She did not have a great deal of time to worry, however. The signal lamps on her panel were winking outrageously, and kept her busy answering telephones. A surprising number of the calls were for Penelope Dunne’s number. Or perhaps it was not surprising, once Vivian realized that the newspapers were on the street with the story of murder on Riverside Drive. Dozens of people were calling up to offer Pen their sympathy or express their disbelief, people Pen scarcely knew, casual friends she saw only once or twice a year. They inquired for Pen in voices that were sympathetic, shocked, concerned, or morbidly curious. They all wanted Pen to know they had called offering their services, “if there is anything I can do.” Most of them would have been dumbfounded to hear an affirmative answer; they were merely seeking personal participation in a current sensation. But Vivian was dutifully polite to them all, and dutifully recorded their messages.
At a little after eleven, Penelope herself called. She had gotten hold of herself very well, and was using the affected, slightly British intonation she always assumed when she wanted to impress people. She said, “This is Mrs. Dunne. May I have my messages, please?”
“Pen, this is Vivian.”
“Oh, hello, dear. Isn’t this ghastly business? I suppose the police have been pestering the life out of you, too. I had to give them your address when the elevator boy told them you’d been at the house this afternoon.”
“One detective came up to talk to me,” Vivian said.
“We’ve had dozens of them at us,” Penelope continued. “You’d think Roger and I were the ones who did the murder, the way they cross-examined us. It was frightful. They kept us at the police station for hours. They’ve just let us go, luckily. Who called, Vivian dear?”
“Everyone you ever heard of,” Vivian said. “I have thirty-six calls—inquiries, expressions of sympathy—”
“They called to gloat,” Pen interrupted. “Did you see that awful picture of me in the Mirror?”
Vivian said she hadn’t seen the papers; did Pen want her to read all the messages? No, just the names, Pen said.
Vivian read the list. She could almost hear Pen yawning over the wire.
“Then there are messages for Roger. Is he with you?”
“Who phoned Roger? A woman?”
“No, a man.”
“Just a minute, then. Roger’s right here. I’ll put him on.”
Roger growled a hello.
“Hello, Roger,” Vivian said. “A Mr. Artie Whisk called twice—at five forty-five and again at five-fifty—to say it was important that Mr. Dunne get in touch with him at once. At eight-thirty a man with a foreign accent called to tell you to call the Rux girl right away—spelled Are-you-ex. A few minutes ago the same man called—at least his voice sounded the same, although he said he didn’t call before—and said that you had better contact Vanizol before midnight—that’s Vee-ay-en-eye-zee-oh-ell—or the deal was off and you would be completely sunk. He said that if he didn’t hear from you by midnight, he would go to the other party. It’s just ten past eleven, Roger. You still have time.”
“You say this fellow spoke with an accent?” Roger Dunne asked.
“Decidedly.”
“It’s a crazy customer of mine,” Dunne said. “He wants me to turn the world upside down for a few hundred pink glass eyes for toy white mice. I’ll call him in the morning.”
“Are you and Pen going home now?”
“The police have taken the apartment to pieces,” Dunne said. “We’re going to the Hotel New Yorker for the night. Don’t call me for Vanizol again, though. Pen will get in touch with your people in the morning. Good night.”
The next hours dragged by slowly. There were few calls now, and plenty of time to wonder where Barney Weaver was, who were the men following him when he telephoned, whether he would be able to keep the rendezvous at the Chinese restaurant.
At one-thirty a call came in on an outside line.
“Missu Sandahson?” said an odd, squeaky voice. “I am Matsuki. You know me?”
Yes, Vivian knew the Oriental mathematics genius who walked dogs.
“Mistah Weavah say prease to giving you message,” said the voice.
“Yes, please do!” Vivian was all attention. She needed every bit of concentration and ingenuity, too, to sift the sense from the queer phonetics and twisted syntax which came over the wire. By alert listening and patient calls for repeats on obscure spots, she managed to get the meaning, however. Barney could not telephone her, yet he needed very much to see her. Would she meet him as soon as she finished work? He would wait for her in the Times Square station of the I.R.T. subway, on the uptown platform, at the foot of the 41st Street stairway. Of course she would.
As soon as she got off duty at two o’clock, she hurried to the 110th Street subway station, tripped down the stairs as rapidly as heels permitted when she heard a train coming, paused just long enough for an appraising glance into a slot-machine mirror to adjust the angle of her hat, and got on the train without noticing if anyone had followed her down the stairs.
There were still crowds in the Times Square station. The Broadway hot spots were cooling, the bars closing, the midnight shows emptying the night owls back into their underground burrows. There were more people on the uptown platform than on the downtown side, Vivian noticed. Upper Manhattan and the Bronx kept later hours than the lower island and Brooklyn. She climbed the stairs, crossed to the uptown side, walked along the white-tiled tunnel to the 41st Street stairway, climbed down again.
At the foot of the stairs she elbowed her way into the crowd, looking for Barney. She did not see him near the stairs. A Bronx Park train was boring toward the station, its two green eyes staring out of the darkness of the tunnel. She pushed farther into the crowd.
Suddenly the crowd seemed to react behind her, drove at her with a hard, quick hostility. The platform dissolved from under her feet. She saw the tracks gleam as they rushed up at her. She flung out her arms helplessly, felt a sharp, breathless pain as she struck flat in the oily trough between the rails. In a stunned half second of despair, she struggled to her knees, and saw the Bronx Park train hurtling down upon her, its green eyes wide with horror. She saw the motorman straining at the controls, heard the grinding shriek of brakes, the screams of women on the platform.
Then she saw a suit of grimy dungarees detach itself from the cliff of people above her, fling itself down into the path of the train, grasp her arm, swing her like a snapping whip across the third rail, against the steel stanchion beside the tracks.
The roaring, screaming tornado of a train whirled past, and the man in dungarees was flattened next to her, his arm pressing her against the stanchion. His face was grim in the dizzy flicker of lighted windows gliding past, and at first she did not recognize the features beneath the smear of oil. Then she gave a start—a dangerous move in such close quarters. The side of the slowing train raked her elbow.
“Barney!” she gasped.
The thunder of the train was still in her ears when Barney was yelling into her white, drawn face. “What did you do that for? Why did you jump?”
Vivian shook her head wildly. She could not speak. Unbidden sobs were choking the words in her throat. The muscles of her lips were still taut with terror.
“You mean you didn’t jump?” Barney screamed.
She shook her head again.
“You think somebody pushed you?”
“Yes!” she managed to gasp.
“Who?”
“I—I—don’t—” She was trembling violently.
The train had stopped. Somebody on the platform was yelling for the power to be cut off. Somebody else was yelling for the police. Detective Kenneth Kilkenny was pounding on the windows of the car in front of them.
A guard opened the door on the wrong side of the train. Barney half carried the girl over the power rail, boosted her into the car, helped her onto a seat.
Detective Kilkenny, his service revolver in his hand, was herding the crowd out of th
e car. “Keep ’em out!” he told the guard. “Clear the car until the ambulance comes. The girl’s hurt. She can’t walk.”
“I can walk, Mr. Kilkenny,” Vivian said, sitting up. “I’m not hurt.”
Barney looked up from the girl’s bleeding elbow, and said, “You’re hurt and you’re going to the hospital. Who’s your friend?”
“Who wants to know?” Kilkenny demanded.
“You’re a detective,” Barney said. “You followed her downtown from the Overlook Arms. Did you see who pushed her off the platform?”
“Pushed?” Kilkenny looked closely into Barney’s face. “You’re Weaver!” he said. “You won’t get away this time.”
“I’m not trying,” Barney said. “But the man who pushed Miss Sanderson did.”
“Say, can’t you take this girl to the platform?” a subway guard suggested. “You’ll be holding up—”
“Keep that door closed!” Kilkenny ordered. “If it wasn’t for this fellow you’d have the emergency squad here with hydraulic jacks and acetylene torches. You do what I say.”
Without another word the detective left the car, sent back a uniformed patrolman he found on the platform, and was swallowed up by the gawking crowd.
Barney Weaver finished tying the girl’s arm and said, “How do you feel now?”
“I’m all right.” The girl smiled desperately.
“No headache, no nausea?”
“No, I’m all right. A little shaky, that’s all.”
“You didn’t hit your head any? Didn’t pass out even for a second?”
“No, I remember everything.”
“What were you doing down here?”
The girl gave him a strange look. “Doing—Why, I came here to meet you, Barney!”
“No, you didn’t. You were supposed to meet me at that Chinese restaurant, and you didn’t even go near the place. I followed you and that detective right into the subway station at One Hundred and Tenth Street.”
Vivian’s expression was uncomprehending. “But you changed that,” she insisted. “Didn’t you have Matsuki call me?”
“I haven’t seen Matsuki since quarter to six—just as you were leaving Penelope’s apartment.”
“Matsuki called at one-thirty—that is, I thought it was Matsuki. I’m not so sure now. Maybe it was someone imitating his funny accent.”
“And he gave you a message from me?”
“Yes. He said I was to meet you on the uptown platform of the Times Square I.R.T. station, at the foot of the Forty-First Street stairs.”
“It probably was not Matsuki,” Barney said.
Detective Kilkenny came pushing through the crowd with two white-coated stretcher-bearers. The doors of the subway car opened.
“But I can walk,” Vivian protested.
“You’re dying,” Kilkenny said. “I don’t want you to talk to anybody. You’re riding the ambulance, Weaver.”
“You bet I’m riding the ambulance,” Barney said.
In the ambulance, an intern covered the white-faced girl with a blanket. She was still trembling.
Barney said to Kilkenny, “Will you stop the ambulance a few blocks down, so we can take a taxi?”
“We’re going to the hospital,” Kilkenny said.
“But can’t we go in a taxi? Somebody is obviously trying to kill Miss Sanderson, and if her admission to a hospital is a matter of record, it’ll probably reach the newspapers. Then they’ll be after her again.”
“We’ll have her admitted under another name,” Kilkenny said. “Who’s trying to kill her?”
“I don’t know. But somebody phoned her that she was to meet me at the Forty-First Street stairway, uptown side, Times Square station. It’s obviously a trap. There are more people on the uptown side at this time of night, so he’d have the cover of a crowd while watching for her. Then he could retreat behind the stairway and wait until she was opposite him, push her off as the train came into the station. Then he could circle around behind the stairway, still keeping the stairs between himself, the girl and the people whose attention would be attracted by her predicament, and be able to get upstairs and away without being seen. I was watching her, and I didn’t see who it was. You didn’t find any eyewitnesses in the crowd, did you?”
“Eyewitnesses!” Kilkenny said derisively. “Give me circumstantial evidence any time. Twice as reliable. Never yet found two people in a crowd who saw a thing happen the same way. ‘She jumped,’ one woman told. me. ‘I was standing next to her and I heard her say, “Good-by, everybody,” just before she jumped.’ ‘She stumbled,’ a fellow says. ‘She caught her heel and fell.’ Three men and a woman said she was pushed. One fellow said she was pushed by a tall dark man in a derby. One fellow said it was a sort of plump guy in a polo coat who ran up the Forty-First Street stairs afterward. The woman saw it all plainly and was sure the man didn’t run up any stairs but stayed and mingled with the crowd. She even pointed out the man—Detective Charlie Storm, eighteenth precinct station; I saw him come down the stairs myself just after the train stopped.”
Detective Kilkenny puckered his lips to accent his low opinion of eyewitnesses and looked about him as though seeking a cuspidor.
“Who was it made this date for you with Weaver this evening, Miss Sanderson?” he asked.
“I thought it was a Japanese boy named Matsuki.”
“The dog nurse,” said Kilkenny. “Did he phone?”
“At one-thirty,” the girl said.
“He didn’t phone,” Barney said, “because I haven’t seen him since early this evening.”
“He might have been phoning for somebody else,” said Kilkenny. “Or is there somebody who might be pretty good at imitating his accent?”
“I can’t think of anybody.”
“Here we are,” the intern said. “Do you think you can walk, miss, or should we—”
“I’ll take care of getting her admitted,” Kilkenny broke in. “I’m going to put her in the maternity ward with a ‘no visitors’ sign on her door. I’ll see she gets protection, Weaver.”
XVI
KILKENNY TOOK BARNEY into the waiting-room on the third floor of the Mid-Manhattan Hospital while Vivian was being put to bed.
“You’ve got plenty of explaining to do, Weaver,” the detective said.
“I was just about to make a bargain with you,” Barney told him. “I’ll give you everything I have, no mental reservations, all questions answered, if you let me take Vivian Sanderson out of New York when I’m through.”
“Not a chance,” Kilkenny said. “If you start talking like that, I’ll have the girl held as material witness, and I’ll slap a murder charge against you.”
“You’re not that dumb, are you, Officer?”
“You resisted arrest,” Kilkenny said. “You escaped from two officers of the law.”
“There was no arrest made,” Barney countered. “I thought the men who grabbed me in that delicatessen were a couple of thugs. They had no warrant, and they made no attempt to identify themselves.”
“You were all packed, ready to leave town.”
“I suggest that you get Dean Wilson, of Academia College, on the long-distance telephone at once. He’ll tell you that I’m on my way out there to be professor of biochemistry.”
“You were in Mrs. Dunne’s apartment when Pierre Laurence was killed.”
“That’s going to be hard to prove,” Barney said, “because it isn’t true.”
“You were there right after the murder.”
“So were a lot of people. So was Matsuki, as you seem to know.”
“Matsuki has no reason for killing Laurence.”
“Neither have I.”
“Did you find Laurence’s body before or after the Jap boy came in?” the detective asked.
“That’s a leading question,” Barney said. “I haven’t said I knew there was a corpse in the apartment.”
“But you did know?”
“Yes.”
“You knew it
when Matsuki came in?”
“Yes.”
“The Jap says you didn’t say a word about it.”
“I didn’t think he’d be interested,” Barney said. “He’s only interested in mathematics.”
“And you didn’t think the police would be interested, either.”
“The police were notified.”
“Not by you, though.”
“No, by Mr. Anthony Grove.”
“Was Grove still in the apartment when you left?”
“Yes, he was.”
“What was he doing?” Kilkenny demanded.
“He was sitting in a chair,” Barney said, “with his eyes closed and his mouth open.”
“With his what?”
“With his eyes closed and his mouth open. I’d just socked him.”
“You—Why did you sock him?”
“It was something I’d always wanted to do. For twenty years I’d wanted to sock Tony Grove. I thought I’d better get it out of my system.”
“You socked him because he called the police? That it?”
“No, I socked him because he intimated that I killed Pierre Laurence.”
“Which you did.”
“Which I did not. I scarcely knew the man. I certainly didn’t know him well enough to kill him.”
“From what I hear,” said Kilkenny, “a lot of people wanted to kill the guy practically as soon as they were introduced. Why wasn’t this Tony Grove still in the apartment when we got there?”
“That,” said Barney, “is your problem. Probably he wasn’t there because he left shortly after I did.”
“Weaver, why didn’t you wait for the police to arrive?”
“I had some errands to do.”
“What, for instance?”
Barney did not reply.
“For instance, you might have gone to Grand Central,” the detective said, “to check a bundle of platinum fox furs and a suitcase belonging to Miss Sanderson. What about those furs?”
“Well, what about them?”
“Don’t try to tell me you’ve been running trap lines in Grand Central station, because those furs come from Norway and they’re worth a lot of money—enough to make a man commit murder, maybe. Where’d they come from?”
See You at the Morgue Page 12