Gentle Murderer by Dorothy Salisbury Davis Page A

all then. She probably showered and dressed as soon as Flaherty left. I think she expected someone—but not her date. Whoever she expected was keeping her late. She smoked two cigarettes in the living room. The lipstick matches what she was wearing when she died. She wouldn’t wear that shade in the afternoon. I think she waited there in the living room as long as she dared without chancing to stand up her date … all dressed to go out, and carrying in her evening bag over two hundred dollars.”
    Goldsmith flicked the ash from his cigarette into the wastebasket.
    “That’s a lot of money to start an evening with,” Holden said.
    “And to finish it with,” the sergeant added. “It was still in her purse, and the purse was open on the bed. But we’ll come to that presently. By a few minutes to seven she could wait no longer. She went out without leaving a message at the desk. In a way, that throws off my theory that she was waiting for someone, but I think she was, nevertheless.
    “Outdoors, the doorman tried to get a cab for her, but she flagged a cruiser herself on the corner of Madison. Unfortunate. It may take a while to turn up the cabbie. She was gone no more than a half-hour when she returned, the cabbie helping her out of the car and upstairs. She had a shock, or else she really got sick. Probably that. The hotel employees tell this story. That would be a few minutes after seven. The doorman rolled the cab down the street away from the front door when the driver didn’t return quick enough to suit him. In fact, he doesn’t know when the driver returned. He didn’t think of him again till we started questioning.
    “The cabbie didn’t take the elevator downstairs. The operator remembers a persistent ringing on the fourth floor a few minutes after they had gone up, but when he got down, there was no one there. It’s probable that the man was worried about his cab and ran down the stairs when the elevator was so slow. The stairs are clearly marked in the hall. And something we know now: the murderer used them.”
    Holden looked at him.
    “We’ve got the shirt he wore. It’s in the lab. A couple of hours ago one of the men picked it up behind some ash-cans at the service entrance.”
    “He didn’t pick up the murder weapon, too?”
    “Just the shirt. Rolled up in a ball. Washed and rolled up in a ball. He must have gone out of here in his undershirt.”
    “Or naked,” Holden said. “I think he could have gone out naked for all the notice there was taken of him.”
    Goldsmith smiled. “Possibly. The funny thing is, I don’t think he was trying to avoid attention particularly. I think a lot of things fell his way.”
    “Then why didn’t he take the shirt with him?”
    “That I don’t know.”
    “I see you’ve eliminated the cab driver,” Holden said.
    “I don’t eliminate him. He’s the best suspect we have at the moment. He might have returned …”
    “Why not have killed her then?”
    Goldsmith thumbed through the reports.
    “There was a phone call to her apartment about eight-thirty. She was alive then. Alive and able to answer it. That’s all we know about the call.”
    Holden drummed on his desk. “You don’t like the cabbie because of motive. Is that it?”
    “Mostly. There’s no indication that the murderer was interested in her physically—at that moment. And there’s the money untouched.”
    “At that moment?” Holden picked up.
    “At that moment,” Goldsmith repeated. He rummaged through the photographs. “She was on the bed, not in it, fully dressed, as you can see here. There is every indication that she was murdered there. Apparently there was no struggle. It’s just possible that she was asleep. If she was, it means that after the cabbie left someone came whom she trusted. Maybe the person she expected earlier.”
    “What was wrong with her?” Holden asked.
    “An ulcerous stomach.”
    “Nothing worse? Or nothing she could have thought was