He was urbane to the point of silkiness. “Why wasn’t it? Doesn’t the child know you well enough? Doesn’t he see you five days a week? It’s not conclusive as far as we’re concerned, that you’re entitled to say, but fair it was.”
“But don’t you see? A child’s mind, a child that age, is as sensitive as an exposed camera plate; itil take the first impression that comes its way. You asked me not to influence him just now, but you men have undoubtedly already influenced him, maybe without meaning to, during the past few days. He’s heard you talking about my being here and now he believes I was. In children the borderline between reality and imagination is very—”
He spoke in a patiently reasoning tone. “As far as our influencing him goes, you’re entirely mistaken. We’d never heard the name, any of us, until he first mentioned it, so how could he have heard it from us first? As a matter of fact, we had to send for Mrs. Moran and have her explain who you were, when he first brought it out.”
She didn’t actually stamp her feet, but she gave a lunge of her body that expressed that state of mind. “But what am I supposed to have done—would you mind telling me? Walked out of here, when such a thing took place, without notifying anybody?”
“Now, please.” He spread the flats of his hands dis-
armingly. “You’ve already told me once you weren’t here, and I haven’t asked you a second time, have I?”
“And I repeat I wasn’t. Most decidedly! I’ve never been in this house before today.”
“Then that’s all there is to it.” He made a calming motion, as of pressing something gently downward with his hands. Peace at any price. “Nothing more to be done or said about it. Just give me a rough outline of your movements that night, and we’re through. You don’t object, do you?”
She quieted down. “No, of course not.”
“No offense, it’s just routine. We’ve asked Mrs. Moran that herself.”
She had sat down again. Quiet become thoughtfulness. “No, of course…” Thoughtfulness became a loss in innermost contemplation. “No…”
He cleared his throat presently. “Whenever you’re ready.”
“Oh, beg pardon. I seem to do everything wrong, don’t I?” She opened and closed her handbag catch one final time. “The children were sent home at their usual hour. Four, that is, you know. Until I cleared my desk and so on, it must have been four-thirty by the time I left. I went back to my room at the Residence Club, stayed in it until about six, resting and doing a little personal laundering. Then I went out and had my dinner, at a little place down the block where I usually go. You want the name, I suppose?”
He looked ruefully apologetic.
“Karen Marie’s; it’s a little private dining room run by a Swedish woman. Then I took a walk, and at, oh, sometime around eight, I dropped in to a moving picture—”
“Don’t recall just which one it was, I suppose?” he suggested leniently, as though it were the most unimportant thing in the world.
“Oh, oh, yes. The Standard. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, you know. I don’t go to them very often, but when I do, the Standard’s the only one I go to. Well, that’s about all, I guess. I came out when the show did and got back to the Residence Club just a little before twelve.”
“All right, well, that’ll do very nicely. Thanks a lot, that takes care of everything. Now, I won’t keep you any longer…”
She stood up almost unwillingly. “You know, I almost would rather not go under—under these circumstances. I’d feel better if this whole thing were cleared up one way or the other right while I’m still here.”
He gave one hand a paddle twist. “There’s nothing to clear up. You seem to be reading more into it than we’re willing to put into it ourselves. Now don’t worry about it, just run along and forget the whole business.”
“Well…“She went reluctantly, looking back until the very last, but she went.
The minute the front door had closed on her he seemed to get an electric shock from some unseen source. “Myers!” The man who had been in the room farther down the hall popped out. “Day and night. Don’t let her out of your sight a minute.” Myers went hustling by to seek the back way out.
“Brad!” Wanger called. And before the staircase had stopped swaying with tumultuous descent: “Beat it out of here fast; check with the Standard Theater and find out the name of the other picture they were showing there Monday night, with Mr. Smith. That’s one good thing about double features; they come in handy in our business. Then check with this Karen Marie’s place; find out if she ate there. I’m going to go over this alibi of hers every inch of the way and God help her if it doesn’t hold up under hundred-pound weights dropped from a height!”
First phone call to Wanger, at the Moran house, twenty minutes later:
“Hey, Lew; this is Bradford. Listen, I didn’t have to check with the Standard movie house. The name of the second feature that night was Five Little Peppers, if you still want it. But somebody else stopped by just ahead of me and asked them the same question, I was told. The girl in the box office wondered why all the sudden interest in a grade-B filler.”
“Who?” Wanger jumped through the phone at him.
“Her. The Baker girl. I got her description. Must have headed straight over there as soon as she left you. How d’ya like that?”
“I like it pretty well,” answered Wanger with grim literalness. “Polish the rest of it off. The kid just came through with the color she was wearing that night. Another of those freak spills, like his popping the name. Dark blue, got it? Go over to the Residence Club, see if you can get a line on what color she had on when she left her room Monday evening; somebody might have noticed. And do it cagey; no badge. I don’t want her to tumble we’re taking stitches until the sewing up’s all done. You’re just a guy trying to follow up a crush on someone whose name you don’t know; you can get to her by elimination.”
Second phone call to Wanger, same place, half an hour later:
“Brad again. Holy smoke, is her alibi cheesecloth! I think we’ve got something now all right.”
“All right, never mind the schoolboy ardor; when you’ve been at this as long as I have you’ll realize that the time you think you’ve got the most is when you’ve got two big handfuls of nothing.”
“Well, d’ya wanta hear it or should I keep it confidential to myself?”
“Don’t get fresh, rookie. What is it?”
“She didn’t eat in Karen Marie’s that night! First the Swensky woman that runs it backed her up solid. ‘Oh, ya, ya. Sure she vos dare.’ Well, after what happened at that movie box office, I dunno why, but something gimme kind of a hunch, so I took a chance and played it. And it paid off! I threw a big bluff and got tough about it and told her, ‘Whattaya trying to do, kid me? Don’tcha suppose I know she was just in here herself and told you to say that, if anyone asked you? Now, d’ya wanta get in trouble or d’ya wanta stay out of it?’
“She caved right in like wet cement. ‘Ya,’ she admitted, kind of scared, ‘she vos here yust now. I like to help her if I could, but as long as you know dot already, 1 don’t want to get in no trouble myself.’
“And wait, there’s more yet. I spaded around over at the Residence Club lobby. The elevator girl and the desk clerk both remembered seeing her pass through that night, and she was wearing—dark blue.”
“Come to papa,” intoned Wanger fervently.
Third phone call to Wanger, next day:
“Hello, Lew? This is Myers. I’m outside the school. I’ve got her safely nailed down until four this afternoon. I’ve been practically sitting on her shoulders ever since yesterday. But here’s a little something just turned up; I wanted you to get it right away. It might mean something and then again it might not. I picked her up when she came out of the Residence Club doorway just now, and on her way to the bus I noticed a fruit-stall keeper give her the old good-morning and she smiled back. So I dropped behind and cased him quick, so I’d still be able to make
the same bus she did. He told me she bought
half a dozen Rorida oranges from him at six o’clock Monday evening. I’m remembering that two glasses of orange juice turned up in the Moran refrigerator the morning after that Mrs. Moran couldn’t account for, that she was certain she didn’t prepare herself before she went up to her mother’s.”
“I’m remembering that, too. At six she was on her way out, not in, even according to her own story. She took them somewhere with her. I’m going over there r^ight now and have a chat with the cleaning maid that does her room. One good thing about oranges, from our point of view, is you can’t eat the peel, too.”
Wanger to superior:
“How’s it looking up. Lew?”
“Almost too good to be true. I’m afraid to breathe on it for fear the whole thing’ll collapse. Believe it or not. Chief, I’ve got a life-size, flesh-and-blood suspect at last, after chasing will-o’-the-wisps until now. I’ve actually talked to her and heard her answer me. I keep pinching myself all the time.” “Pinch her, that’ll be a little more constructive.” “This girl has tried to palm off a tissue of lies on us for an alibi. I’ve heard of them with one weak link, and two weak links, but this thing is spun sugar in the sun! She wasn’t at the restaurant where she said she was, she wasn’t at the picture show, she left her room in a dark blue outfit. The Moran kid identified her to her face as having been with him and his father that night. A crayon drawing he did in school Monday afternoon was found there in the house in the small hours of Tuesday morning, and Mrs. Moran is dead sure he didn’t have it with him when she called for him and took him away. And just to do it up brown: she bought half a dozen Florida oranges at a fruit stall near the club six o’clock Monday evening and took them with her—to wherever she was going. There were two large double glasses of the stuff found standing in the Moran Frigidaire afterward that Mrs. M is positive were prepared by some other hand than her own. True, there were already oranges in her bin, to the best of her recollection. But then where did the ones this Baker girl bought go to? They never showed up in her room from first to last; I’ve questioned the cleaning maid and she didn’t remove any orange peel from that room all week long, not so much as a dried seed.
“Now, what does it look to you?”
“It looks like three strikes and out. Suppose you let her flounder for, say, another twenty-four hours and see if she goes in any deeper. Then get ready for the jump. But don’t lose her whatever you do. Stick close to her day and night—”
“And even at other times,” amended Wanger remorselessly.
* * *
“This is Wanger, Chief.”
“I’ve been waiting to hear from you. I think you better bring the Baker girl in with you now.”
“I am. Chief. I’m caUing you from the lobby of the Residence Club right now. I wanted your okay before I go up to her room and get her.”
“All right, you’ve got it. I just got a report that gives the kid’s story grown-up confirmation for the first time, even if it’s only partial. A man named Schroeder who lives on the other side of the street a few doors down happened to go to his bedroom window to pull down the shade and definitely saw the figure of a woman leaving the Moran house shortly before midnight. He couldn’t identify her at that distance and in the dark, of course, but I don’t see much sense in holding off any longer.”
“No, there isn’t. Not with her past record of disappearances. I’ll be in in about fifteen or twenty minutes.”
* * *
The girl elevator operator tried to bar his way. “I’m sorry, sir, no gentlemen are allowed up in the rooms.”
“I’m not a gentleman, I’m a detective,” Wanger was half-tempted to say, but didn’t. He had to admit there had been pickups he’d like better than this one. “The desk cleared me,” he told her gruffly. She looked out across the lobby and got a surreptitious high sign that it was all right to go ahead up with him. Wanger hadn’t been willing to take a chance on his slippery quarry to the extent of waiting below and having them call her down.
The girl opened for him at the seventh.
“Wait here for me. And no other passengers on the way down, straight trip.”
She was all eyes as he made his way down the peaceful, homelike corridor; she could tell it was an arrest.
He knocked on the door. Her voice said unfrightenedly, “Who is it?”
“Open the door, please,” he answered quietly.
She did immediately, surprise at the male voice still showing on her face. She had a washbasin full of silk stockings there behind her.
“Would you mind coming over with me?” He was somber about it but not truculent.
She said, “Oh,” in a weak little voice.
He stood there waiting in the open doorway. She fumbled around for her outer things in a closet, couldn’t get what she was looking for. “I don’t know why I’m not frightened,” she faltered. “I suppose I ought to be—” She was very badly frightened. She dropped the hanger with her coat and had to brush it off. Then she tried to put the coat on, forgetting to take the hanger out of it.
“Nothing’s going to happen to you. Miss Baker,” he said morosely.
“I’ll have to leave my stockings go, won’t I?” she said.
“I guess you better let them go.”
She knitted her brows, pulled out the stopper on her way past. “I wish I’d finished them before you got here,” she sighed. “Am 1 coming back?” she asked just before putting the lights out. “Or should I—should I take anything with me for the night?” She was very badly frightened.
He just closed the door for her.
“You see, I’ve never been arrested before,” she said placatingly, accompanying him down the hall, quick nervous little steps to his longer slower ones.
“Cut it out, will ya?” he said gruffly, with a sort of querulous annoyance.
He came into the dim room, looked at her, lit a cigarette whose outer radius of slowly expanding smoke took a moment or two to reach the conical shaft from the shaded light over her. When it did it turned pale blue, like something in a test tube. “Crying won’t do any good,” he said with distant correctness. “You’re not being mistreated in any way. And you have only yourself to blame for being here.”
“You don’t know what it means—” she said in the direction his voice had come from. “You deal in arrests, to you it’s nothing. You can’t possibly know what goes through you, when you’re in your room, secure and contented and at peace with the world one minute, and the next someone suddenly comes for you to take you away. Takes you down through the building you live in, in front of everybody, takes you through the streets—and when they get you there you find out you’re supposed to have—to have murdered a man! Oh, I can’t stand it! I’m frightened of the whole world tonight! I feel as though I were in the middle of one of those stories told to my own children, suddenly come true; bewitched, held under the power of some ogre’s spell.”
And as she wept, she tried to smile into the darkness at them, in apology.
Another voice spoke up from the perimeter of gloom: “D’you think Moran had an easy time of it, that last half hour or so in the closet? You didn’t see him when he was taken out; we did.”
She pressed her hair flat to her head, soundlessly.
“Don’t,” Wanger said in an aside. “She’s the sensitive type.”
The unseen matron made a plucking sound at her lips with her tongue, to express her own opinion on that subject.
“I didn’t know it was a murder. I didn’t know it was done to him purposely!” the girl on the wooden chair said. “When you had me out there at their house the other day, I simply thought it had been an accident, that he’d locked himself in some way, and the child hadn’t realized the seriousness of the danger, and then afterward perhaps, to escape the blame, as children will, had made up the story that I was there.”
Wanger said, “That doesn’t alter the case any. That’s not what we’re talking to
you about now. You didn’t eat at the Swedish woman’s. You didn’t go to the Standard. But you went to both of those places afterward and told them to say you did! Then you wonder why you’re here.”
She held one wrist with the other hand, twisting at it circularly. Finally she said, “I know—I didn’t realize I was being watched so soon—you seemed so friendly that afternoon.”
“We don’t give warnings.”
“I didn’t know it was a murder; I thought it was just the child’s little fib I had to contend with.” She took a deep breath. “I was—with my husband. His name is Larry Stark, he—he lives at 420 Marcy Avenue. I made dinner for him at his apartment and was there all evening.”
It made no impression. “Why didn’t you tell us that the first time you were asked?”
“I couldn’t, don’t you see? I’m a teacher, I’m not supposed to be married, it’ll cost me my job.”
“We’ve shot your first story to pieces, there’s nothing left of it; naturally you’ve got to replace it, you can’t just stand on thin air. Why should we believe this one any more than the first?”
“Ask Larry—he’ll tell you! He’ll tell you I was there with him the whole time.”
“We’ll ask him all right. And he probably will tell us you were there with him. But the Moran child tells us you were there with him. And the crayon drawing tells us you were there with him. And the two glasses of orange juice in the icebox tell us you were there with/i/m. And your dark blue suit tells us you were there with him. And your own actions for the past few days tell us you were there with him. That’s quite a lineup to buck, little girl.”
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