The Lenient Beast, page 7
“The same church? I'm a Lutheran. But a friend of Father Trent's and he said Kurt had to have a job promised before he could get a visa, so — well, I figured I could use him somehow.”
I said, T guess you've answered my question all right.” And wondered why I'd asked it. I didn't see how it could affect our investigation to know for sure that Kurt's job had been less than essential and his employer more than generous in that he'd made a job for Kurt rather than just given him one. If Kurt could possibly have been a suicide, then it might have been a contributory cause if he'd come to realize that he was being given charity rather than a real job; but since Kurt hadn't killed himself that point seemed irrelevant.
Mr. Hoffmann had tried to keep us from noticing his occasional glances at the dial of his wrist watch, but I hadn't missed them and knew we were keeping him so I turned and asked Red if he had any more questions and when he said he hadn't, we let Mr. Hoffmann go. True, questioning the employees might bring out a further question or two we'd want to ask their boss, but unless it was something important or complicated, we could handle it by telephone.
We walked outside the Quonset with Mr. Hoffmann, who had a sudden thought and wanted to know if he should introduce us to the stenographer and the boy, and maybe to the foreman. We told God it wouldn't be necessary; they'd all have read about the murder and would be expecting to be questioned, so we could introduce ourselves.
I asked Red if he had any choice whether we should start with the workmen or go back in the office and talk to the two people there.
He said, “Let's try the office first, Frank. While we're there we can get a list of the workmen's names and if we check 'em off as we talk to them we won't miss anybody and we'll know when we got 'em all.”
It made sense; once in a while Red does have a good idea. The stenographer was nearest the door, so we hit her first. We pulled chairs up by her desk and got down to brass tacks as soon as we'd introduced ourselves.
Her name was Rhoda Stern, she told us. She didn't have to tell us that she wasn't whistle bait if she ever had been. She was at least a half dozen years the wrong side of thirty and she was short and dumpy and wore thick glasses whose harlequin frames, on her, didn't seem decorative. And she was hot and bothered by the heat despite the fact that it wasn't over ninety outside and inside the Quonset the noisy cooler had cut it to about ten degrees less than that. A warm day for April, but what was she going to do when the temperature would hit a hundred and ten in July and August? There are times when it doesn't get much if any cooler than this in the middle of the night.
But she was nice; I liked her. I asked her how long she'd been in Tucson and she told us six months; she'd come here last November, from Minneapolis. And how could we stand wearing coats in heat like this? I could have told her then and there that unless she already had a nest egg she'd better start saving up get-away money because within another two months she'd be leaving; there are some people who just can't take heat and she was one of them. But the Chamber of Commerce wouldn't like my telling her that, and anyway I could be wrong. If she lived through her first summer here she'd be all right, and she might do that if she changed jobs and got into an air-conditioned office building downtown instead of having to work in a Quonset hut, which always seems even hotter than it really is.
Kurt Stiffler? She'd liked him, but he'd been so quiet and shy, hard to get to know. She thought maybe it was because his English was “not so hot.” Or maybe — She hesitated.
Red asked, Tuesday, did you go home on the bus, or do you drive?”
“Neither, usually. I mean, I don't have my own car. But Mr. Vaughn — he's the foreman here — lives just a block from where I room, and he usually takes me home. If we're leaving at the same time, that is. Once in a while he has to stay later, and then I take the bus. But Tuesday he took me home.”
“Did you leave — leave the office here, I mean — before or after Kurt Tuesday?”
“The same time, as near as matters. I mean, I followed him right out the door, only he turned one way, toward the bus stop, and I turned the other way. That's the last I saw him.”
“To see if the foreman was leaving?”
“No, I went to where he parks his car and got in it to wait for him. You see, if he is going to work later than five, he always lets me know. Otherwise, I just wait for him at his car. I'm always ready first because he has to wash up and change clothes.”
“And the bus had already gone by and picked up Kurt when you and the foreman came out to the street?”
“I don't know. He always cuts across the lot and out the other side, on Beekman Street. So we didn't pass the bus stop.”
I didn't see what Red was getting at, and I don't think he did either. Probably he'd just wanted to get into the act for a while. She'd already told us she'd last seen Kurt when she'd followed him out of the door of the Quonset.
I asked her, “Do you have a list of all the workmen employed here? Well want to talk to each of them, at least for a minute or two apiece, and it'll help if we have a list so we can check off names.”
She thought a moment and then said, “Sure, I can give you the time sheet for Tuesday, Kurt's copy. I just typed it up.”
She bent over the wastebasket beside her desk and came up with a form with several dozen workmen's names and the number of hours each had put in, written in pencil in a very German-looking handwriting. “Here it is.”
“Thanks,” I said, and put it in my pocket. “I gather you don't want it back.”
“No, it's typed now. Kurt made them out from the time slips and then I type them in triplicate, one for the files here, one for the pay-roll department and one for the main office.”
“And the young man at the desk behind you makes them out now?”
“Oh, no. Now I just type them up straight from the time slips.”
“Seems just as simple, but wouldn't that mean this pencil copy wasn't necessary?”
She wiped perspiration off her forehead again. “This heat is awful. No, of course it wasn't necessary. Everybody knows Mr. Hoffmann made that job just because he was sorry for Kurt. Oh, some of the things he did had to be done, but George and I can take care of them between us, easy.”
“George is the fellow behind you?”
“Yeah, the kid. George Wicks.”
I asked, “Miss Stern, do you think Kurt knew that his job here was — well, on the borderline of charity?”
“If he didn't, he-must have been pretty dumb.”
There was something in the way she said it that made me ask, “You said before, Miss Stern, that you liked Kurt. Did you, really? Be honest.”
“Well, really, I don't see what that has to do with it, Mr. — uh — Ramos.”
“Nothing directly,” I admitted. “We don't mean to suggest you disliked him enough to shoot him, Miss Stern. But it's part of our job to find out everything about him that we can, good or bad. Even personality traits that other people found in him.”
“Well, I guess I see what you mean. I guess it was that he kept so much to himself — and I'm talking about before the accident — that he gave the impression that he thought he was better than the rest of us. But I guess people like him are often that way, unless they go to the opposite extreme and are too pushing.”
“What do you mean, people like him?”
“Jewish people. That's another thing, he never told anyone he was Jewish until his past history came out in the newspaper story about the accident. But the way they stick together, I guess that's why Mr. Hoffmann gave him a job when he didn't need him. It's funny, I'd never thought about Mr. Hoffmann being Jewish but I guess he must be too, his getting out of Germany while Hitler was getting in power there.”
I stood up. I said, “Thank you, Miss Stern,” and started for the door. I wished her a most enjoyable summer. I hoped the heat would fry her.
Red caught up with me outside. He said, “Hey, aren't we going to talk to the kid in there too?”
“I need fresh air,” I told him. “We'll get to the kid later.”
“You're so damn thin-skinned on that race business, Frank. So she doesn't like Jews. She was probably brought up that way; she can't help it.”
“All right, all right,” I said. “Let's find the foreman first.”
We found the foreman, Vaughn. We never got around to asking his first name. I told him who we were and what we were doing and then I showed him the time sheet Rhoda Stern had given us and asked him if it was complete or if there'd been any absences that day. He thought a minute.
“Tuesday? No. Nor today either for that matter. You'll be able to talk to all of 'em. Hope you won't keep 'em too long, though. We're a little behind schedule.”
“Not more than a few minutes apiece,” I promised him. “Unless we run into any of them who really knew Kurt or anything about him.”
“You won't, “he said. “I doubt if any of them knew him at all. He never came out here and they never go in the office. They'll all know the name and who he was, on account of that story in the paper a couple of weeks ago and the story in this morning's paper that he was killed. Say, are you sure he was killed?”
“Yes. Why?”
“Well, if it could be suicide I'd sure say it was. I never saw a guy act more beat than he acted.”
“How well did you know him?”
“Enough to talk to him, that's all. I'm in and out of the office a dozen or more times a day, so I had plenty of chances. I never got close to him, though.”
“Did you try?”
“Yes, up to a point. To the point where I saw he didn't want me to try any harder. He was a funny guy.”
“When, Tuesday, did you last see him?”
“Just before five o'clock. I saw Hoffmann's car drive up and when he went into the office I went, too, and asked him if there was anything he wanted from me. He said there wasn't so I quit as usual.”
“And drove Rhoda Stem home?”
He sighed. “Yes. That dame gets in my hair but I started doing it and now there's no way out. She just lives a block from me.”
“Cheer up,” I said, “She won't last the summer.”
“Hope and think you're right. God, do I get tired hearing her bitch about the heat. In April, yet.”
“Thanks,” I told him. “Well, I guess well-”
“Hey, wait a minute. When's the funeral?”
“Hasn't been set yet. Father Trent of St. Matthew's is going to take care of that end of it. But you can watch the papers. It'll be announced at least a day before.”
We saw all of the workmen, checking them off one at a time after we'd talked to them. We didn't learn anything new about Kurt himself; none of them knew him to speak of, although several knew him to speak to, mostly those who either occasionally or regularly had ridden the bus with him.
We found four who had ridden the same bus with him Tuesday afternoon and two of those four had ridden the bus all the way into town and had seen Kurt get off at his usual stop about six blocks before the downtown bus terminal. That would have been about forty minutes after five. Now we had him that far.
We checked on the clothes he'd been wearing and they seemed to be the same ones we'd seen on him in Medley's yard except that he'd been in shirt sleeves going home from work and had been wearing a jacket when we saw him. So obviously he had gone home from the bus stop, either right away or some time during the evening.
And several of the workmen, too, asked about the funeral. Whether anyone from the job would actually go to it or not — except Mr. Hoffmann; I felt sure he would — at least there'd be a movement afoot to send some flowers.
And a damn silly thing that would be, with no Stiffler left to know they were being sent.
“Well,” Red said, “that washes it up except for the kid in the office. George what's-his-name.”
“George Wicks,” I said. “All right, let's get him.”
Noon whistles were blowing and we'd found the last workman way at the back of the new high school, so we hurried; maybe he went home for lunch and we'd miss him. He did go home for lunch, but we caught him just as he was about to push off on a bicycle I'd noticed leaning against the side of the Quonset. We asked him if he'd mind talking to us before he took off.
“Okay,” he said, “if it doesn't take too long.”
It didn't take too long because we didn't get anything new from him.
“Well,” Red asked me, “should we save a dime and phone from here?”
Through the Quonset window alongside us I could see Rhoda Stern unwrapping a lunch at her desk. Even if I'd liked her, I'd just as soon not make the call from there and have her listen.
“I'll pay the dime,” I said. “My turn to drive.”
We got into the car and went over to South Sixth Avenue, north to the nearest drugstore.
Cap hadn't left for lunch yet and I got him. “We're through at the construction job,” I told him. “Nothing much except that he rode the bus home after work and got off at Burke Street, alone, at about five-forty.”
Cap grunted. “Not much for a morning's work. Well, I've got the autopsy report. Bullet was a twenty-two short, fired close range but not quite contact, went diagonally upward, ended up just behind the upper forehead. No doubt that it was the cause of death and death would have been instantaneous.” » “He got that much of a break anyway,” I said.
“Yes. And Dr. Raeburn revises his estimate of time of death, says it was earlier than he figured; he moves it back about four hours.”
I said, “That would put it between 8 p.m. and 2 a.m.”
“Right. And if he ate dinner at the usual time, probably nearer the first of those two limits. Anyway, he last ate about three hours — and Raeburn says that's fairly accurate — before he died. Probably sandwiches — bread and some kind of sausage, and some cheese.”
“Then eight o'clock is out as possible time of death because he didn't eat at five. If he walked right home from the bus stop, made himself sandwiches and ate them right away, it would have been six o'clock before he could even have started to eat. So he couldn't have been killed before nine at the earliest. More likely half past nine, if he took his time making the sandwiches and didn't bolt them down. Nothing after that? Not even a drink, maybe?”
“Definitely no alcohol.”
“Damn,” I said. “I was hoping he'd had some sherry.”
“Sherry? Why?”
“Medley offered some to Red and me when we talked to him. A good pale dry sherry, he said.” I sighed. “Well, we turned it down so I guess Kurt did too.”
Cap snorted, or as near to it as he ever comes. “You're wasting time suspecting John Medley.”
“Not time,” I said. “I'm wasting suspicion, maybe, but that's cheap. Any other findings on the autopsy, Cap?”
“Nothing bearing directly on the murder. His general health and physical condition were really something. Rae-burn says he should have been in a hospital; it was a wonder he managed to walk around.”
“What all was wrong?”
“About everything. Enlarged heart. Anemia — extremely low red corpuscle count. Both lungs about half calcified — although t.b. didn't seem to have been active. Liver and kidneys both in bad shape. I'm not going to read off the details and fancy words. You can read the report yourself when you come in.”
“Okay,” I said. “Well, shall we go back to canvassing his neighborhood and see if we can get anything more there?”
“Yes, you might as well. Somebody must have seen him.”
I said, “Okay, Cap. See you later.” Outside the phone booth I told Red, “Nothing startling. I'll give it to you on our way into town. Anywhere special you want to eat?”
We got the eating problem solved on our way back to the car and while I drove in on Sixth Avenue I passed on to Red the dope Cap Pettijohn had given me over the phone.
“Makes it easier in one way,” Red said.
I asked him how.
“Less of his time to account for. Damn it, somebody must have seen him after he got off the bus.”
Somebody had, we found out, but it didn't do us much good. The somebody turned out to be one Juan Romero, who ran the little neighborhood grocery downstairs in the same building Kurt had lived in. We made it our first stop today; it had been closed yesterday evening by the time we started our canvass.
Yes, Juan Romero said, he knew Kurt Stiffler. As a customer, that is.
“When did you see him last?”
“Evening he was killed. Stopped in on his way home.”
“Do you know about what time that would have been?”
“Before six o'clock. Quarter to, maybe. Usual time. He nearly always stops — stopped in on his way home from work.”
“Do you remember what he bought?”
“Loaf of rye bread. I think that's — wait, no. He bought some cheese. Quarter pound of jack cheese.”
“No sausage of any kind?”
“No, not then. But he did buy sausage sometimes.”
I kept digging and got a little more, not much. Kurt hadn't acted unusual in any way. There hadn't been any conversation more than necessary for the purchase of the bread and cheese. When Kurt had left, he'd turned in the direction that would take him to the doorway that led to the flats upstairs but Romero hadn't actually seen him enter it. He'd been at the back of the store and couldn't possibly have seen, nor could he have heard the door open and close, if it had.
Was Kurt a regular customer? Well, he had been for the last couple of weeks, since his family had died. He usually did his shopping on his way home from work, about the same time every day, and he usually bought bread and stuff for sandwiches. Sometimes but less often some canned goods, especially beans and soups, and occasionally some tortillas.
Romero thought Kurt must have either skipped breakfasts or eaten them at a restaurant on the way to work but that he made and carried his own lunches and prepared most if not all of his own evening meals.
