The Corpse Next Door Read online

  The

  CORPSE

  NEXT

  DOOR

  JOHN FARRIS

  WILDSIDE PRESS

  All characters and firms in this work

  are fictitious and any resemblance to

  persons living or dead is coincidental

  Copyright © 1956 by

  Graphic Publishing Company, Inc.

  240 West 40 Street

  New York, N. Y.

  Cover by Oliver Brabbins

  1

  THE KID was dead. They had cut him down and pulled the twisted shirt from around his neck and two firemen were giving him respiration, but you could tell it was too late.

  I turned to the jailer. He stood with thumbs hooked in belt, chewing tobacco, looking at the boy lying on the floor of the cell.

  “How long was he hanging there?”

  The jailer shrugged. “Ten, fifteen minutes. Goddam, it sure swole his face up, didn’t it?”

  “Where were you while he was hanging?”

  He pushed a knuckle through gray whiskers near his mouth to wipe away tobacco juice. “Downstairs. Where I’m usually at. Wasn’t no reason for me to be up here, then. Hell, this is practically a new jail. They ain’t supposed to be able to kill themselves in it.”

  I looked around the cell block. Small steel-and-concrete walls, lights recessed into the ceiling behind glass, bunks bolted to the walls. When a prisoner was locked up he surrendered all items with which he might do harm to himself or others. But Jimmy Herne had knotted part of his shirt carefully around a bar of the bunk and fixed the rest around his neck. He had stretched himself on the floor with his face not quite touching. He had rolled over a couple of times, the shirt tightening into his neck. It takes a while to die that way. He had been patient about it.

  I touched one of the firemen on the shoulder. He looked up.

  “Any chance?”

  “Don’t think so, Sergeant. That’s a dead face if I ever saw one.”

  The old jailer leaned against the bars and ruminated. He had a bent shield pinned to one suspender and there were shiny patches on his khaki pants. His lower jaw moved from side to side.

  “Well, maybe it saves the state the expense of executing him, but I wisht he didn’t have to kick off in my jail.”

  “Shut up, damn it!”

  He looked childishly hurt. “Don’t pick on me, I can’t help it if I’m old and smell bad. Hell, Sergeant. What you so upset for? He was just another punk. Ain’t nobody goin’ to miss him.”

  A doctor hurried down the corridor and into the cell. He bent beside the kid and turned him over on his back. He made his examination quickly but thoroughly.

  “Go polish your fire engines, boys. You can’t do anything with this one.”

  “Detective Sergeant Randall,” I said absently.

  “I can’t close his eyes because of protrusion,” the doctor explained.

  The county stored its bodies at Kenwick’s. “We’ll call and have a hearse sent around,” I said. I looked at the jailer and he took off.

  The doctor glanced at the shirt on the cell floor. “That’s Jimmy Herne. He took his own life?”

  I nodded, my eyes shut. “Yes. He confessed killing Leland Smithell yesterday. We should have had somebody watching him.”

  The doctor’s heavy dark eyes were troubled. “I visited Smithell’s house a couple of times since Jimmy went to work for him. I’m sure he treated the boy well. Why would he kill the man who befriended him? Sometimes I don’t understand things.”

  “You should have been a cop, doctor. Thanks for coming over.”

  The old jailer wandered in and spread a blanket over Jimmy Herne. Watching this, I had the feeling in the back of my mind, the chill knowledge of trouble ahead, and I breathed heavily.

  “Doc,” the jailer said, “I’ve got an elbow been giving me trouble since I fell on it a couple of weeks back and I’ve been wondering if you couldn’t . . .”

  The doctor picked up his bag.

  “Aw, hell,” the jailer grumbled, and went away to call the cemetery wagon.

  As the doctor walked out, the firemen were packing up their respirator. They nodded to me and left. I was alone with Jimmy Herne and I didn’t like it. I could feel his eyes, still open and staring under the blanket. I could hear him wailing, “I didn’t do it, I didn’t do it, I didn’t . . .”

  Phil Naar waited in the corridor outside the cell, leaning against the bars, wetting the tip of an unlit cigarette. He wore an old gray suit that looked like he had been born in it and his hat was pushed back on his head so that white hair fell over his forehead from beneath the brim. His face is old. He’s spent nineteen years being a cop and he looks like one. I’ve been a cop for nine years and I look like a hood.

  “Not nice, hey?” Phil said. “He wasn’t a bad kid. I sort of felt sorry for the little monkey. I knew he was weak, but I felt sorry for him. Guts show up in the strangest places, don’t they?”

  Rolling over, once, twice, the shirt tightening . . .

  “Let’s get the hell out,” I said.

  We walked through the door of the cell block and out to the landing, where we picked up our guns. A guard pushed a lever that shut the main door. On his switchboard he has levers that can open each cell individually, or all at once. It’s really a nice jail, if you like jails.

  One of the regulars, wearing denims wet at the knees, was scrubbing the metal stairs with an old brush and a pot of water foaming with disinfectant. The man held the bottle in one hand and looked at the amber liquid thoughtfully.

  “No, no, Dudley,” I said. “It’ll put pine knots on your stomach.”

  He looked guiltily at us and picked up the brush.

  We walked on down the steps.

  Phil squinted at hard sunlight that came through a skylight at the top of the stairwell. “Are you the one going to tell her?”

  I hesitated, thinking about it. “I suppose so. I don’t want to. I’ll have to tell Gulliver first. He’ll feel left out if I don’t.”

  We split up in the hall downstairs, Phil continuing on to circuit court. I went outside and down the street to the Cheyney police department.

  SAM GULLIVER WAS IN HIS OFFICE WITH THE DOOR OPEN SO I went on in. He was reading a letter from the National Association of Police Chiefs. I waited until he was through.

  “What was the excitement at the jail?” he said, putting the letter aside.

  “Jimmy Herne,” I said. “He hanged himself. With his shirt.”

  That’s the thing about Gulliver. I expected him to be a little surprised at least, for God’s sake. But he just sat there and lit a cigar and all he said was, “Did he?”

  I nodded.

  “Dead, I guess.”

  “Sure.”

  He drew on the cigar. “Well, so much for that one. I didn’t think he had enough backbone for a stunt like that.”

  “Doesn’t it make any difference to you?”

  He was a little surprised. “No. He was as good as dead anyway. He just saved a lot of trouble. You send the stiff to Kenwick’s?”

  “Sure.” I was getting a little irritated. He was acting like a scoutmaster again.

  He looked at his cigar and he looked out the window. He looked at me. “Well, I guess that’s all. Anything else, Bill?”

  “I guess not. What happens if Kenwick finds bruises when he strips the kid? You know Kenwick talks like a four-party line.”

  Gulliver waved the cigar. “Rumors. They don’t mean anything.” He slid his roller chair a little closer to the desk. “You know better, Bill. I work better than that. I never bruise anybody. There are other ways.”

  I knew. There are several ways to jar a man loose from his senses. Gulliver has big hands. Th
e heels of his palms are thick. He uses them against the temples of a suspect and never works up a sweat.

  Gulliver smiled a little and picked up a letter. “Look here, Bill.”

  I took the letter offered and glanced at it. It was from the mayor, commending Chief Gulliver on his expeditious work in capturing Jimmy Herne and obtaining a confession of the murder of Smithell, “one of our outstanding local citizens.” I figured the mayor’s secretary was on vacation and nobody was around to read the papers to him. The Highway Patrol, not Cheyney police, had captured Jimmy in the railroad yards of a small town seventy miles north of Cheyney.

  I read as much as I could stand and surrendered the letter. Gulliver was pleased so I had to get out the needle.

  “You’re proud of this one, aren’t you?”

  Maybe I sounded sullen. Gulliver frowned.

  “Sure I am.” He looked at his stiff left wrist, which lay on the desk top, the two frozen fingers of his hand curled. A souvenir of his days as a rookie cop in St. Louis, which had finished him with the St. Louis police. Every now and then, when he feels a compulsion to hate something, he looks at the wrist. He hates himself for it, for because of it he is not whole and strong as he thinks he needs to be. But most of all he hates those who did it to him, the two kids who must have been like Jimmy Herne, but more vicious.

  “I admit there wasn’t much to it, just a matter of pounding away until the kid came around. The evidence was conclusive, fingerprints all over the jewelry box, Smithell’s wallet empty. Jimmy’s past record, and the fact that he ran away.”

  He looked up sharply, as if wondering why the hell he was explaining.

  “I guess you’d better notify the Francis girl,” he said. “Tell her Jimmy’s dead.”

  “Okay.”

  Gulliver put a thumb against his teeth. He was thinking about something. “I thought I was going to have to coax you. You generally gripe like hell when you have to visit bereaved relatives.” A little smile touched his face. “I guess it’s that girl. You seem to have gotten to know her pretty well in the last four days.” He stretched and the chair creaked. He put one arm over the back of the chair, so his upper arm flattened out.

  Gulliver has arms broad as horse’s thighs. I’ve seen tough cons get sweaty just looking at him.

  “You even helped her find a lawyer,” he said, a smooth empty expression on his face.

  I could feel it coming then, like you can feel the pressure of a hard storm behind piled dark clouds.

  “I just suggested someone she might get to help Jimmy. She didn’t have much money. I didn’t want her to waste it on somebody who wouldn’t be any good for the kid.” I wished I hadn’t spoken. I didn’t have to explain anything to him.

  He brought the cigar out of an ash-tray and traced his lower lip with the wet end of it. Unexpectedly, he smiled. He has a smile like a baby when he wants to use it.

  “Oh, I didn’t mean anything, Bill. It’s okay with me.” His eyes said he was remembering. “That Stella Francis . . . now there’s a nice little piece. Yes, yes.”

  “She isn’t a piece, Gulliver.”

  He clamped down on the end of the cigar. There was no more smoothness in his face. “I think she is. I think she’s a cheap little piece. I think she’s a cheap little lay like every other twist from that side of the river and don’t you by God call me Gulliver again without putting Chief in front of it!”

  “Yes—sir.”

  He was silent for a while, looking at me without anger, almost morosely. If you know something of Gulliver, you know his moods, as shifting and unexpected and treacherous as the sand bars that come and go in the big river.

  He picked up a pencil, pinched the eraser and rubbed at a spot on one fingernail, waiting for me to tell him I was ready to be good.

  When I didn’t, he said, “I want you to make a tour of Foundry Road about twelve-thirty or one tonight. Investigate every parked car, get names and addresses. Three or four dozen. We’ve been getting complaints from parents about all the kids necking out there. Throw a scare into ’em.”

  I put my teeth together, cutting off an angry protest. What a crock. “All right.”

  “Get out of here now, Bill,” he said wearily. “Go tell the Francis girl her cousin killed himself because he had a guilty conscience.” He looked at me bleakly for a second longer, then took the letter from the mayor and stroked it with his good hand and started reading it again, but he didn’t seem to be getting any pleasure from the words.

  THE RIDGE IS A SPINE OF LAND NORTH OF THE BIG RIVER, usually above high-water level, and stretching across the rich lowlands almost to the rise of bluffs and shaggy domes of hills. This is an area of decay, largely abandoned by the old settlers who depended on river trade for their living when the unpredictable river made a new bed farther south. The Ridge was left to the lap of flood water, to fade and grow bleak in the sun. I knew the people who lived there and worked in the mills and small factories. I knew the kids like Jimmy Herne, who were unable to resist the relentless pressure of despair.

  I parked in front of the crippled old rooming-house on Davis Street and went upstairs to Stella Francis’ room.

  Her door stood open. She was inside, near the windows, ironing a dress. The sun was low in the west now, but the old house had soaked up heat all day and the small breeze pushing at the net curtains had little effect on the laden air.

  Stella was wearing only a slip, wet under the arms, and the edges of her dusty blonde hair were damp against her forehead. There was a radio on in the room, turned low.

  She glanced over one shoulder. “Bill? Come in. Be through with this in a minute.”

  On a small table with the radio stood a pitcher of ice water. I ducked under a wire stretched across the small room from which Stella’s clothes hung and lifted the pitcher. The radio was now saying, “And just half an hour ago this afternoon, at the county jail . . .” and I spilled some of the water in my haste to find another station.

  I reached over Stella’s shoulder with the misty pitcher. She upended the iron and took the pitcher in both hands, child-fashion, drank, then brushed the hair back from her forehead. Her hair is coarse, but not stiff and dry, cut at the base of her neck, the edges uneven and curled up slightly. In front the blonde hair is like a great mane that can either sweep over her forehead or be brushed back in a wave.

  She put down the water pitcher with a sound of appreciation and looked up at me, her green eyes bright and clear, smiling. She seemed so young that it was strange to remember what the rest of her was like, beneath the slip.

  I touched her wet shoulder lightly and took a bath towel from a nearby chair. “A bit damp, lady.” I toweled off the perspiration, then dabbed at her forehead. I kissed her on the tip of her nose.

  Her mouth opened slightly and I kissed her again, seeing the look of sleepy pleasure in those green eyes, the subtle touch of woman-wisdom, at odds with her youthful appearance. Her skin is surprisingly youthful and good though not unmarked. It seemed, as I kissed her, that I had known her for so long—much longer than four days—known the quick one-sided smile, the somber shadows of knowledge that crept into her eyes at times, the fine firm body. I felt that I had never really known myself until I had met her.

  “Very good,” she said, pleased, when we parted. She made a face at the ironing board. “I hate to iron. Sit down and take a load off those cop’s feet, Bill. Excuse the slip. It’s so hot in this room.”

  “There are other places to live,” I reminded her.

  “But not as cheap.” She walked barefoot to the bed and sat and looked at me curiously. “What brings you across the river, Bill? Something about Jimmy?”

  I hesitated. She was instantly aware of my uncertainty, and a protective wariness narrowed her eyes.

  “About Jimmy,” I said. I knew my face must be coloring. “Stella,” I said, not looking at her, “the boy was in a bad way. A couple of previous arrests and the murder confession. It didn’t look good for him.”
>
  I knew I was blundering off in the wrong direction but I couldn’t help it.

  Her voice became strident in a way that I disliked. “Jimmy’s lawyer said that maybe they couldn’t prove premeditation. Did he change his mind? Bill . . .” There was a thin sound of fear.

  “That’s not what I mean,” I said desperately. “Jimmy . . . I guess he . . . got tired, or scared or something. Of waiting, and not knowing.” Her head came up and she looked at me incredulously. “I don’t know why,” I said. My mouth was very dry. “He hanged himself this afternoon. With his shirt. I don’t know why. But he’s dead. I’m sorry, Stella.”

  She stopped breathing for a moment and her fingers loosened in her lap. She was still looking at me with the same uncomprehending expression. She put her hands between her knees and pressed her legs together hard, so that the calves touched, and her head inclined forward, the mane of blonde hair dangling over her forehead. Her breasts moved erratically as she breathed.

  “Stella . . .” I said helplessly.

  She began to cry, with gulping irregular sobs. She slid off the bed, kneeled on the floor, holding her head like a sick dog, and cried.

  I sat beside her on the floor and held her, her face soft against my neck. She smelled of sweat and shampoo and woman-odor.

  I leaned back against the bed and held her and felt her tears warm on my cheek, knowing the tragedy of shattered hopes more tragic because the hopes were founded in futility, and it had always been that way for her, because she was a Ridge girl. And that was not all I knew. I knew she was poor and nearly alone when she quit high school her first year because she was tired of wearing the same dress three times a week and washing out the same underwear every night. I knew there was a boy, somewhere in her life, shot dead by the owner of a liquor store during an attempted holdup. I knew she worked nights as a waitress and saved her money patiently for the day when she could leave the Ridge and I knew there was a streak of honesty and independence in her a mile wide.

  I knew, most of all, that I had wanted her from the first moment I had seen her, in the hall of the police station, when she had spit in Gulliver’s face because he wouldn’t let her see her cousin.