Tussard and Raymonds had gone away shortly before, by way of the Nineteenth Street stage door. She didn’t know this.
First to come stalking out of the office towards her was that elderly, clean-shaven Jupiter in the Savile Row furnishings—the great Lord Broghville. He was angry, or amused on a celestial scale, or merely in a Jovian hurry with his thunderbolts clutched in a strong gloved hand. Behind him came the clerk-like Holcomb, and behind him, the unruffled Lowes Levison like a broadminded raven. Ann got up from her chair, confronted them. Not one (as Bennett marked with an approving eye) to slink or simper or sniff in girlish diffidence, Ann went immediately for what she wanted.
Louis Holcomb said, “Hello! Gosh, I forgot you were waiting, Miss Crofts. Awfully sorry to—”
She waved aside his apologies. “Hello, Louis. Doesn’t matter. Hello, Lowes. Tell me, has Hobey Raymonds been up here yet?”
“He just went out a few minutes ago.”
“I only ran over because—“ she frowned, then smiled to cover up the implications of the frown “—because Hobey’s such an idiot. I was worried about how he’d make out.”
“I’m sure Hobey isn’t mixed up in this.”
“Everybody,” said Ann, “is sure of the same thing about everybody who was up here last night. It’s just that—that Hobey’s such an idiot. Tony Suttro promised to put in a word for him. And I thought it wouldn’t hurt if I saw you. Thanks a lot, anyhow...”
Geoffrey Bennett, mild as the morning now, had stopped with Levison to wait. He observed the tailored suit, the small cleft in Ann’s firmly graceful chin, her brown eyes, aventurine, direct, soft, and unembarrassed. When there was opportunity, he intruded with gentle benevolence, surprising, like an old lion begging for sugar. “Miss Crofts, I presume?”
Levison took on the responsibility of an introduction. Ann said, “How do you do? I thought I saw you here last night. I suppose you’re the reason for those reporters downstairs?”
“Alas, I am. Unfortunately.”
Ann, wondering about Broghville, where he fitted, what influence he had, how he was disposed, slipped into an excellent Schiaparelli attitude with a hip slightly canted, an elbow cocked. “Reporters and reporters. One of them’s an awful mess of a woman from the Mail, one of these people you find brooding over kitchen sinks at parties.”
Levison said, “That woman? We were taking Mr. Bennett to a taxi. Running the gauntlet with him.”
“Don’t stop for me,” Ann said. “I have to run along myself.”
Bennett had the most charming and innocent manner in the world. He bowed, and with the greatest ease and naturalness offered his arm. He said, “Dashed if I mean to take lunch alone. Perhaps Miss Crofts would care to join me?”
Smiling, she said, “At least I can save Lowes the trouble of coming all the way down. There’s no need for them to see you out, because I can take you past the reporters without a bit of trouble. I don’t know about lunch. I left Aunt Emma minding the shop, and she gets frightfully sour if she has to wait for me very long.”
“I’m sure,” said Bennett, “that Aunt Emma won’t mind at all. Where shall we go?”
2.
Because the enemy were massed about the office entrance on Eighteenth Street, Miss Crofts thought that the coast along Nineteenth Street might be clear. It was. They came out of the stage door and discovered Nineteenth to be empty except for a truck loaded with paper boxes and a discouraged Italian selling bananas from a push-cart. They made their way east to Moore Lane, a narrow thoroughfare which separated Moore House from the Theatre, and led to the quiet and serene quadrangle of Chelsea Court. In view of the conspicuous bulk and dignity of the personage she had under her wing, Ann Crofts was careful to keep an eye out for reporters. Demure little shops, most of them not yet occupied, lined the sides of Moore Lane. In Chelsea Court there were much larger shops, and the windows of these were filled with all manner of things, shoes and shirts, silver and silk and sweets, in tasteful profusion. Chelsea Court divided Moore House into slender twin towers, that on the north serving as a hotel, and that on the south as an apartment house.
And this is the heart of the Chelsea Project. It is much as if you said to yourself (Geoffrey Bennett did), “Someday men will build wonderful cities such as we scarcely have the audacity to dream about today; clean, tall, compact, beautiful cities; not some mere modified smoky hotch-potch of various buildings conforming to the devil knows what mixture of frantic schemes and swindles”; and saying this to yourself, you looked up to the sky and saw just such a city confronting you and glowing coolly above you in the confusing, noisy heart of New York.
Highest in the Chelsea development are the central forthright immaculate towers, the Moore House skyscraper, facing Eighth Avenue. Behind them stands the bulk of the Chelsea Opera House and Academy of Music, a squat structure, but not unpleasing. North of this block is the high Clarke Building, divided equally into large dwelling apartments on the west, and business offices on the east. This flanks Moore House and the theatre on the north, and in a like position on the south rises De Lancey College and the Chelsea Athletic Club, which, urbane, simple, sharp and clean like its twin, the Clarke Building, establishes an architectural balance to the west, and on the far side of Ninth Avenue, the Livingston School of Architecture and Fine Art, now barely completed, completes the project. There are terraces to catch the sun and deep subterranean garages for storing motor cars. The Project as a whole, a brave and exciting reality, and, as Bennett thought, quite unmistakably the fine vision you would dream.
Praise and misprision would be paltry, and quite beside the point. You might as well think good or evil of the moon. Geoffrey Bennett, having traveled a great distance (this makes for detachment) and being scholarly (this sharpens a sound critical attitude) and being old enough to have a just sense of proportion as well, came at once upon the very simple truth. To carp about beauty or its lack in this seventh wonder, was a little frivolous, like decrying railway engines because there aren’t flowers planted all over them. Bennett was used during his not entirely colorless life, to appraising the accomplishments of men; their bridges, that is, and battles, their loves, monuments, parlor sofas and poems and Sabbath social devices; and at the sight of the Project in the golden May noon, the silver buildings brilliantly sharp in a light blue sky, he was excited and exalted. So much so, that he would have stumbled over his own walking stick if Ann Crofts hadn’t steadied him.
“Sorry, damn it! Clumsy of me!”
“Think no more of it.”
“Keep my arm, that’s better, my dear. May I gape as we go?”
These unembellished shining galleries in the air; green terraces and gardens; unearthly huge halls and concourses, pavilions, restaurants, and sunny decks; all these lift themselves with amazing sanity to the sky, and swim serenely there...[A New World’s City, by Anthony Suttro, pp. 87 et seq.]
And on the ground there are shops, and hedges along Moore Lane, and sounds of splashing water from the bronze globe and the swiveled fountains in Chelsea Court. In a room on the highest roof of Moore House tower, you are assured, you may take tea.
Ann Crofts kept a lookout for reporters, in the droves of bemused passers-by. Bennett sniffed at a tobacconist’s shop. She led him down the Court, where he boggled in passing before the windows of an art importer, and then past the freshness of the pouring arches of water in the Fountain. Chelsea Project this noon purred like a drowsy but well-functioning young tiger in a warm sun, and moved suavely to its regular complex rhythm. Life ran swiftly and conveniently, yet softly, without raucous voices or sudden loud bangs. The whisper and click of shoes inside the doors, the murmur along the stone passages of the Lower Court, the low hum of their voices (in the Public Library or Free Art Museum tradition) resembled the whisper of a large and well-bred river going unhurriedly in several directions at once.
The Lower Court was an underground square, lighted from above through glass paving blocks in Chelsea Court. In shape and ge
neral appearance it duplicated Chelsea Court in a luminous cellar, but where skyscrapers slanted overhead in the upper quadrangle, vague cloudy blobs of strollers wandered in the lower.
The shops, too, were less pretentious here. Bennett and Miss Crofts descended to the Lower Court by a handsome marble stair, adorned with bright golden balustrades representing in enormous figures the Signs of the Zodiac.
“Let’s try it in here,” said Ann Crofts. “There won’t be many people, I hope. I’ve never been here before.”
It was, according to a greenish Neon sign, the Lounge Grill of the Moore House Hotel above. There were gold chairs, and tables lacquered Chinese red, and orange walls, and large mural dragons with chromium-plated scales. Ann chose an inconspicuous corner. Bennett said, “Ah, the tinsmith’s delight!”
Ann said, “Do draw up a mechanistic chair,” and they sat down.
People in the streets looked into Lyon’s window or stared at the model of the Queen Mary; or poured by the thousands into the cool Chelsac Theatre or swarmed about their business in the offices or dreamed, a handful of them, from the peak of Moore House over the flat misty spread of the Five Boroughs and New Jersey, and Miss Crofts said, “No soup. I’d rather have a dry Martini.”
“Do have a dry Martini. I shall take one, too. Ask for them, if you don’t mind. Do you know, Miss Crofts, this is the only country on earth, where I am even slightly aware of my language. It is universal, English, isn’t it? Except in America, that is? Extraordinary exception, don’t you think? Your people look at my mouth, you know, almost as if it were a difficult trick and they wished to see how it was done, or as if I might at any moment imitate rare birds, or take out my teeth to show to them. The Chinese and the French and the Pamians and Arabs and Russians expect me to speak my tongue. But Tussard, last night, seemed a little astonished, and even annoyed. Disconcerting, I assure you.
Perhaps you people are the only true foreigners left. Ah, this is a Martini?”
“Yes.”
They had the place entirely to themselves. Other than waiters, there were only a formidable, hairy old man and his wife, sitting over some long drinks and pink canapes at the opposite wall.
3.
Looking over the edge of her cocktail glass, Ann Crofts thought: shall I plunge right into it, or shall I lead him on with preliminaries, like a horse to water? He is like a horse. An elderly race-horse, or a battle-charger, whatever that is. No vices, and can be trusted with ladies and children. Sound of wind and limb. He’s far too big an animal to be sitting on such a little chair. There isn’t much use trying to make him think I’m not inquisitive, when I am. And I’ve got to know.
“What in the world,” she asked, “were you doing with Holcomb in Mr. Christien’s office today? If you don’t mind my asking?”
“Not at all. Visiting.”
“Oh?”
“Exactly.”
“To tell the truth, I’m trying to get out of you what happened to Hobey Raymonds.”
“I feared so. Blunt.”
“What did they say to him?”
“They said he was a nice chap indeed, and then they said he was an intolerable, ruddy young fool. They seemed inquisitive about his coming into the theatre at the time of the murder last night. And he seemed reticent. I think that’s all, really.”
“He didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“Ah? Why did he come there, pray?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’m sure you do, Miss Crofts.”
“I ought to have said, I don’t want to tell you, and I don’t know how to explain it so you’d understand.”
“Precisely. But I do understand, you know.”
“Then don’t let’s talk about it.”
“It will have to be talked about, my dear, before this case is done.”
“Hobey didn’t have anything to do with that dead man, and I can prove it, because I sat in the hall, and I’ll swear I didn’t see him or anybody else cross it to go to the terrace. I had nothing else to do, besides watch that hall, you know.”
“And you?”
“Me? Why me?”
“Why? I’m sure I don’t know why. I merely asked because you encouraged me. Cards on the table, that sort of thing. Why were you in the Chelsac Theatre last night? Calmish sort of girl, I didn’t think you’d mind the question. Indeed, I thought you wanted to talk about it. We seemed almost to be sitting down to good solemn brooding on the subject of crime.”
“Oh, I’m innocent enough. I had an engagement with Tony Suttro.”
“What time?”
“Eleven. You see, it was a misunderstanding. I thought I had an engagement. But he hadn’t got my message. Tony was to have taken us to meet some people who could help my aunt in business. I called his office, he wasn’t there, but they told me he had this meeting at the theatre offices at eleven, so I left word I’d meet him at the stage door then. I brought my aunt. I met him coming up the street.”
“Quite plausible. It was raining then?”
“Yes, hard.”
“You went up to the offices with Mr. Suttro?”
“He asked us to wait for him. He didn’t know what the meeting was about, but he thought it wouldn’t last very long. He asked us both to come up with him. My aunt wanted to wait outside instead. She had to come in out of the rain, though, so she sat just inside the door, by the elevators.”
“Inside the stage door, I believe? Of course. Why did you go up, and why did she remain below?”
“I went up because Tony asked me to, and it looked silly to say no. My aunt had her own ideas.”
“Does she like Mr. Suttro very much?”
“Not very much, I’m afraid.”
“Why?”
“He’s done her favors. You know how it is. And she has a foolish grievance against the Chelsea Project.”
“Did Mr. Suttro seem so unimpressed by the gravity of the meeting in Christien’s office? You said, I think, that he expected it to last only a short time.”
“He seemed to think it was a kind of bother to go to it, that’s all. He couldn’t think of any reason why it should keep him more than a few minutes.”
“Your aunt interests me very much. Enterprising sort of lady, I should say. Why has she a grievance against the Chelsea Project?”
“It’s terribly silly.”
“No matter. I’m very discreet, Miss Crofts, really.”
“Oh, it isn’t a secret. Aunt Emma tells everybody she meets. She once had a scheme, you see, for making over two of the old brownstone houses that used to stand on these streets. These particular houses were on the south side of Nineteenth. She wanted to put gardens in the yards, and then furnish the rooms to match the flowers in the garden and in the window boxes. Then, of course, we’d rent the rooms. However, they tore down the houses to build the Chelsea development. My aunt isn’t very far-sighted; she’d paid for an option on the furnishings before she found out whether or not she could lease the houses. She paid a great deal of money for the option, far too much money. She has a very poor idea of how things are done. Naturally, she couldn’t go ahead with the scheme, and she lost her option on the furnishings, and she tried to sue the Project for the money she lost. Absolutely hopeless, of course. Now she’s very bitter about it. She doesn’t like to go inside the Theatre, particularly when she’s feeling grouchy. Of course, we have a shop in this place now, right here in the Tower Court, and that makes it very much more unreasonable. You can’t understand it very well unless you know my aunt. She’s so—contradictory. But there it is.”
“She was, as you call it, grouchy? Last night, I mean?”
“Yes. In a way, it’s excusable, Mr. Bennett. The money meant a great deal to us, and when you try to laugh it off, you can’t help remembering how much you’d like to have it back. It sticks in her crop, you know.”
“Dare say the police asked about the grievance?”
“Yes, they did. I know they think there’s something odd a
bout us, about my aunt and me.”
“Why?”
“The questions they asked. They ask you things over and over, and come back to them after you think they’ve finished with you. They want to trap you.”
“They can’t, I assure you.”
“It’s a nasty feeling, really, being suspected. Neither my aunt nor Hobey went through the hall to the terrace, Mr. Bennett. Believe me, they didn’t.”
“Is there some doubt, then?”
“Tussard doesn’t believe me. He has a theory, you know.”
“What theory, pray?”
“He thinks I was covering my aunt. He said she went past me through the hall, and out on the terrace, to spy in the window at the meeting. According to him, she wanted to revenge herself on the Project, and find out some secret if she could, and make them pay us back the money we lost for keeping quiet about what we had learned. And this crippled man found her there at the window, and she killed him because she was frightened at being caught—”
“Preposterous. That leaves the dead man’s presence unexplained.”
“It’s so awfully ugly, to be told those things, just the same.”
“Your aunt, however, was established at the stage door.”
“She was, but she ran after Hobey, and nobody knows where she went. Hobey and my aunt were up in the building somewhere, and they only can give their words for it, that they didn’t go to the terrace. And my word. And that’s not worth much, because there’s nobody to give his word for me. I might have gone out on the terrace. Or I might be swearing to save my aunt, or Hobey. That’s why I asked you what they said to Hobey this morning, and what he said—and you didn’t want to tell me. That’s what makes it seem so—”
There was a Crooked Man Page 9