The Body Looks Familiar

Richard Wormser

The Body Looks Familiar

NEITHER A DISGRACE TO THE CITY nor its great pride, the neighborhood lay, solid and well lighted, between the really expensive Hill to the east and the badly lighted, poorly swept Bottoms to the west and south. You could find people living in the area who were on civil service; you could also find an occasional small manufacturer or store owner who might conceivably float a million-dollar loan at the banks.

They called it the Park section, and, indeed, there was one big park and three little ones there. It had the best supermarkets in the city and the least crime; housebreakers and similar professionals naturally headed for the lusher pickings of the Hill, and the people of the Park didn’t have the passionate pressures on them that made Bottoms folk beat and stab and purse-snatch and rape each other.

Nevertheless, the Park was about to have a crime, and it was going to be a lulu, a whopper, a front-page item. Maybe not right away, but within a day or so at the most.

David Corday was sure of that, for two reasons: In the first place, he was chief assistant district attorney, and he knew crime. In the second place, he was about to commit the crime, a murder, himself.

He waited, at his ease. He had on gloves—who leaves fingerprints these days?—and he did not smoke as he waited—because some Sherlock might trace his brand. It was a real fancy precaution, he thought, since he smoked the second most popular cigarette in the country.

But he lounged on a satin-covered bed, and he listened to a softly playing radio, and he had a highball, good Scotch and soda, in his hand. No prospective murderer was ever more comfortable, David Corday reflected; but he didn’t chuckle or smile as he thought it; he was in deadly earnest.

The sound of a rising elevator caused him to turn the radio off, finish his highball. He dropped the glass into the pocket of the light overcoat he wore, stood up, turned off the one light that showed him the very expensive furnishings of the bedroom.

Then he crossed, using a little flashlight, to the living room of this three-room apartment. The elevator had stopped; its door was opening. He got just behind the entrance door of the apartment.

A key grated; the door began to open. It seemed to him that it had hardly cracked an inch before he could smell perfume, perfume as expensive as the satin covering in the bedroom, the plate glass mirror in the living room, the—

A girl entered. She was every man’s dream of physical perfection, in complexion, length of leg, depth of breast and fineness of hair; and she was dressed in a cocktail gown and short silk coat that showed she’d cashed in on what nature had given her. David Corday had also heard that she was not stupid; but he’d never talked to her.

She entered, walked to the middle of the room, turned on a standing lamp and—what else?—looked at herself in the plate glass mirror. She must have seen David Corday then, because she gasped, and the long, thin man who followed her caught the gasp and turned.

But by that time the heavy door had closed, and it was too late. David Corday had a .38 automatic pointed square at the tall man’s midriff. Corday said, “Evening, Latson.”

Latson made a noise that might have been, “Dave.” His hands instinctively rose a little, away from his sides. He was bone-thin, except for curiously thick lips set in a skin-covered skull.

“Yes,” Corday said. “Dave. Old pal Dave. Good old dog, Dave. Turn around, Chief, face the young lady… She’s not hard to look at. Now get your hands up, reasonably high… You carry your gun in your left armpit, don’t you?” As he talked, he crossed quickly to the little love seat next to the mirror. He snatched up a silk pillow, held it under his right armpit, in no way inhibiting the right hand that held his gun.

Then his left hand darted out, around the thin Latson, and got the gun from Latson’s shoulder holster.

He took time for a quick look at the girl. She was about to scream. He was deft switching his gun for Latson’s, pushing the pillow over it, and firing; the silk and feathers made a good muffler, and there wasn’t much noise.

The girl’s dress was at once ruined, her face immediately drained of blood; it had been a direct hit to her breast. But he held the pillow steady and sent the other five bullets into her before she hit the floor.

The room was filled with feathers now, with the smell of singed feathers. Latson stared, immobilized either by surprise or by the automatic in David Corday’s left hand.

Corday said, calmly, “That does that, Chief.” He slid the empty revolver back into Latson’s holster and smiled.

Latson spoke for the first time, except for his gasp of Corday’s first name. “I got to get out of here.”

David Corday said, “Trite, but true. Take your hands down.” He opened the front door with his gloved hand and bowed a little. “With me, Chief?”

Latson had never had a chance to take his hat or coat off. He walked stiffly to the opened door, and out, to where David Corday was pressing the button of the automatic elevator. The door opened at once; no one had called for the car since Latson had ridden up with the girl.

Corday switched the automatic to his right hand again, and gestured. “Though I don’t have to use this,” he said. “You couldn’t reload before I killed you.” He put the gun in his pocket.

Still in his nightmare trance, Latson joined him in the car. His voice seemed to be coming back. He said, “When did you know her?”

David Corday had pressed the G button for the ground floor. He said carefully, “I didn’t. Never spoke to her. Saw you once with her, in a crowded joint… When Elsa left me,” he said, “I thought it was her business… I still thought so when I found out she left me for you. Besides, a stink would have upset all our applecarts.”

“Still would,” Latson said gruffly.

“I’ve lost my taste for apples,” David Corday said. There was an overeducated precision to his speech. “But when I heard you’d ditched my wife for”—he pointed upstairs—“I was still thinking of my job. Last week Kansas City notified me. Elsa’s dead. My name was still on her driver’s license, Mrs. David Corday… She’d been working cheap joints along the river there.”

Latson shook his head, beginning to smile a little. He reached out and pushed the emergency button, stopping the car. Then, amazingly, he chuckled.

David Corday’s eyes got wide. He retreated as far as the little car would let him. His lips twitched, and the blood drained out of his face. “Listen. We got to—”

Latson said calmly, “We don’t have to do anything. And watch your grammar; that word ‘got’ is pretty crude for a high-grade lawyer. A minute or so won’t hurt us. If anybody presses a button, we hit the emergency again and run away from them—I’ve got a little speech to make. It goes like this: I hate to see anyone kid himself, especially a distinguished political ally like you.”

It was certainly not hot there in the elevator car. But Dave Corday’s whole appearance was that of a man pinned against a furnace.

“What did you think I’d do?” Latson asked, “Run away, like some candy-pinching kid? You don’t know Jim Latson. I don’t panic. And somehow, some way, I’ll be out of this, and leave you holding the bag. No pun.”

Dave Corday said, “Jim—”

Jim Latson was chuckling happily now. “Little man, don’t kid yourself. You didn’t do this because I took Elsa away from you. If I hadn’t, the next real man that came along would have snitched her, because that was the way she was. And she didn’t amount to anything, because how could she, or she wouldn’t have married you.”

Dave Corday half brought the pistol out of his pocket.

Latson said, “I ought to yawn, or do something dramatic like that. You aren’t going to shoot me. You don’t have the guts. Which is why you’ve hung this frame on me. Because you hate me. You’ve always hated me and you always will because I’m too much for you. Too much man and too much brain and too much guts. You worked your way into law school—”

Jim Latson reached out, pushed the ground-floor button. The car started to move again.

“And out of law school,” he went on, “and into the D.A.’s office and almost to the top of it. And nobody pays any attention to you, because there are real men around, real men like me, with power and brains and nerves we never had to work for. So you hate me, and you dreamed up this cockeyed frame to fix me.”

The car stopped and the door opened automatically. At this hour, well after one in the morning, there was no one in the lobby. Dave Corday said, “I took a risk someone would see me coming in. The only risk I took.”

They were walking to the street door now, and out into the well lighted, quiet street of the Park district.

“The risk you took,” Jim Latson said, “was in going up against a better man.” He turned and started walking away.

“Your girl,” Corday said after him. “Your gun. The apartment you rented for her.” He sent the words after the tall, thin figure of Jim Latson in a sharp whisper.

Latson turned, and his voice came back, composed, casual. “If your wife ended up in a Kansas City hook-shop,” he said, “maybe it was because that was better than you.”

Then he turned the corner and was gone.

JAMES LATSON stopped when he had gotten around the corner. It was pretty hard to realize—Hogan was dead. Hogan DeLisle. He’d never known her real name. As deputy chief of police for the city, he could have found out; but it hadn’t been her name that interested him.

He shook his head, began to walk again. Corday was crazy. Stark, raving nuts. It didn’t hurt Jim Latson to get de-womaned—though the dame who called herself Hogan DeLisle had been a good one; pleasant, good-looking as they come, easy to get along with.

There would be other ladies, other apartments, other pleasures.

And if Corday’s idea had been to involve Jim Latson in a scandal, he could not do so without involving himself. Latson had never given the girl anything but cash, she’d paid the apartment rent in person, paid her own way at the department stores.

About all Corday could do was offer himself as an eyewitness, and that was one thing no murderer had done yet; Jim Latson had been a police officer quite a while.

Which was a good thing, he thought wryly, beginning to get a little grip on himself. A thing like what happened in the apartment would have shaken the ordinary person. But he’d seen killings before. Plenty of them.

He stepped into a doorway, and carefully reloaded the revolver from a little ammunition box in his overcoat pocket.

The thought came to him that David Corday must have meant the girl’s killing as a warning:
You are next, Latson.
Well, Jim Latson took precautions, but he didn’t scare. One of the precautions had been to leave his car a few blocks from the girl’s house, to use cabs when he took her out. Not that there’d been anything hidden about his affair with her; he’d hardly get a girl like Hogan to keep hidden. They’d been seen in every nightclub in town, in the Zebra House tonight. But he’d never driven her a block in his city-owned sedan, never parked it in front of her door all night; never parked it here at all after dark, in fact, because he had never been sure when he would want to spend the night. A damned alluring female.

He clucked regretfully as he crossed the last street. There was his heap, the big sedan that the department provided, in keeping with his position as number two man on the police. Jim Latson fished his keys out of his overcoat pocket, got in behind the wheel. He lit a cigarette with a gold lighter marked with the number of a precinct; the boys there had given it to him when he was promoted from being their captain.

I’m a sentimental cuss, he thought. I wouldn’t sell that lighter for a new Cadillac.

Then he reached out to put the key in the ignition switch, and at once knew something was wrong. The switch was one of those from which the key can be taken while the ignition is still on; and that, for the first time in his life, seemed to be what he had done.

He frowned, tried the starter. The motor turned over lazily once, and was still, frozen.

Jim Latson began to whistle, noiselessly. It could be a coincidence. He had seen some damned funny ones in his time. He’d once sent a man to the chair on coincidence, only to get a deathbed confession from the real criminal two years later…

Sweat popped out along his narrow brow. That had been an extremely uncomfortable thought. He tried another one; coincidence had broken a lot of cases for him, given him a lot of credit he hadn’t really earned.

That thought hadn’t been any better. This was a case he didn’t want broken.

Futilely, knowing it was futile, he tried the starter again. It got him just where he expected it to get him—no place.

But he didn’t panic. You don’t get on top of the police list—the chief was just a politician—by panicking.

He grinned, suddenly remembering a wisecrack that had been going around town a few months ago: If you can keep your head when others are losing theirs, maybe you don’t really understand the situation.

He understood this one clearly enough. This was the tight spot, the squeeze, the hot one.

Characteristically, he wasted no time regretting that he hadn’t parked on a hill. If he had, Corday would have done something else to the car or waited for another night. Dave—it was hard not to think of him still as a co-operative intimate—had said Elsa died last week. This particular night had been chosen for some reason.

But he’d gotten where he’d gotten by never underestimating himself. He was as smart as David Corday. Anything Corday could spin, he could unravel. Period.

Now—the radio was on a separate battery, under the turtle deck. He could radio in, and a police car would push him to a start. But that would mean that the patrol car would log the time and place, and he was not far enough from Hogan’s apartment in the Belmont to have that happen.

He could just walk away, and have the car picked up in the morning, but that was hardly better. It kept him from being placed here in time, but not in location…

He could get a taxicab to push him.

That, of course, was the solution. Even if the cabby recognized him, the channels for connecting him up to the Belmont, to the girl’s death, were impossibly complicated. And hackmen were not the kind to go out of their way to make enemies of the Deputy Chief.

He got out of the car again, looked around. One of the phone company’s aluminum booths was scarcely a block away in front of a market. A routine call. Cabs pushed people all the time, especially in the middle of the night when the stalled motorist couldn’t beg a friendly shove from some other citizen.

Jim Latson took two steps toward the phone booth, and as he did so, a car came around the corner. A white spotlight played up the back of his sedan, crossed over to hit him, and a cheerful young voice said, “We came as soon as we got the call, Chief.”

The light, politely, went off him. He crossed to the police car, peering. He was a good commander; he knew half the men on the force by first and last names. Sunk, he played his hand out; he said, “Evening, Jimmy; how are you, Page?” to the radioman and the driver.

Page was already maneuvering behind the sedan. It wouldn’t do to say too much; obviously someone—and who but Corday?—had used his name and call letter in radioing in. Corday, as Chief Assistant D.A., had a police radio in his car though he seldom used it.

He put the car in second, turned the switch on, and slowly was pushed ahead. They went through a stationary stop sign before they got up enough speed, and then he let in the clutch, and the motor caught at once.

He pulled to the curb and put the car back in neutral, keeping his foot down on the accelerator.

The cruiser came alongside. Page leaned out and said, “Want us to follow you, Chief?”

Jim Latson said, “I’ll be all right. Resume patrol. I just had a low battery.”

“That city garage,” Page said. “They can’t even keep up a chief’s car.” He gave an awkward salute, pulled ahead, made a U-turn and went back the way he had come.

In the dim glow of the radio, Jim Latson had seen Jimmy Rein making a note on the cruiser’s log. Which was to be expected.

Jim Latson drove slowly home, raced the motor for a couple of minutes to make sure he had a good charge for his next start, and took the elevator—a self-service one like the one in the Belmont—to his own apartment.

He slowly and carefully mixed himself the single highball he always had before sleeping, smoked the single cigarette that always went with it, and then methodically undressed, put his gun and wallet and badge on the stand next to his bed, and got between the pleasantly cool sheets.

Winter was setting in, he thought. He’d have to tell the maid to put an extra blanket on his bed. Though, in all probability, she’d do it without being told. This was a good apartment hotel, better than the Belmont, for instance, though not as expensive.

And then Jim Latson was asleep. Tomorrow would bring what it would bring; no day in his life had yet brought more than he could handle.