False Negative (Hard Case Crime) Read online

  The rough wool blanket was khaki-colored. Two of them together hadn’t kept Jordan warm in his billet in Austria. The troopers were not interested in his observations. They had observed the wind picking up, and that it was unnecessary for both of them to freeze while waiting for back-up. Brannon took cover in the lee of the dunes, while Riley sat in their car. Adam Jordan remained with the woman on the blanket.

  A fierce gust blew the pleated skirt above her hips. She was wearing sheer panties several inches below the line imprinted in her waist by the elastic. They were on front to back, the label on the outside. Jordan turned his back to the wind, and scribbled in his notepad.

  He would eulogize her with tenderness. In the squalid circumstances of her death was a story more compelling than Conrad Palmer’s. He would polish its lurid detail into a cautionary tale, every parent’s nightmare. It would be his ticket out of Atlantic City and into journalism’s major leagues. His and hers.

  Brannon hadn’t quit flashing him dirty looks. Something was wrong with a man who kept close to a corpse. A creep who got his thrills looking at murdered women. Riley might not be off the mark about him. A car door slammed. Brannon elbowed him aside, and stood closest to the blanket.

  Coming across the dunes with Riley was a man pressing a fedora against the back of his head. He was ruddy and beer-swollen, Irish—as were most state police in New Jersey—Irish and something else. The wind snapped back the brim, and Jordan got a look at a crumpled pompadour sprinkled with gray.

  Detective Lieutenant Ralph Day knelt beside the body as the troopers filled him in. He plowed the sand with his fingers, lifted the corners of the blanket, and swept underneath. He climbed to the top of the dunes to view the wider scene, and sent Riley and Brannon to hunt for evidence before their curiosity ran out. “This is how you found her?” he said to Jordan.

  The wind had straightened the dead woman’s skirt. Jordan didn’t tell Day what he’d seen under it. “I know better than to interfere with a crime scene.”

  “I didn’t ask if you know better.”

  Day did not like having reporters around. Cases were blown cozying with the press. Pensions were lost. If it were up to him the Bill of Rights would be revised—the article guaranteeing Freedom of the Press—and while they were at it he would also tell the states to narrow the rights of suspects in criminal cases.

  “Just like she is now,” Jordan said.

  Unlike killers and their victims the police were all of a type, taciturn men from working class families innately suspicious of the civilians who paid them. Fair game for Jordan to coddle, massage, flatter, bribe, pressure, threaten, trick—whatever it took—into giving up their secrets. In the city room where he was admired for being a fast writer careful with facts, he accepted kudos only as an expert at manipulating cops. And also for protecting them from prosecutors and judges by refusing to discuss—even under subpoena—what they told him.

  “What do you make of it?” he asked Day.

  “It would be pure speculation.”

  Speculation put men in prison. From a conscientious investigator like Ralph Day it was often closer to fact than anything heard in court. “I’ll take what I can get.”

  “So you can use it in quotes with attribution?” Day said. “I’ll pass.”

  He might do that. He’d burned sources before. Anything he could get out of a cop at a crime scene was gold.

  “The body is bound with rope, cuffs, and a silk gag. That must tell you something.”

  “Okay, here’s what I have for the Press,” Day said. “Foul play suspected.”

  Two men wearing Eisenhower jackets were making the trek from the road. One of them battled the wind to keep an umbrella over the head of an older fellow toting a doctor’s satchel. Sam Melvin, the Atlantic County coroner, put down the bag on the dead woman’s hips, and invited Day under the umbrella. Jordan stepped close to listen in.

  “...Cornell by two and a half touchdowns,” Melvin said. “Princeton’s gone soft since Kazmaier left.”

  “Who do you like tomorrow?” Day said.

  “Tomorrow? Tomorrow’s Sunday. Oh, you mean the pros. I don’t follow them. They’re soft, too.”

  They talked about the weather while Melvin had a look at the corpse.

  “Evidence of petechial bleeding,” he said as he raised the eyelids.

  Jordan made a note that the eyes were light blue.

  Melvin lifted her head, started to undo the gag.

  “Hold off,” Day said. “We haven’t taken pictures yet.”

  The coroner wiped off his hands on his coat, and offered Camels all around. Brannon shot a roll of film, discarded the burned flashbulbs among others in the sand.

  A worm of ash fell in the woman’s hair as Melvin worked off the gag. Her mouth was agape, frozen in a smile that Jordan planned to describe as hellish if a better adjective didn’t come along. Melvin forced two fingers between her teeth, and pinched out some gauzy material. He unrolled a nylon stocking, fished in her throat till he had its mate.

  “She must have put up an awful squawk,” Brannon said, “to make him want to shut her up like that.”

  Jordan didn’t think the killer had tired of hearing her scream. He’d seen stranger objects retrieved from the bodies of murder victims, not always from the mouth. Not only from women.

  “I’m going to remove the rope now, and palpate the limbs for a preliminary time of death,” Dr. Melvin said.

  “Cut around the knots,” Day said. “I want them.”

  As the coroner looked in his bag for a scalpel, the men in the Eisenhower jackets rearranged the body. Day noticed the handcuffs, pointing them out to Melvin.

  “Why don’t I bring her to the morgue before everyone comes down with pneumonia?” Melvin said. “Stop by with a locksmith. Unless you’ve got someone in your jail who’s good at picking cuffs.”

  The attendants opened a canvas stretcher. Melvin stopped them before they could transfer the body from the blanket.

  “There’s no wedding ring,” he said to Day.

  “It shouldn’t be hard to get her ID’d, even if she’s single.”

  Jordan knew that Day would give him the quote he was looking for. He’d been figuring a way to get it in his story if no one actually said it.

  “She’s a good-looking girl. Somebody wants her back.”

  None of the other Sunday papers had anything about the body on the beach at Little Egg Harbor, but Jordan didn’t credit himself with a scoop. Away from a mile-long strip along the Atlantic City boardwalk the competition maintained a slight presence on the Jersey Shore.

  Jordan had been working on a Bronx weekly when he was hired away by the Press. It was a step up from the Grand Concourse, an opportunity to make his name trailing after movie stars, and big band singers, and the gangsters who ran the clubs where they entertained. But he almost never saw a hoodlum outside court. Whores, bookmaking and loan sharking brought in too much profit for the mob bosses to jeopardize by calling attention to themselves. The luxury suites above the hotel nightclubs were a no-man’s land for reporters. Frequent rumors of fights, drunken orgies, drug use, and of midnight visits by abortionists were impossible to confirm. Publicists threatened libel. Jordan’s editors told him to dig for dirt somewhere else. If Atlantic City couldn’t keep its secrets, the stars would stay away, leaving a swell place to buy salt water taffy, and build sand castles on the beach.

  Jordan was expected to write a Sunday feature every week—an extended piece on an odd aspect of life in “America’s Ocean Playground.” And where did you come up with fifty-two of those each year? The fetishist murder of a beautiful girl was a gift. With luck the cops would go through twists and turns in getting her identified and finding evidence. The investigation would drag on, and he’d live off it till the bathing beauties returned in the spring.

  A quarter past eleven, and he was having breakfast over the Monday paper when the phone rang. He didn’t know anyone up so early. Nightside reporters didn’
t start work till five. No one called unless a calamity required his attention, usually a boardwalk fire or drowning worth a few paragraphs on the local page. A fire at a crowded restaurant, a hotel robbery, another killing would be a welcome change of pace—any story that didn’t involve the Coast Guard. November was too cold to go out in the cutter, and get sick to his stomach chasing after fishermen who’d been caught overnight in strong currents.

  But the voice on the other end wasn’t from the paper. “Adam Jordan, this is Ed Pelfrey.”

  “Do I know you?”

  “I’d like to talk to you about something that ran under your name in the Press.”

  Jordan had been meaning to remove his number from the phone book. Press readers weren’t shy about bothering him at home to ask what right he had to put something they didn’t like in his paper. He’d point out that it wasn’t his paper, and that Thomas Jefferson had given him the right, but Press readers weren’t listeners. Rather than continue the civics lessons, he’d change to an unlisted number.

  “I was out late, Ed, tracking down more stories for you, so if you’ll excuse me I’ll be getting back to my Rice Krispies.”

  “Don’t hang up. There are a couple of articles we need to discuss.”

  Only two? Readers who didn’t appreciate his reporting normally had a gripe with every word he wrote.

  “One,” Pelfrey said, “is the execution of Conrad Palmer. The other is the body on the beach.”

  “What didn’t you like about them?”’

  “There was nothing I didn’t like. They were excellent accounts with lively writing, and good insights into the thinking of a pathetic killer, and the detectives hunting the murderer of a beautiful girl.”

  “Thanks for the kind words, Ed. I really do have to get off the phone.”

  “I haven’t told you who I am,” Pelfrey said. “I’m the editor of Real Detective magazine at Turner Men’s Group in Manhattan.”

  “You’re calling from New York?”

  “That’s right.”

  “To say you like my writing?”

  “To ask if you’ll do some work for us.”

  Jordan pushed away his breakfast. He reached for his cigarettes.

  “Real Detective is Turner Men’s lead title. We publish four fact detective magazines a month. Ever read us?”

  “I don’t look at pulp—don’t get to read many magazines. You were big before the war.”

  “We’re still big,” Pelfrey said. “Circulation is over a million for each title. Four books a month, twelve stories in each issue, eat up close to six hundred homicides a year. We’re starved for copy.”

  “What’s six hundred murders in a country of a hundred-fifty million people?”

  “Six hundred too many,” Pelfrey said. “That’s one way of looking at it. For us it’s barely enough. We can’t use just any case. The old man comes home with a load on, the wife kicks him out of bed, and he slaps her around till she stops breathing, our readers aren’t interested. Ditto for any murderer who’s not smart enough to keep out of the hands of the police for three days, the time it takes to get a good homicide probe working. We want stories with good dick-work, and sympathetic victims. Young, nubile, and attractive don’t disqualify them either. We can’t be picky with our killers. Maybe one in a thousand is an appealing character. Conrad Palmer, for instance. We’d like you to do his story for us.”

  “I’ve never done magazine work.”

  “Pick up a stack of dick books at a cigar store, and study the formula. Begin at the beginning with the victim gone missing, and the discovery of the body, and proceed through the investigation, arrest, and legal process. Our readers aren’t fans of literary experimentation. Tell the story in short, declarative sentences. They’ll think you’re Hemingway.”

  “I don’t know,” Jordan said. “I’m pretty busy.”

  “We pay fast, Mr. Jordan.”

  “So does the Press. Every Friday.”

  “We also pay well.”

  “What do you call well?”

  “A nickel a word. Five thousand word stories are the norm. Six or seven thousand well-chosen ones are okay, if the case merits it. What do you make on the Press?”

  “That’s not any of your business.”

  “We pay better than the papers, because good crime writers are harder to find than inventive killers. We don’t want just one story from you. Keep an eye on every promising murder in your neck of the woods. The first story or two will take most of a week to write, and give you fits. After you get the hang, you’ll knock them out in no time. Our best regulars pull down two, three thousand a month.”

  “Where did you get my name?”

  “People send us clips on potential stories. It surprised me I’d never seen your byline before. Can I count on you for the Palmer case?”

  Jordan was slow with an answer because he was doing math in his head. At a nickel a word he figured on a four-hundred dollar payday. How could a novice who hadn’t learned the formula tell Con Palmer’s story in fewer than eight thousand words?

  “Did I mention that we also need photos?” Pelfrey asked. “The victim, of course, and the crime scene, and investigating officers digging up evidence. Gruesome is okay, but no close-ups of a morgue slab. We want pictures of the suspect when he’s apprehended, and another on his way to court or behind bars. Payment is ten dollars for every one we use. Shoot them yourself, make a deal with a staff photographer, or steal them from the police like most of our writers do. It can add another hundred or two hundred dollars to your fee.”

  “When do you need the Palmer story?” Jordan asked.

  “Yesterday.”

  “I think I can give you what you want.”

  “Some very fine reporters can’t,” Pelfrey said. “They look down their nose at the pulps. It shows in their writing.”

  “How will I know if you like my story?”

  “There’ll be a check in your mailbox.”

  At a candy store on his corner the pulps were racked with slick girlie magazines away from Life, Look, and the Saturday Evening Post. A dozen or so detective titles all seemed the same. On the cover of each one was a tough guy and/or babe with a gun, or a doe-eyed innocent in the clutches of a fiend. Easy to snicker at, but he’d never look down his nose at five cents a word, or a formula that for all he knew was as difficult to master as Professor Einstein’s.

  Real Detective readers did not like being teased with red herrings. They did not want policemen who were conflicted about sending killers to the death house. Investigators were not deductive geniuses, but bulldogs who fastened on a suspect and didn’t let up till they had a confession. The victims of murder were naïve and trusting—in particular those with money—unless they were prostitutes, strippers, or wayward youngsters asking for trouble. Lawyers were not mentioned by name, which was how the Press also tried to cut down on lawsuits. Killers were irredeemable monsters. Those who cheated the electric chair cheated justice.

  Not every murder victim Jordan had written about for the Press was as uncomplicated as she would be portrayed in the pulps. He knew killers who were worse than others. On the Jersey Shore homicide came in various gradations of gray. Real Detective paid better than newspapers because there was an art to telling a story in just two colors—black and white—and keeping readers riveted for five thousand words.

  Jordan read three magazines from cover to cover before sitting down at the typewriter. Color and authenticity were essentials of the formula. Invention was not. Pelfrey didn’t want literature, but morality tales, and maybe that wasn’t a bad thing. Real Detective’s grit was lacking from Jordan’s sensitive death house piece for the Press.

  By 4:00 he’d completed three and a half pages. He could have written two long Sunday features in that time, and knocked out a couple of obituaries. He wanted to count the words, to know to the penny how well he’d spent the afternoon, but he had to leave for work.

  “Mr. McAvoy’s asking for you,” a copy boy said as
he ran up the stairs to the city room.

  Ken McAvoy had started at the Press as junior varsity sports stringer during his sophomore year in high school, and risen through the news ranks to editor. He was divorced, without children, a semi-reformed alcoholic who worked seventy-hour weeks and never took a vacation. His cubicle under the south window was his only perk. He didn’t smile when he looked up at Jordan, but McAvoy almost never smiled now that he almost never drank.

  “What do you want, Ken?” Jordan asked him.

  McAvoy’s desk was buried under news clips and copy paper held down with linotype slugs. On the walls were historic Press front pages cast in lead, the attack on Pearl Harbor, D-Day, V-J Day, FDR’s death, and Bobby Thomson’s shot heard round the world. Jordan liked it here in McAvoy’s place in the sun, and occasionally let himself think about what he’d hang on the wall.

  “The Palmer execution was as good a piece of writing as I’ve seen in this paper. I don’t know how you wormed your way into the death house,” McAvoy said, “but it’s where you belong.”

  His faint smile puzzled Jordan, who didn’t smell alcohol on his breath.

  “We’ve gotten dozens of calls and letters. Opponents of the death penalty say you deserve a Nobel Prize—and so do those in favor. I wish I had more reporters who saw things with your eyes.”

  “I took dictation. The story told itself.”

  “One of your others didn’t.”

  “The killing at Little Egg Harbor?” Jordan said. “I caught a break. I was in my car when they called it in.”

  “Not that.”

  “What else—?”

  “Garabedian’s talk at the Legion Hall.”

  Jordan didn’t blink. McAvoy knew he’d fudged the piece. How many times had McAvoy pulled the same stunt himself?