She sank down into a deep lounge chair, with its sage-green upholstery which she had chosen so carefully so the room would be all grays and greens; gray rug, soft gray walls, green chairs, gay primrose-yellow curtains, and bright splashes of yellow and green and blue in the patterned cover for the sofa. It was a charming, a warm and pleasant room; a few old pieces of gleaming, dark wood gave it dignity and grace. It was not a room in which to talk of murder.
“What did you do?” Laura asked.
“I reported it to the police, of course. Then I drove out to Koska Street. They were already there, that is, a squad car was there when I got there, and then the rest of them turned up. Your Doctor Stevens arrived in the midst of it. He said you had called him to come there and he had been delayed on a previous call. There was nothing he could do, of course. The police will be here to get your statement, I told them why you had to come home before you called them or anybody. I explained about Jonny and I think they understood. Where is Jonny? Asleep?”
“Yes. I don’t think she realized what happened, Matt. Seeing her father upset her; she cried afterward. But I don’t think she knew anything about the—the rooming house. I mean, what had happened there. She stayed in the hall; she couldn’t see. She was puzzled; she knew something was wrong. But she’s all right now. I’m sure she didn’t guess anything like the truth.”
“That’s all right then. Now,” Matt sat down in the chair opposite her, “tell me everything again, Laura. All the details. Don’t hurry. Take your time about it.”
He glanced at his watch, though, as he spoke. She thought, Matt is a lawyer, he wants to hear everything; he wants to go over it with me before the police arrive. Because I found a man, murdered.
She told the story in detail, slowly, taking her time. He watched her, his face a little in shadow above the shade of the lamp on the table beside him, his eyes intent, lifting his glass now and then and sipping from it. When she had finished he thought for a moment. Then he said, “All right. That woman who phoned you, are you sure it was the woman you met on the steps?”
“Yes. It was the same voice, the same accent. Besides, there was nobody else in the rooming house.”
“Would you recognize her again if you saw her?”
“I think so. Yes. I recognized her voice. Matt, could she have killed him? She was running away. She had her bag with her. She ran across the sidewalk and jumped into the taxi and was gone before I could stop her. And then on the steps she said, ‘Go away. I should not have done it.’ That’s all she said. Did she mean—” Laura caught her breath. “Did she mean, ‘I should not have killed him’?”
“Yes, I’ve been thinking that, too— I don’t know. I do know that she was one of the lodgers in the rooming house. Her name is Maria Brown. The landlady—the police questioned her—said that Maria Brown had been there for a month or so, she had her rent paid ahead of time for about three weeks, she had given the landlady no warning of leaving. That’s all I heard. There was a good deal of commotion out there, of course, with fingerprint men and flashlights and everybody milling around, the whole mechanism of investigation. The police will find Maria Brown, all right. But about Conrad Stanislowski—I wish we knew more about how he happened to come here. I’d like to know why he begged you not to tell anyone he was here. He told you to wait for a few days before you told us. He said that he could identify himself. Why would he want to keep it a secret, even for a few days? What did he expect to do in that time? Rather,” Matt said slowly, “why should it conceivably be necessary for him to do anything before he could come forward openly and identify himself to us?”
There was no answer to that. Laura said, “I think he was afraid. There was something about him— I am sure he was afraid of something.”
Matt lighted a cigarette. “Of course, that suggests some quarrel that it was necessary for him to settle. And it suggests that that quarrel may have ended in murder. The woman you saw could have been the instrument. Did she look, well—foreign? Polish?”
“Her accent is foreign. I don’t know whether it’s Polish or not. She was dark, pale— I only got a glimpse of her.”
Matt said thoughtfully, “Orders can come from behind the Iron Curtain. Things like that almost certainly have happened. Maria Brown could have been an instrument. If she were Polish —” He stopped. After a moment he shrugged. “But on the other hand, she may have been only an innocent bystander. She was a lodger in the house; perhaps she heard something of the murder, obviously Conrad told her your name and she may have phoned to you merely in the hope of helping him. But then he died and she simply got scared and ran away. There are people like that. Afraid of trouble. Afraid of the police. Another possibility is that she knows some evidence which she feels is dangerous to her and she is afraid to see the police. There are all sorts of possibilities, too many of them! Well, the police will certainly find Maria Brown. You said you started to question Jonny about her father. Did you?”
“No. I went back to her room and that’s when she was crying so hard and trying not to. I was sure then that he was really her father, so I didn’t question her. She was only beginning to stop crying when the phone rang and it was Maria Brown.”
“Didn’t she show any sign of knowing her father?”
“No, not a thing. She didn’t speak. She didn’t smile. She just froze. You know—whenever she is frightened or confused, she shrinks into herself and doesn’t even move.”
“I know. That’s the habit of fear. Yet perhaps that very cautiousness shows that she did recognize him. Perhaps she was waiting for him to speak or make some move or— Oh, I don’t know! How did you feel about it, Laura? Did you feel that he was her father?”
“Y-yes. At least at first. Then later I thought perhaps he was an impostor. But I went back to Jonny and she was crying, so I was sure he was her father.”
“And while he was here you believed him?”
“Yes, I did. It puzzled me. It was an extraordinary kind of thing. He seemed frightened and hurried and I couldn’t understand why he asked me to keep his arrival a secret, but somehow I—I did believe him.”
Matt gave her a long look, rose and began to pace up and down, his tall figure and dark head outlining themselves against the gray walls and the primrose yellow curtains at the end of the room. He stopped to pick up an ash tray, look at it with unseeing eyes and put it down again; he came back to lean one elbow on the mantel and look, in deep thought, at nothing. He had a thin, rather bony Irish face with a hawky nose, a sharp jaw line, and deep-set eyes below eyebrows that were so black they were like slashes across his face. It was not a handsome face, but it was sensitive and intelligent, and lighted by his eyes which could turn as vividly blue and sunny as a summer sea. They were then, though, a slatey cold gray. He said, “This Brown woman could have known Conrad in Poland, or she could have known of him. He went to the rooming house at 3936 Koska Street, so it is perfectly possible that he knew her address and went to the rooming house because she was there. Now then—she could have had orders to kill him. Or she could have killed him because of some private quarrel between them. The third alternative is that she was merely an innocent bystander. But if she stabbed him, then she either regretted it and telephoned you for help, or she phoned to get you to come to the house and thus involve you in the murder.”
“Me! But the police can’t say I did it!”
“I’m only suggesting possibilities,” Matt said quickly. “If she actually murdered him, perhaps she didn’t expect either you or the doctor to get there so soon, before she could get away. But on the other hand, as I said, if she was only an innocent bystander trying to help him, that would explain what she said to you on the steps. ‘Go away. I should not have done it,’ could mean simply she shouldn’t have phoned to you and got you into it. If, that is, somebody else killed him.”
“Who?”
“Well, for one thing he as much as admitted that he was a renegade Communist. He said he was only a minor official but stil
l —” Matt went to the sofa and sat down, stretching out his long legs. “You said she stared at Jonny. Did she seem to recognize her?”
“No! That is—I didn’t think of that, Matt. I don’t know. It all was so hurried. She did stare at Jonny. She looked as if she couldn’t take her eyes from her. But then she saw the taxi—”
The buzzer in the hall sounded sharply. Matt sprang up. “There they are. Just tell them what you told me.”
Somehow Laura had expected a whole body of policemen, big bulky figures in blue uniforms. Instead Matt ushered in a slight, rather elderly man in a wrinkled gray suit. He had hazy gray eyes and a long, tired-looking face.
“This is Lieutenant Peabody,” Matt said. “Miss Laura March.”
The Lieutenant said, “How do you do?”
Laura, her voice unexpectedly husky, said, “Will you sit down, Lieutenant Peabody?” Suddenly and indeed absurdly the instinct of a hostess caught at her. Her home, her guest. Except he wasn’t a guest; he was a policeman coming to question her about murder. She steadied her thought and her voice and said to Matt, “I expect Lieutenant Peabody might like a drink, too.”
“Yes, of course.” Matt started for the door. “What will it be, Lieutenant? Scotch, bourbon?”
“Thank you,” Lieutenant Peabody said, “I am on duty. Not that it isn’t the kind of night that calls for a drink. But not now.” He sat down on the long sofa, at right angles to Laura, and suddenly and very wearily sighed. But in the same instant his hazy glance drifted around the room, noting details, seeing the tiny red Garnet roses on a side table, the picture which had belonged to Laura’s father, a Normandy landscape, gay with its sunlight and blue sky and its purple-pink plum trees. He examined the Chippendale wall-desk which, too, had belonged to Peter March; he eyed a table with a piecrust edge. He seemed to approve the chairs, the sofa, the odd bits Laura had added, and to guess that she had done so, a piece at a time as she could pay for them, around the nucleus that Conrad Stanley had saved for her, from her home.
Yet in the same long and observing moment Laura felt that the police lieutenant had also noted and filed away every detail of her appearance. At last his glance lingered openly on the little gay heap of colored hair ribbons which still lay on the floor. And Matt said, “I’ve already told Lieutenant Peabody all that we knew of Conrad Stanislowski, Laura. Why he came here—Jonny—all that.” He turned to Lieutenant Peabody. “Miss March has been telling me what she knows of the thing. The fact is Stanislowski was here for only a few moments. He talked very briefly to Miss March. Some time after he had gone, the Brown woman phoned for help, so Miss March went out to the rooming house and there she found him murdered. She had the little girl with her so—”
Lieutenant Peabody interrupted. “First, Miss March, I want to know about this Brown woman. Describe her, will you? Tell me exactly what she said to you over the telephone.”
SEVEN
LAURA TOLD IT BRIEFLY. When she had finished the short recital the Lieutenant nodded. “Maria Brown is probably an assumed name. The landlady didn’t know much about her but said she was obviously a foreigner. The landlady doesn’t know where she came from; she had a sort of part-time job in the Loop. She took the room about a month ago and has paid her rent for another few weeks. How old is she? Young? Middle-aged?”
“She looked middle-aged,” Laura said unexpectedly, “but she moved like a young woman.”
A flicker of satisfaction touched the Lieutenant’s face. “You’d know her if you saw her again.”
“Yes. I think so.”
“What did she wear?”
“A brown coat—tailored, with pockets. A black beret. She had a sort of carryall with her.”
“What kind of taxi was it? Yellow, checkered—”
“Yellow.”
The Lieutenant rose. “The telephone?”
“In the hall,” Matt said. “I’ll show you.”
At the doorway the Lieutenant turned back to Laura. “Did you see a knife in the dead man’s room or anything that could have been used as a weapon?”
“No! No, nothing like that!”
“Ah,” the Lieutenant said and went to the telephone. Matt came back into the room. Both of them heard the policeman’s terse orders. The woman, Maria Brown, was wearing a brown coat and a black beret. She was a young woman. She had taken a yellow taxi.
The Lieutenant returned. “I think we can pick her up,” he said, “although her description fits thousands of other women in a big city.” He sat down again and paused for a moment as if to let himself dive into some invisible filing cabinet and select the exact record that he wanted. He crossed one knee over the other, linked his hands together and looked at them thoughtfully. “Now then,” he said. “Mr. Cosden gave me the general background of the Stanislowski situation but I’ll just go over it quickly and see if I’ve got it all right. Conrad Stanley, the button king—”
Matt said in a sort of aside, “It wasn’t buttons really, it was a fastener, a slide and clip. He extended his patents to all sorts of things, surgical instruments, rubber tubing, mechanical bolts— that sort of thing. Then he developed, patented and manufactured a number of other devices—gadgets most of them but very successful—”
The Lieutenant nodded briskly. “The point is he made a lot of money. He was born in Poland, emigrated to America when very young, changed his name from Stanislowski to Stanley and made a fortune.”
“He came up the hard way,” Matt said. “He had nothing at all when he arrived here. He attributed everything he had made of his life to American citizenship. He was deeply and sincerely patriotic. He loved America.”
Lieutenant Peabody nodded shortly again. “Conrad Stanislowski, this murdered man, claimed to be his nephew. The little girl then is Stanley’s great-niece.”
“Yes,” Matt said shortly. “We’re sure of that. Stanislowski, however, refused to show Miss March any sort of identification.”
Lieutenant Peabody glanced at Laura thoughtfully. “I see,” he said. “Well, we’ll get to his talk with you in a moment. About Conrad Stanley now—how old was Conrad Stanley when he died?”
Matt replied, “Up in his sixties.”
“I understand he left a widow. Is she about Stanley’s age?”
“Well,” Matt said, “no.” Laura thought she saw a flicker of indecision in Matt’s face as if he considered preparing the Lieutenant for Doris’ youth and beauty. If so he contented himself by saying only, “She’s younger. In fact, they were married only a couple of years before Stanley died.”
Matt, of course, had every reason to remember the exact date.
The Lieutenant said, “Second wife?”
“No, he’d never married before. I think he’d been too busy to consider marriage. He concentrated on his business, you see; he not only invented all these things, he manufactured them, too.”
“Ah,” said the Lieutenant politely, and continued. “As I understand it he died three years ago. He left his money divided, half to his wife and half to be held in trust and to be handed over to his nephew, this Conrad Stanislowski.”
“As I told you,” Matt said, “there was a provision to that. His nephew was to have this trust fund only in the event the nephew would leave Poland, come to America, take out citizenship papers and live in America. Conrad Stanley felt it was a sort of debt of gratitude that he wanted to pay. Also, since he had no children, I think he wanted to make it possible for his family to be continued here in America where he had always lived. As I told you he was a very patriotic man and a very happy man.”
Lieutenant Peabody did not this time say, “Ah,” politely, agreeably and merely, Laura thought, as a kind of punctuation, allowing him to continue his main line of questioning. He eyed Matt for a moment and said, “Any other relatives besides this Conrad Stanislowski?”
“None there’s any record of. He had two brothers, one in Poland, father to the nephew; he died before the war. The other brother came to America with Conrad, went to work in
a steel mill in Pittsburgh, was killed in an accident—oh, years ago.”
“Unmarried?”
Matt looked startled. “Why—I don’t know. Do you, Laura?”
She tried to think back to Conrad’s tales of his early days. “He talked of his brother. I don’t remember much of it. But I’m sure if the brother had married, Conrad would have helped his widow—”
“Or his children,” Lieutenant Peabody said.
Matt said, “There almost certainly was no widow, Lieutenant, and no children. But we can make certain of it.”
Lieutenant Peabody nodded dreamily. “I was only thinking of —persons who might have an interest in this murdered man’s claims. As it stands, the only Stanley blood relative now is this child, Jonny Stanislowski?”
“Right,” Matt said.
“Did Mr. Stanley know about her when he made his will?”
“No, he knew nothing of her. In fact, we knew nothing of her until this fall.”
Again Lieutenant Peabody seemed to think for a moment. Then he said, “Well, we’ll talk about that later, too. What about her mother, Conrad Stanislowski’s wife?”
“We know nothing about her, but the way Stanislowski spoke of her to Miss March suggests that she died when Jonny was a baby.”
Lieutenant Peabody looked at Laura. “What exactly did he say, Miss March? Tell me the whole story. You’d better begin at the beginning. Cosden says that you had no warning of Stanislowski’s appearance. He says that all of you thought he was either still in Poland or, since his child turned up in an orphanage in Vienna, that he was dead.”
“Yes,” Laura said. “He just—came here this afternoon. He dropped out of the blue. I didn’t expect him, I knew nothing about him. He—knocked on the door.”
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