Staircase 4

by Helen Reilly

  Dwyer was furious, and baffled. He disliked Gabrielle Conant intensely. He admired Brenda Holmes. If Miss Holmes was telling the truth—talk to the cousin—then Gabrielle Conant couldn’t have killed Glass. And yet he had an obscure feeling that he was being given the runaround. The blasted girl’s friends would do anything for her… To be on the safe side, so they couldn’t spring anything later, he got statements from them, all of them, as to where they were between seven and nine o’clock the night before. Tyrell Amory had been in his laboratory working, Mrs. Amory at home, Susan Van Ness up in Greenfield, Tony Van Ness in a series of bars in a neighboring Connecticut town. Dwyer’s retreat was orderly and threatening. He must ask Miss Conant to remain available for further questioning, not to leave the city; he clapped his hat on his head and strode out.

  With the District Attorney’s withdrawal, the atmosphere in the room changed. There was constraint in it, and coolness, and the stir of unspoken questions, conjectures. Gabrielle saw that Susan, Tony, the Amorys, could understand her reticence with the police; that she should have kept the finding of Miss Nelson from them was another kettle of fish. Alice put the combined feeling into words as soon as the front door closed behind Dwyer and his men.

  Alice said, playing with a charm bracelet on her thin wrist, making the pendants jingle, “Gabrielle, pet—why didn’t you tell us you’d tracked down this woman? Very clever and exciting of you—but why didn’t you want us to know?” Her tone was amused; her eyes were bright, watchful.

  Gabrielle said calmly, “Why should I have told you, Alice? You didn’t believe in the round man, any of you—didn’t believe he existed.”

  Tyrell turned from the window where he was standing looking out into the wet street. He thrust a hand through his brush of fair hair and grinned wryly. “She’s right, Alice… Gabrielle, what was this woman like? What was your round man to her? Husband, relative, friend?” Tony was interested too. Only Brenda Holmes, lovely and erect on the sofa beside John, her shoulder lightly touching his, seemed incurious. But was she? Gabrielle wondered. Brenda must know by now that the alibi John wanted from her covered the time Glass was killed. What did that faintly smiling golden surface cover? How much did she suspect?

  Gabrielle said she had no idea what the relationship between the round man and Miss Nelson was, simply that his photograph was there, on top of her radio, and John said lethargically, lighting a cigarette, “Why bother, now? When the police find her—and they will—we’ll know.”

  Something in the word “know,” in the way he pronounced it, sent a deep shiver through Gabrielle. To know, at last—to have deceiving veils stripped aside. To see—what?

  Suddenly she wanted them all to go. They did go—but not before another visitor arrived, and she surprised a glance that made her heart turn over. It was Phil Bond who came, his well-fed, well-fleshed face harried. He had had the story of the pearls from Inspector McKee. Intercepting the glance not meant for her, Gabrielle knew that Claire Middleton’s story was true, knew, devastatingly, who had placed the pearls in the desk in the living-room of Mark’s apartment on Central Park West after his death had been pronounced murder.

  Chapter Seventeen: The third murder

  IT WAS TONY VAN NESS who had replaced the pearls. The glance Gabrielle had intercepted, a terrified, lightning glance, was from Susan to her husband. When John and Brenda and Phil Bond and the Amorys finally went, at the end of what seemed like an eternity—Gabrielle had asked Susan and Tony to stay—she walked slowly back to the living-room.

  Susan abruptly stopped talking as she came in. Under coppery curls her face wore a closed look. Gabrielle’s heart sank. She knew that expression of old. Like Tyrell Amory, Susan could be immovably obstinate—and she had much more strength than people gave her credit for. Propped on the arm of the couch, Tony was pouring himself a drink with elaborate care.

  Without a word, Gabrielle took the slim green-leather case from her bag and stood turning it in her fingers. Then she said quietly, “Sue—tell me, please. I’ve got to know.”

  Susan twisted in her chair with a movement of violence, and Gabrielle thought, I don’t know her any more. She’s changed since her marriage, and said again, “Sue—please!” Susan capitulated. She did it defiantly and with more than a touch of bitterness. “You’ve got the pearls back, Gabrielle, so what does it matter? Oh, Tony was wrong. I know it, he knows it himself, but he was thinking of me, and of the children.”

  Tony Van Ness had never appeared to better advantage than he did then. He threw aside evasion, interrupted Susan harshly. “I wasn’t thinking of you, Susan, I was thinking of myself. From beginning to end the whole thing was my fault. There was no excuse for it I danced the tune and refused to pay the piper… The hell with that. Gabrielle’s got to know.”

  He told her in bald phrases. On the day of Mark’s death, knowing that she and Mark intended to lunch at the Devon, he had gone there. “To touch Mark,” he said flatly, “to get a loan from him. Yes, I’m not going to deny it. I’d lost every cent of Borah’s check and more.” When he got to the Devon, Gabrielle had just driven off and Mark was standing under the canopy waiting for a cab. Mark had given Tony the pearls, asking him to take them to the jeweler’s and have the clasp fixed. “I meant to do it,” Tony said, and shrugged lean shoulders. “I didn’t do it. I met Carlo Dwight and we had some drinks and then it was after six o’clock and the jeweler’s was closed and it was too late. That night Mark died.”

  Tony swung on Gabrielle. “Don’t tell me I’m a heel, and worse. I know it. It doesn’t matter to you particularly, but it does to Susan.” His handsome, haggard face was contorted, the lines in it deeply grooved. He went on talking.

  The long and short of it was that Mark was dead and no one seemed to know about the pearls and Tony needed money—so he had pawned them. With the proceeds, twelve hundred, the curtains and the new furniture in the house in Greenfield had been bought and the mortgage interest and his life insurance paid. As soon as he got a decent check Tony had meant to get the pearls out of hock and give them back to Gabrielle. He had gotten them out of hock. Then Mark’s death was pronounced murder, and he was afraid to give them back, afraid of getting mixed up with the police. When Gabrielle was up in Greenfield he had taken the key of Mark’s apartment from her purse and on Sunday night, while she was still there, he had driven to New York and had put the string of pearls in the drawer of the desk in Mark’s living-room.

  Gabrielle was inexpressibly relieved. Tony hadn’t killed Mark, he wasn’t the one who had thrust her into the closet in the foyer of the apartment on Central Park West. It was all she cared about. Susan was crying quietly, huddled down in her chair. It was the pearls that had made her cry that night up in the house in Connecticut. She loved Tony, no matter what he did she would always love him. For the first time Gabrielle understood something of her feeling for him. His frankness was disarming. Whatever he was, he wasn’t a hypocrite, knew the score.

  Gabrielle went to Susan and comforted her, held out a hand to Tony. She said that no real harm had been done and that no one but themselves need ever know what had happened to the pearls.

  After they had gone, Susan radiant with relief, revivified, Gabrielle sat down in the slipper chair beside the desk, opened the box, and looked at the pearls. They were Mark’s gift but she would never wear them. There was too much tragedy connected with them and with the day on which they had been bought. Later on she would give them to Susan. She lifted the little string and let the smooth cool stones run through her fingers. The clasp would have to be fixed. She sprang the tiny diamond-studded catch absently—and sat sharply still. Staring down fixedly, she sprang the catch again and again—and let her hands fall to her lap as though the pearls had become too heavy to hold.

  Tony hadn’t taken the pearls to the jeweler’s, the necklace had reposed in the pawnbroker’s until it went back to Mark’s apartment. The clasp was just as it had been that day in the Devon. And the clasp was perfect. There was
nothing wrong with it. Why had Mark said there was? Why had he deceived her?

  All that day, all the next, the enigma of Mark’s statement about the pearls teased her without surcease. To make sure she checked with Tony, and went to the pawnbroker’s. She called Joanna and got a frigid answer in the negative. The string of pearls had had no attention from a jeweler since Mark had given it to Tony in front of the Devon on the day he died. The more she dwelt on the subject, the more mysterious it became. Mark had bought the pearls for her as a wedding present, her initials were engraved on the box, and yet, in the Devon, he hadn’t given them to her, he had kept them in his possession on a pretext; only that the box had dropped from his raincoat pocket outside the cloakroom, she wouldn’t have seen them at all that day.

  The whole thing was senseless, and Mark had been an eminently sane man. There had to be an explanation, if only she could find it… There was no one to whom she could go for assistance. To talk of the riddle to Alice or Tyrell, to Phil Bond, or even to John, would be a reflection on Mark, would cast a slur on his memory—and she couldn’t bear that.

  It was a miserable interval, worse almost than anything she had been through. Inaction deepened her depression. Her occupation was gone. All her thought, her endeavor had been fastened fiercely on finding the round man, and the thread to him had broken in her hands. Miss Nelson had vanished as completely as though she had dropped through a hole in the earth.

  Gabrielle wasn’t alone in her feeling about the missing woman. McKee was almost as exercised as she was. Talking to Gabrielle over the phone, he neither rebuked nor reproached her for failing to tell him about her visit to Florence Nelson’s apartment prior to Glass’s death; to do so would still further have alienated her—and Dwyer, he reflected grimly, was in charge of the alienating department, and doing very well at it. Gabrielle had nothing of importance to add to what they knew of the missing woman. But there had been an advance in a different direction, a distinct advance. The round man finally established himself in time and space.

  Mark Middleton’s eighty thousand in cash had been in bills of large denomination. In addition to the three planted in Gabrielle’s apartment, four more had been tracked down, or rather the numbers of them. In mid-July, almost a month before Middleton’s death, a man answering Gabrielle’s description of the round man had changed four one-thousand-dollar bills for bills of smaller denomination at three separate Newark banks.

  So the fellow existed; he wasn’t a figment of the girl’s imagination. He began to take on shape, character. There was no record of him in Mark Middleton’s life, he was neither servitor, employee, acquaintance, nor friend. The only slot into which he fitted was that of an emissary, a tool, a go-between, a messenger.

  Very slowly the pattern of Middleton’s death was etching itself with more clarity. It was inherent not only in the circumstances but in the character of Mark Middleton himself. Big, open, genial, direct, he was a man to whom right was right and wrong was wrong, with nothing in between. He had been a good friend and an implacable enemy, living by his heart rather than by his robust and unsubtle intellect. His generosity was immense. Impose on it once and you were finished.

  That, obviously, was what had happened. Someone had borrowed or begged eighty thousand dollars in cash from Middleton. “I will carry the message…” The round man had carried the cash, taking it away from Middleton’s apartment in late June. Eight weeks later, in the Devon, Middleton had seen the round man again, and had gone into a tailspin. Why? Because, in the meantime (and it might have been then and there, in the lobby, or the bar, through association with someone or something else) the round man had revealed himself as not what he had seemed but, monstrously, what he was. Middleton had realized that he had been done, tricked, lied to. Going over Gabrielle Conant’s testimony and the physical facts, McKee saw what must have happened almost as clearly as though he had been present.

  Mark Middleton had gone back to his apartment and summoned the round man’s principal. The accusation direct: “I know the truth. I am going to send for the police.” In the act of calling McKee’s private number, the receiver had been replaced and the shot that killed Middleton had been fired.

  So far so good; it wasn’t far enough, by a measured mile. The identity of the principal remained a complete blank. There were a few controlling factors. It had to be someone with a reasonable claim on Middleton’s help, therefore someone close to him, a friend, or relative. And there was his call to Philip Bond that Bond’s wife had taken. “I want to see Phil first thing in the morning.” That, however, wasn’t much help. Bond was Middleton’s lawyer and Middleton might have needed his counsel in whatever steps he had intended to take. On the other hand, Middleton might, as Dwyer insisted, have been going to change his will. But Gabrielle Conant wasn’t the only legatee. Joanna Middleton benefited to the tune of fifty thousand dollars.

  Too many mights, buts, ifs. One thing was certain: the round man, Miss Nelson’s “Bert,” had been removed from his normal sphere, sent out of New York because he was a sure lead to the murderer. Once the round man was located and forced into the open, not only the killer but the reason for killing would stand revealed. Florence Nelson might or might not know where her Bert was; she certainly knew something about him. But Miss Nelson had vanished like a puff of mist. Find her.

  Easy to say; difficult to do. They had a description of her and the clothes she had been wearing, true, but there was nothing distinctive about either the woman or her apparel—you could probably pass a baker’s dozen of her on any busy midtown street. Nor was there anything in her past that was at all helpful. Detectives had gone out to her place of employment, had talked to her boss, her fellow-workers. Police in Montana had interviewed the sister there. The net result was a large zero. The woman appeared to be exactly what she seemed, a good stenographer in her middle thirties with a respectable background and a boy friend named Bert to sweeten and add romance to the monotony of existence and her advancing years. She might be anywhere in the country by this time.

  She wasn’t anywhere in the country. She was in New York. Two days after Glass’s death, she was finally located. The call came in from the Hotel Rothingham at 9:21 a.m.

  “That’s all for now, as far as I’m concerned.” In the bedroom on the third floor of the Rothingham, McKee stood erect and stepped back from the body extended on the carpet at his feet, halfway between bed and bureau. He spoke to an Assistant Medical Examiner, who promptly went to work. Miss Nelson had been dead quite a while. Rigor was already well developed. Standing looking down at her, the Scotsman’s mouth was wry. A gun for Mark Middleton, a metal vase for Glass, a noose of some sort here—the killer had a taste for variety. Miss Nelson had been strangled.

  The body had been discovered by a chambermaid entering the room with a pass key at nine o’clock. Miss Nelson was supposed to have checked out early that morning, had told the desk that she would be doing so and paid her bill the afternoon before.

  She had checked out very thoroughly, in a direction she hadn’t intended to take, McKee reflected moodily. It was one of the things he had been afraid of. Like Glass, Florence Nelson had brought about her own death by playing ball with the murderer. In her case, however, he was inclined to think it was unconscious, that she hadn’t known the score, or even which team she was on.

  There was something pathetic in the woman’s natural innocuousness, she was not a forceful creature, never had been; anger tightened in him. Her procedure, the course she had followed, wasn’t difficult to chart. She had checked into the Rothingham at around ten o’clock on the night Glass died. As a hiding hole it wasn’t a bad choice. It was bold, out in the open, one of the huge West Side midtown hotels filled each day with thousands of transients constantly coming and going. In the search for her, all hotels had been checked as a matter of course, this one among them, but Miss Nelson had registered under a false name, her appearance was nondescript, and she wasn’t wearing the clothes described by her friend, Mrs.
Mabel Tash. Instead of the brown coat with the hood she had turned up at the hotel in a black coat with a fur collar and a black hat pulled well down over her head and concealing her hair. She had either disposed of the brown coat in transit, or it had been disposed of for her. Unless it was at the cleaners—check on that. The other articles of apparel she had taken with her in her hurried flight from her apartment were in her suitcase, open on the trunk rack. The suitcase told the tale. The garments in it were neatly folded, except for the top one, a brown wool dress, the skirt of which she had dragged with her to the floor when she fell.

  She had evidently been packing when her lethal visitor arrived. A knock, a voice, an entrance; a moment’s talk, perhaps; Miss Nelson had returned to her task. Then, while she was bending over the suitcase, a noose had been thrown around her neck from in back and the ends pulled tight until suffocation ensued.

  The photograph of the round man, Bert, was not among her meager possessions, nor was there any clue to him or to his whereabouts in the contents of her purse, which included a ten-dollar bill, four singles, some change, and the usual feminine make-up paraphernalia. For the rest the hotel had very little information about her. The chambermaid was the only one who had seen her, and she had nothing of importance to contribute. As far as was known, Miss Nelson had remained in her room for the most part, and when the maid was doing it she had sat at the window with her back turned, reading a magazine. No one had asked for her at the desk, no one had seen a visitor arrive or depart. She had had several telephone calls, but they were local calls and there was no record of them. The switchboard operator didn’t know whether the voice asking for room 517 was a man’s or a woman’s.

  As in Glass’s case, it looked like one of those blatant and uncomplicated murders that were so difficult to resolve. It had most certainly stemmed from Mark Middleton’s. From the moment the investigation into Middleton’s death was reopened, Miss Nelson was doomed, as a direct lead to Bert. Well, it was done now; and they were further from finding the round man than ever.