Postmark Murder

by Mignon G. Eberhart

  The door closed and Matt came back. “Jonny’s tired,” he said and carried Jonny back into her little bedroom.

  So I was wrong, Laura thought, again; the second man is the real Conrad. Only Jonny’s father could have known the gay, tender little game with the song, and Jonny had instantly responded. When Matt attempted to imitate it, she had been only troubled and silent.

  It was true that the child was by then puzzled, tired, perhaps frightened by all those questions; she was also clearly on guard. Matt’s theory that she had been trained to answer no questions that in any remote way could concern her father was almost certainly the right one. But that afternoon, when the second Conrad had caught Jonny up and begun to sing, there had been no hesitation, no reluctance.

  There were sounds of a romp going on in Jonny’s room. Jonny was shouting with glee. All her silence of the previous hour had gone; she was bubbling with her own special mixture of Polish and English conversation. Matt was apparently speaking for Suki —who was, as a matter of fact, quite capable of speaking for himself and usually did with great vehemence, but not in the English language. It was a long conversation which ended when Matt said in his natural voice and very firmly, “Now go to sleep. Good night, Jonny.”

  Jonny’s high treble answered. “Dobra noc, Matt.”

  After a few moments Matt came back. “She’s asleep.”

  “That song—he is her father, Matt.”

  “If he isn’t, somebody’s taken a lot of pains to coach him.”

  “Somebody—what do you mean?”

  “I don’t know, except if he’s an impostor somebody’s had to tell him about the real Conrad’s background, the circumstances of the Stanley will, even that little song.”

  There was again a subtle flicker of excitement in Matt’s face. She said, “Matt, you know something. What?”

  He looked at her for a long moment; then he came to her, put his hand under her chin and looked down into her eyes. “I’ve only got a sort of idea that this second Conrad is the impostor, the first Conrad was the real one, and so—” His face sobered. He straightened, shoved his hands in his pockets and said, “If I’m right, then of course the second Conrad’s appearance is significant, and very important.”

  Something he had said to Doris over the telephone floated out of her memory. “It was in the cards, you told Doris that. You mean you expected another Conrad?”

  “I thought it was a possibility. There must be some plan. Some focus—”

  “But he knows that song, Matt. Charlie believes him. Doris believes him. Lieutenant Peabody believes him—”

  He jerked around to look at her. “Peabody! He was at Doris’!

  He talked to Stanislowski. Do you mean he’s been here again? What did he have to say?”

  She told of the long talk with Peabody and the short one with Charlie. Matt listened, sitting opposite her in one of the lounge chairs, folding and refolding an empty book of matches.

  He grinned rather wryly when she told him of Peabody’s reason for including Matt himself as a suspect. “He says that— that since you are going to marry Doris, her interests are your interests.”

  Matt tossed the crumpled book of matches into an ash tray. “Peabody questioned me, of course. He has made no secret of the fact that he feels that anybody concerned in any way with the Stanley will is a suspect. But I didn’t know he suspected me of killing the man in order to marry money. I don’t have an alibi. I went Christmas shopping after I left here that afternoon. I didn’t go back to the office at all. Since I didn’t find anything that struck me as just what I wanted, I don’t even have a purchase or a charge account item to back me up. And of course it’s true that none of us really has alibis for the time of Catherine Miller’s murder.”

  “He suggested,” Laura said in a small cold voice, “that someone already inside the apartment house might have been waiting for her when she returned.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  MATT SHOT HER A quick glance. “It is far more likely that somebody followed Catherine Miller when she came back to the service entrance, close enough behind her to catch the door before it latched. Or for that matter whoever killed her could have spoken to her, made some excuse for coming in the service entrance. If she was murdered by mistake then she would not have known or suspected anyone.”

  “Matt—who murdered her? Peabody seems to suspect you or me or Doris or Charlie, nobody else.”

  “You’ve been sitting here thinking that; haven’t you?” He glanced at the heap of newspapers. “Reading the newspapers and thinking who killed Conrad? Who killed Catherine Miller? Don’t forget that there’s also Maria Brown and now this new man, this second Conrad. They are suspects, too.”

  “Why should Maria Brown murder Catherine Miller? Whoever murdered her must have believed that she was Maria Brown. And there’s another thing, Matt; if this second Conrad is the real one, who is Maria Brown? She can’t be his wife.”

  “Why not?” Matt said shortly. “She could be anybody.” He rose with a restless motion and began to pace the room up and down, his hands in his pockets, his dark head bent. “Six suspects if we include Maria Brown and Conrad the second. Four if we include only the people who would have benefited by the will if no claimant had turned up, and that, of course, is you and Doris and Charlie. Me, too, according to Peabody! I know you didn’t do it; I know I didn’t do it, so that leaves Doris and Charlie. Doris has never liked the provision of the will; that’s comprehensible. But I can’t see her going out there and sticking a knife into a man. Besides, she says she knew nothing about him and she has an alibi. Now Charlie would have got a third of the trust fund if no claimant turned up. But if he married Doris, he’d have married money, so Peabody’s motive for me would hold for Charlie—”

  “Charlie marry Doris!”

  Matt turned to give her a look which suddenly held a gleam of laughter. “Didn’t you know that?”

  “No! Charlie’s a confirmed bachelor—”

  “I thought you might have guessed,” he said, an amused laughing note in his voice. “In any event it’s true. Doris told me.”

  So Charlie, too, had yielded, after years of comfortable and secure independence, to Doris’ beauty and her gentle feminine charm. Laura said slowly, “Somehow I never thought of Charlie marrying anybody.”

  “Why not?” Matt said. “As a matter of fact, I’ll confess that a base suspicion as to his affections crossed my mind. It did occur to me that just possibly he was fond of the Stanley business, too, and would not have been averse to taking that over and running it.”

  “But that was sold. Right away. Charlie didn’t object to that!”

  “No—no,” Matt said. “He did point out its value to Doris. Remember?”

  Laura thought back to the many conferences between the four of them following Conrad Stanley’s death. “So did you,” she said after a moment.

  Matt laughed. “Certainly, I did. It seemed a pity to get rid of a business like that, even for the price Doris got.”

  Laura said suddenly, “But Doris isn’t going to marry Charlie. She”—the words came out in a rush—“she told me she’s going to marry you.”

  An odd look came into Matt’s face; he picked up an ash tray, examined it closely and said, “Did she?”

  Laura swallowed hard—and had to go on. “Of course, I know that you’ve been in love with Doris for a long time.”

  Again Matt gave her an odd, straight look. Then he said, “The point is Doris said she refused Charlie. So no matter how much money Doris might get from the Stanley fund, it wouldn’t do Charlie any good. I can see Charlie neatly dispatching anybody, regretfully perhaps, but quite coolly and impersonally and very, very efficiently if he thought it was the thing to do. But I think he’d have been efficient, too, about covering his tracks. I think he’d have arranged a very solid sort of defense first. And I certainly don’t think he’d take such a risk on the chance of Doris changing her mind eventually and deciding to marry him. Besid
es, Doris isn’t the kind of girl to turn over her bank account to anybody, not if I know Doris and I think I do.”

  And you’re in love with her, Laura thought. She said, “Charlie is willing to accept the second Conrad. His papers, passport, everything, have convinced Charlie. He doesn’t oppose him. So why should he have murdered the first man? I mean—”

  “You mean he has not murdered the second one?” Matt laughed shortly. “There’s still time for that! No—I don’t mean that, Laura. It was a bad joke. I see your point. The only thing we are certain of is that Jonny’s the pivot. Jonny’s the motive. Jonny and the money. And I rather think that Maria Brown may have the key to the whole affair.” He hesitated. “You asked me why I felt that the second Conrad is the impostor. I’ll tell you one small thing but don’t give it too much weight.”

  He gave her a rather serious and anxious look, as if he didn’t want to run the risk of disappointing her. “It is trivial: there are a hundred possible explanations for it. All of them reasonable. But this new Stanislowski was wearing an American-made tie. Naturally I was on the lookout for any inconsistencies about him. His clothes looked right somehow, foreign, all that. It seemed to me he was rather at pains to explain his new American-made oxfords. But his tie was a Solvina, American-made and it had been worn. It wasn’t new. He could have got it in England before the war. He could have picked it up in Vienna—oh, there are all sorts of ways. On the other hand it was a small inconsistency.”

  She thought it over for a moment. It seemed too small, too easily explained. “He knew about that song.”

  Matt picked up a cigarette from the little silver dish beside him and rolled it over in his fingers. “Suppose somebody told him all about that, coached him. Miss Nowak said it’s a well-known song; anybody of Polish blood might know it. Suppose Jonny was taken by surprise and she reacted automatically. She didn’t do anything when Miss Nowak tried the song except clutch me around the neck. But she was tired and puzzled. It was all different. She was on guard. She wasn’t going to give anything away. She was going to do what she had been taught to do.”

  After a moment Laura said, “Who coached him?”

  “Well, of course that’s the question. The obvious answer is that Conrad himself told him. Maybe this new guy knew the first Conrad in Poland. Maybe he knew all the circumstances. For that matter he could be Schmidt.”

  “Schmidt?”

  “The man who took Jonny to the orphanage. Obviously a friend of the first Conrad, or at least he had some connection with him. That’s a possibility. Maybe the first Conrad told the second exactly what he was going to do. Maybe the second Conrad—” He checked himself. “Too many possibilities! I’m going off on tangents. But maybe Maria Brown can answer some of the questions.”

  Laura fumbled for his meaning and then understood. “Do you mean that Maria Brown is in a conspiracy with this second Conrad to—”

  “To get Jonny and the money? It’s possible. She could be in cahoots with the new Conrad. She could have known the whole story.”

  “But if—if she was the first Conrad’s wife, I mean the murdered man, if she coached the second Conrad, if she’s behind all this—” Laura caught her breath. “But if she’s Jonny’s mother —how could she?”

  “She left Jonny when she was a baby,” Matt said coolly. “She was in the rooming house when Conrad the first was killed. She got away from the police. She came here to see you, and to make sure that Jonny was here. She knows that you can identify her and somebody, Laura”—suddenly his face was white and stern— “somebody tried to kill you with that sedative.” He came over to the hassock beside her and sat down; he took her hands. “Laura, is there anything, no matter how small or trivial, that you haven’t told me?”

  There wasn’t anything she thought. And then remembered a drifting smell of fragrance of perfume, Doris’ perfume in a little booth on the west side. But Doris had been at the dentist’s. She said, “Those phone calls, Matt. When nobody answered. They’ve stopped.”

  “Oh, yes. Those phone calls.” He rose abruptly, “Well, it’s late. I’m going to have a talk with Peabody in the morning. I’ll tell him about that Solvina tie. I want Peabody to question this new Stanislowski again, give him a real workout. Put the fear of God into him. Of course Peabody may laugh at me but I don’t think he will and maybe—just maybe this Brown woman will turn up.”

  “Matt! What do you mean—”

  “Don’t get your hopes up,” Matt said, but he was suddenly cheerful. “I only said maybe.”

  He went back to the kitchen where he made sure that the chain was fastened. He went to the door of Jonny’s bedroom and looked in at the sleeping child. He came back and gathered up his coat. “Don’t let anybody in, Laura. Remember. I don’t think Jonny will open the door for anybody again, as she did for me this afternoon. I am sure I got that across to her.” He opened the drawer of the table and glanced at the gun. “Remember, it’s murder,” he said, and closed the drawer. “Good night, Laura.”

  He swung off down the corridor. As he stepped into the elevator, he turned and gave her a kind of salute. But after she had bolted the door the apartment again seemed very empty and exposed, high above the sleeping city, and lonely. She, too, opened Jonny’s door. In the stream of light from the hall she could see Jonny, her face buried in the pillow. Suki lay curled tightly against Jonny’s shoulder; he opened one eye, twitched a whisker and went back to sleep.

  Again when she filled the two thermos bottles, she put them immediately in her room. She went into the living room, emptied the ash trays and turned out the lights in the Christmas tree. Jonny must have removed the yellow nodding bird Charlie had given her from its perch on the tree, for it was gone. She turned out the lights in the living room and went to bed. It was a long time before she could sleep.

  If they could have induced Jonny to talk, the important question of Conrad Stanislowski’s identity would have been answered. Laura had not really expected Jonny to reply to the interpreter’s questions, not after she had witnessed Jonny’s refusal to reply to the interpreter Peabody brought. But surely there must be some other way of extracting that all-important information from the child. Surely there ought to have been some slight indication, for instance, of the child’s reaction to the second Conrad.

  There was none. She had taken refuge in cautious silence. She had seemed neither reluctant to leave the second Conrad, nor afraid of him; she had laughed and joined in the song—and that was all.

  After the first Conrad had gone, Jonny had sobbed, wildly and heartbrokenly. Perhaps, Laura decided, that was one reason why she felt so strongly that the first Conrad was Jonny’s father.

  But that night, while Miss Nowak questioned her, Jonny had seemed tired and a little frightened—hadn’t she? That was natural; that was to be expected. It had been a long and to the child a perplexing and tiring day.

  Thinking of Jonny’s behavior, scrutinizing it for any clue to the child’s feelings, it struck Laura suddenly that in fact Jonny had seemed different, troubled, that afternoon. She had stood at the door of Laura’s room, when Laura awoke to find Matt there, pressing close to Matt as if for protection, her eyes unusually grave—as if she were frightened.

  But that was before Doris had called to say that another Conrad had arrived.

  The barrier of language was a barrier now; Laura wished she could talk to the child, carefully but freely. But she must be mistaken in thinking that the child had, somehow, been frightened during the long sleep Laura had had that afternoon. There was nothing that could have frightened or troubled her.

  After a long time, still debating, she went to sleep.

  The next morning, however, Jonny was still thoughtful and silent; her face was pale, her eyes looked heavy and tired and very sober. She followed Laura like a sturdy little shadow. Suki, too, was pensive and refused to play; he sat on top a bookshelf, his tail curled tightly around him, his eyes lambent, as if he felt danger somewhere near. When Laura sought to
distract Jonny from her brooding—frightened?—silence with toys and looked for the yellow bird in Jonny’s room, it was not there.

  The newspapers that morning again had sensational headlines. Once a reporter telephoned from the lobby asking for an interview. Laura, taken by surprise, temporized; she couldn’t see him that morning, she said. Later, then? “Yes,” Laura promised. “Yes. But there’s nothing I know that is not already in the papers.”

  “We’d like a picture, Miss March.”

  Matt would tell her to see reporters if necessary; she forced herself to reply. “Yes—certainly. Later,” and hung up before she was obliged to say exactly when. Her hands were shaking when she put down the telephone; it gave her a small preview of what a murder trial would be.

  Charlie and Doris came an hour or so later, together. They had met in the lobby, Charlie explained quickly, and turned to Doris. “Now then, what’s wrong?”

  “I couldn’t tell you there. And there was that woman in the elevator—” Doris’ face was white; her pink lipstick was smeared. She caught a gasping breath. “The police know I was there!”

  “What do you mean, Doris? Where—”

  “I wasn’t at the rooming house! But I was at Koska Street that afternoon. I was in the telephone booth in that drug store.” She shot a furious look at Laura. “You told them! You saw me there! You told me you didn’t see anybody! But you told the police I was there!”

  “Wait a minute—” Charlie began. “What—”

  “I didn’t see you!” Laura cried. “I didn’t tell the police I saw you. You were at the dentist’s!”

  “What are you talking about, Doris? Tell me,” Charlie said tersely.

  Doris cried in an angry wail, “I was at the dentist’s! But I went to Koska Street. I was going to go to the rooming house. But then I didn’t. I went to the telephone booth. I was going to phone to you, Charlie. I was going to phone to Matt. But then I didn’t do that either. Laura saw me and she told the police!” She whirled toward Charlie; she flung herself into his arms. “Charlie, Laura hates me! She’s always hated me! She—”