a shave, and his dry brown hair had already receded from his forehead.

But it was all crap. His eyes were slate gray, and all they did was watch. The way he held his right hand, his revolver was still on his hip somewhere.

Parker stood loose, hands at his sides with the palms showing. When Dougherty pushed open the storm door, Parker said, 'I'm glad I caught you home.'

Dougherty said, 'That's your car up the street, isn't it? The Buick?'

Parker shrugged. 'It's mine.'

'Come around to the side door.' Dougherty pointed with the hand that held the napkin. 'Around to the right there. It's okay to cut across the lawn.'

Parker went around to the right, where there was a narrow space between garage and house. When he'd first driven by, he'd thought the garage was attached, but not quite. The roof overhang from both sides nearly met in the middle overhead, and a side door in the garage wall faced a side door in the house wall, but the two were separate buildings.

Parker moved down this cramped alley to the side door, and a minute later the door was opened by Dougherty.

Four steps led up to a closed door. Going to the left instead, a flight of stairs led down to the basement. Dougherty, standing up on the steps in front of the closed door in order to leave room for Parker to come inside, motioned toward the basement and said, 'We can talk down there.'

Parker went first. Dougherty shut the side door and went down alter him.

The basement had been half converted to a game room or family room or some such thing. Vertical wood paneling covered the walls and formed a partition separating this part of the basement from the part with the utilities in it. Nothing had been done to make a ceiling yet, but over in a corner a few squares of vinyl flooring had been put in place over the original cement. For furniture, there was a pingpong table, plus a bulging sagging scratchy-looking sofa and a card table and some folding chairs.

Dougherty said, 'The sofa's too uncomfortable. Let's sit at the card table. Take off your coat, why don't you?'

'I won't be staying long.'

Dougherty shrugged and said, 'Well, sit down a minute anyway.'

They sat across from one another at the card table. Parker sat leaning back, his hands at rest in his lap. Dougherty leaned forward with his elbows on the table.

Dougherty said, 'My wife tells me you have information for me. On the Canaday case.'

'Something like that.'

'You wouldn't be here to give yourself up, would you?'

'Not me.'

'I didn't think so. But you are the man found at the scene of the crime.'

'Probably.'

'And you're here to tell me you didn't kill Miss Canaday, I should concentrate on others of her friends.'

Parker shrugged. 'I don't care what you do,' he said. 'I want a list from you, that's all.'

'You want from me?'

'Boyfriends, all kinds. Anybody still living around town. Did she have an address book?'

Dougherty took his elbows off the table. 'Let me get this straight,' he said. 'You want to ask me questions?'

'That's right.'

Dougherty shook his head. 'You don't look the type,' he said. 'You look too smart for that sort of thing.'

'What sort of thing?'

'You're going to go do it yourself, am I right? You're going to find your girlfriend's murderer and bring him to justice all by yourself.'

'Not me.'

'No? What, then? I already know you didn't kill her, if that's what's worrying you. You'd been living with her a couple of weeks, neighbors identified you. You didn't make the phone call, the timing is wrong. You wouldn't have had to kick the door in if Miss Canaday was still alive. I imagine you'd be interesting to me in a number of other ways, because otherwise you wouldn't have run off like that, and I'd like to know what all those guns were doing in that closet, but I'm not sold on you for murder. You wouldn't be connected with the robbery out at the stadium, would you?'

'I'm not connected with anything. If you already count me out, who do you count in?'

Dougherty smiled and said, 'I don't see a reason in the world to tell you anything. What's your name, by the way?'

'Joe,' Parker lied.

'All right, Joe. I'm engaged in a murder investigation. In order to keep my pigeon from flying away, I've let the newspapers concentrate on the search for you. But I'm not searching for you, the robbery detail is. They figure you were probably in on the robbery at the stadium, or at least you know the people who were. The guns in the closet connect you definitely.'

Parker said, monotoned, not trying to convince Dougherty but just getting it said so it could be done with 'I had nothing to do with the robbery. I went in and saw her there killed, and when the cop opened the closet door I saw all the guns in there, and I figured I'd be the fall guy so I ran.'