A Key to Death

by Frances

  “Leave me alone,” Phyllis told Francis Cuyler. “Can’t you leave me alone?”

  “What’s got into you?” he said, and kept pace. She did not say anything, but walked faster.

  “All right,” he said. “Ingraham’s dead. I’m sorry. You’re—all right, it’s hit you hard. Because you thought—whatever you thought. I understand that.”

  “Leave me alone,” she said. “Just leave me alone. Let me go.”

  “Not until I find out what you’re thinking,” he said. “You’ve got some idiotic idea in your head. You’ve been looking at me—when you thought I didn’t see—as if—”

  They were at the Fifth Avenue corner. Traffic stopped them. But then, without waiting for the lights to change, she ran into the traffic, stopped, started again, as cars swerved around her; as a bus slowed jokingly. She reached the center of the street, but there the uptown traffic was too much for her—too much for the most darting flight. She stood, making herself narrow on the line which divided traffic.

  She was alone for seconds only. Then Cuyler was beside her; and a hand on her arm. “You’re crazy,” he said. “You’ll get yourself killed.”

  “Just leave me alone,” she said.

  The lights changed, the way opened. They were on the sidewalk, but he still held her arm. She did not, now, try to release herself.

  “You’ve done enough,” she said. “Haven’t you done enough?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “If you’ve got something to say, say it.”

  She started on. He released her arm, but continued to walk beside her.

  “Look,” he said. “We’ll have a cup of coffee. A drink, if you’d rather. We can’t leave it this way.”

  She shook her head.

  “I suppose,” he said, and his voice was bitter. “I suppose you think I’d put poison in your drink? Or—what?”

  She said nothing.

  “All right,” he said. “What do you think I’ve done—done that was ‘enough’? Why don’t you say it? Haven’t you got the guts to say it?”

  “You killed him,” she said.

  “All right. You’ve said it. You want to hear what I say?”

  “What difference does it make? Oh—say it. Somebody’ll believe you.”

  “I—” he said, and stopped, and swore. “We can’t talk this way.”

  “There’s nothing to talk about. I won’t tell anybody. I couldn’t prove anything, if I did.”

  “Here,” he said, and took her arm again. He turned her toward the door of a restaurant. “We’ll have a drink.”

  She did not resist, now; resistance seemed to have drained out of her. There was a cocktail area just inside the door. It was almost empty. He guided her to a table in a corner. A waiter came. “What do you want?” Cuyler said, and she said, “Oh, anything.” “Martinis, then,” he told the waiter. They came quickly; they were not particularly good. She left her glass standing before her, untouched.

  “Why?” he said. “I suppose because I was jealous?”

  “You hated him. Yesterday you said so. All but said so.”

  “He was all right. I was trying—” He shrugged. “I didn’t hate him.” He drank. “I guess it’s no use,” he said. “Don’t know why I thought it would be.”

  “I told you it was no use.”

  “When you don’t want to believe things, you don’t believe them. I thought I could—get to you. Get this crazy idea out of your head.”

  “You hated him. Oh—because of me. So, I can’t say anything, can I? Because it was because of me. I can’t be the one. You don’t need to worry about what I’ll say. If—if they find out, it won’t be because of me.”

  “Oh, that,” he said. His tone dismissed it. “It’s what’s between us—”

  “Nothing. There’s nothing between us.”

  “That’s not true. You don’t even think it’s true.”

  She did not reply to that. She seemed merely to wait. He leaned toward her; he examined her face as if he had not seen it before. Her face did not change; she did not avoid his eyes, did not respond to them.

  “All right,” he said, finally. “You’re a very pretty girl. You could be a very sweet girl. I’m in love with you, which is no secret. But, you’re not very bright, are you?”

  Her expression did not change.

  “I didn’t ask you,” she said. “I asked you to leave me alone.”

  “No,” he said. “Not very bright. That ought to make a difference. Well—”

  “I’m going,” she said. “You got what you wanted. Made me say what you knew I’d say. I don’t know why you went to the trouble.”

  “No. I suppose you don’t.” He stood up. He looked at her untouched glass. “By God,” he said, “you didn’t really think—or is it bad form to drink with a murderer? Is that what the books say?”

  She walked around the table toward the door. He made no move to follow her; said nothing further. After she had gone, he beckoned to the waiter. He ordered another martini. The waiter looked at the untouched glass.

  “Lady didn’t like it?” he said.

  “No,” Francis Cuyler said. “Didn’t seem to, did she?”

  There was no official observation of Mary Burton and Dorothy Lynch as, parting from Phyllis in front of the office building, they walked west in Forty-fourth Street—crossed The Avenue of the Americas, still universally thought of as Sixth Avenue, and went on to the subway station at Times Square. They parted there. Mrs. Lynch took an uptown express; Mrs. Burton a downtown train for South Ferry. They had said little as they walked; although side by side, each walked alone. Dorothy Lynch was hoping that her husband, already apprised of the cause of her lateness, would not take it into his well-meaning head to demonstrate that he was as good in the kitchen as the next man. She was simply too tired, too drained out, to face the kitchen after he had been good in it or, indeed, the more immediate product of his labors. What she wanted—what she needed—was to go out, to go to a restaurant, have a couple of drinks and a steak as far as possible from home cooked. She, in short, hoped to God that Ralph would not have taken it into his head to be considerate. Much as I love him, I suppose, Dorothy said to herself, and hung to a strap, swaying as the train swayed …

  Mrs. Burton, having been widowed for a quarter of a century, had no such preoccupations. She did not think of food, or at any rate not of her own. She would, without doubt, just miss a ferry. One always just missed a ferry. She would have a sandwich and a cup of coffee, which would do very well. Poor Tommy—Mrs. Burton was not ingenious in the naming of cats—would merely have to wait. Well, he was too fat, anyway. They got that way when—

  But she did not really think of these matters in any coherent manner. It is true that the predicament of Tommy briefly crossed the surface of her mind, as the shadow of a blown leaf may cross a murky pool. Mrs. Burton’s consciousness remained submerged in muddled thought, and troubled by it. She had somehow mixed things up again. She knew this, was unhappily convinced of it, but she could not make herself remember what things she might have mixed up. This worried her.

  It was frightening, it was really dreadful, to feel that her mind was not what it had once been. Twenty years ago—even five years ago—she had not forgotten things. She would not, then, conceivably have told Mr. Ingraham the Pierre when she meant the Roosevelt. “You’re my memory, Mary,” Sam Schaeffer had said often, in other years. “Couldn’t get along without that head of yours,” Forbes Ingraham had told her.

  She did not deny that she was getting older, but she was not really old. A little over fifty—well, at any rate, somewhat under sixty. There was no reason why things should get mixed up; why she should forget things, and get them wrong. Only the little things, of course, but they could be so disconcerting. It was like trying to move through heavy mist. The outlines of things were blurred, wavering.

  Now, since this terrible thing had happened, this unbelievable thing, she could hardly make herself think
at all. If it was like being in a fog, it was also a little like trying to wake herself from a nightmare, as one may, knowing that what seems reality is only a dream, and hateful, but is still a tangle of fantasy against which struggle for a long time is futile. I must wake up; I must remember what I said wrong, Mary Burton thought, and walked through the ferry building toward the boat.

  A boat had just come in, and she stood waiting—moving in an accustomed pattern, but still fighting against a dream—while, segregated in their own passageway, as if in a cattle chute, those the boat had released hurried onto the island of Manhattan. It was, she thought vaguely, an odd time to be going that way—away from home. Manhattan was for the daytime, for office time. In the evenings, one went the other way.

  The gate opened and those who were waiting—not at this hour many, as many are reckoned in New York—began to cross the ramp onto the boat. Although there was no hurry, since the boat would wait, they hurried, jostling one another. Mary Burton went with them, onto the boat. But she went uneasily, almost reluctantly, still feeling dimly—and still striving to dispel the dimness—that she was leaving behind something undone, or done wrongly. She felt as she often felt on leaving her small house in the mornings, that she had forgotten something—that she had left water running somewhere or, perhaps, a lamp burning where Tommy might knock it over and start a fire. (That had almost happened once. He—it could only have been Tommy—had upset a lamp with a silk shade, and it had fallen so that the hot bulb, unbroken, was pressed against the fabric. Fire had not actually started, but the shade had been charred deeply.) It was like that now—water left running, a light burning, a door unlocked.

  She stood just on the boat, not entering the cabin. A deck hand had reached for the folding gate when she remembered. She said, “Oh. Wait,” and almost ran off the ferryboat. The deck hand looked at her, and shrugged his shoulders, and closed the gate.

  She was not sure even now, again in the ferry waiting room. She was sure only of what she was not sure, and in what her uncertainty lay. And, so remembered or partially remembered, the thing which had bothered her seemed of greatly diminished importance. It was a relief to have put her mind on it; encouraging to discover that, when she really tried, she could remember as well as ever. But the whole matter was not, probably, worth having missed a boat over. However—

  She found a telephone booth, and dialed a number, by no means needing to find it in the directory. She listened to the sound which meant that the telephone she had dialed was ringing; waited long enough to know that it was to remain unanswered. Well, she had not really expected anything else.

  She replaced the receiver and hesitated. Then she consulted the Manhattan directory and this time she dialed a number unfamiliar to her, but familiar enough—Spring 7-3100. It was not the best number she could have selected for her purpose, but it was good enough, and this time she was very promptly answered.

  “The officer in charge of the investigation of Mr. Ingraham’s death,” she said. “I think he was a captain—a Captain Weigand, isn’t it?”

  It was. She waited, while at a telephone switchboard a man’s fingers worked briskly. Again she was quickly answered: “Homicide West. Stein.”

  She asked for Captain Weigand; was told that he was not in, was asked if anyone else would do. She hesitated.

  “No,” she said. “I think—”

  “A message?” Sergeant Stein asked.

  “If you’d tell him that Missis—” she began, and stopped. “No,” she said. “I’ll call him tomorrow. Thank you.”

  She replaced the receiver once more, and opened the door of the telephone booth and started out. But she stopped again, and turned back, and dialed another number.

  It took somewhat longer this time, but she was answered.

  “This is Mary Burton,” she said. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything?”

  “No.”

  “About this dreadful thing. Poor Mr. Ingraham.”

  “Yes.”

  “I was on my way home and I got to worrying. I thought I remembered and then I wasn’t sure and I wondered if you remembered. About—”

  She told of the little worrying thing. She listened, then. She began to nod toward the mouthpiece, as if toward the person to whom she listened.

  “Of course,” she said, and then, “I’m so glad you do. I was so afraid I’d—”

  She listened again, momentarily. She said, again, “I do hope I didn’t interrupt anything.”

  She hung the receiver up and this time left the booth. She went to a lunch counter and ate a baked Virginia ham sandwich, which was neither baked nor from Virginia. She drank coffee.

  It would be untrue to say that, when Mary Burton boarded the next ferry, her mind was at ease. But it was free to worry about other things—more important things. There would be changes in the firm—more than there had been when Mr. Schaeffer had died. There was only Mr. Webb now. It was hard to tell what would happen.

  Reginald Webb left the law offices some little time after the departure of Cuyler, and the three women, and Eddie, but he was not the last to leave. There was a light in the library, and Webb looked into it. Saul Karn sat at one end of the long table, under the light. He was surrounded, seemed to be walled behind, a number of reasonably ponderous volumes. He was engaged in inserting slips of paper between pages and this was, indeed, one of the major occupations of his life. At the appearance of Webb, Karn inserted a slip—at “The People of the State of New York vs John Doe, et al”—took his glasses off, and looked up.

  “Still at it?” Webb said.

  Since he so evidently was, Karn regarded the question as both rhetorical and ridiculous, and was briefly tempted to say, “What’s it look like?” in reply. But what he said, without emphasis, was “Yes.”

  “What do you think?” Webb said. “They getting anywhere?”

  “Probably,” Karn said. “They usually do, sooner or later.”

  “Not always.”

  “No.”

  Karn put fingers at his marked place, preliminary to reopening the volume, since he saw little point in continuing an exchange of the obvious. Webb was unduly given to conversation. Most people were unduly given to something, and Saul Karn had long accepted this fact, without prejudice. Even Forbes Ingraham, a considerably better lawyer than Webb, had been unduly given to matters obviously extraneous—matters only to be described as emotional. This last matter, for example, had been quixotic. In a manner of speaking, Ingraham had only himself to blame.

  “Want to get on with it, don’t you, Saul?” Webb said, and his voice was tolerant. Karn, who had replaced his rimless glasses on his nose, again removed them.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “See to things before you go, then?” Webb said.

  “Certainly,” Karn said, extending himself. He resumed his glasses and opened the book in which he was seeking a suitable precedent.

  “Good night,” Webb said. To this, Karn merely nodded his head. Webb looked at him for a moment, and shook his. Then Webb left. By the time he was in the elevator, Reginald Webb had forgotten Saul Karn, having other things to think about. Unlike Mrs. Burton, he knew precisely what worried him. This did not make matters any better.

  Left to himself, Saul Karn continued through the appropriate pages of several more volumes, putting marking slips where they would do the most good. With that, he had traced a precedent to what was almost certainly its lair. He put the volumes concerned in a neat pile and returned the remaining volumes to the shelves. With that done, Saul Karn proceeded to other matters.

  He proceeded to the office safe, and opened it. He took a locked deed box from the safe and opened it. From the box, he removed a sheaf of legal sized yellow paper. He was gratified to discover that the sheaf was still where, on instructions, he had placed it.

  He did not return yellow sheets to the deed box, but put them instead in his brief case. It had been suggested that he keep this to himself, for the time being. Circumstances being w
hat they now were, this instruction could not indefinitely be followed. Nor was there any precise precedent. The next step needed to be thought over until an appropriate conclusion was reached. Karn had no doubt whatever of his ability to reach the conclusion which, under the given circumstances, would be proper.

  He went through Ingraham’s office then, and through the one beyond it which had been occupied by Sam, and there, in an office so evidently long unused, Saul Karn shook his head sadly and thought, “poor old Sam,” letting the disorder of remembrance creep for a moment into his orderly mind. He then dismissed these intruding thoughts, and made sure that the door from the office to the outside corridor was securely locked. He found it was, and thought, “for what that’s worth,” noting, as he had noted before, that the heavy old door no longer fitted snugly in the jamb. To a man with a screw driver and a moderate amount of experience it would not, Karn was sure, matter whether the door was locked or not. Probably the whole jamb was little more than coherent sawdust.

  There was nothing to do about that, except what he had already done. Saul Karn went out of the offices, carrying his brief case, turning off lights behind him, making sure that the front door also was locked. He waited some time for the elevator, which was no longer on rush hour schedule, and said a brief good night to the operator, no longer in uniform, who took him down. In Forty-fourth Street, he walked briskly eastward toward Grand Central and he, also, was not officially observed. He passed, without noticing, a parked sedan in which three men were sitting in conversation.

  For some fifteen minutes, Reginald Webb had been sitting between two men, neither of whom he had before met, in the back seat of a parked car. A third man, also not of Webb’s acquaintance, sat behind the wheel, and did not turn his head.