Night Call and Other Stories of Suspense

by Armstrong Charlotte

  “You have kids, you keep an eye on who is in the park, believe me,” said the first woman. “Yes, I’ve seen her. Not this morning, though.

  I don’t say she wasn’t here. But I had an appointment at the beauty parlor and it’s a scramble. Sally was going to watch the kids. When I got home I gave them lunch and then kept an eye on them while Sally went to the dentist. We kind of spell each other on a school holiday.”

  “That’s right,” said the other one, whose face had a lopsided, novocained look. “She might have been here when I took off. I wouldn’t want to say for sure. How about the kids? What do they say?”

  “They are willing to say she was or she wasn’t,” said the man, “depending on what they think’s wanted. How old are they?”

  “Seven,” chimed their mothers, in twin voices of despair.

  “But neither of you,” said the man, rather anxiously, “noticed her making and eating her lunch, there on that bench today?”

  The two shook their heads. The one with the new hairdo said impulsively, “I know you can’t tell by looks, but I’ve always kind of liked her looks. For what it’s worth.”

  The one with the novocaine said, “Me, too. I’ve got no intention of growing old, mind, but if I ever do . . .” They both peered around him at Miss Peacock.

  Miss Peacock was sitting there, erect, as was her habit. The sun was lowering, and did not give much warmth. But she felt warm and extraordinarily comfortable. Although this was the end of the quest, she still had no alibi, she was in the hands of the police, and the victim of a crime was insisting that she was a criminal. How odd, she thought. How

  very strange.

  “Come on,” begged the novocained woman, “She didn’t really do it, did she? I don’t want to believe that.”

  Then the hairdo woman snapped her fingers. She had thought of something. “Lunch,” she cried. “Don’t tell me anything. Let me tell you. When I called the kids in I asked them what they’d like. Okay. They absolutely had to have a roll sandwich with tomato and some raw onion.”

  “What?” shrieked the novocained one. “You didn’t give it to them, Barbie?”

  “I sure did,” said Barbie, the hairdo. “Why not? I didn’t have any rolls, of course, but I sold them on plain bread. Well?” She looked at the man. “Where did they get the idea?”

  “That’s what she had,” he admitted.

  “There you are, then,” said hairdo, with satisfaction.

  The detective thanked them and dismissed them. They went drifting toward their children to gather them in. They kept looking back, and smiling.

  The man in the brown suit came to Miss Peacock. He was not smiling. Would she mind waiting where she was while he fetched the car?

  Miss Peacock did not mind.

  When he came back, very shortly, he put her into the seat in his polite way. Miss Peacock said, “It occurs to me that I have been trusted.”

  “You wouldn’t have gotten far,” he said absent-mindedly.

  “It’s no alibi, of course,” she said cheerily. “The children may have seen me prepare just such a sandwich on another day. It’s tenous. It’s only a presumption.”

  “True,” he said, looking straight ahead.

  “Are you—taking me in?”

  “Yes, I am.” The man in the brown suit sighed.

  Miss Peacock sighed too, quite happily.

  At the police station they came into a room where a man in a blue suit was seated at a desk talking with a woman who was dressed in a pink nylon uniform and a white sweater.

  “This is Mrs. Norwood,” the man in the blue suit said. “She works in the bakery a couple of doors away from the lingerie shop. She bought a slip in there this morning.”

  “Mrs. Norwood, have you ever seen this lady before?” asked

  Miss Peacock’s man. He seemed to be presenting her.

  Mrs. Norwood squinted through already squinty eyes. “I don’t know—not really. I just don’t remember.” She was nervous and anxious.

  “Can you say this is not the woman who waited on you?”

  “Well, I can’t say that.” The pink woman twisted her hands. “I wasn’t looking at her so much. I was looking at the merchandise. I just know she wasn’t young.”

  The man in the brown suit was feeling exasperated. Miss Peacock could sense that. So she put her hands on the desk, leaned over toward the pink woman, and asked, “Do you recognize my voice, then?”

  The woman said, “No. No. But I got no ear, honest. I just can’t say, not one way or the other. I can’t help it.”

  “Of course not,” said Miss Peacock comfortingly.

  The man in the blue suit cleared his throat and looked at the man in the brown suit, who rolled his eyes. But Miss Peacock was imagining. “You were looking at the merchandise,” she said, “naturally. Then you must have seen the hands of the person who served you. Were they gloved?”

  “Gloved! For heaven’s sakes, I’d have noticed a thing like that.”

  Mrs. Norwood looked down at Miss Peacock’s hands. Well,” she proclaimed, suddenly radiant and decisive, “I can’t swear as to who it was, but I’ll tell you it wasn’t this lady.”

  “How is that?” demanded the man in the brown suit.

  “Because I saw her fingernails chewed down about as far as they could go. And look!”

  Miss Peacock’s nails were discreetly a medium length, immaculate, softly aglow with a colorless polish.

  The man in the blue suit said, more or less sotto voce, “By the way, we got a line on the gun. M.O. paid off, too. Same thing, over in Glendale. There’s a suspect.”

  “Be with you as soon as I take Miss Peacock home.”

  In the car Miss Peacock said, “Of course, it is only the word of

  Mrs. Norwood against a positive identification.”

  The detective grunted.

  “And it is the truth, is it not, that you still cannot prove that I was anywhere else this morning but in that shop?”

  “That’s right,” he said grumpily.

  “It would be up to a jury . . .” she began.

  Then he burst out. “There’ll be no jury. You read too many mystery stories. I know.”

  “But—”

  “It adds up. There’s such a thing as character. As reputation. I know, I tell you. You didn’t do it. So will you please . . .” Then he muttered, “Excuse me.”

  Miss Peacock became demurely silent. He handed her out of the car and said contritely, “I want to apologize, Miss Peacock, if I was a little bit annoyed. And I apologize for all this trouble.”

  “Oh, no,” cried Miss Peacock. “Please don’t apologize for one moment. I’ve had a perfectly marvelous afternoon.”

  She held out her hand. He bowed so low that he just missed kissing her dainty fingertips.

  Miss Mary Peacock withdrew graciously, and walked, like a queen, into her castle, in a city where she was better than visible—she had been seen through.

  Transcending the generation gap, Armstrong shows the natural affinity that grandparents and grandchildren have for each other and the special language that allows them access to one another without parental interference. This EQMM story from 1967 demonstrates Armstrong’s love of puzzles, developed from childhood games with her father.

  THE COOL ONES

  At 11:30 on Saturday morning, when she came out of the Art Museum, old Mrs. Finney was kidnaped.

  A cab pulled up, the driver sitting there like a lump. A strange woman on the sidewalk said, “Let me,” and reached to do what the driver was not doing. Mrs. Finney, accepting the opening of the cab door as a kindness toward an old woman, got in. But the strange woman got in, too, and the cab took off, uninstructed, with surprising suddenness.

  Then Mrs. Finney saw the gun shaking in the woman’s hand.

  Mrs. Finney, at 75 years of age, considered herself more or less expendable—but not as expendable as all this. So she pretended to be in somewhat more terror of death than she actually was, and cow
ered down into the seat as if stricken dumb and overcome by fear. This relaxed her captors and enabled shrewd Mrs. Finney to watch the street signs.

  She soon concluded that the strange woman was timid and dominated, and that the man who drove the cab was operating under high tension, with the boldness that is next to desperation.

  The kidnapers took her to a place down near the river, a flat of some sort, poorly furnished, but furnished. It had a telephone.

  So she lay on a hard bed in an inner room from which there was no escape, since, even had the window not been nailed shut, the drop from it was sheer and too far for her old bones to challenge.

  She could hear the man asking for Mrs. Pierce on the telephone. Poor Ruth, she thought, meanwhile breathing with careful control in order to steady her heart, meanwhile enjoining her muscles to relax while they could, meanwhile discovering in her being a tiny glow of perverse delight in such an adventure—and at her age!

  “You better believe it,” she heard the man saying savagely. “We’ve got her, all right. You want to see your Mama again, you get together ten thousand dollars in small bills, and you get it fast.”

  Ruth must have said something.

  “So she went to the Museum,” he jeered. “So when she don’t come home from the Museum, then I guess you’ll believe it. That’s enough, now. Get the dough. I’ll call and tell you what to do. Don’t try tracing the call. And no cops—or the old lady’s had it.”

  The man hung up and Mrs. Finney could hear the strange woman’s nervous giggle, out there in the other room. She heard the man swear viciously, and could sense his dangerous restlessness.

  Old Mrs. Finney’s thoughts began to flit about erratically. Was she worth $10,000 to her daughter and her son-in-law? On the other hand, wasn’t that really very little? Well, no matter. The situation was classic: they would kill her, anyhow. Unless—supposing—if only . . .

  Her wits steadied. They began to nibble and work at a plan, just in case. She wasn’t dead yet . . .

  Warren Pierce rushed home from the Country Club and counseled his wife, Ruth, to call the police, although of course discreetly. An officer named Parkins came at once, in an unmarked automobile, wearing plain clothes. He carried a tape recorder.

  The detective listened gravely and was reassuringly calm. He hooked up the recorder so that the exact words of any phone call would be preserved for study. He told Ruth that she must try to hold the man in conversation, when the kidnaper called again. The more they heard him say, Parkins told them, the better chance they would have to pick up a clue to Mrs. Finney’s whereabouts.

  So, in the spacious suburban house where the old lady had her own quarters—so nice!—on the ground floor of the south wing, her daughter waited with wailings and wringings of her hands, and her son-in-law busily collected the ransom money from various sources.

  Ruth and Warren Pierce were solid, prosperous middle-class people, cautious souls, who had always played it safe and had always supposed themselves to be safe, if anything in this world could be safe. In this bewildering and threatening situation they clung to experts for all kinds of support, including the emotional.

  Parkins bore up under it, but Parkins did not tell all he was thinking. Much depended, he warned them, in what the collection method turned out to be. It was very difficult, he soothed, for a criminal to devise a method that was perfectly safe for the criminal.

  What Parkins did not tell them was the impossibility of devising a way to return, with perfect safety to the criminal, an adult kidnapee, alive and well. “Ask for some proof that she’s all right,” he advised. “That will hold him on the phone.”

  So two tense hours went by . . .

  Old Mrs. Finney, during the same two hours, had been left alone in that cold, bare room, where she lay on the hard bed and thought and listened and remembered and schemed and checked and memorized and altogether, felt very much alive.

  But now the strange woman put her head in at the door. “You’re so quiet. Thought maybe you’d passed out,” she said in her jittery voice.

  The man stuck his head in too. “Hey, Milly, I told you it don’t matter.” He was high on some drug. Mrs. Finney vaguely knew that much.

  But the old lady said to him crisply, “It matters whether my daughter believes you’ve got me. If not, why would she pay? Now I’ll tell you something. I’d like very much to go home and I can get you the money. I don’t suppose you’d let me mail it to you, or something of that sort?”

  The man bared his teeth in a scornful grimace.

  “Then you’d better let me talk to Ruth,” said Mrs. Finney. “In the first place, that’ll convince her you’ve got me, won’t it? In the second place, I know where to get the money, today, which happens to be a Saturday when the banks aren’t open.”

  The kidnapers were listening sourly.

  “I am an old woman,” said Mrs. Finney, “and I can’t be bothered kicking and screaming. The point is, you want ten thousand dollars and I want to go home. All right. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a deal.”

  The old lady sat up and put her feet to the floor. “Have you decided how you are going to collect the money?” She knew they had been wrangling over this for the whole two hours.

  “We know how,” the man said sullenly.

  “Well, then,” said Mrs. Finney, “for pity’s sake, let’s get on with it.” She had so much more force than the other woman, Milly, that suddenly it seemed as if Mrs. Finney and the man were the conspirators.

  “Yeah. Okay,” he said. “I want the money and I want it fast.”

  “What time are you setting for the meeting?”

  “What’s it to you?” His tone was deliberately rude, and he was naturally suspicious.

  “You want it fast and I want it fast,” snapped Mrs. Finney, “but it will take a little time for them to get that much money. Also, you’ll want the theater crowded.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Right. Say, eight o’clock.” And his voice held the faintest query, as if he wanted her approval.

  Mrs. Finney sighed artfully. “I suppose it really isn’t safe any earlier. Well?”

  “Well?”

  He led her into the other room, which was as miserable as the first, and he let her sit down in front of the telephone. She looked at it with great interest. This was her chance.

  He had to put on a show of ferocity, so he said, “Okay. You can talk and you can tell her just how to get the money. But if you start to say one word—just one word—out of line, I got my hands right around your skinny old neck. Understand?”

  “Certainly,” said Mrs. Finney. “We’ve got a deal. You get the money and I get home.”

  “Sure, sure,” he said. “You got a deal, old lady.”

  But he was lying, and Mrs. Finney knew it. Well, so was she.

  So the world wagged, in these circles. Mrs. Finney braced herself as the man dialed the number . . .

  When the phone rang at the Pierce house, Ruth stiffened and turned white. Warren leaped toward the receiver. Parkins lifted a hand to slow him down. He had the tape recorder going. He said, on the third ring, “Okay—now. Better let Mrs. Pierce answer this time.”

  “Ruth?” said her mother’s voice.

  “Oh. Mother!”

  “They want ten thousand dollars.”

  “Oh, Mother, are you all right?” Ruth must, in the name of devotion, wail.

  “Listen carefully,” said her mother crisply and distinctly. “They want ten thousand. Tell Binky to get on the telephone. He can get one from Celia, one from Esther, one from Vida, three from Opal.” She slowed down. “Two from Odette, two from Simone, three from Estelle—”

  “Hurry up,” the man said in her ear.

  “And one more from Vida, and that’s it. It’s all in your hand now,” said Mrs. Finney loudly.

  “Oh, Mother, where are you?” wailed Ruth, whose brains were limp in her head, her mother thought.

  “I’ve told you—”

  The man’s
hand pinched her shoulder; she leaned back, immediately obedient, and surrendered the phone.

  Her breath came a little short. Had she got it right? Exactly right? Just as she had rehearsed it in her head so many times?

  Yes. Yes, she believed she had.

  The man said into the mouthpiece, “Okay, Mrs. Pierce, now you know. So put the money in a brown paper bag. At eight o’clock tonight you be at the Rialto Theater, on South Quincy. And you be there alone—no cops. Or else. You stand in line, you buy a ticket, you go into the show, and that’s all you have to do. So do it.”

  Ruth was still wailing when the kidnaper cut her off.

  The woman, Milly, whimpered in a corner from sheer ineptitude.

  “All we got to do is wait a while,” the man said. “And then we’ll go. I grab the bag from her, pass it to you. You stash the money on you, in the Ladies’ Room. So if they got cops with ’em, let them search me. It’ll work. Won’t it? Hey, won’t it?” He seemed to be asking old Mrs. Finney.

  “I surely hope so,” she sighed. “I surely do hope so. I wonder—is that a pot of tea you have there?” Her mouth was very dry.

  “So give the old lady a cup of tea,” the man said. “She’s not such a bad sport, at that. Go ahead. I’m going out and walk around a couple of minutes.”

  He was on taut wires. He went out, locking the door behind him.

  Mrs. Finney did not think that Milly would be the one to attack her, finally. So time could work. And time would tell . . .

  At the Pierce house Ruth was still wailing. “But she doesn’t know anybody by those names! She doesn’t know anybody named Celia. She doesn’t know anybody named Esther. Or Vida. Or Opal, either. It doesn’t make any sense at all, what she said. Oh, my poor mother, so terrified. She must be out of her mind!”

  “The numbers don’t add up, either,” said Warren Pierce, whose faith was in mathematics. “Doesn’t come to ten thousand, no matter how you add it. What was the point of all that? I’ve got the money ready. What will we do, Mr. Parkins? Go through with it, tonight?”