“With a husband and a bassinette and a window-box full of petunias?” The schoolteacher nodded. “They say it’s nice work if you can get it, though I wouldn’t know. But first things first. You have honest eyes, young lady, and I believe you have a conscience. I can’t believe that you are seriously considering running away right at this time, when we are tottering on the brink of success. How can you let down poor Mrs. Rowan, and that man in the death-house? Things are beginning to happen—”
“And what things!” Iris shuddered.
“You mean the murder last night. Yes, the man who killed your former roommate has now made the major mistake of coming out into the open again. I feel in my bones that it is a direct result of the conference we had the other day in Mrs. Rowan’s living room, and what came after. Even if the police are still too myopic to realize the significance, we three women can still alone and unaided—”
“We too can be corpses this new easy way!” the girl interrupted wildly. “Save the rest of the pep talk, I don’t want to do or die for dear old Rutgers.” She came close to her obviously unwelcome visitor. “Do you want to know really why I’m running away? It’s because I’m simply scared witless, that’s why. Do you want to know why I’m even afraid to answer my phone or my doorbell? Because the murderer knows my phone number, he knows where I live!”
Miss Hildegarde Withers cocked her head on one side, like a curious bird. “But I don’t see—after all, anyone can look in a phone book or dial Information.”
“You still don’t understand. He—he actually called me!”
The schoolteacher leaned back and took a deep breath. “At last!” she whispered. “Now we’re getting somewhere. He called you and tried to scare you off? What did he say? What was his voice like? How do you know it was the murderer?”
“I just know!” Iris blurted out. “I don’t want to talk about it, I don’t want to think about it even. The first time was early this morning. The phone rang and I picked it up and answered, and I—I heard somebody laughing.”
“Laughing? But—”
“I knew you’d think what you’re thinking. Anybody would. That’s why I didn’t report it to the police. I thought at first that it was just some drunk with the wrong number, or a crossed wire or somebody clowning. But it sounded sort of wrong, somehow.” Iris bit her knuckle. “I hung up and tried to forget it. And then about an hour ago, just when I was in the middle of reading in the paper all about what happened to that Marika woman, the phone rang again. I thought it was—well, I thought it was somebody I knew, so I picked it up. And there he was laughing again.”
“You said he?” asked Miss Withers soberly.
“It was a man, all right. But I can’t describe it. It was funny laughter, not funny ha-ha but funny peculiar. I dropped the phone, and when I picked it up two or three minutes later it was still going on, believe it or not. So I admit it, I’m scared. See why I’m packing? I’m afraid to stay here alone. I don’t want to wait and be killed like Midge Harrington, and Marika last night. I don’t want to play detective. I’m too young to be murdered, I want to live and have wonderful things happen to me, I want to get married someday and—” Suddenly the girl flung herself face down on the bed, completely unwound.
“Get control of yourself,” snapped the schoolteacher. “We are dealing with a very nasty specimen indeed, but if he had any intention of murdering you he’d be at it, wouldn’t he, instead of wasting his time on pointless, anonymous phone calls?”
Iris remained uncomforted.
“What probably happened is that your telephone line is out of order, and when somebody calls you, instead of hearing them you just hear a sort of howling on the line—like static on the radio or snowflakes on a television screen.”
Iris reached out blindly and mopped her eyes with something. Or was it so blindly, Miss Withers wondered—for the girl’s fumbling hand had somehow avoided clutching the chartreuse satin of what was obviously one of her best evening dresses and had caught up a cotton blouse.
“A nice performance, Miss Dunn,” said the schoolteacher as she rose to her feet. “But the audience is walking out. Laughter over the telephone indeed!” She stalked out and closed the door firmly. Halfway down the hall she stopped, tapped her front teeth with a fingernail, and then tiptoed back.
Even with her ear to the panel of the door she could hear nothing inside. But a little adroit manipulation with a hairpin pushed back the metal cover of the peephole in the door—not enough so she could actually see into the apartment, but enough so she could now finally hear Iris’ voice, low and desperate.
“… can’t wait until tonight. Bill, you’ve simply got to come now, right this minute …” She must be on the phone, then, having made a quick recovery from her fit of the vapors. But her voice was jagged as broken glass. “No, I’m not packed, but I’ll throw the stuff together somehow. What? No, not that again. But The Hat was just here snooping around, and, darling, I’m positive she’s beginning to suspect!” The rest of it was of a more intimate nature, and Miss Withers removed the hairpin and went quietly back down the hall.
“I certainly am beginning to suspect,” she said to herself. “But just what?”
She lurked in the downstairs lobby for exactly thirty-one minutes, and then pretended to be deeply interested in the names on the mailboxes when a young man came dashing madly in from the street and headed for the automatic elevator. Miss Withers watched calmly while the indicator rose to the 18th floor level and stopped.
“Check,” said the schoolteacher, making mental note of the fact that Iris Dunn’s Bill was tall, thin, and underfed; affected a worn tweed jacket and stained flannels, could have done with a haircut, especially on his upper lip. Hardly, she thought, a tower of strength for Iris in her hour of need.
Besides, she had seen him before. On the very first day of this investigation she had run into him at the back door of Natalie Rowan’s house. Only then he had said he was reading the gas meter.
Which seemed very unlikely. Young men who read meters do not drive expensive new automobiles. She had no doubts whatever about which one was his. A long yellow teardrop stood in a no-parking zone a little way down the street, its lines so contrived that it seemed to be moving when it was standing still. Around it a small group of neighborhood children were gathered.
“It’s a Jaguar, ma’am,” announced one grubby urchin. “British job, guaranteed to do over a hunnert ’n thirty.” Miss Withers nodded, and copied down the license number.
“All things have two handles; beware of the wrong one.”
—Emerson
6.
“DON’T MOVE!” SAID THE Inspector from the doorway as he returned to his office later that afternoon. Miss Withers, who had been shamelessly peering at the papers laid out on his official desk, gasped and started.
“Because I always want to remember you just the way you are this moment,” said the little Irishman melodramatically. Then his voice changed from syrup to sandpaper. “With your long nose in somebody else’s private business, as usual!”
The schoolteacher swiftly regained her composure, and sniffed a scornful sniff. “Sticks and stones,” she reminded him. “At least, Oscar, it’s a pleasant change for once to come into your office and not have you make rude remarks about my hat.”
Piper registered mock surprise. “Is that a hat? I thought maybe it was just some flotsam and jetsam left behind by the tide.” Then he dropped down behind his battered old oak desk, and sighed.
There was an odd light in Miss Withers’ eye, but she only said, “What’s the matter, Oscar? No arrest yet in the Marika murder?”
He shook his head. “I just came back from the photo files. That Fink woman ought to crawl back in the funny papers where she belongs. The boys showed her over three thousand photographs, all men known to have been mixed up in crimes of violence against women, and she can’t make up her mind about any of ’em. First she thinks maybe and then she thinks no. And then she complains th
at the pictures are beginning to make her eyes tired and can’t she please go home and come back some other day.”
“One can hardly blame the poor creature,” said Miss Withers sympathetically. “Three thousand plug-ugly criminal faces in one session—”
“It’s her duty as a citizen to cooperate with the police!”
“Assuredly. But when I try to cooperate you say I’m interfering.” She nodded toward his desk. “I see you got a report from Phoenix.”
“You don’t miss much, do you? Too bad I don’t keep a diary in my bottom desk drawer, you’d probably have skimmed through that too!”
“I’m afraid at your age, Oscar, your diary would be about as spicy as the almanac. Very well, I’m sorry I peeked. But I don’t see why you mind my knowing that the Phoenix police report that David Cawthorne, 56, no criminal record, was a patient in a TB sanitarium there until two weeks ago, when he left one night late without the formality of being discharged. It’s a blind alley anyway—you can’t believe that the man got angry because Marika stopped sending him money, sneaked out of the hospital, and then hitchhiked his way back to New York City just to kill her, do you?”
“Say, that’s not a bad idea at that, we’ll look into it. Anyway, somebody did. Kill her, I mean.”
“And this is one crime you can’t pin on Andrew Rowan, because he’s still locked up in the death-house!”
He shrugged. “Rowan is the least of my troubles, now.”
“Perhaps. Yet, if the man is actually executed next Monday, and then later it all comes out that he was innocent, how do you suppose you’ll sleep at night?”
“Lousy, just like I do now!” But the Inspector gave her an odd look. “See here, Hildegarde, all kidding aside. Are you just still playing a wild hunch, or do you know something I don’t know?” He took out a cigar and studied it searchingly, as if he expected to find a worm in it. “Look, I haven’t forgotten about that trick will of Rowan’s. And remembering some of the rabbits you’ve pulled out of the hat in the past, I have a certain healthy respect for your feminine intuition or whatever you call it. If you could give me one simple solitary fact pointing to his innocence—”
“But facts aren’t always simple and solitary, Oscar. Anyway, I guess it’s time to break the news to you that I didn’t drop in just to peek at your desk and needle you about the progress you’re not making. I came to report a threat.”
“A which?”
“To report threatening telephone calls made this morning to Miss Iris Dunn, the girl who’s been trying to help Mrs. Rowan and me get to the real truth about the Harrington murder.”
“Oh, yes, the roommate. She inherited Midge’s personal stuff, because there weren’t any relatives. A giddy type, I remember her at the morgue. You should have seen her—”
“Save it for your reminiscences. Oscar, I’m trying to tell you something important, something that makes me so mad inside I could spit!” And she went on to tell about her surprise visit to Iris’ apartment.
“Let me get this straight, so there isn’t any mistake,” Piper said with obvious masculine superiority when she had finally run down. “You say the phone rang and the girl answered and she heard a man laughing. He called again this morning, still laughing. Is that all?”
“I confess it doesn’t sound like much, the way you put it. But, Oscar, she said it was very peculiar laughter.”
“She says! A hysterical snip of a girl—”
“Well, I’m not a hysterical snip of a girl, as you very well know! Oscar, in all your experience have you ever run into anything like that, where somebody just calls up and then laughs on and on and on?”
“I have not. And I don’t believe that anybody else has either.” He smiled a superior smile.
“Don’t be in a hurry to lay bets on that,” Miss Withers told him grimly. “I confess that at one time I almost made the same mistake you’re making. I thought Iris was simply dramatizing, making it all up just as an excuse to back out of the whole thing. I should have realized that it would take something drastic to make a down-at-the-heels actress turn her back on a nice cut of a twenty-thousand-dollar reward, which is what Natalie Rowan has offered.”
“Wow!” the Inspector said, opening his eyes.
“Yes, Oscar, wow. But listen. When I got home this afternoon and was right in the middle of washing up our brunch dishes, my phone rang! I dried my hands as fast as I could and hurried out into the living room—you know how Talley always gets excited when the phone rings, and barks and paws at it and sometimes even knocks it off the hook? I picked it up and said hello and then—well, Oscar, I heard something I never heard before, something I’ll remember to my dying day.”
“A proposal?”
But she sailed on, not deigning to notice the jibe. “Oscar, it was a man—laughing. He didn’t say anything, he just laughed. It was heavy, strange, horrible laughter, like a drunken idiot’s.”
The Inspector looked sharply at her. “Hildegarde, are you all right?”
“I’m as all right as anybody could be who heard that awful bellowing. It was inhuman, it was ghoulish and evil, like laughter bubbling up from the deep wells of hell.”
“Come, come,” said Piper uncomfortably. “Nerves—”
“Stuff and nonsense! I have no more nerves than a baked potato. Besides, what about Talley? Is my poodle having a nervous breakdown too?”
“How could anybody tell?” the Inspector said. “That fool dog—”
“Talley isn’t a fool, except in the classical sense. He’s a clown, a cheerful extroverted clown. Listen. I told you how interested he always is in the telephone, especially when one doesn’t answer it right away. As I sat there holding the instrument and shivering in my boots at that awful sound that went on and on longer than any normal human being could laugh without choking or stopping for breath, I held the phone down to Talley’s ear to see if he heard it too or if maybe I was ready for a straitjacket. Do you know what he did? Oscar, as heaven is my witness, he just shut his eyes, opened his mouth—”
“And yawned?”
“And howled, Oscar! A dreadful, thin, agonized howl such as I’ve never heard him let loose since the violinist upstairs moved away. So there!” She sat back in her chair, and waited.
“Well,” said the Inspector after a moment, “that’s a new one on me. I don’t suppose the Bell System has suddenly hooked up the tie-lines with Gehenna. Maybe this is a case for a psychiatrist—oh, I don’t mean to psychoanalyze you or your dog. But any murder that gets into the papers attracts a lot of half-demented people. They start coming down here and confessing, or else they claim they’re a reincarnation of the victim or something equally screwy. This business sounds to me like the work of some nut, who ought to be certified and on his way to Matteawan.”
“And how, pray, would this so-called nut of yours know that Iris Dunn and I are the only two people who are trying to help Natalie Rowan reopen that old murder case?”
“How do I know?” snapped Piper irritably. “How does anybody know what a madman knows—or will do in a given situation?” He blew a large but ragged smoke ring. “The thing just doesn’t make sense. Are you trying to suggest that the murderer of Marika is so afraid of you two women that he’s trying to scare you off by calling up and giving you the eerie ha-ha?”
“I’m not suggesting at the moment. I’m insisting that you must find out where those calls are coming from. You must tap our telephone lines and put policemen there to listen—”
“Sure, sure!” he cried. “Your phone and the girl’s and I suppose Mrs. Rowan’s too—with eight-hour shifts that’s nine men pulled off their beats, sitting around some cellar wearing earphones on the long chance that some nut, who has nothing to do with the murder, will call up again and pull his phony act. And if we did tap the lines the listening officers wouldn’t hear anything more than you hear. We’ve got an automatic dial system in New York, remember. There’s no way on God’s green earth for them to check back through the r
obot switchboards in time to find out where the call is originating.”
“Oh,” said the schoolteacher, deflated.
“Besides,” the Inspector went on soberly, ‘look at this angle. Just suppose for the sake of argument that the same man killed Midge Harrington and Marika Thoren. Why would he go calling attention to himself by those phone calls made to the women who are trying to link the murders? He’d want to sit tight and let Rowan be executed, wouldn’t he? No, Hildegarde, I stick with my theory that it was just some demented joker. If he calls you again, interrupt! Get him to say something, so you can hear his voice.”
The schoolteacher gave him a look. “Oscar, that’s easy to say, but you haven’t heard that laughter. It would be like—like trying to interrupt Niagara Falls or a hurricane or hell’s bells ringing in the rafters …”
“Take it easy!” Piper looked worried. “This has really got under your skin, hasn’t it?” He stood up quickly. “Let me get you a nice glass of cold water.”
“I do not have the slightest desire for a glass of cold water!”
The two old friends glared at each other for a moment, and then the tension was broken by a dark young man in shirt sleeves and uniform trousers who poked his head in the door and said, “Oh! Busy, Inspector?”
“Not at all!” Piper assured him heartily, obviously and unflatteringly happy at the interruption. “Come on in, Gino. Got anything yet?”
The newcomer carried a big block of drawing paper under his arm. “Maybe, sir.” He shrugged expressive Latin shoulders.
“Gino’s our anatomist,” the Inspector observed to Miss Withers. “Started out to be a sculptor and wound up in the Department. You should see him reconstruct a face with clay and stuff when he has nothing to start with but a moldy old skull—” He took the drawing block and studied it thoughtfully. “Not bad, not bad at all. Recognize him, Hildegarde?” He turned the pad in her direction, and she saw a pencil drawing of the head and shoulders of a stocky man in trenchcoat and wide-brimmed hat, a man wearing heavy-rimmed glasses above a truly remarkable nose.
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