The Corpse Next Door: A Detective Sergeant Randall Mystery. John Farris
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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