Postmark Murder

by Mignon G. Eberhart

  Finally the woman moistened her lips, and said tonelessly, “I know the police are looking for me. I read the newspapers. They will never find me. I have had experience. I know how to hide. The police—what are they doing? They search for me; I read that. But that is all. There is too little in the paper. It is too short. There are other lines of—of inquiry. That is kept secret. What do they believe? What do they suspect? Tell me—”

  “I—I don’t know.”

  Marie Brown did not believe her; her dark eyes searched Laura’s with frank skepticism. Talk to her, Laura thought desperately; she wished that Matt would come; he would know what to do. Be diplomatic, she thought; be cautious. “If you are a witness, Miss Brown, if you have any evidence, why don’t you tell the police? They won’t hurt you. They won’t do anything to you. Don’t be afraid.”

  “Bah!” Maria Brown said. “The secret police! I know them. They’ll never find me.” Scorn flashed in her face. And then she saw Laura’s slight instinct of movement toward the telephone.

  “Do not touch the telephone! Do not try to call the police. I tell you I will not—” Her stocky body moved swiftly. She clamped one hand down hard on the telephone.

  She must not show fear; try to reason, Laura thought, swiftly. And keep that implacable strong figure in the hall, away from Jonny. Somehow she made her voice steady and quiet. “You can’t hide forever. It’s better to come forward now and tell them if there’s anything you know. They think you may be a witness. He was alive when you telephoned to me, wasn’t he? And then he died—”

  Jonny’s fluty high voice called suddenly and in distress from the kitchen. “Laura—Suki!”

  The woman’s head jerked toward the kitchen, and Laura seized her by the wrist. Maria Brown pulled away with one hard motion, swung around to the door, flung it open and was gone, her heels thudding hard down the corridor.

  By the time Laura reached the door, Maria Brown had already got to the elevator. It still stood at that floor, the door open, and Maria Brown slid into it and out of sight. Laura could see only her gloved hand pushing the signal button. The door of the elevator shut irrevocably almost in Laura’s face. And from the doorway of her own apartment Jonny wailed, “Laura!” A flood of Polish words followed, incomprehensible except in their tone of fright and distress. Laura ran back. Jonny held the kitten in her hands, and something was very wrong with the kitten. His little body was limp, his eyes blue slits, his mouth slack and half open.

  Stop the woman, Maria Brown! How? Call the police! Call Matt—but first do something about the kitten.

  She managed to look in the classified advertisements of the telephone book and find a nearby veterinarian. She dialed his number and told him about the kitten. She listened to his directions.

  “Sounds as if the kitten has been accidentally drugged,” he said. “Give him some very strong coffee. Pour it by the teaspoonful, into his cheek. He’ll swallow some of it. If he doesn’t start to come out of it in a few minutes, let me know. I’ll come.”

  She telephoned to Matt while she was making coffee, and Jonny, holding the kitten anxiously, stood beside her.

  “Maria Brown!” Matt shouted. “Hold everything. I’ll be there as soon as I can make it!”

  Somehow Laura contrived to reassure Jonny. Somehow she steadied her hands and drew the kitten’s little lips away and got a few drops of coffee into his cheek. His heart was beating slowly, but beating. She tried another teaspoonful of coffee. She stroked his throat gently. At last there was a faint swallowing motion. It seemed hours; it was in fact twenty minutes before the kitten sputtered, shook his head and opened his eyes to give them a blue dazed look. By the time Matt arrived he was on his feet wobbly and uncertain.

  It was like Matt to take time to lift the kitten in his hands, to examine him, to comfort Jonny, to tell her the kitten was all right. He was all right, or about to be; he achieved a weak and hoarse purr as Matt stroked his throat.

  And then Matt questioned Laura swiftly and telephoned to Lieutenant Peabody. Apparently Lieutenant Peabody was either angry or skeptical, or both. Matt said, “Well, that’s the way it happened. She gave no warning of it. She just arrived. … Miss March tried to question her.

  No, the woman wouldn’t answer. The only thing she asked about was Jonny ‘Is the child here?’ … She asked what the police were doing. She said you’d never find her.

  She said the secret police and she said she knew how to hide, so it looks as if she’s had experience, in Poland perhaps or—well, that’s what she said! … Well, then she heard Jonny’s voice and Miss March caught her arm, she thought she might have a gun. She got away. … There was no way to stop her, Lieutenant! …All right.”

  He hung up, his face hard and white.

  “He doesn’t believe it,” Laura said.

  Matt hesitated for a moment. Then he said, “There’s a girl at the switchboard downstairs. How do you ring her?”

  There was a house-number. Laura gave it to him.

  “Hello,” said Matt, “hello. I’m calling for Miss March. I wonder if you happened to notice a woman in the lobby, a short time ago. She was dark and short. She wore a brown coat and a black beret. I see, thank you.” He put down the telephone.

  “She didn’t see her,” Laura said.

  Matt shook his head. “She said she was busy. And, of course, this is a busy time of day with lots of people coming and going and lots of telephone calls. I wish she had seen her.”

  “Lieutenant Peabody will not believe me?”

  “He’ll have to believe you,” Matt said and looked at Jonny and the kitten. “Now then, what’s the vet’s number?”

  Again Laura listened while he talked to the veterinarian. He turned at last from the telephone.

  “He says the kitten was drugged. Says it was a kind of sedative, very strong, sleeping capsules, for instance.”

  “But I have nothing of the kind, Matt! There’s nothing he could have got!”

  “What did he have to drink that was different? Who gave it to him? Has anyone fed him except you?”

  “No, of course not. Oh, sometimes Jonny gives him a little milk. This morning he had his usual breakfast, some cat food, fishy. I threw out the can. There’s nothing in that, that could hurt him. He lapped a little of the milk and coffee from the thermos. You know. Jonny has chocolate from one thermos and I have a kind of cafe au lait from another, early in the morning—”

  “Yes I know.” Matt said. He hesitated “Did you drink the rest of it?”

  “No. I didn’t want milk this morning. I wanted real coffee—”

  “Was there anything else at all that the kitten could have eaten?” There was something odd in his voice, something icy and angry in his eyes.

  Laura said slowly. “Jonny gave him some cream from her oatmeal.”

  “Jonny had the rest of the cream on her oatmeal, right? And there’s nothing the matter with her. You didn’t drink any of the milk and coffee from the thermos— Where’s the thermos?”

  “I washed it. That and the saucer the kitten drank from but I—” A strange and terrible speculation leaped from nowhere, stood clear and unavoidable.

  EIGHTEEN

  MATT WAS ALREADY AWARE of it; it was in his face, in his questions, but he didn’t know of a door which had closed at a time when two thermos bottles stood on the kitchen table. He said quickly, “What is it, Laura? What—”

  “Last night I thought someone was here—I heard something—”

  She told him of it, aware of the icy anger gathering in his face. As if to conceal it, so as not to alarm her, he turned abruptly away, went into the living room, walked the length of it, stood at the window for a moment, and then came back. He paused to stroke Suki; he said, “He’s all right now, Jonny.” The kitten lifted blue eyes, and purred and snuggled against Jonny’s shoulder.

  “He’s going to make it,” Matt said. He sat down in one of the lounge chairs and stretched his long legs out in his habitual posture and stared at the
rug. “Now, let me get this straight, Laura. That’s all you heard? Just the sound of the door closing? What time was that?”

  “I don’t know. About eleven, I think. It seemed late. I was just about to go to bed.”

  “You hadn’t heard any other sound in the apartment?”

  “No, nothing. It doesn’t seem possible that anybody entered the apartment.”

  “Was anything disturbed? Anything—taken?”

  “No, nothing. Not so far as I know.”

  He rose without a word and went out to the kitchen. Laura followed; he was experimenting with the kitchen door, opening and closing it, working the lock. “You’d better keep this bolted. Night latches are very easy to open. A piece of celluloid, a thin knife. Keep it bolted. Keep the chain on.” He put the chain across the door, and came back again to the telephone.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Report this to Peabody.”

  This time Peabody seemed frankly skeptical, and impatient. “No,” Matt said. “She didn’t see anybody in the apartment last night. She heard a door close but the thermos was on the kitchen table then. You’d believe it if you’d seen the kitten! The vet says he was heavily drugged. Obviously that was intended for Miss March, not for Jonny. The other thermos held chocolate in it. Anybody would guess that milk flavored with coffee was meant for Miss March and the chocolate for the child. It would be a logical guess. … No, she washed the thermos and saucer. … No, there’s no proof! But it happened and it shows that somebody wanted to—” Matt checked himself, with a glance at Laura, listened for a time and then said shortly, “All right,” and hung up.

  Laura said, “He didn’t believe that either!”

  “He’s going to talk to you about it. Look here, Laura. I don’t want to frighten you. But—”

  “I know,” Laura said. It was a nightmare; there was no reality about it; yet, as in a confused and yet terrifying dream, a fancied voice may speak words that seem clear and significant, those words emerged. “It was meant for me.”

  “If it was like that,” Matt said, “then there’s got to be a reason for it. It would be easy enough for anybody to get in that kitchen door and put stuff in the thermos bottle. It would be the logical guess that the thermos with coffee in it was for you, and the chocolate was for Jonny. Laura, is there anything that you haven’t told the police that would give them an idea as to the murderer?”

  Murder, Laura thought—and attempted murder. But murder was for the newspapers, for other people. It had nothing to do with her! Yet murder had touched her when Conrad Stanislowski had come to her apartment. She had brushed its skirts when she entered the rooming house and found Conrad Stanislowski in that bare, brightly lighted little room.

  “No,” she said. “No. I’ve told the police everything that happened. There’s no reason—there’s no reason why anybody would—would—” murder me, she thought incredulously; murder me!

  “You’ll have to accept the fact that it happened, Laura. If the small amount that the kitten lapped was enough to put him asleep for the day, there must have been a pretty big amount of it in the thermos.”

  Even in the pleasant, orderly room, a kind of cold and terrible disorder seemed to make itself manifest, intangibly, seeping from somewhere outside like a chill little wind. That was fear.

  She took a long breath. “There is nothing I know that threatens anybody, Matt! Nothing!”

  He began to pace up and down the room, restlessly, hands thrust in his pockets. “Could there be then something you know and—and don’t realize that you know? That’s possible, isn’t it? Something which, put with something else perhaps, would add up dangerously to the murderer.”

  Laura’s thoughts traveled again an all too familiar path, familiar and in its way clearly outlined, yet it was like a path winding amid dark and treacherous undergrowth. “No,” she said. “No.”

  Matt stopped at the window, which now reflected the room with its soft gray and clear yellows, the glittering glass walls of the French clock, Laura herself, erect and white, against the green armchair, watching him. He said, over his shoulder, “Since Conrad did not die when he was stabbed, and apparently the murderer thought he was dead and left him for dead—that is, assuming that the murderer was not Maria Brown—then the murderer might get a terrific jolt when he learned that not only you, but Maria Brown, had actually been in the rooming house. Maria Brown must have had some conversation with him. Again assuming that she is not the murderer, the murderer might jump to the conclusion that Conrad Stanislowski had also talked to you before he died. And what would be more likely, if that had happened, than to tell you who stabbed him!”

  “He didn’t. If he had, I’d tell the police. Whoever murdered him would know that I would tell the police!”

  Matt pulled the yellow curtains across the windows and came back to lean one elbow on the mantel. “The point is we can’t let it happen again. I’ll get Peabody to give you police guard.”

  “Oh, no! I’ll keep the doors bolted after this!”

  “Darling,” he said in an odd voice, half gentle half stern “you opened the door for Maria Brown.”

  She could feel the quick flush in her cheeks. “I thought it might be Doris. It was stupid—”

  Matt took three strides to her and put his hand under her chin, tilting up her face so she met his eyes directly. “Don’t do it again. I—” He stopped “Well, just don’t do it again.” He took his hand from her chin, lighted a cigarette and sat down, his eyes suddenly very blue—and altogether enigmatic.

  Laura said, still feeling the warm pressure of his hand around her chin, absurdly confused by it and hoping he did not observe her confusion, “I’ve been warned. If anybody really wants to get in, I can stop it. I’ll be careful—”

  Matt looked at her for a long moment. Then he said abruptly, “This woman, Maria Brown, knew your address. Of course she could have looked it up in the phone book. She managed to get up here without being seen by the switchboard girl, but then, of course, that wouldn’t be hard. Certainly she got away in a hurry. She’s hiding and she intends to stay hidden, so she’s afraid of the police. Her reason for coming here apparently was to find out certainly whether or not Jonny is here. So it comes back to the business of Jonny somehow being a—a motive, a focus, for this whole affair. Laura, this time you had a good look at the Brown woman. Describe her, will you?”

  Laura did so, in detail, her broad face with a trace of the Slavic in her cheekbones, dark eyes in which scorn had flickered when Laura spoke of the police. Her pale firm mouth, the strength of the hand which had clamped down on the telephone, her purposeful movements, her implacable determined manner.

  “How about her voice?” Matt said. “Are you still sure she telephoned to you?”

  “Yes. She has an odd voice, flat, toneless, rather husky.”

  Matt said, so gravely that it seemed a very important question, “Were you frightened?”

  “Yes. I thought she might have a gun—”

  “I mean were you—oh, instinctively frightened, with your nerves, not your reasoning process?”

  “Oh. You mean because she murdered him—”

  “If she did,” Matt said shortly.

  Laura thought back to that brief interview “Yes. I was frightened. Yet I had to talk to her, try to reach the phone. I wished you were here. I wished you would come. You’d have known what to do.”

  The flicker of a grin touched Matt’s mouth. “Don’t rate me too high. I can’t think of anything I’d have done that you didn’t do.

  Except I might have managed to hang onto her. Perhaps not. She sounds a little violent.”

  “No,” Laura said slowly, “there was nothing hysterical or emotional about her. It was all cut and dried. As if she had planned every word. As if she knew exactly what she was doing.”

  “Well, that’s not good either,” Matt said. “Did she see Jonny?”

  “No, she only heard her voice. That’s when I caught her by the
wrist and she pulled away and left.”

  “You say she looked young? How young?”

  “In her thirties I think.”

  Matt eyed her for a moment. “I wonder if she was Conrad’s wife.”

  “His wife! But she’s dead! Conrad told me.”

  “Did he say that exactly?”

  He hadn’t, of course. “I thought that’s what he meant. He started to speak of his wife. He said, ‘I married—’ and then he stopped and said, ‘I was left to see to the child’—something like that.”

  “Perhaps that’s literally what he meant.”

  Again Matt rose and began to pace around the room, circling the sofa and chairs, his dark head bent thoughtfully. “Perhaps that’s exactly what he meant. Perhaps his wife did leave him, and she left Jonny, who would have been a baby at the time. Suppose she got to Chicago, heaven knows how. Suppose Conrad knew her address and went to the rooming house because she was there. He as good as told you that there was something he wanted to do, something he had to do, before he could come forward openly and present his credentials, make himself known to all of us and claim Jonny and of course the money. Perhaps the thing that he had to do, or settle, concerned this woman, his wife. And she killed him.”

  “But she phoned to me for help! She asked me to bring a doctor!”

  “And then he died and she ran away. Look at it this way, Laura. If Maria Brown was his wife, if she had left Conrad and deserted her baby, she’d have had to be certainly a ruthless woman. If she had quarreled so desperately with Conrad that she’d leave her baby—yes, she might have the cruelty and ruthlessness to kill him. And she may have had a pretty solid motive.”

  He was talking now, Laura thought, like a lawyer, concisely, analytically, assembling his case. He stood facing her, hands in his pockets, his face intent. “Suppose he met her and told her of the will! As a matter of fact they must have been in communication, somehow, if he knew her address. So suppose she knew of the will. Suppose she decided to kill Conrad and escape, then later she intended to come forward and establish her claim to Jonny and the money. Certainly if she’s Jonny’s mother, she would have every reason to expect some of the money to go directly to her after Conrad’s death. Certainly she would be the obvious guardian for Jonny.”