The Woman in Black, page 15
He said it so abuptly that it startled me, and I must have looked startled. He pushed his dank hair back with both hands.
“I don’t know what the hell’s the matter with me. I guess I need a drink. Mind?”
He was in the dining room before I had a chance to say whether I minded or not. He poured himself what looked to me, when he came back with it, like a fairly heady dose.
“What else does he know?”
He said it as abruptly as he had before and stood with his feet apart looking at me, rather too much in the attitude of command, it seemed to me, since it was my house, my liquor, such as it was, and my information he was presumably interested in getting. I might have been annoyed, except that just then something seemed to click in the back of my mind. I wasn’t annoyed, I was worried. It was an odd sort of worry. It was like a caterpillar with cold feet crawling lightly up my spinal column.
I don’t know whether he felt it or whether it occurred to him rationally that his technique could be improved on. He relaxed from his Napoleonic stance, came over and sat down beside me on the sofa.
“Come on, Grace—kick through.”
He reached a moist clammy hand over for mine.
“Remind me to tell you I’m nuts about you when this is over, will you, baby? It’s important right now but it’s not immediate. And boy, is this other important? I’m telling you, this is the works, Grace, and we’re right in line together.”
I got up and moved over to a chair. “Don’t act Hollywood, or whatever it is, Milton,” I said. “You’re unattractive when you do.”
“Have it your own way. But listen. This is the pay-off of the century, happening right now. Get that, baby. There’s a story here that’s the honey story of all time, ancient and modern. I’ve been getting a whiff of it off and on, and if you get enough whiffs, pretty soon you get a smell. Baby, does this smell!”
“Is that what’s scared you?” I asked.
“You’re damn right it is. It scares the living bejaegers out of me, and no foolin’. I play it one way and it’s gold in my shoes. The other, and I’m . . .”
He made a light gesture with his glass. “Poof . . . sunk. That’s straight dope. And you’re going to tell papa how to play it.”
He leaned forward, his eyes fixed intently, glittering bright, on mine.
“Kick through, Grace.—Has anybody mentioned Joe Kramer to you this morning?”
“Joe Kramer?” I said.
“The Body. Young Tarzan. You know, the handsome blond boy muscle man. Has his name come up in any of this deal?”
He drained his glass. When he leaned forward closer to me I felt myself edging unconsciously back into my chair. I didn’t like the glint in his eye, and I didn’t like the way the two lumps of ice tinkled like little warning bells in the bottom of his glass, or the caterpillar feet cold again on my spine. I don’t mean it had anything to do with me. It had none. The glint was ruthlessly impersonal, the profit motive gilded with malice, with delighted malevolence.
“I’m sure I’d have remembered if I’d heard it,” I said.
“I’m sure you would too. The point is, did you? Quit stalling, baby.”
“Quit calling me baby, will you?” I said. “I don’t like it, and I’m rapidly getting to the point where I don’t like you, Milton.”
He smiled. “Quit stalling, Grace. Quit stalling and kick through.”
I hadn’t been stalling and I had no intention of beginning, but when the telephone ringing cut me off abruptly, starting to say so, I was aware of a startling sense of relief, as I got up quickly to answer it. It was strange, because I wasn’t afraid of Milton Minor any more than I’m actually afraid of snakes. I just don’t like them close to me.
“Hello,” I said.
“Is this you, ma’am?”
I don’t know why the rasping concrete grinding out at the other end sounded sweet and smooth as honey to me then, but it did.
“Yes, it is. Sergeant Buck,” I said.
Being able to say his name aloud in front of Milton Minor, who’d got up and was heading toward the dining room again, was like having an armed guard of friendly natives lined up outside the door.
“Sit down in a chair and listen to what I got to say, then, ma’am.”
I reached back, pulled the desk chair closer and sat down in it. He’d probably specified a chair because he didn’t think I had sense enough to think of one myself. Then I understood. I’d done an injustice to Sergeant Buck. I listened until he’d finished, and then I said, “All right. I . . . I’ll be glad to.”
“Thank you kindly, ma’am.”
I heard the dial tone in my ear for quite a while before I snapped to and put the phone down.
“How is old Iron Pants?”
Milton came back from the dining room, the decanter in one hand, his glass in the other, preparatory to encouraging himself further.
“Sergeant Buck is fine, apparently, if that’s who you mean,” I said, who’ve called Sergeant Buck everything I could think of to convey the same idea and now resented Milton Minor’s doing it because he was being insolent and superior to us both. “And Joe Kramer’s name has come up . . . come up, and gone down again.”
Milton tilted the decanter back from the glass and looked at me. It was a swift penetrating glance that I ought to have made a better judgment about than I did.
“What the hell do you mean . . . come up and gone down again?”
“I mean he’s dead,” I said. “Up at the Preston Hotel. In Betty Livingstone’s room. The back of his skull’s caved in. That’s what I mean. Come up, and gone down again. In short, somebody has murdered Joe Kramer.”
Milton stood there, his eyes bulging, glassy marbles, his face putty-colored jelly, quivering in strange places. The crash was my decanter and glass landing on the floor at his feet.
I went over to the fireplace and pressed the bell, but Lilac was already halfway up the basement steps.
“Clean this up, please, Lilac, and get Mr. Minor some coffee. I’m going out.”
Milton was wavering unsteadily back to the sofa, with Lilac a black thundercloud surveying him and the broken crystal and bourbon and ice on her waxed pine floor. But it was me she attacked as I passed her in the doorway.
“Where you goin’? You stay home. You stay right here where you is. You hear!”
I heard, but I went on. What I hadn’t told Milton was that Joe Kramer when he died had clutched in both hands a gray wig and a black dress. I didn’t tell Lilac where I was going because I was going to the Preston Hotel. Sergeant Buck wanted me to see if I could, as he called it, “idemnify” them as the gray wig and the black dress that had converted Betty Livingstone, young and blonde, into Bertha Taylor, old and worn out, the conscience and the pursuing nemesis of Enoch B. Stubblefield and the bloody boomerang of sudden death.
What I couldn’t understand was why he should have told me not to bring Dorothy Hallet.
19
I soon found out why Sergeant Buck didn’t want me to bring Dorothy Hallet to the Preston Hotel. And I should have known. The reason was that it wasn’t safe. He said so himself, not being frank but just literal. If there was a slightly hollow smile on my face he ignored it—or “ignered” it rather, as he’d have said if he’d been called on to mention it at all. It served me right, of course, because I’d gone racing up there, flattered because he’d called on me. It was merely pride that deserved its fall. It did change my attitude, however. Here-after anybody could call him anything they wanted to.
The Preston Hotel was dingy and certainly not luxurious, in spite of the break the papers gave it when they got the story. Still, it was an improvement on Mrs. Kelly’s empty boarding house. Betty Livingstone’s room was on the third floor, overlooking the Post Office and the expanse of concrete and fountains around the Station, and the Capitol through a side window.
“She checked in Friday,” Captain Lamb said. “Had to have a room with a telephone. She stayed here Friday night. The maid says that’s the only night she slept here. She kept the room, came here during the day. She had a visitor Sunday afternoon but nobody remembers seeing who it was. There were a couple of glasses in the room. They’d had whiskey and water. She gave the colored porter what was left, about half a bottle. He threw the bottle away and doesn’t remember the brand. Says it tasted funny. Could have been good stuff and he wasn’t used to it.”
Captain Lamb told me that on the way up in the rickety creaking elevator. He’d come to meet me, not the Sergeant. I suppose Buck thought it would compromise him. I didn’t think of that then, however. It was before the hollow note was struck, and I was still feeling flattered and kindly.
“He’s gone,” Lamb said, referring to the late Kramer’s battered remains. “Somebody got him over the back of the head with a blackjack, and kept on . . . a nice ladylike blackjack with Miss Livingstone’s initials on it.”
I looked incredulously at him, but he nodded seriously. Our footsteps echoed on the thin marbleized linoleum in the narrow hall. A door toward the front opened, and Sergeant Buck’s gaunt granite form was there. That’s when he told me they didn’t think it was safe for Mrs. Hallet to come.
“Somebody might reconnize her,” Buck said. There was a spittoon handy, which he used. It seemed unnecessarily fastidious, considering the mess the place already was. They’d covered where Joe Kramer had been with an old cotton blanket from the double brass bed against the wall. It had a sheet still on it, and on the sheet were the gray wig, and the black dress.
Sergeant Buck motioned me over to them. “Can you idemnify them there, ma’am?”
I looked at them. It was absurd not to pick them up so I could look closely at them. They seemed to have brought so much blood in their trail already that I suppose I was superstitious about them.
“The wig looks the same,” I said.
I was trying to remember how it had looked on the woman standing hesitant and anxious in the rain by the rhododendron bushes at the end of the flagged path a long time ago. It seemed a very long time ago, and it took me a sharp wrench of the mind to realize that it was less than twenty-four hours. I looked at the dress. It was cheap rayon. The wattled spots had dried, but the cloth had shrunk where it had been wet and it was easily recognizable.
“This is the dress,” I said.
I could see the blue eyes in the sad ill face against the Wedgewood blue of Dorothy’s downstairs powder room, and the straggling gray hairs that “Bertha Taylor” had made no effort to do anything about. It must have been a terrific temptation to Betty Livingstone to look in the mirror to see if she was still convincing.
“I suppose she thought the bright light on her face might give her away,” I said.
Captain Lamb waited for me to explain. I hadn’t thought of it before, but it was probably the truth. The rest of the lights in the house were pleasantly subdued. The sallow foundation and gray powder on her face wouldn’t show anywhere except at the dressing table, where the lights were bright, and where I was standing while she waited over by the door.
“Where is her scarf?” I asked. “She had a black scarf. It was over her head when I met her outside the Hallets. She put it on her shoulders when we went in, and then later I saw her tying it around her head for a turban, down on the terrace. She had a car, too, on the Park Road. Where is that?”
Captain Lamb was writing in his notebook. “Anything else?” he asked laconically.
I couldn’t remember anything else, but I began to tell them about all of it, beginning at the beginning—her first phone call to Dorothy Hallet at my house, in the guise of Mr. Stubblefield’s secretary.
“And Mr. Stubblefield’s secretary is a man,” I said. “Mr. Seymour seemed to think both of us, Mrs. Hallet and I, should have known that and not been taken in.”
I told them about her second call, but I left out about that odd feeling of the theatrical I’d had. They’d think it was something I was adding, now that I knew, and I didn’t want to prejudice myself as an accurate reporter. The rest of it I told them as literally as I could.
“She must have been very good, to carry it out,” I said.
“She was taking a part she knew pretty well,” Lamb said. “This impersonation’s happened three times in the last year. At least they say out in Livingstone the mother hasn’t been out of town for longer than that. But this was the first public performance. Mr. Stubblefield says the other two were on the quiet.”
He went over to the dead girl’s suitcase on the table by the window.
“Here’s a letter she started to her mother, Sunday afternoon.”
He handed me a couple of sheets of the Preston Hotel’s stationery.
“Dear Mums,” I read. “I’ve taken to the road again—guess where? It’s an awful dump I’m in, but it’s out of the way and safe as houses. Some day I’m going to tell you all about it, because you’ll laugh till you bust. It was a divine idea. I only wish I’d thought of it myself. But this time I’m gilding the lily—doing a little ad libbing on my own. It’s going to be more fun than I’ve ever had before if I don’t get hysterics in the middle of it. It’s what we call a bit part. I’m only on stage a few moments but what a stage! I’ll tell you all about it when I get home in August, so get ready for a good laugh.
“I’m fine and I hope you are. I hope you’re being careful. I didn’t think your last letter sounded very good, but I know you’re trying. I still have the apt. but I’m alone a lot, which I guess can’t be helped. It’s the trouble with travelling men but now the war’s over I hope it’s going to be better. I have no other complaints, so I’m really lucky. I—There’s a call for me. I’ll finish later, or after the show tomorrow, to tell you how it went off. I hope I don’t get stage fright and bungle——”
It ended there. I read it through again.
“So her mother doesn’t even know about it, does she?” I said.
Captain Lamb shook his head. “It looks that way.”
“Was the call from downstairs?”
“No. From the outside. The only reason we know anybody was here was the bottle and two glasses. It was a man who called, and the clerk says he remembers it was a different voice from the other man who called. She never called out herself.”
“What about this travelling man—is she married?” I asked.
“We’re checking in New York on that. We’ve got a report from her agent. He says she was doing all right, really getting somewhere, on the stage, when she threw it all up. She left her name on his books, but she refused all the parts he got for her, until the last two years she’s been going out of town on calls—these here, I guess. He doesn’t know anything about them except they come through his office. He relays them to her, she sends him fifty or a hundred bucks, and that’s all he knows.”
“He knows her address, doesn’t he?”
“A box at the Central Post Office. That’s what her mother uses too. That’s all anybody knows about her, so far.”
“Do you suppose she’s been afraid of this? Is that why she was hiding?”
I went over to the suitcase and looked at the things on it. The lingerie was simple and in good taste, and could have been bought anywhere. There were no laundry marks or labels on any of it, and the suitcase had her initials on it but nothing else. The closet door was open. Three dresses were hanging inside, but none of them had a store label. One had had, but it had been taken out. There were two pairs of shoes, but they were old and the store name didn’t help. It was a large store that does only cash business.
“Where is the blackjack?” I asked. “Is it still here?”
It was. Sergeant Buck had it wrapped in a towel on the dresser. He unwrapped it without visible enthusiasm. I expected from his reluctance to see it still had evidence of its recent use, but it hadn’t.
“No prints,” Captain Lamb said. “They washed it off.”
I looked at it. It was an artistic job of blackjack making. It was covered with green pebbled leather, still damp, with a leather loop to slip over the wrist. The top had a silver mounting, and the silver mounting had a red stone “E. L.” set in it.
“Stimulated rubies,” Sergeant Buck said simply.
“They look real to me,” I said. I looked at the small lethal weapon with considerable curiosity. I’d seen them advertised during the dim-out in New York in the early days of the war. “Milady Walks In Safety” was one ad I remembered, under the name of a really swank Fifth Avenue shop, with a picture of a delicate creature a zephyr would have blown away stalking down the street with her blackjack hanging from her wrist. The only one I’d ever seen in anybody’s possession was in the bag of an English woman writer on her first visit. It was the first thing she’d bought in New York, she said. She’d read about us, and been to the movies, I guess.
“I should think you could trace that easily enough,” I said. “It must have cost more than all her clothes put together. Those rubies are real, I’m sure of that. I wonder why she left it here in the room?”
“The maid says she didn’t. She had it with her in her handbag. She says she showed it to her when the maid said she ought to be careful going out alone at night.”
“Oh,” I said. “Then it was taken last night, from that place on I Street—with the wig and dress.” I looked at Captain Lamb. “—By somebody who must have known she’d have it?”
I tried to remember. “If it had been on her dresser, I think I’d have seen it.” I was sure I would have. The rubies glistened fiery red in the sunlight. We must have seen it if it was out anywhere in the naked lamplight of the I Street room.
“When was Joe Kramer killed?” I asked all of a sudden.
“Around noon, it looks like,” Captain Lamb said. “Nobody seems to have seen him come in either. Not today. He came last night and gave the hall boy five bucks to phone him at his hotel as soon as she turned up. I wouldn’t be surprised if it didn’t set him back ten to get in today. But we’ll find that out. So far we’ve drawn a blank. There’s a pretty shifty bunch around here, but the maid seems all right. She swears the wig and dress weren’t here when she cleaned, if you call it that, this morning. Just the suitcase. Kramer had a tough day. He had a shiner on him, when he came.”
