by Helen Reilly
The Scotsman ran over the other cards in the kitty, Mary Dodd, her red-haired niece, the girl’s fiancé, Assemblyman Somers. They were all pretty much up in the air, had their heads constantly together. He had in duty bound reported the substance of what the record had to tell concerning the death of Cliff’s former girl friend and Dr. Dennison to District Attorney Dwyer. That was up to Dwyer. His business was the isolation and apprehension of Sara Hazard’s killer.
Above all, the maid, Eva Prentice, occupied McKee’s attention. There was no trace of her anywhere.
The telephone rang. He plucked the receiver from the hook. It was Todhunter’s sidekick, the burly Withers, calling. “The St. Vrain woman is up here in the Bronx,” he said. “She tried to do a sneak but we were right on her trail. She’s in an apartment on Vyse Avenue. Todhunter’s after her.”
The Scotsman said “Good. Keep in touch with me,” and hung up.
Standing in the partial shelter of an inadequate cedar outside the Eldorado Apartments on Vyse Avenue in the Bronx, Todhunter watched Margot St. Vrain go through glass doors and press a button in the small white lobby. Her back was towards him. He couldn’t see what bell it was.
She turned right, went through a door and vanished. Duplicating her movements and choosing a bell at random, Todhunter went through the same clicking door and up a cement and iron staircase in the northern wing of the building. He heard Margot St. Vrain’s mounting footsteps above him, started to mount himself. He didn’t want to get too close, he didn’t want to lose her.
The footsteps passed the second floor, went on to the third. Silence. There were six doors opening off each main landing. Had she gone in through one of the doors on the third floor? Kind of a shoddy layout for the elegant Miss St. Vrain. Park Avenue was more in her line.
The mousy little man leaned against a wall and surveyed the closed doors. His thoughts wandered. Jumbo was looking a little pale around the gills, get him some of those new vitamin dog biscuits. A fat man wheezed upward. Todhunter busied himself with a shoelace.
Fifteen minutes went by, twenty. Miss St. Vrain was making quite a call. Was there possibly another way out of the building? He peered anxiously into ascending gloom and ducked like a rabbit.
Margot St. Vrain was coming down the stairs. She went past him without a glance. Withers was outside to take care of her. His job was to find out where she had been and to do a little interviewing. She must have come from either the fourth or fifth floor. Twelve apartments. The little man sighed and took up his burden.
Nothing to do but make the rounds. Apartments Four A, B, C, and D, and E were a washout. While he was questioning their occupants the fat man and two women came down in turn from the floor above. All three denied any knowledge of a Miss St. Vrain in a mink hat, mink coat, brown skirt and brown walking shoes whom the little detective kept insisting anxiously he was trying to locate on business.
The fifth floor yielded better results. A Mrs. Dennett in Apartment Five C said eagerly, “Yes, sure, I saw her. It was a swell coat, real Eastern mink with those new sleeves. She went into Apartment Five E.” Mrs. Dennett pointed to a door on the opposite side of the landing.
When Todhunter thanked her and turned toward the indicated door, Mrs. Dennett stopped him. “It’s no use,” she said. “Mrs. Thompson lives alone. There’s no one there. She went out a couple of minutes ago. She must have passed you while you were on your way up.”
Todhunter’s brow furrowed. After their emphatic “noes” he had given the three down-coming tenants scant attention. One woman was dark, the other was light, and the man was fat. That was all he could remember. He knocked at Mrs. Thompson’s door and rang the bell, just to make sure. There was no answer. He got rid of Mrs. Dennett and a few minutes later he was entering Apartment Five E accompanied by the superintendent.
The superintendent’s name was Marshall. Marshall’s description was much the same as Mrs. Dennett’s. Mrs. Thompson was fair, blonde, youngish and rather pretty. That was all the superintendent knew. She had sublet from another tenant, taking the apartment over on the first of October. She had paid her rent in advance.
Todhunter took a quick look around. There were no clothes in the closet. The top of the dressing table was swept bare. The little detective’s dismay deepened sharply. His trained eyes read the signs of what looked like a hasty flitting. The blonde woman with the parcel whose face he scarcely recalled was Mrs. Thompson, to whom Margot St. Vrain had paid a visit. And Mrs. Thompson was gone. Todhunter whistled softly, “It may be for years and it may be forever.”
The superintendent unexpectedly joined in in an excellent baritone, “‘Oh, why art thou silent thou voice of my heart?’ Nice song, ain’t it,” he said appreciative of his own efforts.
“Yes,” the little detective murmured, “it is, very.”
Fernandez stopped carving the duck at the small table in the big studio behind the Scotsman’s study as McKee dropped the phone into its cradle with an infinitesimal slam. His saturnine face was sour, set. Fernandez looked at him with surprise. The Scotsman’s equanimity was difficult to disturb. The Medical Examiner helped himself to green peas.
“What is it, Chris?” he asked.
McKee pushed his untouched plate away and lit a cigarette. “Margot St. Vrain called on a woman named Thompson up in the Bronx and the woman, Thompson, has vanished.”
“Well,” the Medical Examiner sipped his chablis, “can’t you ask the Queen of Swing where Mrs. Thompson went?”
The Scotsman said curtly: “I could if I wanted to indulge in a little waste motion. But I’m about through with useless questions. They’re not getting us anywhere. I don’t like it, Fernandez. The more I see of it, the less I like it.”
The concentration in his voice tightened. He kept on staring at his distorted reflection in a battered Queen Anne candlestick. “This about clinches it. Another missing woman is too much of a good thing.” “Another?” Fernandez stopped pouring wine. “Yes. First, Sarah Hazard’s maid Eva drops out of sight and now this Mrs. Thompson takes to the hills. All we know about the maid is that she used that room on East Twenty-first Street for a love nest. She and a man who gave his name to the landlady as Gray, have taken wing, are gone. There was nothing informative in the room itself except a few of Sara Hazard’s cast-off clothes and...”
He reached behind him, opened the drawer of a small stand, took out the squat black automatic that Steven Hazard had hidden under Eva Prentice’s mattress and laid it on the cloth. “—This.”
Fernandez stared. McKee nodded, his mouth was stern, contracted. “There’s blood and hair in the inner crevices.” He tapped the automatic. “It’s my belief that this gun was used to kill, not as a firearm, but as a bludgeon. But there it is. Belief. It’s not good enough. I’m going to get back to basic facts and start all over again, prove every step as I go. When I crack this case I want it on toast for the D. A.’s office. What’s the first thing we need in a murder trial, Fernandez?”
“All right,” the Chief Medical Examiner said around a mouthful of duck. “I’ll play. The corpus, naturally.”
“Just so.” The Scotsman struck the edge of the table lightly with a clenched fist. “And that’s precisely what I’m going to get and where I want your assistance. I’m going to have Sara Hazard’s body exhumed.”
XV
“Dwyer, I want an order for Sara Hazard’s exhumation.”
John Francis Dwyer stared at the man who was the head of the Manhattan Homicide Squad. The District Attorney’s prominent blue eyes bulged. Morning sunlight shafting through the windows into the paneled office put a halo around his smooth butter-colored head and his solid body, where he sat in his chair behind a massive desk.
He said with militant disgust: “So, you’re still fooling around with that case, McKee? Yes, I got wind of it. Haven’t we got enough on our hands now without your digging up a graveyard for a possible corpus delicti? You have nothing to go on, no real proof that there ever was a murder, no
thing that’ll stand up in court. I tell you you’re crazy. And an order like that will create a big hullabaloo. What’s the husband going to say? Besides, I understand Pat Somers has a finger in this pie.”
District Attorney John Francis Dwyer was vigorous, forceful, direct and fearless in the ordinary sense of the word. Certainly he was honest according to his lights. In the radius of their orbit, these lights included a decent respect for what Dwyer termed the realities. Bashing his head against a stone wall was no part of the program.
McKee tranquilly shielded the flame of a match that threw the planes of his lean sharply articulated face into prominence. “I want that body, Mr. District Attorney, and I want it just as soon as I can get it. This is a case of murder. I admit I haven’t got the proof I want. I’ll also subscribe to another item. There’s something screwy about the entire layout, a fundamentally wrong twist somewhere, that has us off on the wrong track. I’m going to find the right one. I repeat, I want Sara Hazard’s body.”
Dwyer remained unconvinced. He fumed. He tossed things around. He pounded on the desk. He made irate remarks about ghouls and body snatchers, about the construction of bricks without straw and fairy tales. McKee was firm. At the end of half an hour, the District Attorney reluctantly did what he knew in advance he ultimately would do, what he always did when the Scotsman insisted.
“Very well, McKee. I still think you’re wrong, but have it your way. At your own risk, remember, at your own risk. I’ll make the application, but I wash my hands of it.”
That was on Monday at half past nine in the morning. On the succeeding Thursday noon the Scotsman sat at his desk considering the definite and interesting reverberations of the proposed disinterment. The application had been made before Judge Seaford in Poughkeepsie. There had been a change in Seaford’s attitude after its reception. Following the normal course, the closest surviving relative, Steven Hazard, had been notified of the proposed procedure. Hazard’s reaction had been explosive. He had entered a violent protest against the exhumation of his wife’s body.
The Scotsman’s brown gaze was narrow, contemplative. All the opposition that Steven Hazard could muster wouldn’t have amounted to a row of pins, if he hadn’t had a friend at court. Pat Somers in New York to Judge Seaford in Poughkeepsie. McKee could have run off the talk between the politician and the judge as accurately as though he had listened in on it. A veiled threat, a gentle reminder, nothing specific or crass, and the concluding: “O.K., Pat, I’ll hold the application under advisement.”
In other words it had been shelved. The shelving might continue indefinitely. The Scotsman’s hunger to see, to know, his need to clarify and substantiate and prove, had grown by leaps and bounds during the last seventy-two hours.
The nationwide search for the levanting maid, Eva Prentice, was quiet but thorough. It had failed to turn up so much as the glimmer of a trump. Same result on Eva’s boy friend, the man with whom she had at times shared the room on East Twenty-first Street. The fellow’s real name was George Loomis. Loomis was sometimes a seaman, otherwise he picked up what jobs he could find ashore. He had shipped out on a coastwise vessel as an oiler on August 26th, the day following Sara Hazard’s death. The shipping office records showed that Loomis had been paid off in New York on October nth, four days before the Scotsman’s own return from Rio and five days before the arrival of the anonymous letter at Headquarters. From October 11th on there was no trace of Loomis anywhere.
Loomis could have known all about Sara Hazard from the girl friend. Cheating cheaters. He might have tried to cash in on his knowledge and, finding himself up against a tartar, might have resorted to force. The same thing held for the maid. They might have acted in collusion. If they were hiding out together or separately, the hideouts were good ones.
Mrs. Thompson’s summary disappearance perplexed him even more. Eva was admittedly a thief of both jewels and clothing. There was nothing, as far as they had been able to learn, against Mrs. Thompson. If a virtuous woman had no past, Mrs. Thompson headed the Sunday school list cum laude. As far as they were concerned she might have sprung into existence complete on October 1 when she sublet the furnished apartment on Vyse Avenue, an apartment that had been advertised in the papers. She had sprung out of existence with the same ease and completeness immediately following Margot St. Vrain’s visit to her on that Sunday evening.
Nothing more on the night of Sara’s actual death. Euen Firth, one of the last persons to see her alive, was still away on a hunting trip, locality unknown.
Too many x’s with question marks after them. There was one known quantity that impeded his further absence. It was Pat Somers’ determination to block the exhumation order. If Somers wanted to play it that way, a bat could be swung from the other side of the plate.
Nothing concerning the possibility of Sara Hazard’s death being murder, nothing about the application for the exhumation, had appeared in the newspapers. The Scotsman had wanted it like that. It gave him leg room, space to turn around in. The time for that was over. He sighed, sat erect, picked up the phone and called Carl Randau of the World-Telegram.
After he had talked to Randau he rang his buzzer, sent for Todhunter and gave the little detective careful instructions. He said: “Steven Hazard owns an old farm outside Shunpike in lower Dutchess County. It’s on Lake Kokino, a smallish body of water about two miles long. There’s nothing else there but a hotel on the far side of the lake and a couple of other country homes. Hazard and Pat Somers have gone up to Kokino, complete with hunting gear and shotguns. Miss Dodd and her niece are joining them for Halloween. They may be there now. I believe Cliff Somers is to run up late tonight when he’s finished campaigning. According to their interchanges with each other via the phone, they all want a breath of country air. I want the air weighed and measured and analyzed. I want to know everything they do, whether they contact anyone or anyone contacts them. Take as many men as you need. I want you to pay particular attention to Steven Hazard. I’ve got to stay here in the city to see the FBI men from Washington. I’ll join you tonight.”
Todhunter said, “Yes, Inspector,” and dwindled noiselessly from the room.
“Come on and help, Kit, there are millions here.”
Mary Dodd was in a rough tweed skirt and a heavy sweater and had a basket over her arm. She pushed the leaves aside with her stout brown brogues and knelt down under the twin hickories at the northern end of the long low farmhouse perched on a shoulder of the hill overlooking Kokino.
Kit Blaketon was sitting on the rail of the veranda above and gazing off into the blue autumn haze that softened and almost hid the faint humps of the distant Catskills lying against the west. The girl shook red hair back impatiently from the shoulders of a turtle-neck crew shirt, jumped down and joined the older woman.
Shorn grass, stubbly and brown, rolled almost to the water’s edge. Steven Hazard and Pat Somers were pacing a stretch of it, side by side. Pat was smoking a cigarette in short nervous puffs, Steven Hazard had an unlit pipe clenched between his teeth. His hands were thrust deep in his pockets, his shoulders drooped, his head was bent.
A late afternoon in the country, the scene was quiet, pastoral, lazy and completely normal. Pat Somers and Steven Hazard had driven up to Kokino that morning. Kit Blaketon had arrived with Mary Dodd at around four o’clock. The two cars stood in front of an old barn behind the house which backed on the narrow dirt road that circled the lake and led in from the outer world, a world that seemed very far away.
The farmhouse faced the lake. Fields stretched away in back of it tumbling up into the eastern horizon. More fields and broken patches of woodland on one side, on the other, a pine grove capped a razor-back spit of land thrusting sharply into the shimmering blue glass of the gently lapping water.
In the summer there were hammocks and deck chairs scattered here and there in the dimness of the pine grove where heavy boughs shut out the sun. At that time of the year it was lonely, deserted, its approaches choked with tindery g
oldenrod, masses of red sumac and giant poke. The huge pines towering above the others near the far end of the summit were a landmark for miles around. High banks descended steeply from the grove to the lake below which surrounded the long finger on three sides. The water there was deep and harbored bullheads, pickerel and bass. Judge Hazard, Steven’s father, had fished there by the hour on long tranquil spring and summer days.
Pat and Steven joined the two women under the nut trees. The sun was beginning to go. Mary Dodd rose, waving her basket triumphantly. “Taffy tonight,” she said, “real taffy with real hickory nuts.
You both have to help. Don’t forget, it’s Halloween.
Pat passed a big hand over his jaw. “I remember the potato cake my mother used to make on Halloween...” He paused.
A boy in overalls and a jumper was coming round the corner of the house. He had ridden over from Shunpike on his bicycle. He was carrying a yellow envelope. He looked from one man to the other, said, “Mr. Hazard?”
Steven Hazard was standing a little apart. The shadows already converging on the house seemed to have concentrated themselves in his dull aloofness as he stared moodily at the distant hotel, a turreted phantom a mile or more away across the lake. He turned with a start.
“I can only deliver this personal,” the boy said.
“I’ll take it, lad,” Steven gave the messenger a coin and the boy thanked him and departed.
There was something written across the front of the envelope. Steven Hazard glanced at it. He walked toward the steps, halted in front of them and ripped open the telegram. He read the enclosure swiftly. His back was to the others. They couldn’t see his face.