I shook his hand and waved him down.
Hank said, “Bellick here is one of the smartest tails on the force.”
Bellick studied his cigar sheepishly. “I am only doing my job, gents.”
“He’s modest,” Hank said. “He’s really a smart little tail. Take the way he was watching this place, for instance.”
“This place?” Bellick opened his eyes in mock astonishment. “What draws you to the conclusion I am watching this place? I’m just having a little fresh air after my lunch.”
“Inscrutable,” said Hank. “The great stone face of justice. The mask of honor, the soul of righteousness. The unswerving public servant, unflinching in his duty, relentless in his pursuit. Tell me, Bellick, you wouldn’t by any chance be tailing me?”
“You? Why am I tailing you?”
“Look, Bellick, let’s cut short the repartee. I’ll make a deal with you. Why don’t you just stick with me instead of watching me from across the street? I’m a nice guy. We could talk about things. We could be chums.”
Bellick shook his head, sadly. “You got me wrong, MacAndrews. I am just standing out there getting a little fresh air after lunch.”
Hank threw up his hands. “You see—he’s just a machine, after all, a cog in the wheel. Trum presses a button and Bellick goes into his act. It doesn’t matter that he breaks an old friend’s heart. Duty first, says Bellick. Bellick forgets that it was Homer Bull who gave him his first chance. Bellick forgets the days when he was only a simple flatfoot, pounding a beat out in Canarsie.”
“Aw,” said Bellick, “take it easy, MacAndrews. I got a job to do. I got a wife and kids—”
“That’s just it,” purred Hank. “The closer you are to me, the closer you’ll be to Bull. Then, if anything happens, you’ll be in on the ground floor.”
“Bull in on this?” asked Bellick.
“He will be, soon. I called him in today.”
Bellick studied his coffee cup. “I got to think it over.”
“You’ll be sorry, Harry. What’s going to happen when Bull and I lose you somewhere? I’ll be with Bull and Bull doesn’t like to be followed—it hurts his pride. You know what happens when Bull doesn’t want to be followed. You remember? We lose you.”
The little man sighed and took off his derby. “All right, MacAndrews, I am staying with you.”
Hank clapped him on the shoulder. “Now we’re over the first jump, Bellick. Now I can let you in on the ground floor, so you can help Bull crack this case.”
Bellick opened his cow-like eyes and put a fresh cigar in his jaw. “You got orders from Bull?”
“Straight from the feedbox. Here’s the set up: Bull wants me to tail somebody, you understand? It would be crazy for me to tail somebody while you’re tailing me, now wouldn’t it?”
“I don’t know. I’m supposed to be with you.”
“Don’t be a sucker—I’ll be around when you want me. Trum doesn’t really think I had anything to do with Lecotte’s murder. The old hatchet face just wants to annoy me.” Hank lit a match to Bellick’s cigar. “I like you, Bellick. I like you well enough to give you the job Bull wanted me to do. It’s right up your alley.”
“Tailing?”
“Better than tailing. This time you’ll have to use science. You’ll have to be on your toes.”
“You mean I can talk?”
Hank nodded enthusiastically. “The works. You’ll be following a dame, but you’ll be picking up information about her. She’s the key to Lecotte’s murder, Bellick. Think of the chances. Think of your wife and kids.”
Bellick was selling himself fast. He took out a battered black note book and a pencil. “Who is this woman?”
“Her name is Mrs. Preston and she lives at 17 Quaker Lane in the Village. You’ll follow her everywhere, checking up on the people she sees, what she does with her spare time. She’s the biggest lead in the Lecotte case, Bellick. You get the dope on her and you’ll be bringing a murderer to justice.”
“When do I start?”
“Now. This very minute. You report back to my apartment twice a day.”
Bellick got up and then sat down again, tortured by some small thought. “You are a friend of mine, MacAndrews. For a long time I am considering you a personal type friend. Is this correct?”
“One hundred percent, Bellick!”
“There is only one thing I am worrying my head about in this type deal. Trum is my boss and if for one minute I forget it, I am winding up, perhaps, on a street in Canarsie. You remember this street? I would like to stay away from it, since the salty air is not doing my sinuses any good.”
“Trum will promote you after this deal, Bellick. So far as I’m concerned you’re still doing what your boss told you to do—you’re tailing me. I’ll never let him know otherwise. All right?”
Bellick rolled his cigar end adroitly in his mouth. “And is Mr. Bull also not letting him know otherwise?”
Hank nodded. “Bull will back you up to the limit. He always was fond of you, Bellick. He’ll be happy when he hears I called you in to help us.”
Bellick relaxed after that one. He shook hands with each of us soberly and departed.
I said, “I don’t get it.”
“You don’t know Bellick. He’s a leech. He can hang on to a lead for two weeks without closing an eye. He’ll do us more good away from me, Jeff. He’s liable to dig something down at Mrs. Preston’s that may mean something.”
“Then you think Mrs. Preston is important?”
“I don’t think she’s unimportant.” Hank settled down to a long explanation. “After all, who have we got that amounts to anything, so far? If Bull were here, he’d have all our leads catalogued and would probably be pointing his nose into the important directions. What have we got? We know that Paula lived at Mrs. Preston’s house. We know that she left there and moved somewhere else. We also know that she had an uncle named B. Franklin and we deduce that she might have used his name when she disappeared.” He held up his hands. “End of deductions. Beginning of confusion.”
I said, “How about Lecotte? Why don’t you send Bellick down to the club?”
“Paula is tied to Lecotte by only one small link of evidence—and that comes about because Lucy told you a story. You’ve built a mountain on this molehill and arrived at the conclusion that the redhead Ike mentioned must have been Paula. Then, to make matters still worse, you hightailed after one last night because you thought she fit your mental picture of your dream girl.”
“Never mind the dream girl,” I said. “Even if she wasn’t the redhead I saw last night, Paula may still be tied up with Lecotte’s dump and Bellick might possibly dig up something about her down there.”
Hank shook his head sadly. “You’re dreaming again. We’ve got nothing to follow but Mrs. Preston. At least, she should be first. Bull would tell you that she’s source material, the type of thread that fits into the main design later. You and I should try to follow the other threads, maybe, in the same way that Bellick will operate. We’ll have to dig into the Mrs. Franklin angle and explore that apartment again. We’ll have to keep after that janitor—his story smelled a little from dry rot. Then there’s the possibility of locating one of Paula’s friends, perhaps through an art group—”
I interrupted him there and dug out the slip of paper I had picked out of the drawer in the Franklin apartment. “This note reads: Alice Yukon, Country Road, Woodstock, New York—next Saturday. It may be a date with Alice for this Saturday. Today is Thursday.”
“And Woodstock is an artists’ colony. Could be.”
“It can’t do any harm to take a ride up there,” I said.
“It’s a thread. Why don’t you go? I’ll keep the search moving from this end.”
“I’m going.”
I took no luggage. I crossed town and boarded a ferry to th
e Jersey shore. The train was slow and crowded and I had plenty of time to meditate. Hank and I had built a top-heavy plan, a plan that worked out of Mrs. Franklin’s apartment and could very well lead me to Mrs. Franklin’s friends. There would be difficulty in meeting such people. I worked on several approaches to Alice Yukon and finally abandoned all of them. If Alice Yukon was a friend of Paula’s, there would be no need for subterfuge. If Alice Yukon was not…
At Kingston I boarded the bus to Woodstock. Kingston lay behind us and we rolled through the tortuous two-lane road that dipped and wound through the brown hills. Pre-war memories clouded my brain. Not too long ago, when art meant painting these hills on canvas, I had tested my hand in these ripe and rolling fields, dabbling in the mysteries of sunlight and shadow and the thousand and one problems of good landscape.
An artist came to Woodstock to live in simple style, unfettered by the hidebound customs and conventions of city life. It was a talented town, a town of musicians and theatrical people, cartoonists and authors. Here gathered the young future of all that was good and bad in American art and letters. Woodstock was a woodland Bohemia, a town of quaint buildings and charming corners.
I walked down the main street, feeling at home, and turned automatically toward Ben Chester’s carpentry shop for I knew that Ben would be glad to see me.
And Ben was. He sat me down and poured me a glass of beer and asked me nothing about the war. We talked about the “good old days” in Woodstock. I admired his latest cabinets and he showed me the new storage place for his special woods. We returned to the house, finally, and he opened another bottle of beer.
“You up here for a long visit, Jeff?”
“I don’t think so, Ben. I came up here to ask you a few questions and then pay a short call.”
“What on earth kind of questions could I answer for you?”
“Don’t be modest, Ben. You’re a specialist in your field—and your field is Woodstock. There isn’t a family within an area of fifteen square miles you don’t know about.”
“Who you itchin’ to know about?”
“Alice Yukon.”
Ben frowned. “The Yukons are quiet folks, Jeff. I can’t say that I really know much about them at all.”
“Them? How many are there?”
“Two. Alice Yukon and her much older brother, Gregory.”
“Artists?”
“They both are, I guess. I’ve seen Alice around in the meadows painting peculiar looking pictures.” Ben wrinkled his nose. “Kind of modern stuff, I guess you’d call it.”
“And her brother paints, too?”
“Never saw him working at it. But I heard he does some sort of work in the art line. I can’t rightly say just what it is. Never really met him myself. He’s kind of a stand-offish man, I’d say.”
I said, “He must be an ornery character if you don’t know him, Ben. How long have they been up in these parts?”
Ben thought. At length: “Four seasons this last summer.”
I whistled. “And you never met the gentleman? Come now, Ben, let me have it. What’s wrong with Gregory Yukon?”
Ben shrugged. “Quiet sort of fellow. Never went out of his way to be friendly with anybody here in town. Can’t hate a man for that.”
“How about Alice?”
Ben winked at me. “Alice is a smart looking girl. You’ll like her, Jeff. Regular pin-up girl she is.”
I said, “I can’t wait to meet one in the flesh. Did you ever meet a friend of Alice’s named Paula—Paula Smith?”
“Local girl?”
“Paula came from the city. New York.”
Ben thought about her for a while. “Never did meet a Paula Smith, Jeff. We’ve got lots of Smiths up here, but they’re mostly Janes and Marys and Toms and Bills.”
“I thought you might have seen a strange girl up here with the Yukon gal.”
Ben shook his head. “Not recently.”
“But you have seen Alice with a friend?”
“Last year, Jeff. Last summer.”
“Remember what the friend looked like?”
He eyed me curiously. “I do remember the girl, Jeff. I saw her a couple of times on the street with Alice, come to think of it. I remember she was a little shorter than Alice, but maybe twice as pretty.”
“Redhead?”
Ben nodded. “Prettiest red hair I ever saw. That’s how it happens I remember her.”
I stood up. “How do I get to the Yukon place?”
Ben gave me my directions and I set off down the road to Bearsville, walking with a nervous step, anxious to reach Alice Yukon. The Yukon house sat in a small grove of firs, well off the road and almost hidden in the tall trees. It was a ramshackle affair, patterned after a Swiss cottage, but neglected badly. The charm had long ago been beaten off this cottage by wind and rain. A few of the shutters hung crazily from their rusted hinges. One of the windows was cracked and covered with newspapers and sheets on the inside. In the silence, the house had an unhealthy look. It was a dead house. It sat among the trees looking for all the world like nothing more than a stage set—a papier-mâché prop out of a Hollywood hillbilly movie.
I stood on the road staring, fascinated by the house. Then my eye roved to the left and I saw the sleek maroon roadster parked in the driveway beyond the firs. The sight of the roadster jolted me back to reality and I kicked myself mentally for having fallen into a mood because of a Woodstock cottage. Many of the small places in Woodstock are kept in casual neglect deliberately. There are always people who fall in love with a certain type of shabbiness. It is part of the Bohemian spirit, sometimes, to retain the “flavor” of such shabbiness in such things as houses, fireplaces, dogs, cats and smocks.
I started down the path and a large and friendly cocker spaniel welcomed me through the gate and broadcast my arrival as he ran ahead of me.
There was a wide screened porch to the left of the faded yellow door. And on this porch sat a girl. She looked up from her book as I approached, then put down the book and waited for me, smiling.
She had a good smile, broad and well made up. There was a fullness to her lips that I liked and her teeth were regular and did the smile no harm. She had a long, pretty face, dark in the eyes and dark under the eyes. There was a sadness in the eyes that the smile couldn’t dissipate. Her hair was tar black and long enough to fall well over her shoulders.
She stood up and I saw that her figure was lithe and well molded. She wore a white silk shirt, opened low and in the mannish style. She wore bright blue slacks that were tight enough to promote her fine hips. Her nails were manicured with bright green polish.
She opened the screen door and came out to me. She said, “Hello, soldier. Looking for somebody? Come in.”
I was about to answer when a man came through the doorway on the far side of the porch. He was quite a lad. His body was fashioned in heavy masses, heaviest in the midsection and the shoulders. He had a shock of whitish hair, well rippled at the brow. His head was square and brutish, fat in the nose, fleshy in the jowls and yet not unpleasant because of his eyes. He had soft blue eyes, gentle and cold and incongruous in that face. He stood there frowning a little as I studied him. It wasn’t comfortable under his frown.
I nodded at him pleasantly, waiting for him to say something, but he returned only the nod and stood there staring at me.
I said, “This is the Franklin place, isn’t it?”
The man said, “Franklin? Who told you anybody named Franklin lived here?”
I recognized the hangover of some foreign tongue in his talk. I said, “Have I made a mistake? I’m sorry.”
Alice Yukon laughed nervously. “There aren’t any Franklins living here.”
The big man glowered at me. “Whoever told you that you should come here?”
“A woman. A girl on Fifty-Fourth Street in New York sai
d so.”
“What woman?” His thick mouth spat the question at me. “The woman who told you that must be insane.” He waved his hands up near his ears and turned his back to me.
“Maybe so,” I said. The silence after each bit of dialogue made me uncomfortable. I caught a small flicker of sympathy in Alice Yukon’s eyes and turned to her. “Perhaps you knew somebody in the city named Franklin?”
She drew back in obvious alarm. “I? Why do you say that?”
“She spoke very highly of Alice Yukon.”
She was hit between the ears by that one. She was about to answer, but her brother crossed the porch quickly and grabbed her arm. She looked up at him and her eyes were loaded with terror. He dropped her arm and turned my way.
“We don’t know who you’re talking about,” he said, quietly.
“Obviously.” I warmed to the game after that. Either Gregory Yukon was a fool or he thought me one. I let the silence hang around us for a while. Then I said, “Paula Smith sent me here.”
Gregory Yukon’s eyes were steady when he answered me. His voice dropped and he pitched it to a new low to register mild confusion. “All this is very interesting, I’m sure. But I’m afraid you are talking in riddles. You say Paula Smith sent you here? And who is this Paula Smith?”
“A good friend of mine and a good friend of your sister’s.” I saw Alice Yukon look down at her clenched hands. “Isn’t that right, Alice?”
Alice didn’t say. Her brother answered for her and this time his voice was loaded with venom. “Alice never heard of this—this Paula Smith! Tell him, Alice!”
I didn’t give Alice the chance. I said, “Paula Smith corresponded with me while I was over in France, Alice. I knew her brother, Kip Smith. We were buddies. Kip is dead.”
She began to sob. She said, “I don’t understand all of this—”
Gregory came toward me and stood between us. He was really angry now. He said, “What is all this nonsense? You are upsetting my sister. I must ask you to leave.”
I said, “Take it easy, big boy. I’m not going to harm your little sister. You don’t have to listen, you know. I came here to talk to Alice Yukon. You can forget all about the Franklin business.”
The Girl with the Frightened Eyes Page 9