Manhunt. Volume 2, Number 10, December, 1954

I went back to the murdered girl’s apartment.

4

The tech crew and the assistant M.E., Dave Anders, were hard at work. The carpet was covered with chalk marks, the photographer had climbed to the top of the writing desk to get an overhead shot of the body, and the fingerprint men were dusting every flat surface in sight.

Fred Spence glanced at me a little glumly. “Looks like a real fast hit, Jake,” he said. “One will get you ten it was a loid-worker.”

“Maybe not,” I said. “Our girl friend next door says there was an argument over here this morning. Seems Elizabeth Hanson here had been having a running feud with somebody named Jeffrey Stone.”

“Yeah? Who’s this Stone?”

“I don’t know.” I walked over to the telephone table and picked up the directory. Dave Anders glanced at me and nodded.

“Be with you in a minute, Sergeant,” he said.

I nodded, running my finger down a page of S’s. Jeffrey Stone was listed at an address in Greenwich Village, Five-thirty-one Charles Street. I made a note of the address and phone number in my note book.

“There was a call came in while you were talking to Mrs. Hallaby,” Fred said.

“You get the name?”

“It was one of those telephone answering services. They said they had a call from a Miss Doris Webber, and that Miss Webber wanted Miss Hanson to call her back. They told me the Webber girl said it was urgent.” He handed me a slip of paper with the name and phone number. I transferred them to my note book and lit a cigarette.

Dave Anders stripped off his rubber gloves, put them in his bag, and came over.

“You wouldn’t want to go out on a limb about the cause of death, would you, Dave?” I asked.

“Not me, Sergeant.”

Neither of us was kidding. No matter how obvious it may seem that a person has been killed in a certain way, nothing is official until after a body is posted. People have been shot after they have died of poison; others have walked a considerable distance with a bullet wound through the heart, only to step in front of an automobile and be killed that way. Stranger things have happened, and will happen again. That’s the reason for the postmortem. The cardinal rule in any medical examination is to establish the actual cause of death, and do it in such a way that there is no possibility, however remote, of any other cause. It is not always so simple as it sounds, but it is vital in any criminal investigation and prosecution, as well as in the settlement of estates and life insurance policies.

“One thing, though,” Dave said. “You notice that stain on her lip?”

“Yeah. Blood?”

“Hard to be sure.”

“Can’t you check it at Bellevue?”

“No. There isn’t enough for that. And it’s mixed with her lipstick, too. We couldn’t do a thing with so small a quantity, Sergeant.” He glanced over at the girl. “The point is, though, it might not be her blood.”

“What makes you think that, Doc?”

“Well, there was no bleeding through the mouth. It’s surprising, but that’s the way it is. So, unless her killer got some of her blood on himself, and then brushed it against her mouth, the chances would seem pretty good that she got her teeth into someone.”

“But there’s no way to test the blood, right?”

“I’m afraid not. We’d need a lot more of it before we could make any kind of test.”

“So, offhand, you’d say that if we got a suspect with a few teeth marks in him, we’d be pretty close to home?”

“That’s the way it strikes me, Sergeant.”

“Thanks, Dave. That’s the kind of thing a cop likes best.” I turned to Fred Spence. “Stick around till the techs are through,” I said. “And you’d better call the lieutenant and ask him to send you a stake-out to leave here for a while.”

“Okay. You leaving?”

“Uh-huh. I think I’ll talk to this guy Stone.”

“Don’t forget that girl. The one that called here. Doris Webber.”

“I won t.”

“It shouldn’t take us long.”

“Fine. I’ll check with you at the station house, Fred.”

5

Jeffrey Stone’s room on Charles Street in the Village was even hotter than the squad room back at the Eighteenth. And it was much smaller; so small, in fact, that the two of us made the room seem cramped. He was a very handsome guy, Stone was, a big guy with a lot of chest and very long yellow hair. I went through the preliminary routine without getting any reaction from him at all. But when I told him Elizabeth Hanson was dead, I did get a reaction. He’d told me he was an actor, but there was no acting involved in the way he took the news. It took me nearly half an hour to quiet him down enough to question him further. And even then he sat on the side of his bed, staring at the wall, as if he had heard my words, and understood them, but couldn’t permit himself to believe them.

I poured him a drink from the fifth on his dresser, but he didn’t touch it.

“What were you and the girl arguing about this morning?” I asked.

“The same old thing,” he said dully. “Other men. It was just her way, I guess. She... She never seemed to feel right with only one guy in the picture. I... I wanted to marry her, but she... she...” He broke off, biting his lip.