The Storm Killer Read online

  My chest constricted and it felt as if I’d stepped into a vacuum and my breath was being sucked out of me. The shit was getting deeper and deeper, and I wondered if I’d ever be able to dig myself out of this nightmare.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I’d been counting on Ila Quinn’s testimony exonerating me of Helen’s murder. In fact, I’d spent the last couple of days convincing myself that Boyle and Belcher would have to listen to her and start looking for another suspect. On top of everything, I really liked the old girl.

  She was a little bit crazy, or maybe she was just lonely. I should have realized there was more to her claims that someone was trying to break into her apartment. My only question was, how the hell had Ila’s killer known she had seen him.

  I turned my attention to Belcher. “Why would I kill Ila Quinn? Sure, I was over at her apartment the other day. She was ready to swear it wasn’t me in the hall the night Helen was killed.”

  Belcher’s eyes narrowed. “What about it, Boyle? You interviewed the woman. You said she was sure it was Locke.”

  “You gonna to take his word over mine, Frank? The old girl swore it was Locke.” He took a pen from his pocket, tossed it on top of the pad of paper, and pushed them both across the table. “Make it easy on yourself, Locke. We found your prints on the gun.”

  “She showed me the gun,” I said. “Told me Wyatt Earp gave it to her.”

  Boyle slammed his fist on the table and leapt to his feet. “Sign the goddamn confession. Now.”

  “When was she killed, Belcher?”

  “Hey you son-of-a-bitch, I’m talking to you.” Boyle swung his sap at me again, but I was watching for it and I rolled out of the chair and sprang out of his reach.

  “When am I supposed to have killed Ila Quinn?”

  Boyle unbuttoned his jacket and drew his revolver. I don’t think he even considered the consequences of killing me inside the station. He just cocked the gun and pointed it at my head. “I said, sign the confession.”

  My pulse quickened, my mouth went dry, and I realized that Boyle had a screw loose. Belcher moved up alongside of Boyle and touched his arm.

  “Put the gun away, Mike.”

  “Hey, he went crazy, tried to get my gun and I had to shoot him. Who’s gonna question it? There are two of us, and he’ll be dead. Think about it, Frank. It’ll clear up two cases.”

  His finger quivered on the trigger and I began to count down the final seconds of my life. It was a stupid way to go. Shot for something I hadn’t done.

  I’d reached the number three when the door burst open and Mary walked in followed by a uniformed sergeant. I don’t know who was more surprised, me or Boyle.

  Mary looked from the gun, to me, and then back at the gun. “What’s going on here?”

  I hoped Boyle wasn’t so crazed that he’d kill me in front of Mary. He seemed to be considering the odds, then he let out a little sigh and slid the gun back into his holster.

  “Locke was just about to sign a confession. Why don’t you come back in a few minutes?”

  “You shouldn’t have been questioning my client without me here. I’m pretty sure I could make the argument that he signed any confession you handed to him under duress.”

  Boyle took a step toward Mary. “You’re gumming up the works here doll face. We’ve got him dead to rights. You don’t need to be here.”

  “He has a right to a lawyer,” Mary said. “What was he confessing to?”

  “I wasn’t…” I started to say, but Mary held up her hand to silence me.

  “The murder of Ila Quinn,” Boyle said.

  There was a quick flash of surprise on her face but it was soon replaced by the stoic expression she’d been wearing when she entered the room.

  “When was she murdered?”

  “Last night,” Belcher said.

  “Got his prints all over her apartment, and on the gun that killed her,” Boyle added.

  “Never happened,” Mary said. “He was with me last night.”

  Boyle laughed. “Ain’t that convenient. You’re his lawyer and his whore.”

  I started toward Boyle and Belcher grabbed my arm. “Don’t do something you’ll regret, Locke.”

  “Stay out of this, Jim,” Mary said. “I’ll handle it.”

  “There’s nothing to handle,” Boyle said. “I told you we’ve got prints and motive.”

  “What’s his motive?”

  “Ila Quinn told me she saw Locke coming out of his sister’s apartment the night of the murder.”

  “She told Jim she would swear it wasn’t him.”

  “And now it’s his word against mine.”

  Mary walked past the two detectives and stopped alongside of me. “I want this man released right now. I’ve got two other witnesses who can place him in Boston last night, and I can find a dozen more that will testify he was on the train into New York this afternoon.”

  The smile fell from Boyle’s face and he looked confused when Belcher grabbed his arm. “We’ve got to let him go, Mike. We’ll check out his alibi and if it doesn’t hold, we’ll bring him back in.”

  Boyle shoved his partner away. “I don’t buy it, Locke. You killed your sister and you killed the old lady and I’m gonna prove it.”

  “What if I’m innocent?”

  “You aren’t” Boyle said.

  “You’ve got nothing,” Mary said. “We’re leaving.”

  Belcher guided Boyle out of our path. “Go ahead,” he said. “But don’t leave town for the next couple of days.”

  “You should have let me kill the son-of-a-bitch,” Boyle said.

  “Shut up, Mike,” Belcher pointed a finger toward the door. “Get out.”

  I didn’t need to be told twice. Grabbing my jacket, I skirted around the two coppers, took Mary’s elbow, and led her to the door. “I owe you,” I whispered in her ear.

  “Yes you do,” she said as we walked arm-in-arm down the hall. It was all I could do to keep myself from breaking into a trot.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  They say a hangover’s the worst part of drinking. Whoever came up with that proverb never tried to quit. My mouth might as well have been stuffed with cotton, Gene Krupa was playing a drum solo behind my eyes, and my stomach was dancing to the drumbeat. It’s a wonder I managed to climb out of bed and make my way to my desk.

  Flopping down in the chair, I opened the bottom drawer and took out the bottle and the glass I kept there. There were about two fingers of whiskey left in the bottle and I poured it all into the glass and tossed the empty bottle into the garbage pail.

  The smell of the whiskey eased the drum riff, but with the clearing of my head came thoughts of Mary. A voice in the back of my head reminded me that if Mary were to walk through my door at that moment, all would be lost between us. I asked myself why I cared, and after a heated discussion with myself about the consequences of taking a drink, I picked the bottle out of the trash. Reluctantly, I poured the whisky back in the bottle before returning it to the drawer.

  ***

  I had bacon, eggs and coffee at a little place down the street called Emily’s before heading to the offices of The New York Daily Post. The Post building was located two blocks from Park Row, within sight of the gilded dome of the Pulitzer building where Joseph Pulitzer once had his office. On a good day I could make it to work in thirty minutes. This wasn’t a good day. It took me almost an hour.

  In the later years of the nineteenth century Park Row and northern Nassau Street made up the publishing center of New York City. Now all that was left of the fabled Newspaper Row was The Post, and The Sun, which was housed in the Stewart Building.

  The Post building was four stories above ground and five stories below. It was in the lower levels where the massive presses ground out hundreds of thousands of papers which were then carried up to street level by moving belts. From there trucks raced the papers out across the city to the newsboys. After all these years I was still awed by what it took to put out a good n
ewspaper.

  In an effort to avoid Otis and Robert Dunlop, the city editor, I entered through the back entrance. I took the stairs down to the press room where the air was saturated with the smell of ink and mold caused by the constant dampness of being underground. The presses were silent now, but in the early morning hours the sound could make you feel as if you were traveling in the belly of a massive locomotive. The vibration could set your teeth to rattling like an icy plunge into the Hudson in January.

  After waving at a pressman who was working on one of the giant presses, I continued on, following a series of ramps leading up to the main floor and past the newsroom. When I reached the top ramp, I entered another stairwell and took the steps two at a time up to the third floor where The Post’s newspaper morgue was located.

  I stepped into a small vestibule, then through another door into the waiting room of the morgue. Betty Anderson, the research manager, was seated behind a massive oak desk at the far end of the room. Her desk held an ashtray overflowing with butts, a cup filled with pens and pencils, an inkwell, and a picture of her dead husband. Three small offices were located on either side of the room. Four of the doors were open, while two were closed indicating someone was inside going through one or more files.

  Betty was a petite woman with child sized hands and white false teeth that made her mouth look like she had just finished sucking on a sour grape. She had started working at the Post during Grover Cleveland’s first term, took guff from nobody, and at times acted like she owned the paper. She glanced up when she heard my footsteps on the tile.

  “Sorry to hear about your sister,” she said. Before I could respond she added, “I thought Otis banned you from the premises.”

  “I’m not working, just wanted to do a little research. Thought maybe we could keep it between the two of us.”

  “Right. And when Otis finds out he’ll fire my ass.”

  We both smiled at the idea. The files on this floor went back eighty years and everyone at the paper agreed it would take three girls to replace Betty. Otis would sooner close the morgue than lose her.

  “This would be a big favor, Betty. I’m going stir crazy sitting around the apartment doing nothing.” I hoped that would get to her. Betty worked six days a week and rumor had it that in all the time she worked for the Post she’d only missed one day of work, and that was to attend her own husband’s funeral.

  “What are you looking for?” she asked.

  “Any articles you can find on actresses who have been murdered in say the last ten years. Anything from the New York papers, Boston, D.C., and maybe Baltimore.”

  “Your sister was an actress, wasn’t she?”

  I nodded and she reached into a drawer, pulled out a request form, and picked up a pen.

  “Couldn’t we do this on the quiet,” I asked. “No paper trail for Otis to find.”

  She removed the cap from the pen and started filling out the sheet. “I gotta cover my ass, Jim. Otis might not fire me, but he can be a pain in the ass when he’s mad.”

  “I understand.”

  Betty nodded to her left. “Take the first room. I should be back in about fifteen minutes.” As she left the room the door next to the office she’d assigned me opened. A short bald man with a splotchy face and rotting teeth stepped into the waiting room.

  Steve Fowler was a second rate rewrite man who bathed too infrequently and resented those of us who did the real writing. He set the folder he’d been studying on Betty’s desk and without looking at me said, “Fucking shame about your sister.”

  “Thanks.” Eager to escape his horrid scents and his foul mouth, I steered my way over to the research room. The room was an eight by eight cell with a desk, a chair, a wastebasket, an L.C. Smith typewriter, a telephone, and an ashtray. The walls, once white, were gray from years of smoking and the tiled floor was chipped and uneven. I knew I could find paper and pencils in the drawer, along with telephone books and maybe a cockroach or two. To think, my father used to ask me why I would ever want to become a reporter.

  While I waited for Betty to return with any files she might find, I lit a cigarette and tried to remember if I’d finished the bottle I kept hidden in the water tank above the toilet on the first floor. Hell, I was beginning to obsess about booze almost as much as about who killed Helen. That couldn’t be good.

  Betty was back in less than ten minutes. She handed me four files, and closed the door behind her as she left the room. I had just opened the first one when someone knocked and pushed the door open. I recognized one of the copy boys. He had wild eyes that never stopped moving and he spoke with a stutter. “I’m sorry Mr. Locke, but Mr. Gerhardt sent me down. Said he wants to see you right away.”

  I should have realized that if Betty knew I was banned from the paper, everybody knew. Fowler must have gone straight to Otis when he left the morgue.

  “Tell Otis I’ll be up in a few minutes.”

  An anxious look flickered across the boy’s face. Shifting his weight from one foot to the other he began to squirm. “He told me to wait for you.” .

  Otis once fired an office boy who didn’t move fast enough to suit him, and they all feared him. I took mercy on the boy and pushed myself away from the desk. “What’s your name?”

  “Toby, sir.”

  “All right Toby, lead the way.”

  As I followed Toby through the waiting room I assured Betty I’d be right back to look at the files. She looked a little skeptical but didn’t say anything.

  The advertising department took up half the fourth floor. Joseph Griffin, the owner of the paper, kept a large suite on the same floor. He rarely used it since he left the everyday running of the paper to his managing editor, Otis Gerhardt. The view of the Brooklyn Bridge from Otis’s office was spectacular. It was the best part of being called upstairs.

  The door was open and I entered without knocking. Otis’s office was maybe twenty feet wide by thirty feet long, with a wall of bookshelves on the far end, and a large conference table in the center of the room. Otis sat at the table smoking a pipe and paging through the morning paper.

  Otis looked up and glared at me. “I thought I told you to take some time off.”

  “I did.”

  “I seem to recall something about two weeks.”

  “The coppers are trying to railroad me Otis. Boyle isn’t even looking at anyone else. I wouldn’t be here but I think I’m onto something. It’s a hell of a story, boss.”

  Otis took his pipe from his mouth and pointed it at the chair across from where he was sitting. “Okay Jim, convince me I shouldn’t fire you.”

  I sat and filled him in on what had happened in the past week. He swore when I told him about Boyle pulling his gun on me, and nodded when I told him what I’d learned about Ethel Bloomberg. He stopped me occasionally to ask questions, and when I was finished he leaned back in his chair and peered up at the ceiling.

  I knew better than to interrupt Otis. Over the years I’d been called up to his office hundreds of times to discuss stories. Although Bob Dunlap, the city editor, was my direct supervisor, Otis was a hands-on managing editor. He often invited reporters upstairs to discuss important stories. Dunlap didn’t like it, but there wasn’t much he could do about it.

  After about ten minutes Otis said, “I’ve never heard of someone singling out women, actresses if you’re right, over several years and in different cities. I’m not sure I buy it. I’ve been in the newspaper business for a long time and I’ve never heard of such a thing.

  “There was Jack the Ripper in London,” I reminded him.

  “Prostitutes I can maybe understand. Guy’s got a problem with women; he pays to take out his frustrations. Maybe he gets a little carried away.”

  “I don’t know, Otis. The cop I spoke with in Boston told me he was aware of several multiple murderers here in the States. It didn’t sound like prostitutes were involved.”

  “They’d have to be nuts,” Otis said.

  “I imagin
e.”

  “You think this person might have killed others, I mean besides Helen and this other woman, what’s her name?”

  “Ethel Bloomberg. There might even be others. I asked Betty to pull any articles she could find on actresses murdered in the last ten years in New York and surrounding cities. I was just starting to go over the files when you sent for me.”

  “Be a hell of a story if it’s true,” Otis said.

  “Huge.”

  “We’d scoop The Times, The Boston Globe, hell, it might be the story of the decade,” Otis said.

  “Bigger than the Lindberg kidnapping.”

  Otis slammed his fist onto the table. “What the hell you waiting for, Locke? Get back downstairs and get to work.”

  I jumped up and headed for the door. “I’m on it.”

  “And keep me posted on what you find out,” Otis called out as I ran for the stairs.

  When I entered the morgue this time, Betty was sitting behind her desk reading the morning paper and smoking. She smiled and said, “I hear you’re back to work.”

  “News travels faster than I do around here.”

  “Otis told me to make sure you get whatever information you need. To be honest, when you walked out of here I’d have given odds you weren’t going to be coming back.”

  “You and me both.”

  I crossed over to the office she’d assigned me earlier and saw that the files were still stacked as I’d left them. Betty had organized the files from most recent to oldest. I grabbed the first folder, opened it and saw that the first clipping was from The Baltimore Chronicle. It was dated September 8, 1931, nearly four years earlier.

  Ruth Havarette was twenty-three years old when she was murdered. Her body had been discovered in a park two blocks from where she lived. She had been stabbed multiple times in the chest and stomach. Her killer cut her dress open from her belly button to her neck, but she did not appear to have been raped. Ruth Havarette’s murder didn’t seem all that similar to Helen’s or Ethel’s. Her murder had not been as gruesome and she was a hoofer, not an actress, although she was dancing in a stage production.