The bride wore black (11 page)

Superior to Wanger:

"Well, what'dja find out over there? You seem to be becoming our expert in murders-that-don't-look-like-murders-but-are."

"Sure it was! Certainly it was! How can there be any doubt about it?"

"All right, don't blow all these papers off my desk. Well, Kling tells me the men he put on it don't seem to feel as sure about that as you do yourself. That's why I got his okay on your homing in. He was very nice about it "

"What?" Wanger became almost inarticulate. "What're they trying to do, build it up that he locked himself in acci "

His superior sliced his hand at him calmingly. "Now, wait a minute, don't get so touchy. Here's what he means by that, and I can see his point, too. It's true that Mrs. Moran got, or claims she got, an anonymous telegram with her sister's name signed to it. Unfortunately, there hasn't been any trace of it found around the house; it's disappeared, so there's no way of tracing where it was filed from. It may have been filed right here in the city, and in her perturbation she didn't notice the dateline. It's true that the kid keeps prattling about a 'lady' playing games with him. The only two facts that point definitely

to an adult agency's being involved are the cut telephone wire and the note on the kid's quilt "

Wanger forced up his underlip scornfully. "And what about the putty?"

"Meaning the kid couldn't have reached the top of the door with it, that it? No, Kling tells me they tried him out on that. Didn't interfere, just handed him the putty set, said, 'Let's see you cover up the door like the other night,' stood back and watched. When he'd gotten as high up as he could go, he dragged over the three-legged telephone stool, climbed up on that, and his hands spanned the top crack beautifully. Now if he did that, of his own accord and without being coached, the second time, why, they wanna know, couldn't he have done it the first?"

"Hoch!" Wanger cleared his throat disgustedly.

"They put him to another test. They said to him, 'Sonny, if your daddy went in there, what would you do let him out or make him stay in?' He said, 'Make him stay in there and play a game with me.'"

"Are those guys crazy where're their heads? I suppose the kid cut the phone wire, too. I suppose he wrote out that note in printed capitals "

"Let me finish, will you? They're not trying to say that the kid did all those things himself. But they are inclined to think along the lines of it being an accident, with a clumsy frightened attempt on someone's part, afterward, to escape being involved.

"Now here's the theory of Kling's men and remember, it hasn't jelled, they're just playing around with it until something better shows up: Moran had some lady friend on the side. A fake telegram was sent to the wife to clear the coast. Before the woman got there, Moran, alone in the house with his kid, started playing games with him. He accidentally locked himself in the closet and the damn-fool kid puttied up the door. The woman

shows up and Moran is smothered to death in there. She loses her head, deathly afraid of being dragged into it because of her reputation. She puts the kid to bed and leaves an unsigned note pinned to the quilt for the wife. Maybe the phone starts ringing while she's there, and, afraid to answer it, she loses her head even further and cuts the wire. They think she even went so completely haywire that after having already opened the closet door once and seen that Moran was dead, she made a panicky attempt to leave things looking just like she found them by closing the door on him a second time and leaving him in there, even replugging the putty so it would look like the kid's work and nobody else's. In other words, an accident followed by a clumsy attempt at concealment on the part of somebody with a guilty conscience."

"Pew!" said Wanger succinctly, pinching the end of his nose. "Well, here's the theory of your man Wanger: bull fertilizer. Do I stay on or do I come off?"

"Stay on, stay on," consented his overlord distractedly. "Ill get in touch with Kling about it. After all, you can only be wrong once."

They seemed to be playing craps there in the room, the way they were all down on their haunches hovering over something in the middle of the floor. You couldn't see what it was; their broad backs blotted it out completely. It was awfully small, whatever it was. Occasionally one of their hands went up and scratched at the back of its owner's rubber-tired neck in perplexity. The illusion was perfect. All that was missing was the click of bone, the lingo of the dice game.

A matron stood watchfully looking on, over by the doorway, without taking part in the proceedings herself. Something about her clashed with one's sense of fitness. Almost anyone's sense of esthetic fitness. She kidded the beholder, from the top of her head all the way down to

her ankles, that she was going to end bifurcated, in a pair of trousers. Then at the ankles she ended in a skirt anyway; and the sense of harmony was revolted.

Wanger, over in the opposite doorway, where he'd just come in unnoticed, stood taking in what was going on as long as he could stand it. Finally he strode forward, the apelike conclave disintegrated, to reveal a pygmy in the middle of the giants. Cookie looked even smaller than he was against their anthropoidal bulk.

""Not that way, not that way," Wanger protested. "Whaddaya trying to do, anyway sweat a kid that age?"

"Who's sweating him?" Wanger knew they hadn't been. One of them put away a gleaming pocket watch he'd evidently been danghng enticingly at the end of its chain with complete lack of result.

The matron threw back her head and laughed with a neigh like a horse.

Cookie, with that devilish quickness of children to scent sympathy and play up to it, took one look at Wanger, wrinkled up his muzzle into a monkey grimace and began to emit the moderator opening stanzas of a good hearty bawl.

"Yeah. See?" Wanger said, fixing an accusing eye around the room. "Don't y'know kids that age are afraid of cops to begin with? Each one of you guys is a natural enemy to it, and when you all gang up on it at once "

"We're in civvies, ain't we?" one of them retorted in perfect seriousness. "He didn't see the badges, so how could he tell?"

"The expert child handler," another chuckled under his breath as they moved toward the door.

The last one said morosely, "I hope y'have better luck than we had. Jazes, I'd rather tackle the hard-to-crackest yegg any day than a kid like this that don't even know what you're saying to it at all."

"It knows all right," Wanger grunted. "It takes a little finesse, that's all."

The matron was the only one who stayed in the room, though her value was problematical. It had been found early in the game that she terrified their "material witness" far more than all the males put together. If she came any closer than the doorway, he went into nightmare hysterics.

Wanger drew up a chair, sat down on it, spread his legs at a ninety-degree angle and perched Cookie on one.

"We're going to play Charlie McCarthy again," the matron chuckled pessimistically. "I don't think he was even awake through the whole thing that night "

"He was awake all right. Who's doing this?"

Cookie was beginning to know Wanger from previous knee "interviews." He smiled favoringly, perhaps even a trifle venally, up at him. "You got'ny more jelly beans?"

"No, the doctor says I gave y'too many already." Wanger got down to work. "Who made your daddy go in the closet, Cookie?"

"Nomebody made him, he wannedta go. He was playin' a game."

"That's the same place where y'got stumped before," the matron pointed out gratuitously.

Wanger snapped his head around with a flash of unfeigned ill temper, rare with him. "Listen, will you do me a favor!" He drew a long, preparatory belly breath to see him through what he knew he was in for. "Who was he playing the game with. Cookie?"

"Us."

"Yes, but who's us? You and who else?"

"Me and him and the lady."

"What lady?"

"The lady."

"What lady?"

"The lady that was here."

"Yes, but what lady was here?"

"The lady that the lady that " It wasn't that Cookie wasn't willing; the dialectics of the thing were throwing him. "The lady that was playing the game with us," he concluded with a burst of inspiration.

Wanger had nearly run through the breath supply he'd laid in by now; he let the dregs of it out with a dejected hiss.

"Y'see how he gets away from y'each time? That kid isn't going to need a mouth when he grows up."

Wanger was not in an equable mood. "Listen, McGovem, I'm not kidding, if you make one more side remark while I'm doing this "

"Doing what?" the matron wanted to know, but with prudent inaudibility.

Wanger took out a small black pocket notebook. He turned back to his knee-riding witness, who was swinging his legs blithely. "Well, look, what was the name of the game?"

"Hide-n'-seek!" crowed Cookie positively. He was on familiar ground now.

"Whose turn was it first?"

"Mine!"

"And then whose turn was it?"

"'Nen the lady's!"

"And after that?"

"'Nen it was my daddy's turn."

"Build-up," murmured Wanger softly. He scribbled almost indecipherably on his free knee, using the curve of one arm to support his other burden: "Invegled " He crossed it out, substituted, "Invagled " He crossed that out, too, scrawled, "Lured in during game of hide-and-seek."

Then he looked up bitterly. "What the hell! It don't make sense! How's a strange woman that the guy never saw before going to walk into a house and get

THE BRIDE WORE BLACK

a full-grown man to play games with her just like

The sardonic matron said very softly, to make sure she couldnt be accused of having spoken at all, "You'd be surprised. But not the kind of games you mean."

The book hit the opposite wall and dropped with a little flurry.

"What'sa matter?" asked Cookie, looking after it interestedly. "What'd the book do, ha?"

"Wait a minute, you're taking it for granted he never saw her before, aren't you?" the matron tried to remind him, at the risk of her neck.

"You heard what he says each time!" Wanger hollered over at her wrathfully. "I've got it jotted down in that thmg six times over! She never came to their house before."

Cookie started to pucker up into his wizened monkey expression again.

"I'm not sore at you, sonny," Wanger hastily amended patting the slope of Cookie's head mollifyingly a couple of times.

Then it suddenly came. Cookie looked up at him with the uncertainty of one whose confidence in a relationship has just been shaken. "Whoua you mad at then'? Are you mad at Miss Baker?"

"Who's Miss Baker?"

"The lady that was playin' games with "

Wanger neariy dropped him to the floor on the back of his head. "My God, I actually got her name out of him! Did you hear that? Here I didn't even think he "

His enthusiasm was short-lived. His face dimmed again. "Aw, it was probably just a spiked handle she gave herself. She started being Miss Baker when she came in the door, she stopped being Miss Baker the minute she got outside it again. If I could only get an idea of what the stall was she sold herself to Moran

on, to be let in here like that, it might help some "

"One of the neighbors?" suggested the matron.

"We've canvassed every one of them for six blocks in all directions. Cookie, what did Miss Baker say to your daddy when he first opened the door and let her in?"

"She said hullo," he faltered tentatively, evidently doing his conscientious best to fulfil what was required of him.

''That's going to start in again," sighed the matron resignedly.

Wanger glanced around in the direction of the stairs. "I wonder if she'd be any help Ask the doctor if she's in condition to come down for just a minute. Tell him I don't want to question her, y'understand, I just want to see if she can throw some light on a point the kid brought up. I won't keep her a minute."

"Don't take any lead pipe to the kid while I'm out of the room now," the matron warned. "I'm supposed to be in attendance the whole time he's with you."

She returned in a couple of minutes. "They didn't want her to, but she did want to. Shell be right down."

The doctor and a nurse both came in with her. She walked very slowly. The murder hadn't been in the closet out there; it was in here on her face.

"Now, please " the doctor urged Wanger.

"I promise you," Wanger assured him.

She was a mother. She was half-dead herself, but she was still a mother. "You're not tiring him too much, are you, officer?" She tottered over to the two of them, bent forward and kissed the youngster. The doctor and the nurse held her up, each by an arm.

Wanger almost didn't have the heart to go ahead. But, after all, it had to be done sooner or later. "Mrs. Moran, I don't suppose there's a Miss Baker that you happen to know of. . . . I'm trying to find out if there really is such a

person or if it was just a. . . . He just mentioned a Miss Baker "

He saw the change come over her face before the doctor and nurse did, because she was turned toward him. It had seemed impossible a moment ago that anything could have been added to the emotion she had undergone already, and yet now something was. A climactic excess of horror, to top all the other horror she had experienced, seemed to spread slowly over her face like a cold, viscous film. She pressed two fingers to the outer edge of each eyebrow, as if to keep her skull from flying apart. "Not her!" she whispered.

"That's what he says," Wanger breathed back unwillingly.

"Oh, no no!"

He correctly translated the meaning she gave the harried negative; not a denial of the person's existence, a denial of the accusation simply because it was so unthinkable.

"Then there is ..." he persisted gently.

"The child's " She pointed, hardly able to articulate. Tears, no longer of grief but of mortal terror, welled unchecked from her eyes. "Cookie's kindergarten teacher

If there was anything could make what had happened seem even worse than it was, it was this: to have the cause of it take form, materialize into human shape, cease to remain just an abstraction become, from an impersonally barred door, the young woman who was in charge of her own child several hours each day.