Who Has Wilma Lathrop?

by Keene, Day

  Lathrop stood savouring the thought. Their last night together hadn’t been a he. Wilma had meant every word, each caress. She hadn’t been pretending. The pretence had been before that, while she had been trying to act her conception of a schoolteacher’s wife.

  Lathrop realized his glasses were steamed. He wiped them with his handkerchief and studied the star-lighted landscape. He was in the Cook County Forest Preserve, at Dam Number Two, a spot at which he and Wilma had swum several times. The boys had been very clever. To date, they hadn’t missed a trick. Both sorrow and remorse sought familiar spots. It was dubious if Wilma had told them the details of their courtship and marriage. That left Vladimir. The blond youth was in this up to his duck-tail haircut.

  The little things added up and there you were. Still, Vladimir’s act had been convincing. He had managed to fool the police.

  Lathrop closed the doors of his car but to be on the safe side he rolled down all the windows. From what he remembered of carbon monoxide from his college chemistry, the gas was colourless, tasteless, and odourless. It caused headache, weakness, nausea, fainting, paralysis of the nervous sytem — and death.

  It was too cold and too late for petters. As far as he could tell he was alone in this particular section of the Forest Preserve. His car stood on a little used side road. If he hadn’t subconsciously depressed the handle of the car and fallen to the ground when he had, by now he would be a body, a man dead by his own hand. His assumed suicide would have been accepted as proof that he had killed Wilma and the case would have been transferred to the closed file.

  Lathrop found his cigarettes and lit one. If he had died, the reporter who had written the story for the morning paper would have had a field day in clichés. Remorseful husband … it stands to reason … dead by his own hand … grey dawn of morning … alert passer-by. If the coroner had noticed any swellings or contusions left by the blackjacking in front of Attorney Ramsey’s house, they would have been attributed to the first beating he’d taken. He could visualize the headline —

  SUSPECTED KILLER TAKES OWN LIFE!

  The faculty members at Palmer High would have felt sorry for and a little ashamed of him for having so besmirched their mutual profession. Mrs. Metz would have clucked her tongue and said she knew it all the time. Mr. Metz and Dr. Klein would have worried for fear the new owner of the building would raise their rents. Mrs. Nielsen, in her own grief, would have read the headline with grim satisfaction. The new janitor would have wondered who was going to pay him. Of his closer acquaintances, only Jenny and Eddie Mandell would have understood. Young as they were, they knew what love could do.

  Despite the bitter cold, small drops of perspiration beaded on Lathrop’s face. The very simplicity of the plot had guaranteed its success.

  Lieutenant Jezierna and Sergeant Meyers and Detectives Harris and Jethro and Madigan were intelligent men. They would have mental reservations. They would have followed the inquest closely. They might even have made an independent investigation. But in the end all they would have been able to do would have been to shake their heads and add his and Wilma’s death to their mental file of queer cases.

  It had been clever, devilishly clever. No further search would have been made for Wilma, and the blackjack twins would have been free to do what they would with her.

  Lathrop’s sense of urgency returned, this time in a different form. He was wasting valuable time. Wilma loved and needed him. And he thought he knew where she was.

  He got in his car and started the motor. The lonely side road was tyre-deep with snow and pocked from the fall and winter storms. He was forced to drive at a crawl until he reached the cleared highway. Then he depressed the accelerator to the floor boards.

  There was little traffic on the highway until he reached the junction of River Road and North Avenue. Then the streams of market-bound produce trucks forced him to slacken the speed. Once he almost sideswiped a huge semi-trailer loaded with potatoes. Another time, trying to leapfrog a convoy of trucks, he barely missed a head-on collision with a car coming the other way. Both times he drove on, deaf to the blast of horns and vehement but inaudible profanity behind him.

  Still closer in, the cars of early rising workers swelled the stream of traffic and forced him to both slow down and stay in line. He drove east as far as Austin Boulevard, then stopped his car at the kerb in front of an all-night lunchroom a few doors from the corner.

  As Lathrop parked his car, a newspaper truck piled high with morning papers paused on the corner he’d just passed and the bundle hustler in the back of the truck bounced two twine-tied bundles of newspapers on the walk before the truck sped on.

  Lathrop walked back to the corner and found a lone quarter in change in his pocket. He laid it on the newsstand and extracted a paper from one of the tied bundles.

  His name was splattered in bold type all over the front page. He walked back to the lighted window of the lunchroom to read it. The headline read:

  LATHROP WANTED FOR MURDER!

  There was even a picture of him, taken ten years before. He was in uniform with two gold pips on his shoulders and a silly grin on his face. It had been taken on the day he had graduated from the nightmare of the officer’s candidate school at Fort Benning, Georgia. It had been some months after the picture before someone had discovered he had a degree in engineering and had got him transferred from the infantry to the combat engineers.

  Lathrop read the newspaper story carefully. It was mainly a rehash of the story he had read the day before. With one important exception. The State Attorney’s office had decided it had enough evidence to hold him on suspicion of murder while it asked the Grand Jury for a true bill. The police laboratory had failed to establish the fragments of bones as human but a second sifting of the ashes had disclosed a melted partial plate that checked with Wilma’s dental chart. The police were still vitally interested in questioning the two men who, allegedly, had attacked him in the Juvenile Court parking lot, but they were much more interested in taking him into custody. All police cars in the city had been alerted to pick him up on sight.

  Lathrop looked through the windows of the lunchroom. There was a public phone on the wall. He folded the paper carefully and tugged open the heavy front door. Speaking from behind the glass cigar counter, a swart-faced man of obvious Greek ancestry greeted him cordially. “Good morning, sir. What will it be for you. Some waffles and fresh country sausage? Or maybe some nice ham and eggs?”

  Lathrop had never been less hungry. He extracted a five-dollar bill from his pocket and laid it on the glass case. “No, thank you. But I’d like to use your phone if I may. And might I have some change?”

  After the cold of the night and the physical effects of the carbon monoxide fumes that had almost taken his life, the co-mingled smells in the overheated lunchroom made Lathrop feel slightly giddy. He gripped the edge of the cigar case as he fought down a wave of nausea.

  The Greek picked the bill from the glass. “You don’t feel so good, huh?”

  “No. I don’t.”

  “You got troubles, huh?”

  Lathrop swallowed the lump in his throat. “Yes. It so happens I have.”

  The proprietor of the lunchroom rang up “No Sale” on his cash register. “Ha.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “You got troubles. Ten dollars a night it costs me just for light and heat so I can stay open all night. I have to hire another short-order cook and another waitress, at time and a half for night work. And how much money do I take in? What kind of trade do I get? Drunks who buy a cup of coffee it costs me more to make than I can charge. More drunks who make water all over the wash-room. An old lady who asks, ‘Has the last bus come?’ ” The Greek laid four dollar bills, three quarters, two dimes and a nickel on the rubber mat. “Now you want change for à five-dollar bill.” He put his elbows on the case and leaned his weight on them. “Tell me again, Mister. You got troubles, huh?”

  “No. Maybe not,” Lathrop told
him.

  Chapter Twelve

  EXCEPT FOR the work lights in the freightyards beyond the high woven-wire fence, Mercer Street was unlighted and sodden with slumber, the weathered houses huddled together against the cold of the morning wind.

  The yards, it seemed, never slept. Noisy freight hogs belching smoke snorted up and down the tracks searching out empty boxcars like so many metallic cow ponies. There was a constant bump and crash of automatic couplings. Occasionally a puffing engine with a full train rumbling behind it whistled triumphantly as it passed 6019 Mercer Street, outbound for Des Moines or Omaha or St. Paul or Minneapolis and all way points in between.

  Lathrop parked his car where he’d parked it the first time he’d called. The green shades in the front room of the Stanislawow house were drawn but enough light seeped out around the edges to frame the windows in yellow.

  It was a physical effort for Lathrop to turn off the ignition and open the windows of his car. He attempted to analyse his feelings. It wasn’t physical fear. He wasn’t frightened for himself. He was afraid of what he might find behind the drawn shades.

  He crossed the street, stiff-kneed, and examined the dark areaway between the Stanislawow house and the one next door. The areaway led to a small back yard enclosed by a high board fence, the yard littered with old tin cans and the accumulated debris of years.

  Lathrop picked his way through the rubble to the alley and opened the wooden gate. He’d come to the right place. The late-model Oldsmobile that had followed him from Palmer Square to Attorney Ramsey’s residence was parked on the far side of the fence that separated the alley from the yard. Lathrop glanced at the car, then turned and looked at the rear elevation of the house. There was a light in the shade-drawn window of one of the second-floor rooms. As he watched, a shadow crossed the shade, moving from one side of the room to the other.

  The house was square and larger than he remembered it, built in an era when both lumber and labour had been cheap. When he was satisfied there was no way to get in or out of the building except by the front and the back doors, Lathrop walked back the way he had come and got a tyre iron out of his car. The iron felt good in his bare hand. Tapping it against his leg as he walked, Lathrop recrossed the street, mounted the sagging wooden steps and pushed the bell under the faded sign reading Rooms.

  He couldn’t hear either a bell or a buzzer. There was no sound or movement inside. He rapped on the door with the tyre iron. This time he heard movement. An inner door opened. Feet thudded down the hall. A moment later Vladimir, his blond hair touselled and mussed, barefooted, bare-chested, a pair of pants pulled on hastily, unlocked and opened the door.

  “Yeah?” the blond youth asked. His eyes were rimmed with heavy shadows. His breath reeked of prune whisky. When he recognized Lathrop, he ran the back of his hand over his eyes. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  Lathrop told him. “I’m calling for my wife.”

  Vladimir used the back of his hand again, to wipe his mouth this time. “You nuts or something? It’s five o’clock in the morning.”

  “I know.”

  Vladimir attempted to shut the door. “Go on. Beat it. Wilma isn’t here.”

  Lathrop blocked the closing door with his foot. “Then you won’t mind my coming in for a moment.” He forced the door open and closed it behind him.

  Obviously roused from a deep sleep, the blond youth shook his head as if to clear it. “How come the cops haven’t got you? You were on every channel before I went to sleep.”

  Lathrop studied the blond youth’s face. However deeply he was enmeshed in this thing, Vladimir hadn’t been let in on the last act. Vladimir didn’t know he was supposed to be dead.

  “Maybe I’ve been lucky,” Lathrop said.

  “O.K. So you’re in. What do you want?”

  “My wife.”

  “I told you Wilma wasn’t here.’

  “Then you won’t mind letting me go through the house.”

  “And wake up the old man and Vilna?”

  “I’m certain they won’t mind.”

  Vladimir wet his lips with his tongue. “Look. Take it from me, Lathrop. The best thing you can do is walk right out that door again.”

  “And let the police arrest me for two murders I didn’t commit?”

  “That’s what you say.”

  “I happen to know. I was there.”

  Vladimir hesitated, shrugged. “O.K. Take a look.” He gestured towards the lighted front room. “But I’m warning you, as soon as you leave here, I’m calling the cops. You must be a psycho to do what you did to a nice kid like Wilma, just because she made a couple of slips before she married you.”

  Lathrop glanced into the front room. The floor beside the chairs was littered with early editions of the morning paper. An empty jug of prune whisky was standing on top of the unlighted television set. There were three glasses on the end tables, none of them smeared with lipstick.

  “Suppose we try another room,” Lathrop suggested. “Go ahead. You walk in front of me down the hall.”

  Vladimir had turned on the kitchen light but the blue-painted hallway was dark. He started to protest, looked at the tyre iron that Lathrop was gripping, then changed his mind and led the way down the hall.

  The kitchen was even messier than it had been when Lathrop had seen it last. Both the plain deal table and the sink held dirty dishes. The egg stains on the two plates on the table looked fresh. Lathrop stuck a finger into the amber liquid left in one of the coffee cups. The dregs in the cup were lukewarm.

  Lathrop looked at the door of the bedroom opening off the kitchen. The door was closed but a light that hadn’t been lit when he’d walked down the areaway showed under the bottom of the door. “Suppose we look in there next,” he suggested.

  Vladimir shook his head. “No dice. Vilna is asleep.”

  “Does she usually sleep with the light on?”

  “You know how some folks are.”

  “I’m beginning to learn,” Lathrop said. “Believe me, this affair has taught me a lot that I didn’t learn in college, or in the army for that matter. Funny, the light in that room wasn’t on when I walked down the areaway a minute ago.”

  Colour flooded Vladimir’s sallow cheeks. “You son-of-a-bitch. Spying, huh? I thought I heard a noise.”

  “Do you open the door or do I?”

  Vladimir looked at the tyre iron in Lathrop’s hand. “O.K. So things are a little irregular between Vilna and me. It’s no one’s business but our own.”

  “Open the door,” Lathrop said.

  His sunken eyes sullen, Vladimir opened the bedroom door. The feeble-minded girl was awake and looking at the ceiling, a contented smile on her face. There were two pillows on the bed. Vilna’s head rested on one. As Lathrop watched her, Vilna looked at Vladimir and mewed contentedly.

  The colour in Vladimir’s cheeks deepened.

  “Get out. If you don’t, I’m going to call the cops.”

  “You do that,” Lathrop said.

  He turned at a sound in the kitchen. The larger of the two men who had left him in his car to die was standing in front of a narrow flight of stairs leading to the second floor.

  “You son-of-a-bitch,” the man said. “You educated son-of-a-bitch. You’re a hard man to kill.”

  Lathrop gripped the tyre iron so hard the metal bit into his hand. “So it would seem.”

  From behind him, Vladimir said, “No rough stuff now, Charlie. You promised.”

  The man he’d called Charlie motioned with the revolver he was holding. “Drop the iron, Lathrop.”

  Lathrop dropped the tyre iron.

  Vladimir picked it from the floor. “Has she told you where the stuff is?”

  “Not yet,” Charlie said. “But she will.” He looked back at Lathrop. “I couldn’t believe my ears when I heard your voice down here. Pete and I thought you’d be knocking on the big gate by now.”

  Lathrop shrugged. “It’s not your fault I’m not.”

&
nbsp; “No,” Charlie admitted, “it isn’t. Now we have to do the whole thing over again. And that was such a perfect set-up. How did you get out of your car?”

  Vladimir was puzzled. “What are you talking about?”

  Lathrop answered for the man Vladimir had called Charlie. “I don’t think,” he said, “that you quite realize what tough company you’re in, Vladimir. This thug and his pal sapped me unconscious a few hours ago and left me in my car with the motor running and a garden hose attached to the exhaust.”

  Vladimir wasn’t shocked. “That was smart. I get it. When you were found in the morning the cops would think you had knocked yourself off on account of you were sorry for what you did to Wilma.”

  Lathrop said, dryly, “One hundred per cent correct. That puts you on the honour roll. Now suppose one of you take me upstairs and let me talk to Wilma.”

  Charlie continued to be amazed. “I can’t get over it. Don’t tell me you were fool enough to come here alone?”

  “Of course not,” Lathrop said. “I brought six squad and four riot cars with me. They’re standing out in front. And there are two dozen uniformed officers sealing off the alley.”

  Charlie grinned. “Who do you think you’re kidding, teacher? You didn’t dare contact the cops. You’d be in a cell right now if you had. But just to make sure — ” He called up the stairs without turning his head. “Hey, Pete …”

  The second man appeared at the head of the stairs. “Yeah?”

  “I want you to take a look around outside.”

  “And leave Wilma alone?”

  Charlie was amused. “She won’t run out on us now. She won’t even try. She won’t even open the window and yip. She knows what will happen to her man if she does. And this time we won’t give him an easy out like that set-up in the Forest Preserve.”