Staircase 4

by Helen Reilly

  It was dark out, and the air was icy. It was going to snow. A few random flakes drifted lazily. Down on the street, Gabrielle started south on foot. Her wild, violent anger was anger at herself. Since John Muir’s return over a week ago the personal equation between them had been in abeyance. Last night she had concluded that it was she who had kept it that way, because Mark’s death had numbed her. She had even been able to smile at her own flash of jealousy at John’s casual interest in Brenda Holmes. She had fooled herself to the top of her bent. John Muir didn’t love her and his interest in Brenda wasn’t casual. Brenda was the woman he loved.

  Walk fast, let the wind blow, be cold, shiver and shake, and face facts… Turning the last corner fast, Gabrielle collided with someone in front of the drugstore. “Upps… Hurt, Miss Conant? I came over on the chance that you’d be in, had about given you up. I was just going.”

  Gabrielle pulled herself together, straightened her hat, smiling mechanically. It was Inspector McKee.

  There was nothing unusual in the Inspector’s manner, his voice or bearing, and yet she was warned in advance, so that when he told her, upstairs in her living-room, what he had come to say, she received the burning thrust of it without the flicker of an eyelash. The police had built up a man with whom she was infatuated, to whom she had given money, for whom she would lie and cheat and steal and kill.

  It wasn’t true. She had lied about John Muir’s flying visit to her on the afternoon of the day Mark died because she thought it had nothing to do with Mark’s death, couldn’t possibly have anything to do with it. She was wrong. John’s plane was supposed to have left LaGuardia at five-thirty that day. It didn’t leave at five-thirty. It had been delayed by weather. John wasn’t flying south when Mark was killed, he was in New York City.

  Chapter Eleven: The search

  IF YOU COULD ONLY KEEP YOUR MIND FROM TALKING, from being a separate entity, small and clear and reminding and deadly. John had said on that distant afternoon, “Don’t marry Mark. I’m warning you…” She had refused to take advantage of the warning, and John Muir had walked out without another word. Less than four hours later Mark was dead.

  Subconsciously, without ever bringing it out into the open, Gabrielle had assumed that at least one of the reasons why John Muir had come thousands of miles to stop her marriage to Mark was because he loved her and didn’t want her to take the irrevocable step that would permanently separate them. But John Muir didn’t love her. He was in love with Brenda Holmes.

  The Inspector was watching her. She forced herself to outward stillness, listened without visible evidence of shock to his documentation. McKee said that everyone on Mark’s horizon, everyone even distantly connected with Mark, was being scrutinized. John had been a close friend of Mark’s. A check with the South American offices of John’s firm, and Pan-American Airways, had put John in New York on August the twentieth, from ten in the morning until 9:42 that night.

  “You didn’t happen to see Mr. Muir that day, Miss Conan?”

  Careful, she warned herself. She was already committed. And she could honestly say, she thought with a sardonic flash, that she hadn’t “happened” to see John—he had deliberately sought her out. In any case she must stick to her story.

  “No, Inspector—but I’m afraid I don’t understand.” She moved to the coffee table, picked up a cigarette, lit it. “Granting that Mr. Muir was in New York on business that day and that the departure of his plane was delayed, why is it important? Mark had hundreds of other friends besides Mr. Muir, a great many of them right here in town.”

  The Inspector nodded pleasantly. “True. But it does seem rather odd that Mr. Muir didn’t mention to anyone later on that he was up here on the day his best friend died. Moreover, his visit doesn’t appear to have had anything to do with business. He didn’t turn up at his office at all… No matter. We’ll talk to him, of course. What I really came for is this. I want you, if you will, to go back carefully over the weeks preceding Mr. Middleton’s death, with particular attention to the day on which he died.”

  Gabrielle did.

  It was that recital, long-drawn-out and interrupted with probing questions, that gave Gabrielle a directional hint to the one safe path out of the black morass into which she was slowly sinking. It was the only possible thing she could think of to do—and she had to do something. She was under suspicion by the police. In spite of the Inspector’s affability, John Muir was under suspicion.

  After McKee left she walked the floor endlessly. To call John and warn him that the police knew he was in New York when Mark was killed would imply doubt—and she had no doubt. He might be in love with Brenda Holmes, and their ways in the future, her own and his, might lie far apart. That was beside the point. John had had nothing to do with Mark’s death, she knew that with certainty.

  What then? The path the Inspector had indicated began to open up a little more clearly. The round man—and the truth; before she slept that night Gabrielle made up her mind to try and find the round man herself.

  Her resolution still held on the following morning. From the first she was under no illusion as to the difficulty of what she proposed to do. Trained people were trying to do the same thing, John’s investigator now, and formerly the police. But no one believed in the round man as she did, or had actually seen him in the flesh. Gabrielle set about her improbable task with businesslike precision. She had two leads, the man himself, and the car in which he had driven away from the Devon.

  The car was the one point on which she had been less than frank with the Inspector. “The car the round man got into? I don’t know what sort of car it was…” All right—the round man, and the car. But the car might have been driven into New York from any place in the United States, and the round man had vanished into thin air. More than once hopelessness invaded her. She pushed it resolutely aside. Go back to the place where she had seen both the round man and the car. Start from there.

  Before she left the house that day Susan called. She wanted to come down to New York. Gabrielle put her off firmly. “I’m perfectly all right, and I’m up to my ears in a rush free-lance job for McGrath’s.” That settled that. She told Alice the same thing unsolicited. It would explain why she wouldn’t be available.

  At eleven o’clock on Thursday she entered the Devon bar, almost empty at that hour so that she had no trouble getting a seat at one of the little tables that commanded a view of the main lobby and also of the Avenue outside, through a wide plate-glass window. She drank ginger ale until she was nauseated, ate a luncheon she didn’t want, bore the inquiring glances that gradually began to be directed at her until she could bear them no longer. Then she transferred herself to an armchair in the lobby itself. At three o’clock she left the hotel and walked the surrounding streets until it was almost dark. A return to the Devon bar; perhaps the round man might come in for a cocktail. Vain hope. At eight that night she went home exhausted.

  On Friday she widened her circle, using the Devon as a central point, radiating from it and returning. Washington Place, Waverly, the park itself, north, east, south, and west, neighboring streets. Again and again the futility of the search she had undertaken pressed in on her; New York had almost eight million people in it, how was she going to find one man among them? It had millions of cars rolling through its thousands of miles of streets. How was she going to find one car? She refused to give up. And then, without warning, she struck gold.

  She was walking up Fifth Avenue at around four-thirty on her way back to her apartment, when near the corner of Twenty-first Street the car she was beginning to think she had dreamed up, black body, gray top, old-fashioned but smart lines, appeared before her startled eyes, outstanding in the procession of sleek new models and trucks and busses in which it was embedded.

  Gabrielle stood still with a gasp. She was headed north. The Packard cabriolet was going south. She reversed herself and started to run, but the light was green and the flow of traffic continued without interruption. Before she
had taken more than three steps the Packard cabriolet was out of sight.

  Her disappointment was bitter but at the same time her spirits soared. The Packard in which the round man had driven away on the day of Mark’s death, she was convinced it was the same car, was not only in New York, it was going in the direction of the Devon. That made twice. Why not a third time? She retraced her steps to the Devon’s canopy. The Packard was nowhere in sight. After that she toured the Village without success until sheer fatigue sent her home. But tomorrow was another day.

  Gabrielle went to a movie that night in order to keep out of reach of possible droppers-in, and of telephone calls. Early the next morning she started out again with renewed vigor, vigor that waned gradually as the long November day darkened and drew down. More ginger ale at the Devon, more patrolling of the streets as far south as Bleecker, as far north as Fourteenth, as far east as Broadway. There was no sign anywhere of the Packard cabriolet.

  Late in the afternoon she was on University Place between Tenth and Ninth, her eyes ceaselessly roving the traffic and the pavements, for there was always the possibility that just as she had caught sight of the car so she would catch sight of the round man, when she saw Alice Amory.

  Alice was on the southwest corner of Ninth Street talking to a short dumpy woman with a bundle in her arms. Wondering vaguely what Alice was doing so far downtown, Gabrielle quickened her pace. She was tired and discouraged and had a sudden longing to return to her own world, if only for a little while. And she was anxious for news of John Muir and what the police were doing, if anything. Alice had parted from the woman and was walking west fast. She was almost at Fifth Avenue when Gabrielle caught up with her.

  “Alice,” she called, and Alice stopped and turned sharply around. “Gabrielle!… What are you doing in this part of the world?”

  “Out for a walk,” Gabrielle said. “I’ve been chasing you for a block and a half. I saw you talking to that woman on the corner of Ninth when I was on the block above.”

  Alice pulled folds of mink more tightly around her. It might have been the low light or perhaps the cold, but her face looked suddenly pinched, almost old. And then Gabrielle did get a shock, for Alice said, too quickly and too brightly, “Woman? What woman? You must have been seeing things, darling… Oh, you mean the woman who asked me the way to the subway? I’ve just come from Wanamaker’s. They sent Tyrell the wrong shirts… How about a cocktail at the Fifth Avenue?” Gabrielle said she’d love one. Seated at a table in the Amen Corner, she listened to Alice’s light voice, watched the restless movements of her jeweled hands—and again, as it had with Tyrell in Mark’s apartment last Wednesday afternoon, a gauze curtain descended, making Alice strange, different, a travesty of her normal, secure, established self. Why had she tried to deny the stout woman with the bundle she was talking to on the corner of Ninth Street, and then thought better of it? What was making her so nervous, keyed up?

  She spoke of Gabrielle’s adventure at Mark’s place. “Frightful for you, darling—perfectly frightful…” Of the police: “They’re being utterly ridiculous. Imagine questioning John Muir, of all people—not your horrid District Attorney but that tall Inspector, the one who looks like Lincoln, only with milk and vitamins and nice ties. Just because John missed his plane the day Mark died. I suppose he dashed up on that business, the suit against the firm. No, that was settled, wasn’t it? It might have been Brenda Holmes…”

  The way Alice spoke Brenda’s name, lingered over it, not caressingly, focused Gabrielle’s attention. They were supposed to be friends. Alice’s intonation was anything but friendly. “You know,” she said suddenly, “I thought, I hoped, when John first came home, that you, that he—oh, damn, Gabrielle, John Muir seems to be head over heels about Brenda now, but it won’t last. Dear Brenda cares only for Brenda—and nothing whatever for God. John will find that out, just as Mark did.”

  “Mark?” Gabrielle’s brows drew together. She was sharply surprised.

  Alice said, “Oh, yes, didn’t you know? Mark had money, and our Brenda’s been trying to marry money for years… He was interested for a while and then”—she shrugged—“it petered out.” She looked at her watch, and moaned. “I’ve got to fly. The Larks are coming to dinner. Of all the deadly bores—maybe I’ll poison them.” She signaled the waiter.

  They parted on the pavement in front of the hotel. Alice was taking a cab and wanted to give Gabrielle a lift but Gabrielle said she was going to walk. Moving up the Avenue in the wintry dusk and watching the traffic, she thought of what Alice had told her about Mark and Brenda. Why should she be surprised? Brenda was a beautiful woman… Perhaps it was because Mark had never mentioned her name, had seemed, when they met at the Amorys’ or the Bonds’, to be indifferent to her.

  Dusk was thickening. The wind was cold. It blew gustily down the Avenue. Gabrielle was tired. She changed her mind and decided to take a bus home. One came along as she reached Tenth Street. The only other passenger who got on was a man muffled up in a heavy ulster, with his hat down over his eyes. He remained near the doors at the front. Gabrielle edged toward the rear, got a single seat near the doors at the middle, and settled back. She didn’t stay that way long. The ride was the shortest she had ever had.

  Two blocks to the north a southbound passenger car cut sharply across in front of the bus and swung into Twelfth Street. Gabrielle stared after it idly—and woke up. It was the Packard cabriolet, and there was a woman at the wheel. By the time she got to her feet the bus was already at Thirteenth Street. The next stop was Fourteenth. A jam of people waiting to get on, she was out of the bus the moment it stopped and eeling her way nimbly through the crowd.

  Not so the man muffled up in the ulster who also got out at Fourteenth, after a delaying harangue from an immense woman with three chins. The man looked around, up and down and in and out, for his quarry in vain. He sought a telephone and called the Homicide Squad and said dolefully into the receiver, “Chandler here. I lost the Conant girl,” and gave his location.

  Chapter Twelve: Second corpse

  MEANWHILE Gabrielle had reached Twelfth Street out of breath but with a high heart. In all probability the woman driving the Packard was the woman who had driven the round man away from the Devon on the day Mark died. The car had turned east into Twelfth Street. Go over it from end to end.

  The Packard wasn’t between Fifth and University, it wasn’t between University and Broadway. To the south the spires of Grace Church thrusting up into the darkening sky; nothing in the short block there. Fourth Avenue then, a river of traffic, beyond Fourth, office buildings and a Delehanty’s and St. Ann’s church, then Third Avenue with an el train pounding overhead. Still nothing. It was almost completely dark by that time. Gabrielle kept on walking east. Run-down houses and small shops, overflowing garbage cans, litter in the gutters, children playing in the streets, narrower pavements, women in shawls in basement stores with queer smells drifting through the doors; east of Second Avenue the neighborhood began to improve. Rows of tenements had been replaced with modern housing. Cars of every other make in the world lined the curbs—but no ancient Packard. And then, when she had almost given up hope, she saw it. Long and lean and rakish, the Packard cabriolet was drawn up in front of an apartment building midway between First Avenue and Avenue A.

  Gabrielle approached it cautiously. The car was empty and the lights had been turned off. The apartment house in front of which it stood was a great ugly modern building that housed hundreds of tenants. The Packard had reached its destination not less than a good twenty minutes earlier. How was she to find, to isolate, the woman who had driven it here?

  Her luck was in. She was standing there, whipped by a wind off the river and racking her brains, when a woman, approaching from the opposite direction, paused beside the Packard and unlocked the door. Reaching in, the woman took a package from the front seat, relocked the door, and walked briskly across the pavement and into the apartment house.

  Gabrielle started in a
fter her. What she had to do was to find out in which apartment the woman lived and what her name was. But when she entered the long white-tiled antiseptic lobby it was empty. Gabrielle paused and listened. Heels were clicking up the stairs to the left at the back. She sprinted for the staircase, and unexpectedly came up against a great fat man with a wrench who appeared out of an embrasure. The man was evidently the superintendent.

  Gabrielle slowed, smiled pleasantly, and tried to control her breathing. She said, “I know I’m foolish, because I saw your no-vacancy sign outside, but I was wondering whether—this time of year with so many people going south—you have any sublets?”

  The superintendent nodded ponderously. “As a matter of fact, Miss, we have. There’s Mrs. Smith on the eighth, she’s moving into the country, bought a house…”

  The heel taps had stopped, not very high overhead. Would Mrs. Smith have walked to the eighth floor? There was a self-service elevator off on the right and it was not out of order.

  “And let’s see,” the superintendent went on, “there’s Miss Nelson on the second floor. She was speaking to me just today. She’d like to get out of New York for a couple of months—don’t know as I blame her.”

  Gabrielle agreed enthusiastically. “I don’t either.” Miss Nelson had a four-room apartment on the second floor. The superintendent didn’t know what rent she was asking, said, “She just come in, now. Why don’t you go up and talk to her?”

  There was nothing Gabrielle craved more than to see and talk to Miss Nelson. Her heart pounding, she mounted the stairs and rang the bell of 2B. The woman who had been at the wheel of the Packard cabriolet opened the door. Miss Nelson was tall and thin, in her thirties, with strawlike, elaborately waved blond hair and glasses. Her rouge didn’t match her lips and her purple wool dress was the wrong color for her skin, but she wasn’t bad looking. She looked at Gabrielle and said, “Yes?” stiffly.