“… when they moved in here eight months ago.” The voice of Mrs. O’Brien continued. “I was always awful fond of the old lady, and I used to say to her so often, ‘Mrs. Ealing, you shouldn’t leave your door unlocked like that,’ and I told Maysie so too, but she says her mother bein’ so feeble and all, it saved a lot of trouble. She could just call, ‘Come in,’ when somebody knocked and wouldn’t have to get up to go to the door.
“And I says to ’em—I mean to the police—I says that you couldn’t ask for nicer neighbors than Mrs. Ealing and her daughter, and who’d be wantin’ to be doin’ anything to the poor old lady, I wouldn’t know. And then they wanted to know if we’d noticed anyone goin’ in or out of the place on Tuesday, but you know how it is. This front door to the buildin’s unlocked, and a dozen people could go up to the Ealings without I’d be seein’ ’em.
“So then they asked a lot about Maysie and I told ’em there wasn’t a steadier, better girl to her mother, and it was just beautiful the way she treated the old lady, although Lord knows it must have been tryin’ at times, with the old lady just a little bit—But, of course, I didn’t tell ’em about that”
“You mean about her bein’—queer?”
“Now, now, Mrs. Quigley, she wasn’t queer. I don’t like that word. She was just a bit touched and only sometimes at that, and can you blame her, poor thing. Ever since she lost that boy in the War, Maysie told me she hadn’t ever been quite the same. Him gettin’ killed just seemed to sort of take the life out of her. It almost seems—”
Mrs. O’Brien paused and lowered her voice like one about to commit blasphemy. “It almost seems, Mrs. Quigley, as if it was a mercy she’s gone.” Mrs. Quigley nodded gravely in agreement. “Maysie was a good daughter to her like you said, but just the same it was awful hard on her, especially with that young man in London and all. How’s she takin’ it?”
“She was better this mornin’. You know they made her go down to police headquarters so they could talk to her, and she was there nearly all the mornin’. She got back a little while ago and she seemed pretty calm. But oh last night, it was terrible, I’m tellin’ you, Mrs. Quigley.
“She came home about eight—she got kept late at the office finishin’ up some work for her boss. You know how it’s been. Almost every night she’s kept late—and she went upstairs and went in and turned on the light and found her mother. The first we knew about it was when she screamed and ran out into the hall. Mrs. Helvig came runnin’ down from upstairs—the Helvigs are right above the Ealings—and Maysie was out in the hall.
“The doctor that come with the police had to give her something to quiet her down. Mrs. Helvig stayed with her last night and she’s up there with her now. Maysie didn’t want to be alone in the apartment and could you blame her? It gives me the shivers myself, knowin’ a horrible, bloody thing like that has gone on right in this house. Why this mornin’ I says to Jim, it don’t hardly…”
The conversation drifted on and Mrs. Quigley at length drifted off to 145. Mrs. O’Brien drew in her head, and the young man slouching against the railing drew out an afternoon paper from his pocket. The headlines of the front page leaped up at him in black glaring type.
EALING KILLING LINKED WITH CROSSLEY MURDER
“The murder of Mrs. Deborah Ealing, of 143 West 110th St., erroneously reported at first as a Spanish vendetta killing, is now being definitely linked by the police with the murder of Prentice Crossley, wealthy stamp dealer and…”
He skipped the rest of the lead, his eyes jumping quickly down the page until he found the paragraphs he was seeking.
“The report of the medical examiner places the time of death ‘sometime after noon Tuesday.’ The murder weapon was a bayonet with a triangular blade containing tiny notches, and is exactly like that used in the killing of Prentice Crossley. It was found wiped clean, and hanging with some other War relics, a German and an American helmet, on the wall of the back hall. Maysie Ealing, the daughter, says that it was a War souvenir sent to them by her brother who was killed in France, and always hung in that particular spot.
“Rigor mortis had already set in by the time the medical examiner was summoned, and it was not discovered until some hours after the body was taken to the morgue, that the fingers of the right hand clutched a tiny piece of paper. This has been definitely identified by Jason Fream of the Acme Stamp Company and Kurt Koenig, two of the stamp experts originally called in by the police in the Crossley case, as the six-real Spanish issue of 1851, valued at $12,500, which was stolen from the Crossley collection the night Crossley was murdered.”
CHAPTER XVI - A Familiar Face
Number 143 West 110th St. was an old building, but there was none of the crumbling sordidness of the tenement about it. Its halls were dark but clean. Its five stories housed ten families. This much could be ascertained from the mail boxes in the vestibule. The young man who had recently been loitering on the sidewalk and who for the purposes of this narrative is known as Spike, peered at the name plates in the half-light that came from an electric bulb at the rear over a pay telephone. The Ealing apartment was on the third floor in the front.
He mounted the stairs. Before the door leading to the third floor front he paused a moment before knocking. His brows were knit in heavy lines of indecision. It was as if he were trying to make up his mind about something, as if he could not quite bring himself to do what he was about to do. Finally he raised his hand and knocked. Number 143 boasted no such elegancies as electric bells.
For a long time there was no answer. He knocked again. Presently the door was opened by a woman. She was middle-aged and comfortably plump with a scrubbed, red peasant face and a coronet of heavy blond hair. She eyed the visitor hostilely and demanded his business in a heavy Swedish accent.
“Miss Ealing,” he explained, “I want to see her.”
“Miss Ealing can’t see nobody. She iss sick. Her modder iss just dead.”
She pushed the door to, but Spike caught it before it slammed.
“I quite understand the circumstances,” he said in a voice politely hushed, suavely considerate of the presence of grief and death. “But I must insist on seeing Miss Ealing. I’m—I’m from the district attorney’s office.”
At the reference to the district attorney, the woman’s hostility increased, but she ceased to push the door.
“But she vas dere all morning,” she protested. “You asking her questions all morning and now she iss tired.”
“I know. I’m sorry, really. I wish I might spare her the distress of further intrusion, but it can’t be helped. I shan’t keep her long.”
The woman melted a little. She was uncertain just how to deal with this gentle but firm gentleman. He wasn’t like those others, those heavy-jawed fellows who had come with the policeman in uniform that first night when Maysie Ealing had rushed screaming into the hall. This one was different.
She hesitated, looked at him suspiciously and finally gave in. She motioned him to enter and she closed the door behind him as he stepped into the dimly lit foyer of the apartment.
“I tell her,” she said. “You wait. She iss lying down now.”
When she had gone Spike had a chance to look about him. He was standing in a little hallway, one end of which led into the living room. His eyes, gradually getting used to the dim light, traveled about the tiny passageway. There was an old fashioned hat rack and umbrella stand, a telephone desk without a telephone, nothing of note. Nothing, that is, except the sinister decorations of the wall immediately facing the entrance door.
There were two helmets, the shallow wide one of the doughboys of 1917-18, the deep, clumsy one of the German soldiers. They were hanging side by side in strange fraternity, mute witness of the ultimate emptiness of hate. Beneath was a row of tacks driven into the wall at intervals of two or three inches, forming a little shelf about twelve inches long. It was empty now, but Spike noted it carefully. That would be where the dagger-bayonet was found.
He
stepped quietly into the front room. It was small and shiny with hard, varnished oak woodwork. The furniture was worn, but there was no spot of dust, and the curtains were crisply clean. There were pots of green plants at the windows and in one corner a couch with an old fashioned afghan crocheted in bright colors. It was a room of no particular taste or period, and yet somehow it managed to convey a feeling of homely comfort.
Spike looked about him and wondered where it had happened—where the old lady had sat—in what chair she had been when the daughter had found her. But the room gave back no answer.
He crossed to the opposite wall and surveyed a group of family photographs. Babies, indistinguishable as to sex or disposition. A sturdy lad of possibly twelve, and a little girl of eight or ten, playing with a dog. The girl again in a fancy dress costume. Another one of the boy, a bit older this one, probably just entering high school.
And then there was the large picture apart from the others. The boy grown into a young man in a corporal’s uniform, a pleasant looking young man, with frank, humorous eyes and a big generous mouth, and hair that waved slightly. The frame was of silver and there was engraving across the bottom. Spike bent closer to read it.
David Ealing
116th Infantry— 29th Division— A. E. F.
Missing in Action—Samogneux, October 1918.
“… ever since she lost that boy in the War… him gettin’ killed just seemed to sort of take the life out of her…”
For a long time Spike stood looking at the photograph, his brows furrowed in a perplexed frown. Where… Was it…
He was still looking at it when he heard a slight sound behind him. He turned. Maysie Ealing stood in the doorway leading from the back room.
For a moment there was no sound in the room while the two of them confronted each other, the young man and the girl. Not exactly a pretty girl and not really a girl any longer. She looked as if she might be about the same age as the dark woman who lay in the upper room on Sark Island—Linda Crossley.
The blond of her hair was faded and her small piquant mouth was bracketed with two tired lines. She was thin, too thin. And yet there was about her a feeling of strength, of firmness of will. Her eyes were deeply shadowed with grief and horror and physical exhaustion, but her chin was firm. She bore a strong resemblance to the soldier photograph on the wall.
It was she who spoke first in a dead, colorless voice. “You are from the district attorney’s office? You wanted to see me?”
“Yes; may we sit down?”
She looked at him, uncertainty and suspicion in her steady gaze. “You were not—down there this morning?”
“No, I know. The situation is a bit unorthodox, and although I’m not officially connected with the district attorney’s office I—ah—assist at times on— ah—special assignments. You see I’m the district attorney’s brother.” He drew forth his visiting card and handed it to her.
She took it and looked at it for a moment without comment. Then she motioned him to a chair and sat down herself in one opposite.
“There are two points, Miss Ealing,” he began, “that were not entirely cleared up this morning.”
She sighed heavily, wearily. “Do I have to go over all that again?”
“No. I just want to ask you two questions.” His hands fumbled for his cigarette case. Then hastily remembering the circumstances he shoved the case back into his vest pocket. But she had seen the gesture.
“It’s all right,” she said. “Go ahead and smoke.” She stretched forth her hand. “I’ll take one too. Being silly isn’t going to do any good to anyone.”
He lit her cigarette and his own. She inhaled deeply and settled back more easily in her chair as if in the curling whisps of smoke she found relaxation at last from the intolerable strain of the last twenty-four hours.
And then Spike shot the first question at her.
“Why did you go to work for John Fairleigh six months ago?”
Her hand raising the cigarette to her lips paused in mid-air. Her eyes were quickly veiled with downdropping lids so that no one might read the expression therein.
“Why—why should I not?” Her voice was still flat, colorless, but now it seemed the result of conscious effort to make it so, rather than the natural consequence of exhaustion.
“I only wondered if there was a reason—a special reason?”
“No, of course not. It—it is a good position.”
“Will you keep it now—after this?”
“Of course—if I want to.”
“And do you want to?”
“Yes—well, for a while, anyway. Things are so upset now—I don’t know—”
He waited a bit before he posed his second question. But when he did finally, he shot it at her quickly.
“Tell me, has Linda Crossley been in this house within the last two days?”
For a moment there was no answer. Slowly she rose from her chair. She held on to the arms as if to steady herself. Her lighted cigarette dropped to the floor. Her face was white, contorted with the effort to erase all betraying expression. A valiant effort but futile. Stark fright and horror stared from her eyes. She swayed. She grabbed for the back of the chair, missed it. She fell heavily before he could catch her. She had fainted.
For a long time Spike waited in the living room after he had carried her into the rear bedroom and summoned the Swedish woman. Just before he left he stood once more before the picture of the young man in uniform. Gradually a look of satisfaction came into his eyes.
He was just remembering where he had seen that face before.
CHAPTER XVII - The Inspector Has Spots Before the Eyes
THE AVERAGE CITIZEN, the one previously referred to in this narrative, isn’t fooled for a minute by alibis. He knows, thanks again to the metropolitan press, the detective story magazines and the writers of murder fiction, that axioms may be homicidal as well as Euclidian.
Take, for instance, the chap who is found standing over the dead body with a smoking pistol in his hand and a look of fiendish triumph on his face. This is not the murderer. (Someday a writer of murder fiction is going to break with tradition and pin the crime on the one who is caught red-handed in the first chapter. He’ll fool ’em all.)
Or take the matter of alibis. It is an unchallenged fact that the person who of all the suspects has the most unbreakable alibi, the person who at the very moment the murder was committed was taking tea with the Prime Minister at Number 10 Downing Street, fifty miles from the scene of the crime—that person is the perpetrator of the foul deed.
In view of this axiomatic situation it would seem that police departments and detective story writers would save themselves much time if they would admit the situation. But they are hidebound, conventional souls and go plodding along in the same old grooves, “checking up” on the characters in hand and placing a naive faith in their findings.
Inspector Herschman was one of these conservative souls. The result was that in the Crossley-Ealing killings he had a complete record of the movements of all parties concerned and very little else.
This paucity of other real evidence weighed heavily on his mind, and he felt that life was not entirely molded to his heart’s desire. This feeling of depression was intensified by the presence in his outer office of six newspaper reporters. He knew that if he went out and faced them they would ask all sort of childish, troublesome questions. “Do you know who killed Prentice Crossley and if not why not?” and “Who killed Mrs. Deborah Ealing?” and “Why the hell don’t the police find out?”
And since Inspector Herschman had to admit to himself that he didn’t know the answer to any of these questions he instructed his secretary to say that he was in conference and could see no one. Having thus entrenched himself behind the world’s most palpable prevarication, he sat in his office, gazing out of the window with troubled eyes, fiddling with the letter opener and chewing on an unlit cigar.
It was thus that Spike found him. He took one glance at Hersc
hman’s face and cried out in deep concern.
“Inspector, you look terrible.”
“I feel terrible.”
“What’s eating you?”
“Oh—uh—I didn’t sleep so well last night.”
“Try Ovaltine.” Spike gave him a more critical scrutiny. “Eyes, dull and sluggish. Spots before ’em. Complexion pale. Are you subject to hot flushes, or have your best friends already told you?”
“Told me what?”
“It doesn’t matter. The point is, I was just passing by and an awful thirst came upon me, and what do you say to coming up to my place with me for a drink? I’ve got my car outside.”
For the first time that morning Inspector Herschman brightened. He rose and reached for his hat. Three hours later he was brighter still.
“It’s a cinch,” he confided as he supported himself fraternally on Spike’s shoulder. “Just an open and shut case. We got ’em all but that girl—that one that swiped your boat. But she’s the one we want to get, but we don’t know where to find her. We don’t know where she is. She’s gone. Just an open and shut—”
Spike assisted him to his feet. Outside he put him into a taxi and gave the driver the inspector’s home address.
For more than an hour after Herschman had left Spike sat in deep thought, sorting out the information which he had just extracted from the unwitting and slightly fozzled police inspector.
Here, boiled down to undramatic statements of fact, are the results of many hours of patient police investigation, two quarts of Scotch and a conscience so unscrupulous as to take advantage of a man when he’s drunk.
A Most Immoral Murder Page 9