She saw Mark before she finished her little speech and grinned broadly. “There now,” she said, “I might have known you’d be Johnny-on-the-spot. Miss Handy was wondering where you’d gone to. That girl! Locked herself in and won’t talk to nobody. Know how she got this note to me? Hollered out the window to Macy’s truck. Taking precautions, she says. Precautions! Miss Mainwaring’s going to have to sleep on somebody’s floor tonight unless you can talk Miss Handy into putting the furniture back where it belongs so we can get the door open. Miss Handy says she’ll scream the place down if anybody so much as knocks. Well, you can read it for yourself.” She had clearly done the same.
It was a short note, not as incoherent as first glance suggested.
Dr Kloppel,
I kept the sleeping pills you gave me and everybody the other night. I didn’t take mine and Mainwaring didn’t take hers and we put them in the bureau drawer. And Liz Hull and Kate Warriner didn’t take theirs either, so Mainwaring traded two piqué dickies for theirs because she said it was dangerous for people to take them and she was collecting all she could find to save people from danger. This noon I took a nap, I didn’t go to work because I didn’t sleep all night, and when I woke up and went to get a handkerchief the pills were gone. Mine and Mainwaring’s and Liz’s and Kate’s and God knows how many more. I had the door locked, but there’s such things as passkeys if you know where to look, and everybody does. So is that a fatal dose? I mean that’s pills for four people at least, and if one person got them all in say a cup of coffee would it be fatal and kill? Could you taste it? Please reply at once. This is important.
Minnie May Handy.
PS Still alive and going to stay that way.
They gave the note to Foy.
“Who takes care of this girl’s food?” Dr Kloppel asked Agnes.
“Anybody, sir.” Agnes began to look worried. “Anybody that wants to be obliging can get a tray from the dining room and take it up.”
“That won’t do. We’ll have to think of something else. I don’t like this; I never had a thing like this happen before. Saving pills—I don’t like it at all!”
“Agnes,” Mark said, “can’t you fix a tray yourself without letting the whole world know what you’re doing?”
“I can!”
“Then that’s the answer. Boiled eggs, crackers, fruit. Shell on the eggs, skin on the fruit, crackers in a sealed package. Got that?”
“I have indeed!”
“And tell Miss Handy you talked to me. Tell her to keep on with the furniture routine and don’t worry about Miss Mainwaring. And you might see that Miss Handy has a pitcher of water that you draw from the tap yourself. All right?”
No spoken reply was needed. Agnes left the room with a backward look and forward stance that said she was about to cross the ice in advance of bloodhounds and single-fingered plug a broken dike.
“What would four doses do?” Foy asked.
“In her case, I don’t know.” Dr Kloppel squirmed. “At best, it could be pretty bad. At worst—those women! How do we know it’s only four? There could be dozens, collected and swapped for a—what’s a dickey?”
“False front,” Mark supplied. “You know, if anything happens it’s squarely on my head. I made that girl the goat because she was tailored for it. I wanted to draw fire. Now I don’t know what I’ve drawn. I’m going to spend the night over there. That stuff is the same as poison.”
Dr Kloppel groaned and raised haggard eyes. “Poison! Heaven help me. They’ve got cyanide over there. Brady wanted it a couple of months ago, and I got it for her!”
Mark said, “What!”
“Cyanide.” Dr Kloppel shrunk in his chair. “A straightforward request and she signed for it. There could be some left. I can’t remember what she told me, but she signed for it. It was all out in the open, nothing furtive, nothing suspicious… Please don’t look at me like that.”
Foy snarled. “All out in the open. Up on a shelf with the first-aid kit. Standing next to the aspirin and the court plaster, labelled and all!”
“I don’t know, I don’t know, but it was all straightforward. She hasn’t mentioned it since—since this business started. And she’s a smart, intelligent woman; if there was any left, she’d throw it away or tell me about it. She’s intelligent, she wouldn’t keep it around.”
Mark took pity. “Calm down, even if it’s still there it won’t be used. It wasn’t used on Ruth, and you know why. It needs a special setup, the victim has to be willing or unsuspicious, and nobody in that house is either. Not now. And it’s too dangerous, it works too quick, no time for a getaway. No, I don’t think it’ll be used. If it’s been there all this time and—”
The phone rang.
Chicago had canvassed the first apartment house, a small one in a lower-middle-class neighbourhood. No Lawfords or Crawfords. No Millers. Some of the tenants were new, and the janitor had lost track of those who had moved. The latter were the kind who slipped away in the night, leaving broken bedsprings behind them. A second squad was working on the other houses and would report shortly. More exchanges had been cleared. The car sent out to the suburbs hadn’t phoned in. It was a long way out, in a snooty section, and the boys were probably fighting off butlers.
After that the calls came five minutes apart. Lawfords and Crawfords were cropping up in office buildings, markets, poolrooms and factories. Dr Kloppel’s bookcase began to look like Mother Hubbard’s cupboard. Then, at a quarter of six, the car that went to the suburbs paid off.
The suburban house belonged to Norman Crawford, president of Bassett and Wright, one of Chicago’s largest department stores. Crawford wasn’t home, but they knew where he was and were getting to him fast. It would be a matter of minutes, they were keeping an open wire.
Foy sat with the receiver to his ear.
“At times like this,” Mark said softly, “I wouldn’t take a million for my job. Sometimes I get as sick as a dog, and I’ll be a lot sicker than that before this night is over, but I wouldn’t take a million. Ruth Miller is gone. Now we’re working for a window-dresser’s boy who got fired to save somebody’s face… Not two million.”
Foy said, “Hello. All set here, get on with it.”
The other two crowded him. They heard respect creep into his voice and saw it straighten his shoulders. He sat as if he were standing at attention.
Chicago talked, first in a hearty growl, then in a steady, flowing stream. Foy said little beyond, “Yes, sir, you have it correct, sir,” but he clung to the phone as Ruth Miller must have done. He had nothing to fear, nothing to hide from, but his mobile Irish face told the watchers that Ruth was living and dying again in Norman Crawford’s story. The story took seven minutes to tell, and Foy interrupted only twice, toward the end. He said, “I’ve got everything but the name, sir,” and after that he said, “I’ll be damned.”
The receiver rattled into place on the hook.
Dr Kloppel went back to his shabby chair and listened. He knew they had to talk as they did, this was their job; but he had seen her lying in the rain, had lifted her broken body. He picked up the mug marked PAPA. It was empty, but he made no effort to refill it. He held it to his breast with both hands as if it had the power to strain the evil that was entering his heart. If he held the mug in his hands they could not turn into fists.
11
Mark knew she was Clara because her sweater was clearly a hand-me-down, mended with too bright thread and fitting too well in the wrong places. She was eating bread pudding at one end of a long wooden table, and two other women were chopping soup vegetables at the other end. Just as clearly, these were the neighbourhood women who worked in the kitchen by the day and returned to their homes at night. One of them was already wearing her hat, eloquently, and both were watching the clock. It was exactly seven.
The chef sat by the gas stove, dividing his attention between a pot of soup stock and a newspaper. The dinner rush had abated, the time was right for talk.
; They hadn’t noticed his entrance, and when he spoke to them, standing in the door that opened on the courtyard, they turned astonished faces.
“I’m East,” he explained. “Mark East. I’ve been wanting to talk to you people, but this is the first chance I’ve had.”
The woman who was wearing a hat silently laid down her chopping knife and made a bolt for the door, nearly knocking him down. He said, “Just a minute, please. Who are you?”
She dragged a worn coat from a wooden peg in the wall beside the door. “I’ve got a baby at home,” she shrilled. “I’ve got no time for talking. I’m late, I got a baby at home, and I’m going there.”
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Trimble, Mary Trimble, I don’t know nothing, you can ask the others, I got to get home.”
He let her go, holding the court door open and watching her run through the snow, pulling on the coat as she ran. The other woman looked undecided. “You may go, too,” he said. “It’s Clara I want to see, Clara and—Alexander, isn’t it?”
The chef nodded. “Go,” he said to the woman. “Come early in the morning to finish.” He gave Mark the kind of shrug that is reserved for equals. “Rabbits… You want to examine my hand?”
“Later,” Mark said. He turned to Clara.
Clara ate steadily, her mild eyes unclouded and undisturbed. If she has a mind, he thought, it doesn’t function in the presence of food. He moved the bowl of pudding out of reach and laughed. “One thing at a time, Clara.” Alexander laughed, too, and joined them at the table. Clara smiled helplessly.
“Is better you examine my hand now,” Alexander said. “Later is no good.” There was a red scar across his wrist, and he displayed it with loud modesty and a running comment on the capacity of Poles for bleeding and living. Mark encouraged him, tossing in names like Sklodowska, Kosciusko, and Pulaski. Alexander returned the compliment by pouring coffee, not the Hope House stock but his own special reserve. It was worth more than the time it consumed.
“Who looked after you that night?” Mark asked.
“Not her,” Alexander said of the listening Clara. “She run out on me. No nationality, all mixed up, little of this, little of that, all bad. But the ladies of the House were okay, and what you just saw, the day workers, not so bad. The day workers got children of their own, and a man is like a little child when he is hurt, isn’t it so? Miss Brady, no children, was very tender. Like a mother. Miss Plummer, no children, no wits, arrives when the worst is over, but is all kindness. Many come and go. I am always a novelty, everywhere I work I am always a novelty.”
“What did they fix you up with?”
“A tight dressing. Gauze and iodine. No doctor, no stitches, I mend like a dream. It was all to the good, I have too much blood, too hot, it is okay to lose some.” He winked.
Mark responded in kind. “When did this dressing arrive, and who put it on? Can you remember?”
“Me? Remember? I remember kindness, soft hands of ladies, and screaming.” He glared at Clara.
Clara had been listening with a child’s intentness. Now she interrupted happily. “I remember,” she said. “But he don’t, he can’t. He kept his eyes shut, he was fit to be sick to his stomach when he saw his blood. On top of all that prune brandy. Mrs Fister put the bandage on. Miss Plummer brought it down, we had to wait some time for it, and he drank his prune brandy with his eyes shut. Mrs Fister is the same as a district nurse, she knows what to do. Around ten o’clock it was.”
When he asked her how she could be sure of the time, it was the same old story built around the unmasking. She had been in and out of the kitchen all evening, taking her turn at guarding the punch, making sandwiches, washing the little glass cups. She had carried up a tray of clean cups a few minutes before the unmasking began. And a few minutes before that the bandage had arrived. She and Mollie and Pauline had taken turns at the kitchen work so they’d all have a chance to watch the party. She and Mollie and Pauline had seen some of everything that went on because they had taken turns. That’s how she knew. Ten o’clock, as near as anybody could tell.
When he asked where Mollie and Pauline were, she said they were waiting on table in the dining room, with Agnes. Some of the young ladies ate later than others.
No, she said, the elevator didn’t run down to the basement. It was stairs, stairs to the serving pantry where the dumb-waiter and steam tables were.
Did she know Miss Miller? Well, no, she didn’t. Her mild eyes regretted that. But Agnes had just reminded her, not an hour ago, that Miss Miller was supposed to be the one who did that crazy dance with Miss Handy. Miss Handy had done the crazy dance lots of times, but Agnes said Miss Miller’s was the craziest.
Had she seen that dance, the craziest one? Had she! She’d split her sides. It was better than movies. She’d left the punch bowl and the clean little cups that were always getting used up, and walked to the front of the lobby. Four or five times she’d done that, to watch the young ladies. Singing as well as dancing, and playing that game where you march around chairs to music and fight over the last one. Something going on every minute, but Miss Handy put on the best show, Miss Handy and that poor Miss Miller. She’d clean forgotten it wasn’t her place to be in the front of the lobby, and she’d been spoken to sharply on account of it. But it was worth it. She sighed happily in recollection. “All that fun, all that laughing, why anybody would want to die! I’ll never understand if I live to be a hundred.”
“Who spoke to you sharply?” he asked.
“Who would you expect? Heads. Near-Heads. Miss Brady, Mrs Fister. Came to me afterwards and said my place was with the bowl.” Clara sighed again, this time not happily. It was, she said, a small, mean thing to do. Especially Mrs Fister. Considering how she herself was one of the oldest workers in the place, two days older than Mrs F, and had always done what she was asked, even to getting up in the middle of the night to help with a sick girl. And pleasure was something everybody was entitled to, no matter how old or what you did for a living. She’d complained to Miss Plummer about it; well, maybe not complain exactly, but she had mentioned that her feelings were hurt. And Miss Plummer had mentioned it to Miss Small, she must have, because the next day Miss Small apologised for Mrs Fister and Miss Brady and told her to overlook the whole thing. And Miss Small had given her a little brooch. “I cried like a baby,” Clara confessed. “I never had a brooch before. I was due for a raise, and I thought I’d hurt my chances, so when I got the little brooch I cried.”
“Did you get the raise?” Alexander asked.
“No,” Clara admitted.
“Hah!” Alexander said.
Mark led her back, step by step, over the ground she had sketchily covered. Her four or five deflections from the bowl had taken her into disputed area, both in time and place. He gave her no theories of his own to play with and mangle, no names to tempt or confuse, no hours to recall. He guided her skilfully through the accident in the kitchen, through her turns at guarding the punch; he charted her little excursions to the front of the lobby and the doors of the lounge, where the fun was. When her mind had been brought to focus, she recaptured the night as it had literally and inexorably moved to its end.
She made the elevator hum from floor to floor, he could hear the doors clang. She gave the simulated pearls to Miss Mainwaring, and even reproduced Miss Brady’s presentation speech. She put people where they were, not where they claimed to be, and she did it like the legendary child who told the world the king was wearing no clothes.
Clara didn’t know how or why Ruth Miller had been killed, but she told him who had done it. He knew that already, but he needed Clara’s soft say-so. If the State came up against a tough defines lawyer, Clara was the girl to make him sweat.
During the leisurely recital, which had the open impact of a game of “Authors,” Alexander moved from table to dumb-waiter, drinking his superior coffee and removing stacked dishes. He complained softly throughout and he might have been talking to himself.
When Mark leaned back in his chair and lit a cigarette, Alexander reached out for attention.
“Cop in the courtyard,” he said briskly.
Clara screamed at once.
“That’s the Inspector,” Mark said. “He’s waiting for me.” He got up. “Thanks for everything, and you might tell Agnes I was here. And ask her to pass the word along to Miss Handy.” He remembered the bread pudding when he had one foot in the courtyard, and he turned back and restored it to its former position.
He and Foy leaned against the fence and looked up at the Hope House walls. They were alone. It was too early for the white cat.
“So that’s the way it was,” Foy said. “Well, we figured it about right… That her window up there?”
“Sure… You’re going to love Clara on the witness stand. No matter what she says or does or wears, she’s going to be every juror’s Aunt Hattie, the one who made the cookies. Clara, like the Aga Khan, is worth her considerable weight in gold.”
“Time to talk about the witness stand when you’ve got somebody to prosecute! What are we waiting for?”
“What have you done?”
“Bessemer’s back on the seventh floor. In a little while Moran takes over the lobby, he may be there now. I told him to walk in, sit down, and say nothing. Sobeloff takes over here, as soon as we leave. He’s outside the gate, waiting and watching the front door. One man to each of the floors and the roof.” Foy looked up again. “I hate that roof! She could get up there by way of the fire escape, even with the snow. With the bathroom lights out, Sobeloff could miss her. And she knows where the switch is. If she tried that, and failed—” He swore bitterly. “I don’t want another body with its face smashed in! I want a living, breathing body with a face that I can talk to. I want to look it in the eye and hear it talk back… Can they get her off on insanity?”
Death of a Doll Page 26