by Helen Reilly
Her back was to the fireplace and to the door beside it, a door leading into the dining room beyond. The door had been open a few inches. Eve didn’t hear it close. Going into the dining room a few minutes later, Gloria Fox, the parlor maid, found Charlotte Foy there, her face white, her hands gripping the back of a tall carved chair. The girl was frightened at her appearance but Miss Foy wouldn’t let her call anyone. She sent her upstairs for medicine, took it, and then said brusquely, “I’m all right now. Go back to your work.” When she returned to the living room, Bruce Cunningham was gone. He had an engagement with a fellow officer. He left after arranging to have dinner somewhere with Natalie.
Eve didn’t speak to him directly again. She said goodbye without looking at him. She didn’t need to look. The feel of him standing there beyond the archway, tall and straight in his uniform, was all through her. It was Thursday afternoon. She was going to be married to Jim Holland probably on Saturday. The anguish of farewell gripped her devastatingly. It wiped out everything else, so that for a while incidentals were blurred. She heard and saw, spoke and was spoken to, mechanically, in another world that had no real existence.
Jim talked about Lordship Beach, said they thought of taking a house there. It was a swell place with a cliff coming up out of the sea. “It’s rather like Cornwall, isn’t it, Eve?” She said yes. Her father was pleased when he heard that she intended to give up the shop. “Now that’s what I call a good idea.” She said the wedding was going to be quiet but she and Jim wanted them all to come.
“But of course, darling,” Alicia exclaimed. Natalie said wild horses wouldn’t keep her away. Charlotte said suddenly and harshly, “I can’t. I’ve got to go to Boston tomorrow.”
She spoke in a loud voice as though she were making a declaration of faith before piled fagots. The others stared. In spite of her detachment, Eve felt a stiffening in them. It was mostly in her father but—did Gerald glance quickly at Alicia and did Alicia’s face tighten, so that for a moment she looked hag-ridden, ugly?
Eve was puzzled. She could understand her father, but not Gerald or Alicia. Boston in that household meant the Coreys. Natalie’s mother, Virginia, had been a Corey. The old and extremely wealthy Boston family had strenuously objected to Virginia’s marriage to Hugh, who, at that time, if he was a young and brilliant professor of economics was also penniless and a widower with two children to boot. After Virginia’s death, the Coreys had tried to obtain custody of Natalie in the courts. Hugh had very properly fought them and had won, but he had never forgiven his wife’s people and he hated the yearly trips Natalie made to her maternal aunt and cousins, trips on which Charlotte occasionally accompanied her.
Jim was disappointed at Charlotte’s announcement. Unlike Bruce Cunningham, he was rather fond of her. He had known her when she was a good deal younger and she had been kind to him, as a boy. “Can’t you put off your trip?” he asked.
She said no without explanation. Hugh made no attempt to hide his displeasure. The paper he was holding crackled sharply and he turned and walked away. He was in a towering rage; he did get into them sometimes, very suddenly. Ordinarily Charlotte was sensitive to his reactions, but not then. She repeated, “I’ve got to go.” Her face was gray and there were brownish pockets under her eyes.
There was an odd little pause. Eve felt it again, more strongly, the presence of queer undercurrents in a family with which she had lost touch. What was worrying her aunt and Alicia and Gerald—and even Natalie? The whole thing was disturbing, disagreeable. She welcomed the interruption when it came.
The phone in the hall rang. This time the call was for her. It was Clara Long, her assistant, talking from the shop. A prospective buyer had turned up, was there now—would Miss Fla veil come?
“At once,” Eve said. It altered her plans. She and Jim had intended to go to Tony’s for rubbery spaghetti and red wine; she left the house almost immediately, alone.
Natalie was cross. “Oh, Eve. I was making all sorts of plans,” she said. “I thought you and Jim would have joined Bruce and me somewhere later on this evening and we could have gone to El Morocco, they’ve got a marvelous new dancer, or to the Casablanca or to the Stork and talked...”
“No, my pet,” Eve said firmly. Natalie loved to spend money on people and didn’t like to be thwarted, but Eve ignored her little pout of disappointment, kissed her and explained that it was impossible. She couldn’t afford to lose a chance of disposing of the business. “I’ll call you tomorrow.” She said goodbye to the others, and to Jim, “There’s no reason why you should hurry away. I’ll be busy for a while. Ring me in about an hour.”
She didn’t encounter anyone in the hall. The door of the little writing room under the stairs was shut. She opened the front door, closed it behind her, and was swallowed up instantly in fog. The fog was thick, impenetrable; it blanketed the entire Square. It was cold and very dark. The dim-out was real here. No lights pierced it. The lamp above the door shed a feeble glow on the drenched bricks of the steps. Beyond them there was nothing but blackness and moisture and a bone-piercing chill.
Eve was glad to be alone. She drank in solitude as a thirsty man drinks water. The Square was quiet, but then it always had been. Set down in the heart of New York, with the city sprawling away from it in every direction, it managed to hold itself apart and to produce a fictitious air of space and privacy and freedom from walls. Beyond it somewhere horns blasted feebly, and out on the river whistles blew. Eve descended the steps, one hand on the rail. She reached the pavement and turned left. Before she had gone more than a few feet she bumped into someone, violently.
Arms steadied her. A man’s voice said, “Oops—sorry. Are you all right?”
Eve said, “Quite all right, thanks,” and proceeded more cautiously on her way.
The park, locked and silent beyond its tall iron gates, was completely invisible. Her father wouldn’t take his walk that night. Or perhaps he would, with rubbers on and a coat of just the proper weight. He had always taken extraordinary care of himself. She could imagine him crossing the street and unlocking the gate and methodically pacing the paths through the thickets of the artificial wood behind the tall iron railings for the requisite length of time to the dot.
She dallied with the thought of her father deliberately, putting aside thought of Bruce and Jim and herself. Natalie’s future was assured, and she had peace with honor; that was all that mattered. Meet other problems as they arose. As far as Jim went he was no romantic love-sick boy. He was a man of thirty-seven and a realist. He wouldn’t demand the impossible. She would make him a good wife, could give him all he needed, a home, companionship, an intelligent interest in his work. Their minds were in tune, they were friends, laughed at the same things...
She collided with a lamp post, blinked wetness that wasn’t fog angrily from her lashes, and went toward the pale glimmer of two enormous half shut eyes that were the black-taped lamps of a cab in front of the apartment hotel on the corner. As she got in, slammed the door and gave the driver her address, a clock somewhere struck a quarter of six.
There her actual knowledge of what further took place among the people in the red brick house with the blue shutters on that December day ended. Nevertheless she had in her possession then, without knowing it, the groundwork for murder. Certainly on that late afternoon and early evening, between half-past four when she entered the house and twenty minutes of six when she left it, the die was cast, irretrievably, into a cunning and malignant mold of planned destruction that very neatly, within a hair’s breath, defied detection.
It was almost the perfect crime. A tiny shred of green stuff invisible to the naked eye was what finally broke the case—that and a man’s hat that didn’t fit and a speck of pink china dug from between the floor boards of a country house miles away. Christopher McKee, the head of the Manhattan Homicide Squad, exploring in the same sort of fog that filled the Square that night, had to learn where to look for these things and how to interpret them. Befor
e that much had happened.
CHAPTER THREE
Certain facts weren’t difficult to establish later. Shortly after Eve went, at approximately ten minutes of six, Jim Holland left the Flavell house with Alicia and Gerald Flavell, and on Gerald’s invitation went home with the couple for a final drink. The younger Flavells lived only a stone’s throw away in an apartment hotel on the east side of the Square. Alicia didn’t second her husband’s invitation with any enthusiasm. It was maid’s night out, she and Gerald were dining with friends, and in her opinion Gerald had already had quite enough to drink. But Gerald was insistent, so Alicia shrugged graceful shoulders and submitted.
In the Flavell house itself quiet succeeded the departure of the guests. Hugh Flavell retired to his study on the third floor, where he dined frugally from a tray and gave orders that he wasn’t to be disturbed before, presumably, settling down to work on his book.
Charlotte Foy, who still looked ill, went to her room to pack, and Natalie, complaining of a headache, went to hers to lie down for a while before dressing. Bruce Cunningham wasn’t calling for her until half-past seven. She told Annette, the older of the two maids, not to let her oversleep. “Call me at a quarter of seven.” There was no danger of her oversleeping.
When the maid went in she found Natalie clinging to the foot rail of the bed doubled up with pain, her face as white as the soft batiste negligee that wrapped her slender twisted figure.
The maid was alarmed. “Oh, Miss, you’re sick!” She ran and got Charlotte Foy and they put Natalie on the chaise lounge and propped her with pillows.
But once the spasm passed Natalie made light of it, sitting up and throwing her hair back and laughing at their worry. “It’s just my wretched stomach—I shouldn’t have had that drink with Gerald. He mixes such awful concoctions, and liquor always upsets me. That was what was making my head ache. I’m better already.”
She wouldn’t have the doctor and she wouldn’t put off her engagement with Bruce. “The air will do me good, and I won’t be late, she promised her aunt. “If your lights are on when I get back, I’ll come in and talk to you.”
She was as worried about Miss Foy as Miss Foy was about her and tried to persuade the older woman to defer her trip to Boston. “Don’t go tomorrow,” she pleaded, holding one of Charlotte’s hands in both of hers. “You’re not fit to travel—and I’ll worry about you....If you’ll wait until next week I’ll go with you. But I can’t leave before Eve’s wedding.”
Charlotte Foy was determined not to postpone her journey. “I’ve got to go, Natalie,” she said austerely. “Everything has been arranged. You can come up on Sunday or Monday. I’m not satisfied with Hendricks. I want my Boston man to see you. And you oughtn’t to go out tonight.”
Natalie was hurt and more than a little ruffled by her aunt’s refusal to listen to her. She didn’t like to have her proposals brushed aside in such an unceremonious fashion. She drew herself up stiffly, her mouth quivering and her eyes sparkling frostily. Then she glanced at the little gold clock on the table beside her and gave a cry. “Heavens, the time—and I’ve got to have a bath and do my hair and dress.” She jumped up and threw off her negligee with such haste that she tore the delicate embroidery on the wide bishop sleeve. She let the filmy garment drop to the floor and started pulling off her stockings.
Charlotte repeated, looking down at her gravely, “I wish you wouldn’t go out tonight,” but Natalie didn’t pay any attention. She said with bright impatience, “I’m all right now, darling, really I am, I haven’t a pain or an ache,” and Charlotte shrugged and left her and returned to her packing, and the maid went too, after drawing a tub for her young mistress and shaking in the perfumed salts she wanted.
But Natalie’s attack was more serious than she had pretended because when the cook mounted to the first floor to admit Bruce Cunningham at half-past seven she noticed that, although Natalie ran lightly down the stairs in a new short black evening dress that had arrived that morning, she was pale and peaked-looking and that there were shadows under her big brown eyes.
The cook, whose name was Joan Adams and who had been with the Flavells for years, also noticed that his fiancée’s condition made no apparent impression on Lieutenant Cunningham. He kissed her, said briskly, “Hi, Nat—Ready?” took the mink coat from her arm and put her into it and they went out.
Fog blew in when the door opened. Miss Adams closed it, extinguished some of the lights and presently went to bed. If there were any visitors later, she didn’t see or hear them; her room was at the top of the house. So that was all for the night, as far as independent witnesses were concerned.
It wasn’t until twenty minutes past nine on the following morning that the terrible discovery was made. It took place under particularly distressing circumstances. It was a child of five in pursuit of a bouncing ball who made the gruesome find—with an assist by Patrolman Crothers.
The morning of December the third was clear and bright. The fog of the night before had been blown away by a brisk wind out of the northwest and the sun shone brilliantly in a high blue sky without a single cloud. Patrolman Crothers was completing the last leg of his beat in a pleasant mental vacuum induced by the change in the weather and the peace of his surroundings. The streets bounding the Square were quiet. He liked Henderson Park. It was a swell neighborhood and everything was neat and prosperous and orderly. Overhead tall trees creaked in the fresh breeze and children’s voices rang inside the shrubbery beyond the tall iron railings, but not in any volume. It was a bit early yet for the nurses to have assembled their charges in force.
Crothers was in the middle of the south side of the Square when the uproar began. Beyond the iron fence, inside the park, a child was running and screaming as he ran. His feet clip-clopped rapidly on cement. The screams were loud, frantic. The patrolman came to a halt. He had heard plenty of kids holler before but not many as bad as this. He peered through two black iron uprights rimmed with frost. A boy of five or six in tweed shorts and a tweed overcoat was flying down the path toward the south gate. Some distance away an elderly nursemaid charged in pursuit of him, her hat over one eye, her face red and angry.
“Charles,” she called pantingly, “Charles, you naughty boy! Stop! Come back here to me. Don’t you dare try to unlock that gate! Don’t you dare.”
It was exactly what the child was trying to do. He had evidently done it before. His screams had stopped. He was crying steadily, in gasps, and wrenching at the lock. Tears streamed down his face.
“Now, young man, that’s enough of that.” Crothers reached through the bars and put a big restraining hand on the boy’s two small fumbling ones. He drew his hand away. There was a stain on his palm. The boy’s fingers were reddish-brown and sticky.
The patrolman gazed at the child. His mind worked quickly and well. He was an intelligent officer and he had recently attended a lecture on blood stains at the Police Academy. The red stickiness on the boy’s hand was blood. He hadn’t cut himself. The blood wasn’t fresh. It had been exposed to the air and was partly coagulated.
Crothers used his head. There was an alarm box on the telegraph pole at the corner. He said to the nursemaid, “Stay where you are,” went to the box, called the precinct, gave his location, asked for help and went back to the gate. The nurse admitted him. He knelt beside the crying child. “Come on, big boy,” he said to the little fellow, “what’s the matter?”
“In the leaves,” the child stammered through hiccoughing sobs. “She looked at me. She didn’t move. The leaves did. They blew...”
“Where?” Crothers demanded. The child gestured vaguely and the patrolman began his search. It didn’t take long. He found what the child had stumbled on a few minutes earlier, near the north gate, off the path and in among a planting of bushes. The bushes were broken and had partially closed in over the weight superimposed on them, with force. Crothers looked down. The hair on his neck prickled.
A woman was lying on the ground in the middle of th
e miniature thicket. Her posture was disorganized. One leg was doubled under her and her arms were flung out crazily. Her hat had fallen off. Her face, in profile, plowed the damp earth. Her eyes were open. Yellow leaves covered her with a light blanket. The wind blew and the leaves danced, some of them. Others were held in position by the varicolored stickiness that was blood from a gaping wound in her breast. A glance was enough without the touch. The woman was dead. She had been dead for some time. Rigor had already set in.
Crothers lurched to his feet. The few occupants of the park drawn to the spot by his appearance within those decorous precincts stared curiously, from the mouths of various paths. They couldn’t see the dead woman, but if they ganged up on him they would—and some of the spectators were children. He said peremptorily, “Move back, please, all of you. Take the kids away. There’s been an accident...He straightened and wiped sweat from his forehead with relief. The wind blew. Above the wind a siren wailed and two radio cars swung out of Lexington at a smart clip.
Shortly thereafter, that call went streaming out from the golden bowl at the top of police headquarters on Centre Street: “Homicide, Charlotte Foy, in Henderson Park. Homicide, Charlotte Foy of twenty-two Henderson Park West...“
Christopher McKee, the man at the head of Manhattan’s Homicide Squad, was in his office when the phone rang. Crothers discovered the body at nine-twenty-one. McKee reached the Park at nine-forty. His stenographer Kent, Captain Pierson and three of his own men were with him. The precinct detectives had already been at work. The park had been evacuated, a sizable area near the north gate had been roped off and there was an officer at each of the other three gates.
Doctor Benson, a tour man from the Medical Examiner’s office, was down on his knees examining the body. Off to one side on a broad cement path, where they could do no harm by messing up the surface, the second Commissioner and Assistant District Attorney Smith were talking war and peace. They greeted McKee. Smith said genially, “One more for the undertaker, another little job for the cemetery man. Nasty piece of work.”