Conspiracy of Silence

by S. T. Joshi

  I tried another tack. “What about this business of Frank ‘making advances’ to Florence Crawford, his sister-in-law? You put any stock in that?”

  Franklin shrugged quickly. “How the hell do I know? I knew nothing about that family. I wasn’t exactly in their social register.” That sneer again. “I wouldn’t put anything past people like that. They think they can do anything. If Frank wanted to squeeze his brother’s wife, that was his lookout.”

  “And what’s the deal with Eva Dailey?” I said.

  Franklin’s face screwed up in a puzzled frown. “Who?”

  “That was Frank’s real squeeze . . . or one of them. You must remember that, surely.”

  “Maybe,” he said . . . doubtfully.

  “She killed herself a couple of months later. Right here in town. Does that ring any bells?”

  His face cleared somewhat, but then lapsed into bland indifference. “Yeah, OK, it’s coming back. Straight suicide. Nothin’ much there.”

  “She was pregnant, if you’ll recall.”

  Franklin shrugged again. “Yeah, so what? Dames like her get knocked up all the time. Maybe it was Frank’s kid, maybe someone else’s. And maybe she was so cut up about losing the father of her baby that she offed herself. Nothin’ much there either.”

  I got up heavily and thanked Franklin for his time and information. I guess I really hadn’t hoped to get much out of him. But I had another lead.

  The police report on Eva Dailey said that her body had been claimed by a sister, Maureen. A quick check of the Pompton Lakes city directory at the public library gave me her address. It was time to see whether I could figure out how—or whether—Eva fit into this whole business.

  Chapter Four

  “Are you Maureen Dailey?”

  The blowsy woman who stood in the doorway of the cramped apartment on Van Ness Avenue struck me as a pretty tough nut to crack. A big-boned, not especially attractive redhead, with glinting green eyes that immediately narrowed as she caught sight of me and heard my question, she stood like a rock and looked me full in the face, her big breasts and thick legs making her seem like a particularly intimidating figurehead on a ship. If a heavily armed tanker could have a figurehead, this would be it.

  “Yeah. . . . Who wants to know?”

  Whether or not she’d ever had trouble with the police, I got the impression she may have had difficulties with other enforcement authorities—like bill collectors.

  “Joe Scintilla. Private investigator.” I held out my card, but Maureen looked at it about as briefly and uninterestedly as Myron Franklin had. “I wonder if I could talk to you about your late sister, Eva.”

  At the mention of her name Maureen’s green eyes blazed bright for a moment, then subsided into doubt and suspicion again.

  “What’s this about? Who are you? What do you want from me?”

  It was impossible to answer all those questions at once, so I just said: “I’m investigating the death of Frank Crawford. I believe Eva was . . . involved with him.”

  That might have been the wrong thing to say. Maybe Maureen mistook my meaning, for she lashed out at me:

  “Whaddya mean, ‘involved’? You blamin’ her for knocking him off? Where do you get off sayin’ somethin’ like that? He knocked Eva off . . . or he might as well have done, even though he was dead. His brother did him in, mister, and that’s all I know.”

  She started to slam the door in my face, but I stuck a hand out and stopped it in mid-path.

  Without raising my voice, I said, “Miss Dailey, please let’s talk about this. I’d like to get to know what was behind it all. I’m aware that your sister . . . took her own life, and I know that she was probably carrying Frank’s child. . . . I’m sorry about all that; I know it must have been very tough for you.”

  It’s as if all the air had been let out of a balloon. Maureen Dailey almost collapsed in front of me. She clung to the edge of the door with both hands, tears began to flow at once from those piercing green eyes, and she almost fell to her knees.

  “Oh, God, copper”—I didn’t bother to correct her mistake as to my profession—“it’s been so hard. . . . Little Eva was the world to me. She was all I had! Parents long dead . . . and then my little sister snuffs herself out!” She looked up at me, with the most plangent expression of pain and bitterness I’d ever seen. “Do you know what it’s been like these last twelve years, mister?”

  “I can imagine, ma’am. It must have been tough.”

  Eventually she backed away from the door, letting it open fractionally. I figured that was my cue to enter.

  Maureen Dailey’s apartment was in what might be called the fair to middling part of Pompton Lakes. Not the haven of derelict shacks like that ex-police chief’s, but many steps down from the grandeur of Thornleigh, a brief glimpse of which I had caught along the drive to this place. The apartment itself was little more than a one-room affair with a kitchen alcove. It was clean enough, but had more stuff in it than a place twice its size ought to have had. Maybe Maureen had had to gather up her late sister’s effects—and couldn’t bear to part with them.

  I sat down on a couch that had only one space for human occupancy, the rest taken up with boxes, knick-knacks, and other paraphernalia. Maureen made to sit in a wing-backed overstuffed chair nearby, but almost immediately got up and began foraging in an open cardboard box on the floor.

  She fished out a couple of photographs and handed one to me.

  “Wanna see her?”

  I nodded and took the snapshot. It showed a surprisingly delicate countenance, nothing like Maureen’s brassy face. Here was a girl who looked shyly, almost fearfully into the camera—one of those people who look perpetually timid, as if apologizing for their very existence. I couldn’t quite tell the color of the hair, but it looked auburn, and framed the face flawlessly. The features were, as I say, delicate—heavy-lidded eyes, smallish nose, lips slightly parted, somewhat pointed chin. There was a fairy-like quality to the overall expression, as if she were a sprite who had unwittingly flitted into the world of men and was looking for a way out again.

  I don’t doubt that a man so keen on female company as Frank Crawford was reputed to be would have fallen for a face like that.

  “That’s her,” Maureen said unnecessarily. Then, less irrelevantly: “Just about a year before she . . . died.”

  She swallowed hard and handed me another photograph.

  This was a shot of Eva and a man—“I took that one,” Maureen piped—that had to be Frank. He certainly looked like the fun-loving, devil-may-care playboy type: a huge grin on his face, twinkling eyes, cowlick of dark hair falling down across his forehead and almost into his eyes. It was just a head shot of the two of them, but you could tell that he had his arm around Eva, and his cheek snuggled against hers. She still looked a bit shy and embarrassed—perhaps because of this public display of intimacy—but there was a twinkle in her eyes.

  “So this is Frank?” This was my unnecessary comment.

  “Yeah,” Maureen almost snarled. “That low-down two-timer! . . . What am I saying, two-timer? He probably had a bevy of squeezes holed up on every street in this burg!” She continued to fume as she looked down at the picture.

  “So you knew Frank?” I said.

  “Sure, I knew him,” she replied. “Met him lots of times. Eva was my baby sister, after all. I tried to warn her about him, but by the time I figured out what kind of a guy he was, it was too late. She was hooked . . . star-struck. It was as if Valentino had dropped down from a cloud and said, ‘Be my baby, Eva!’

  She finally sat down heavily in that wing-backed chair and, after a pause, went on: “Get a load of this, shamus. They met at a restaurant where Eva was a waitress—and Frank was with another girl at the time! Can you imagine a fellow flirting with the waitress while his current tomato is sitting right there next to him? Well, that’s the kinda guy Frank was.” She wrinkled her face to think and remember, almost as if she was doing a problem in differ
ential equations. “And yet, it was as if Frank was a kind of overgrown kid, just playing with everything life had to offer. And, for someone like him, what it had to offer was a lot of women.

  “Money?” she went on, talking almost to herself. “He had lots of money, but didn’t really seem to care. It was just there—no need to waste what little brainpower he had over where to get it and what to do with it. He was lucky to be born into a wealthy family, because he probably hadn’t the faintest idea how to make a living. Just a big kid.”

  “When did they meet?” I asked.

  Maureen shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know . . . maybe a year before . . . maybe in 1923. Eva was barely twenty-two, Frank not much more, I gather. He already had a reputation as a skirt-chaser, but that didn’t matter to Eva. After that first meeting in the restaurant, he came back the next day and asked the manager about her—and, I figure, probably greased his palm to give out Eva’s address. She lived not far from here.”

  She sighed heavily before going on. “Oh, I suppose Frank cared for her in his own frothy way—he wasn’t just trying to get a good lay, if you’ll pardon my coarseness, copper.” I couldn’t figure out why Maureen kept misconstruing my occupation: maybe to her a copper and a shamus were pretty much the same thing. “He could get that wherever he wanted. Those Crawfords are like kings around here—and Frank was like a crown prince coming down amongst the common people. All he had to do was curl his finger and any number of dames would gladly jump into his bed—and I’m sure they did.

  “But I’ll give him this much credit: he treated Eva well enough, until . . . right at the end. Took her to places she’d never been, gave her lots of presents, sweet-talked her like you’d never believe—it was pretty nauseating sometimes.” She stuck out her tongue to clinch the point. “But it wasn’t an act—I could tell. He really was sweet on her. And of course Eva fell for him like a ton of bricks. I mean, who in her place wouldn’t have?”

  She looked at me with narrowed eyes. “You gotta understand something, Scintilla. My family don’t hang around with people like the Crawfords—except to be their maids and bootblacks.” Her tone had descended to bleak self-pity. “Our parents came from Ireland, and we were poor there. They were lucky even to get through Ellis Island before the immigration laws cracked down on people like us. They lived in Hell’s Kitchen in Manhattan for a decade before they had the sense to get outta there into a place where you can at least breathe. Not that they, or we, could do much better here. Eva got that waitress job just because of her pretty face and figure—I could see how that lowlife manager looked at her out of the corner of his eye. She was a little wisp of a thing—Frank Crawford could probably have picked her up with one hand, and probably did—but she had a heart bigger than his or any of that high-falutin’ family of his.”

  She bent toward me, eyes shining and nostrils flaring. “You know the real culprit here, copper? It was that witch of a mother . . . what the hell was her name?”

  I could help her out. “You mean Helen Ward Crawford? The mother of Frank and James Allen Crawford?”

  A sneer marred her face. “Yeah, that’s her. Helen Ward Crawford.” She pronounced her name as if she held it against the woman that she had three names. “You know the type: Nothing and no one is good enough for my sons. She only allowed James to marry because his wife came from a well-to-do clan in upstate New York—nothing like the millionaire Crawfords, but close enough to their league to be acceptable. That dame was a piece of work, too, let me tell you . . . but that’s another story.”

  I was surprised at how well Maureen Dailey seemed to know the inner workings of the Crawford clan, but didn’t make a point of the matter. I began to suspect that this was a case where I’d learn the most just by letting people talk. What they said, how they said it, and most importantly what they didn’t say could make all the difference.

  Maureen went on: “Well, you can predict what happened. As soon as Helen Ward Crawford, Mrs. High-and-Mighty, learned that her precious youngest son had hooked up with a lower-class Irish waitress down in the village, she blew her top. Demanded that Frank stop wrapping his arms around his savory piece of flesh.” I couldn’t believe Maureen would speak of her own sister like that, even sarcastically. “And, again to give just a smidgen of credit to Frank, he stood up to his battle-axe of a mother . . . even went to the extent of saying he was gonna marry Eva, and dared his mama to cut him off without a penny, or whatever it is that rich people do in cases like that.”

  “He said that?” I said sharply. “He said he was going to marry Eva?”

  “Yeah, sure, he said it,” Maureen said. “At least, that’s what he told Eva and me he’d said. But who knows what that meant? Maybe he was just being an unruly kid—just teasing his mother to see how far he could push her.” She shook her head so hard that her flaming locks fluttered around her face. “I don’t think he meant it—or at least, I don’t think he ever planned to go through with it. For one thing, Frank had other . . . action going on. Get my drift, copper? I think he was seeing at least two other women at the time, although maybe they were just bedmates. I mean, Eva was a bedmate too—he seemed to get a kick out of spending nights over at her postage-stamp of an apartment, kinda like a king going out in disguise and shacking up with the peasantry—but she was more than that. I could tell.”

  “So,” I said gently, “that baby . . . was Frank’s?”

  Maureen almost exploded: “Of course it was! Whose else? You think my sister slept around? No way, pal! OK, she wasn’t the best Catholic in the world, but she did draw the line somewhere! She’d put all her eggs in one basket—it was Frank or no one. I don’t know if she really expected Frank to marry her, but she at least expected him to provide for her, and her child, in some way. When it became obvious that wasn’t going to happen, she”—Maureen choked up suddenly—“she took the only course she thought was open to her. . . .”

  I said nothing for a few moments; then: “Didn’t . . . didn’t Eva try to get the Crawford family to provide . . .?”

  Once again Maureen blazed with anger. “Oh, she tried—but I told you, Eva was just a scared little girl. How does a girl like that stand up to a clan as powerful as the Crawfords? That mother—and James Allen Crawford too, for that matter—looked at Eva as if she was some kind of pest that had to be eliminated. There was no way they were going to yield an inch—or a penny. I think one of them even gave her the name of their family doctor . . . and you can guess what for.”

  Maureen sighed loudly, then put her hand up to her face. I could tell there were tears there. Again I kept quiet for a time. Then I said:

  “Miss Dailey, do you really think James Allen Crawford killed his brother Frank? And if so, why? James claimed that Frank was fooling around with his wife, Florence. Do you know anything about that?”

  Once more, rage got the better of her sorrow. “How the hell do I know? I wouldn’t put anything past Frank . . . or that whole family. I wouldn’t put it past that James guy to have knocked his own brother off just to get him out of his involvement with my sister.” I started, not having thought of that angle at all. “That Florence broad wasn’t much of a looker, but to someone like Frank that didn’t matter. Anything in a skirt would do for him.” She paused a bit to get a grip on herself. “But, for what it’s worth, I think that’s barking up the wrong tree. I can’t say as I knew the ins and outs of that goddamn clan, but Frank had enough action on the outside without risking getting his butt kicked going after his own sister-in-law.”

  She had a point there. “But then,” I said, “why would James say something like that? Do you really think he even killed his own brother?”

  Maureen shrugged, as if she’d lost all interest in the matter. “I wouldn’t be surprised at anything he did. He was an odd one, that James. It was like he felt the weight of the world was on him. The guy never laughed, or even smiled. With the eldest brother gone, it was as if he thought of himself as the linchpin of the whole family—without him, it wou
ld just collapse. He knew Frank was a light reed—couldn’t be relied on for anything. And he was right about that! But . . .”—and here again she paused as if puzzling over some inscrutable conundrum—“it doesn’t make much sense for him to knock off his own brother. I mean, what’s the point? And this thing about Frank making a move on James’s wife—I don’t buy that, and I don’t buy that James would kill over something like that. He was a guy who really held his emotions in check—he had the bearing of a military man, and I think he wished he was one. No way he could have committed a crime of passion like that.”

  Everything Maureen Dailey had said struck me as pretty sensible in its hardscrabble way. She may have been embittered at how the Crawford family treated her sister, but she saw things clearly and even sharply—she was a good psychologist. Her tale held together.

  If she was lying about anything, she did it with a flair.

  I thanked her and left.

  So where was I? The most troubling part of the case was the sloppiness of the police investigation—and yet, what Myron Franklin had said about the kid-gloves treatment that a family like the Crawfords would expect to receive in a town like this made a certain sense. As for what Maureen had said, if her tale was even partly accurate, then it seemed fabulously unlikely that Eva Dailey had somehow taken it into her heart to kill the man she had obviously become enamored with; she had held out the forlorn hope that he would do the decent thing and marry her, and held on to that hope until his death had canceled it in no uncertain terms. Unable to stand up to the united front the Crawfords had apparently put up, she had done what she thought was the decent thing and taken her own life, so that the world would have one less unwed mother—not to mention a bastard child—to worry about.