The hours between had brought few changes to the lobby. The desk was still littered with berries and leaves and scraps of tinsel ribbon. But the gift packages were gone, and the evergreen garland, trimmed with holly, now framed the elevator door.
He went into the lounge. Embers of fire, smell of spruce, music on the open piano. The tree reached to the ceiling.
He walked up the stairs while Moran talked on.
Miss Brady didn’t answer his knock. He gave her a minute before he opened the door and went in. She was clearing out her desk, tearing sheets of paper and dropping the fragments to the floor. He took a nearby chair and waited for her to speak. Soon she did, without looking at him.
“I thought you were through,” she said.
“I was. I am. I quit when Foy took over.”
“Then what, exactly, do you want?”
“I want to know if I can do anything for you.”
“Nothing. Where’s Foy now?”
“Somewhere around… I’m sorry, Miss Brady.”
“You had your job, I had mine… What are you waiting for?”
The door to the hall was open. He’d left it that way because he was waiting for the hum of the elevator and the warning sound of footsteps. As Miss Plummer had once waited for the elevator and counted the bricks between the floors, as Ruth Miller had waited for Mrs Fister’s return. But he didn’t know they had done that, too.
He answered her quietly. “I’m leaving in a few minutes. As you say, it was my job; and now it’s over.” He underscored the last words, not too much, but enough. She understood.
“You asked if you could do anything,” she said. “I’ve changed my mind. Could you—I’m thinking about the girls. Will they—see?”
“No,” he said. “Foy feels as you do. He’s going to wait until everything is quiet.” He added, “He expects your co-operation.”
“He’ll get it.” The paper fragments were thick on the rug. Letters, circulars—She destroyed them all, methodically. “Some of the girls are young, too young… Demoralising.”
Foy had felt the same way. Norman Crawford had used the same word. Demoralising. He said, “I heard someone else use that word this afternoon.”
“This afternoon? Is that when you found out?”
“Well, yes. We were on our way to sewing it up, but somebody clinched it for us.”
“You were in the kitchen, I know that. Talking to Clara. Is that what clinched it, that and Plummer?”
He said, “Yes. But I’m thinking of something that may be news to you. This afternoon we got the background. We got a story, a name, and a psychiatrist’s report. It’s an old report, but it’s as good today as it ever was. I’m telling you this because I like things neat, tied up and labelled, and you’re entitled to the play-by-play.”
He told her about the telephone number, and repeated Norman Crawford’s conversation as Foy had repeated it to him. “So you see how it adds up,” he said. “The girl who killed Ruth Miller was born wanting things. She was ambitious, devious, lazy. A psychiatrist said that five years ago when she was up for shoplifting. Ambitious, devious, lazy, although she did take jobs when they were worth her while. She could fit herself into any sort of job if her particular pot of gold was at the end of it. Nobody ever checked on her, she was too good for that. She could charm the birds out of the trees if she wanted the birds; she could be, and act, anything. She was a superb actress. She still is.”
“Yes,” Miss Brady said.
“And there’s another thing about her that worries Foy. She’s a bad loser. If she can’t have what she wants, nobody can.”
“Foy’s wrong.”
A car backfired in the street below, and they both jumped. Eight floors down, and they heard it.
“You’ve got a window open in that other room,” he said sharply. “Close it.”
“I will,” she said.
He got up and went to the door. He’d said enough. “I’m going now. Would you rather—I mean do you want to go down with me?”
“No.”
He shut the door behind him.
When he had gone, Miss Brady looked at herself in the mirror and rouged her face carefully. Then she too went down the hall, making as little noise as possible. No need to let the whole world hear me, she thought, although I don’t care now. I don’t care.
Miss Small was still at her desk when Miss Brady walked in. All Miss Brady said was, “Changed my mind. Couldn’t sleep after all.”
Miss Small said, “I know. I couldn’t either… Monny, I’m frightened. The place is crawling with policemen!”
“Ugly devils, aren’t they? All shoulders and feet. Tramp, tramp, tramp, the boys are marching… If you can’t sleep, why don’t you take something? I’m going to.”
If Miss Small heard, she gave no sign of it. “It’s a dreadful night. Monny, what’s going on? What’s going to happen? You’ve got to tell me.”
“Maybe East and Foy are going to earn their money.”
Miss Small drew back, but her eyes followed every move of Miss Brady’s hands. Miss Brady was lighting a cigarette. “Have you talked to them, Monny? They must have said something. Did they ask your permission to take over like this?”
“Take over?”
“Yes. They cancelled all late leaves, wouldn’t let anybody out. Not even poor Kitty, and she wanted to see the doctor. Not Kloppel, some other man she goes to. Did you tell them they could do that?”
“Tell them! I’m locked in myself!... Want to see something?” Miss Brady crossed to the window and drew the curtains aside. “Look down by the gate. A cop. There’s one on every floor, I know because I walked down. A rat couldn’t get out of here now. Not even a mouse.” She laughed. “There’s a cat on the fence, too. See him? The cat would get the mouse, the cops would get the rat, but who would gnaw the rope? Nobody.” Miss Brady’s voice was flamboyantly careless. “I was building up to Mother Goose but it won’t work.” She dropped the curtain, and they returned to their chairs.
Miss Small’s voice, in contrast to Miss Brady’s, was like a whisper. “What are they looking for, Monny?”
“Who said they were looking for anything?”
“They must be. Maybe something of Ruth Miller’s. Did she leave anything?”
“I think they found everything she left. When they confiscated her suitcase. Unless there was something at Blackman’s that I didn’t know about… They went down to the kitchen, too.”
“Kitchen! Monny, you’re raving. What kitchen?”
“Ours.”
“But that’s fantastic! Ruth Miller wasn’t near the kitchen, I don’t think she even knew where it was. I don’t understand it. I don’t know why they—”
“Maybe we’ll know why tomorrow. Maybe sooner. But East went down there early this evening. I didn’t see him, didn’t know he was in the place, but the grapevine, the good old creeping, crawling grapevine, passed the word along. Clara told Mollie, Mollie told Pauline, Pauline told Agnes. Agnes brought my dinner up at eight and told me.”
“Monny! You’re so mysterious and funny! Told you what?”
“About East. East asked the chef about his hand, all tender and compassionate. He asked Clara, too, all about herself in conjunction with the hand and the party. He made a great fuss over Clara. Clara told Mollie, Mollie told Pauline, et cetera, et cetera, that Mr East acted like he’d won a sweepstake.”
“But why, Monny, why? Monny, you look dreadful, don’t look like that!”
Miss Brady examined the room as Miss Small had done before, not seeing it. “Don’t ask me why,” she said. “Don’t ask me why about anything. I was down in the kitchen myself that night. I saw blood and tears, that’s all. That’s all I saw… Got anything to drink?”
Miss Small sighed. “Brandy,” she said. She reached into the desk and hunted out the bottle. “It isn’t very good brandy, but it’s all I can offer. I’m sorry. Will it be all right?”
“Sure.”
“I’ll wash out
the glasses.” Miss Small went into the tiny bathroom and returned. “Anything new on Lillian Harris, Monny?”
“She’s all right.”
“That’s good… Here, Monny. Don’t spill.”
Miss Brady raised her glass with a flourish that called for applause. It was one of the old gestures. Miss Small promptly laughed.
“Clown!” Miss Small said.
“Sure… But you’re holding back. Aren’t you going to join me, as the etiquette books don’t say?”
“I’m not holding back,” Miss Small said. “Not me… But you know I hate this stuff. I always have. I really do hate it, Monny.”
“I know. Me too.”
They touched their glasses, held them high and smiled. “After this, beddy-bye,” Miss Small said.
There was a shout, the world rocked, and Miss Brady fell to the floor. Her mouth was bleeding where a hand had struck her. Foy’s hand. Foy’s. His square hands were on her shoulders, gripping, not hurting, lifting her up. He was lifting her up and talking to someone across the room. He was talking to East. She was surrounded by men who looked like Foy and East; a wall of men, crowding, pressing close.
She put her hands to her head; she had hurt her head. I fell, she said to herself, I remember falling. He struck me, he struck the glass out of my hand and I fell.
“Why did you do that?” she asked vaguely.
Foy’s answer came from a distance, although he was standing beside her.
“Because there was cyanide in your drink,” he said.
Cyanide. Cyanide. Now where—?
“Easy does it, Miss Brady. Easy now. It’s all over.”
“Cyanide,” she repeated fretfully. “I had some once.” The room was filled with the sound of tramping feet… Tramp, tramp, tramp, the boys are marching… “I had some, I had some once. But I threw it away. I gave it to—”
She raised her eyes and looked at Foy and East. East turned away.
The night came back like thunder, the hour, the minutes, the last words. “It’s all I can offer. I really do hate it, Monny. I always have.” The beloved voice. Returning like an echo.
Then East’s voice, living, close beside her. “I tried to tell you.”
She couldn’t see his face, her eyes were blind with remembering. He had tried to tell her what the end would be. He had said, “If she can’t have what she wants, nobody can.”
“Oh no,” she cried. “Not to me!”
Little by little he told Roberta.
Foy had watched the door himself, waiting for the house to grow quiet. But when he saw Brady go in, he began to worry. He thought of all the things that could happen, a tip-off, suicide, poison, and he moved in closer. He heard them talking. Talk, just talk. And then they had laughed. Together. He hadn’t liked the sound of that, so he’d signalled to the nearest man on duty, and the signal had travelled up and down the stairs from floor to floor. After that it had been a near thing. In time, he had heard the clink of glasses. In time, he had reached Brady. But only Brady.
Roberta shivered. “Bad.”
He went on, quoting fragments of his first interview with Plummer. “Miss Plummer unconsciously gave us the answer when she told Brady that Small went down to the kitchen when the chef was hurt. That didn’t say anything to me, I’d heard it before, from Small herself, when I was interviewing Minnie May. But it said a lot to Brady. I saw how she looked at Plummer. She looked like somebody getting a preview of hell. You see, she knew Small hadn’t gone. She’d been there herself, the whole time, so she knew… A few hours later everything broke and Norman Crawford and Clara mopped it up.”
“Mark, has anyone said anything about suspecting her?”
“Not in words. But when Foy and I left, we met Kitty Brice in the lobby and she didn’t look crushed… It was a made-to-order job from the start. When Small went to Hope House as a boarder, she couldn’t face the character investigation they required. So she turned on the charm and the grave, sweet talk about private rights and the un-American way. Brady was enchanted. Right off the bat she gave our girl a job, and the reference rule was tossed out. Our girl climbed up and up. When Ruth Miller came on the scene, she was pretty close to the top of her world, and she wasn’t climbing down. So Ruth had to go. Ruth’s fear was too obvious, the story was bound to come out eventually.”
Roberta said gently, “Poor Ruth.”
Mark saw the woman he had left only a short time before, slumped in a chair, looking at the drift of torn paper on the floor. Letters, notes, travel folders—
He answered Roberta, but to himself. He said, Poor Monny.
Deadly Duo
Margery Allingham
Wanted: Someone Innocent
I didn’t blame my uncle. I don’t think anyone could have done that. I said as much to my landlady, the vast Mrs Austin, one night when she sat on my bed squashing my feet in a wide gesture of intimacy, in the horrible little room at the top of her house in Pimlico.
Mrs Austin was a Cockney and kind and emotional, as they are, those stalwart old women whom no one suspected of gallantry until they suddenly produced it like a flag, and she had been saying with unintentional brutality that it was a shame I wasn’t one thing or the other, neither the young lady of wealth I’d been trained to be nor the go-getting milliner’s apprentice I was doing my best to become. Thirty-five bob a week was not her idea of a living wage, she said, and I could not have agreed with her more; seven dollars, Sally would have called it. I put Sally out of my mind hastily. It didn’t help to think of her when there was only Mrs Austin to talk to.
The old woman shook her head at me, her festoon of chins sweeping the unfashionable choker of marble-size pearls she wore. “You wouldn’t do no good making ’ats, dear, not if ’orses wore ’em,” she said. I laughed at that, but in my heart, I agreed with her. What was more serious, I was sickly aware that Madame Clothilde was beginning to get the same impression.
Her real name was Ethel Friedman, and she was the nearest thing to a black parrot in appearance, but she had given me a job when Uncle Grey died, and she had done it partly out of kindness to an ex-customer and only incidentally because she thought I might be able to bring a few of the right kind of customer to her shop in Hanover Square.
At that time, a year ago, I had believed she was justified, but then I was nineteen, fresh from Totham Abbey School, inexperienced and sanguine. Now I was twenty and completely disillusioned, of course.
Mrs Austin harped on her theme. “Holidays abroad and then no money! Serve ’im right if you end on the streets,” she persisted. “Fancy dying like that.”
“Don’t,” I said, “please don’t. You don’t understand.”
She snorted. I sat looking through her purple bosom at Uncle Grey as I remembered him, an aristocratic old man, whose linen was laundered meticulously, whose shoes were very narrow, whose hands were long and gracious, and who had a sweet smile and a prim mouth, which yet could say gently witty things.
He was a bachelor of a vanished school, and, when my father and mother had disappeared together under the green waters in the Queen Adelaide disaster, a frightened nurse had presented herself to him on the steps of Prinny’s Club, Pall Mall, with me, a white-faced seven-year-old, clinging to her hand. He simply had done what he could for us, as he must have for any other two ladies in distress. He paid the nurse her wages and wrote her a reference. He placed me in the care of Miss Evangeline Budd, the principal of Totham Abbey, “School for the Daughters of Gentlemen.” The fees must have surprised him, but I fancy he was gratified that it was the best old-fashioned girls’ school in the country.
Before the European disaster swallowed his investments, he used to take me abroad every year. We went everywhere and saw everything, and always he treated me as a grown-up young lady whom he was privileged to escort. He was always considerate and never affectionate. I thought of him as a cross between God and a Cook’s man.
When everything was gone save a small annuity, he died. He wrote me no
letter, but one of the club servants came to see me at the Abbey and brought me his Georgian-silver snuffbox and the signet ring with the square amethyst. An insurance policy covered Uncle Grey’s debts, as well as his funeral.
My upbringing proved about as useful as the other things I’d been left. My education had been excellent but only so far as it went. I could write a respectable hand, but I couldn’t type; I could balance my dress allowance, but I couldn’t keep accounts; I could play the piano, but I couldn’t vamp a tune; I could welcome a duchess to a bazaar, but I couldn’t sell her a hat. I had not even made any useful friends.
At school, Sally had sufficed me. We had been such tremendous buddies that neither of us had had much time for anyone else. She was a year older than I, and by the time I was job-hunting, she had gone home to the United States and was now with a hospital unit on the other side of the world. I could see her quite distinctly as I stared into Mrs Austin’s straining gown. Five feet of dynamite topped with dark red curls, dark eyes with all the gayety of her race in them and a mouth that, with all its impudence, was also wise.
“You ought to get married, ducks,” announced Mrs Austin for the hundredth time. “Perhaps you’ll pick up something on this outing tomorrow.”
“It’s not going to be that kind of party,” I said, laughing. “My headmistress is retiring, and this is her farewell reception to her old girls.”
“If you ask me, you’re wasting your time,” she said. “You look a picture these days, but it won’t last. It’s wonderful ’ow girls do go orf, working about in London. Now’s your chance, when you do look something. Don’t throw yourself away on schoolmistresses. I wonder you want to go.”
I had been thinking that myself, although not for the same reason. I dreaded the reception. Sally wouldn’t be there, and all it had to offer me was a lonely goodbye to the one place I’d ever known to be any sort of home. Once the Abbey had a different head, it would not seem like my old school any more. It was my last tie with a life that wasn’t bounded by the shop and the attic bedroom, and I was going to see it break.
Death of a Doll Page 28