The Body Looks Familiar (3 page)

Corday said, “Palmer and I were just leaving,” but he moved slowly enough so that they did not have to share the elevator with Latson. The man’s assurance, his ease, had shocked Corday. He had at least expected Latson to take charge of the case himself, to stay in a position where he could suppress the wrong kind of evidence.

He was shocked but, riding down with Ronald Palmer, he took a little cold comfort. Palmer obviously had known the girl, had probably known that she had been at the Zebra House with Latson the night before. It was why he had maneuvered Palmer so skilfully into the scene.

It hadn’t been hard; there was always some reason the chief trial deputy could find for wanting to see a nightclub manager, a bar owner. But it had apparently come to nothing, and that was what amused Corday.

Because if Palmer planned on blackmailing Jim Latson, he was in for some very uncomfortable moments. So was Jim Latson, which mattered more to Corday; but Latson’s discomfort would be as nothing compared to Palmer’s; his would go quickly from mere discomfort to the dire plight of a man reaching out to pet a Pekingese, and finding his hand on the back of a wolverine.

As Corday and Palmer went through the downstairs lobby, the reporters and photographers had broken through the thinning cordon of Captain Fink’s men. Corday had to stop four or five times to say, “No comment. See Captain Martin,” before he got to the car. He drove Palmer rapidly back to the Civic Center.

NOW HOMICIDE was in charge of the case. That meant Captain Martin and his small squad of regulars, plus a few of the utility men always on duty at headquarters and available for any division that needed them.

Two of these utility men were named Lyons and Koch, and Captain Martin had given them their orders: “The basement.”

Koch, who was thin and worried about his hairline, looked at Lyons, who was stocky and athletic, and sighed. They had been lent to Homicide before; they knew Captain Martin and his terse orders. What he meant was, “I want you to give the service department of this hotel a thorough search. Go through all the lockers of all the help, question everybody, get me lists, inventories, floor plans, backgrounds, criminal records if any, and do it now.”

What they found down below was a small but efficient unit. Although the apartment hotel had no dining room, room service could be had at any hour, and to order. It was nothing for the Belmont to furnish Chinese pheasant with truffles at four-fifteen in the morning.

With drinks. Also fresh linen, as many times a day as you wanted it.

This was daytime, and no personnel were on shift who had been on when Hogan DeLisle was murdered. But the executive housekeeper gave Lyons and Koch a list of night personnel, a master key to the lockers, and her blessing.

It was unpleasant work. Koch found one busboy’s locker that apparently hadn’t been emptied in a year; when he unlocked the door, filthy clothes came cascading out, and he swore as he pawed through the sweat-caked linen, searching for nothing.

Koch said, “Waste of time. If this was robbery, it’d make sense, working down here. Only it wasn’t.”

His partner looked up, grunted. “Here’s a screwball. Night floor waiter. He’s got a book for translating Lithuanian into French, and one for going the other way.” He slammed the locker door shut again.

“This guy never takes anything home,” Koch said. He shoved the busboy’s dirty clothes back into the locker, kicked the door shut and went over and washed his hands. “Two more lockers and we can move over to the women’s locker room.”

“That’ll be fun,” Lyons said. “Stop bitching. If this had been short of homicide, we’d be working for Cap Fink. Martin’s easy to get along with.”

Koch opened a locker for himself, one for Lyons. “Sure,” he said. “Martin’s easy to get along with. All you gotta be is perfect.”

Lyons reached in the locker and took out a box. “Maybe the lady’s diamonds’ll be in here,” he said, “and we can all go home. Well, when Martin gives you an order, it sticks; later on he don’t pretend he told you to do something else.” He had opened the box, pulled something out. He gave it a casual glance, and then, perhaps because he had been talking about Captain Martin’s high standards, he held the object close to his eye and squinted.

Then in an oddly strangled voice, he said, “Hey. I got something.”

Koch looked up from his own search. Dangling from Lyons’s hand was a string of beads. They were irregularly shaped, greenish blue, hooked together with silver links.

“Turquoise,” Koch said. “So what? They come all prices. My wife bought a string of them out west one summer vacation.”

Lyons said, “But look,” and handed over the stones, clasp first.

Koch had to move over under the unshaded center light to peer. The silver clasp was somewhat larger than the turquoise merited, and it was initialed. Not with very large letters, but with plain ones.
H. DeL.,
for Hogan DeLisle.

Neither detective wasted time speculating; the initials were too unusual. Lyons went at once to the house phone fastened on a center post near the washbasin and said, “Gimme the housekeeper.” He identified himself, looked at the name on the locker, and said, “How’s about an employee named Ralph Guild…” He took his notebook out and started writing. “Night waiter… been here over a year… All right, gimme his home address.” He cleared his throat. “Naw, we’ll go out there. We need the air.”

When he hung up, he turned to his partner and said, “West side, Jacobi Avenue.”

Koch said, “Should we phone upstairs, tell Cap Martin?”

Lyons spat on the cement floor. “He’d just say where is he? You know Cap.”

So they went out, two unexcited men, and got in their squad car, illegally parked in the alley. They both lit cigarettes, and Lyons drove.

The car rolled west, away from the Civic Center, through the wholesale produce section, through a block covered entirely with used machinery shops, past the freight terminal, and then into an area forgotten by progress where small frame houses sat huddled as close together as possible, each with a fourteen-by-twenty foot back yard, a fourteen-by-ten foot front lawn.

After a minute or so of this, Lyons said, “Here we are.” Koch slid the car to the curb and then got out. Koch moved his gun from his hip holster to his coat pocket, ready to shoot through the cloth, and they went up the rickety wooden steps.

But the very pregnant young woman who answered the door did not look formidable. Her two-piece smock-type dress only accentuated her condition as she hitched the top part down and looked at them. Lyons said, “Mr. Ralph Guild live here?”

She said, “But he’s asleep. He doesn’t get home till after seven every morning, he has to get his sleep.”

Koch said meaninglessly, “That’s all right,” and shoved forward till she gave way.

Lyons pulled his gun, and the woman—Mrs. Guild, beyond much doubt—screamed a little. Koch said, “It’s all right, lady,” and when her eyes went to one of the two doors opening off the living room, he promptly palmed the knob and threw the door open.

The man in bed muttered, “Coming right up,” as they slammed into the room, and then he sat up: a skinny guy, about thirty, in polka-dot undershorts. The bed looked as though no expert had made it.

Koch said, “Ralph Guild?” in a hard, businesslike voice.

“Yeah, sure. My papers are on the bureau.”

Lyons slid a hand under the pillow, down among the sheets and then put his gun away. Koch crossed and picked the papers off the bureau. “Immigration,” he said, “naturalization. Court order changing his name from something—thank God, I don’t have to phone it in—to Ralph Guild. He’s a Czech.”

“He’s a bad check now,” Lyons said. His normally cheerful face was grim. “Out of it, Guild, and on your feet. Get some pants on.” He backed up, started throwing clothes at Guild, first feeling each garment for weapons.

Guild said, “Yes, sir,” standing up. He was going a little bald, one tooth was missing among his uppers. “May I ask what you want me for, sir?”

Koch’s voice was kindly. “Take it easy, boy. Don’t mind Mr. Lyons here, it’s just his way. Do you know a girl named DeLisle, Hogan DeLisle?”

Guild nodded eagerly, fastening his pants. Almost at once he had to unzip them again to tuck his shirt in. “Yes, sir, of course I do. Miss DeLisle, I am her regular waiter. She always asks for me… I must explain, I am night waiter, ten till seven, at the Belmont Apartment Hotel.” He was fumbling with a hideously bright necktie—the only thing in the room that had any kind of color.

The knot wouldn’t tie to Guild’s satisfaction. He stopped fumbling and suddenly got a thought. “Nothing has happened to Miss DeLisle, sir?”

“She’s dead,” Lyons said. “Take him to the car, John, while I search the house for the murder weapon.”

Koch marched Ralph Guild to the car. When Lyons rejoined them, he said absently, “That dame can sure cry,” and started the car.

AS DEPUTY CHIEF, one of Jim Latson’s duties was to wander, without schedule or map, through headquarters building. It kept the men on their toes. And so, when he returned from the murder suite (as the papers were already calling Hogan DeLisle’s apartment), he signed a few letters on his desk and took off.

Missing Persons, Arson, Radio Room, Personnel. He paused there and lit a cigarette, perched on the edge of the bureau chief’s desk, swinging one leg, idly watching the clerks. When he left, a half dozen civil-service fingerprint cards were in his pocket.

He went on to Loft Squad, Taxi License Bureau, Juvenile, and into Identification. Two clerks were busily putting together a bundle of prints from the DeLisle apartment; flustered by the personal attention of Chief Latson, they never noticed that the envelope for the FBI was six cards heavier when he left than before he visited them.

Jim Latson wandered back to his office. The second mail of the day had not been sorted. Two little piles were on his desk: one personal, the other duty. Seeing his wife’s handwriting on the top of the personal file, he went through the other one first.

But there was no putting it off. He examined the Italian stamp and the flimsy
Avion
paper until it was more boring not to open the letter than to open it, and used a knife on his desk, a souvenir of a national meeting of peace officers.

Yeah, she was in Rome. She had an audience with the Holy Father, not a private one to be sure, but the Pope had spent more time blessing her than any of the other pilgrims. She had lit a candle for Latson’s return to the church, and she needed another five hundred dollars.

Yeah. Except for the amount, which sometimes—but not often—went as low as two hundred, he hadn’t needed to open the envelope at all; habit was an X-ray that could read her letters folded. Yeah.

He hadn’t been to confession in ten years. But officially he was a Catholic and in politics that meant that his behavior was subject to Cathedral inspection. The archbishop had let it be known, clearly, that divorce or overt infidelity meant the withdrawal of Cathedral support for any party that kept Jim Latson in high office.

He wrote a short glad-you-are-enjoying-yourself note, and got his private checkbook—one of his private checkbooks—out of the locked drawer. But when he thumbed through the stubs, he saw that this, the New York book, was not the one he had been using to send Marie her money. He put it away and got the San Francisco book, and that was right.

There was no use letting her know any more than she had to know. He wrote the check, and was just about to sign it when his red phone buzzed. Orders—his own—were that any man with a red phone dropped everything when it rang, but he took time to lock the checkbooks away before scooping the phone up.

“Got an arrest in the DeLisle case,” Captain Martin said. “A room waiter. Motive, robbery.”

Some day Martin was going to drop from the exhaustion of wasting a word.

“Where are you?” Jim Latson asked.

“Girl’s flat. Lyons and Koch brought him in. Necklace of hers in his locker.”

“Keep him there. The body still around?”

Captain Martin said, “M.E. took it.”

“Too bad. Looking at bodies is good exercise. I’ll be over. Keep it from the papers if you can.”

“Can’t.
News-Journal
was here.”

“No great harm. Be there in five minutes.”

“Okay, Chief.”

Phone on the hook. Note and check in an envelope. Airmail to Italy was—yeah, he remembered, stamped the envelope, addressed it by hand and shoved it in his pocket. The buzzer from downstairs said his car had been brought to the street level.

But still he took time to check his gun. The suspect might try to escape, and so get killed.

He wondered as he put his hat on, started out, what the name of the room waiter was.

Also, he wondered if the guy’s fingerprints would show up at Hogan DeLisle’s. Funny if they didn’t. Not that it mattered. Fingerprints would not be used in this case when it was found that those lifted in the girl’s apartment had gotten mixed up in some way with a bunch of police officers’ prints from Personnel.

Some clerk would get fired over that. And Captain Martin would have to work the DeLisle case without fingerprints… Too bad, but Martin was a good man, he could do it. You never got fingerprints in a case these days anyway.

Not to do you much good.

“SHE GAVE IT TO ME,” Ralph Guild said. “Every night, nearly, she phone down for warm milk and crackers, for Ralph to bring it up. When I got there, she would make a little joke; has the new Guild started yet? You see, my name it is the same as a union or something… And I would say no, not yet. So she gave me this string of beads, and she says, when the baby comes and they let you see your wife, give her these; it will make her feel beautiful again. They were not valuable, she said.”

“Fifty bucks.” This was a detective lieutenant named Sands. “I was on pawnshop detail before I got on Homicide.”

“Sure,” Jim Latson said. “Fifty bucks is no tip at all for a room waiter. Fifty-buck tips happen every night, sometimes two or three a night.”

“Please,” Ralph Guild said, “I know fifty dollars is much money. But from a regular patron, one I—”

“How was she dressed?” Jim Latson asked. “I don’t mean on the night you killed her, last night, but usually. When you brought her”—he dropped one eyelid, drawled his words—“her bedtime crackers and milk.”

Ralph Guild licked his lips nervously. “Dressed? She would be in bed. She would phone down and unlock her front door; I would bring her her—snack, you call it—and I would lock up when I left.”

“Snack’s a good word for it,” Sands said. A heavy-fleshed, small-eyed man, he had been a certainty to pick up Chief Latson’s insinuation.

“Have sex with her?” Captain Martin asked.

“Me? A waiter? No. She was very rich, she knew fine gentlemen.”

Sands was snorting through his broad nose. “Money don’t do a guy much good in bed,” he said. “And after the rich gents went home, there was a nice young waiter, looking for a good tip. A fifty-buck tip.”

Jim Latson was thinking that Sands would make a good captain. Put him on the Vice Squad, and he’d work for nothing.

The half dozen reporters present were breaking for the door. They could now tell their desks that it was safe to say that a sex angle had been turned up in the DeLisle case.

Harry Weber of the
News-Journal
remained behind. “You got a robbery motive,” he said, “why search around for rape, too? The papers haven’t been that good to you.” The
News-Journal
was the biggest paper in town; it always had two men on a big story, one to ask fool questions.

But the police are public servants. They should be polite to the press. “Get him into court,” Captain Martin said, “and we can’t prove the beads weren’t a tip. Tip for doing what?”

Dave Corday strolled in, followed by the reporters returning from their phone. “Nice work, boys,” he said. “That was a quick catch. This the defendant?”

Jim Latson laughed. “That’s up to you, Dave. If you don’t like him for it, we will be happy to catch you another one. A happy district attorney’s office, that’s the slogan of my department.”

Corday said, “Jim, that’s the way to talk. After all, arrests without convictions don’t do either of us any good.”

You smug bastard, Jim Latson was thinking. You size six feet in number twelve shoes. You sure stepped out of your league when you tried to frame me.

But a sneaking, lonely thought remained: the graceful figure, the laughing face of a girl who called herself Hogan DeLisle. He missed her, and he had never thought another woman would get under his skin.

For that, some day, Dave Corday would end up in the gutter.

Corday was asking Martin what the situation added up to; Captain Martin was telling him in his curt way.

Corday nodded. “Okay. I like the sex angle better than the robbery. It makes more sense. He was her lover, and she either broke off with him or refused to give him any more money—we’ll find out which. I’ll put the D.A.’s officers on Guild: his background, his financial position. From your men, I’d like to get a tie-in on the gun, on his relations with his wife, and, of course, anything else you get.”

“Can do,” Captain Martin said.

“Particularly the gun,” Dave Corday said. He was talking directly to Jim Latson now; but his eyes were not on the chief’s eyes but on his left armpit, where the gun bulged the carefully tailored suit not at all. “By now ballistics will have a good deal on the slugs that came out of the corpse; and I want the gun that fired them. I want that gun, Chief. If you have to drag every river, open every manhole in the state, we’ll need that gun. Without it, there’s no case.”

Jim Latson grinned and bowed deeply. “Mr. Prosecutor, you have but to command and us lowly cops’ll break our tired bones for you. You want a gun, we’ll get you a gun.” He reached in his armpit, came out with his own weapon, butt first. “Take mine, counselor. Anything to keep you happy, as I said before.”

“I never owned a gun in my life,” Ralph Guild said. But none of the policemen were listening to him.