Staircase 4

by Helen Reilly

  “Florida,” Mrs. Tash said.

  The airports and railroad terminal and bus lines were covered. The tenants were dispersed, the dead man was carried away in a basket, Steinmetz, the Homicide detective, went back to the office, and two precinct men settled down in the apartment to wait. Nothing more happened there that night. Miss Nelson did not return.

  Gabrielle was a block and a half away when she first heard the siren. It was a dreadful sound. She sat back hard against the cushions of the long green convertible and tried to iron out the hollow between her shoulder blades. The hollow was fear, an atavistic fear of the unseen, of a hand clapped on her arm from behind, a harsh voice calling on her suddenly to stop. She was still breathless from the journey through the window of Miss Nelson’s kitchen and down the fire stairs in darkness with a woman’s screams banging against her ears. She and John had made their way across the hard cement of a back yard into a vacant lot strewn with debris that led to Thirteenth Street, and along Thirteenth to First Avenue where John’s Cadillac was parked.

  Refuge had never been so sweet. She wore Miss Nelson’s coat. Her own, stained with the dead man’s blood, was in the back. John was going to have it cleaned at some cleaners a long way off, said it would be safer. It was good to be in motion, to be putting distance between themselves and the horrible apartment and the sprawled sawdust man lying on the floor of the dinette in a pool of blood.

  John drove west steadily while they talked. When he entered through the unlocked door, the man in Miss Nelson’s apartment was only just dead—he didn’t go into details and Gabrielle didn’t ask for them. Standing looking down at the dead man he had felt a breeze on the back of his neck. The kitchen window was wide open. He went to it, looking down. A shadow on shadows in the yard below, darting, disappearing; he had given chase futilely, which was how he knew about the fire stairs, to return and find her.

  He was angry at himself for having let that happen. “I didn’t want you to go upstairs, Gabrielle. I was a fool, thought I had more time.”

  Sleet tapped at the canvas above their heads and the black winter wind blew. The night was bitter. The streets were almost empty. Gabrielle discussed the dead man, who he was, why he had been killed, whether Miss Nelson had killed him.

  John answered in monosyllables. He was abstracted, engrossed in his own thoughts. He pulled to a stop near a drugstore, sat for a moment gazing absent-mindedly in front of him, then shifted into gear and drove on. “It’s no use,” he said with a shrug. “I was going to phone around, but it wouldn’t get us anyplace. If someone we know was mixed up in that business back there, there’s been plenty of time for whoever it was to get clear.”

  Gabrielle sat up sharply. “But, John, surely it was Miss Nelson who—”

  He wouldn’t accept it. “There’s no such word as sure in any of this. What do we know? Precisely nothing. We’re about where we were when we started. If we could only establish one clean line.” He struck the wheel lightly with his hand.

  The drugstore and a telephone; Gabrielle had a sudden intuitive flash. “That was what you did that first night, the night you came home, the night that you followed me over to Jordon’s. After we left, when we were on the way uptown, you didn’t get out of the cab to buy cigarettes. You telephoned to—to see where everybody was?”

  John nodded, taking the big car carefully over ice between holes.

  “Whom did you call?”

  “Everyone at Tyrell and Alice’s who knew Mark even distantly. It seemed like a good idea at the time. It didn’t pan out. No one answered except Julie Bond.” He corroborated her earlier guess. “Someone was listening outside the door of Tyrell’s study the other night, while you were telling me about Mark. If you remember, you had just recalled that there was a woman in the car with the round man.”

  “Did you—have you any idea who was listening in on us?” Gabrielle asked. John said no. Did he hesitate before he said it? Gabrielle thought of Tony Van Ness and of how Tony had tried to stop her on the way into the study—Tony who had come into possession of unexplained money—and eighty thousand dollars of Mark’s was missing.

  John slid deftly between two trucks, accelerated “There’s more than one person mixed up in this, Gabrielle. There’s the round man and Miss Nelson and that fellow back there—and God knows who else. If we could only establish a single positive.” He struck the wheel again, this time sharply, with an edged palm. “Well, perhaps we can.”

  “How?” Gabrielle said tiredly.

  “Take a look at this.” He shoved an envelope at her. The envelope was empty. It had gone through the mail, the stamp was canceled. It was addressed to Mr. E. P. Glass, Room 416, Jenkins Building, East Twenty-Second Street. There was a list in pencil written on the back of it: blades, soap, bread, rye. The dead man’s name was presumably Glass.

  John said, “Someone emptied that fellow’s pockets. I think that’s what whoever killed him had just finished doing when I walked in. There’s a bloodstain near the stamp.”

  Gabrielle looked at the envelope with revulsion. “Where did you find it?”

  “Under the stove. I imagine it dropped there when the murderer went through the window in a hurry.”

  “What are you going to do, John?” But she knew before he spoke.

  He said calmly, “I’m going to have a look at that office, now, before the police get there. Maybe I can pick up some information in the building, from the janitor, superintendent, elevator boys—if someone’s there. If not, I can get in touch with some of the other tenants when I know who they are—the names will be on the doors. Unless you’d rather I took you home first.”

  “Of course not.”

  But Gabrielle didn’t like it. She very much didn’t like it five minutes later, after John’s tall thrusting figure had disappeared and she was alone in the convertible parked down the block and across the street from the Jenkins Building.

  Wind shook the canvas impotently. It broke without effect on the stone flanks of the city, lost itself moaningly in the black throats of the avenues. An occasional pedestrian huddled under an umbrella, trucks shouldering past at intervals; it was just after eight o’clock and at that hour the business section was dark and empty.

  To wait, she thought drearily, above hands clasped in her lap, to sit and do nothing, a prey to a million fears. It was the second time that night she had waited. Suppose something happened. Suppose the police came or, worse still, suppose they were already waiting in Glass’s office, and John had walked straight into a trap.

  It was too much to have to take. She couldn’t stand it. At the end of another five minutes Gabrielle got out and slammed the car door behind her. Icy rain was coming down hard. It spat at her cheeks coldly. Miss Nelson’s coat was heavy, hampering. It had the virtues of its faults, it was an excellent disguise. She pulled the hood more closely around her head.

  Reconnaissance. The Jenkins Building was old and soot-stained and dilapidated. Three lighted windows on the second floor, they were a dentist’s windows; two on the sixth. There was nothing but blackness in between. Display fronts on either side of the entrance, a scissors house, a corsetiere—beyond the glass of the doors the hall was empty. Gabrielle went in.

  Overhead light, pallid and cheerless, fell on dingy tiling, on two elevators to the left, stairs beyond them. She started for the elevators, didn’t put her finger on the bell. Both cars were in the basement, the indicators stood at B. Take the stairs. There was no danger of missing John. The old-fashioned elevator shaft was an iron grille affair you could see into.

  The building had a curious hollow stillness to it in which a cough would have sounded like a shout. She found herself walking on tiptoe up the stairs. Out in the country you expected isolation. Here where people dove to and fro like bees, where voices called and typewriters clacked and telephones rang and people saluted each other in passing, the cessation of all human activity was strange, unnatural. It was like stepping aboard a floating ship ablaze with lights and w
ith colors flying and finding it empty and unmanned.

  Hurry drove her, and the whip of fear. Second floor, third floor, fourth floor—she was breathless when she stepped out into a long corridor parallel with the elevators. Other corridors branched off right and left. She looked at numbers. The one she wanted was to the left and some distance away. She went around a corner into a tomblike tunnel walled with tiles and broken only by dark ground-glass doors with names on them—Jones P. Jones, attorney; Friedburg Fabrics; James Murray, Cutlery; Bletman Brothers, Inc. Her heels clicked on the marble floor. Reesman, Ribbons—410—the door she wanted according to the envelope John had shown her, was three farther along. There was no sound anyplace, no one in sight. Where was John? He had certainly entered the building. She had seen him with her own eyes. Perhaps he was in the basement talking to the superintendent. The emptiness of the silent spaces mocked her, the stillness pressed grindingly on her taut nerves. She was an intruder in a dead world—a sleeping world that might suddenly rouse.

  Her steps slowed. A light flickered behind the ground glass of 416. She looked at the door. Was John there? Had he managed, somehow, to get in? Perhaps it wasn’t John. The hesitant light beyond the ground glass went out. Gabrielle reached the door, paused in front of it. The legend on it read Acme, and in smaller letters, E. P. Glass.

  There was certainly someone in E. P. Glass’s office. A voice spoke. It was a strange voice, and yet there was something familiar about it. The voice was saying, “Yes, Mrs. Harper… Oh?… Well, thanks very much.” The telephone dropped into its cradle with a click.

  Dragging footsteps, hesitating and slow, approached the door from inside. Gabrielle went on staring at the ground glass. She had recognized the voice. The door swung inward and she threw a balled fist hard against her lips to keep the cry from coming out.

  It was John. He stood tall and curiously wavering in the shadow of the doorway. He was hurt, injured. There was a cut on his temple. A trickle of drying blood ran down his cheek. There was dust on his coat and his tie was pulled drunkenly sideways. He looked at her with angry despair and then resignation, as though giving in to the uncontrollability of women, accepting it.

  Gabrielle said shakily, “John…” and stopped. John was staring past her fixedly, his head on one side. She listened then and heard it, the distant whine of the elevator, the clang of an opening gate. People, men, were advancing on the spot on which they stood.

  Chapter Fourteen: Aftermath of two murders

  ON THE FOLLOWING MORNING, in his office, McKee absorbed the death of an unidentified man in an apartment on East Twelfth Street with a second cup of coffee and the day sheet and talked to Steinmetz, the detective who had handled it. Steinmetz said, “Looks like Miss Nelson.” McKee said, “Yes… I wonder why she left her door unlocked behind her when she took off.”

  Miss Nelson hadn’t left by the front door. With the fuller light certain discoveries had been made. The fleeing woman had gone down the fire stairs on which the kitchen window opened. A thread from her brown coat had caught on a rough place on the window sill and there were several more threads on the iron railing that led to a cement court at the back of the house, from which she could have reached Thirteenth Street, via an empty lot, without being observed.

  The dead man was still without an earthly habitation and a name. His pockets had been emptied and there were no papers on him. “Fingerprints, Steinmetz?”

  “Not in our files, Inspector. We sent his prints to Washington and Albany.”

  The unlocked front door bothered the Scotsman. Under ordinary circumstances a woman fleeing an apartment with a dead man in it, a man she had killed, would certainly have locked her door behind her to stave off discovery, particularly as she expected a friend to drop in. He tapped a pencil thoughtfully on the desk in front of him.

  “Well, keep after it,” he said, “and let me know.” Steinmetz went and McKee turned to other things, and presently reached the report on Gabrielle Conant.

  Chandler, the detective who had been covering her, had lost her at Fourteenth Street and Fifth Avenue at around five o’clock the evening before. McKee pressed his buzzer for Chandler, and they went over the report together. The Scotsman recognized Alice Amory from the description: “Smallish, dark, money, in mink.” Chandler said, “Miss Conant ran into this dame late yesterday afternoon on Ninth Street and they went into the Fifth Avenue together for a drink. When they left, the dame in mink waited for a cab and Miss Conant started to walk up the avenue.” He told McKee what had happened. “She got off the bus at Fourteenth Street so fast you couldn’t see her for dust. I tried to—”

  McKee nodded. Interesting to know why Gabrielle Conant had shaken off her tail, whether it was deliberate. “Pick her up later, Chandler?”

  “Not until around ten o’clock, Inspector. She turned up at her apartment then in a Cadillac convertible belonging to a John Muir. Big, good-looking fellow. But Miss Conant had been home between the time I lost her and then, she had different clothes on.”

  Alone in the long narrow inner room the Scotsman looked at the slip of paper on the desk in front of him and then at assorted roofs, drab and dwindled under the heavy November sky. The slip of paper was a canceled check of Mark Middleton’s made out to a famous Fifth Avenue jeweler for the sum of four thousand, two hundred and thirty-five dollars and seventy cents. On the morning of the day he died Middleton had bought a string of pearls from the jeweler, giving the check in payment and taking the necklace away with him. Like his eighty thousand dollars in cash, the pearls had also vanished. They were not among his effects.

  Over the phone Middleton’s lawyer, Philip Bond, had been acrimonious. “Everything seemed to be in order, Inspector, and there was a lot to do. There was no reason why we should go into what Mark did with his money while he was alive. He probably bought the pearls for Gabrielle Conant. They were going to be married in a couple of days.”

  About to reach for the phone and call the girl, McKee sat back. Gabrielle’s peregrinations through the Village with the Devon as a focal point, continued through three days during which she had divorced herself from her friends and normal occupations, had already engaged his uneasy attention. Mark Middleton had lunched with her at the Devon on the day he died and according to her story it was in the Devon that Mark had stared after the round man in a rage. Was it possible that she was taking a hand, trying to find the round man herself? He frowned blackly, got up with a violent movement, got into his coat, and descended to the street.

  Gabrielle Conant showed surprise in which there was no pleasure when she opened her door and found McKee standing on the mat. There had been no diminution of her rancor. It was still in full bloom.

  “Oh! Good morning, Inspector.”

  There was an interrogative note in her voice. She was definitely not hospitable, blocked the door, gave way with reluctance. In the attractive living-room, with fresh paint over the ravages of fire and new curtains at the windows, she sat on the edge of a chair in a yellow housecoat that made her skin very white, her hair very dark, added to the shadows under her tilted eyes. She looked as though she had been dissipating the night before, and yet she had been home by ten o’clock.

  McKee showed her the canceled check and explained. “Miss Conant, on the day Mark Middleton died, he bought a string of pearls.”

  Relief was her first reaction, then agreement. “Yes—of course. I forgot them.” She told him about Mark’s having shown the pearls to her in the Devon, said, “The catch was defective. Mark was going to have it fixed. Did he take the pearls back to the jeweler’s after I left him that afternoon, Inspector? Are they at the jeweler’s now?”

  McKee shook his head. The filling up of Mark Middleton’s afternoon on the day he died was a major project. So far, backtrack as they would, they had dredged up very little—but there were certain things Mark Middleton definitely hadn’t done. Returning the pearls was one of them. He said, “The necklace would appear to have been in Mr. Middleton’s p
ossession when he died, Miss Conant.”

  “The round man!” Gabrielle exclaimed.

  McKee looked at her.

  “You’ve been searching for him yourself, haven’t you?”

  Gabrielle returned his look steadily. She didn’t deny it, she didn’t say yes. John had warned her to avoid committing herself, to say as little as possible until they found out how the land lay. There was nothing to do now, not after last night, but to follow his instructions.

  McKee warned her with gravity and with a disturbing conviction that his warning would have no effect. But it had to be done, anyhow. He said that her accentuation of the round man, the way she had dwelt on him to everyone who would listen, had already endangered her life. “A better way of finding out the truth and resolving the case, Miss Conant, would be to tell the truth yourself—all the truth.”

  She flashed, “I don’t know what you mean.” She was very much on her guard.

  McKee was mild. “Well, now, Miss Conant, there was that incident at Mark Middleton’s Central Park West apartment the other day, when you went there to ticket your things.”

  More relief.

  “Oh, that,” she said. “I was frightened at the time, but there has been so much…” She gave him the details, described Tyrell Amory arriving and letting her out, Joanna Middleton’s entrance, and what Joanna had done.

  McKee said musingly, “You think Mrs. Middleton was looking for something in the desk in the living-room and didn’t want you to know it?”

  “That was the impression I got, Inspector.”

  The evidences of a search of Mark Middleton’s effects, which McKee had discovered for himself and which had sent him to Tyrell Amory for information, was important. The key piece, the foundation stone on which Mark Middleton’s murder had been built, was still hidden from them. That it had something to do with the missing eighty thousand dollars, the most important development in the case to date, was a fair assumption. Perhaps there was a physical clue of some sort, something in writing, and the killer was looking for it. He had an advantage. They were forced to work blind.