Clues for Dr. Coffee, page 15
Ritter took the clippings downstairs and reopened his questioning of the bored desk clerk.
“Ever see this dame?” He dealt the clippings face up on the reception desk.
“Ah? Well, yes, as a matter of fact I have.” The clerk batted his eyelashes. “I saw the pictures in the papers, too, even before I saw the girl, but I somehow didn’t connect the one with the other. Yes, I’ve seen her.”
“Did she ever come here to see this bird Wallace?”
“Wallace? You mean Mr. Simpson.”
“I mean the man in Twenty-six.”
“Ah. Well, yes, as a matter of fact she did.”
“Often?”
“That depends upon what you call often. She’s been here three or four times, I’d say.”
“Do you announce her or does she go right up?”
“Well, the first time she stopped at the desk. Lately she’s been going right up.”
“What do you mean, lately? Tonight, maybe?”
“I didn’t see her tonight.”
“If she comes here regular, she could maybe go through the service entrance and take the elevator in the basement without you seeing her?”
“That’s possible, yes.”
“Does she always come alone?”
“Not always. Last time she came she brought loverboy along.”
“Who’s lover-boy?”
“How should I know?” Again the clerk batted his eyelashes. “He’s a rather uncouth young man whom for some reason Miss Erryl seems to find not unattractive. She apparently takes great pleasure in gazing into his eyes. And vice versa.”
“But you don’t know his name?”
“I do not. We don’t require birth certificates, passports or marriage licenses for the purpose of visiting our tenants.”
“You’re too, too liberal. You let in murderers. Did lover-boy ever come here without lover-girl?”
“He did indeed. He was here last night raising quite a row with the gentleman in Twenty-six. When he came down he was red-faced and mad as a hornet. Right afterward the gentleman in Twenty-six called the desk and gave orders that if he ever came back, I was not to let him come up; that if he insisted, I was to call the police. The man had been threatening him, he said. But I think he came back again tonight.”
“You think?”
“Well, I had just finished taking a phone message for one of our tenants who was out, and I turned my back to put it in her box when this man went by and got into the elevator. I had only a glimpse of him as the elevator door was closing, but I’m sure it was lover-boy. I shouted at him but it was too late. I tried to phone Twenty-six to warn Mr. Simpson—”
‘Wallace.”
“Wallace. But there was no answer, so I assumed he was out. Then a few minutes later the phone in Twenty-six was knocked off the hook.”
“Did you see lover-boy come down again?”
“Now that you mention it, no, I didn’t. Unless he came down while I was up banging on the door of Twenty-six.”
“Or took the car down to the basement and went out the service entrance, maybe?”
“You’re so right, lieutenant. Or he could have been picked up by a helicopter on the roof.” The clerk giggled.
“Very funny.” Ritter advanced his lower lip. “Any other non-tenants come in tonight since you came on duty?”
“Traffic has been quite light this evening. There was the blonde who always comes to see the man in Sixtythree on Wednesdays. There was a boy from the florist’s with roses for the sick lady on Nine, and there was an elderly white-haired gent I assumed to be delivering for the liquor store on the corner.”
“Why?”
“Well, he had a package under his arm and it was about time for Miss Benedict’s daily fifth of gin, so—”
“What time do you call about time?’
“About an hour ago.”
“This was before Wallace’s light went up on your switchboard?”
“About twenty minutes before. Now that I think of it, I didn’t see him come down, either. Of course, with all the excitement—”
“That makes two for your helicopter,” the detective said. “Let me know if you think of any more.”
Ritter went upstairs again for another look at the dead man and to wait for the coroner, who had been summoned from his weekly pinochle game but had not yet arrived. At least this was one case the coroner could not very well attribute to heart failure—“Coroner’s Thrombosis,” as Dr. Coffee called it—since the cause of death was plainly written in blood.
The dead man had been on the threshold of middle age. His temples were graying and there was gray in his close-cropped beard. The beard, instead of giving him an air of distinction, left him with a hard, ruthless face. His features were regular, except perhaps for his ear lobes, which were thick, pendulous and slightly discolored as though they had been forcibly twisted.
Whoever killed Mr. Wallace-Wallis-Simpson must have really hated him to have done such a savage knife job on him. Why, then, would the victim have admitted a man who was such an obvious and determined enemy? Could the murderer have obtained a key from some third party? …
Ritter’s revery was interrupted by the approach of Sergeant Foley, the scowling print expert.
“Lieutenant,” he said, “we got something special here. I think we’re stuck with a sixty-four-million-dollar question with no sponsor to slip us the answers.”
“You mean you can’t make the stiff?”
“Oh, the stiff’s a cinch. We haven’t made him yet, but we got a perfect set of prints and he’s old enough so he must be on file somewhere in the world. But the murderer—no soap!”
“Sergeant, you surprise and grieve me,” Ritter said. “With my own little eyes I see five perfect bloody finger marks on the bathroom door.”
“Finger marks yes,” said Sergeant Foley, “but prints no.”
“Meaning what—no prints?”
“Meaning no prints. No ridges. No pore patterns. No whorls. No radial loops. No ulnar loops. No nothing.”
Ritter frowned. “Gloves?”
“We usually get some sort of pattern with gloves, even surgical gloves sometimes, although they’re hard to identify. But here—nothing.”
“And the knife?”
“Same thing. It wasn’t wiped. Bloody finger marks but no prints. The knife, by the way, comes from the kitchenette here.”
Max Ritter scratched his mastoid process. He pursed his lips as though rehearsing for a Police Good Neighbor League baby-kissing bee. Then he asked: “Your boys finished with that phone, Sergeant?”
“Yup. Go ahead and make your call.”
A moment later Ritter was talking to his private medical examiner, Dr. Daniel Webster Coffee, chief pathologist and director of laboratories at Northbank’s Pasteur Hospital.
“Hi, Doc. Get you out of bed? … Look, I got something kind of funny, if you can call homicide funny.… No, the coroner’s a little late, but this one he can’t write off as natural causes. … A knife job, but good. Like a surgeon, practically.… No, I don’t think there’s anything you can do tonight, Doc. I already emptied the medicine chest for you, like always. But if I can talk the coroner into shipping the deceased to your hospital morgue for a p.m.… You will? Thanks, Doc. I think you’re going to like this one. The killer’s got no fingerprints.… No, I don’t mean he left none; he’s got none. Call you in the morning, Doc.”
When Dr. Coffee returned to the pathology laboratory after the autopsy next morning, he handed two white enameled pails to his winsome dark-eyed technician and said: “The usual sections and the usual stains, Doris. Only don’t section the heart until I photograph the damage.”
Doris Hudson lifted the lids from both pails and peered in without a change of expression on her covergirl features.
“Lieutenant Ritter is waiting in your office;, Doctor, talking to Calcutta’s gift to Northbank,” she said. “If you agree that Dr. Mookerji is not paid to entertain the police department, I could use him out here to help me cut tissue.”
Doris’s voice apparently had good carrying qualities, for the rotund Hindu resident in pathology immediately appeared in the doorway and waddled into the laboratory.
“Salaam, Doctor Sahib,” said Dr. Mookerji. “Leftenant Ritter is once more involving us in felonious homicide, no?”
“In felonious homicide, yes,” said Dr. Coffee, as he walked toward his office.
“Hi, Doc,” said Ritter. “What do you find?”
“The gross doesn’t show much except that the deceased died of shock and hemorrhage due to multiple stab wounds in the cardiac region and lower abdomen. As you know, Max, I won’t have the microscopic findings for a day or so.”
“Did you shave off the guy’s whiskers?”
“That’s not routine autopsy procedure, Max. But it’s pretty clear that he grew a beard to hide scars. There’s old scar tissue on one cheek, the chin, and the upper lip.”
“He also grows the bush to hide behind.” Max Ritter grinned. “Doc, the guy’s a con man and a small-time blackmailer. I wire the Henry classification to the FBI last night and I get the answer first thing this morning. His name’s Paul Wallace, with half a dozen aliases. He’s got a record: four arrests, two convictions. Two cases dismissed in New York when the plaintiffs, both dames, withdrew their complaints. Last four years are blank, the FBI says, at least so far as Washington knows.”
“What about the murderer with no fingerprints?” the pathologist asked.
“That’s what I want to talk to you about, Doc. Since this Wallace is a crook, maybe the guy that knifed him is another crook he doublecrossed. Maybe the butcher boy has a little plastic surgery on his fingers.”
“I don’t know, Max.” Dr. Coffee shook his head, then with one hand brushed an unruly wisp of straw-colored hair back from his forehead. “I’ve never seen a firstclass job of surgical fingerprint elimination. Did you ever see the prints they took off Dillinger’s corpse? His plastic job was a complete botch. No trouble at all to make the identification.”
“Then how do you—”
“Give me another forty-eight hours, Max. Meanwhile, what progress have you made in running down blind leads?”
Ritter told the pathologist about Patsy Erryl and her visits to the dead man’s apartment with and without ‘lover-boy,” about the bored and vague desk clerk’s recital, and about his own conclusions.
“This white-haired old geezer with the package under his arm is definitely not delivering gin to Miss Benedict in Seven-oh-two for any liquor store within half a mile,” said Ritter. “I check ’em all. Could be that this package is the plastic raincoat I find in the bathroom.
“Anyhow, I just come from talking to this Patsy Erryl, the opera hopeful.” Ritter brought forth his envelope of clippings and spread them on Dr. Coffee’s desk. “Look, Doc. A real dish. Not more than twenty. Bom in Texas, she says. Some little town near San Antonio. Grew up in the Philippines where her father was a U. S. Air Force pilot. He was killed in Korea. Her mother is dead too, she says. I ain’t so sure. Maybe Mama just eased out of the picture, leaving little Patsy with a maiden aunt in Northbank—Aunt Minnie Erryl. Anyhow, little Patsy studies voice here in Northbank with Sandra Farriston until Sandra is bounced off to join Caruso, Patti, and Schumann-Heink. Remember Sandra? “Then Patsy goes to New Orleans to study with an old friend of Sandra’s for a few years, she says. Then she comes back to Northbank to live with Auntie Min and sing in night clubs, under Auntie Min’s strictly jaundiced eye. Then all of a sudden she wins this Metropolitan Opera audition tryout. …”
“What about lover-boy?”
“I was just coming to that, Doc. Seems he’s a reporter on the Northbank Tribune. Covers the Federal building in the daytime and the night-club beat after dark. Name’s Bob Rhodes. He’s the one who pushes her into opera auditions. Quite a feather in his cap, to read his night-club columns. He thinks he discovers another Lily Pons.”
“What has he been seeing Wallace about?”
“I don’t know yet.” Ritter pushed his dark soft hat to the back of his head. “Seems last night’s his day off and I can’t locate him. I’m on the point of putting out a six-state alarm for him, but little Patsy talks me out of it. She guarantees to produce him for me at eleven o’clock this morning. Come along?”
“Maybe I’d better. How does the girl explain her visits to Wallace?”
“She don’t know he’s a crook, she says. Friend of her dad’s, she says. Ran into him in New Orleans when she was studying music down there, then lost sight of him for a few years. When he sees her picture in the papers after she wins that opera whoop-de-doo, he looks her up here in Northbank. She goes to see him a few times to talk about her family and maybe drink a glass of sherry or two. That’s all. She has no idea who killed him or why.”
“What about that stuff you collected from the medicine cabinet in Wallace’s bathroom?”
“I got it here.” Ritter pulled a plastic bag from his bulging pocket. “It ain’t much. Aspirin, toothpaste, bicarb, hair tonic, petrolatum, and this bottle of pills from some drugstore in Cleveland.”
Dr. Coffee uncorked the last item, sniffed, shook a few of the brightly colored tablets into the palm of his hand, sniffed again, and poured them back. He picked up the phone.
“Get me the Galenic Pharmacy in Cleveland,” he told the operator. Minutes later he said: “This is Dr. Daniel Coffee at the Pasteur Hospital in Northbank. About a month ago you filled a prescription for a man named Wallis. The number is 335571. Could you read it to me? Yes, I’ll wait.… An Abbott preparation? I see.… Diasone. Thank you very much.… No, I don’t need a refill, thank you.”
Dr. Coffee’s face was an expressionless mask as he hung up. He pondered a moment, then picked up the phone again. He dialed an inside number.
“Joe? … Coffee. Has the undertaker picked up that body we were working on this morning? … Good. Don’t release it for another half hour. Dr. Mookerji will tell you when.”
The pathologist took off his white jacket, hung it up carefully, and reached for his coat. He took the detective’s arm and marched him out of the office. As he crossed the laboratory, he stopped to tug playfully on the tail of the Hindu resident’s pink turban.
“Dr. Mookerji,” he said, “I wish you’d go down to the basement and wind up that autopsy I started this morning. I need more tissue. I want a specimen from both the inguinal and femoral lymph nodes, and from each ear lobe. When you’re through, you may release the body. Doris, when you make sections from this new tissue, I want you to use Fite’s fuchsin stain for acid-fast bacilli. Any biopsies scheduled, Doris?”
“Not today, Doctor.”
“Then I won’t be back until after lunch. Let’s go, Max.”
The office bistro of the Northbank Tribune staff was on the ground floor of the building next door where reporters and desk men could refuel conveniently and where they could always be found in an editorial emergency. It was whimsically named “The Slot” because the horseshoe bar was shaped like a copy desk with the bartender dealing fermented and distilled items to the boys on the rim like an editor meting out the grist of the day’s news for soft-pencil surgery. There was a pleasant beery smell about the place, and the walls were hung with such masculine adornment as yellowing photos of prize fighters and jockeys, moth-eaten stags’ heads, mounted dead fish, a few Civil War muzzle-loaders, and framed Tribune front pages reporting such historic events as the sinking of the Titanic, the surrender of Nazi Germany, the dropping of the first atomic bomb, and the winning of the World Series by the Northbank Blue Sox.
The masculine décor was no deterrent to invasion by emancipated womanhood, however. A series of stiffly uncomfortable booths had been erected at the rear of the barroom, and from one of them, as Dr. Coffee and Max Ritter entered, there emerged a dark-eyed, flaxenhaired cutie who, from the swing of her hips as she advanced toward the two men, might have been a collegiate drum majorette—except for the set of her jaw, the intelligent determination in her eyes, and the challenge in her stride.
“Hi, Patsy,” said Lieutenant Ritter. “Where’s the fugitive?”
“Fugitive!” The girl flung the word from the ends of her lips, scarcely opening her even white teeth. “I warn you, I’m not going to let you railroad Bob Rhodes. Who is this character you’ve brought along—a big shot from the state police, or just the FBI?”
“Patsy,” said Ritter, his Adam’s apple poised for a seismographic curve, “Dr. Coffee is maybe the only friend you and your lover-boy have in the world—if you’re both innocent. Doc, meet Patsy Erryl, the girl who’s going to make the Met forget Galli-Curci, or whoever they want to forget this year. Where’s Bob?”
“He’s been delayed.”
“Look, Patsy baby, if you insist on obstructing justice, I’ll have lover-boy picked up wherever he is and we’ll take him downtown for questioning without your lovely interfering presence.”
“Don’t you dare. If you—”
“Just a minute, Max,” Dr. Coffee cut in. “Remember I’ve never met Miss Erryl before. I may have a few questions—”
The pathologist was interrupted by a crash near the entrance. A man had sprawled momentarily on all fours and immediately rose to his knees, trying to recapture the bottles that were spinning off in all directions.
Patsy Erryl sped to his rescue. She caught him under the armpits, straining to get him to his feet. “Bob, please get up. They’re trying to railroad you, and I’m not going to let them.”
“Come, my little chickadee, there’s no danger.” Rhodes had recaptured three of the elusive bottles. “There are no witnesses. There is no evidence. I did not kill Fuzzy Face.”
“Bob, you’ve been drinking.”
“No, my little cedar waxwing. Only beer. My own. If only Mr. Slot would stock my Danish brand. You know I never drink until the sun is over the yardarm. Which reminds me. We have passed the vernal equinox. The sun must be—”
“Bob!”
“Rhodes,” said Max Ritter, “the desk clerk sees you at the Westside last night.”
