by Frances
“For you,” Bob said. “Here. In Glenville—? Should I go to the police there? It would be the State men. They’d listen. But—”
Again, Captain Weigand’s fingers tapped his desk. Bob Oliver waited.
“Ten to one,” Weigand said, “if there is any what you call ‘funny business’ going on, Keating and company know you suspect something. If it is Keating, if he has a company. If—all very iffy, as FDR used to say. Your visit to Miss Farthing’s place wasn’t too convincing, I gather. To people who would need to be convinced. If, our friend with a cigar was ‘and company.’ But—if he was only a friend of Miss Farthing’s. Her agent, say. Or, agent-plus, of course. Perhaps she was trying on the wig—the wig that went with the part they were talking about. The outside chance—the eleventh chance. That j.d.’s did cut your tire. That nobody in Glenville knows you suspect anything. If the State boys are brought in, officially—by the editor of the newspaper, say—they would have to ask around.”
He stopped. He said, “You see what I’m getting at, Mr. Oliver?”
“Not—” Oliver said, and stopped. “Officially,” he said, “it’s still only another mugging?”
“Right,” Weigand said. “And may be that, of course.”
“You’d rather have it stay that way? For the time being?”
“Yes,” Weigand said. “I don’t say I mayn’t make a telephone call. But, officially, and for the time being, it’s a mugging. Which doesn’t mean I’m trying to gag you in any way. Right?”
Weigand stood up. He said he appreciated Oliver’s coming in.
Oliver grinned at him. He said, “I had a choice?”
Captain William Weigand looked surprised. He said, “Of course, Mr. Oliver,” and, still standing, watched Bob Oliver go out of the little office. Detective Shapiro started to follow him.
“Oh—Nate,” Weigand said. “Stick around for a minute, will you?”
VIII
Mrs. Simpson assumed full responsibility, as was her wont. “The late Mrs. Abigail Montfort.” Yes, she really thought that would be better. More Seemly, under the circumstances. And she did wish that others, Not Naming Any Names, were as conscientious about doing what they promised to do as Lois Williams was. Sometimes, between them, she felt that many younger people nowadays didn’t really know the Meaning of Responsibility.
“The girls to sit,” she said. “Boys!”
Lois had, in recent weeks, grown increasingly able to follow Mrs. Simpson, even when Mrs. Simpson was not capitalizing. This threw her. She shook her head. It was possible—even probable—that she was not as attentive as usual. A smudge of dust, vaguely shaped like the human foot, kept intervening. So did an angular, violent man—a man who would have to be told of the smudge. Now that the brochure was ready for the printer—now that—
“I’m afraid—” Lois said, politely, but she also stood up in their corner of the Community House. “Boys?”
“Saturday afternoon,” Mrs. Simpson said. “Swimming. Tennis. All that sort of thing. With boys. Four already have suddenly remembered previous engagements. And the insurance company is Adamant.”
(Adamant of Hartford. Its symbol, An Immovable Object.)
“Oh,” Lois said.
“It is so helpful,” Mrs. Simpson said, “to know I can count on you. For the cannon-ball house.”
“For the—oh, you want me there?”
“It’s Ella, really,” Mrs. Simpson said. “Ella Harbrook. The poor thing—it’s such a Trying Period of course. She asked particularly whether you could be one of them. There have to be two, of course. One for each room that’s open. It’s just sitting, you know. To be there.”
Lois knew. But—the Montfort house. The dark house.
“Someone,” Mrs. Simpson said, “in whom she can feel Real Confidence. She’s sure she can in you. I said I was sure you would.”
“Well—” Lois said.
Well—why not? There would be people coming through. The house would be as dark for anyone else and—
She did not want to argue, to waste more time.
“Of course,” Lois Williams said. “Now I really must get this to the printer, mustn’t I?”
Mrs. Simpson accepted responsibility. She said that Lois must Run Right Along.
Lois did not actually run the few blocks from the Community House to the office of the Glenville Advertiser. She left her car in the Community House lot and walked. She did, to be sure, walk rather rapidly. She had things, and the brochure copy the least of them, that she found she was, with each step toward sharing, more anxious to share.
Material to be printed was handed in over a downstairs counter. Lois handed material in and it was carried away and she waited. Then a thin, stooped man came in, carrying it, and nodded his head. “By Friday, Mr. Harkness?” Lois said, and the stooped man said, “Sure. Maybe tomorrow evening. Way I understand it, names black face caps and body text six point leaded. That right?”
That was right. It wasn’t too long?
“Not if we use six point,” Harkness said, and went back into the place from which the ink smell came.
Now—to what was important. She went quickly toward the staircase, her heels rat-a-tat-tat on the wooden floor. A young woman looked over a railing at her, smiled at her. And said, “He’s not there, Mrs. Williams. Went out right after the run started.”
“Oh,” Lois said, and said it flatly. “Do you happen to know—”
But the young woman was shaking her head, in advance. Robert Oliver had merely got into his car and racketed off in it, and not said “boo,” or anything else, to anybody. Which, it had to be admitted, was a way he sometimes had.
Lois said, “Oh,” again, and then, because she thought, I show I’m disappointed, “It wasn’t anything important. He wanted some names—”
And then she went out into the hot sun of a late morning in late August and walked back to the parking lot and discovered, somewhat to her surprise, that she was fuming. The great—oaf! Here she had something—something important and—where was he? Racketing off in the MG like—like a teenage hot-rodder. Without, obviously, giving a damn whether she was dead or alive. For all he knew—for all he knew, anything might have happened to her. For all he cared, evidently.
She stopped at the Glenville News & Stationery. She picked up the morning’s New York Times and the Herald Tribune. She saw—could hardly help seeing—that in the Daily Mirror an off- duty cop had routed a mugger. She did not buy the Daily Mirror; she never did. She got her car in the parking lot and drove home in it, and when she opened her front door the telephone was ringing.
She hurried to it and, obscurely, thought, About time. She lifted the receiver and there was a moment of nothing and then the dial tone. The—the same thing again? For an instant, but only for an instant, there was a faint chill in the pleasant room. Then she thought, This is really getting me down, and put the receiver back. It was, clearly, not the same thing. This time somebody had been trying to get her and given up a moment too soon. That was all there was to this. Too self-important to wait ten more seconds! The oaf!
In a hot telephone booth near the West Twentieth Street police station, Bob Oliver put a receiver back in its receptacle, and put it back harder than was really necessary. He scowled at nothing in particular. Never around when you wanted them, that was the way they were. Instead of waiting until he had a chance to call, she was out doing some damn silly thing that might just as well have been done any other time. If ever. Get her neck—her pretty neck—in a sling if she wasn’t careful.
The MG started up from the curb with an angry snarl.
Lois changed into blue shorts and halter. (Might as well save the white piqué for another day, or at any rate another hour.) She went out onto the terrace with the morning papers. Dulles was taking off from Washington. On the other hand, Eisenhower was returning to Washington. Hammarskjöld was flying to Switzerland from New York, but Gromyko was flying to New York from Moscow. How jumpy everybody was, Lois thought.
Was it possible that the very knowledge that they could jump was what made them so jumpy? If Dulles had to go to wherever it was—she looked; it was London—in a sailing ship (or even a steamship) would it seem one tenth as urgent that he go at all? Everybody was too jumpy. Look at this Oliver creature!
She skimmed on through the Times, stopping only here and there—stopping, for example, to read James Reston’s comment, as sensible people do.
The item was on the first page of the second section—the “split page.” It was not prominent. It stated that Miss Grace Farthing, who had had roles in several Broadway plays, had been seriously injured the night before during a “mugging” attack, in the Village, within a few blocks of her home. Her assailant, surprised by an off-duty patrolman, had escaped. Miss Farthing—who was separated from her husband, Hugh Banks, a former newspaperman—had been taken to St. Vincent’s Hospital where—
Lois Williams read the rest of it. A chilly breeze began, again, to blow across the terrace. But she did not, this time, involuntarily look upward at the sky, seeking the intervening cloud. That wasn’t where the cloud was.
The New York, New Haven & Hartford makes little effort to conceal the grudge it holds against passengers, who are an evil it hopes, given time, to prove unnecessary. One way to bring about this desired result is to eliminate, insofar as possible, those trains which most people find most convenient to ride on. Glenville is minor among the communities the New Haven serves, but every little helps. From ten in the morning until 5:02 in the evening, no trains run from Grand Central to Glenville.
Detective (first grade) Nathan Shapiro rode northeast from New York by bus. This provides an excellent opportunity to look at an often lovely countryside, but Nathan Shapiro does not like the country. In the country, when duty forces him into it (which is fortunately not often), his long face grows longer, and droops farther. It is Detective Shapiro’s conviction that if one wishes to look at grass, there is always Brooklyn’s Prospect Park.
The buses which run from New York to Glenville take a somewhat circuitous route, being barred from routes more direct and having, in any case, a good many stops to make. They are firm- minded buses, and are not air-conditioned. They also bounce a good deal. Detective Shapiro dislikes being bounced.
The bus stopped opposite the Glenville post office on Main Street at a few minutes after two in the afternoon and Shapiro got out of it. There are few villages in the country more charming than Glenville, more restful to the eye and to the spirit, more, to all outward evidence, precisely what small villages in near-New England should be. Big white houses still stand on Main Street, and the shops are reticent, well-mannered shops. A pleasant place, Shapiro thought, reluctantly. Not Brooklyn, certainly, but pleasant. Rose would like it, he thought. He hoped this trip wasn’t going to make him late in getting home to Rose.
Having oriented himself, Nathan Shapiro walked west on Main Street toward No. 82, residence and office of Charles Young, M.D. He walked up the driveway and around the house, obedient to a sign which pointed, which said, “Doctor’s Office.” He went into a small waiting room, and sat down in it.
There was a young woman with two children, one of whom came at once to Detective Shapiro and looked up at him and said, “Hello, man.” The sadness went out of Shapiro’s face at that, and he smiled down at the child—a little girl—and said, in a soft voice, “Hello, girl.” “Mary!” the girl’s mother said, admonishing, but she too smiled at Detective Shapiro. “Don’t bother the gentleman.” There was a boy of fourteen, alone, and with his arm in a sling. There was an old woman—a very old woman—who sat and trembled. Some kind of palsy, Shapiro thought, sadly. So many things happened to people. And why did God not give us children? Rose loves children.
A nurse came to the door and smiled at the young woman who had two children and said, “You can come in now, Mrs. Wellington.”
She held the door open and Mrs. Wellington and Mary and —who? John? Paul? Matthew?—went through it. The nurse nodded her head and smiled at the boy with his arm in the sling and said, to the old woman, “It will only be a few minutes, Mrs. Bruce” and looked at Shapiro with polite vagueness and went back out of sight.
It was, of course, more than a few minutes before Mrs. Wellington and the children came out—and Mary came up to Nathan Shapiro and looked at him through round, pleased eyes and said, “I’m all well now.”
“I’m glad, dear,” Shapiro said.
Mrs. Bruce trembled even more as she stood up, and it was almost half an hour before she came out, trembling no less—not all well now, or ever likely to be. And then the boy was next and it was another half hour. He came out and, after an interval, the nurse came to the door and looked at Shapiro as if, now, she saw him for the first time and said, “You wanted to see the doctor? You can come in, now.”
Shapiro went in and through a small anteroom—the nurse’s lair, apparently—and into a larger room and toward a heavy man who sat behind a desk and looked at him over glasses.
“Afternoon,” the heavy man said. “Not been to me before, have you? What seems to be the trouble?”
Nathan Shapiro was sorely tempted. There must, surely, be something some doctor could do about that stomach of his—a stomach which now, unsupplied with lunch, was even more than usually annoyed. A doctor who wouldn’t merely say, “Quit worrying, keep regular hours, eat regular meals,” thus demanding the impossible of a policeman. A doctor who would say, “Take this and you’ll be all well.”
“I’m not a patient, Dr. Young,” Nathan Shapiro said in his soft, sad voice. “I’m a detective. From New York.”
“From the looks of you, you could be both,” Dr. Young said. “Ulcer?”
“No,” Shapiro said. “Always pending, never present.”
“Bland diet,” Dr. Young said. “Regular meals. Regular hours. Don’t worry. No charge for that.” He looked at Shapiro, still over the lenses of his spectacles. “Heard that before, probably,” he said.
“Yes,” Shapiro said. “If you can give me a few minutes, doctor?”
“Well,” Dr. Young said, in the most reasonable of tones, “you’re here, aren’t you?”
“About the late Mrs. Montfort,” Shapiro said, and, immediately, Dr. Young said, “What about her?”
“I understand—” Shapiro began and was told to wait a minute, and was looked at, over the lenses of spectacles, as if he were a recalcitrant student.
“You say you’re a detective from New York,” Dr. Young said. “You mean police detective? Or this other kind?”
Shapiro took his badge out and held it across the desk. He was asked if he realized he was in Connecticut. But, for all the gruffness of tone, Dr. Young was not, Shapiro thought, antagonistic. Dr. Young merely wanted to get things straight. Which was, of course, entirely reasonable.
“Yes,” Shapiro said, resignation in his tone. “I realize I’m in Connecticut, doctor. I—”
“There’s no reason to be so depressed about it,” Dr. Young said. “Nothing wrong with Connecticut. What’s Abigail Montfort, dead or alive, to do with the New York police?”
“Probably nothing at all,” Shapiro said. “Possibly—there may be a connection between her and a young woman who’s dead in town. Mugging victim.”
“It doesn’t seem likely,” Dr. Young said. “Poor old thing certainly not up to mugging anyone. What do you want of me?”
“Mrs. Montfort died of natural causes?”
“Of the physical impairments to be expected at her age,” Dr. Young said. “You want a list? It’s on the death certificate.”
“No chance of—anything else? Anything which could be made to look—”
“Like natural death? Of course there’s a chance. There’s a chance your wife, if you’ve got a wife, is feeding you arsenic. Resulting in a bad stomach. You’ve been to doctors. Anybody ever test for arsenic?”
“No,” Shapiro said.
“Then—of course there’s a chance,” Young said. “One in— what? You kno
w your own wife.”
“Ten million,” Shapiro said. “A hundred million.”
“All right,” Young said. “You’re happily married. Fine. Conceivably, Mrs. Montfort could have been, very gently, smothered. Conceivably, she could have been given something. I didn’t take her apart to find out.”
“Because you were sure?”
“I’ve been keeping an eye on her—had been keeping an eye on her—for—” He paused. “Something like twenty years,” he said, and seemed inwardly surprised, unbelieving. “Twenty years,” he repeated, as if to make himself believe. “I’ve watched her change. Grow old. Seen things start—the skin change, the body shrink. All the things that start and—bring the end. Arteries—all the things. Yes, I was sure. I am sure. She’d lived the time she had to live, and died of that. Lived longer than I will. Probably than you will.”
The last, Shapiro, gloomily, did not doubt. He didn’t doubt any of it. He never had.
“You were called there Monday evening?
“Yes. Mrs. Harbrook was afraid she’d died in her sleep. She had.”
“How long before you got there, doctor?”
Dr. Young looked at the ceiling.
“Half an hour,” he said. “Took me fifteen minutes to get there. Finished for the day—hoped I was—and was having a shower. Ten minutes to get dressed. Five in the car. Ella Harbrook said it was about ten minutes before she called me that she thought the old girl had stopped breathing.” He had talked to himself. “Comes to twenty-five minutes,” he said.
“Based,” Shapiro said, “on what Mrs. Harbrook told you, of course.”
“Nothing to—” the doctor began and stopped. “What’re you getting at?” he said.
“The condition of the body?”
“You think Ella Harbrook was lying?”
“I don’t know. She stands to inherit—”
“So—that’s it? What’s it got to do with this young woman of yours? The one got mugged? What is the connection? Improbable, impossible, connection?”