“Looks nice,” he said. “I like the blue you was wearing yesterday too.”
“Go on,” I said. “Give out.”
“You rode up to eight,” he said. “Twice. Second time was late. You got back on at six. Shortly after that the boys in blue came bustlin’ in.”
“Any of them up there now?”
He shook his head. His face was like a vacant lot. “I ain’t told them anything,” he said. “Too late to mention it now. They’d eat my ass off.”
I said: “Why?”
“Why I ain’t told them? The hell with them. You talked to me civil. Damn few people do that. Hell, I know you didn’t have nothing to do with that killing.”
“I played you wrong,” I said. “Very wrong.” I got a card out and gave it to him. He fished a pair of metal-framed glasses out of his pocket, perched them on his nose and held the card a foot away from them. He read it slowly, moving his lips, looked at me over the glasses, handed me back the card.
“Better keep it,” he said. “Case I get careless and drop it. Mighty interestin’ life yours, I guess.”
“Yes and no. What was the name?”
“Grandy. Just call me Pop. Who killed him?”
“I don’t know. Did you notice anybody going up there or coming down—anybody that seemed out of place in this building, or strange to you?”
“I don’t notice much,” he said. “I just happened to notice you.”
“A tall blond, for instance, or a tall slender man with sideburns, about thirty-five years old.”
“Nope.”
“Everybody going up or down about then would ride in your car.”
He nodded his worn head. “Less they used the fire stairs. They come out in the alley, bar-lock door. Party would have to come in this way, but there’s stairs back of the elevator to the second floor. From there they can get to the fire stairs. Nothing to it.”
I nodded. “Mr. Grandy, could you use a five dollar bill—not as a bribe in any sense, but as a token of esteem from a sincere friend?”
“Son, I could use a five dollar bill so rough Abe Lincoln’s whiskers would be all lathered up with sweat.”
I gave him one. I looked at it before I passed it over. It was Lincoln on the five, all right.
He tucked it small and put it away deep in his pocket. “That’s right nice of you,” he said. “I hope to hell you didn’t think I was fishin’.”
I shook my head and went along the corridor, reading the names again. Dr. E. J. Blaskowitz, Chiropractic Physician. Dalton and Rees, Typewriting Service. L. Pridview, Public Account. Four blank doors. Moss Mailing Company. Two more blank doors. H. R. Teager, Dental Laboratories. In the same relative position as the Morningstar office two floors above, but the rooms were cut up differently. Teager had only one door and there was more wall space in between his door and the next one.
The knob didn’t turn. I knocked. There was no answer. I knocked harder, with the same result. I went back to the elevator. It was still at the sixth floor. Pop Grandy watched me come as if he had never seen me before.
“Know anything about H. R. Teager?” I asked him.
He thought. “Heavy-set, oldish, sloppy clothes, dirty fingernails, like mine. Come to think I didn’t see him in today.”
“Do you think the super would let me into his office to look around?”
“Pretty nosey, the super is. I wouldn’t recommend it.”
He turned his head very slowly and looked up the side of the car. Over his head on a big metal ring a key was hanging. A pass-key. Pop Grandy turned his head back to normal position, stood up off his stool and said: “Right now I gotta go to the can.”
He went. When the door had closed behind him I took the key off the cage wall and went back along to the office of H. R. Teager, unlocked it and went in.
Inside was a small windowless anteroom on the furnishings of which a great deal of expense had been spared. Two chairs, a smoking stand from a cut rate drugstore, a standing lamp from the basement of some borax emporium, a flat stained wood table with some old picture magazines on it. The door closed behind me on the door closer and the place went dark except for what little light come through the pebbled glass panel. I pulled the chain switch of the lamp and went over to the inner door in a wall that cut across the room. It was marked: H.R. Teager. Private. It was not locked.
Inside it there was a square office with two uncurtained east windows and very dusty sills. There was a swivel chair and two straight chairs, both plain hard stained wood, and there was a squarish flat-topped desk. There was nothing on the top of it except an old blotter and a cheap pen set and a round glass ash tray with cigar ash in it. The drawers of the desk contained some dusty paper linings, a few wire clips, rubber bands, worn down pencils, pens, rusty pen points, used blotters, four uncancelled two-cent stamps, and some printed letterheads, envelopes and bill forms.
The wire paper basket was full of junk. I almost wasted ten minutes going through it rather carefully. At the end of that time I knew what I was pretty sure of already: that H.R. Teager carried on a small business as a dental technician doing laboratory work for a number of dentists in unprosperous sections of the city, the kind of dentists who have shabby offices on second floor walk-ups over stores, who lack both the skill and the equipment to do their own laboratory work, and who like to send it out to men like themselves, rather than to the big efficient hard-boiled laboratories who wouldn’t give them any credit.
I did find one thing. Teager’s home address at 1354B Toberman Street on the receipted part of a gas bill.
