“If I may speak to you privately, Mrs Sutton. The situation is somewhat unusual.”
Roberta gathered up her bag. If they had fired Miss Miller, she was going to do something about it. She’d make her father speak to old man Blackman. Miss Miller might be a little slow, but she was careful. And she didn’t madam you all over the place. “Thank you,” she said to Miss Collins, letting her eyes say what she thought of bleached hair. “Come along, you two.”
Bessy and Beulah followed her down the aisle, Bessy plainly agog and Beulah in the same state but not showing it. Mr Benz was waiting for them at the main door. He indicated that his information was private, and he and Roberta moved out of earshot.
“In deference to the elderly ladies,” he explained. “A regrettable situation. Miss Miller is unfortunately dead.”
A slow pain took possession of Roberta’s heart. Dead, she thought, and I never did any of the things I meant to do. That poor girl, alone in that dreadful place she was moving to. “When?” she asked.
“I believe, let me see, several weeks ago, before Thanksgiving. We were not informed directly, I mean there was no family involved. But we have other employees residing at the same address, and they told us. They wanted permission to open her locker and remove such possessions as were left, the shoes for wearing behind the counter, the extra umbrella, and the like. We valued Miss Miller highly and were sorry to—to lose her.” Mr Benz hoped Mrs Sutton would let him stop with that, but he hadn’t forgotten her tycoon connections and wasn’t surprised when she went directly to the point he wanted to avoid.
“Before Thanksgiving? Then I must have talked to her just before she died. She wasn’t sick then, she looked even better than usual. What happened?”
Mr Benz knew there was no help for it. You had to tell these people the truth. They didn’t want anything else.
“She killed herself, Mrs Sutton.”
Roberta heard her own reply, and it sounded senseless. “I was out of town. I just got back. I don’t believe it.”
“I’m sorry, Mrs Sutton. Our own social service investigated, and that’s the answer.”
“Thank you,” Roberta said. “It’s Mr Benz, isn’t it? Thank you, Mr Benz.”
Mr Benz bowed. Tycoons always had good manners. It paid.
Roberta said nothing when she herded Bessy and Beulah out to the car, and they asked nothing. They knew it wasn’t necessary. Mark would take one look at Roberta’s white face and she’d tell him everything.
Mark sat at his own table at the Lafayette and his own waiter hovered. The waiter knew Mark as a species of cop whose work permitted him to eat, dress, and kill time like a gentleman. At the moment, the gentleman was smiling at his own thoughts, which undoubtedly had something to do with one of the three ladies who were joining him for lunch. The waiter flicked his napkin and tried to guess which thought. He was wrong.
Mark was wondering what a Pernod would do to Bessy if he told her it was only liquorice water. But when they finally arrived and he saw Roberta, he decided to postpone the Pernod. Roberta looked as if she couldn’t cope. He embraced them all in Gallic fashion and compromised on vermouth cassis.
After the first drink, he said: “What are you concealing so imperfectly, Roberta?”
“Nothing,” she answered. “Can’t you forget your work for an hour?”
“Not when you look like this. What happened between the time you talked to me this morning and now?”
“The girl at the soap counter isn’t there,” Bessy said.
“Her name is Miller, and there’s something nasty about it,” Beulah added.
“Miller.” Mark closed his eyes for an instant. “Miller. Wait… Is that the girl who jumped from a window?”
There was silence before Roberta said, “I don’t know… Is that what she did?”
Mark said, “If her first name was Ruth, it is.”
Then she told him all she knew, ignoring the food he had ordered until Beulah put a fork in her hand and Bessy buttered pieces of bread. Ruth Miller wasn’t anybody, she told them; just a pale, quiet girl with a gentle sort of way. She’d been happy about moving to a girls’ club, or something like that, because there was plenty of hot water and what she called privileges. The privilege of doing your own laundry was one and food that you didn’t cook yourself was another. That was all… “Mark, did you say—window?”
Mark spoke softly and persuasively. He knew, with more reason than Mr Benz, that Roberta was not the kind of girl you hid things from. She was a weight-loser and a dreamer of bad dreams when she was kept in the dark. But there was more than one way to tell a story, all detectives knew that.
“I can be wrong,” he said. “I dimly remember reading something or other. I always read those things, you never can tell, you know, but this one looked straight enough. Poor health, maybe insomnia, and there was another contributing factor, let me think. Oh sure, they were having a party and some of the people there said she seemed depressed.”
“Depressed? I don’t believe it. It was probably the first party she’d had in years. All right about the poor health and insomnia, but I won’t go the rest of the way, I won’t believe the rest of it. My Miss Miller was preparing to live, not die.”
“I take a New York paper, but it wasn’t in it,” Bessy regretted.
Beulah turned with a soft snarl. “You take the Times. I told you to take the Daily News but no, you take the Times.”
“My father always took the Times.”
“And your father died. I’m not saying what did it.”
“Hush,” Mark said. “That’s loose talk. What are you doing this afternoon, Roberta?”
“A church, a bar, and a tomb… Mark, I don’t understand about Miss Miller.”
Bessy returned a half-eaten macaroon to the tray of sweets. “Shop girls,” she explained. “Turpitude. When I was young it was nurses.” She selected a meringue.
“I hope that explodes in your face,” Beulah said. “See? Serves you right.”
Mark added his napkin to the pool and waited for Bessy to emerge. “Skip the church and the tomb and stay with the bar,” he whispered to Roberta. “It’ll shorten your day in the end, if you know what I mean.”
“Okay. Dinner tomorrow night, Mark?”
“Got it on my calendar. How’s Nick?”
“Fine.”
“How’s the baby?”
“Fat… Listen Mark, couldn’t she have fallen? You know, overheated, opened the window—You hear about those things all the time.”
“Are you going to mope about this?”
“Certainly not! I simply like things straight, that’s all. And I don’t feel as if—I don’t believe this one is!”
“Neither do I,” Beulah said. “On general principles.”
“Listen, you,” Mark said to Beulah. “This is a big city. It has a police force. When somebody dies violently they take the place apart. And if they say suicide, that’s what it is. This isn’t Crestwood, this is New York.”
“New York,” Beulah repeated. “Isn’t that the place where they sent a man to Sing Sing because he looked like somebody else?”
There was no answer to that. His neck had been out and Beulah’s aim was legendary. He studied her disagreeable old face and was afraid he knew what she was planning. She and Bessy were in New York at his suggestion. He’d told the Suttons it would be a generous gesture, ending in happy hearts and peace on earth. It would, he decided, end in bloodshed, and twenty-four hours would tell whose.
“The country around here is beautiful,” he said earnestly. “We must go for long, long drives every day and come back home exhausted. Sleep, sleep, sleep.”
“That gives me an idea,” Beulah admitted. “I think Bessy will go to bed early tonight.” Her brooding eyes met his without recognition and told him plainly that Bessy was as good as tucked up and locked in. And they told him what she’d do it with. Nick Sutton’s port. He listened spellbound.
“I may even go to bed early mys
elf,” Beulah said gently. “Young people don’t want two old country ladies underfoot. After dinner we’ll have a nice little talk with dear Nick, and then we’ll leave you to your own devices… How high up is your apartment, Roberta?”
“Twenty-eighth floor.”
“That’s too high. I don’t wonder you’re nervous. I wouldn’t look out of the window tonight if I were you. I know I shan’t. I’m beginning to feel psychic again. Mark, how high did you say that poor girl’s—oh, excuse me. Social occasion.”
Mark asked for the check. He had to ask twice, because there were other words in his mouth begging for precedence. When he finally stood hatless and alone on the sidewalk, waving Roberta’s plum-coloured Rolls out of sight, he condemned himself for not staying with it. He owed that much to the Suttons. He was probably going to owe them more. Then, being a man, he went back to the Lafayette and condemned himself again, over a cognac. The waiter looked as if he understood.
Psychic, he repeated. So she was going to be like that, was she? Mincing up and down the sidewalks of New York, making loud guesses about the bulges in peoples’ pockets, seeing human hands behind the fall of every sparrow. Fall. Fall. Now wait, he told himself, wait. Where Beulah goes, crime doesn’t necessarily follow. Wait.
She said she wouldn’t look out of the window tonight. Why? An act. Trying to keep that suicide alive, because it was a nice change from wringing chickens’ necks in Crestwood. And she wanted to know how high that girl’s room was. Why again? Same reason as before. Making something out of nothing. That poor girl was one of the unfortunate ones. A girl who sold soap behind a department-store counter. A girl who—what had Roberta said? A girl who thought hot water was a privilege.
He was saying something Elizabethan to himself when the waiter brought the second cognac.
The waiter said, “Vraiment.”
4
In deference to their guests, who normally dined at six, the Suttons dined at seven. Their regular hour was eight. They preferred seven themselves because they were very young and always hungry, but Mrs Hawks, the housekeeper, said the Duke preferred eight. Seven made his evenings too long. The Duke might be dead, she said, and he certainly was, but she tried to keep his time.
“She’s wonderful,” Roberta said to Nick while they were dressing. Dressing was another thing the Duke preferred. “I bet he paid her a pound a month and borrowed it back. We pay a fortune and throw in a couple of coats, and she makes us eat sardines for dessert.”
“Get rid of her,” Nick said.
“I don’t want to. She gives me prestige. I went to the pastry shop because I felt like picking out my own tea-cake, and you should have seen the service I didn’t get until I gave my name. I’m the lady Mrs Hawks lives with.” She laughed. “Hawks. For weeks I called her Ox because she did. Then she wrote me a note and there it was—Hawks.”
“Note?”
“About soap. We were out of it.” Her voice trailed off.
“What,” asked Nick, “is there about no soap that makes you look like that?”
“Nothing. Come on. The old girls are waiting.”
Cocktails preceded dinner, and coffee and brandy were scheduled to follow, but when they left the table and went back to the library Beulah murmured, “Nothing more.”
“What!” Nick said.
“We’re exhausted. It’s been a long day and we’ve been on the go every minute. Poor Bessy is falling asleep standing up.” This was spoken in a loud, compelling voice. Bessy got to her feet at once and swayed with closed eyes.
“Bed,” Beulah went on, “for both of us. At home we never stay up after eight.” A bald lie, but the Suttons didn’t know it. Sometimes they sat up all night, quarrelling. She waited for Bessy’s protest, and when none came she was momentarily touched. I’ll do something nice for her, she promised herself. But not tonight, tomorrow. “Come along, dear,” she said. “Say pleasant dreams to Nick and Roberta.”
Roberta walked with them to their room, saw them started on the way to bed, and left them. When she returned to the library, her coffee was cold but she drank it. Nick limped over to her side and sat down.
“You’re deep in something,” he said. “You hate cold coffee. Did those two wear you out?”
“No. They’re nice.”
“Is the thin one crazier than the fat one? I can’t see any difference but there ought to be one.”
“The Duke wouldn’t talk like that… Nick, why don’t we go out? I feel like going somewhere. They won’t care, they won’t even know. And don’t tell me you had a hard day at the office, you haven’t got an office.”
“Go where?”
“Some noisy place. You know, junky. Some place we’d get the devil for going to if we weren’t married.”
“But won’t the Duke’s lady friend—”
“She won’t know either. She’s going to the cinema with a daughter of a hundred earls. Come on, what are we all dressed up for?”
The attendant behind the desk at the library said, “Somebody’s got those numbers. Do you want to wait?”
Mark said, “Yes.” He took a chair at one of the long tables and relaxed. It was a pleasant though fusty place, smelling of old, printed pages and the fresh gardenia on a girl’s coat. He wasn’t surprised when his thoughts took a little jaunt into the past, even when they moved in a rhythm that was almost like waltz time.
He looked about him at the old, nodding heads and the young, undaunted ones. It was the young ones that made him feel the way he did. They made him remember that he hadn’t been inside a public library for fifteen years. The girl he’d been in love with then had been trying to prove that Joan of Arc wasn’t burned at the stake. He’d helped her. They’d proved it, too, he remembered with awe. At least she got some sort of pat on the back from Smith College. He wondered what she was doing now. Probably a literary agent.
He watched the new crop doing the same thing, bending over faded pages, making notes in little books, slipping other notes across the table with unmistakable looks. He knew all about those looks, too, and that made him feel good. He thought, for every life too unhappy to live, there’s a new one being born in somebody’s eyes. That brought him back to the present with a jolt, and his mind obediently fell into the old lock step. He went over to the desk.
“Here you are,” the attendant said. “Just turned in.”
He carried his newspapers back to the table and found what he wanted.
Late last night the body of a young woman in fancy dress was discovered in the courtyard adjoining the premises of 415 West Street. The pedestrian who made the discovery notified the police. The deceased was later identified as Ruth Miller, resident of a club adjacent to the courtyard. According to the police, she jumped from a window on the seventh floor. She was known to have been in poor health.
It told him exactly nothing. He opened a second paper.
Ruth Miller, age 29, was instantly killed last night when she fell from a seventh-floor window in a midtown hotel. Police list the death as suicide.
Overwritten, garrulous, saccharine. Mark suppressed a snort. No doctor? No background? No native of such-and-such, daughter of so-and-so? He opened a third paper. Nothing. A fourth. It looked better.
The body of Ruth Miller, a resident of Hope House, was discovered in the hotel courtyard shortly after midnight last night by a woman walking her dog. The position and condition of the body indicated that Miss Miller had jumped to her death earlier in the evening when there was still considerable rain. According to Dr M L Kloppel, of 310 West Street, and Dr Paul Myers, Medical Examiner, Miss Miller had been dead approximately three hours. She had been in ill health for some time and had attended a social function in the hotel against the advice of her friends. When found, Miss Miller was still wearing the rag-doll costume in which she had danced a few hours before. The verdict was suicide.
Well, well, he marvelled, somebody slipped, somebody let a few facts in by mistake. Hope House. Dr Kloppel, whose initials were M L.
When Dr Kloppel was born his father had tiptoed into his mother’s bedroom and said, Mama, we will call him Martin Luther… When found, Miss Miller was still wearing the rag-doll costume in which she had danced a few hours before. Rag doll. Limp, flat, lying in the rain.
He copied names and addresses, returned the papers, and left the building. It was only nine-thirty; the night was cold and clear and made for walking. He stood on the curbstone and examined the stars. Couples moved along the sidewalk, arm in arm. Other couples came down the library steps, heads together, whispering. I should have married that girl, he thought. Then I’d be sitting home with a couple of dog books, proving that Hector never was a pup. Home.
Home to Ruth Miller was Hope House. Hope. “All hope abandon, ye who enter here.” Dante. Hell. Canto three, line nine… She’d wanted to live there, she’d been happy about it, she’d told Roberta so. Then a day or two later she’d danced in a rag-doll costume and jumped from a window.
He walked east, turned abruptly, and walked west. 415 West Street. Run-down neighbourhood but respectable; rooming houses and railroad flats; third generation Germans, second generation Irish, first generation Greeks.
Hope House was in the middle of the block, an eight-story brick building with chintz curtains at the ground floor windows and Venetian blinds above. The drawn blinds, discreetly barred with light, told him nothing except that the occupants of the front rooms could read the signs in the windows across the street. Gentlemen Only. The wide, glass door leading in from the street showed a small lobby, a desk, and a woman with grey hair who was sewing. He didn’t go in. He didn’t want to. There was, he decided, no point. He was there only because he didn’t feel like going home.
At one end of the building a wooden gate opened into a courtyard. The gate was ajar. He touched it gently, and it swung inward. Well, he thought, why not? No harm done.
Death of a Doll Page 7