by Leslie Ford
“That’s why I’m taking you to lunch, baby. I need an alibi!”
He grinned at her as she looked at him blankly. “You— you need an alibi?”
“That’s what I said. Come on to lunch and I’ll explain it.”
Her pulse quickened as she snapped her bag shut and took her gloves out of her pocket.
“Fine,” she said. “Come on.”
If Dorsey Syms needed an alibi, she was thinking quickly, she’d be glad to help him. If her father needed one, then Dorsey’s could crash. The minute the police knew— There were people Connie would rather have thrown to the wolves. Dorsey Syms was the only one begging for it. She smiled brightly at him as they went through the pressrooms.
She stopped just before they got to the door to wave over to the dry old man in his shirt sleeves at the desk marked City Editor, in the corner by the front window. “Goodbye, Ed, I’m going out to lunch.” Dorsey opened the long plate-glass door into the narrow vestibule. He stood aside, holding it open for someone coming in the storm door from the street.
“Cheese it, the cops!” He grinned back at Connie, and at the tall thin man who had stopped and was holding the storm door open for them to come on through. “Raiding the joint, Bill? You know my cousin Constance Maynard? This is Lieutenant Williams, Connie.”
“Oh,” Connie said. The smile faded from her eyes. “Of course.” She recognized him now he’d taken off his green felt hat. “How are you? Is there anything I can do for you before I go out? Gus Blake isn’t here.”
Lieutenant Williams stepped back into the street. “No, it was Gus I wanted to see,” he said. “I’ve just been down to his place. About that entry he had last night. Where is he, do you know? I’d like to get in touch with him.”
“I don’t know where he is,” Connie said.
She looked over at the empty space along the Reserved line in front of the Gazette building. “His car’s gone. Maybe he’s gone with Chief Carlson out to the Wernitz house. But I don’t know, Lieutenant. He came in this morning and left right away. I assumed he’d gone home.”
And if he hadn’t, she was thinking, maybe he really didn’t know about the entry, as Williams called it. Even Gus wouldn’t be that casual about his possessions—she hoped. She turned to her cousin.
“You haven’t seen him?”
“Not since he was in the bank. That was about ten-thirty. I didn’t get a chance to talk to him.”
The detective put his hat back on. “It’s funny he wouldn’t stick around,” he said. “Around home, I mean.” He seemed more puzzled than perturbed. “You were with him, I understand, Miss Maynard. When he got home last night. Didn’t he seem to think there might be some connection between the entry and the Wernitz deal? I just told Swede Carlson. He hadn’t heard about it. That’s the trouble with this county-city setup. Your right hand don’t know anything about your left one till the trail’s stone-cold. What did Gus say about it, Miss Maynard?”
“He didn’t say a thing,” Connie said. “Nothing at all. I don’t think he knew anything about it. Mrs. Blake didn’t mention it while I was there. And Gus certainly wouldn’t have gone off and left her and the kid and taken me home if he’d known anything about it.”
Lieutenant Williams looked at her.
“Yeah,” he said slowly. “Carlson and I both thought it looked a little sort of—well, sort of—”
He let it hang there without saying sort of what, perhaps because he saw the large figure of the county chief coming up the street toward the Gazette office.
“Well, if you see him tell him Swede and I are looking for him, will you?”
He tipped his hat perfunctorily and walked off to meet Carlson.
Dorsey glanced at his cousin. Her cheeks were flushed a little. She went quickly across the sidewalk to her car and opened the door before he could reach it.
“Why don’t you lay off Janey, Con?” he inquired calmly as he stepped in after her and pulled the door shut.
“Why don’t you mind your own business, Dorsey?”
She jammed her foot down on the starter. The engine roared. Dorsey saw Carlson and Williams look around at them, and go on talking again. Swede Carlson, his shoulder propped against the telephone pole on the curb, his overcoat open, both hands in his trousers pockets, leaned his head to one side and spat magnificently into the gutter. Dorsey saw that Connie was too annoyed to see that the chief of the county police was still looking at the shining green convertible, if Lieutenant Williams was not.
“I’d like to know just where the hell Gus has gone,” she snapped as she pulled out and into the stream of market-day traffic. “And another thing I’d like to know is just where he got all that inside dope on Wernitz. And what he went to the bank for. He never goes to the bank.”
Dorsey Syms reached in his pocket and got out a cigarette. He reached forward and pressed in the lighter on the dash.
“So I ought to mind my own business,” he remarked equably.
FOURTEEN
JANEY PUT THE LAST of little Jane’s things in the blue canvas suitcase and snapped the lid shut. She hurried, listening breathlessly down the stair well, starting at every rattle and shiver of the house as a truck jolted by in the street, and the creeping sounds in the hot-water pipes up the wall.
“Put Flopsie in, too, Mummy.” Little Jane came over with the white lop-eared rabbit in her arms. Janey started to refuse, and remembered. She mustn’t let little Jane see she was frightened and nervous.
“Of course,” she said. “We wouldn’t leave Flopsie. Who’d give Flopsie her lunch?”
“And Daddy. Who’ll give Daddy his lunch, Mummy?”
Janey’s throat tightened. “Daddy’ll get his lunch downtown. And we’ve got to hurry, sweetie. What else shall we take?” She tried not to look down at the troubled blue eyes in the round, sober little face turned up to her. “Daddy loves to eat downtown. Hurry, now. We’ll take your coat and leggings downstairs and put them on down there, and then we’ll get a taxi and go see Grandma. I’ll take the suitcase down and you stay here till I come. Here’s your book. Look at the pictures till I come back.”
She took the suitcase out into the hall. Her own was already packed and waiting at the foot of her bed. She listened a moment, went along to the front room, picked up her hat and coat and looked hastily around. She didn’t want to leave anything behind that she’d need and have to come back for, and she had to hurry. She had to get little Jane out of the house. Lieutenant Williams had been there, with his camera and fingerprint powder, soberly going all over the basement and the pantry and dining room, and all over the back yard. The footprint was gone. She hadn’t even mentioned it to him. The colored boy was already frightened at the way she’d run out when she saw him seeding the grass where it had been; there was no use for the police to start blaming him. The way they’d moved around and talked when they thought she wasn’t listening had destroyed the last poignant hope that somehow none of it had really happened, or that, if it had, it was all over now and there was nothing to worry about any more. But even if it hadn’t, she had to get out anyway. The sickening terror in her stomach when she’d heard the basement hinge whine and the pantry board creak was almost more than she could bear, even when she found it was only Gus. He must have thought she was crazy, if he thought about it at all. Or that she was just stupider than usual. If he hadn’t thought already she was being stupidly contrary, he’d never have made the fuss about the grass patch and the floor board. And she’d never really cared about either of them. It had always been a joke before.
She looked over the top of her dressing-table, pulled open the drawer, and saw her evening bag there. The sleeping-pills— She remembered suddenly. The orange capsules she’d taken from Mrs. Maynard’s table. They were still there. The one she’d dropped and Connie had given back to her was halfway to the river by now, or wherever Smithville’s sewage went. She took the yellow tissue with the rest of them in it, went to the bathroom, and flushed them down to fo
llow it. That really would have been a crazy and stupid thing to do. Who would have taken care of little Jane? It was more than stupid, it was wrong. But it was all over now and somehow very remote, as if it had been another Janey in another life, too hurt and confused to know what she was doing.
She started back to the bedroom and stopped, catching her breath sharply. It was the doorbell. Someone at the front door. Normally she would have run downstairs to open it—but nothing was normal in that house any more. “Be careful,” Lieutenant Williams had told her. “I don’t want to worry you, Mrs. Blake, but you ought to be careful who you let in the house.” He hadn’t said, “Even if it’s somebody you know,” but she’d sensed it. Or was it just something inside of herself that told her that? Or just nerves? The bell rang again. She ran to the front room, pushed the window up, and looked out.
“Who is it?”
As she saw who it was, her hands tightened on the sill. It was Chief Carlson. The big Swede. Her mouth went dry suddenly. The checks at Wernitz’s— She realized oddly that she’d forgotten all about that. Even when Orvie Rogers had given her the envelope from his father and mumbled something about slot machines it had seemed all very unreal. There was no time to think about it, then, because the police came right away and Orvie just stuck it in her hand and got out. He probably thought the police would think it was funny, his being there when he should be at the plant. The envelope was in her red sweater pocket in the suitcase now.
But looking out now on Swede Carlson’s thick, foreshortened figure, Janey remembered the slot machines again.
“I’ll be right down,” she called.
She picked up her hat and coat and the suitcase and stopped at little Jane’s door. “You read quietly, sweetie, until I get back. I won’t be long.”
In the front hall she put the suitcase down by the stairs and laid her hat and coat on the chair. She opened the door. “Come in, Mr. Carlson.”
He dwarfed the tiny hallway as he came in. It looked even smaller than it did with Gus in it, as tall but not as wide either way. Chief Carlson’s eye went straight to the suitcase.
“Goin’ somewhere, Mrs. Blake?” he asked pleasantly.
Jane swallowed quickly. Would he think she was trying to run away—or try to stop her going?
“Just down to my mother’s on Charter Street,” she said breathlessly. “I’m taking my little girl. I’ve got to go, Mr. Carlson. I—I’m afraid to stay here. I—”
“That’s a smart idea, Mrs. Blake. I’m glad you’re goin’.”
So this was Gus Blake’s Janey he was always hearing about. She’d been pointed out to him on the street, but he’d never seen her close up without a hat on. Scrawny little thing, compared with Mrs. Carlson, anyway. Pretty eyes; washed out—she was scared—but still pretty. What was she scared of him for? Or what else would it be?
“I was just talkin’ to Lieutenant Williams,” he said.
“He told me about you last night. Mighty plucky, Mrs. Blake. I bet Gus was mighty proud of you.”
“Gus—doesn’t know anything about it.” She moved back into the dining-room. “Would you like to sit down here? The living-room’s upstairs.”
“And your bedroom’s on the third floor, I understand. That’s where you called the operator from?”
Janey nodded.
“Why didn’t you tell Gus, Mrs. Blake?”
As her chin lifted he thought for an instant she was going to say it was none of his business. She turned her blank blue eyes to look not at him but through him. Not as scared now as she was when he came. He waited, wondering if she was going to say, “Because Gus came in with Connie Maynard and went out with her and so the hell with Gus, Mr. Carlson.”
“He—he’s very busy,” she said. “I didn’t think it was important enough to worry him about it.”
His bleak eyes rested on her for a moment. “Suppose you show me around, Mrs. Blake,” he said quietly. “And tell me all about it.” He smiled a little. “I’ll be careful not to make any more noise ’n I can help.”
He saw the flush creep along Janey’s high, pale cheekbones. “I’m sorry,” he said. He hadn’t meant to hurt her feelings.
“It’s all right,” she said quickly. “I suppose it was stupid of me. But I’m pretty stupid, anyway, I guess. But it’s just that I—I don’t want little Jane to grow up always scared of everything, like thunder and the dark and dogs and caterpillars and things. I don’t think people have any fun if they’re always afraid of everything.”
Swede Carlson nodded. “You’re right, Mrs. Blake. Doc Wernitz, for instance—he was afraid of the dark. I guess the fella that murdered him—if he should just happen to be the one came here—figured a little slip like you would be too afraid to open her mouth and scream—much less have the pluck and brains to get to the phone right away. I sorta figure that’s why he turned the lights off first. So you’d be so scared you wouldn’t know what it was he was after.”
She was almost to the pantry door on her way to take him down to the basement. She flashed around and stood rigid, her finger tips on the end of the table to steady herself, her eyes wide, changed from blue to sooty-black, staring at him, her lips parted, moving soundlessly, repeating the word he had used deliberately.
“Murdered—” He could see her lips frame it.
“I’m afraid so, Mrs. Blake. That’s why I’m askin’ you to show me around, and tell me everythin’ you can think of. Forget all this stuff about your bein’ stupid. Gus wouldn’t ever have fallen in love with a stupid girl no matter how pretty she was.”
He saw he could have saved his breath. She hadn’t heard him.
“Oh—then you—you don’t think it’s my baby he was after? It’s not little Jane?” she gasped. “Oh, if I was sure it wasn’t little Jane they were after, I—I wouldn’t be half as scared!”
The big man’s bleak eyes were warmer.
“Because— Oh, you see we haven’t got anything a burglar would want. This silver—” She threw her hand out at the tea service on the sideboard, a wedding present from Orvie Rogers’s parents. “That’s all we’ve got that’s valuable. And he—he went right past it. I couldn’t think of anything else they’d want but little Jane—maybe on account of something Gus wrote in the paper. But if it’s not little Jane, I’m not afraid anymore!”
Swede Carlson mentally shook his head. The poor kid, he thought. That was why she’d looked out the window upstairs, as though the devil himself might be at the door. His face was a shade grimmer. What a night she must have spent, with Gus off gallivanting all over the country with the Maynard witch. Sometimes it looked like the brighter a fellow was the bigger fool he was. And if Janey Blake was stupid, he’d take them stupid every time. And she really meant it. A little color had come back into her cheeks and her eyes had lost the washed-out stare and come alive again. Afraid of kidnaping—not afraid of murder.
“That the way I figure it, Mrs. Blake,” he said quietly. “I don’t know what he was after. But I don’t figure it was any kidnapin’. Now, suppose you just tell me what happened. Everythin’, hear?”
The loose board, the whining hinge, the fuse box, clean as a whistle under the gray powder Williams had left, the basement steps, the hinge whining again, the latch clicking, the glow moving slowly and steadily up the stairs— Janey heard and saw and explained it all.
“And out here,” she said. She opened the kitchen door. “I didn’t tell Mr. Williams, because it was gone. It was a man’s footprint in the damp ground here, where it washes from the drain spout when it rains. I—I’m sorry, but it got raked over this morning. He—he must have been running, because the toe was a lot deeper than the heel. It was about an eleven, and sort of pointed. I mean not blunt like your shoes, but sort of narrower at the tip, like an evening—”
She stopped, looking up at him, blinking her eyes. Swede Carlson looked down at her. He was reflecting philosophically that if he ever died of apoplexy it wouldn’t be in his own bed like a decent God-fearing
citizen. It would be right at the feet of some blank-faced, blue-eyed dame saying, “I’m sorry, but I washed his fingerprints off the door, they were all covered with blood, it looked as if I never scrubbed.” He took out his handkerchief and blew his nose savagely. Her voice, coming as through the distant roar of the Volga booming across the bosom of the Little Mother of all the Russians, sounded thin and reedlike in his congested ears, “—not blunt like your shoes, but sort of—” And then she was standing there looking at him blank and half-dazed again.
“Isn’t that funny?” she said. Her eyes wandered off across the garden to a little bunch of bamboo stalks lying on the ground by the frostbitten chrysanthemum in the border. “That’s just what it looked like. I thought there was something funny about it. It looked like the print you’d make with a pair of patent-leather evening shoes.” She looked back at Carlson. “You—you don’t suppose it could have been anybody that—that was at the Maynards’ party? The men had on dinner coats. But that doesn’t make any—any sense. Who would—I mean, they were all our friends, Chief Carlson!”
She twisted her fingers together quickly, the pitch and tempo of her voice rising in indignant protest. “It couldn’t have been anybody who’s a friend of ours!”
“It looks like the fella that killed Doc Wernitz was a friend of his,” Swede Carlson said, in as matter-of-fact tone as he could manage. “He wouldn’t have been in the house if he wasn’t. Nothin’s turned up missin’, so far, that we know of.”
She was looking down at the raked patch of earth. “He was going that way.” She pointed to the iron gate at the end of the narrow garden. “If he went through there, he must have got away down the alley. Do you know what I bet, Mr. Carlson? Not bet—I don’t mean that.” She amended it hastily. “Because I’m never going to gamble any more. I lost over a thousand dollars on the slot machines.”
She broke off, her jaw dropping, her eyes wide. She raised her hand halfway to her mouth and dropped it to her side again. “Why, I’ve—I’ve said it! I’m not afraid to say it anymore! But—that’s wonderful, isn’t it? I’ve been— I’ve been too ashamed to admit it to anybody else!”