A Key to Death

by Frances

  The list had not been in the desk. “How could it have been? I don’t know what list they were talking about.” The taller man had given up, in the end. He had stood beside the man with the gun and looked at her. He had said, “All right, lady. Where’d you put it?”

  She had denied, again, knowing what he was talking about. The man with the small, tight mouth had shaken the gun in his hand, shaken it in warning, turned to the other man and said, “Well, what d’you say? Help her remember things?” But the taller man had, again, shaken his head.

  “Where’d you go this afternoon, lady?” he had asked. “Maybe you can remember that.”

  She had.

  “I told him I’d been at your apartment,” she said, to Phoebe James. “With Mr. and Mrs. North. Before that, here. I’ve still got some things here,” she told Pam. “Things I forgot, or didn’t think I’d want. I told him I’d had dinner with Reg, and where. The taller man said—I remember now, I didn’t pay much attention then—he said, ‘So you were the date, huh?’ I should have realized then he was one of the men who talked to Reg—made him get in the car.”

  “They brought you here,” Phoebe James said. It was not a question. (But why should it be? Pam thought. Of course they did. She is here.)

  They had made her walk between them, Nan Schaeffer said. The man with the gun kept it pressed against her. They had taken her, not to one of the passenger elevators, but to a service elevator at the end of the corridor. “I never knew where it was,” she said. “Even that there was one. But they did.” The elevator was automatic. They took her down in it, to a floor below the lobby floor—a place of harsh concrete, without comfort. They had taken her through a door and along a corridor, and through other doors. They had met a few people—waiters, she thought; hotel maids. But nobody seemed to pay any attention to them. “They all seemed so hurried.” They had taken her out, finally, into the street, through what appeared to be a service door. A car had been waiting; they had put her into it, and sat one on each side of her, and a man who had been waiting in the car, behind the wheel, had been told where to drive.

  “What time was this?” Phoebe asked her. “Do you know?”

  It had been, she thought, about eleven o’clock when they reached the street. She was guessing; she thought it had been a little after ten, certainly not later than ten-thirty, when she had entered the apartment and found the men there. She did not think it was more than half an hour, perhaps less, when they took her out. It had taken not more than five minutes to reach the building—the two-apartment building—in which she had lived with Sam Schaeffer, in which now she told her story.

  Nudged by the gun, she had found the key to the apartment and opened the door and—

  “Wait,” Nan said, interrupting herself. “They sent the other man—the driver—some place first.”

  After they had got out of the car, she said, she and the man with the gun had moved toward the street door of the apartment; the other man had leaned in the front window of the car and talked, briefly, to the man there. She had not heard what he said, but thought the driver had been given instructions. Then—

  But again she said, to herself, “Wait—I remember something else. Just a couple of words—something the taller man said to the driver. He must have raised his voice. It was something about a ferry. If he wanted to make the ferry, or he had better make the ferry—I don’t know.”

  “This driver,” Pam said. “Could the driver have been a woman?”

  “A woman?” Nan Schaeffer repeated, and the surprise in her voice was this time very evident. “Why do you keep—no, of course not. A man was driving—hardly more than a boy, really. He had that thin back of the neck boys have, and narrow shoulders. I didn’t see his face. But of course it was a man. Or a boy. Why do you keep asking about a woman?”

  “She thought,” Phoebe James began, but Pam said, “It doesn’t matter. I had a—it doesn’t matter. They took you inside? The man with the small mouth. The other man. Surely you can describe the other man?”

  “I don’t know,” Nan said. “I’m—I’m afraid I’m no good at that sort of thing. A good many people aren’t. He had—a hard face. His eyes—I think they were brown. There wasn’t anything to remember—like the other man’s mouth, small and tight.”

  “You’d know him if you saw him again?” Pam asked her.

  “Oh—if I saw him. Probably I would.”

  (I sound, Pam thought, like a detective—like a policeman. And—where were the police? A long time ago they should have—)

  “Mrs. Schaeffer,” Pam said. “You did call the police?”

  “The police?” Nan Schaeffer repeated. “I told you—I tried to get them and—it was all confused—and then I tried Phoebe and—”

  “Not then,” Pam said. “Now. Or, just before now. Before we got here.”

  “Of course,” Nan Schaeffer said. “I—of course I did. Phoebe, and then the police. They said they’d—they’d send someone.”

  “They haven’t,” Pam pointed out.

  “You think they’re so quick,” Phoebe James said. “They’re not—you see now they’re not. I told you that.”

  “But—” Pam said, and then, “All right.” Probably it was all right. Anyway, the men hadn’t come back. With lights in the house, they wouldn’t come back. Nan Schaeffer was right about that. “How did you get a chance to telephone?” Pam asked. “Not this afternoon, although—anyway, I mean last night. When you called me? Jerry and me?”

  She had, Nan told them, been taken into the living room and told to sit down, the small-mouthed man pointing out a chair with his revolver. The men had locked the street door and begun to search the big room. They had started with her desk—“it’s over in a corner; it’s more a table than a desk, really—a table with drawers.” Finding nothing there, they had begun to search the cupboards.

  Pam repeated the word.

  “Two of the walls are panelled,” Nan said. “Didn’t you notice? Behind the panels are shelves to store things—cupboards. You tap the walls in certain places, and the panels open. We—” She broke off; momentarily her face worked. “Sam and I used to keep all sorts of things in them,” she said. “Books and papers, and one section was for liquor and—”

  The men had become engrossed in their search. Nan Schaeffer, after twenty minutes or so, had thought she saw a chance. She had stood up and, when they did not stop her, had moved toward the rear of the room, and the door under the staircase. She had stood there for a moment and then, still thinking herself unnoticed, had gone through it.

  “I think now,” she said, “they let me go thinking I would lead them to whatever they were looking for. Or, perhaps they really didn’t notice.”

  In any event, she said, she had managed to get to the library. “This room.” She had got to the telephone, and tried first to get the police. She had got somebody and been unable to make him understand. Probably, she said, she hadn’t been very coherent—the man had kept saying, “Wait just a moment. You’re talking too fast.” But she had not, she decided, time to wait. She had hung up, and then dialed Phoebe James’s private number. She had not turned on the light, knowing the number, being able to see the dial in the faint light which came in the big window. And Phoebe had not answered.

  “I—I was desperate,” Nan Schaeffer said, and now she leaned forward, and her manner seemed to reflect the desperation of the night before. “I tried to think of somebody who would be home—I didn’t think Reg would have gone straight home—I thought of you, Mrs. North—you and your husband. I had to turn a light on to find the number, but I put the lamp on the floor and—”

  She recreated the scene, as much by her manner, her quick gestures, as by her words. Pam could see her, crouched on the floor, shielding the light as much as possible, turning frantically through the flimsy pages of the telephone directory, finding the number she sought, listening to the sound of ringing—and at the same time for a sound behind her.

  “When you answered—you
r husband did,” Nan said, “I—I couldn’t keep my voice down. You know what I said—probably you remember better than I do. Because—almost at once one of them came in. I tried to talk fast, to tell you where I was and—I didn’t get it out, did I? Of course I didn’t.”

  “No,” Pam said.

  “He hit me,” Nan said. “With the gun, I think. It was as if something exploded in my head and then—then I don’t remember. I was knocked out, of course.” She touched, very gently, the bruise on her temple. She said she supposed she was lucky to be alive.

  When she was conscious again, it was dark in the room—“this room, they left me here.” She could hear them moving in the room outside and after some time they came into the library. They drew curtains and turned on a light, and came over and looked at her. She had opened her eyes; she closed them. But she had not, apparently, been quick enough. “She’s coming out of it,” the smaller man said. “Want I should—?”

  Nan had, she said, opened her eyes at that, and the man had raised the revolver, to use it as a club. But the other man said, “Hold it. Maybe we can do better,” and had gone out of the room. He had returned in a few minutes with a glass of water, and a bottle of sleeping pills. “My own,” she said. “I—I couldn’t sleep after Sam—but when I moved, I left them here.” They had made her take two capsules. Almost at once—“I suppose I was still groggy”—things had begun to seem unreal, and she could not be sure what was happening.

  But during that growing vagueness, before she again lost consciousness, she thought one of the men had used the telephone. She did not know which man. “They were both—shadows.” One “shadow” had used the telephone; had dialed a number, when answered had said, “Well?” She thought he had said nothing more, then, but had listened. After some time, during which all, for Nan Schaeffer, grew more vague, the man had said, something else, and again she thought she had caught the word terry.

  “But I can’t be sure,” she said. “Not of anything then.”

  It had been daylight when she awoke, to find herself lying on the sofa. At first, she had thought the reason she could not move was that she had lain too long, in a position too cramped. But then she realized she was bound. And she could hear, sounds from the living room, and realized the men still were there. After a few minutes—she thought it was a few minutes—the men had come into the room and, once more, stood and looked down at her. She had not, she said, pretended to be asleep.

  “She’ll do,” the taller man had said, after looking at her carefully.

  “And then he said, ‘Just take it easy, lady. We’ll be back.’ Then they both went out and—I guess—left. Oh yes—they got the keys out of my purse. It was on the floor.”

  She still, she said, had no idea what time it was, but finally she had twisted herself around so that she could see an electric clock on the desk. “There,” she said, and indicated a clock on the desk, facing the sofa on which she sat. It had showed, unbelievably, that the time was almost two o’clock.

  It had taken her two hours of struggle to get one hand free, to wriggle from the sofa to the floor and, there, reach the cord of the telephone and pull the instrument to the floor beside her. How, with her hand only partly free, she had managed to dial Phoebe James’s number—

  “I don’t know how I did it. I thought—I thought I would never get it finished.”

  “Why—” Pam began, but Nan Schaeffer spoke quickly.

  “I knew Phoebe had a key,” she said. “She’s had it since—since Sam died, when she was coming here to—to help. To get things straightened out.”

  And now the two women looked at Pam North and, it seemed to her, there was a peculiar intensity in their regard. It was as if they were demanding something from her. But she did not know what they wanted. There was something which eluded her—her mind reached for it and it slipped away. It was as if they were demanding an answer from her, seeking to force her to some decision. Under the pressure, her uncertainty of its purpose, Pam felt herself growing uneasy. What did they want of her? What—

  “It’s strange the police don’t come, isn’t it?” Pam North said. “It’s been quite a long time now and—”

  She stood up, and moved toward the table by the heavy sofa—it was, she realized absently, a sofa which could be converted into a bed—and toward the telephone which one of them had put back on the table.

  “I’m going to call them again,” Pam said. “I know Bill Weigand’s special—”

  The others looked at her. There was, Pam thought, a puzzled expression in Nan Schaeffer’s eyes—an expression, perhaps, of uncertainty.

  “I know I—” Nan began. “It’s all—it was all so confused before you came. Perhaps they didn’t—But they’d have traced the call.”

  Pam began to dial the seven stages of a New York City number. It would be hard, she thought—it must have been almost impossible—to dial while you lay on the floor, only one hand free—a thing essentially so easy must under those circumstances have been agonizingly difficult. W—A—9—

  But then she heard the sound; they all heard the sound. In the big living room, someone was moving. The sound of steps was sharp as someone crossed a bare area of the oaken floor.

  Pam stood, her hand motionless above the telephone dial.

  “They’ve come back,” Phoebe James said, in a whisper. “Hear them? They’ve come back!”

  Pam looked at Nan Schaeffer. Nan’s expression was still that of a person deeply puzzled. But now it was more than that. Nan listened to the steps in the room outside, and listened with an expression of entire incredulity.

  They had been delayed, first by the telephone call which had come through as they were leaving the office in the West Twentieth Street station, then by Weigand’s own decision as he drove, slowly through snow deepening on the pavement, up Park Avenue.

  The telephone call had been from Detective Thackery, who had a report. Early in the morning—probably about three or four o’clock—burglars had forced their way into the offices, in West Forty-second Street, of Sneed & Mallet, Private Investigators. “It’s a crummy little outfit,” Thackery had said. “Even as they go, crummy. Oughtn’t to have a license. Mallet was in the car when they put the blast on Halpern. Remember?”

  “Right,” Bill said.

  “Still in the hospital,” Thackery said, and did not try to keep pleasure out of his voice. “Got it right where he had it coming—in the tail.”

  “Yes,” Bill said. “Where you’d expect. So?”

  The safe in the Sneed & Mallet offices had been broken open, according to Oscar Sneed’s “squeal” to the precinct. Sneed professed not to know what had been sought, since no money was kept in the safe. “Not very much to keep anywhere, probably,” Thackery said. Sneed had hinted at confidential documents of great value. “Who some guy went to a hotel with,” Thackery interpreted. Sneed had also said that some tape recordings were missing and then, rather hurriedly, not very convincingly, had said that he dictated reports on a tape recorder and had them transcribed. This, considering the grubby modesty of the Sneed & Mallet operation, the investigating detective had considered improbable. The office equipment appeared to consist of two typewriters, three desks and a filing cabinet—which also had been ransacked.

  “So,” Thackery said, “looks like it might tie in, doesn’t it? A tape on the wire tap. Maybe there was only the one, maybe some others. Anybody’d take them all along, of course. Went to the lawyer’s office first and didn’t find what they were looking for—didn’t even find the transcription, because Karn had taken it home with him. Had a shot at Sneed’s place, and apparently got what they wanted. Or—maybe they did. There’s no way of telling. Sneed’s not going to tell. Guy can lose his license for a private tap.”

  “Yes,” Bill said. “It could tie in.”

  “We might take it up with Mallet,” Thackery said. “He’s in good enough shape. Just has to lie on his belly. Could be that would make him talkative.”

  It might, Bi
ll agreed, be worth trying. Would Thackery see it tried? Thackery would.

  Weigand and Mullins had left, then, and driven through Twentieth Street to Fourth Avenue, and up it, around Grand Central, into Park. But, when they were a few blocks above the Waldorf, Weigand had swerved the Buick into the curb and said they might see if the doctor had got back yet.

  Dr. Aaron Arn had got back. He was, however, examining a patient. And, had they an appointment?

  They had not; on the other hand, what they wanted would take only a minute or two. If Dr. Arn was not going to be too long?

  They waited. They waited half an hour, and Bill Weigand seemed quite content to read the September issue of the Atlantic Monthly. This surprised Sergeant Mullins, because usually at this stage—or what he had taken to be this stage—the Loot was trying to be in half a dozen places at once, or to reach one place in no time flat. From the way he acted now, you’d think they had a month. It occurred to Sergeant Mullins that perhaps the Loot felt they had, which indicated they were not at the stage he had thought. Mullins sighed, and continued to look at the July issue of Esquire. Esquire wasn’t what it had been. Full of reading matter, nowadays.

  “And remember, no sauces,” Dr. Arn said, from behind a well-filled-out man of sixty, who had an expression of mingled relief and perturbation on a plump face, who said, “Well—” in a tone of doubt. “For six months anyway,” Dr. Arn said. “Then we’ll see. Hello. You two again?”

  He took them into the inner office.

  “There,” he said, “goes a man who will pay no attention whatever to what I tell him. He’ll have four drinks and dinner at Chambord.”

  “And?” Bill said.

  “Stomach ache,” Dr. Arn said. “What can I do for you?”