Tell Me, Pretty Maiden (16 page)

TWENTY-TWO

There was a distinctive smell to the building—old wood, furniture polish, and a hint of pipe tobacco. It was an old sort of smell, of a building that has existed for a hundred years or more. The upstairs hallway was narrow, wood-paneled, and dark. We made our way along it to the far end.

“Let’s see if Halsted’s room is unlocked, first,” I suggested. “He may have left a letter or note that could be a valuable clue.”

Good idea.” Daniel tried the door. It opened and we went inside. “Although I’m sure the local police will have been through his room thoroughly by now.”

“That doesn’t necessarily mean they haven’t overlooked something.” I started going through the papers on his desk. He was remarkably tidy for a young man, or perhaps the police had tidied his papers after they had examined them. There were class notes on philosophy and religion. A couple of scribbled observations led me to believe that Mr. Halsted wasn’t entirely shallow and, like a lot of boys his age, was starting to think about the meaning of life. I found myself hoping that he was alive and safe somewhere and that there was a perfectly good explanation for the crashed motor car that didn’t involve him in robbery and murder.

The top drawer of his desk showed his other side, the side that Miss Van Woekem disapproved of: programs from local horse races, theater tickets by the dozen. Judging by these, Mr. Halsted didn’t spend many evenings studying. Daniel had been going through various boxes. “He seems to have more than his share of debts,” he commented, “but that was to be expected from what Miss Van Woekem said. Tailor. Three new shirts. Wine merchant—he owes the wine merchant fifty dollars! And look at this—eighty dollars owed to a jeweler. It doesn’t say what for.” He closed the box again. “The police will take this as confirmation that he needed money badly and would go to any lengths to get some.”

“We don’t know that he couldn’t pay his bills,” I said. “Maybe these were just the outstanding ones to be paid at the end of the month. He may have been given a generous allowance by his parents that allowed this sort of lifestyle.”

“That’s true,” Daniel agreed. “I should pay a call to his folks when we get back to New York—with your permission of course, ma’am.”

“Permission given.” We exchanged smiles.

Daniel went across to the wardrobe and opened it. “He certainly has enough clothes,” he said. “However, I don’t see any evening wear. For someone who went out in the evening as often as he did, that’s odd.”

“He may have been wearing it when he disappeared.”

“Of course. But that would imply that he didn’t plan to go out with criminal pursuits on his mind, wouldn’t it? A man in formal evening attire would certainly be noticed if he had to flee through the streets.”

I started going through his jacket pockets and unearthed a small diary. Most of the entries were prosaic in nature: “Philos. essay due.” “Tutorial with Hammersham 10 A.M.” “Lunch with Brodart.” It was rather strange to read entries for this week, appointments that he hadn’t been able to keep. I checked the night that he disappeared. “A and J? Ask S?”

“I wonder who or what A and J are?” I said. “S could be Silverton. Didn’t Miss Van Woekem say that he was friends with Harry Silverton, the son of the family where the robbery took place?”

Daniel nodded. “And his car was seen driving away from the Silverton mansion at midnight at great speed. We should go and interview the Silverton family when we are finished here. I’ll just go through the rest of his clothing drawers and it wouldn’t hurt to check under his bed and his waste basket.”

“You want me to get down on my hands and knees?”

“You are younger and more agile than I.”

“And I am hampered by the restrictions of skirts and petticoats we women have to wear,” I said. “Have you ever considered how hard it is to do what men take for granted while wearing long tight skirts? You should try leaping off a moving trolley or climbing a wall.”

“Most women don’t want to do such things.”

“But I do. I’m going to have to start wearing bloomers on a regular basis.”

Daniel raised his eyebrows. “All right. I’ll look under the bed. I bet you’re really afraid of finding spiders.”

“On the contrary. I grew up in a thatched cottage. Spiders were a normal occurrence.”

I pulled open the top drawer of his chest. A leather box contained gold cufflinks, collar studs, a ring with a square black stone. Next to it was a silver-backed brush set. Mr. Halsted was certainly used to the good things of life. His handkerchiefs were monogrammed, his undergarments neatly folded. Either he was naturally neat or a college servant looked after him. But the chest of drawers revealed no other telling secrets. Daniel discovered nothing but dust under the bed. The waste basket was empty. We came out of the room and stood in the dark hallway.

“Now let’s tackle the friends,” Daniel said. He took hold of my arm as I started for the nearest door. “It may be wiser if I make the first contact,” he whispered. “Young men could be alarmed by finding a pretty young woman standing outside their door. They might immediately leap to the wrong kind of conclusion.”

“Very well,” I said. “I have no objection to your asking the questions. You have more experience at it than I anyway. I could learn a thing or two maybe.”

Daniel glanced at me as if he was trying to tell whether I was being sarcastic, then nodded and rapped on the door. It was opened by a ginger-haired young man whose bleary-eyed condition suggested that he hadn’t been awake long.

“I don’t know you,” he said accusingly. “You’ve got the wrong room.”

“We understand that you are one of John Jacob Halsted’s friends,” Daniel said with the sort of authority in his voice that only the police have.

The boy’s expression changed to wary. “One of his many friends.” He attempted to sound airy. “JJ was everyone’s friend. Generous to a fault.”

“You say was,” Daniel picked up on this as I had done. “Do you believe him to be dead?”

“Either dead or whooping it up in South America,” the boy said flippantly, but then he added more seriously, “I sure hope the silly coot is okay.”

“Do you mind if we come in and ask you some questions?” Daniel asked.

“Are you the police? I was already grilled by the police.”

“We’re from New York,” Daniel said, carefully avoiding an outright lie. “We’re acting on behalf of Mr. Halsted’s family, who are naturally worried about him.”

“Oh, I see.” His gaze lingered on me. “You know JJ then?”

“I’m a good friend of his aunt,” I answered. “She naturally wants to find out what has happened to him. All we have to go on are ridiculous rumors.”

“I suppose you can come in,” the boy said. “Room’s in a bit of a state, y’know. Rather a rowdy time last night and only got home at four in the morning. Had to climb in along the tiles.” He opened the door wide and ushered us into an unbelievably untidy room. My gaze went from the unmade bed to the items of clothing that littered the floor to the unwashed glasses on the table.

“Sorry,” he said again.

“What’s your name?” Daniel asked. “Mine is Sullivan and this is Miss Murphy.”

“It’s Ronnie,” the boy said. “Ronald Farmington the Fourth if you want the full thing. Of the Boston Farmingtons.”

“Of course.” Daniel smiled. “And you’re one of John Jacob’s best friends, is that right?”

“Yes. Bertie, JJ, and I. We’re thick as thieves. We hit it off instantly when we met as freshmen.”

“Is Bertie the one who has the room across the hall?”

“That’s right.”

“Is he likely to be at home?”

“I should say so. He has a paper due tomorrow and he was up almost as late as me last night, so he’ll probably be working away like a madman.”

“I’ll go and bring him in then,” Daniel said. “That way we won’t have to ask the same questions twice.”

Poor Ronnie was very ill at ease as he cleared the debris of several weeks from an armchair and offered me a place to sit. He was just about finished when Daniel returned with Bertie, who was large and chubby with a round, good-natured face.

“Rum do about Halsted,” he said. “I’m glad somebody’s finally doing something about finding him.”

“So tell us everything you know about the night he disappeared,” Daniel said.

Bertie screwed up his face, thinking. “It was a weeknight,” he said, “but JJ poked his head in the door and said he was going to the theater. He said a new show was opening, a musical review.”

“He was keen on the theater, I take it,” Daniel said.

“Oh rather. Keen on any sort of nightlife—shows and vaudeville and cabarets. He liked pretty girls in skimpy costumes. They were definitely his favorite.”

“Do you remember which theater he was going to?”

Bertie shook his head. “Can’t say that I asked. It was such a regular occurrence that it never occurred to me to find out. Did he tell you, Farmington?”

“All I remember saying is that he’d get himself kicked out if he was caught climbing in late again this semester, and he said, ‘Don’t be such an old fuddy-duddy.’ He said what did he have friends for if it wasn’t to sneak down and unlock the door for him from time to time.”

“So you agreed to do that?”

“Yes, of course. We’d never leave another fellow in the lurch, even though we gave him a ticking off about skipping out when he had a paper to write.”

“He gave us this angelic smile and said that he suspected his little excursion was really going to be worth it,” Bertie added.

“Meaning he was meeting someone there, do you think?” I asked. “A girl?”

They looked at me as if they were surprised I was joining in the conversation.

“Could be,” Ronnie said. “He was always falling in and out of love with some girl or another.”

“But he didn’t tell you anything about the one he was going to meet?”

“No, I was rather busy, late on my own paper, you know. And my father had given me a devil of a talking to about my grades, so I was more concerned with my own problems.”

“Are there many theaters in town?” Daniel asked.

“Only three or four, counting the vaudeville place.”

“So someone might have remembered seeing him that night, if he was a regular.”

“They might,” Ronnie agreed.

“And I presume he didn’t come home after the theater?”

Bertie shook his head. “We waited up to let him in. He’d throw a pebble up at Ronnie’s window and then one of us would creep down and open a downstairs window in the common room for him to climb through.”

“But two o’clock came and he still hadn’t shown up,” Ronnie added, “and we got fed up. We had early classes the next morning so we said ‘to hell with him’ and went to bed. And next morning we found his bed hadn’t been slept in. And Bertie said to me, ‘You don’t suppose he went home with some floosie, do you?’ We heard nothing more until the police came.”

“What was your reaction when the police told you what he was supposed to have done?” Daniel asked.

“Utter disbelief,” Bertie said. “We told them that JJ would never have broken in and robbed a house, especially not a friend’s house. He might have had his faults but he was loyal to a T. And as for shooting someone, JJ didn’t even own a gun. I know because he made a joke about it once. He liked a girl but she was going with another fellow and JJ said, ‘I suppose I could challenge him to a duel, but I don’t own a pistol, so that wouldn’t be much use. And I don’t suppose I could shoot straight even if I had one.’ ”

“And why would JJ bother to steal things from someone’s house?” Ronnie went on. “Silver and jewelry and the like? He only had to ask his parents for money and he usually got it. They were potty about him and he was so good at getting around them.”

“So he hadn’t run up any big debts that he couldn’t tell them about?”

I saw the boys give each other a hurried glance.

“He did like to gamble,” Bertie said cautiously. “Played cards for pretty high stakes, but if he owed money, I mean a serious amount of money, he never let on to us about it.”

“I gather the house he is said to have robbed belonged to a friend of his. A Harry Silverton?” I asked. “Did you know him, too?”

“Only slightly. He was a senior when we came in as freshmen. He and JJ became pals because they played polo together. Both were potty about horses.”

“Did Halsted tell you that he was planning on visiting Harry Silverton that night?”

The boys shook their heads. “Never mentioned him,” Bertie said. “As I told you, we were both rather busy that evening and annoyed that JJ was going out when he should have been studying. Ronnie told him so. He said, ‘There are only so many classes you can flunk before they sling you out of here, you know.’ ”

“And JJ only laughed and said we were turning into stuffy, middle-aged bores.”

“So did John Jacob spend a lot of time with this Silverton?” Daniel asked. “Did they regularly spend evenings out together?”

“No, not evenings,” Bertie said. “They went to the races together on occasion, I know that, but Silverton wasn’t one of his close pals. More like an admired older brother.”

“So if he admired Silverton, that would make it even less likely that he’d want to steal things from his home,” I said.

“I told you, JJ would never steal from a friend,” Bertie said firmly. “If he was going to steal, he’d do it in a big way and rob a bank. Always one for flair, was our JJ.”

“You keep speaking of him in the past tense,” Daniel said. “So in your heart you must believe that he’s dead.”

“If he were alive, I think he’d have done the honorable thing and turned himself in by now,” Ronnie said slowly. “He wouldn’t have wanted his folks to worry.”

“Tell us about his automobile,” I said. “Because that is the only piece of evidence that ties him to the crime. It was seen driving away fast from the Silverton mansion and one of the stolen items was found under the seat after it had crashed into a tree. Was it possible that he let someone else drive his motor car?”

“Drive Myrtle?” The two boys exchanged a glance and then chuckled. “He didn’t let anyone else drive her. Myrtle was his pride and joy. If he had five minutes to spare he was polishing the damned thing.”

“He drove fast?”