You Could Call It Murder

by Lawrence Block

  A cab was heading uptown on Hudson Street. I hailed it and sank gratefully into the seat. This time no sweet young brunette tugged open the door and climbed in after me. I rode by myself, and I was lonely.

  The hard part was finding a place to begin.

  Linda Jeffers was gone, if not forgotten. As far as I could determine, she stood a fairly good chance of getting her brains shot out of her head. I couldn’t quite understand Dautch’s motives; the girl obviously wasn’t going to run for the police, and even if she did he remained pretty much in the clear.

  But the fact remained that Dautch and his bully boys were chasing her and had caught her. Maybe she had been feeding me a story—maybe she was running from Dautch for another reason entirely, and no man named Keller had been murdered at all. Whatever had happened, I had to do something. I had to find a girl.

  I thought of going to the police. The idea made a certain amount of good sense. There were approximately twenty thousand policemen in the city of New York, and there was only one of me. They could do a better job of manhunting —or womanhunting, as the case may be—than I could, if only by sheer weight of numbers.

  But what was I supposed to give them? I had a name—Dautch—and I’d already determined earlier that they couldn’t match that name to a record in police files. I had another name—Linda Jeffers—but that wouldn’t do them much good either. And I had a farfetched tale of accidentally seen murder which I was beginning to lose faith in on my own.

  They would laugh their heads off at me.

  I decided to find out a little bit more about Linda Jeffers. She had said that she lived on East End Avenue near 94th Street. Maybe I could find out something about her where she lived. Maybe, for that matter, she had changed her mind and had gone home from work first.

  I bid goodbye to my taxi at the corner of East End and 93rd. There were four residential brownstones on the block between 93rd and 94th, in addition to the headquarters of the Peruvian embassy and a home for unwed mothers. I passed up the embassy and the foaling pen and made inquiries at the four brownstones. None of them had a tenant named Linda Jeffers, nor had any had a male tenant named Keller.

  There were a few more buildings that I tried on the next block, between 94th and 95th Streets. Again I got the same answers. No one knew anything about Linda, or about Keller. Out of sheer desperation I tried a few buildings on 94th itself, thinking I’d mixed things up. I had no luck.

  Maybe I’d got things all wrong. Maybe she said West End Avenue. Maybe she said 84th Street. Maybe.

  And maybe not.

  I grabbed another taxi and returned to the Commodore. Someone was playing games with me and I didn’t understand it at all. I had been handy and Linda had tossed me a convenient line of patter designed to keep me from getting in the way. For one reason or another she’d been chased by somebody—and there was no reason to assume his name was really Dautch, since everything else had been a lie. My cab was nearby and I was a pleasant host. I’d been lied to, utilized, and paid off in bed.

  And that was that.

  I didn’t like it. I didn’t like getting coshed in a hallway by a pair of thugs simply because some girl was playing me for a sucker. I didn’t like chasing wild geese all over metropolitan New York.

  I didn’t like being used.

  And the hellish fact remained that the girl was still in trouble. Somehow or other she had managed to louse herself up. Somehow or other Dautch—or whatever in hell his name was—had gotten hold of her again. I didn’t know whether he wanted to kill her or what, but after the chase they’d given us last night he obviously wanted her and she just as obviously wanted to stay away from him.

  Well, the devil with her. I had more important things to worry about than a girl who was playing me for a bloody fool to begin with. I stopped at the desk at the Commodore and picked up a few scraps of paper, plus a pair of letters. I stuck them into a pocket without bothering to look them over and told the chap behind the desk to send up a boy with a bottle of scotch when he had the chance. Then I rode the elevator to my floor and went to my room. The elevator ride set my poor head spinning again and I stretched out on the bed for a second or two to get my bearings again.

  The doorbell woke me ten minutes later. I had dozed off with amazing ease. I got to my feet, opened the door, and signed for a bottle of scotch. I opened it in a hurry and poured a great deal of it into a water tumbler. It helped. It did an even better job than the bromo seltzer which Bernie and Arnie had brought me.

  Then I looked at the papers from the desk. The two letters were bills. I wrote checks to cover them and dropped them into the mail chute in the hall. Next I checked the messages.

  One was from Edgar Taft. It said that he had remembered I was without a car and thought I might appreciate the use of one. Besides, he went on, he had no further use for Barb’s MG and didn’t want to have it around. Accordingly it was parked in the Commodore’s garage waiting for me to put it to use.

  Which was pleasant. If one is going to have a car, one might as well have a good car. And if I was going to make any additional trips to Cliff’s End, it would be a great joy to avoid the nefarious combination of busses and trains I’d been forced to take the first time around.

  The other scrap turned out to be the bill from the Commodore. It was the end of the week, and there was my bill, and wasn’t that nice of them? I scrawled out a check and made a note to drop it off at the desk on my way out.

  My glass was empty. I poured more scotch into it, took a small sip, and all at once the silly thing was empty again.

  Strange.

  Then it was full again.

  And then it was empty again.

  Strange. I thought. Fool glass must have a hole in it. Scotch disappears the instant it’s poured.

  Strange.

  Then I was stretched out on the bed, too tired and too drunk to bother removing my shoes. My eyes closed themselves and the world crept away on little cat feet, leaving me floating in the middle of the air.

  I dreamed about Linda Jeffers and Barbara Taft. I dreamed about getting hit over the head, about racing through dark streets in a fast taxi that turned into an MG. I dreamed ridiculous dreams and I slept the sleep of the just.

  Which may or may not have been fitting.

  The phone wailed like a V-2 over London. The blitz had been a long while back, but I still felt like diving under the bed and waiting for the All Clear to sound. Instead I picked up the receiver and mumbled a groggy “Hello” into it.

  American telephone operators invariably possess metallic voices. This girl sounded like a robot. “Mr. Roy Markham? I have a long distance call for you. Is this Mr. Markham?”

  I admitted that it was.

  “One moment, please.”

  I waited the moment, as she had requested. Then a voice came over the line.

  “Mr. Markham?”

  “Who is this?”

  “Helen MacIlhenny,” the voice said. “The dean of women at Radbourne.”

  “Oh,” I said. “What is it?”

  “I’m sorry to bother you,” she said. “Were you sleeping?”

  I grunted. I wondered what time it was. My watch was still on my wrist; I hadn’t remembered to take it off before passing out. It said 3:48 but I refused to believe it.

  “What time is it?”

  “Time?” She sounded stupefied. “Time?”

  “Time.”

  “Oh,” she said. “A quarter to four. Mr. Markham, something terrible has happened.”

  She didn’t have to tell me that. Something perfectly dreadful had happened, by God. Someone had called me in the middle of the bloody night.

  “Mr. Markham? Are you there?”

  “I’m here.”

  “I hate to call you at this hour,” she went on. “But I just heard, it was just discovered, and I thought you would want to know right away. Because it fits in with what you’re doing, of course. It’s horrible, but it fits in.”

  “What does?” />
  “Do you remember Gwen Davison?”

  I remembered a large-breasted girl, a girl who had roomed with Barbara Taft, a girl who hadn’t been much help to me.

  “Yes,” I said. “I remember her. Why?”

  She searched for the right words. “She . . . she was found, Mr. Markham.”

  “I didn’t know she was missing.”

  “No, that’s not what I mean. She was found . . . dead. She was murdered.”

  My face fell.

  “Murdered,” Helen MacIlhenny went on. “She was stabbed to death on the campus. A pair of students found her. And do you remember a boy named Alan Marsten?”

  The beatnik type, the one in Grape Leaves. “I remember him.”

  “The police are holding him. They’ve accused him of the murder. They think he killed her.”

  Things were happening much too quickly for me.

  “I thought you might want to know,” she went on briskly. “I felt this might . . . fit in . . . with your investigation of Barbara’s death. Don’t you think?”

  “You were right.”

  “And while it’s a bad time to call—”

  “I’m glad you called,” I told her, honestly enough. “This puts everything in a new light. How long does it take to drive from New York to Cliff’s End?”

  The question caught her by surprise. “Why . . . five or six hours, I believe. Why?”

  “I’m coming right up,” I said. “I’ll be there as soon as I can. Will you be awake?”

  Her voice was grim. “I shall be awake, Mr. Markham. I doubt that I’ll get much sleep for the next several days. I couldn’t sleep even if I had the time. And I don’t have the time.”

  “Then I’ll see you shortly,” I said. “And thanks again for the call.”

  My clothes felt as though I had slept in them, probably because I had. I stripped, took a fast shower, and dressed again. The slight pain of a hangover had taken the place of the thunderous throb that the blackjack had given me. I took a quick nip of scotch from the bottle, a hair of the dog. as it were. Then I went down to the lobby.

  “There’s a car for me.” I told the doorman. “An MG that a man left for me. Will you get it?”

  He nodded and ran off to get it. He had it pulled up in front a few moments later, a fire-engine red affair that was sleek and low and lovely.

  “Hell of a car.” the doorman assured me. “Bet you can really travel in a wagon like that one.”

  I told him I hoped so. I gave him a dollar and got into the bucket seat behind the wheel. I hadn’t driven a sports car in a long while but it all came back quickly enough. I wrapped myself up in the safety belt, got the car going, put it into low and started up.

  A gas station attendant filled the small tank and gave me enough road maps to get me to Cliff’s End. I studied them for a few minutes, figured out the right route and marked it on the various maps with a pencil. Then I put the maps on the seat beside me and aimed the car at the East Side Drive. That was the fastest way out of the city.

  The car was a demon on wheels. Traffic was light at that hour, since not everyone was as much of a fool as I was. I kept the accelerator pedal close to the floor and the car moved along speedily.

  I was in Connecticut long before daybreak. There was one long lovely stretch of road that ran right through Connecticut, and the traffic was heavy on that road, but all the cars were heading toward New York—batches of early- morning commuters on the way to Madison Avenue. No one

  seemed to be heading north and I had the whole road to myself.

  The MG sang to me and we moved across Connecticut and into Massachusetts. It was a clear day once it got started with the sun hot and heavy in the sky. There was a slight breeze but nothing strong. There was no snow falling and hardly any left on the roads, which was a blessing.

  When the car and I neared the New Hampshire border the weather remained the same but the road conditions were worse. Snow was piled up on the sides of each road I took, and here and there the paved surface was slippery. With a less sure-footed car I would have had to take it easy, but the MG knew how to hold onto the road. The pedal stayed near the floor and the car went on speeding madly.

  Gwen Davison was dead. Alan Marsten was supposed to have killed her. And Barbara Taft’s suicide was looking a little less like a suicide every minute.

  Confusing.

  Dean MacIlhenny had guessed it would take five or six hours to get to Cliff’s End. I could understand why—it was a hellish trip from the New Hampshire line on, with winding roads and rotten weather. Five or six hours would have been good time.

  But Barbara Taft’s car was hell on wheels. I made the trip in four hours flat.

  Six

  I DROVE straight to Helen MacIlhenny’s home, a small house on a tree-lined street. The porch light was on and other lights burned in what seemed to be the living room. I left the MG at the curb, walked up a snow-covered path to the door. I rang the bell and she opened the door for me.

  “You’ve gotten here so quickly,” she said. “Oh, is that Barbara’s car? Or have you one like it?”

  “It’s Barbara’s. Or was. Her father is letting me use it.”

  “It’s quite a car,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to ride in one of those little things. Men used to take me riding, but that was in the rumble seat days, I’m afraid. No more.” Her eyes brightened. “But I’m letting you freeze yourself. Come right inside, Mr. Markham.”

  She poured coffee into cups and we sat sipping it. “I was just ready to go to my office,” she said. “I’m due there in half an hour, at nine o’clock. But I thought perhaps I’d go early in case you arrived at an early hour. You got here sooner than I expected.”

  “It’s a fast car.”

  “It must be. Mr. Markham, this is a terrible situation. It’s . . . it’s dreadful.”

  I did not say anything.

  “Gwen Davison murdered. Murder is an exceedingly ugly word, Mr. Markham. Bone-chilling.”

  “Where was she found?”

  “In her own room, the room she shared with Barbara. She was killed with a knife, slashed in the stomach and across the breasts and—”

  She broke off and turned away.

  “I think you told me they’re holding the Marsten boy,” I said. “How did they come to suspect him?”

  “It was his knife. One of the students recognized it and the police picked him up. He admitted it was his knife when they showed it to him.”

  “Did he confess?”

  “No.”

  I lighted a cigarette. “Did he come up with an explanation?”

  “He’s a strange young man,” she said. “His defense is a passive one, Mr. Markham. He has said that someone must have stolen the knife from him. He refuses to say where he was when Gwen was killed. He must have killed her.”

  “But no one saw him?”

  “No.”

  “When was she killed?”

  “Around midnight.”

  I thought it over. “In her dormitory room?”

  “That’s right,” she said. “Male students are not allowed in the women’s dormitories at that hour, needless to say. But I’ve hardly so much as thought about that.” She managed a tiny smile. “It’s a relatively minor infraction of the rules. In comparison to murder, that is.”

  Gwen Davison was dead and Alan Marsten seemed to be her killer. And somewhere there had to be a connection between this new death and the death of Barbara Taft.

  Finding it was something else.

  “Where’s Alan now?”

  “In jail,” she told me. “The jail in Cliff’s End isn’t really much of a prison, Mr. Markham. It’s just a room in the little police station with a few bars across the door. There’s rarely anything resembling a serious crime here. Once in a while a student becomes intoxicated and spends the night in the cell. We’ve never had a ... a murder before. Not to my memory, and I’ve been here a good many years.”

  I didn’t bother mumbling that
there was a first time for everything. I put out my cigarette in a small crystal ashtray, finished my coffee and got to my feet. “I’ll want to see Marsten,” I said. “Do you think you could fix that up for me with the police force?”

  She smiled. “It’s already arranged. I anticipated your wishes. They’re expecting you.”

  I told her I’d drop her off at her office on the way. She was pleased by this, since it would give her a chance to ride in the MG.

  “It’s been a long time,” she said. “Do I have to fasten this safety belt thing?”

  “We won’t be going that fast.”

  “That’s good,” she said. “It’s like an airplane. If any of the students see their good dean breezing along in this little thing I’ll never live it down.”

  I grinned at her. “I’ll bet you’ve had lots of men take you for a spin.”

  “But then the cars were all Marmons and Stutz Bearcats, Mr. Markham. This is quite different.”

  I dropped her off at her office. She told me the ride was much better than a Marmon or a Stutz. Then she told me how to find the police station. “It’s not much,” she explained. “If you don’t look closely you won’t even see it.”

  I found out what she meant. A small white frame building, one story high and less than twenty feet wide, crouched at the end of a dead-end street. It was the police station. A uniformed sergeant sat behind an old oak desk. He was the only man in the station house.

  I told him who I was and what I wanted.

  “Ayeh,” he said. “Ayeh.” His voice was resolutely New England. “You’re the Englishman the dean was talking about. Come for a look at our killer, did you?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Hear ye want him for something else. A killing he did in New York.”

  “Well,” I said. “I’m not so sure about that.”

  “Shouldn’t be hard to extradite him,” the man said. “Though I reckon we can try him here about as well. You want to see him now, do you?”

  “Yes.”

  “This way.”

  He led me to the back of the building. There was a heavy wooden door there. Its single window was barred with rusty slabs of iron. I looked between the bars. Alan Marsten was sitting on the edge of an ancient army cot, his head in his hands. He did not look up.