“This is Chuck Sadler, Mrs. Criff.”
“Oh yes! Mr. Sadler! I’ve been thinking of all you said—” From the eager, almost breathless tone it would seem that Mrs. Criff might have been haunting the telephone, expecting him to call. “—and I have a few things, just small items I remembered and jotted down, plus a few new happenings, recent ones.”
It occurred to Uncle Chuck that Mrs. Criff had wanted to be a central figure in the investigation and that the police might have ignored her as a gossiping old biddy. Their mistake, he thought. “I was calling in the hope that you would be willing to see me again,” he told her. “I admire that sound judgment of yours and your good memory. Sometimes it takes one of us old-timers—” He corrected this slip quickly. “—but of course I’m much older than you are. You show the good sense of a person beyond your years. Could you meet us somewhere this morning? A coffee shop perhaps?”
“Us?”
“I hate to leave my niece alone. There have been some mysterious things happening. Besides that, she’s so crushed and bewildered. You might be able to help with a word of advice.”
She exclaimed in delight. She would be so happy, so deeply honored; she felt so much sympathy for a good woman who had had to put up with a fiend like Sargent Chenoweth. She exhibited so much enthusiasm that Uncle Chuck almost found himself yawning. No wonder the cops had brushed her off. “Mr. Sadler, there is a nice large coffee shop in our neighborhood here, just four blocks or so, I believe it is, one of those Knowles drive-ins. Would that be all right? I could meet you there in about a half hour. My daughter’s in bed today with a fearful headache—there was a terrible row … Well, I’ll tell you about it when I see you.”
“What street is the cafe on?”
“Bennington. You can’t miss it.”
“Fine. Look for Doris and me in a rear booth.”
“Goodbye for now, Mr. Sadler.”
Uncle Chuck ushered Doris to a booth in the café. He looked around. The place showed every evidence of a busy prosperity. Though this was an off hour, too late for the ordinary breakfast trade, there seemed many who had dropped in for coffee and a snack. The waitresses were not uniformly beautiful, but all were neat and alert, with a ready smile as they came forward with a glass of water and a menu for each new customer. There was a big oval counter on the other side of the large room, separated from the tables by an artfully twined array of greenery. The carpet underfoot was thick and luxurious, the linen gleaming. At the far end of the café were the drive-in windows, where patrons were served in their cars.
The waitress came with water, handing Uncle Chuck and Doris each a menu after setting down the glasses. She stood smiling. The smile lit up her features and she seemed quite pretty—the effect of the friendly and interested air, Uncle Chuck thought, having had his own run-ins with the beautiful and dumb. Somebody here was picking them for their intelligence and willingness to serve.
“We’ll order in a moment,” he told the girl, and still cheerful and smiling, she nodded and walked away. Tor Doris he said, “Does Knowles run these places himself?”
“I think in the beginning, when there were only a few, he did. I know that years ago when he was first starting, he used to say that he had to learn the hard way. He said that a lot of things he’d been told by others, advice on running his places, was just junk. But I believe that during the last six or seven years, when he had spread out so much, he let managers run the individual cafes while he just sort of kept an over-all eye on things. But I believe there were certain rules that the managers had to follow, policies that Bill Knowles never relaxed.”
“Those policies have paid off apparently.”
“Yes, I’m sure they have. Bill must be quite wealthy by now.”
“How would you compare what he has to what Sargent had accumulated?”
She looked at him as if he had lost his senses. “Why, Uncle Chuck, you could see for yourself—Sarge’s modest little office, even that shared with a partner, and then this—” She motioned about her at the big, busy café. “—and this only one of at least a dozen. Bill Knowles is rich, at least he’s rich compared to Sarge.”
Uncle Chuck nodded. “Well, and still, Sargent’s business wasn’t one in which you needed a large outlay for premises. I’m not arguing that Knowles isn’t wealthy. I’m saying the businesses are different. It’s possible for an accountant like Sargent—” He broke off, half rose in his seat to greet Mrs. Criff who was coming toward them, hunched down, hat pulled low over her gray hair, her eyes searching the surroundings warily. “Here’s Mrs. Criff. Remember, Dorrie, how you felt yesterday, and try to put yourself back into that mood. It may help us.”
Doris gave him a half-despairing glance, as if afraid she couldn’t do as he asked. Then she turned to meet Mrs. Criff.
Chapter 14
Mrs. Criff gave one more sharp glance around before seating herself on the end of the leather seat on the same side as Uncle Chuck. Having apparently decided that there was no one in the restaurant who knew her and might report the meeting to someone at home, she turned her attention to Doris. Doris was dressed in black; she had pulled her dark hair back severely and wore a small black hat. She looked pale but composed. Mrs. Criff, having sized her up, nodded as if with approval.
“Mrs. Chenoweth, I want to extend my sympathy to you in this hour. And please forgive me if I add a remark—I just don’t see how a man could leave a decent, ladylike person such as you and take up with a juvenile tramp.”
Doris flinched. In her mind, Uncle Chuck knew, she was still defending Kat Knowles, still thinking of Sargent as a kind of monster who would rape a little girl.
“I found out on the radio who she was,” Mrs. Criff went on, her eyes narrowing behind the glasses. “Dead in some disgraceful pose, I take it, though the newscast didn’t go into details. A suicide, they think now. I knew when I saw her on the street those two times she’d come to no good end. I just felt it in my bones.”
“Mrs. Criff—” Doris had put a hand half across the table toward the older woman. “—I knew Katrina as a little child, and she wasn’t—”
“Strange, you know,” Mrs. Criff interrupted, “but I had seen the child a time or two myself, years ago. I didn’t recognize her. How could I, the way she’d got herself up? She looked like a freak!”
Curious—and to ward off an argument—Uncle Chuck put in, “In what way a freak? Just what do you mean, Mrs. Criff?”
The woman made a grimace of distaste. “It was all overdone. Too much. Oh, I’m quite aware of how the young girls fix themselves up these days, Mr. Sadler—the heavy eye make-up and the strange things they do to their hair—and I don’t think I’m narrow-minded. I can recall a few fads we went in for in the ’twenties. But this girl, the Knowles girl, made herself conspicuous.”
“Clothes? Make-up?”
“All of it. And now, meeting Mrs. Chenoweth, I cannot understand her husband’s choice. Why, it seems the police suspect Sargent Chenoweth might have been about to elope with the girl!”
“I guess that was a possibility,” Uncle Chuck said guardedly. He too had listened to a news broadcast early that morning, before Doris had come into the kitchen.
As he summoned the waitress to order coffee for the three of them, he was remembering that as yet he hadn’t turned over to Martin the photostat of Kat Knowles’s birth certificate. Martin must have been running down leads of his own. There had been no word of any meeting between Martin and the girl’s father, though this must have occurred before now. Knowles couldn’t have gone dashing around the country indefinitely without running into the cops along the way. Perhaps the broadcast had been based on information given by Knowles himself, the source guarded by the cops.
And now, too, Uncle Chuck was remembering the young girl on the kitchen floor, dead. He could see in memory the tight denim pants, the Robin Hood sandals, the suede jacket that matched them and the purse, the wildly fallen hair. Had she been a girl who dramatized herself? Be
ing Sargent’s mistress, would she have plunged into looking the part as well as playing it? Uncle Chuck suspected that this was what she had done. And then, remembering what he knew of Sargent—who had always impressed him as being too clever for his own good, but still not a fool—he wondered why the conspicuous getup hadn’t palled.
He filed it away mentally, for further thought. “Mrs. Criff, you have some new information—”
She smiled slightly, looking wise behind the glasses. “Yes, I do. I made a few notes.” She opened the big handbag on her lap and took out a slip of paper. “I remembered when it was, the last time Sargent Chenoweth called at the house. I placed it because I remembered what had happened on his way in. He got wet cement on his shoes, and this was because he had stepped by mistake on a part of the front walk which was being repaired. And that walk was repaired just about six months ago.”
“And was this about the time he and your son-in-law had their disagreement?”
“Exactly! It was the very night they had the quarrel, and when Mr. Chenoweth left I heard him say he was never coming back!”
“Six months ago.”
“Yes, precisely.”
Uncle Chuck couldn’t remember that Arthur Cannon had committed himself regarding any particular date, but the impression he had given was that Sargent’s hot-and-heavy dealing in Diamond Tunnel was quite recent.
“What was your son-in-law’s attitude?”
“Well, he didn’t seem to be as angry. He followed Mr. Chenoweth to the front door, and he kept saying things like, ‘Now, Sarge, cool down. Don’t blow your stack.’ That sort of thing.”
“You don’t know exactly what caused the disagreement?”
She nibbled her lower lip, then shook her head slowly. “My guess, and it is just a guess, Mr. Sadler, is that the quarrel had to do with some sort of advice Arthur had given Mr. Chenoweth about buying stock. I think Mr. Chenoweth had made a lot of money about that time on some tip Arthur had given him. Maybe if there were losses later, he didn’t take them very well. But this next is even more important perhaps.” She hesitated, glancing around as if to make sure no one could overhear her. “At the door Arthur reminded Mr. Chenoweth that he was ending a long, long friendship, and Mr. Chenoweth said, very angrily, ‘Yes, I know that. I’ll cry all the way home.’”
She had turned her gaze on Doris now.
“That’s what he said. ‘I’ll cry all the way home.’ And then very quietly, but getting angry now, too, Arthur said, ‘Don’t you anyway—when you finally go home these days?’”
Uncle Chuck’s eyes widened. “Arthur Cannon knew about the girl.”
“Wouldn’t you say so, from that?”
“It sounds like it. How much disapproval did he put into it?”
“Quite a bit. Not that I don’t doubt that Arthur might do the same thing if he had the chance, if some young flippet made goo-goo eyes at him. But for a minute afterward there was a sort of dead silence—I wish I could have seen them, but I just happened to overhear this from the top of the stairs. The only thing I heard, finally, was the door slamming.”
“When I first called yesterday,” Uncle Chuck reminded, “you said that if Sargent had come to the house to see Arthur Cannon, you would have expected something violent to happen. Now, was this a recent impression, I mean, based on things Cannon had said lately? Or was it based on the quarrel of six months ago?”
“Well, Arthur seemed to seethe and simmer there for a while. He seemed to develop a great dislike for Mr. Chenoweth.”
“And recently?” Uncle Chuck persisted.
“I haven’t heard him mention Sargent Chenoweth recently.”
“So it is possible the quarrel had been patched up and that your son-in-law was again advising Sargent about his investments?”
She hated to admit that what she knew might not extend right up to the last minute. She glanced evasively out at the other people in the café. “Possible, though I don’t believe it.”
“Your son-in-law wants Doris to believe it. He wants her to pay quite a sum out of what she may have left—pay for stocks now almost valueless, which he claims Sargent ordered him to buy.”
Now her eyes brightened and she sat up straight. “Then that must have something to do with what happened yesterday, what I came to tell you—the terrific argument Arthur had with Caroline. She’s sick from it, had to stay in bed. Was this anything to do with something called Diamond Tunnel?”
“That’s the name of the stock.”
Mrs. Criff nodded wisely. “My daughter has been planning for ages on getting a lot of new furniture. Yesterday they were going to deliver some of it, and when Arthur came in and found out about it, he flew into a rage. I heard him yelling something at her, something about Diamond Tunnel, and how they couldn’t afford any new furniture, they couldn’t even afford the house or the cars, and about a dozen other things he mentioned. He kept hollering that she was ruining him and here he was on the edge of disaster.”
“Surely a loss of less than five thousand wouldn’t put him into such a bind?” Uncle Chuck wondered.
“I don’t know,” she said, displaying a bit of caution. “Sometimes I think Arthur plays a dangerous game on his own—taking his own advice. It wouldn’t surprise me if he had practically all of his money tied up in something very speculative.”
“Did you hear any discussion between them of Sargent’s murder? Any reference to Knowles or his daughter?”
“No. But there was an odd development. Late in the evening Arthur got a telephone call which seemed to calm him down.”
“Any idea who called him?”
“I didn’t get in on the first part of the conversation,” she said. “I heard the phone ring while I was in the upstairs hall. By the time I reached the extension upstairs—it’s in their bedroom—some man had apparently introduced himself. Arthur sounded kind of stunned. The man was telling him that he had contacted a Lieutenant Martin of the county sheriff’s office and telling Arthur that of course he had had to do this as a matter of routine. Then Arthur suddenly sort of came to life and said, wait a minute, he’d take the call on the other phone, the phone that’s in the little office where you and I talked, Mr. Sadler. He gave the man the number to call back, and then they hung up. This office phone is on a different line, a private line.”
A picture was developing which fascinated Uncle Chuck. This little old woman lived with her daughter and Arthur Cannon and apparently spent her time spying on the son-in-law. There seemed to be an intense dislike, covered by her air of righteous interest. Arthur Cannon had, as the saying went, taken a snake to his bosom.
“You didn’t form any opinion of the meaning of this phone call?”
“It had something to do with money. It calmed Arthur down right away, and he’d been on the verge of a stroke, from his appearance.” She frowned at Uncle Chuck. “Do you have an idea?”
“I’m beginning to have a hunch,” Uncle Chuck said.
Mrs. Criff turned to Doris. “Mrs. Chenoweth, I hope you understand my motive in coming here and talking to you and Mr. Sadler as I have. I’m not ordinarily one to talk freely—to do anything remotely resembling gossip—but it occurred to me, after Mr. Sadler left yesterday, that as long as a public hullabaloo was going on over your husband’s death, you would be suffering. You wouldn’t be allowed to forget or to have any rest. And so I felt called on to add anything I might remember, whether it’s of value or not.”
Doris made a quiet rejoinder, thanking Mrs. Criff and assuring her of her gratitude.
Seeing that they were about to leave, the waitress came forward with the check. She slipped it under the edge of Uncle Chuck’s saucer, then turned to go.
“Miss …”
She glanced back at Uncle Chuck.
“Does Mr. Knowles come in here very often?”
“Mr. Knowles?” Her eyes were blank.
“The owner. Isn’t this a Knowles drive-in?”
“Oh! Oh, of course! No, sir, I’ve n
ever seen Mr. Knowles. If he’s ever been here, I haven’t known anything about it.”
“How long have you been employed here?”
“It will soon be six months.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome, sir.”
Mrs. Criff had waited while the brief exchange went on. Now she said, “I’ll leave first, if you don’t mind. Try to be of good cheer, Mrs. Chenoweth. This too shall pass. Goodbye, Mr. Sadler.”
He rose. “Thank you for coming, Mrs. Criff. Will you call me if you think of anything more? I’ll be at Doris’s for the time being.”
“Yes, I’ll call you.”
As soon as she had disappeared, Uncle Chuck hastily picked up the check and motioned for Doris to follow. He paid the cashier near the door and then, hurrying as fast as the cane allowed, he headed for a phone booth just outside the entry. “What’s the name of your insurance agent, the one you phoned this morning?”
She hesitated at the door, looking at him in surprise. “Owens. Rick Owens. But why—”
“That story of Mrs. Criffs.”
“I don’t understand—”
“You’re not going to wait and see the insurance man later. We’ve got to see him now.”
The half block of store buildings was far from new—the condition of the sidewalk and the size of the curbside trees told of years of use and of growth. But the shop fronts had been face-lifted, the old show windows removed, decorative baffles of ornamental openwork cement installed, and the building converted to offices. When Uncle Chuck turned in at the entry of Owens’ office, he found himself facing a sign.
RICK OWENS
INSURANCE REPRESENTATIVE
We Insure Anybody!
Auto …….502’s
Suspended
Revoked
Out of State
Restricted
Handicapped
Doris had paused and was looking at the flamboyant sign with an air of puzzlement.
The Man Who Cried All the Way Home Page 11