by Lee Harris
“I’ll call her first thing in the morning.”
I was so energized by the discovery that I was up early, even though it was Saturday. We all ate together and then I called the number Mrs. Benzinger had given me.
I realized the moment the phone was picked up that I had not asked for Amelia’s current last name. “Is this Amelia McGonagle?” I asked, for want of a better name.
“Well, no one’s called me that in fifty years but I guess that’s who I am,” a rather thin voice said. “Who are you?”
“My name’s Chris Bennett. I talked to your sister last night and she gave me your number. I wonder if we could talk—”
“About what?” she asked tartly before I could finish my sentence.
“About Willard Platt.”
“Willard? Why in God’s name would anyone in his right mind want to talk about Willard Platt?”
“Something’s happened and I need some information. I wonder if—”
She stopped me again. “You’ll have to come here. I’m not feeling too good and it’s hard to hold the phone.”
“When is good for you?”
“One o’clock?”
“One is fine. Where do you live?”
She described it the way people who don’t drive give directions. I jotted down what she said, knowing that Jack would have a map that could help me.
“And your last name?” I asked finally.
“Chester,” she said. “L. B. Chester next to the bell.”
“I’ll see you at one.”
15
I decided finding Roger would have to wait. I dashed out to do some shopping and put together lunch. I ate mine early, then drove to New York. Jack had located the street, just a few turns off Pelham Parkway, a wide road packed with cars. When I finally found Amelia’s street, it was one-way the wrong direction and I wasted several minutes trying to get myself to her building by trying one narrow parked-up street after another and nearly losing the right one in the process. Then I made circles looking for a place to park. Finally, someone pulled out of a space just as I approached and I was able to squeeze in before the aggressive car behind me took it away.
I was two blocks from the address I was looking for, and I found L. B. Chester when I got there. Up on the fourth floor, Mrs. Chester opened her door and looked me over. “What did you say your name was?”
“Chris. Chris Bennett.”
“Come in. You can leave your coat wherever you want. I can’t hang things up anymore. Coats are too heavy.” She had a walker that she leaned on wearily as we went into her living room. She shuffled in slippers although she was fully dressed and rather garishly made up with powder and rouge and a bright lipstick that looked very out of place. “Sit down.” She motioned toward a sofa and set herself down in a chair with arms.
She was very thin, her arms bony, her fingers almost skeletal. Her eyes seemed to be set too deeply in her wan face and she had outlined them with dark pencil. I didn’t think it added to her looks.
“So what’s the story on Willard?” she asked when she had settled herself.
“Willard Platt was murdered a week ago today,” I said, stopping for effect.
“Hah!” she said, a grin spreading over her face. “I knew someone would get him eventually. Just took some time.”
“What would they be getting him for?” I asked.
“For being a mean bastard. That’s enough, isn’t it?”
I wasn’t sure that it was. “Was he mean to you?” I asked.
“Mean as they come. I hated him.”
“But you married him.”
“I made a mistake. I met a gorgeous guy in uniform and I fell for him. He was big and strong and handsome and he swept me off my feet. That’s why I married him.”
“And then?”
“And then …” she said. She leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. “It all changed. He changed. He didn’t like the way I kept the apartment. He didn’t like the way I cooked. He didn’t like me to be late from work because then dinner was late and he was hungry and it was all my fault.”
“It sounds like you weren’t suited to each other.”
“No kidding?” She paused for breath. “Who’d he marry?”
“A very nice woman. I’ve only just met her. They live in my town.”
“He never made it to Hollywood, did he?”
“I don’t think so. Did he talk about it when you knew him?”
“That’s all he talked about. I didn’t think he was such a great actor, but he did. He was good-looking enough, I guess. Nowadays that’s all it takes, but back then you had to have talent. He didn’t have any.”
I thought it was her anger speaking, not her judgment. If Willard had convinced everyone he knew for fifty years that he had a bad leg, he was a pretty good actor in my book. “I think he went into some kind of business,” I said. “But he worked with high school students in the drama club.”
“Good for him,” she said sarcastically.
“Did you and Willard have any children?” I asked.
“Did I have a kid with Willard? Who gave you that idea?”
“I’m just asking. If there were a child, he might have some claim on Willard’s estate.” I didn’t know if that was true, although I thought it likely, but it seemed to me if she was reluctant to admit the existence of such a child, an inheritance might change her mind.
“He leave a lot of money?”
“More than I have.”
“More than I have too, I bet.”
“Did you have a child together?”
She closed her eyes for a moment, then pulled a tissue out of a pocket and patted her nose. “I got a kid, but it’s not his. He was my first husband, not my last.”
OK, I thought, then no claim on the estate. “When was the last time you saw him?”
“Oh, maybe ten, eleven months after we got married. I threw him out one night. Couldn’t stand him anymore. Getting divorced was a bitch. You’re too young to know, but there wasn’t any divorce in New York except for adultery, so I went to Reno, stayed there for six weeks, did it that way. He paid for me to go. He didn’t want to do the fake adultery thing, where you set a guy up in a hotel with a woman in a nightgown and the detective comes in and finds them. So there was no other way.”
“Did you keep in touch after that?”
“What for? I wanted him out of my life, not in it.”
I was curious to know whether he had paid her alimony, but I didn’t want to ask. She had mentioned working, so maybe she didn’t ask for financial help. “Then you never saw him again?”
“Never.”
“Did you talk to him?”
“What about? We went our separate ways.”
I really had only one question left and it was the most important one. “I understand Willard was shot back in the 1940s.”
“Who told you that?”
“Actually, it came out in the autopsy.”
“Oh, yeah, you said he was murdered. Yeah, he was shot.” She smiled a little.
“Can you tell me who shot him?”
“Hah! Can I tell you. Bullet missed by a mile, didn’t it?”
So she knew about it. I leaned forward. “Who shot him, Mrs. Chester?”
“You’d like to know, wouldn’t you?”
“Very much.”
“Why? What difference does it make fifty years later?”
“It could be important.”
“To you? Who are you, anyway?”
“I’m trying to find out who murdered Willard Platt. His family asked me to help.”
“So you think the person who shot him back in the Forties is the same one who killed him last week?”
“I don’t think that. I just think it’s an unanswered question.”
She narrowed her eyes. “What’s it worth to you?”
“Excuse me?”
“To find out? How much are you willing to pay if I tell you who shot Willard?”
I was
taken aback by her question. It had never occurred to me that she would want to be paid. I had never paid anyone for any information and I wasn’t about to start now. “I won’t pay anything. I thought you would tell me, since you seem to know.”
“I don’t seem to know. I know. And I don’t have to tell you if I don’t want to. Any other questions?”
“I think that was my last one,” I said. I took a slip of paper out of my bag and wrote my name and phone number on it. I put it on the round table next to her chair. “If you decide to tell me, you can call collect. I’d really like to know.”
She smiled at me, the red lips almost clownlike. “Forget it,” she said. “You want to know, make me an offer.”
“Thank you for your time. I hope you’re feeling better.”
“There’s no feeling better anymore. There’s just getting through the day and hoping there’s another one tomorrow.”
I didn’t say anything, but I felt very sorry for her. I took my coat from the chair where I had left it and went to the door. “Goodbye,” I called.
There was no answer.
“Well that’s an interesting turn of events,” Jack said. “She knows and won’t tell. Well why not? People sell everything, why not information?”
“She’s a strange woman, Jack. I can just see her as a young, provocative girl. It’s as though she never outgrew the part. The makeup she wears is like a caricature. If she washed her face and put a little soft color on it, she’d look almost healthy. But I can tell you for sure she didn’t kill Willard Platt, even if she tried a long time ago.”
“You think she’s the one?”
“I think there’s a very good chance.”
“So where do you go from here?”
That was the question. I had gone further than I had expected, having found Amelia, but she seemed like a dead end now. I wasn’t going to pay her and she had no reason to tell me what I wanted to know unless I did. I had talked to the mayor, who had lied to me, to Mrs. Platt, who may have lied, to Toni, who knew nothing because she wasn’t here when her father was murdered, to the owner of the nursery, who wasn’t sorry to see Willard dead but didn’t strike me as a suspect.
“I guess I should call Joseph,” I said. “When I hit a stone wall, she’s always the one who points me in the right direction.”
Joseph is Sister Joseph, the General Superior of St. Stephen’s, where I lived for fifteen years, many of them as a nun. In addition to being my spiritual director, she is my closest friend. These are not the reasons I go to her when I need help solving a murder. I go because she has a unique way of looking at facts. By the time I ask for her help, I am often so personally involved that it’s hard to be objective. Also, in telling her the facts of the case, I often begin to see things myself that had become obscured.
“Go to it,” Jack said.
And I did.
I arranged with Joseph that I would drive up tomorrow after mass. While I was on the phone with her, Jack called to say that he’d like to come along; he hadn’t been up there for a while. There would probably be plenty of people on the convent grounds, mostly women, as the college was in session, and I wouldn’t need a lot of time, perhaps an hour with Joseph. Eddie was a regular on my visits. The nuns all loved him, and I was sure there would be plenty of baking activity in the kitchen when word got around that we were coming.
Eddie had taken a nap while I was gone, and Jack was getting dinner ready when I got off the phone. I asked Jack if it was OK if I went out for a while and he said he didn’t mind; he was busy and Eddie would help him. I got in the car and drove over to the apartments where Roger Platt lived.
I decided there was no other way to find him than knocking on doors. First I went through the names on the mailboxes, but nothing looked like a clever permutation of the letters in his name. Nor was there any business name listed. So I went over to the section I had seen him enter last weekend and rang the first bell on the first floor.
I had no success on the first and second floors. Half the apartments had no one home, and I made a note of which ones they were, in case I had to come back on Monday. Where I was able to talk to someone, there was no Roger and they had never heard of him. I was starting to feel that this was a wild goose chase—I’ve had many of them in recent years—when I pressed a button for the fifteenth or so time. I heard footsteps coming toward the door, then the bolt turned and the door was pulled open.
And I stood face-to-face with Doris Platt.
16
I don’t know which of us was more surprised. We looked at each other for several seconds, neither of us speaking. Finally she said, “You’d better come in.”
I went inside and into the living room, where a tall man in his forties rose from where he had been sitting.
“I’m Roger Platt,” he said. And to my surprise, he offered me his hand.
I shook it and said, “I’ve been looking for you.”
“I gather as much. Why don’t you sit down? You’re Mrs. Brooks, I assume.”
“Yes. Chris. I’m glad you’re all right.”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“No one’s seen you for a while. Your mother was worried.”
“I know. Doris tells me you followed me home one night.”
“I did. But I didn’t know which apartment you lived in. I’ve been knocking on doors.”
“That’s what I did,” Doris said. “But I started on the top floor because I knew Roger wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.”
Interesting, I thought. So nobody in the building got visits from both of us. “I hope you’ll call your mother,” I said to him.
“I will. Is there anything else?” He seemed anxious to dismiss me.
“Yes, there is. I have a few questions.”
In that moment, I decided to find out what he knew of his father’s past, even if it meant unsettling him. He had done enough unsettling himself to deserve it. “Did you know about your father’s first marriage?”
“My father’s what?”
“I’ve just come back from talking to your father’s first wife. I just wondered whether you knew about her.”
“Mrs. Brooks, you’ve got a few lines crossed. My father married my mother after the war and that’s the only marriage he ever had.”
“You’re wrong about that. A lawyer friend of mine dug up the marriage certificate yesterday and I was able to trace her. We spoke this afternoon.”
“This is crazy. Next you’ll tell me he had kids with her.”
“He didn’t. They weren’t married very long, about a year. I don’t know whether your mother is aware of her existence.”
“Do not discuss this with my mother,” he ordered.
“I don’t intend to. Mr. Platt, are you aware that your father was shot back in the Forties?”
“Doris was just telling me about the autopsy. I’m starting to wonder if I know who my father was.”
“I have a strong feeling that it may have been his first wife who shot him, but I don’t know that for certain. She knows who did it, or at least she claims to, but she won’t tell me.” I didn’t think the details of our conversation needed to be revealed.
“I’m finding all this hard to believe. Why don’t the police know this?”
“It’s possible that they do. They certainly know the results of the autopsy. But police don’t usually look too far back in time for motives or possible killers. I find that everything that happens in a life can be relevant.”
“I hear you talked to Dad’s old friend, Harry.”
“I did. He knew about your father’s first marriage. He was a witness.”
Roger shook his head. “I can’t believe this.”
“He also knew your father had been shot.”
“You’re not going to suggest that Harry killed Dad.”
“I’m not suggesting anything. But that seems unlikely. He would have had to come out here on Saturday and somehow get back. Does he own a car?”
“Not
that I know of. I’m not sure he ever did.”
“Can you tell me why you weren’t at the funeral?” I asked.
“I can, but I’m not going to. How I conduct my life is my business.”
“I heard that there were bad feelings between your father and Mr. Vitale at the nursery across the road.”
“There were. I’m sure part of that was my father’s fault. He was never an easy person to get along with. But don’t believe everything you hear. If my father drove a hard bargain, you can be sure Vitale did too. I think in the back of Vitale’s mind was that he would develop the land he wanted to buy from us.”
“You mean build houses?”
“Exactly. And they would have gone for a fortune. That area has everything—privacy, a view, no traffic. It’s an ideal place to live.”
Those were interesting thoughts. It had never occurred to me that the nursery wanted anything but the right to plant trees and shrubs. Perhaps Willard Platt had demanded a promise in writing that the land would not be developed and Mr. Vitale refused to give it. It was possible that both parties had acted in a less than ethical manner. “I’ve been getting the story in bits and pieces,” I said. “I see that there’s more to it than I originally thought.”
“There’s more to everything,” Roger said without elucidating.
“Is there a way I can reach you if I have any more questions?”
“No there isn’t. I don’t want you coming here and I don’t want you calling me. Doris and I are in touch and she can pass along a message, but don’t expect me to respond. The truth is, I don’t care very much.”
“You had a bad relationship with him,” I said.
“I had no relationship with him. I didn’t like him and he didn’t care very much for me. At some time in my life I decided I was tired of being a disappointment to him, so I stopped seeing very much of him. It’s made my life a lot easier.”
I wondered if he felt the same way about his wife. “Thanks for your time,” I said, standing.
Doris walked me to the door and went outside into the hall. “I just wanted you to know, I found Roger about an hour before you got here.”