Time Off for Murder

by Zelda Popkin

  "I hope," said Miss Carner gravely, "you'll not have to reveal them to the police."

  Again the pallor, deepening under the ecru skin. But Struthers was silent. Miss Carner picked up her purse. "Then there's nothing we can do but wait."

  The furrow creased Struthers' face again. "I trust she will return today," he said. "There's the payroll, her appointments. There are so many things …"

  The telephone rang at that moment, and the secretary lifted the receiver…. "John 8 - Yes, this is Ben Struthers…. Yes…. Yes, Mister Rorke…No, Mister Rorke…. Yes, Mister Rorke, I will inform her." He hung the receiver up.

  Mary said: "Mister Rorke is anxious, too?"

  "He has telephoned every day."

  "May I ask who Mister Rorke is?"

  "Miss Knight has not informed me. I do not feel free to speculate about her acquaintances."

  Miss Carner stood up. "You're very well trained," she said. "To mind Miss Knight's business and your own."

  A faint pink colored Struthers' face. "I try to," he said. "I wish Miss Knight to be satisfied. I trust, Miss, I have allayed your curiosity."

  "Quite the contrary," Miss Carner answered. "Quite the opposite."

  Mr. Struthers shrugged his shoulders wearily. "There's nothing else I can do. Nothing I can say."

  Washington Square had shut its windows, turned on its oil burners against the sharp wind, blowing north by west across the Hudson. Busses and motor cars rolled, dark and secretive, past the deserted benches of the park, past pedestrians, scurrying like the autumn leaves, blown by the wind; past solitary dogwalkers, shivering at the curbs.

  Lamp light glowed behind the diaphanous window curtains of the Square. In the high, gracious rooms of sedate brick houses, chairs were drawn up before open fires. Their hospitable warmth seemed to pass through their curtained windows, and hurrying by them, Mary Carner opened a button of her topcoat. Then, she caught herself buttoning it again and unbuttoning it and she said to herself: "I'm nervous. Why am I so nervous? What's to be afraid of? I'm merely going to Phyllis' house. This is New York. It's eight o'clock. There's nothing to be afraid of. Nothing can happen to you on a New York street at eight o'clock."

  A young man, with a wire-haired terrier on leash, cut in front of her, toward a fire hydrant. A taxi drew up at a curb and a couple in evening attire came out, entered a house. Two men in tweeds, arguing, with widely gesticulating arms, jostled her. "I'm not alone. This is a thoroughfare. I'm safe as a babe in its mother's arms. What makes me nervous?"

  The residence of Lyman Knight and his daughter Phyllis was on the south side of the Square. Three stories high, of mellow red brick, with beautiful Grecian columns framing its doorway, leaded window panes, and a fence and gate of graceful wrought iron, it was part of that row of magnificent private dwellings which are the pride and joy of modern New York, the tangible reminder of the graciousness of the city's earlier way of life.

  Steep stone steps led to the front door. A grilled gate was shut over the basement entrance. The facade seemed wholly dark. But as Mary looked closely at it, she fancied she saw pin points of light through the shades drawn over the front basement windows and two windows on the second floor.

  She looked quickly up and down the street. Around the rim of the park, the lights in apartment buildings and offices were an exquisite frieze. The man and dog had disappeared; the arguing pair were down near the corner. A tall man, whose contours seemed vaguely familiar, was strolling leisurely at the far end of the block. The man ducked into a basement areaway, half a dozen houses down, and passed from Mary's speculations.

  Mary mounted the steps, ran her hand over the black moulding of the entry, hunting a bell. She struck a match.

  Behind the curtained glass of the front door, something seemed to move - the outline of a head, jumping back, and two white eyeballs, illumined by the match flare. She thought she heard the tick of footsteps, running up the stairs. She flattened her nose against the glass, peered into the darkness. She saw nothing, heard nothing.

  She pressed the bell, listened to its remote, imperious buzz. Then silence. She found the bell again, held her finger against it. Someone was at home. There was no doubt of that. From the top of the steps she could see plainly that there was light behind the basement shades. She tapped her toe impatiently.

  Suddenly, a light clicked on in the hall and the door opened. A towering, square-jawed woman, dressed in long-sleeved, black servants' poplin, peered out. Mary Carner set her foot in the opening, her hand on the knob. "Is Miss Knight in?" she asked pleasantly.

  "No." The single syllable was a bark.

  "I'm so sorry. I had to see her tonight."

  "She isn't home."

  "I realize that now. Can you tell me when she'll be in? You see," she coaxed, "I've been trying for several days to reach her."

  "Call her office. You're a client, ain't you?" The slight inflection of curiosity was encouraging.

  "I'm a friend. A very good friend. Is her father at home? May I see him?"

  The woman looked quickly over her shoulder. "I dunno," she said.

  Mary followed her glance. There was movement in the shadows at the head of the staircase.

  "Please see whether he's in. It's very important. I must speak to him."

  "Wait a minute." The servant lifted Mary Carner's fingers from the door-knob, brushed them with a movement that was like a slap across the knuckles, nudged the detective's knee out of the doorway, closed the door, locked it.

  Through the curtained glass, Mary saw her back mounting the staircase. She leaned against the door, trying to see inside, to hear. Behind her, motors honked, tires slithered, heels clicked on the pavement. Within the old house was the dark silence of a tomb.

  Then she saw the woman coming back down the steps, stopping in the middle of the staircase, waving her arm. It was the sort of admonitory gesture a parent makes to a refractory child. The door was opened - just a crack this time.

  "He's gone to bed. Mister Knight's fast asleep. Go away."

  The door slammed. The light in the hall went off.

  The wind whipped Miss Carner's skirts. She buttoned her topcoat, dug her hands into her pockets.

  As she walked slowly down the street, a man slouched out of an areaway and swung into step beside her.

  "Hi, Mary."

  "Oh, Chris. It was you."

  "Sure it was me."

  "Why did you follow me?"

  "Personal reasons. Have a nice visit?"

  "Don't be nasty. I didn't get in."

  "That's good."

  "Oh it is, is it?" Temper flared. "You think it's fun to be given the bum's rush?"

  He linked his arm in hers. "Not fun, but safer. You don't know what's good for you. Sweetheart, has it occurred to you that these people don't want you sticking your nose into their business? They're making that perfectly clear. Lyman Knight doesn't want you to look for his daughter. He's not worried about her. Nobody is but you."

  Chapter III

  On Saturday, the twenty-ninth of October, Lyman Knight asked the Police Department to find his daughter, Phyllis, who had been absent from home for a fortnight.

  "All cars. All cars." The police radios rasped: "Be on the lookout for Phyllis Marie Knight, female, white, age: 34; height: five feet; weight: ninety-nine pounds. Long blonde hair, blue ayes, fair complexion. Distinguishing features: protuberant front teeth, hair worn braids, coronet style. Wearing navy blue wool suit, white silk blouse, blue cloth turban hat, navy slippers, light tan silk stockings, carried large blue leather handbag. That is all. All cars…. All cars…."

  The teletype alarm ticked out to every police precinct, to all state police headquarters in the near New England and Middle Atlantic States: "Phyllis Marie Knight, attorney, prominent society and civic affairs, reported missing since Oct. 19. Please check all amnesia, accident cases, all hospital admissions."

  The afternoon papers and the press associations which served the world its daily ration of sensa
tion ran to greater detail. With something akin to glee, they spread the news that a lady had disappeared. The lady was Social Register. The lady was blonde. With that beginning, a mystery might go far.

  A photographer who had tempered justice with mercy had taken the lady's picture. It made a fine display: two columns wide, on page one in all the afternoon dailies, a classic head, with chiseled features, high, thoughtful brow below the braided hair, white drapery under a firm chin, unsmiling mouth. A pose suggesting Portia, without the banal black robe and mortarboard.

  "Miss Knight," the press informed such of its readers as were unaware of the lady's eminence, "was one of New York City's better known attorneys. Last April she successfully defended Sophie Duda in Bronx County Court from a charge of homicide in the slaying of her infant son, born out of wedlock. Miss Knight chose the legal profession in preference to a life of ease and social activity which would have been hers, normally, as the only daughter of Lyman Knight and the late Marianna Schuyler Knight. Her mother was descended from one of the most famous families of early New York."

  The doors of the house on Washington Square swung open.

  The black-clad housekeeper stamped sourly back and forth to admit detectives, reporters and press photographers to a dusky Edwardian parlor where a diminutive gray man sat in a throne-like arm chair before a marble mantelpiece.

  Thus Mary Carner found him, holding court, on Sunday morning.

  She had rung the bell while Washington Square's babies and dogs were frolicking in the winey autumn sunshine in the park, while Washington Square's elders were sleeping behind their drawn shades.

  The housekeeper had recognized her. "Oh, it's you again."

  "May I come in this time?"

  "What do you want? Miss Knight ain't home."

  "I know that. I'm a detective."

  "Police?" The woman stuck out her lower lip and chin. Belligerently, she examined Miss Carner's autumn leaf tweed coat, her red felt hat. She said: "You don't look like a cop to me."

  Miss Carner turned back the flap of her purse, to which her metal shield was pinned. The woman's expression altered just the slightest.

  "All right. You can come in," she said. Then, apparently thinking better of the matter, she dropped her voice to a conciliatory whisper. "Listen," she said, "I'd of let you in the other night …but he," she jerked her head toward the drawing room, "he didn't want it."

  "If you had," Miss Carner said coldly, "Miss Knight might have been found by now."

  The servant's lips tightened. "I did what he told me to do," she mumbled. "I always do."

  Miss Carner stepped into the hall, and back into the nineteenth century. The years had passed by this house leaving only their fusty accumulation of the odors of bacon and coffee, moth-balls and must, disinfectant and coal gas, to tell that living persons had dwelt there since that hour in the single digit years of the century, when Marianna Knight was carried through its door, separated forever from the chairs and tables and rugs and curtains she had lovingly assembled.

  Phyllis and her father and the servant who had tended their wants had stepped so lightly on the turkey red hall and staircase carpet that it seemed still new. The dark wood panelling climbed shoulder high. Above it magenta wallpaper, dyed deeper by soot and dust, defied the decades. A brass wall bracket with frosted bowl belonged to the gas-lit days, its single electric bulb an interloper. Behind the street door, a coat tree stretched its bare, bronze arms above a carved wood bench. A tall jardiniere beside the coat rack held a man's umbrella and a matching cane, each topped by the ivory head of a dog. Brown plush curtains, looped back from brass rings upon a wooden pole over closed solid doors, barred the entrance to the parlor. The housekeeper slid the doors open.

  "Go on in," she said. "Here's another one," she announced.

  A thin voice piped, "Come in. You, too."

  The parlor doors rolled together behind Mary Carner.

  The autumn sunlight trickled through dingy Nottingham curtains and overdrapes of dark plush into a long, high-ceilinged room. Near the window stood a grand piano, its keyboard closed, its rack holding yellowed music sheets; in front of that, a polished, mahogany swivel stool, and in the corner behind it, a rubber plant, nearly ceiling tall. The carpet was Aubusson, splashed with huge flowers and leaves of faded green and pink and blue. Against the brown wallpaper hung dark, oil-painted landscapes in heavy gilded box frames, glass covered. The marble mantel, with its black coal grate, in which a bright fire burned, had a simple dignity, but its classic lines went down in despair under the weight of an ormolu clock and a pair of rearing bronze horses. Against a wall stood a long sofa, with elaborately carved wooden frame and thin seat upholstered in a faded damask that once was salmon pink, and opposite, in the corner nearest to the portiere-hung sliding doors, a small gilt chair with square seat, right-angled back, beside a marble topped table which held a red plush photograph album and a painted glass lamp. The chairs and sofas sagged under the ladies and gentlemen of the press.

  Two tall armchairs of green velvet, with matching ottomans, high tufted backs, and crocheted antimacassars, stood vis-a-vis, before the fireplace. In one sat Lyman Knight, seeming cut out of the same piece of gray cloth as the sack suit that hung loosely on his frame.

  Lyman Knight had a long mustache, shaggy, ends curling upward, and furry eyebrows that made a fringe across his forehead. His blue eyes were faded, deep sunk in a cadaverous face, his nose high-bridged, aristocratic, his lips thin and blue. Two long yellow teeth projected like fangs over his upper lip as he talked. The aroma of camphor hung over him.

  He seemed to Mary Carner something that had long been shut up in a closet. His eyes on this morning were as though they were seeing the light for the first time in years.

  In the armchair opposite him sat a very young man, in a neat business suit, with a dark fedora on his curly brown hair, rosy cheeks, one of them scarred in a jagged line from eye to chin. The young man frowned over a notebook.

  Mary Carner looked at the young man's feet. She walked across the room, bent over his shoulder, said: "Hello. You're from headquarters?"

  The young man cocked his head. "Uh huh?" The affirmation had a question mark.

  "I'm Mary Carner of Blankfort's store."

  "Pleased to meet you." The young man looked vague but amiable. "This ain't no bargain sale," he added helpfully.

  "I know that." Miss Carner was faintly irritated. "Do you know Inspector Heinsheimer? I'm a friend of his. Worked with him on the McAndrew case."

  "Never heard of it," said the young man blandly. "But who am I to ask for references? I ain't running this. It's open to the public, like Central Park. Reese is the name. Sit down and behave yourself." He patted the arm of his chair.

  Mary Carner sat down gingerly on the arm of Detective Reese's chair.

  Lyman Knight's eyes pounced on her. "We do not abuse the furniture," he said pontifically.

  Miss Carner jumped up. The young detective drew her down. "It's O.K., Mister. The lady's the law, too."

  "Yes," said Mary quickly. "I'm the law, but I'm Phyllis' friend, too. I'm the person who called up here every day. I'm the person who came here Monday night."

  "Oh, did you?" Lyman Knight's eyes went blank.

  The reporters and Detective Reese looked at Miss Carner with quickened interest.

  "I'd like to ask a question." Miss Carner got off the arm of the chair. "What, Mister Knight, made you suddenly decide to ask the police to help you find your daughter?"

  Lyman Knight frowned down at his hands. His thin gray fingers moved nervously. "Why, she didn't come home," he said at last. His voice rose to a crack at the end of the sentence.

  "But she had failed to come home for ten days before you thought of asking for help in locating her. Weren't you disturbed before?"

  "Not at all. Not at all. My daughter never told me where she went." There was a little whine of self-pity. "I never knew what she was doing."

  "Didn't anyone in the household
know? Someone knew whether to expect her for dinner or not, didn't they? As I remember her, she was always very precise."

  "Not at all…. Not at all." Lyman Knight waved a deprecatory hand. "My daughter …gentlemen and ladies, you must realize how difficult it is for me to discuss my family affairs with strangers…my daughter was a…how shall I put it?…very peculiar person. She bad none of the proper…proper filial instincts. She never confided in her father. She followed her own whims in everything."

  "Then," a newspaper woman on the sofa spoke up, "you did not approve of your daughter's activities? You didn't like her being a lawyer?"

  Lyman Knight's eyes narrowed. "She failed to ask my approval or disapproval," he said. "She came and went as she pleased. She had her private income - her inheritance from her sainted mother. I was in no position to forbid her to do what she wished to do."