Manhunt. Volume 2, Number 10, December, 1954

Fred came back an hour later. Doris Webber had an alibi for the entire day, and she’d convinced Fred she knew nothing about the murder. She’d called Elizabeth Hanson because she’d just heard of a possible opening for her in summer stock, up in Connecticut. She’d wanted Elizabeth to get up there in time for the audition. Other than the fact that the girls were friendly in a professional way, there seemed to be little connection between them. Fred had long-distanced the theater in Connecticut, and checked out Miss Webber’s story. The producer had told him Miss Webber had spoken up for Elizabeth Hanson and that he had agreed to hold the part open another day.

And so there we were. Nowhere.

We went back to the apartment house and talked to several of the other tenants and the resident manager. We called Miss Webber again, got a list of Elizabeth Hanson’s friends, and talked to every one of them. We talked to her agent, the delivery men who served her building, the man who did her hair, the stores where she sometimes modeled clothes. We talked to the producers and directors of the stage shows she’d been in, and to everyone connected with the television shows she’d done.

We knocked off once for sandwiches and coffee, and once again, along about three A.M., for a few hours’ sleep — and at ten o’clock the next day we were still nowhere. The autopsy had established positively that the girl had died from the bullet wound, and that was it. The tech crew had checked out every fingerprint, but they’d come up with nothing except the girl’s. A set of her prints had been fed through the IBM machines at Headquarters, but the result had been negative. Another set had been sent to the FBI in Washington, with the request for a teletype reply. The reply had just come in. Like our own check, it was negative. Which meant that if our girl had ever been in trouble, she’d somehow avoided arrest.

Fred and I sat in the squad room, drinking coffee, and trying to think up a new angle.

The phone rang and I lifted it.

“This is Barney Coe, in Lost Property, Sarge.”

“Hi, Barney. What’ve you got?”

“You called us and asked us to be on the lookout for a ring with red stones. Remember?”

“Yeah, I remember.”

“Well, we’ve been going through this morning’s DB 60’s, and I think maybe we’ve come up with something.”

“What’s the description?”

“Wait a minute... Okay. It reads, ‘One three-eighths inch fourteen carat yellow gold band with seven garnet stones.’ ”

I was on my feet before I’d hung up the phone. “What pawnbroker?” I asked.

“DeLima’s, on Eighth Avenue. You know where it is?”

“Yeah, I know. Thanks, Barney.”

“No trouble, Sarge. I hope you make out.”

7

“What’s up?” Fred asked.

“Lost Prop’s got a DB 60 on a ring. It looks like it might be the one I told you about, the one Jeffrey Stone gave our girl.”

“Maybe this is the break.”

“Maybe.” I called Stone and arranged to pick him up in fifteen minutes for a trip to the pawnbroker’s. Then Fred and I told the lieutenant where we were going, and went downstairs to check out an RMP car.

“Sounds good, you say?” Fred asked.

“Couldn’t sound better.”

The DB 60 card, from which Barney Coe had read, is the form furnished by the police to every pawnbroker in the city. Pawnbrokers are required to fill out one of these forms for every item they receive, and they must do it the same day of receipt. At the close of business each day, they mail these forms to Headquarters. There the forms are checked against lists of lost and stolen property. In case of a match-up, the police call the person whose property has been lost or stolen and arrange to take him to the pawnbroker for identification and recovery.

At the pawn shop, Jeff Stone identified the ring at once, but we couldn’t return it to him. It was our one and only piece of evidence.

The pawn record showed the ring had been hocked by a woman named Ann Hutchins, and listed an Eighth Avenue address not far from the pawn shop.

8

Ann Hutchins was, at the most, about seventeen. I hadn’t known her by name, but I recognized her immediately as one of the Eighth Avenue B-girls. But she was smarter than most. She didn’t try to be coy. She told us the ring had been given to her by a boy named Frank Rogers. She said he had given it to her yesterday afternoon, and that, as soon as Frank left her room, she had gone straight to the hock shop. She had, she said, planned to tell Frank she’d lost the ring. She volunteered the name of a run-down hotel on Ninth Avenue, where she told us Frank lived and where we could probably find him at this hour. We asked her if she had a picture of Rogers. She did, and showed it to us. He didn’t look much older than she was, a thin, hawk-faced youth with hardly any shoulders at all.

We went back out to the RMP and drove over to the hotel on Ninth. Just as we started across the sidewalk, a young man came out of the hotel. He took one look at us, and then whirled and ran back inside, with Fred and me right behind him.