BEAUTY SLAIN
SWORD FATAL WEAPON IN BIZARRE SLAYING
by Robert Hochberg
In one of the most bizarre slayings in city history, police reported last night the discovery of the nude and brutally murdered body of Miss Ellen Marie Canaday, 22, in the bedroom of her apartment at 106-12 Longmans Avenue. Miss Canaday had been fatally stabbed through the chest with an ornamental sword which had been hanging on her apartment wall (photos, page 7).
The suspected slayer, was still on the scene when police arrived at the murder apartment, made his escape and is still at large.
Miss Canaday, a model, had lived alone at the Longmans Avenue address about one year. Since the front door had been forced, it is assumed her attacker was not known to her, although police do not discount the possibility of a personal quarrel as a motive in the case.
Detective Lieutenant Albert Murphy, in charge of the investigation, stated the similarities between this slaying and the so-called Strangler murders in the Boston area were too few and minor to imply any necessary connection with those crimes, though Boston police authorities have expressed interest in the investigation of the Canaday case.
Murphy also announced expectation of the early recapture of the man believed to be the slayer (description and artist’s rendering of suspect on page 7).
No comparable slaying has occurred in the local area since 1949, when three Norwegian sailors …
Parker stopped reading at that point, scanned down the rest of the story to he sure there wasn’t anything else in it he wanted to know, and then switched over to page seven.
The artist’s drawing was rotten. It looked just a little like the face Parker used to wear, before he’d had plastic surgery done a year ago, but it didn’t look anything like the face he had now.
The written description, in a box beside the bad drawing, was accurate as far as it went, but it didn’t go very far. Women and children were obviously eliminated by it, but it still left a hell of a lot of men in the running, all of whom fitted the written description and none of whom - including Parker - looked like the artist’s rendering.
In addition to the drawing and description, there were three photographs on the page. One showed Ellie’s bedroom, with the body removed. One showed a uniformed cop looking blankly at the sprung front door that Parker had kicked in. And one showed a plainclothes cop holding the sword out in front of himself and looking at it as though he wondered what the hell it was and why he was supposed to be holding it.
Under this last photo was the caption:
Detective Third Grade William Dougherty studies murder weapon for clues. Sword, taken by slayer from apartment wall, had been wiped clean of all fingerprints.
The way the world usually worked, Detective Lieutenant Albert Murphy, the one who’d been quoted all over the place in the main story about the killing and who was listed as being in charge of the investigation, wouldn’t know a damn thing about the murder or the investigation or anything else. The way the world usually worked, it was Detective Third Grade William Dougherty who would really be running the case and would know what was going on.
Parker folded the paper and put it down on the table. He was sitting in a luncheonette downtown, not far from where he’d left the truck four days ago. The noon hour rush would be starting in a little while, but right now the place was almost empty. The walls were beige and the booths were green.
There was an untouched cup of coffee on the table beside the paper. Parker looked at it, shook his head, and left coffee and paper both on the table as he got to his feet and walked to the telephone booths in back.
The phone books were on a slant-top table beside the booths. Parker looked in the local white pages and found only one William Dougherty listed, with the address 719 Laurel Road and the phone number Lloyd 6-5929. This was probably the right one, but it would be best to check.
He stepped into the booth and dialed. A woman answered on the third ring, and Parker said, ‘Detective Dougherty, please.’
‘Oh, he’s at work. Call him at headquarters.’
‘Yeah, I’ll do that.’
Parker hung up, left the booth, and up front at the cashier’s cage got directions to Laurel Road. He paid for the coffee he hadn’t drunk, picked up the Buick from the no-parking zone out front, and headed away from downtown.
Laurel Road was in a section that should have been a suburb but wasn’t. The city government, seeing all those taxable middle-income and upper-income people moving just outside the city limits into an area called Twin Knolls, simply shifted the city limits around a little, and very quietly Twin Knolls became a part of the city and its tax structure. The middle and upper-income people promptly moved farther out, and lower-middle-income people like plainclothes detectives moved into Twin Knolls in their place.
Laurel Road was never straight. It curved away from a curving street called Camelia Lane, and kept right on curving, sometimes to the right and sometimes to the left. It looked like somebody’s impression of a barber pole.
For the first few blocks, the widely spaced houses were large, sprawling affairs, split-level ranches with cantilevered sun decks over the carports. After five or six blocks, as the road meandered between more recent constructions, the houses began to get smaller and less ambitious, showing the result of city status. Shrunken flat- roofed ranches and narrow Cape Cods were clumped on smaller, less-landscaped lots.
Number 719 was far in, nearly at the end of it all. Two blocks farther on, Parker could see where the finished buildings petered out, and a half-completed house stood at the farther limit like a leafless tree.
He drove on by 719, glancing casually at it on the way by. It was a Cape Cod, with an A roof slanting front and back. A playpen was on the scraggly lawn, and the garage doors gaped open, exposing an empty interior. The curtains in the dormer window upstairs showed that the attic had been finished off into a room or rooms, which implied more than one child for Detective Dougherty.
