Nets to Catch the Wind

by Dolores Hitchens

  She touched Amy’s hand with a set of cool fingers. Her nails were long. They rested on Amy’s wrist like a row of little knives. “You’ll forgive this, I hope?” Her perfume was warm and flowery, drowning out the odors of food. “I’ll see that Mr. Neece has an uninterrupted luncheon date soon. Right now it’s important that he be in on the talk.” She bit her lip, the only betrayal of what Amy felt was inner tension and excitement. Then Neece murmured extravagant apologies, bent over Amy’s shoulder—and then they were gone.

  Amy looked down at her untouched lunch, aware of a thud of nervousness in her pulse beat. She tried to analyze the situation, and it seemed to her that Cunninghan and Neece and Mrs. Schneider must be up to something. Was it possible there was to be a break in the case, some sort of revelation? What else would bring Mrs. Schneider downtown in such a rush? Wouldn’t it ordinarily have been more in character for her to have summoned Cunninghan and Neece to her home?

  Amy left the lunch that she now found tasteless. Near the door was a telephone booth. She thought of Pop Bronson. If the thing that had brought on the conference between Mrs. Schneider and her lawyers was new enough, he might not know of it—and still there was a chance. She stepped into the booth and called his number. There was no answer. She went outside to her car.

  She was behind the wheel, her hand on the key in the switch, when she remembered with peculiar clarity something Mrs. Schneider had said. The hurried conference was to be about an account book. Mrs. Schneider’s eyes had given the words a strange significance. Neece had reacted with an immediate preparation to leave.

  According to Fogarty, there was another book figuring mysteriously in the case, the missing diary or journal kept by Tzegeti.

  If the conference were actually to be about Tzegeti’s diary, would Mrs. Schneider have made so revealing a remark? Amy remembered that she’d heard about the missing diary from Fogarty, that it hadn’t figured in the news nor been mentioned at the trial. It was entirely likely that Mrs. Schneider would presume her to be ignorant of such a book’s existence.

  Amy started the motor, turned the car toward the outskirts of town. In a short while she pulled up before the dusty hedge surrounding the Tzegeti house, stepped out, went up the beaten path to the porch. She knocked. There was no sound, no movement, from inside the house.

  She waited in the soundless heat, examining the front of the house. It had been a long time since the old wood had had paint put on it. The tangled vines were dusty. The carved boar’s head, hanging by the leather strap to make a knocker, wore an expression that seemed to Amy too tired to be savage, just a big tired pig worn smooth with handling, its mouth open, the teeth showing, in a panting effort to cool off. She lifted the wooden lump, pounded again on the panel. This time there was an answering sound, a dim step. The door opened and the Tzegeti child looked out. Her eyes held a blind, scared stare. “Mama is very sick, Mrs. Luttrell. She says she can’t see anyone.”

  “Have you had the doctor for her?”

  The girl shook her head. There was perspiration on her face, and from the room beyond her came a closed, hot smell. “She said not to call for anybody. She wants to rest till she feels better.”

  “I think I ought to see her.”

  Amy reached for the door. The girl stepped back; her air was one of relief, and Amy judged that the mother’s condition was a worry and a perplexity that she needed to share with someone else, someone older. Amy went on into the bedroom. It was quite dark, warm, stifling. Mrs. Tzegeti made a skinny ridge, outlined in shadow, down the middle of the huge clumsy bed. Her head was sunk into the outsize pillows; only her eyes gleamed. “Mrs. Luttrell?” Her voice was a shadow of what it had been, a husky whisper full of effort and strain. “I didn’t want you to come in. Not now.”

  Amy bent over the bed. She saw the sheet drawn up to cover the lower part of Mrs. Tzegeti’s face, the enormous eyes under the black brows. She reached down, touched a hand before the other woman could jerk it away. The skin was chilled and wet. “You are very ill.”

  “Yes.” There was no complaint at it, just acceptance. The eyes weaved and glittered. “But I need only rest.” The thick accent garbled her words, the fold of sheet muffled the heavy whisper. Amy could scarcely make out what Mrs. Tzegeti said. “Please go away. You can do no good here.”

  Amy said firmly, “I think Elizabeth wishes you to see a doctor.”

  “No.” The head rolled on the pillow. “No doctor.”

  Amy bent over the sick woman, half angry at the perversity that seemed so foreign, so senseless. “There is something else I must talk to you about too, Mrs. Tzegeti. I should have mentioned it the other time I was here. Do you know anything about a journal—a sort of diary—kept by your husband before Schneider’s murder?”

  Mrs. Tzegeti quit rolling her head. She grew quite still. She reminded Amy of a bird that tries to become invisible by freezing to its branch.

  “Do you have it here?”

  No answer. The still eyes were bright as marbles.

  “Did your husband give it to you before the police took him?”

  Amy’s hand brushed the coverlet at that moment, drawing down the sheet that had covered Mrs. Tzegeti’s face. An instant later the girl, Elizabeth, just inside the door, let out a whimpering scream. Amy recoiled, then turned to Elizabeth and shook her. “Where’s the nearest telephone?”

  Elizabeth didn’t seem to hear. She was watching the slow, claw-like hands of her mother tugging the sheet into place again. “What is it?”

  “Some kind of corrosive poison. She spilled part of it on her face. Where is a phone?”

  A spasm crossed Elizabeth’s face. “Is she . . . going to die?”

  “A phone! A phone!” Amy shook the kid until her teeth rattled, until the stunned look left her face. Then she listened to the stuttering words. There was a telephone two houses down the street, but Mrs. Arkuto never let strangers in. “She’ll let me in!” said Amy grimly, running.

  A dark, cautious-looking woman with a coronet of black braids peeped out at her from behind the door of the second house. Amy battered the door in. The woman hotfooted it to a second door on the opposite side of the room, slammed it, turned the key with a loud scrape, and began yelling for help. The phone was on the wall; Amy used it to call Dr. Sprague. He instructed her to find out immediately what Mrs. Tzegeti had taken, in case she should lose consciousness before he got there. Amy ran back to the Tzegeti house.

  She bent again over the slight shadowy body on the bed. The sheet was back in place, covering the raw welted flesh around the mouth. The eyes had assumed a remote look, a faraway indifference. The sound of Mrs. Tzegeti’s breathing was like that of a small saw rasping through plywood.

  “What poison was it?”

  The indifferent eyes went on looking at the wall. The breathing faltered for a moment, a catch as if with pain.

  A new idea stiffened Amy. She caught Mrs. Tzegeti’s cold, wet hand. “Did you take the stuff yourself? Or was it given to you—forced on you?”

  There was a short moment of silence. “I took it,” Mrs. Tzegeti said clearly.

  “Where’s the rest of it? Where’s the bottle—the container?”

  “I . . . I destroyed it.”

  “That’s a lie!”

  She was directly over Mrs. Tzegeti’s face now; the features stood out from the shadow, bony, chiseled—it seemed a paper mask behind which ribs of steel were threatening to break through. “I tell you . . .” came the thick garbled whisper, “that you must tell everyone—I took this drink myself. I took it while Elizabeth was away, and I do not know its name, it was something Fredric used on the roses.” The sigh came out, fluttering the sheet. “There is just one thing more . . . You are a good woman, Mrs. Luttrell. Even though you are angry with me now, I know that really you are kind . . . patient. It’s about—about my little girl. I don’t know who will—” The breath hissed in; a muffled scream, a spasm shook her, as if at the wrenching and twisting of some giant han
d. When the spasm passed, Mrs. Tzegeti lay flatter, broken like a woman of straw.

  Amy scarcely knew what she replied. The memory of the scene in the café fled through her mind, Mrs. Schneider’s hurried words, the meaning and urgency only half concealed. Those other people knew, somehow, that Mrs. Tzegeti was dying, that the secret of the diary might be lost forever. “Where is your husband’s journal?”

  Mrs. Tzegeti opened her eyes and seemed to recognize some strange face bent over her at the other side of the bed. Death’s, perhaps. A whisper stirred in her throat. “The little handle.”

  “What did you say?”

  “The . . . little . . . handle . . .”

  The voice slipped into silence. The words had seemed enormously distinct, spoken almost without accent, as if with a final effort Mrs. Tzegeti had given up what she must. Then there was another spasm; she let it possess her with a kind of indifference. Her hands lay slack and her face didn’t echo the pain. She didn’t speak again.

  The doctor arrived, then the ambulance. Late in the afternoon, in the hospital waiting room, a nurse came to tell Amy and the child that Mrs. Tzegeti was dead.

  Elizabeth had been sitting by herself next a window. The big eyes had been looking out at the sky, at the quiet street, the houses with neat lawns, flower beds, and lots of fresh white paint. The nurse spoke to Amy, supposing her to be a relative and older, better able to bear the word of loss.

  The words fell like stones in the quiet of the small room. Elizabeth turned away from the light. Her face grew still, and the touch of hostile withdrawal Amy recalled from their first meeting settled there. She seemed all at once smaller, defenseless, and forlorn.

  “Dr. Sprague would like to see you in a few minutes,” the nurse added, and went out. Her heels made a clear, sharp clicking sound on the composition floor. The glass door swung a couple of times, then stopped. A plane droned outside, high in the sky. Elizabeth pulled at the sweater she had thrown across her shoulders. A mended spot on the breast began to ravel; she tucked the thread end out of sight.

  Amy moved to the window seat. Elizabeth turned her head. All emotion seemed washed out of the young face. “Will they let me see Mama again?”

  “Yes, you’ll see her.”

  “But she’s dead, isn’t she? That’s what the nurse meant?”

  Amy searched for words, the right words. “She isn’t afraid any longer, nor in pain, nor grieving for your father.”

  Elizabeth looked down at her folded hands. “Will they bury them together?”

  This, Amy didn’t know. She suspected that the Tzegeti funerals might be county-financed, and she wasn’t familiar with the rules. Besides, it was too early to be thinking about another funeral—the memory of that morning’s interview at the mortuary was still raw, galling. And there were other things to come first. Ugly things. There would be an autopsy on Mrs. Tzegeti, and an inquest. And Elizabeth would have to testify. She came back to the present, to the small room and Elizabeth’s quiet waiting eyes. “We’ll find out.”

  “When I came back from the grocery store I knew that something was wrong with Mama. She’d been sitting up when I left, and the room was light.” A shiver swept over the child; she averted her face quickly; and Amy understood the effort at control, the grief put down, the tears held in check. There would be a time, the girl’s attitude seemed to say, when she would be alone, when she could weep by herself for the one she had lost. But now she would be calm and coherent. . . . Was it Middle European stubbornness? Or just the average adolescent’s determination to begin to be grown up in an adult world? The latter, Amy decided, freeing her mind from its small aim of searching out foreignness in Elizabeth.

  “Do you think someone could have come to see your mother while you were away?”

  “I . . . thought so, yes.”

  “Do you know who it might have been?”

  Elizabeth shook her head. “No.” She paused, her gaze on the scene outside, the Palos Verdes hills green in the far distance, the houses like little flecks of paint. “Once, before, I thought——”

  “Yes?”

  “It was late in the evening, nearly dark. Mama was facing the window. We had just finished dinner. We were still at the table. She pushed her plate away with a kind of jerk. Then she asked me to go to Mrs. Arkuto’s house and to see if a telephone call had come, any message for us. I was surprised—we never have had a message like that.”

  “How long were you gone?”

  “Not long. But when I came back Mama was lying down. She was very quiet, but I could hear her breathing—as if she’d run a long way——” Some tears welled into Elizabeth’s eyes; she brushed them away impatiently, as if angry at the momentary loss of control.

  Amy considered. “You believe your mother saw someone outside in the dusk, someone who wanted inside?” At the same moment she was aware of a strange stirring of memory and something flickered in her mind, a faint echo under the story told by Elizabeth, like a double exposure on a photographic negative. She tried to pin the impression down, but it faded; it was as if she’d reached into water to catch a reflection.

  “I thought . . . because the way she looked past me at the window,” the girl said finally.

  The nurse came in then. “Will you come this way, please?” She smiled at them, but her glance was sharpest at the bent head of Elizabeth. Amy got the impression that Dr. Sprague had done some explaining. They followed the nurse down the hall into an office, where the doctor stood behind a desk. The nurse went out.

  Dr. Sprague was a small gray mouse of a man, not looking the expert diagnostician and surgeon that he was. “Sit down, Amy. And you, child. I haven’t had a good look at you yet.” He examined the young girl, who sat stiffly, her eyes fixed woodenly on the spot of light under the desk lamp. All at once the doctor walked over, stood beside her, touched her shoulder. “How old are you?”

  “Fifteen.”

  “You’re practically grown up.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He stood quiet for a moment, as if thinking. “We did everything for your mother that we could. Do you have any idea why she took that stuff?”

  The cords stood out in Elizabeth’s throat; she waited—the threat of tears passed. “No, sir, I don’t.”

  “She didn’t say anything that might have given you the idea she meant to do away with herself?”

  Elizabeth looked up quickly. “Oh, she wouldn’t do that, sir!”

  “Wouldn’t kill herself? Is that what you mean?”

  Elizabeth shook her head stubbornly. “She wouldn’t do it!”

  Dr. Sprague walked over behind the desk as if to put a barricade between himself and the child. Plainly he didn’t like the job of inquisitor. He ruffled the reports on which he had been working, and Amy sensed that he would have welcomed wild grief, a breakdown—it would excuse him from this task. He looked up sharply. “Your mother couldn’t have drunk it by accident. It’s a fuming, eroding poison.” He shut his eyes for a moment. Perhaps he was remembering Mrs. Tzegeti’s face. Then he went on, speaking in technical terms.

  When he had finished Elizabeth said, “My mother believed in the goodness of God.”

  The doctor stared down at the reports on his desk. Every suicide must have its cause. The words had to be written in, the probable motive. Where was there room to mention the tough spirit that had survived the years of torture in Europe, the frustration of a strange tongue, murder, then fear and loneliness? If Elizabeth said her mother wouldn’t have killed herself, Amy was willing to believe. But then she thought, no one else would. She saw the doctor reach for his pen.

  There was a knock at the office door. The police had arrived.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “WHAT WERE you doing at the Tzegeti place?”

  The chief of police sat in the chair formerly occupied by Dr. Sprague. He had the medical papers spread out before him. A lieutenant of detectives named Chaffey, a raw-boned man in a worn brown suit, sat near the corner of the desk and
made notes in a small book. Amy faced them. The overhead lights were on, brightening the room strangely, as though the chief had to have a better look at the police widow who consorted with the crooks who had been the cause of her husband’s death. “What did you want with them?”

  “I was trying to get information from Mrs. Tzegeti,” Amy said. “I’d gone there before. I think she knew something about the murders on the train.”

  “You can bet she did,” said the chief sourly.

  “Whatever she knew, she was afraid to tell.”

  “She was too smart to tell,” the chief corrected. “There was dough in this thing. She was due for a big pay-off, bigger than the stack Schneider had in his office. She wouldn’t spoil things by talking to you.”

  “How do you account for her taking poison, then?”

  An air of caution closed in on his face, tightening up the little lines around his eyes. “Cold feet, maybe.”

  “If she didn’t have cold feet about dealing with her husband’s murderer, I don’t see what else could have scared her.”

  He looked wise. We haven’t been completely idle, Mrs. Luttrell. We were putting on the heat where it did the most good.”

  “Did one of your men call on Mrs. Tzegeti today?”