by Helen Reilly
“June the twenty-fifth.” Gabrielle sat forward, her eyes brilliant. It was coming at last. “The round man!” she exclaimed. “It was on that day, the twenty-fifth, that the round man arrived at Mark’s apartment during lunch. He had a briefcase with him. Mark could have given him the money—and then, to keep from having to account for it, or pay it back, he killed Mark.”
McKee moved a pencil on his desk. Gabrielle Conant had been rather badly frightened. Her recovery was quick. She was offering them a stranger, a man whose existence as an important factor had never been substantiated. Clearly a re-evaluation of the whole case was called for. He had been out of the city when Mark Middleton died, had been away for a good part of the autumn. No use interrogating the girl in detail until he knew a good deal more.
Gabrielle leaned toward him eagerly. “This does prove, doesn’t it, Inspector, that Mark’s death was murder—and not suicide?”
McKee said, “We’ll have to see. It’s not possible at this stage to say anything definite. Certainly the disappearance of eighty thousand dollars of Mr. Middleton’s money in cash calls for further inquiry. Well, thank you for coming, Miss Conant. We’ll keep you informed.” He rose.
When the girl was gone the Scotsman pressed a button, had File No. 136-704 brought, and sent for Todhunter.
Gabrielle went home a prey to violently conflicting emotions. The Inspector had admitted that the disappearance of the eighty thousand dollars in cash changed the picture, that Mark’s death might have been murder and not suicide. But suppose Tony—Susan’s husband, the father of Susan’s children—was mixed up in it somewhere? She told herself that there was no evidence, nothing to connect the modest sum spent on the house in Greenfield with Mark’s missing eighty thousand, that Tony might have won money at cards, or on a horse.
She was only just in when Alice called her, full of this new development. She said, “Almost a third of what Mark had, Gabrielle—Phil Bond and Tyrell are stunned. I hope they find it, for your sake, darling. Did Mark ever say anything—I mean he told us he was going to give you a nice wedding present and he might have—”
Gabrielle said she knew nothing about the money. Later Susan called from Greenfield to find out what the Inspector had had to say. She was shocked when she heard the news, but not at all apprehensive—and she would have been terror-stricken if Tony had had anything to do with it.
Before she went to bed Gabrielle put the chain on the front door and a chair under the knob of the kitchen door. Get new locks tomorrow, she decided firmly.
At half-past eleven on the following morning she was preparing to go around to the hardware store when a lawyer from the District Attorney’s office rang her bell. Assistant District Attorney Simpson introduced himself pleasantly. He was a brisk fellow in his thirties with a sharp nose and glasses. Gabrielle thought he had come to talk to her about the money. He hadn’t. District Attorney Dwyer had received an anonymous letter accusing her of having killed Mark.
For a moment Gabrielle was too astounded to speak. Then she got breath, and her voice back. The anonymous accusation was too absurd for anger. She smiled at Mr. Simpson, said gently, “I killed Mark—why, Mr. Simpson? We were engaged, were about to be married. What was my motive supposed to be?” Watching Assistant District Attorney Simpson she decided she didn’t like him much.
He was apologetic, and evasive. “We don’t pay too much attention to letters like this, you know, but we’ve got to look into them, Miss Conant, so if you wouldn’t mind putting me straight about a few things…? That’s fine.” Mr. Simpson stared at the toes of his polished black oxfords and then directly into her face. “Another man has been mentioned. Who was the man who visited you here in your apartment on the afternoon of the day Mr. Middleton died?”
Gabrielle sat motionless. Was Mr. Simpson guessing or had the anonymous writer mentioned a visitor? Probably. But the writer didn’t know her visitor was John Muir, or he would have been mentioned by name. What was this? An attempt to smear her? Admit nothing. She covered her pause with: “Sorry—I was trying to think back. To the best of my recollection no one came to see me that afternoon.”
Mr. Simpson didn’t insist. He was almost elaborately civil. She must understand that their office had to check on all sorts of screwball letters, complaints. Gabrielle said she quite understood, and they parted with mutual civilities. She thought of calling John Muir but decided against the phone; five minutes later she was on her way to his office.
The surly cab man with the big nose and the mole on his forehead wasn’t in front of the florist’s on the corner. To make assurance doubly sure that she wasn’t being followed, she took the subway. John was in and saw her at once. He sent his secretary out of the room, said, “Gabrielle!” in a pleased tone, put her into a chair, and gave her a cigarette. “Is it this money of Mark’s that—?”
“No.” She poured it all out at once, the anonymous letter to the District Attorney, the accusation of a covert connection with another man, what she had told the Assistant District Attorney who had come to see her. “I said there was no one with me on the afternoon of the day Mark died.”
“Hmmm—an anonymous letter.” John drew concentric circles frowningly on a pad in front of him, thought it over. “You did the right thing, Gabrielle. At this stage—”
His phone rang. He lifted the instrument impatiently, said, “Yes, oh—all right. I’ll be there in a minute,” and hung up. “Some men I’ve got to see.” He gestured toward a conference room opening out of his office.
“Look, Gabrielle, what are you doing later on today?”
“Nothing much.” Gabrielle said she had to see Phil Bond at four but that she wouldn’t be too long. “There are a lot of things I want to talk to you about.”
“And I want to talk to you,” John said. “Suppose I come along to your apartment between five and six and we’ll go somewhere for dinner. Right?”
“Right.” Gabrielle fastened her furs and picked up her gloves with a feeling of release. It was good not to be always alone. John took her to the elevator. Three glossy, plump, well-fed men were waiting in the conference room; he waved to them as he went past. At the elevator he said cheerfully, “See you at around five-thirty,” and for no particularly good reason, Gabrielle went out into the cold November afternoon with a lightened heart.
She had a sandwich and tea in Schrafft’s and walked to Phil Bond’s office. Phil was ready for her. They talked of the missing eighty thousand before getting down to work. Phil Bond was very troubled and upset about it. “I suppose we should have unearthed it long ago,” he said slowly, “but we were sure the stuff, the securities Mark sold, were in one or the other of his safe-deposit boxes. It wasn’t until we opened the third one yesterday morning that we got on the trail.” He reached for a file of papers.
Gabrielle left his office at ten minutes after five, her bright mood persisting. She drew the keen air into her lungs with a feeling of pleasure. Her senses were waking from sleep, from the atrophy of Mark’s death. It was the hour of magic in New York, twilight, with the first star twinkling high overhead and the tall towers arrowing up into the fading sky, dark against the lambent west, and hung with millions of square yellow spangles. Busses and private cars and taxis filled the streets, neon lights flashed and the crowds were a flowing sea.
It was dark when she got home. The darkness prevented her from immediately seeing the traces of recent excitement when she got out of the cab in front of her door. But once inside the house she smelled the smoke. She sniffed, startled. There had been a fire somewhere close by.
The fire had been in her apartment. The door was wide open. The first person she saw was a big fireman in a rubber coat making his exit. He brushed past her indifferently. Gabrielle ran toward the living-room, came to an abrupt stop on the threshold.
The room was a complete wreck, the disorder indescribable. The rugs had been rolled up and the furniture moved aside. The bookcase spilling books was lying face down on the wet floor.
The curtains on the middle window were gone. The frame and the wall beside it were black and blistered, and the air was filled with a sharp odor of charred wood and chemicals.
There were half a dozen men in the room. One of the men—Gabrielle’s eyes widened—was the Assistant District Attorney she had seen earlier in the day.
Simpson looked up and saw her. He said in a peculiar tone, “Here’s Miss Conant now,” and a short thickset man with hair as yellow as butter and a bright blue stare, swiveled sharply. It was District Attorney Dwyer himself. In one hand the District Attorney was holding the smashed base of her blue pottery lamp, in the other what looked like some crumpled dollar bills.
They weren’t dollar bills. They were thousand-dollar bills. The District Attorney spoke in a voice as hard as his eyes, and Gabrielle put her shoulders gently against the door jamb. What he said was, “We found these bills tucked up into the base of this lamp, Miss Conant. What did you do with the rest of it?”
“The rest of what?” Gabrielle’s voice was just above a whisper.
“The rest of Mark Middleton’s missing eighty thousand dollars.”
Chapter Nine: A Pushing Hand
“I KNOW NOTHING ABOUT THE MONEY. I never even heard of the eighty thousand dollars until yesterday. I didn’t hide three thousand-dollar bills in the base of the lamp. I never saw a thousand-dollar bill in my life until just now…”
For more than an hour Gabrielle repeated that steadily. Nothing she said had the slightest effect on the District Attorney. They struck sparks from the beginning. Dwyer had an eye for a pretty woman. Gabrielle’s slim distinction didn’t appeal to him. The poise of her dark head, her very quietness, a quietness he couldn’t break, merely deepened his conviction of her guilt. Even before McKee said so, he realized he hadn’t enough evidence for an arrest, which was why he worked over her so hard in an effort to drag more out of her by main force.
“You took that eighty thousand of Mark Middleton’s. We have the numbers of the bills. A fire started here in your apartment while you were out. Three of the missing bills were found in the hollow base of that lamp over there. You hid those three bills in that lamp. Only that they were found by accident—What did you do with the rest of the money?”
“I never had it, don’t know anything about it.”
“Give it to some man, the man who was with you here on the day Mark Middleton was shot? Who is he?”
“There was no man here.”
Assistant District Attorney Simpson came in. He handed Dwyer a slip of paper.
Dwyer was pleased. He beamed. “Memorandum from your bank, Miss Conant. So you never gave money to anyone?”
“No.”
“Then what did you do with seven thousand dollars of your own you drew out of the bank last May, May the eleventh, in hundred-dollar bills?”
He almost had her then. Not quite. She grew paper-white but got hold of herself. To Dwyer it was the old story: an infatuated woman and an illicit lover with a taste for honey…
“Who’s the other man?”
“There is no other man.”
“Then what did you do with the seven thousand?”
“That’s my affair.”
The effort to break her didn’t succeed. Dwyer refused to listen to what she said, made mincemeat of her assertions, danced around on the fragments.
“Someone has been in and out of your apartment secretly, someone who planted the money? Convenient, Miss Conant, very convenient. A visitor who passed through locks and bolts at will—after the event. Did you tell anyone about this mysterious visitor? Oh, you didn’t have time. Well, well. But you have time now. You’ll have to do better than that, Miss Conant.”
He was fighting a losing battle and knew it. McKee arrived. He listened for a few minutes and then talked to Dwyer in another room. Dwyer said, “She’s guilty, Inspector, guilty as hell.” He made his case trenchantly.
Gabrielle Conant was engaged to Mark Middleton. They were going to be married. She was carrying on with another man—“We know that from the letter we got—and then there’s the seven thousand of her own she disposed of last May. Middleton found out about the other man, confronted her with him—and she shot him.”
“Why?”
“Because she was in love with this other guy and wanted to hold him, because she’s a poor girl and Middleton was a rich man, because the marriage was off, because he was going to change his will. He called his lawyer, Bond, on the afternoon of the day he died, couldn’t get Bond. Perhaps Middleton knew she took the money, perhaps she grabbed it after he was dead.”
“Ah, the eighty thousand.” McKee gazed pensively at an etching above Gabrielle’s dressing-table. Dwyer glared at him suspiciously.
“Well, what about it?”
“My dear fellow, that’s the point. What was Mark Middleton doing with eighty thousand in cash?”
That stopped Dwyer, but only for a moment. “How do I know? There are any number of explanations. Maybe the girl asked him for it, told him some tale. Maybe he was engaged in some transaction that called for cash on the barrelhead.”
“Mark Middleton was not a criminal.”
“What’s that got to do with the price of potatoes? Lots of deals calling for cash are perfectly legitimate, on the up and up, simply have to be kept under cover.”
“Yes, of course. But why, if Gabrielle Conant killed Middleton and his death was pronounced suicide, did she keep on insisting to anyone who would listen that he was murdered?”
“Ha!” Dwyer was triumphant. “Because she’s smart. Because she knew she might come under suspicion when the loss of the eighty thousand turned up. That anonymous letter—someone knew something phony was going on. She was afraid of just such a development and decided to beat her antagonist to the draw… If she didn’t shoot Middleton, who did?”
“You’re convinced now that his death was murder?”
“Well, with these bills found in this girl’s apartment—”
“Exactly. The money, the cash—is the crux. Until we find out why Mark Middleton wanted cash for his securities, why he sold them to obtain the cash, we won’t get to first base. Did you know,” McKee asked, “that someone tried to kill Gabrielle Conant by pushing her under a subway train early last week?”
He described the incident Todhunter had witnessed. Dwyer was contemptuous. “Todhunter thought she was pushed. He was a good distance away and that was just his idea. Nothing to substantiate it. Absolutely nothing.”
McKee didn’t insist. “Perhaps not. What happened here? How did the bills happen to be found?”
“There was a short circuit on an extension cord in the living-room. A fire started. One of the tenants on the floor below called the fire department. The lamp in there had overturned, wind blew it over, the window was up. The base of the lamp is hollow, and there’s an opening in the bottom. The bills were in it. One of the precinct men first on the scene recognized the numbers on the bills. I understand the numbers were sent out yesterday afternoon. As soon as I got the flash I came straight up here. Then the girl walked in.”
McKee said slowly, “If someone did try to—eliminate Gabrielle Conant, then the bills were planted and the fire started, deliberately, in order that exactly what happened should happen.”
“If!” Dwyer breathed fire and brimstone. But he knew when he was licked. His conviction of Gabrielle’s guilt remained unaltered; from McKee’s attitude, objections, he realized that there wasn’t enough to make a case, yet.
“But mark my word,” he said heavily at the end of five minutes of arguing, “you leave that girl running around loose and you’ll have another homicide on your hands.”
“That,” McKee said softly, “is what I’m afraid of.”
Presently the choleric District Attorney stamped away with his entourage and the Scotsman talked to Gabrielle alone. But the harm had already been done. Dwyer’s hammer blows had had their effect. They had lost her confidence. McKee did what he could. “You think, Miss Cona
nt, that someone has been coming in and out of this apartment, that…” It was useless. She was a small iceberg, unapproachable.
“I really don’t know what I think at the moment, Inspector—except that I would like to get this mess in here cleaned up… Unless I’m going to be taken to jail,” she added politely.
Give her time, McKee decided. There were other things he had to do before the scent cooled. He took his departure.
Back at the office he sent men out to check thoroughly on Gabrielle’s apartment, the exits and entrances, the neighbors and what they might have seen, and on who had called the fire department. Then he tackled another facet.
Whoever was out to get Gabrielle Conant knew her habits, where she was going, how long she’d be out of the apartment; had to, to get into it, plant the bills and set the fire. Then there was the telephone call taking her on that abortive trip down to Jordon’s where she was supposed to receive information about the round man. The call had come after her return from a party at the Amorys’. In the light of what had since occurred, the visit to Jordon’s was assuming a new and darker value. The pattern was old, and familiar. Gabrielle wouldn’t have met the unknown Mr. X. she was supposed to meet. Instead she would have met an acquaintance, a friend. Surprise, surprise. “What are you doing here, Gabrielle? Did you get a telephone call, too?” After that a sortie out into the street. An excited “Come on—your round man. He just made off in a car. We’ll follow him. I’ve got a car here.” In the car into which Gabrielle Conant would have unsuspectingly stepped she would have been slugged into oblivion without knowing what hit her, an oblivion from which there would probably have been no awakening. Something had interfered with the plan, perhaps the presence, unseen by the girl, of a third person on the scene.
McKee’s gaze moved to the calendar on his desk, stood still on the date November the twelfth. It was on the twelfth of November that death had threatened Gabrielle Conant twice, first on the subway platform, and again on a dark street on the West Side at close to midnight. November the twelfth. It was on the morning of November the twelfth that John Muir, a friend of Gabrielle Conant’s, and of Mark Middleton’s, had come back to New York from South America. There had been no attempt on the girl between Middleton’s death and John Muir’s return. None whatever. McKee leaned forward, put his finger on his buzzer and kept it there.