Time Off for Murder (14 page)

  Mary held up a little notebook. She said: "Aren't we all dumb? Guessing. When here, Phyllis wrote down the date she had with death."

  "Where?" Inspector Heinsheimer snatched the book from her hand. It was a tiny leather bound diary, gilt-edged, gilt stamped "Appointments." Mary had it opened at the page for the nineteenth of October. The Inspector's plump forefinger ran down the column. It stopped at "12:30 Lunch. W.V.A." "What's W.V.A.? Geography?"

  Only the police stenographer laughed.

  Mary said: "W.V.A. must be Wilfred Van Arsdale. Phyllis' ex-boy friend. Troy. We knew about that date the time she disappeared. Van Arsdale himself came on to New York and told the police about it. That was the time she told him she was interested in another man, Saxon Rorke."

  Simultaneously the Inspector and the young D.A. raised their eyebrows, in a concerted gesture of amazement, so startling in its spontaneity that Mary Carner laughed. "What's wrong with that?" she said. "You men acted so funny. Like Queen Mary must have when she first heard of Wally Simpson."

  "Your girl friend didn't look like Wally," the Inspector said. "But there's lots of places in this town where they think Saxon Rorke's His Royal Highness."

  "I know," said Mary. "He's very rich. And very society. He's a fascinating gentleman. Have you seen this letter in the bag? Phyllis wrote it." She had abstracted the letter from its envelope. "Johnny Reese and I knew about that letter a half year ago. We read it on a blotter. Wondered what had become of it. Asked Rorke. And he said he never got it. Best reason in the world. She never sent it."

  She passed the letter to the assistant D.A. who read it with sympathetic eyes.

  Mary said: "Yes, it is pathetic. She, a proud, intelligent, worldly woman, was head over heels in love. She wasn't sure of herself. She wrote the letter Tuesday night and carried it around unmailed. Afraid of the answer. Afraid to face the facts."

  "Like so many of us," the District Attorney said quietly. "We can face any grim fact in the outside world, but never anything that touches our pride."

  "That was Phyllis. She wouldn't face personal facts. She wouldn't face the truth about her father. She hesitated to face the truth about her relations with Saxon Rorke. As if she feared that knowing would destroy her."

  "And so she never knew," the D.A. said. "She died not knowing whether he loved her or whether it was just chivalry. Is that it? And just as well - now she's dead."

  "And yet he must have loved her," Mary said. "He was very much disturbed. It was he who forced her father to report her disappearance…Have you notified him?"

  "One thing at a time," the Inspector said. "If he reads the papers, he knows. We'll get around to him. This book. Here. Right here. She wrote down everything. Here's that movie date I heard you speak of. I don't get it exactly. Look what she's got here." His forefinger pointed to the place where, in pencil, in Phyllis' slanting back-hand, was scrawled: "6:? News Reel Theatre."

  "She went there, all right," Mary said. "Here's the stub." She held up a fragment of bright red pasteboard.

  "Yep," the Inspector scowled. "But what's the question mark for? A person or a place or a thing?"

  "It looks," the D.A. ventured, "as though she wasn't sure herself of what it was."

  The Inspector grunted. "She was sure enough of the next one though, all right. The time's eight-thirty. The address is this here house. And the person she had a date with is N.P. Man, woman or child, that's the one that met her here. N.P. Anybody know any N.P.'s?"

  "Now wait. N.P. I've seen those initials somewhere. Now wait…. Let me think. Oh yes, I know where I saw it. On another appointment sheet - in Phyllis' office. What was the name?" Mary's memory struggled across the gap of months. If Johnny Reese were here, she thought. He with his fly-paper memory. Paulson? Pinkerton? No. Peterson. That was it…. The querulous voice of the ecru Struthers - and where was he now? - saying: "Take poor Mister Peterson." Neal? No. Something more Scandinavian. Nils? "Nils Peterson," she said finally. "That was the name. He had been in to see her, had telephoned several times that day. Was agitated about something. The secretary didn't know what. Peterson was a client. A poor client. She had helped him save his property or something. Peterson always came in to talk to her about his troubles. He talked about going back to Sweden…. But what on earth had he to do with this house? And why should he have wanted to get her murdered? She was his friend. His best friend. His only friend. Phyllis was that sort…." Sympathy for the dead girl sobered her.

  The Inspector said: "Snap out of that, Carner. Where is this Peterson guy? Where can we get at him?"

  She raised her shoulders wearily. "Ever try the phone book?…Excuse me. I didn't mean to be rude. We can get to her files. His address must be there. Or maybe the Missing Persons Bureau - or maybe he's gone, too. Now, I remember. Her secretary said Peterson hadn't been around since the day that Phyllis disappeared. Was a regular pest before but never even telephoned after Phyllis vanished."

  "Very interesting," said the young D.A. "Very interesting. I think you've got something there, Miss Carner."

  The Inspector said: "Y'ask me, I think you got a good deal there."

  The D.A. rose. "I'd say you've got plenty." He stood up. He whistled. "I feel as if I'm on a merry-go-round. A date with Nils Peterson and the corpse carrying the name and date around. A ghost banquet. Four witnesses in the house. A raid next door. A wire tying up this place right with that one." He shook his head. "Too many suspects. Too many witnesses. Too many clues. Lot more than the law allows."

  "Sure." The Inspector grinned. "Give me a nice simple mystery any time. One with just a teentsy piece of string to hang a murderer with - or a button to choke him on. But we'll clear it up. We'll get through the underbrush. Don't let it get you down. Say, what's the matter with you, Mary? What's happening to you?"

  Mary Carner wore a look of profound astonishment. She clapped her hand over her open mouth. "I'd clean forgotten, it went out of my mind. This is all cockeyed. We've been figuring this thing all wrong. Phyllis Knight wasn't killed on the nineteenth of October. She wasn't killed when she came here to meet Peterson. She must have left this house alive. The raid next door had nothing to do with her. There weren't all those witnesses to her murder. She was alive that night. Go back to the Missing Persons files, Inspector. In the first week of November, Phyllis Knight wrote two letters, from some place in New Jersey. She was alive then. And she asked us to stop hunting for her."

  The Inspector pursed his lips. "O.K.," he said. "We start from scratch again. Where do we go from here?"

  "I still think," Miss Carner said, "we go right out to look for Peterson."

  But as she spoke, her eyes had an absent look, as if her thoughts were remote from the thing she had mentioned. And they were, for while she said one man's name, her memory was hearing the voice of another.

A homicide investigation is as painstaking, as intricate, as the spinning of a web.

  It begins with the camera, for the human eye is a cheat and memory irresponsible. Three men see a single scene and there are three impressions. But on the photographic plate facts are indisputable: Thus, the cadaver lay after its last agony. Thus were its hands, feet, head, clothing. This is the room in which it happened. Here was a window; there a door. It was so far from here to there. What is that shadow on the wall? Is it where a shoulder rubbed against the plaster? That streak on the floor? Was something dragged across? Here stood a table. The dishes on it were arranged in a certain way, which - who can foresee relevance? - may have some meaning later on.

  The fingerprints carelessly left behind on glass and crockery and wood and metal must be dusted over with a puff and powder, photographed, enlarged, indexed, compared with each of the millions of prints on file at the headquarters of the New York police and in the Federal Bureau of Investigation at Washington. "These whorls and ridges are unknown to us. This last one belongs to so and so, who one time was entangled with the law."

  From the photographic dark-room, the shuttle moves on to the dissecting table and the laboratory. Are there marks of violence on the skull, the larynx, the limbs? Is there narcotic or poison in the brain, the heart, the viscera, the lungs? What was eaten? What was drunk? What was breathed before life ended? There is no privacy for the violently dead.

  A scrap of paper, a sliver of glass, a burned match, the muddy print of a heel, the scrapings of a fingernail, all receive a label, a number, a turn under magnifying glasses and microscopes. Nothing is unimportant. The omniscient Spectroscope reports: "In this clod of dirt above the print of a heel there is so much of silica, so much of iron filings, a trace of lime. If you find mud of this content on a suspect's shoes, you may be fairly certain that that one left his footprint on the scene." The Colorimeter adds: "The writing on this sheet of paper came out of the same ink bottle as that other bit of chirography, there, and one of those whom you suspect may have filled his fountain pen from that very bottle. If you match your inks you may have drawn your web a good bit tighter."

  Under the converging lenses of the comparison microscope, a bullet reveals prints of firing pin and gun barrel as clear, as definite, as unique as the whorls of a fingerprint. There is nothing more amazing in all the science of crime detection, than that no two revolvers leave identical markings on a bullet, but that each separate gun, invariably, makes the same unique scratches and nicks whenever that gun is fired.

  Then, there are people to see and talk to. These may be a hundred, a thousand, a number to infinity. Each person who may have been nearby, or walked nearby, each person who had association with the deceased, must be tracked down, spoken to. The neighbor, the gossiping friend, the corner shopkeeper, the secretary, the maid of all work, the family doctor, the motion picture cashier, the garage attendant. The chance remark, the turn of a head, a word on the telephone, the trembling of a hand - who knows which one will yield the essential clue?

  Reasoning minds supplement tireless legs and patient hands. What have we seen and heard? Where does it point? Who had a reason? Who had an opportunity?

  But there is an etiquette of sudden death. No matter how patent the evidence, you may not name the dead until some next of kin has looked upon its face.

  Inspector Heinsheimer sent a man down to Washington Square to bring Lyman Knight to the Morgue at Bellevue. "We won't bother Rorke about it," he said to Miss Carner as he bent down to tie a shoe-lace. "He isn't kin. It's the father's job, if he's up to it. You met the old man, Miss C., what do you think of him?" He finished the bow on his shoe, straightened up, said to the police stenographer, "The bug-house for talking to yourself. When'd that female leave?"

  "Slid right out while you were talking," the stenographer answered.

  "Dames! That's why you can't do business with them. Now you see them. Now you don't. Oh well, maybe she's gone some place to powder her nose."

  He had guessed correctly. Miss Carner was powdering her nose. She had chosen to do it in a taxi-cab. Her nose and chin were whitened, her lips rouged, her hair neatly tucked under her hat by the time the cab let her out at Saxon Rorke's door.

  She gave her name to the doorman, waited patiently beside the switchboard while he plugged in a cord, pushed a key, announced her. Li, as dignified, as owlish as before, opened the door, bowed, led the way to the living room.

  Saxon Rorke came up the steps to greet her. He was in tweeds and a bronze Florida tan. With the dogs at his heels, he made a conventional, but convincing portrait of virile masculinity.

  He extended his hand, showed his fine teeth in a wide smile. "This is a pleasure. If I'd known you were coming, I'd have provided some etchings."

  "Then you do remember me?"

  "I never forget a charming woman."

  She frowned slightly. "This isn't a social call."

  "And why not?"

  "I bring bad news."

  He stiffened. "About Phyllis?"

  "Yes."

  Mary began to feel sorry for herself. "I've given myself a mean job," she thought. "Why didn't I let the police break the news to him?"

  "She's dead?"

  "Yes."

  Rorke lowered his head.

  Mary said gently: "Hadn't we better sit down. It's easier to take bad news sitting down."

  "You're being considerate. I'm really not a child. I can take it. Rover! Fido!…They didn't nip you?"

  "I don't mind dogs." She bent down to pat the shaggy heads.

  He led the way to the big living room, sat down on a sofa with her. "I've just come back from Florida," he began. "That state gets me. I stay later each winter. We're still not all to rights. And just as well, for we may be leaving again any day. For the country. I've bought a place in Virginia, You must come down sometime. Country squire stuff. Riding to the hounds. Not these hounds, of course. They'd be scared of a chipmunk." He was talking fast, too fast, almost as if he were trying to cover with prattle, a mounting hysteria. Mary stared at him in amazement.

  "You're looking very well," he went on. "Have you had lunch? I'll ask Li to fix something for us. Hard work agrees with you, or isn't it hard work running around town to call on bachelors at their apartments? . . ."

  Mary finished the sentence. "To inform them that their fiancees have been found murdered."

  She saw the ruddiness go out of his face like a headlamp dimmed. She saw his fingers tremble. He settled back on the sofa. "Tell me."