Conspiracy of Silence

by S. T. Joshi

  “That’s what I’m still trying to figure out,” I said. “You know, he said that you were fooling around with his wife.”

  Crawford burst out in a guffaw. “What a bunch of bull! I may like the skirts, Scintilla, but I do draw the line somewhere. I don’t say Florence wasn’t nice to look at, but to go after your own sister-in-law is beyond the pale of even my questionable morals. Anyway,” he added a bit sheepishly, “she really wasn’t my type.”

  “Any chance Granger had something to do with James’s confession?”

  “I can’t see how,” Crawford said, face screwed up in bafflement. “I could swear he was as dumbfounded as I was when he told me the news. And as for Mother, I couldn’t get a word out of her. It’s almost as if she wanted him in jail—for what possible reason, I can’t say. He was supposed to be the savior of the family—and now he was going to rot in jail for decades, maybe forever. What gives? It makes no sense.”

  “So you think your mother knows something?” I asked.

  “She has to. She took all these events too calmly, as if this was exactly what she wanted to happen. She’s a tough old bird, Scintilla—a kind of spider whose web has caught us all. She hates it that I have something over her—the mere fact of my existence—and I wouldn’t be surprised if she had some hit-man come after me if she thought my gouging her for money got to be too much. . . . In fact—”

  He looked at me a bit sheepishly.

  “In fact,” I picked up, “you thought I was the hit-man.”

  “Well, yeah,” he said with that crooked grin of his. “At first I thought you might be a copper, but what kind of copper would go to this much trouble to prove that someone wasn’t dead? So the next thing that occurred to me was that you were here to . . . get me out of the picture. Eliminate me. Erase me from the map. Get rid of this fly in my mother’s ointment.”

  “A not unreasonable conjecture,” I admitted.

  “Yeah, you’re telling me. It was something I had to live with for twelve years. Who knows but that one day some guy would come along, knock on my door, and say ‘Are you Frank Crawford?’ I’d almost forgotten my real name in all that time. As the years passed and nothing happened, I figured I was in the clear . . . but I could never sit comfortably. In the back of my mind there was always the thought: ‘Someday, somebody’s going to come after me. And then—look out!’”

  He looked up at me with the closest thing to an apology he could manage.

  “Sorry for trying to blow you away. But you gotta understand my situation. I was happy down here, and didn’t want anything to spoil that.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” I said offhandedly.

  “So”—nervously—“what happens now?”

  “That’s up to you,” I said shortly.

  “Oh, c’mon, Scintilla, don’t give me that bull. All you gotta do is go back and turn me in and the whole jig is up.”

  Once again, his face collapsed in defeat and self-pity as he envisioned the demise of his cushy life south of the border. No more free money, no more señoritas—or, for all I knew, señoras—willing to share his bed, no more of whatever else he did to fill the gaping days and months and years out here in this microscopic village on the rump of the United States of America.

  “Crawford, I can keep my mouth shut,” I said. “There’s no reason for me to spill the beans to anyone but to my client. She has to know—she’s paying me to find out what’s going on here. What she does with that information is her business. I’m sure she likes you well enough, but her main concern is to get her dad out of jail.”

  “But”—and Crawford turned fiery again, almost unhealthily so—“James doesn’t want to get out of jail! Don’t you see? He went there of his own free will. He wants to be there.”

  “Why?” I said simply.

  That brought him up short. “How do I know? I’ve never understood what made him tick. Why don’t you ask him?”

  “Oh, I intend to,” I said.

  Chapter Fourteen

  But first things first.

  There’s no point dwelling on the long, tedious drive back to El Paso, or the long, tedious flight back to Bennett Field. I needed at least a night to get the dust of Texas out of my mouth—and also to brace myself for what would no doubt be a couple of tense days shaking the truth out of people who had flatly lied to me or, at the very least, been a bit frugal in the “whole truth and nothing but the truth” schtick.

  And then there was Lizbeth to deal with. I should have guessed her reaction when I told her the upshot of my trip south of the border.

  She quite literally danced a jig.

  Then she threw her arms around my neck and planted a wet kiss on my mouth.

  She continued to cling to me as she peered into my face with an appraising smile, as I tried to get the scent of her perfume out of my nose.

  “Why, Joe Scintilla,” she chirped, “I do believe you’re blushing.”

  “I don’t blush, lady,” I said gruffly.

  Of course, I didn’t tell her the whole story—especially the part about Frank Crawford trying to blow my head off, or the Mexican babe he must have had holed up in his place when I came knocking on his door. But the mere fact that he was alive and kicking was enough to send Lizbeth into a tizzy of delight.

  “I knew I was right!” she kept saying over and over again. “I just knew it!”

  “How did you know?” I asked quietly.

  She stood stock still and looked at me with wide eyes.

  “Oh, I don’t mean I knew about this whole business of faking Uncle Frank’s death and sending him down to Mexico,” she replied hastily. “Up till the time you . . . um . . . dug up Frank’s grave, it never occurred to me to think that he was alive. I thought he’d just died of natural causes . . . but even then, talking with my father year after year in prison, I felt that he was covering up something.

  “You see, Joe”—she looked at me intensely—“I was the only one who ever cared about my father. Everyone else”—she choked up suddenly—“seemed content to let him rot in prison. It’s like it was a penance for something . . . but for what? Whatever it was, it was not for killing Frank—that seemed to me so obviously a put-up job that I just couldn’t swallow it. And then, when you found that grave empty, I knew Frank must be alive somewhere. And now you’ve found him!”

  She gave me a broad smile, as if I were now her favorite uncle.

  “OK, Lizbeth,” I said, “but we . . . I still have some work to do. This case isn’t solved until we figure out why your father took responsibility for a murder he didn’t commit . . . for a murder that didn’t even happen. That part still makes no sense.”

  Her euphoria quickly turned to pensiveness.

  “I know,” she said reluctantly. “I don’t understand that either.” She looked up into my face. “You’re going to have to talk to him again, aren’t you?”

  “Sure I am,” I said. “But there’s someone else I need to talk to first.”

  “You better get Dr. Granger out here right away,” I said briskly to the secretary.

  She looked at me, first with outrage, then with alarm, then with something akin to fear. Without a word, she stumbled out of her chair and retreated into the inner office without a backward glance.

  In a few moments Granger walked out, obviously irked.

  “Scintilla,” he said, “you’d better have a good reason for bothering me again. I’m a professional man, and I have many patients relying on my expertise.”

  His bluster wasn’t going to get him anywhere this time. In any case, his waiting room was, at this particular moment, entirely empty.

  “Granger,” I said heavily, “I think I have a pretty good reason for being here. Let’s go back to that night of March 19, 1924. Are you aware that someone saw you giving a hypodermic injection to the prostrate body of Frank Crawford?”

  It was as if I’d electrocuted him. He staggered back against door of his office; if the door hadn’t been closed, he would have t
umbled into it.

  “Wha-what did you say?” he almost whispered.

  “You heard me.”

  I’ll give him credit: he recovered quickly. “What of it?” he barked out. “I thought he’d suffered cardiac arrest. I gave him a shot of adrenalin to try to restore his heart action.” By this time, he was fully in command, once again the high-class medical professional. “Obviously I failed, but that’s because Frank Crawford was beyond the point of recovery.”

  “Oh,” I said blandly, “I wouldn’t say that. I had a nice chat with him a few days ago in Mexico. He seems to be doing just fine.”

  Maybe it was a low blow, but I had to break him down. And I did.

  If he hadn’t clung to the doorknob, he would have collapsed to the floor. Gruffly saying to me, “Get in here,” he opened the door and almost shoved me into his office, slamming the door almost in the face of his startled secretary.

  He staggered to his padded chair behind the desk and almost fell into it. Then he covered his hands with his face.

  I sat calmly in the chair opposite the desk and waited.

  Finally he looked up at me. All the blood had drained from his face. At that moment he probably looked more like a corpse than Frank Crawford had done in that charade of a funeral service.

  “Scintilla,” he said hoarsely, “what do you want from me?”

  “Just the truth, Granger.”

  “The truth?” he almost wailed. “What is the truth? I still don’t know what that whole business was about. . . . I was just obeying orders, Scintilla. OK, maybe that’s not much of an excuse, but it didn’t seem harmful at the time. After all, no one was really dead . . .”

  “But Eva Dailey died a little later,” I reminded him.

  “Hey, I had nothing to do with that!” he snapped. “Her death is not on my conscience! It may be on Frank’s or James’s, but not mine. You can’t pin that on me!”

  “I’m not trying to pin anything on you,” I said a bit wearily. “Just tell me what happened.”

  “I tell you,” he said almost in a whine, “I don’t know what happened. That is, I don’t really know why this whole business had to be arranged the way it was. All I was asked to do—and believe me, Scintilla, I didn’t take a dime of the Crawfords’ money; I didn’t need it and I didn’t want it—was to give Frank a heavy dose of morphia to immobilize him, and make sure that the police didn’t do their own examination. That was the easy part. After that, we carted Frank off to the undertaker—whose palms, I’m sure, were liberally greased—and the whole farce was perpetuated. The fact is, I kept having to give Frank additional doses of morphia over the next several days . . . and so when I came to revive him with adrenalin, I was a bit alarmed that he didn’t seem to respond immediately. But finally he came out of it, and he just walked out of his coffin and lit out for Mexico.

  “But to this day, Scintilla, I don’t know why it had to be done that way. It was all James’s idea, and he somehow managed to convince us it was the best way.”

  “Is that so?” I said. “What about the mother?”

  “Helen?” he said with a puzzled look. “Well, yes, I think she knew about it . . . but James came up with the plan.”

  “Why?”

  Again he looked at me with a face almost twisted in bafflement. “What do you mean, why? He just wanted Frank out of the way. I guess both he and Helen had determined that Frank would really never be a Crawford in the fullest sense of the term, and now with this trouble with Eva, they must have figured that the best way was to make him vanish.”

  “But why not just have him leave for parts unknown? Why go through this cumbesome fake-death scenario? That’s what makes no sense to me.”

  Granger paused before speaking. “Well, Scintilla, I’ll be honest and say it didn’t make all that much sense to me either. But somehow James and Helen convinced us this was the way it had to be.

  “But you gotta understand, Scintilla . . . the plan was not to have James pretend to have killed Frank! That was really a shot out of the blue. . . . You could have knocked me over with a feather when James came out with that line to the police. But I could tell he was dead serious—he wanted to confess, and he wanted to go to jail. And of course I couldn’t do anything: if I said that Frank wasn’t dead and that the whole thing was just a trick, a con, a put-up job, then all kinds of bad things would have happened. I would have lost my license, my practice, everything!”

  He looked at me pleadingly, as if he was in my power.

  “How did Helen react,” I said, “when James made that confession?”

  “It’s pretty hard to know what’s going through her head,” Granger said. “She’s a tough woman—been through a lot, and worked like a demon to keep that family together. To be honest, I don’t recall any reaction at all from her at all. She just took it in stride.

  “She isn’t a lovable woman, Scintilla. She may be rich, but the family she’d married into has been a constant trial to her. I don’t think she ever got over the death of her eldest son, Bill. He was always her favorite. Ever since then, she seemed to go around with a look of anger and grief on her face. I wonder if she ever smiled after that . . .” He trailed off.

  “So she might have known that James was going to make that confession?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Yes, I suppose she could have.”

  “Could she even have put him up to it?”

  “Why would she have done that?” he said in puzzlement.

  “That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” I said.

  He considered for a moment. “I suppose she could have. But I just don’t see what purpose that would serve. He was now the eldest son, running the company, or at least in charge of the family’s finances and standing in the community . . . and you better believe this incident caused the Crawfords a pretty serious blow to their social life. I don’t think they were invited to parties or dinners for years thereafter. Of course, people gave way in the end . . . money does that. But to this day, people think there must be something wrong with that clan.”

  “Well,” I said, “I don’t doubt that there is something wrong with that clan. And I need to find out what it is.”

  There was nothing for me to do but to go to the source. I began planning for another trip to Rahway.

  I would have gone the next day if I didn’t learn that Lizbeth had been kidnapped.

  Chapter Fifteen

  It was pure luck that I got the notice as early as I did. That morning I trudged to my office to take care of some paperwork relating to another job; without that work to occupy me, I would have headed out for Rahway at the crack of dawn. Instead, I found, in the morning mail, the following letter—if it could be called that—enclosed in an unmarked sheet of paper:

  DROP THIS CASE IF YOU WANT

  TO SEE LIZBETH ALIVE

  The writing was in plain block letters; the writer had used a blue fountain pen in a hand that seemed to shake slightly.

  The first thing I did was to pick up the phone and call Thornleigh.

  The phone was answered by Joseph, whose voice was almost shrill with consternation and worry. It didn’t take me long to find out the essentials of what had happened.

  “Is Lizbeth missing?” I barked.

  “Y-yes, sir,” Joseph stammered. “Taken in the night. . . . The whole household is in an uproar . . . .”

  “Have you called the police?”

  “Yes. They’re here now.”

  “Good. Keep ’em there. I’m coming right away.”

  Stuffing the note and its envelope into my pocket, I flew out the door and into my Ford. I had no choice but to take the Miller Elevated Highway, the western backbone of Manhattan, up to the still new George Washington Bridge, which had opened only five years before. Across the bridge, I roared through Englewood, Teaneck, Hackensack, and what seemed like dozens of other deceptively placid communities until I finally came to the southern outskirts of Pompton Lakes. At this point I floored the pedal until I ski
dded recklessly into the interminable drive up to the front door of Thornleigh.

  Police cars were littered like untidy children’s blocks near the entrance, and I nearly rammed one of them in the back in my haste to pull up and get out in one motion. My pounding on the door raised a thunderous din within, but in seconds Joseph had opened the door and let me in.

  What I found was pandemonium. Servants seemed to be running around to no apparent purpose; Florence Crawford was collapsed on a sofa with her head in her hands, weeping loudly; police were everywhere, hardly less confused than the servants; and, to my surprise, Dr. Nathan Granger was on the scene.

  So was Frederick Taber, the Pompton Lakes police chief. I went up to him.

  “What can you tell me, Taber?” I snapped.

  He looked me up and down for a second and was on the verge of saying something he might regret; but he settled for: “What’s it to you, Scintilla?”

  “Lizbeth Crawford is my client, Taber. I need to know what’s going on.”

  He relented grudgingly. “I don’t know much more than what I’ve been told. Miss Crawford was apparently seized in her bedroom a little past one in the morning. Some of the servants heard a scuffle and maybe a scream, but this house is so huge that no one could immediately figure out where the disturbance was coming from. By the time they realized it was from Miss Crawford’s room, she was long gone.”

  “Have you been to that room?” I asked.

  “Yes, of course,” Taber replied with some asperity.

  “Let’s go there.”

  I waited for him to move. Once again he looked me over; then, with ill-concealed irritation, he led me off to the west wing.

  To my surprise, Lizbeth’s bedroom was on the ground floor. It was a spacious room, and every object in it spoke powerfully of her presence, not least the faint trace of her usual perfume. The furniture was slightly disarranged, but somewhat less than I had expected; the bedcovers had been pulled violently back and were partially on the floor, and a chair seemed to be knocked over, but otherwise the place seemed to be in good order.