She’d be late at the office, but who cared? Anabel, enchanted, said to herself that if one’s days had no place in them for enchantment, then one might as well be dead.
Somebody tapped on the glass of the door. The young man said, “Excuse me?” and went to open it.
“You the man who called? Grange. Lieutenant. Police Department.”
“Yes, sir,” said Anabel’s young man, suddenly very pale. “Lieutenant Grange, this is Miss Anabel Simpson, who has here one of the coats stolen from Carson Frères last June.”
“Is that so?” said the police officer.
“At retail,” said the young man desperately, “that coat is worth about twelve thousand dollars. I’m sorry, Miss Simpson. I had to report this. It would have been very foolish not to . . .”
Anabel straightened up. “I see,” she said. “Stolen? Of course, it was too good to be true.” So much for enchantment. “Do you think I stole it?” She looked at them both.
The young man said, unhappily, “No.”
The policeman, in a blue suit, with a pale gray eye, sounded neither happy nor unhappy. “If you didn’t steal it, where did you get it?”
Anabel told him. She produced her receipt.
The policeman grunted. “We’d better get over there.”
Somebody else had come from some inner room. Anabel’s young man said to him, “Mind the store, Albert.”
“Yes, Mr. Kimberly.”
“Put that coat in a safe place,” said the Lieutenant.
“Yes, sir.”
“I have a car,” said young Mr. Kimberly.
“I have a car,” said Anabel.
“We’ll go in mine,” said the policeman.
So they went, in a dark sedan, from the dashboard of which the policeman removed a device on a tube and spoke cryptically into it. Anabel sat between them, chilly and shorn and disenchanted. Young Mr. Kimberly sat contrite and, though silent, still solicitous. The policeman just sat and drove.
“I don’t suppose I’ll even get my money back,” said Anabel once, forlornly. Nobody answered. “Oh, well,” she said, “it was a very foolish thing to do.” Nobody answered this, either.
They stopped in front of the double house and Mr. Kimberly was gallant, helping Anabel out. Anabel was aloof. The policeman came around the police car and said, “Okay, let’s go.”
“It’s upstairs,” said Anabel, so they went upstairs right away.
The door of 8416 opened and a tall, thin, red-headed woman Anabel had never seen before said, “Yes?”
“About this mink coat,” began the policeman.
“I beg your pardon?”
“This young lady bought a coat from you.”
“I don’t understand.”
“She’s not the one,” said Anabel, feeling small and frightened.
“No?” said the Lieutenant. “Where’s Miss or Mrs. Baldwin?”
“There’s nobody here by that name,” said the red-headed woman with her groomed eyebrows high. “My name is Spencer. Mrs. June Spencer.”
“Is this the place?” demanded the policeman.
“Oh, yes, this is the place,” said Anabel.
“Mrs. Spencer, my name is Grange. Lieutenant, Police Department. Could we come in?”
“Well, I suppose so,” said the redheaded woman. “But I can’t imagine what this is all about.”
When they were all inside, the policeman asked once more, “Is this the place?”
“Yes,” said Anabel, looking around her. “I mean, I’m pretty sure. It looks just like it.” She closed her eyes and said, “It must be.”
The policeman’s head shook, despairing of female positiveness. He said to Mrs. Spencer, “This young lady bought a coat here earlier this morning—a mink for five hundred dollars.”
“Really,” said Mrs. Spencer with an embarrassed laugh, “I don’t happen to have a mink coat. Forgive me if I seem a little stupid. I just woke up twenty minutes ago.”
“Nobody else lives here?”
“Why, no.”
“How long have you lived here?”
“Oh, two years.”
“Mind if I take a look around?”
“Well, no . . .” the woman said with a housewifely fluster.
The Lieutenant went through a door. Mrs. Spencer said, “Won’t you sit down? Mr. . . . Miss . . .?”
“Patrick Kimberly. This is Miss Simpson.”
“What is this all about?”
“I don’t quite know,” said Mr. Kimberly stiffly. He guided Anabel’s arm with a touch, and she sat down.
The Lieutenant was back almost at once. “Nobody else here.” He fixed Anabel with his piercing gray eye. “What did your Mrs. Baldwin look like?”
“Short, blonde, dumpy,” said Anabel, staring at tall, red-haired slender Mrs. Spencer.
“I don’t even know anyone like that,” Mrs. Spencer said. “Surely there’s been some mistake?”
“Seems to have been,” he said his pale eyes examining Anabel.
Anabel, who was getting mad, lifted her cornflower-blue gaze. “What about the ad in the newspaper?,” she said crisply.
“Hmm. You got a morning paper, Ma’am?” inquired the policeman.
“No, I’m afraid I don’t. I really don’t understand.”
“You say there’s no mink coat, no sale, no nothing?”
“Well I suppose that’s what I say,” said Mrs. Spencer helplessly. “I don’t know what else to say. May I offer you some coffee?”
“No, thanks,” said the Lieutenant. He beckoned with his chin. “Let’s go,” he said, and he led them out and down the stairs.
“If there’s anything I can do,” called Mrs. Spencer from above.
When they were back on the little porch. Anabel’s cheeks were pink and her eyes full of blue fire. She said, “There is some flimflam going on here.”
“I think so too,” said Mr. Kimberly quickly.
“Yeah?” said the policeman. Again his pale eyes regarded Anabel.
So Anabel turned around and pushed the bell-button of 8414.
“What’s this?” snapped the Lieutenant.
“The newspaper,” cried Anabel. “I’ll show you. There was a morning paper on this mat—”
8414 opened. “Yes?” the man said.
“May we see your paper?” Anabel demanded.
“My . . . huh?” The man looked bewildered.
“Lieutenant Grange. Police,” said the detective, edging Anabel aside.
“Police!”
“You got the morning paper?”
“Well, I . . . Yeah,” said the man. “What’s up?”
“Much obliged if you’d let me have a look at it. Like to ask a couple of questions, too.”
“Well, sure thing.”
The man backed inward and the three of them entered the downstairs apartment.
“You the landlord here?” asked the Lieutenant, from some instinct.
“That’s right. My name is Ferguson. Listen, what’s the trouble, officer?”
“Oh, a little question’s come up,” said Lieutenant Grange. “Let’s just see your paper, if you don’t mind.”
Ferguson plucked the paper off a table and held it out. The policeman allowed Anabel to take it. She dropped every section but the Classified. She turned pages in panic. What if there was no such ad? What if she had had some insane dream? Then her forefinger was shakily pointing. “See?”
Lieutenant Grange humphed in her right ear.
Mr. Kimberly was looking over her other shoulder, and he um-humphed in triumph into her left ear. Anabel felt much better.
Ferguson, who was a middle-aged man with very little hair, tea-colored eyes, and a hollow-chested stance, said, “What’s going on, hey?”
Anabel stepped backward and felt her cheek being breathed on by Mr. Kimberly. He said softly, “I believed you.”
She murmured, “There’s something else, too—”
The Lieutenant was saying, “This young lady says she
bought a valuable mink coat upstairs this morning.”
“Upstairs?” said Ferguson. “From Mrs. Spencer? I dunno as I ever saw her with a mink.”
“You never did, eh?” said the policeman. “You married, Mr. Ferguson?”
“Nope.” Ferguson followed the Lieutenant’s gaze with his own. A bag of knitting lay in the corner of an armchair. “My sister has been visiting me. But she took off for a few days to the beach.”
“Mind if I look around?”
“Help yourself.”
Again the policeman vanished through a door. Ferguson cast a worried glance at the two of them. Then he followed the Lieutenant, saying, “The bed ain’t made. I hope you’ll excuse it.”
Mr. Kimberly said hurriedly to Anabel, “What something else,
Miss Simpson?”
Anabel said, “This isn’t the same man, either.”
“Oh, no,” he groaned, full of sympathy. “Are you sure?”
“It was a man’s hand that I saw take in the paper. I saw his wrist. It had the watch on backwards. But this one’s isn’t.” Anabel knew that she wasn’t making much sense, but it didn’t seem to matter because
Mr. Kimberly felt so firm to her shoulder.
“There’s some kind of flimflam going on,” he said. “Now don’t you worry!”
“But when it’s not the same woman, and it’s not the same man but it is the same place . . .”
“Sssh,” said Mr. Kimberly.
“Shall I tell the lieutenant? It sounds so—well, so crazy! Why wouldn’t it be the same man either?” said Anabel. “I’m all confused.”
“Of course you are,” murmured Mr. Kimberly.
“He doesn’t believe me, anyway. How could he?”
“Sssh,” said Mr. Kimberly, “I believe you.”
The Lieutenant and Ferguson came back. “No short, dumpy blonde, or anybody else,” the Lieutenant said with a stern glance at Anabel. “Now, Miss Simpson, this is getting to look kind of peculiar.”
“It certainly is,” said Anabel meeting his eye.
“We’re going to have to check it out.” The policeman turned to the landlord. “Your full name is Lester Ferguson? Right?”
“Right.”
“You own this building?”
“Yes, sir.”
“How long?”
“Eight . . . no, nine years, I guess it will be, come November.”
“And this Mrs. June Spencer, she’s rented the upstairs for how long?”
“Couple of years, I’d say.”
“And you don’t know anything about any mink coat?”
“Sure don’t, Lieutenant.”
“Or the ad in the paper with this address?”
“Must have been a misprint of some kind, I’d say.”
The policeman blinked rapidly.
Mr. Kimberly said, “Maybe it was corrected in a later edition. Maybe Ana . . . Miss Simpson got the earlier edition.”
“And maybe not, eh?” said the Lieutenant. “Well, Ferguson, we’ll be talking to you again, probably.”
“Any time,” said Ferguson, and he enthusiastically opened the door to let them out.
Several people were bunched together on the porch, and a few more on the sidewalk. Mrs. Spencer was standing at the bottom of her stairs, very angry with five women and two men, who were all babbling at once, each one holding up a folded morning newspaper.
“Lieutenant Grange,” she cried at the sight of him. “Will you please make these people go away? The ad is a mistake. I didn’t put it in. I have no coat for sale!”
“That’s right, folks,” said the Lieutenant, shoving into their midst. “Looks like there’s been a mistake here . . .” The people surrounded him, waving their newspapers.
Anabel was clutching Mr. Kimberly’s sleeve. “That man. He’s the man!”
“What man?”
“The man in the brown suit! He is. I know!”
Mr. Kimberly shoved forward and grasped the left wrist of the man in the brown suit, who was standing a little to one side with the newspaper in his hand, just watching and listening.
“Hey!” the man said, pulling.
“Uh-uh,” said Mr. Kimberly, pulling the other way.
Then the two men were wrestling and the women were squealing.
Lieutenant Grange bellowed and two uniformed cops came running from a prowl car at the curb. Very quickly Mr. Kimberly was panting in the grasp of one of them, and the man in the brown suit was panting in the grasp of the other.
“Ladies,” said Lieutenant Grange, “stand aside, please! Now,” he fixed Mr. Kimberly with his pale fierce eye, “what do you think you’re doing?”
Anabel had to defend her defender. She said, “That is the man who took the paper in.”
“Huh?”
“Into 8414. Look at his watch.”
The Lieutenant took the man’s left wrist and turned it and humphed in a startled way.
“So?” the man snarled at him. He had long teeth in a lean pale face.
“He wears the strap outside,” said Anabel, “and so did the hand that came out of the door and took the paper in.”
“So?” the man snarled at her. “It’s a crime to wear your watch on the inside of your wrist? What goes on here? I came to answer an ad in the paper. Listen, you’ll hear from this, all of you!”
The uniformed men seemed to know that they ought not to let go yet. The Lieutenant stood there, stolid and skeptical, watching.
Young Mr. Kimberly was silent, too. He licked his lips and looked anxiously at Anabel. She was up to it. She said to Lieutenant Grange, “Pick up his newspaper.”
“Huh?”
“There.”
The Lieutenant looked down at the porch floor and saw a folded newspaper. “This one? How do you know it’s his?”
“Well, isn’t it?” said Anabel fiercely. “Look around.”
The Lieutenant sent his pale glance through the small crowd. Sure enough, all the rest still had their papers, folded to the Classified, in their hands. “Well, so it’s his,” he said. “So what?”
“That’s the point,” cried Anabel. “It isn’t his paper, it’s mine. I left it behind me in her apartment upstairs. I’d marked the ad myself with green ink. The ad in the paper he dropped is marked in green ink. And here, see my pen? Green ink!”
“Oh, come on, what’s with you?” said the stranger in the brown suit. “You the only one in the world who uses green ink?”
“Well, no,” Anabel said, “but I always make those squiggles . . .” Oh, she knew, she knew. But how could she make them believe?
Mr. Kimberly said suddenly, “That receipt the woman wrote out for you, Miss Simpson. Wasn’t it on a piece of newspaper?”
“Yes,” Anabel said, realizing. “I tore it off a corner of my paper—”
“And the corner of this page is torn, Lieutenant,” Mr. Kimberly said. “You’ve got the receipt. Why don’t you match the two?”
Lieutenant Grange matched them. Then he slowly stuffed receipt and the newspaper into his pocket. Breath came into Anabel. The lieutenant turned to Ferguson, who was standing in the doorway 8414. “Do you know this man? Was he in your place this morning?”
“I don’t know him,” Ferguson said. “How could he have been in my place?”
Lieutenant Grange said to the red-headed woman who was still standing at the bottom of her stairs, “Do you know this man? Was he in your place this morning?”
“I don’t know him,” she said. “How could he have been in my place?”
Grange said to the man in the brown suit, “You weren’t here? You know nothing? You’re an innocent party?”
“Right,” snapped the man.
“Well, then,” the Lieutenant said, “you won’t mind showing me your bill of sale or receipt for of that Patek-Philippe watch you’ve got on?”
The man in the brown suit stood still. Everybody stood still. Then the man said, “Better go two blocks up and take the left turn into the park. In
my green two-door . . .”
“Yeah?” the Lieutenant said.
“My wife’s in the trunk. Why should she smother or something?”
The red-headed woman shrieked to the man in the brown suit, “Harry . . .”
Ferguson said, “Oh, for crumb’s sake, sis. I told you you couldn’t work a switch. I told you to lay off messing around with a married man.”
“How could Harry and me know that stupid blonde wife of his would get mad at us and sell the damn coat!” screeched the red-headed woman. “She knew it was hot.”
“Kindly shut up,” said the man in the brown suit to his fellow-conspirators. “Kindly shut up.”
The policeman who dropped Mr. Kimberly and Miss Simpson off at the fur shop took the mink coat away. Anabel didn’t watch it go; she couldn’t. Mr. Kimberly was saying not to go to her office, she was too upset. He would bring coffee.
So over the coffee in this cool and reputable place, Mr. Kimberly explained. “Harry and his wife, the blonde, were thieves, lying low in 8416. The red-headed woman—landlord Ferguson’s sister—and Harry got together. So the blonde wife decided to walk out on him, as she told the Lieutenant.”
“She needed money?” Anabel said.
“And sold a stolen coat. Pretty stupid.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Anabel dreamily. “It didn’t fit her anyway.”
“Women!” exclaimed Mr. Kimberly. Then hastily, “Not you, of course.”
“We’re kind of impulsive,” said Anabel. “I was.”
“You’re a darling,” said Mr. Kimberly, not too much under his breath.
“But what you did! Oh, Mr. Kimberly, that was a very foolish thing to do—”
“Pat . . .”
“Pat, it wasn’t very wise of you to grab that criminal just because
I said—”
“Yes, it was,” said Mr. Kimberly. “It was the wisest thing I probably ever did.”
Nodding to her literary ancestor Edgar Allan Poe, Charlotte Armstrong drops a headstrong young reporter in New York City into an unsolved disappearance case from years ago. While the Gothic elements of the surroundings and what she discovers do not overwhelm the brash young protagonist, her misguided actions make her face whether some stones ought to be left unturned. This story first appeared in EQMM in 1968.
Night Call and Other Stories of Suspense Page 2