The Woman in Black, page 7
They didn’t, and we went. Mrs. Stubblefield was really sweet about it. She thought five o’clock was much too early for anybody to get up who hadn’t planned on it and gone to bed at nine. It was then almost eleven.
“Why don’t you try writing fiction instead of biography?” I asked, as we got into my car down on Massachusetts Avenue below Waterside Drive.
Milton shrugged. “Quelle différence, chère madame?”
I shook my head.
“Mr. Stubblefield appalls me. I’ve met a lot of big industrialists, but they’re quiet and unpretentious people. This man acts as if he thought he was a cross between Henry Ford, Henry Kaiser, Henry Garsson and Henry VIII. If I’d been Ellery Seymour I’d have swatted him in the nose. I really would.”
“Oh no, you wouldn’t,” Milton said coolly. “You’d be used to the needling by now. Any parlor psychiatrist could figure it out. E. B. knows he’s pretty dependent on Seymour, and he’s not nearly as much at home in the Monde as Seymour. He does it to get under his skin, and Seymour knows it. He’s plenty smart. He’s also a nice guy and pretty honest.”
“You mean about the magic? That long speech he made? Was that smart? Or honest?”
“I left the answer book in my other pants,” Milton said. “I’ll tell you tomorrow, or next year.”
We were crossing the P Street Bridge. The rain had stopped, but it was still hot and muggy. Milton lighted a cigarette and threw it out the window after the first puff. He wiped the damp shreds of tobacco off his lips with the back of his hand.
“God, I hate Washington,” he said. “The climate stinks.”
As that’s so axiomatic it hardly needs the constant restatement it gets, I let it go. I was looking across him to see if there was a light in the yellow brick house in the block before mine.
“Oh, good!” I exclaimed.
“Good what? I see no good in anything.”
“I do,” I said. “Colonel Primrose is back. Now we can——”
He interrupted me with a groan. “Look, Grace. Why don’t you marry the guy and let it go at that?”
“If everybody would shut up, I might,” I said. “I’m not going to be forced into it to satisfy my friends or spite Sergeant Buck. I don’t want to compete with Mr. and Mrs. North, and I’ve always believed Holmes gave Doctor Watson’s wife an obscure poison—you remember she died awful quick. I don’t dare break up the Primrose-Buck menage if I want to keep my health . . . and anyway my kids don’t like the idea.”
“Let’s say I never brought it up at all.”
I made a U-turn in the block and stopped in front of my own door.
“What about giving me a drink before I go?” Milton said. “It’s only quarter past eleven, and your dusky duenna’s still up.”
The light was on down in the kitchen, and from the wreck of an old pickup truck parked in front of me it was apparent that Lilac was entertaining.
“Anyway, I want to use your phone. My vitals are being gnawed by curiosity.”
We went inside. While I hung up my wrap he went on into the dining room and mixed himself a blend and soda. He came back into the sitting room holding it up distastefully.
“This the best you’ve got? I’ll see what Stubblefield Enterprises has on tap tomorrow. Where’s the phone?”
I pointed to the desk in the corner.
“211, isn’t it.” He flicked the dial. “I’ll pay the bill, so don’t look like that.—This is Hobart 6363. I want to speak to the Chief of Police in Livingstone, Montana. Livingstone. Chief of Police. No, it’s not a gag. No, I don’t know his name. Give me the charges when you’re through, will you?”
Sheila was galloping around, whacking the tables with her tail, delighted to have somebody home again, and while I quieted her I listened to Milton. Montana was where he’d said the lady in black was supposed to be buried. I sat with my hand on Sheila’s head looking at him, but he just smiled and waited, making marks on my fresh desk pad.
At last his face brightened. “Hello—Chief? This is Captain Charles Lamb, Washington, D. C., Homicide.”
“—His name’s Albert,” I said.
“I’m checking on a woman—think you know her,” he went on. “Bertha Taylor. Mrs. Lawrence Taylor. Thought you would. She still in town?”
He listened, nodding his head at me like a papier mâché toy that keeps on wagging until the momentum gives out. “She was? Six o’clock. Okay, thanks. No, nothing special—routine check-up. I’ll send you a report. Thanks, Chief.”
He put the phone down.
“You see? Bertha Taylor’s still in Livingstone. She had a police escort home at six o’clock. Mrs. Taylor being a harmless dipso they try to keep out from under heavy traffic. So, she isn’t in Washington. Simple?”
“How did you know?”
The phone rang, and he answered it. “Three minutes, $2.70 plus tax,” he repeated. “Thanks very much.”
He took two dollars and seventy-five cents out of his pocket and put it on the table.
“I’ll contribute five cents toward the tax and you can stand the difference. And I’ll make it good with Lamb in the morning.”
“I want to know how you knew about Bertha Taylor,” I said.
He brought his highball over and sat down beside me.
“I know a lot of things. I know more about E. B., and Ellery Seymour, and Enoch B. Stubblefield Enterprises, than they know themselves. I used to be a working reporter. Remember?”
“I thought it was you who’d forgotten,” I said. “So who is Bertha Taylor?”
He put his glass down. “Have you ever been out to Coney Island early Monday morning before they clean up the beach? Orange skins, banana peels, egg-shells, litter, all washed up, empty and sodden? Well, that’s Bertha Taylor. She’s one of the old orange peels washed up on the beach of this our life.”
He grinned to show he wasn’t really being as serious as he was.
“She used to be different—same like the oranges before lunch on Sunday. I made a stop-over once just to have a look at her. I thought it really was her today. I still believe in miracles, I guess. I thought she could have pulled out of it.”
“Who is she, Milton?” I demanded.
“Let’s call her E. B.’s conscience and let it go at that. Unless you mean this dame in black here today. I don’t know who she is.”
He stared thoughtfully at his neutral spirit.
“But I’m going to find out. I’m also going to find out whose idea she was. In fact, I think I’ll start now.”
He drained his glass and got up. But he didn’t go. He stood fumbling absently at his pack of damp cigarettes.
“I don’t get it,” he said at last. “I don’t get any of it, including this new plant in Louisiana. Do you suppose Bill Kent’s a crook—or is it our little Susan? Or do you suppose the guy’s really got a new polymer? Could be, you know.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know what a polymer is.”
“I don’t either. But it’s something you put with something else, a sort of regrouping of certain molecules. You stir ’em all up and get synthetic rubber. There are different kinds, depending on the process. GRS—that was the stuff they made out of butadiene and styrene. General purpose rubber, they called it. They used petroleum. They used alcohol for a while, but petroleum’s cheaper. There’s some stuff called Neoprene, but it’s a special purpose product—resistant to heat and gas for things like inner tubes. It’s too complicated for me. But I know there’s a desperate still hunt on for a way to make a synthetic rubber for general purposes that’s as good as Neoprene for specialized use. It’s going to come, they say. And the guy that gets it—if he can make it cheap, and they think he can—he’ll have something, believe me. And just think what’s going to happen to World Economy. I’ll bet the State Department’s turning over in its grave already.”
“Could anybody like Bill Kent find it?” I asked. “I mean, he can’t have much of a laboratory to work in.”
He shrugged. “They tell me you could cook it up on the kitchen stove if you knew what you were doing. I wonder. He wouldn’t be with Rubber Reserve unless he was interested. And he’s a pretty confident guy, isn’t he? He might just have something to bargain with. I wonder, Grace. Did you notice when it was the little lady decided she didn’t feel well? It was precisely when our Freddie spilled the beans about a new process of some kind. Maybe she’s been talking out of turn and Bill doesn’t know it yet. As I said before, Ellery Seymour’s nobody’s fool.”
He went to the door.
“Well, so long. I’ll call you in the morning. It’s nice to be back here, Grace. You’re one of my favorite women east of the Rocky Mountains.”
9
Milton Minor hadn’t more than closed the front door, it seemed to me, when I heard a soft double-quick sound of the brass knocker. As I got up I looked around to see what the gifted biographer and amateur detective had left behind that he had to come back for. But there was nothing but the $2.75, which was clearly mine for the Telephone company. Sheila stretched and got up and proceeded ahead of me along the hall. When I opened the front door it took me a long fraction of an instant to adjust to the fact that it wasn’t Milton out there. I stood stupidly in the doorway, thinking I must be slightly touched in the head. It couldn’t be Dorothy Hallet, at that time of night and in those clothes, no matter how much the face looked like hers.
“Don’t just stand there, Grace—let me in,” she said urgently. “You’ve got to do something for me. Go change your dress and come along. Hurry. It’s getting terribly late.”
She took the doorknob out of my hand and pushed the door shut.
“I know you think I’ve lost my mind.”
It was an understatement. I looked at the old raincoat she had on, the gray scarf she had tied around her head and the stained sneakers on her feet. She was trying to look a lot calmer than even in the dimly lighted hallway I could see she was.
“Where are we going, first?” I said. “It looks like a ragpickers’ convention to me.”
I went back into the sitting room. “You can take five minutes to tell me. It can’t be as urgent as all this.”
“It is, though,” she said quickly. She reached in her pocket, took out a folded sheet of notepaper, and handed it abruptly over to me.
“Dear Mrs. Hallet,” I read. “I hope you’ll forgive my intrusion of this afternoon. I’m sorry it had to be at your house, and you were very kind to me. I have some information that I think you ought to have. I wouldn’t have bothered to offer it to you, however, if you hadn’t been so gracious. I am at 801 I Street tonight. It’s a cheap boarding house. My room is Number 6, to the left of the head of the stairs. The front door’s open until about half-past twelve, and I’ll be there. I’m getting out early in the morning. The climate here isn’t healthy. If you don’t care to come I’m trusting to you to destroy this. It’s very important to you, and I hope you’ll come, for your own good. You don’t know what some of the people around you are like. I’ll wait up till they lock the door.”
I read it through again.
“Where did you get this, Dorothy?”
“It was under the box of cleansing tissues in the powder room. The maid brought it up after everybody had left.”
“But you’re not going?”
“I’m certainly going. Alone, if you’re afraid to go with me.”
I shook my head.
“I’m too old to take a dare, angel, and it’s raining cats and dogs and I think you’re crazy anyway. Listen. Bertha Taylor is out in Livingstone, Montana.” I told her about Milton’s call. “Whoever this woman is, she isn’t Mrs. Lawrence Taylor.”
“All the more reason, then,” she answered evenly. “Are you coming with me?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I think it’s foolhardy in the first place. Why didn’t you take Theodore——”
“Theodore!” she said. “He’d be as much use as a paralyzed rabbit. Anyway, he’s still looking under cushions and emptying out drawers looking for the missing gun.”
“Nobody found it?”
She looked away abruptly.
“Dorothy!” I said. “Where is the gun? Do you know?”
“No, I don’t.” She turned back. “I did know. I took it off the mantel. I don’t know now, because it’s gone again. And for some reason or other, that’s part of why I want to go and see this woman.”
“You think it was hers?”
“I know it wasn’t. It belonged to me, Grace—it was my gun.”
“Oh,” I said. I couldn’t think of anything else.
“Ellery got it for me two months ago. I asked him to, because I’m like everybody else, I’ve suddenly got scared of my own shadow. I’m scared now. I don’t know how the gun got in the library. It was upstairs in my sitting-room desk the last I saw it. And I didn’t want anybody starting to trace it back to me, because I didn’t want Theodore lecturing me on law and order. That’s why I wanted it left on the mantel, so I could get it.”
“After you did, what happened to it?”
“That’s what I was going to ask you,” she said calmly. “I put it under the cushion where you and Milton Minor had been sitting. I had to hurry. Bill Kent barged in at that point defending Susan’s honor. I didn’t want to have to go into a song and dance about why I was standing in the living room with a gun in my hand.—You didn’t take it?”
“I certainly did not,” I said.
“Did Milton?”
I shook my head. “I didn’t see him. I haven’t any reason to think he did.”
Dorothy Hallet smiled. It was a brief automatic movement of her lips without humor or meaning.
“You don’t trust him any more than I do, darling. I know he can be amusing, but he’s a louse, Grace, and you know it as well as I do.”
“Let’s stick to the point,” I said. “I don’t think he took the gun. Does it make a lot of difference anyway? It was empty, and I assume it wasn’t registered——”
She interrupted me. “It isn’t registered. And it isn’t empty either. What do you think of that, darling?”
“But it was empty,” I said. “What do you mean? Did you load it?”
I tried to speak quietly, realizing with a curious kind of remembered hearing that we’d been snapping at each other like a couple of angry fishwives. I was also a little stunned, at the moment.
“No. I didn’t. That’s what’s so interesting. Mr. Joe Kramer didn’t unload it. Not entirely. He only pretended to. He left three shells in it.” She paused to let that register in my blurred unhappy mind. “And don’t ask me why, dear, because I haven’t any more idea than you. When I opened it, there were three shells. Nobody else had a chance to touch the thing. But let’s skip that. Will you come with me, or won’t you?”
She took the sheet of notepaper out of my hands and put it in her pocket.
“Oh, please, Grace!” she said quickly. Her voice was suddenly full of entreaty. “I wouldn’t ask you if there was anybody else. It’s terribly important to me. I’ll tell you, some time.”
“All right,” I said. “I’m a fool. I’ve always known that. I didn’t think you were one. I thought you were the sanest woman I’ve ever known.”
“Change your dress. And hurry, Grace, won’t you?”
I was even fool enough to take my own car, because I thought I was the saner of the two at the moment. And I was sane enough when we passed Colonel Primrose’s house, where the downstairs lights were still on, to wish we could stop and take him and/or Sergeant Buck along. But I knew better than to suggest that to Dorothy.
I don’t imagine 801 I Street is a particularly prepossessing place at any time, but at ten minutes past twelve on a hot heavy night it was frighteningly ominous. It was a high mansard-roofed Victorian house that had seen a lot better days. It was set back from the sidewalk behind a broken-down iron fence. A dilapidated doll buggy lay on its side in the yard, which was barren of grass or even weeds and full of mud puddles glinting under the street light. Radios were still blaring out from other open windows along the street, but there was no sound from 801. Its windows were open, but they were dark and empty, and the limp gray curtains hung despondently still, like old ghosts too tired to move. The front door was standing open. A dim light coming down the stairs made it seem darker, some way, than the flat lighted surface of the ornate façade.
I pulled on the car brake reluctantly and switched off the motor. The street light there was vaguely comforting, but not enough to take the curse off the place in general. I was hoping Dorothy would change her mind.
“I’ve seen more attractive spots,” I said.
“Don’t be a snob, Grace.”
“I’m not a snob, I’m a coward. Are you sure this is it?”
She held the note down under the map light. It still said “801,” and a gilt “801” peeling off the transom over the door in front of us was still visible. She put her hand on the car door and opened it.
We got out with a show of being casual and perfectly at home that must have looked as false as it was, and went through the missing gate and around the holes in the walk where the bricks were missing too, to the front steps. They were solid enough, stone worn concave, and with the remnants of the day’s garbage on them. We went inside. The air was fetid with a hundred smells and the wainscoting on the stairs, as we made our way quickly up, not daring to stop for fear one of the blank doors on the ground floor would open, was broken and mouldy where the plaster oozed out. With every step we took the stairs creaked loudly enough to wake the dead. If it hadn’t been for the light on the second floor, dispelling the shadows, I don’t think I’d have gone on up to the landing. It was a naked light, with gnats and midges flying around it, and a big moth miller that barged in and out, striking it and falling, and recovering to strike again. That was the only sign of life I could see or hear as we got to the top step and Dorothy pulled me around to the left. There was a door there with a brass “6” nailed to the middle panel.
