Postmark Murder

by Mignon G. Eberhart

  She put down the papers and lighted a cigarette and the telephone rang and again no one answered.

  “Who is this?” she said sharply. “What do you want?”

  For answer the telephone clicked. She put it down. There were ways of dealing with such things; the police, the telephone company. Matt had told her to let him know, let Peabody know if it happened again.

  She would tell him at once. What could he do then and there, that night? Besides, he was with Doris.

  She debated for a moment and decided to tell him of it the next day. But her apartment seemed again exposed and lonely, high up in the cloud-laden city, like a target.

  She turned on the radio and dance music swirled out into the room; she went back to the kitchen and went through the nightly routine of making hot chocolate for Jonny and hot milk flavored with coffee for herself. She put them as usual in the two thermos bottles, set the empty milk bottles outside the kitchen door in the service hall and went back to the living room. She was restless, as if the telephone call had touched off a deep uneasiness. She had left the radio turned on and the dance music threw its spell around her; it suggested gaiety, lights, voices, dancing; she listened, caught by the golden net of a dream.

  The little French clock on the mantel chimed eleven. She turned off the radio and went to the black, glittering windows, seeing her reflection on them. A slender figure in gray skirt and white blouse.

  She looked at her image with sudden disapproval; nothing glamorous, nothing chic and elegant about her, only Laura March, her face white, and her gray eyes deeply shadowed in that reflection. Her level dark eyebrows and the slender line of her cheek gave her a faint resemblance to the picture of Peter March in her bedroom.

  She approached herself in the shifting reflection, leaned so near that it dissolved except for a shadowy outline, and looked down through the night to Lake Shore Drive. The traffic had dwindled to only an occasional sweep of headlights along it. Street lights glimmered in the long bright curve out toward the Navy pier. The pavement looked wet and slippery and desolate. The lake was black now, invisible in the blackness of the night. She wanted to shut out the night and its unspoken threat. She drew the draperies across the windows with a quick swish of yellow silk.

  Someone was in the apartment.

  The knowledge seeped out of nowhere. Her hand clutched a fold of yellow silk. Then she knew why she was listening with every nerve. There had been some sound.

  The curtains had swished, rustling, across the window. And immediately there had been a sound from somewhere in the quiet apartment. It was as if a door had very softly closed.

  Jonny, of course!

  She went back quickly to Jonny’s door and opened it cautiously. But Jonny hadn’t awakened; she was still in bed, still asleep. Suki was sitting up on the pillow, his black ears alert, his eyes reflecting the streak of light from the hall. Laura closed the bedroom door again softly, and it was exactly that small click she had heard.

  Doors don’t open and close themselves. She ran into the kitchen.

  No one was there. The kitchen door was closed; she had set out the milk bottles and closed the door. She hadn’t bolted it, she thought suddenly. It wasn’t her habit to bolt the door. Perhaps it hadn’t quite locked.

  Perhaps it had swung itself open. And then closed itself again?

  There were always wandering currents of air seeping through the innumerable corridors of a big apartment house. Still it seemed an odd feat, even for a very whimsical draft.

  But the kitchen was obviously bare of an intruder; so was the little niche called a dining room adjoining it, with its ruffled white curtains, its small table and chairs. There was no place for anyone to hide there. She went to her bedroom, she opened closet doors, her heart pounding as she forced herself to thrust clothes aside. She did not stop until there was scarcely a square inch of the rooms she had not searched.

  Gradually her heart resumed a more normal pace. Nobody had entered the apartment. Nobody could enter it now.

  She took the two thermos bottles to her room and put them on the bedside table. Again she left the door to Jonny’s room and the door to her bedroom open so she would hear the child if she stirred during the night.

  She would hear anything else, too.

  There was in fact nothing to hear except the regular low moan of the foghorn, so accustomed a sound that to well-trained and faithful Chicago ears it is like a lullaby.

  Morning was brighter, with the sun struggling in golden patches through gray clouds. It was colder, too, so Laura, waking at the same time that Jonny came sleepily into the room, sprang out of bed to close the window and turn on radiators. She and Jonny huddled themselves in bathrobes as they opened the thermos bottles. That morning though, hot milk flavored with coffee did not strike Laura as adequate for the day almost certainly to come; she wanted real coffee, hot and very strong. She gathered her white wool bathrobe around her and she and Jonny and the kitten all went to the kitchen. Again breakfast was a lively affair on the part of Jonny and the kitten, and when later, Laura started to pour out the contents of her thermos, the kitten leaped up on the table beside her and expressed his interest in the hot milk in no uncertain terms.

  “You’ll get your breakfast, Suki,” Laura said. “You won’t like this. It’s got coffee in it.” But the kitten said emphatically that he wanted to taste it, so she poured a little in a saucer. Suki dived upon it voraciously, and Laura washed out the thermos bottles while Jonny ate her oatmeal. Suki, however, lapped only a little; then apparently exhausted with his self-appointed morning chore of rousing Jonny and Laura, he ignored his breakfast, curled up on a chair and went to sleep. He slept through all the morning routine, the tiny tip of a pink tongue showing below his sooty nose.

  That morning on an impulse Laura ordered the Christmas tree; it was early but its trimming would divert Jonny—and perhaps herself. The tree, she was told, could be delivered that day.

  There was that morning a series of telephone calls, none of them threatening and anonymous. Matt telephoned first.

  “Everything all right?” he said.

  “Y—yes. There was another of those phone calls.” She told him what there was to tell.

  “It’s a damn queer thing,” he said slowly. “No point to it. At least, none that I can see. I’ll tell Peabody about it. Everything else all right?”

  She had fancied the night before that someone had entered the apartment; it was only fancy. She said, “Yes, all right.”

  “Look here, if you take Jonny out today, stay with other people, will you? Don’t go to the park.”

  She wouldn’t, she told him; and yes, she and Jonny would be at home by late afternoon when he said he’d like to come in to see them.

  She had barely put down the telephone when it rang again. She was beginning to feel a prickling awareness of the telephone, like dread; she picked it up and answered quickly before fear could fasten its hold upon her. This time it was the doctor, Dr. Stevens, polite, kind, asking if he could be of any help. He’d meant to call her before; he’d been busy; her discovery of the murdered man must have been shocking. “I gather the inquest is to be held off for a few days, pending identification of the man,” he said. “He told you he was the little girl’s father, didn’t he? Well, the police will clear it up. Anything I can do for you? No, don’t apologize, my dear; you were quite right in calling me.”

  And then, as people read the morning papers and saw her name in connection with the account of the murder, there were other telephone calls—old Laura Slakely, her godmother, who lived in the country near Libertyville, and was shocked, sorry, and insisted that Laura come immediately to stay with her. “I’ll send a car for you. Bring the little girl—what do you call her?—Jonny. But, my dear child, your mother wouldn’t hear of you staying in that apartment alone! You must come out here at once!”

  She was with difficulty persuaded that it was better for Laura to remain in town. “There’s no danger at all,” Laur
a said and hoped she was right. And then Ellen Stone, a friend from early school days telephoned, and Marie Field and Joan Cavert, all three of them shocked, kind, offering to help if there was any way to help—and, quite naturally, excited and intensely curious. One of her former employers, the senior partner in the firm, telephoned, too. “What’s all this, Laura? What’s all this? Now see here, if you need any of us—” He was hurried, brisk, but like Dr. Stevens, sensible and matter-of-fact, and all of it bolstered up her spirits. But then Lieutenant Peabody arrived and brought with him an interpreter, whom he introduced politely.

  “I think we must question the child now, Miss March. I let a little time elapse; it seemed advisable. But we can’t wait any longer.”

  There was nothing to do but agree. And at the end of a patient and long hour of questioning, they still knew nothing.

  The interpreter, a stolid, sturdy little man in a shabby brown suit, was patient and gentle with Jonny; Peabody suggested questions and he put them into Polish, but Jonny only shrank against Laura, occasionally shook her head and steadfastly refused to reply. Her face was still and wary; her blue eyes perfectly— purposefully—blank. In the end, the interpreter turned to Peabody with a hopeless shrug. “I am sure she understands me.”

  Laura put her arm around Jonny; the child was trembling. She said, “Isn’t that enough?”

  “The question is why doesn’t she answer?” Peabody said dreamily.

  The interpreter looked at him and again shrugged. “I am sorry, Lieutenant. I’ve tried every way I know. I asked her if she had seen her father lately. I asked her what her father looked like. I’ve asked her everything and—you can see for yourself. I think it frightens her.”

  “Yes,” the Lieutenant said, “I think you’re right. And that’s odd.” He got to his feet. “Well, thank you.” He paid the interpreter, who took the money in a businesslike way, then bowed to Jonny and said something in Polish at which Jonny permitted herself a faint, cautious smile. He said to Peabody, “I told her to be a good little girl, that Christmas was coming and St. Nicholas is nice to good little girls at Christmas.”

  Plainly, he felt sorry for the child. Laura said, “Thank you,” and the interpreter bowed politely to her, too, and went away.

  “Now then,” the Lieutenant said, “these telephone calls you say you’ve had. Tell me all about them again.”

  There was, of course, not much to tell, and she was not at all sure that he believed her brief account.

  He said thoughtfully, “Of course, we can have these calls traced but that involves practically a twenty-four-hour service at the switchboard. Even then it is difficult, particularly if the calls are made from a pay telephone. Stedman seems to feel that in the telephone call that came while he was here, I mean when somebody spoke to him, there was an element of threat. Did you feel that?”

  “Nobody spoke to me. But that’s what is frightening.”

  “Ah,” Lieutenant Peabody said. “Whoever called spoke to him but refuses to speak to you. Of course that might suggest that that one call was made by a different person. Well, I’ll see what I can do.” He looked at Jonny and unexpectedly patted her head. “It’s all right my dear. Don’t be frightened, it’s all right.” He glanced at Laura. “I hope she understood that.”

  Jonny replied by suddenly and shyly smiling at Lieutenant Peabody.

  SEVENTEEN

  SO THAT WAS THAT, Laura thought, after he’d gone; they had questioned Jonny and Jonny had told them nothing. Yet, as Peabody had said, that in itself was rather queer. If Stanislowski had been Jonny’s father, why shouldn’t she have said, “Yes, I saw my father”? Why had she refused to answer any questions put to her in Polish?

  Perhaps Jonny had sensed something, something incomprehensible yet frightening. Perhaps her instinctive childish reaction was to take refuge in silence.

  She must get Jonny outdoors; she must divert her somehow with some special little treat. Matt had said, go where there are people.

  Laura searched the moving picture columns of the newspaper. The day cleared as it wore on, so the sun was out fully by noon, bright and sparkling on the winter lake. They had lunch. Jonny took her nap. The kitten still slept. Laura thought, but vaguely, how long the kitten is sleeping. Early in the afternoon Doris telephoned.

  “Have they questioned Jonny yet?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did she say?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing! What do you mean?”

  “She wouldn’t reply at all. She just stood close against me and shook her head.”

  There was a silence. “Well,” Doris said at last, “there must be some way to get her to talk. What are you doing this afternoon?”

  “I thought I’d take Jonny to the movies. There’s a Disney film.”

  “I’m coming, too,” Doris said flatly. “I’ll pick you up in the car at two.”

  There was nothing to do but agree. Jonny awoke, and in the little rush of getting ready to go it did not strike Laura as unusual that the kitten did not, as was his custom, accompany them to the door with strongly disapproving comments. She and Jonny were standing at the entrance of the apartment house when Doris’ big car swept elegantly up and stopped and the chauffeur sprang out to open the door for them.

  Doris was wrapped in her pale beige mink, subtly perfumed, and as perfectly dressed as if she were going to a cocktail party. Jonny sat between Doris and Laura. The car purred powerfully out into the traffic. And the bright and sunny day lifted Laura’s spirits. It was a typical Chicago winter day, charged with a contagious kind of sparkle and color.

  They drew up at the movie. Immediately and magically they entered an enchanted land. But when the picture was over and they went out again into the street, Laura found herself suddenly searching through the crowds of people, searching for a man in a dark overcoat, bulky and awkward, with a hat pulled over his eyes, and an indistinguishable face. If there was such a man she did not see him. They went through the flooding crowds from the movie, past the laden shoppers along the streets, to the car which stood directly at the door waiting for them, loftily ignoring the protesting squawks of taxis behind it.

  Inside the car it was safe, and quiet except for the powerful rush and roar of the Loop, the shrill two-noted whistles of the traffic policemen. It was already dusk, but a sparkling dusk with lights shining brightly from the great buildings along Michigan Boulevard. The traffic was heavy and slow. It was almost dark when the car deposited Jonny and Laura at the apartment house. Doris had had enough of the afternoon and she had had enough of Jonny and Laura’s company. She said good night, quickly and impatiently, and the car moved away before Jonny and Laura had reached the door of the foyer. Laura stopped this time to pick up mail; there were no telephone messages. The girl at the switchboard eyed her curiously as she gave it to her; clearly she had read the papers.

  Matt had not arrived; he had left no message; he was not waiting in the foyer or lounging in the window of the corridor outside Laura’s apartment. She closed the door of her apartment and, an unpleasant and recent habit, bolted it. Jonny had taken off her red coat and hat, put them neatly away, and gone back to her bedroom, calling Suki, and Laura was absently looking at herself in the mirror, smoothing her hair, when the door buzzer sounded sharply.

  Because she was expecting Matt she went to the door, and then, her hand on the latch, remembered his warning. She called through the door, “Who is it?”

  A feminine voice replied. It’s Doris, Laura thought, and opened the door, too quickly, for the woman, Maria Brown, stood outside.

  She wore the same brown coat and black beret pulled over a short fluff of dark hair. Her face was pale; again she wore no lipstick. Without knowing it Laura made a swift move to close the door but Maria Brown was quicker. She slid purposefully into the hall. She closed the door firmly behind her. She said, “Is the child here?”

  Her words were strongly accented; her voice flat and toneless; it was the voice of the
woman on the telephone, there was no doubt of that. It was the way she had spoken to them, briefly, on the steps of the house in Koska Street. The light on the hall table cast a glow upward into her face. This time Laura scrutinized it, telling herself she must remember details, and this time it seemed to Laura there was something Slavic in her broad cheekbones and sallow skin. She took a step nearer Laura. “Answer me. Is the child here?”

  Jonny. She ought not to have opened the door. It was too late to think of that.

  She must keep the woman from seeing Jonny. She must also try to hold her, try to find out where she was staying, try to find out something about her. How? The telephone stood five feet away. Could she reach it?

  The woman’s hands, in shabby black gloves,’ clutched her handbag purposefully, and she stared at Laura. And suddenly Laura thought, suppose Maria Brown has a gun in that black handbag. She knew that Laura could identify her; she knew that Laura had seen her as she escaped the house on Koska Street, and murder.

  For the first time a sense of personal danger caught at Laura. Maria Brown moistened her pale lips. “Why don’t you answer me?”

  “Where have you been?” Laura cried. “Where did you go? Why did you telephone to me?”

  Maria Brown stared at Laura with fixed, unfathomable eyes and set her pale lips firmly. Her face had strongly marked features, deeply lined, yet nevertheless it was a young face. Talk to her, Laura thought, talk to her—and try to reach the telephone. She hoped that Jonny, attracted by voices, would not come running down the hall. She grasped for words. “You phoned to me, didn’t you? Did he tell you to send for me? Where did you go? The police are looking for you.” That was a mistake; she added hurriedly, “They think you may have evidence. Something you—you saw or—” Her stammering words fell flat, came to a full stop as Maria Brown’s gaze did not waver, and certainly revealed nothing.