Escape Artist efm-2

by Ed Ifkovic

  I ran my tongue into my cheek. “But you’re not married yet.”

  Gustave scoffed. “And on the basis of that you accuse me?” He looked at Cyrus P. Powell. “Why not Mr. Powell? He’s unmarried.”

  Powell grunted. “Hardly a crime.”

  “Other things point to you, sir.” I looked into Gustave’s eyes. “A second ago it came to me when I was thinking about Frana wanting to be an actress. You might have promised her that life. She couldn’t stay away from the Lyceum, true, but you made a point of telling me that you’d discouraged her a number of times. You said she often came with Kathe Schmidt. Well, it just hit me. Kathe told me she’d been here once, a visit that so unsettled her she wouldn’t go again with Frana. Yet you said she came a number of times. I’m thinking that Frana came alone, pleaded with you. A gorgeous girl, and attractive to you, Mr. Timm. Prettiness means a lot to you. The way you flirted with my friend Esther that time we stopped in at Houdini’s rehearsal, telling her she should be an actress. Outrageous.”

  “Miss Ferber.”

  “Let me finish my thought,” I insisted, fiercely. “I came away from that evening angry, thinking you shallow. I think you have a penchant for pretty girls, and Frana was certainly that.” I glanced at Mildred, who’d turned pale. “Alone-no Kathe with her-you flattered and eventually seduced her, promised her escape. That unbelievable tale of the man with the New York apartment. You’re the ideal older man. In theater. A young girl’s dream come true.”

  “But you have no proof.” He was looking at Mildred.

  “True, but I always thought it curious that you and Homer Timm didn’t live together. Then I understood the tension between you two, the dislike. Two brothers ending up in Appleton, both coming out of the East, yet not living together. Homer chose Mrs. Zeller’s rooming house; you chose a solitary cottage by the river, out on the Flats, isolated, in the shadows of the mills. Homer would have difficulty conducting an illicit affair at the rooming house, especially under the eagle eye of Mrs. Zeller. You, Gustave Timm, had privacy galore.”

  “Nonsense!”

  “Miss Ferber,” Mildred interrupted, “Gustave and I are together constantly. I think I’d have known if he…he wandered…”

  “And just how would I have arranged to meet that young girl in that storeroom? Lord, the day before I was in Milwaukee. You can check that. I was negotiating a contract. I got back late at night. And the next day she’s missing. No one got near her, as you know. Her uncle was a watchdog.”

  I started to feel faint again.

  Gustave spoke to Sam Ryan. “This is your reporter, sir? This foolish young girl who spins funny tales to sully men’s names, first my brother, then me.”

  Mildred swallowed a sob.

  Sam cleared his throat. “Miss Ferber, you do seem a little hasty here. Perhaps you need to reflect…”

  “Stop!”

  We all jumped.

  Homer Timm spoke in a softer voice, “Just stop.”

  “Stop indeed!” Gustave echoed his brother.

  “No, Gustave.” Homer’s voice was grave. “I can’t do this anymore.”

  “Homer.” Gustave warned him.

  “Enough of this. A girl is dead, and I believed you when you said you had nothing to do with her murder. But now I don’t.” Homer looked at me. “A young student, Miss Ferber. I shut my eyes to something horrible, and now it’s too late.”

  Homer adjusted the front of his frock coat, smoothed the edges of his moustache. “I can’t go on protecting Gustave.” Gustave lurched toward his brother, his face flushed with anger, but Mac grabbed the wiggling Gustave, one beefy palm on the squirming man’s shoulder. “I believed Gustave when he said he had nothing to do with the girl’s death. But I wondered. He swore to me. He said he had a new life. He was in love with…with Mildred. He was getting married.” Homer glanced at Mildred. “I never understood what that was all about. I never believed it.”

  “Homer, I’m warning you…” Gustave’s voice broke.

  Homer rushed his words. “You see, Gustave had to leave home back East because he’d had an incident with a fourteen-year-old girl, accusations, an arrest that was squelched, someone paid off, promises to leave town. Our mother wrote me, pleaded with me. I wanted nothing to do with it. There were other episodes along the way, covered up, ignored. Each time he said he’d reformed. He learned about the job at the Lyceum, applied, got it, I suppose, because of me. I had to. He’s my brother. Cyrus hired him.”

  Mr. Powell broke in. “Homer, you lied to me.”

  “No, no. I said he’d been in some trouble and…”

  The man stomped his foot, furious. “An outright lie.”

  Homer closed his eyes for a second. “I was so afraid. I watched him. I’d seen that girl at the Lyceum, I’d seen other young girls, and I’d seen Gustave flirting, flattering, and I worried. I warned him. When she was in my office, I tried to ask her questions, but she never said anything. At night I’d leave the rooming house, sneak up to his home, watch”-Mac made a clicking sound, nodded triumphantly at me-“but I saw nothing most of those nights. I just walked and walked. Every so often I spotted him walking. I was going crazy. I couldn’t sleep, so I followed him, afraid of what he might do. There were nights he wasn’t home, and I searched for him. I didn’t trust him. But I couldn’t be everywhere. When Frana died I asked him, and he said no. He may have had liaisons with young girls way back when, but he would never kill them, he said. And that made sense to me. It did.”

  Gustave twisted his body and looked toward the stage door. Mac tightened the grip. “I wasn’t around. How would I…”

  Homer held up his hand. “No more, Gustave. No more. You scare me. I watched you. You walked the streets and I didn’t know why. One night my brother followed you, Miss Ferber, as you walked home. I was there. Afraid.”

  Mac spoke up. “I was there, too.”

  Homer went on. “I didn’t want to believe murder but I started to suspect. All the yammer about actresses and Broadway-it sounded so Gustave. When I saw Miss Ferber coming out of the back door of the high school, I felt she’d get to the bottom of it. I was afraid something was going to happen to her. You were close,” Homer said to me now. “I didn’t want it to be my brother. Up until that moment I believed him. I’d even hoped this charade of getting married was real. But somehow, with you standing there, I thought-oh God, no! It might happen again.”

  “Gustave.” Mildred Dunne’s voice broke.

  Homer looked at his brother. “Now I’m sorry. A young girl got strangled…”

  “I didn’t do it.”

  “Yes, you did. That afternoon, after the hysteria at the high school when I told you a girl had disappeared and no one knew how, there was something about the way you looked. You knew something. I asked you about that afternoon. I said I’d seen you strolling by the fountain near the high school. I was lying. Of course, I didn’t see you, but you said you were meeting Mildred at the end of the school day. Still, I told myself-no, no. He can’t kill anyone.”

  Silence.

  Homer’s voice trembled. “It’s over, Gustave.”

  Mildred spoke up in a small voice, breathless. “Gustave, tell them he’s mad. Tell them.”

  Gustave faced her, but kept quiet. He looked like a little boy, terrified. At that moment I wondered how Gustave had found the courage to…I stopped, out of breath.

  I needed more information.

  “Wait,” I said. “Miss Dunne, did Frana stop at the library the day before she disappeared? Perhaps with her class?”

  Mildred didn’t answer.

  “I’m assuming she did.”

  “So what?” A frigid glare.

  “Gustave was in Milwaukee. I would hazard a guess that you communicated with Frana that afternoon, perhaps slipped her a note from Gustave. You knew of Frana’s…predicament. Gustave had no other way to reach her. You were ready with a letter.”

  Mildred faltered, pale. “No.” She searched for an explanation.
“It’s not what you think it is. Yes, I had Gustave write a note, but a note telling her to stop her foolishness. She was hounding poor Gustave, hanging around him, moonstruck, wild-eyed. She made lurid accusations about him. To me. I told him to write a letter telling her to stop the nonsense. A letter that would threaten to involve the police.”

  “Why didn’t you tell the Chief of Police this?” I kept my face blank.

  “Because we thought to say anything would be incriminating. It would look bad, such a note a day before the murder.”

  Gustave spoke. “I would look guilty of something.”

  I had enough. “Miss Dunne, just what…”

  I stopped. Gustave stretched out his hand toward me, not belligerently but in surrender.

  Silence in the room. No one moved. The image of Houdini’s eyes, hypnotic, pinned us all in place.

  Then Gustave spoke, his voice resigned. “Leave Mildred out of this, please. For God’s sake, Miss Ferber.” He bit his lip. “It was her fault, really. Frana’s. She pursued me. Actress this, actress that. And she was so pretty, so delicate. I couldn’t stop thinking about her. They do that to me, you know. It’s not my fault. It was her fault. She threw herself at me. One night she came to my home, and one thing led to another. I thought-all right, a little liaison, a European affair. I thought Frana would marry that dumb lummox she talked about, the football player. She brought up marriage, which surprised me, so I said, yes, of course. It was just talk. She kept saying, look at me. Mildred is rich but I’m real pretty. I’m…”

  He swallowed. “I thought she’d go away. And then she said let’s go to New York. The stage. My connections.” He laughed. “What connections? I don’t know a soul. I avoided her. I pleaded with her. But she understood me, and she flattered me. She had a way about her, so soft but so…so iron-like. Frana…so beautiful…so…so fragile…such a woman.” He closed his eyes.

  “But why did it go so wrong?” Sam Ryan asked.

  Gustave waved him off. “She was carrying a child. I said to keep it quiet, for God’s sake. But she couldn’t do that. Everything was spinning out of control. I made her promise to keep my name a secret, but I couldn’t trust her. She kept asking if I’d told Mildred yet. Then she told me her family knew, and they were going crazy. They locked her up. She couldn’t sneak out at night the way she’d been doing. She insisted I visit her father.”

  “How did you know about the secret storeroom?”

  “I stumbled on it. I was bored, waiting for Mildred one afternoon, watching the students rehearse onstage. All the pretty girls. Mr. McCaslin asked me to get a screwdriver from the janitor’s room. It was not well lit, so I tripped, falling into a small table. I saw the latch. It intrigued me. Another day I checked it out. Well, there it was, a secret space that opened onto a busy hallway with a simple twist of the knob. I got excited, thrilled. I used to slip inside, crack open the hallway door, and I’d spy on girls, unseen. The only person I told about it was Frana, who thought it stupid. Once, just as I closed the panel and latched it, the janitor walked in, seemed surprised to see me standing there. I reached for a broom and he just nodded.”

  Gustave paused, drew a shaky breath. “Then they locked up Frana at home, the crazy uncle in control, and I panicked. One night, before they barred the window, she slipped out of her house. That night I said we couldn’t get married, and if she was having a baby, she should say it was her football boy. She went crazy. She threatened to tell her family about me, tell everyone I was the one.”

  He glanced at Mildred, whose eyes were moist and half-closed. “I knew what I had to do, but I didn’t know how to contact her. I’d told Mildred how Frana was driving me crazy, the flirtations, following me around. She said we needed to write her a note, tell her in writing to stop. Threaten her with the police. But I wrote a different letter, sealed it, and Mildred slipped it to her that afternoon. I was in Milwaukee.”

  “Gustave.” Mildred’s voice was flat. He wouldn’t look at her.

  “I planned the escape. I told Frana to write that letter supposedly from her uncle, slip it onto the secretary’s desk the next morning, destroy my letter, and meet me that afternoon around two, watch for the door to open. We’d run away. Late that morning I stopped at Homer’s office, dropped off a note for Mildred, and managed to drift in with the students until I got down to the auditorium. I had to hide in that hot, brutal room for hours, waiting for two o’clock. I’d closed the panel latch but stuck a piece of wood so I could spring it open. And then Frana was there, all excited. We ran off. She was laughing so hard. ‘You love me, not her,’ she kept saying. She actually thought we were getting on a train to New York.”

  He paused and seemed lost in thought. When he spoke again, his voice was a whisper. “I got crazy and grabbed her. The next thing I knew she was lying there, dead.” He twisted his body again, a hand brushing the stage door, but Mac tightened his hold on him. Gustave flinched. “You know, I had no choice. She chased after me.”

  Something was wrong. I felt it to my marrow. Gustave’s long confession seemed rehearsed, a performance. His last lines, delivered in a whisper, struck me as false. Now he turned to face Mildred. She was staring at him, her expression one of anger mingled with disgust. She stood there, monumental, in that doorway, her fingers gripping the doorjamb. He gave her a thin smile.

  “Miss Dunne,” I began, now seeing it. “This is not the whole story. You saw your plans for a longed-for marriage sabotaged by a foolish little girl. Perhaps this weak man mentioned that Frana expected marriage, that she was carrying his child. A scandal, your name bandied about town. Perhaps that witness who saw a young girl running off with a man also saw you and Gustave returning. He said a couple. Perhaps you helped plan…”

  Sam Ryan spoke up. “Miss Ferber, perhaps we’d best not go there.”

  “But…”

  “Miss Dunne is a member of an old Appleton family and…”

  Mildred’s face turned scarlet as she sputtered, “How dare you?”

  “I dare.”

  Sam interrupted me. “Miss Ferber, stop this now.”

  Mildred Dunne’s hand tightened on the doorjamb.

  “Who had the most to lose?” I asked the men. “Mildred.”

  Gustave was looking at me, his gaze unfocused.

  I went on. “I keep thinking of the witness who saw that man and woman walking back. At one point the man was leaning against a tree, and the woman pushed him. Perhaps the man was bothered by what…”

  Sam, wishing away the unthinkable: “He said the woman was laughing loudly.”

  “That doesn’t defeat my argument.”

  And he thundered. “Miss Ferber, please. Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?”

  Quiet in the lobby. The line stunned me, not because it was comeuppance but it made me recall Fannie’s hurling the same remark at me. I’d said those words to Kathe, and Fannie, attacking me, had said, “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?”

  In a rush of images, I recalled Kathe’s conversation. I’d asked her why she wasn’t with Frana that afternoon and she’d told me she was in the library. She’d described a boisterous scene, the clown Johnny Marcus joking about Frana’s captivity, the other students chiming in, adding to the joke, even Kathe, disloyal, barking her laughter.

  “You left the library that afternoon, Miss Dunne,” I said.

  She didn’t answer, but I could see her face twist, her eyes question.

  “Miss Ferber, stop.” From Sam.

  “Kathe talked of all that noise. You famously demand silence there. You condemn those who whisper. You must not have been there. Where were you?”

  She sputtered. “I…”

  I raised my voice. “You never leave the library unattended. Riots will follow, laughter, tomfoolery.”

  A small voice, laced with fear. “A meeting. Mr. Jones called a meeting…I had to stop in his office…a second.”

  “I guess if we question the principal about this meeting you had at two in the afterno
on he’d deny it. I hazard a guess…”

  Mildred began to speak but her words were garbled, thick. We all waited. Slowly, that one fierce hand still gripping the doorjamb, she looked from me to Sam to Mac. When her eyes caught Gustave’s, they hardened. She looked ready to lash out, but then the hand slipped from the doorjamb, fluttered around her face, and her head started to roll back and forth, a doll’s head with the wiring snapped.

  “Stop her,” she mumbled so low I thought I hadn’t heard it. She started to sob in short, hiccoughy gasps, and then closed her eyes. “Gustave…backed off…unable. And she was standing in front of me, taunting. ‘Why are you here? He loves me, not you.’ Laughing, foolish, her hands on her belly, mocking me.” She shot me a sharp look. “I slapped her. The next thing I knew she was lying there at my feet.” Her voice swelled, hysterical. “It wasn’t supposed to happen. Finally I was going to be…happy.” A deep wail escaped from the back of her throat, a trapped animal’s cry. “Wrong, all of it. All…Why? I was promised…Why?”

  Suddenly she started to rock against the doorjamb, arms flailing, head bobbing. She still spoke but the sounds she made were dark noise. She hugged her chest, seemed ready to topple. That awful moaning unbroken now, she disappeared back into the office, and I watched her drop into a chair, her arms still wrapped around her chest, her body rocking, rocking, rocking.

  When I turned my eyes away from Mildred Dunne, I expected to see the men staring into the room at the distraught woman, the sad woman who had just confessed to the unthinkable. I expected someone to go to her, someone to summon Chief Stone. But no: the men were all staring at me, and the look in their eyes was one of reproach and disapproval. Sam, with a face I’d never seen before, was shaking his head back and forth.

  In the other room Mildred Dunne was beating her fists against her chest. Her careful pompadour had unraveled; long strands of hair covered her face like a veil.

  At that moment Homer sobbed so loudly we all turned toward him. He covered his face with his hands and slowly sank to the floor, his legs stretched out before him. We watched as he crumpled up, but my eye caught the magnificent poster of Houdini in the display case. Powerful, fierce, resolute, brilliant, Houdini’s muscular physique dominated that space. And under it lay a shattered man, loose-jawed, a man in pieces.