“Of course. I was at Willsson’s with Noonan and the others. After I left there, around ten-thirty, I dropped in at her house to tell her I had to go up to Tanner. I had a halfway date with her. I stayed there about ten minutes, long enough to have a drink. There was nobody else there, unless they were hiding. When was she killed? And how?”
McGraw told me he had sent a pair of his dicks—Shepp and Vanaman—to see the girl that morning, to see how much help she could and would give the department in copping Whisper for Noonan’s murder. The dicks got to her house at nine-thirty. The front door was ajar. Nobody answered their ringing. They went in and found the girl lying on her back in the dining room, dead, with a stab wound in her left breast.
The doctor who examined the body said she had been killed with a slender, round, pointed blade about six inches in length, at about three o’clock in the morning. Bureaus, closets, trunks, and so on, had apparently been skilfully and thoroughly ransacked. There was no money in the girl’s handbag, or elsewhere in the house. The jewel case on her dressing table was empty. Two diamond rings were on her fingers.
The police hadn’t found the weapon with which she had been stabbed. The fingerprint experts hadn’t turned up anything they could use. Neither doors nor windows seemed to have been forced. The kitchen showed that the girl had been drinking with a guest or guests.
“Six inches, round, slim, pointed,” I repeated the weapon’s description. “That sounds like her ice pick.”
McGraw reached for the phone and told somebody to send Shepp and Vanaman in. Shepp was a stoop-shouldered tall man whose wide mouth had a grimly honest look that probably came from bad teeth. The other detective was short, stocky, with purplish veins in his nose and hardly any neck.