Death of a Doll

by Hilda Lawrence

  “You’ve said it all,” he agreed. “Maybe I’d better see Blackman.”

  “Don’t be childish, he won’t know what you’re talking about. He doesn’t know Ruth Miller existed.”

  “Do you?”

  “Look.” Miss Libby flipped the pages of a folder. “I have the dope right here. I don’t know what you’re looking for, but if it’s trouble you won’t find it. Here’s the story, plain facts and no colour. She was a good saleswoman, no more than that. Not executive material, not even hard enough for head of stock, which isn’t as big a job as it sounds. She bought almost nothing in the store, shoes and stockings, that’s all. She had no store pals, was never late or absent, and came to the dispensary only once.”

  “Why did she come then?”

  Miss Libby read silently. “Damn,” she said under her breath. “But that happens all the time.”

  “Did you say something, Miss Libby?” He liked the way she blushed when she was caught.

  “She came because she was hysterical. A customer accused her of giving wrong change and took the place. That time the customer was wrong, and we proved it on the spot, but the girl went to pieces. You can’t make anything out of that, it happens all the time. Almost always with the Saturday afternoon crowd. That’s when you get the office workers, very superior because they have a half holiday. They go grande dame and devil the clerks, and along about five o’clock some girl cracks up.”

  “I see. This fine pretty world… Where did Miss Miller come from?”

  “Come from?” Miss Libby’s eyes travelled down a page, and the baby skin coloured again.

  “Sure,” Mark pressed. “The job before this one, references—you know what I mean.”

  “Now Mr East, you needn’t—”

  “Come, come, Miss Libby. Where did she work before she came here? Even a dish-washer has references.”

  Miss Libby ground her nice white teeth. “No record,” she moaned. “You’ve got me. But I can explain! You know what last year was like. Normally sane workers going crazy, yelling for higher wages, quitting jobs, cashing those compulsory bonds, acting like customers themselves, nobody to wait on anybody. We took what we could get. Miller was self-effacing and looked as if she needed a job. We took her on. It says here ‘never before employed.’ I remember now that I didn’t believe it after her first week’s record came up. She knew how to sell, and she didn’t make mistakes. So—”

  “So?”

  “So maybe you’ve got something after all,” Miss Libby said grudgingly.

  “Don’t look like that. I’m not going to sue.” He leaned across Miss Libby’s immaculate desk. “So she lied about never having worked before, she didn’t make friends, and she went to pieces when a Saturday afternoon lady accused her of short changing… Girls like you major in psychology or something, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” Miss Libby admitted. “And I’m supposed to be good.”

  “Well, be good now. What do you make of all this?”

  “Trouble in the past. Maybe a brush with the law. On the verge of being found out and couldn’t face it. Hell, Mr East—sorry, excuse it, but I feel awful. But what can we do? It’s too late.”

  “Maybe it isn’t. Have you got the Smith girls handy?”

  “They’re outside now, trying not to look terrified. Come in,” she called.

  Moke and Poke filed in and lined themselves against the wall.

  “You’re not going to be shot,” Miss Libby said kindly. “This is Mr East. Did Benz tell you what he’s here for?”

  “Yes’m,” Moke said.

  “Then answer his questions, that’s all.” She tossed the next move to Mark with open relief and relaxed on the end of her spine.

  “This is going to be easy,” Mark said. “I hope you don’t mind if I call you Moke and Poke. Now, did you girls know Ruth Miller very well?”

  They answered simultaneously, affirmatively and negatively, and burst into tears.

  “I know how you feel,” he said. “That’s the way Mrs Sutton feels too. Do you know Mrs Sutton?”

  Moke recovered first. “We’ve seen her. She’s cute. We think she’s lovely to take an interest, but we don’t know what for.”

  “I’ll tell her you said that, and I’ll tell you why she takes an interest. She’s afraid Ruth was in some sort of trouble, and it upsets her to think she wasn’t here to help. So even though Ruth is dead, she wants to straighten things out if she can. You might call it a sort of memorial, see?”

  “That’s lovely,” Moke said.

  “Sure. And between us, we’re going to help. All you have to do is answer my questions. Now. Hope House is full of girls. I wonder if there’s any one girl you don’t like?”

  “We don’t like nobody,” Moke said. “It don’t pay.”

  “I see… Who is Jewel Schwab?”

  “Annie Schwab, but she don’t care for Annie. She runs the elevator.”

  “Nice girl?”

  “Kind of grumpy, wouldn’t you say, Poke?”

  “Inhibited. She can’t get a fellow.”

  “That’s fine, that’s the stuff. Now, I want to see Jewel tonight, but I understand a Miss Brady looks over all callers. Right?”

  “She tries to. So does Miss Small. Who told you that?”

  “A tall girl with spots on her face.”

  “Kitty Brice. She’s the telephone operator and helps at the desk.” The corners of Moke’s mouth said she didn’t care for Kitty.

  “And who’s Miss Small?”

  “Miss Brady’s assistant. Brady’s the Head, Small’s the second Head. They’re educated, you could talk to them, Mr East. The rest of us got orders nobody was to talk, but they’d talk to you. You tell them about Mrs Sutton and they’ll understand. You see, it’s like this. There’s a lot of swells behind Hope House, and Miss Brady and Miss Small have got to keep scandal out or it’s bad for their reputation as Heads.”

  Mark nodded. “They’re right. Scandal would be very bad. But suicide doesn’t necessarily mean disgrace. It could mean something sad, like heartbreak. Do you suppose that was Ruth’s trouble?”

  “No, sir!” Moke was positive. “Maybe we didn’t know her so very well, but we know it wasn’t anything like that. You notice a thing like that. It shows… But I’ve been thinking about something. When she moved to the House she sort of changed. She moved on the Saturday and on the Monday she died. But I don’t know—”

  “Sure you know, Moke. Go on.”

  “Well, I don’t think she ate all the meals, and that’s funny because the meals are good. She said it was because she was sick, but she looked like she was in a trance or something. That was on the Sunday.”

  “Never looked like that in the store?”

  “No, sir… I wish we’d paid her more attention now.” Moke’s eyes filled again, but Mark went on as if he didn’t see.

  “Tell me about the Sunday. You, the other one, Poke. It’s your turn now.”

  Poke watched his face while she talked, looking for a sign that said they were making up for that regretted lack of attention. She found it.

  “We saw her on Sunday morning,” Poke said. “We didn’t see her on Saturday because we had a date. We had her to our table for breakfast, but she wouldn’t eat. And Sunday was the tea day. The big tea, with bought refreshments, and sewing for the party.” Poke covered the tea from start to finish; Mrs Marshall-Gill, the costumes and the masks that made everybody look the same, the mole, and the simulated pearls, pink. And Ruth in a corner by herself.

  Moke concurred soberly, bobbing her head. “Yeah, yeah, that’s right. That’s the way it was. And then she spilled tea on her new suit she’d saved up for.” A sudden look of surprise crossed her face. “That’s funny. The suit. That’s funny.”

  “Funny?” Mark turned from Moke to Poke to Miss Libby. They were frowning at each other with complete understanding. “Funny?” he repeated.

  “Yeah,” Moke said. “When you save up for a new suit and get it, you d
on’t jump out of a window.”

  He addressed himself to Miss Libby. “That is the kind of reasoning that drives a man crazy and cracks a case… Now what about the party? Did Ruth look as if she were having a good time?”

  They couldn’t say. They’d seen her once or twice, because of the mole, but they hadn’t talked to her much. Everybody was dancing and carrying on and hanging around the punch bowl. To see if Minnie May would slip in gin. But Minnie May didn’t have a chance. Mrs Fister never left the bowl but once and that was when the chef hurt his hand. And the maids ganged up while she was gone. The guessing started at ten o’clock and then they took off the masks. And the pink pearls were won by Dot Mainwaring, who was very religious and not very clean.

  “Ten o’clock,” Mark repeated. “According to Dr Kloppel, Ruth had been dead an hour then.” He made his voice as gentle as possible. “Didn’t you wonder where she was? Didn’t you miss her at all?”

  “We knew she wasn’t there,” Moke said thickly. “But we thought she’d gone to bed. We knew she got permission from Mr Benz to go to the doctor on account of her eyes, so we thought she had a headache. That’s what we thought. The party was almost over and we were going up to her room to see if we could get her something when that dog—”

  Miss Libby spoke for the first time. “Mr East! Come to the point if you have one,” she said sharply.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Sorry, and I mean it. But I’ve got to know about those eyes.”

  “We don’t mind,” Moke said. “We understand you got to know. It was about new glasses. She was talking about getting some. The others broke. So she got off early and went to the doctor’s.”

  “Do you know his name?”

  “No, sir.”

  “You’re a hard man,” Miss Libby insinuated. “What’s the matter with your own eyes?”

  He looked at Moke and Poke carefully. They still stood straight against the wall, but their cheeks were too white around the edges of the rouge they had salvaged from the last stockroom disaster. It was time to stop.

  “Run along,” he said, “and thanks.” It sounded thin, but what else could he say to girls like Moke and Poke. “I may drop in at your place tonight,” he added, “but don’t tell anybody.”

  That wasn’t enough and he knew it. He’d taken too much and given nothing in return, nothing that could be carried away and later used for comfort. “You mustn’t worry about this,” he said, “or think too much about it. Very often things happen because they’re meant to. I know that sounds cruel and it bothers me too, but I usually find a good reason in the end. When and if I find the reason for this, I’ll explain it to you, and you’ll see how it had to happen the way it did.”

  They were entirely satisfied.

  “Applause,” Miss Libby said when they left. “But you do know your business. When and if you find a reason for this, will you explain it to me, too?”

  “You’ll be seeing me,” he promised.

  He went back to his office and worked on a profitable case involving a young man whose family didn’t want him to marry the daughter of a longshoreman. He’d met the daughter and her father and the young man and his family, and thought they all deserved what they would inevitably get.

  He called the longshoreman’s daughter on the phone, told her to go ahead with the wedding and advised a prenuptial settlement. Then he called the young man’s family and suggested that, in the end, a husky wife would be cheaper than the present succession of trained nurses and lawsuits. After that he wanted to bathe in an icy mountain stream, so he took Bessy and Beulah to the St Regis for cocktails.

  It was a wise and fruitful move. Bessy sketched the women’s hats on the backs of all the envelopes he had in his pocket, using a pencil borrowed from the head barman. She borrowed it herself, without warning, and came back to the table with a single glass of cherry brandy paid for out of a child’s clasp purse. The St Regis customers loved her.

  “She’ll do it every time,” Beulah sneered. “It’s a trick to shame another round out of whoever she’s with. I hope nobody in this place knows you.”

  “I hope somebody does,” he said. “There’s something distinguished about Bessy.”

  “There certainly is. Wait till her eyes turn pink. That’s when we leave, in a hurry. Now, what do you know that I don’t?”

  He told her, but not until he’d ordered the round. There was something distinguished about Beulah, too.

  “Find the eye doctor,” she said. “Maybe he wasn’t an eye doctor, maybe he was something else altogether. Find him.”

  “Do you mind telling me how?”

  “You live here, I don’t. If you don’t know the medical men in your own town, then you’re not living right. You can put an ad in the paper, can’t you?”

  “Yes, I could.” He thought it over. “Yes, that might turn something up.”

  “Of course it will. You’re making too much of that shyness and the business of keeping to herself. How do you know she wasn’t incurable, maybe a leper? How do you know she wasn’t as blind as a bat, too? If she went to see a doctor just before the party, and he told her—”

  “I’m almost glad you’re here,” he admitted, “although there have been moments… I’ll take care of it tonight.”

  Bessy entered the conversation with a squeal. “Look, Beulah! That fur hat with the rose is exactly like the one I sent away for the day Papa died and I knew I had the money. And I know where I can lay my hands on it this minute.” She dampened the barman’s pencil in cherry brandy. “I heard what you two were saying. If you put an ad in the paper, the doctor won’t answer it.”

  “Why?” Beulah demanded, adding bitterly, “Dear.”

  “Because he gave her the wrong medicine and knew it as soon as he checked his poison cupboard. So he knows it’s the same as m-u-r-d-e-r. Always spell because you never know who’s listening.”

  “Time,” Beulah warned, shrugging into her coat. “Practically red.”

  Mark returned the pencil himself and put his guests into a cab. He directed the driver in clear tones. “This address and no other,” he said firmly, “no matter what you’re offered.” Then he returned to the hotel and telephoned an ad for insertion in a morning Personal Column. It read: “The doctor who was recently consulted by Miss Ruth Miller is asked to communicate with the undersigned.” He added his initials and home address.

  It would have an ugly and suggestive look in type, wedged in between the deserted beds and boards and refusals to pay the little woman’s bills, and it would be lingered over by speculative eyes. It would also, he feared, put joy in the hearts of the cranks.

  He began to think of himself as henpecked, and ordered another drink. He counted the hens: Roberta, Bessy, and Beulah, the cool Miss Libby who might not be that at all, Moke and Poke, La Cashman, and a lady who was waiting for him in the immediate future, calling herself Jewel Schwab… He knew what Roberta was afraid of, and several times he had been afraid himself, but tonight the lights and voices around him did not spell m-u-r-d-e-r. He thought of the dinner he could have with a clear conscience, and of the play that could follow, if he were in the canary-breeding business.

  So he did what he knew he must do; he turned his back on the lights and warmth and struck out for Hope House. As he walked he wondered if the longshoreman’s daughter had gone straight to Hattie Carnegie’s. Naturally. And then to Elizabeth Arden’s. And then, and only then, to a good lawyer. She was a normal, grasping woman, and he understood her down to the ground. He told himself he liked that kind. He didn’t like shy department-store clerks who were self-effacing to the point of rubbing themselves out.

  When he reached Hope House, the lobby was filled with girls and women of all ages, streaming in and out of the dining room and lining up at the elevator. He saw the impression he made and began to feel better. The stream swerved and the mailboxes replaced the elevator as a vantage ground. He went up to the desk and spoke to the woman in charge. She was one of the two he had seen g
etting into the cab and laughing.

  “Miss Brady?” she repeated. She was plainly surprised. “Why, yes, I believe she’s in. May I have your name?”

  “Mark East. Tell her, please, that I’m investigating Ruth Miller’s death.” He heard the rustle of sighs all around him. The woman at the desk, obviously Miss Small, looked as if she didn’t believe him.

  “Investigating?”

  “Yes. At the request of one of Miss Miller’s friends. It’s a formality, that’s all, and quite usual. People always want to reassure themselves when a thing like this happens.”

  “But I didn’t know—” She was perplexed and annoyed. “I’m Angeline Small, Miss Brady’s assistant. Won’t I do as well? I don’t want to trouble Miss Brady unless it’s absolutely necessary. She hasn’t fully recovered from the shock.”

  She was recovered yesterday, he told himself, if she is your dark-haired friend. Not only recovered, but laughing out loud.

  “I understand your solicitude, Miss Small, but for the record I’d better see Miss Brady. I won’t detain her.”

  Miss Small hesitated again. “You say you represent a friend of Ruth’s? She gave us the impression that she had no friends, had no one at all. That’s why Miss Brady was eager to take her in.”

  “Her friend,” Mark said easily, “is Mrs Nicholas Sutton. I suppose Miss Miller thought that claiming Mrs Sutton, or talking about her, might sound like putting on the dog.” He waited, looking over Miss Small’s head to the girl behind the switchboard. Kitty Brice. “Hello,” he said. “I couldn’t stay away.”

  Miss Small left the desk and crossed to the lounge, asking him to follow. “Will you wait in here, please? Miss Brady will see you.”

  The lounge was empty and likely to remain so, for Miss Small firmly closed the door when she left him. He examined the good, simple furniture; the careful, correct prints; the bright, inexpensive rug. Very nice, he decided; a little too neat and institutional but probably heaven to the boarders… I’ve got that woman’s back up and I don’t blame her. According to Kloppel, she’s due to spend the night handing out aromatic spirits of ammonia. Brady won’t like me, either. I’ll go easy. He sniffed the air. No miasmas, nothing but burning logs.