Hoch's Ladies

by Edward D. Hoch

  Susan sighed and pushed him gently on the chest. “Look, Mike, you’ve got a wife back home and I’ve got Russell. I have no intention of getting involved with anyone else. You’ve tried this two nights in a row. Don’t try it a third time.”

  She turned and entered the elevator alone, not waiting for him. Later, after she’d slipped into her nightclothes, she went to the window to peer out at the traffic. Mike Brentnor was just crossing the street, walking quickly away from the hotel. She wondered where he was going.

  Susan had arranged for the taxi to pick them up at the same time the following morning. Mike Brentnor seemed tired and subdued, and she made no comment on the previous night’s events. “Sleep good?” he asked once they were under way.

  “Not bad. It’s certainly quiet around here.”

  The driver, who seemed to consider himself one of the party by now, chimed in. “This is Friday. It’ll be noisier tonight. Reykjavik is a two-night town—Friday and Saturday.”

  “So I’ve heard,” she answered. She stared out at the bleak countryside, wishing there were more trees. Soon the mill came into view as it had the previous morning. Happily, there were no police cars in view.

  “We’ll phone you when we’re ready to come back,” Brentnor told the driver.

  “I’ll hang around,” Culhane offered. “It’s a slow morning.”

  They had to wait only a few minutes before being ushered up to Bjorn Arnarson’s office. He seemed better in all ways than he had the previous morning. Shaking hands with them both, he asked, “Have you been enjoying your visit to Reykjavik?”

  “It’s very nice,” Susan told him. “It could be a little warmer, though.”

  He nodded. “We still have snow to the north. It will stay till summer. Have you seen any of our nightlife?”

  “I saw a little,” Brentnor admitted. “I tried one of the discotheques last night. It was pretty tame.”

  The older man chuckled. “What do you expect from a country that had no alcoholic beer until 1989?” He opened the folder on his desk. “But now, down to business. What are your needs for the Christmas season?”

  Brentnor opened his own briefcase and extracted a typed proposal. He passed the original to Arnarson with a copy to Susan. She saw the figures for each item in the company line, some of them running to twelve gross. It was a large order. “Could you deliver these in New York by September?”

  “I believe so, but the prices you offer are too low for some items. You know, Mr. Brentnor, that our top-quality sweaters could bring more than two hundred dollars each in Manhattan. I have been there. I know the prices at Christmas time.”

  “The economy—”

  The company president wrote down a few quick figures on his pad. “For delivery on or before September thirtieth, these would be the prices. I could make some concessions, of course, for a two-year contract.”

  The dickering went on like that for another twenty minutes before a compromise of sorts was arrived at. Arnarson called in his secretary and told her to type up the formal agreement. “Two years,” Brentnor grumbled. “You drive a hard bargain.”

  “I have confidence in you, and in Miss Holt here. You will make Yggdrasill the toast of New York.”

  He offered them a bit of sherry to seal the bargain, and each drank a polite sip. Then they departed with handshakes all around. “You will have our chairman’s signature on the agreement within a week,” Brentnor promised, zipping the papers into his briefcase. It was a minute after eleven by the reception-room clock as they left the building and started across the lot to where the taxi waited.

  But something was wrong. Culhane was out of his cab, head down, running toward them. For an instant Susan thought the man must be out of his mind as he hit them at full speed and dragged them to the pavement. Then she heard the single crack that sounded like a pistol.

  “I know shooting when I hear it!” he shouted. “Keep your heads down!”

  “What’s happening?” Mike Brentnor demanded. “Who’s shooting?”

  “Damned if I know.” He covered them with his body.

  Susan lifted her head enough to see three figures wearing ski masks run from the office next to the mill’s main entrance. “What is it—a robbery?”

  One of the masked men, holding a pistol and a large plastic sack, seemed to look their way but kept on running toward a small car that had suddenly appeared, driving fast to meet up with them.

  “It’s Friday. They were after the payroll.” Culhane rolled off them as the masked men jumped into the car and drove away at high speed.

  “It looks like they got it,” Susan said, breathing hard as she got to her knees and tried to brush off her coat. “This is peaceful Iceland?”

  “If that was the payroll, they’d better start paying by check,” Brentnor said. He scrambled to his feet as if about to give chase but the getaway car had already vanished from sight.

  It was Jon Jonsson, the company vice president, who was the first out of the building. “My God, did they get away? They have the payroll!”

  “You still pay in cash?” Susan asked.

  Distracted, he seemed barely to hear her. Culhane supplied the answer. “The hourly workers are paid in cash. Salaried employees get checks.”

  Bjorn Arnarson himself had appeared in the main doorway. “Jon,” he shouted, “what is it?”

  “They escaped with the payroll. Three masked men.”

  “A fourth was driving the getaway car,” Culhane corrected. “Is anyone hurt?”

  Jonsson had no answer to that question, so he and Arnarson hurried together toward the payroll department with Susan and Mike Brentnor trailing behind. “I heard a shot and looked out to see them running toward a car,” Jonsson said. “One was carrying a plastic bag.”

  Inside, Mrs. Schwartz was close to hysterics. “They had guns,” she cried. “I couldn’t stop them. I called the police as soon as they were out the door.” Some of the other women were trying to comfort her, but the company president insisted on hearing the whole story. “Tell me exactly what happened.”

  “I think they had the ski masks rolled up to look like caps. They pulled them over their faces as they came through the door. For an instant I thought they were machine operators coming for their pay, but then I saw the masks.” Her voice cracked. “And the guns! One man fired a shot at the ceiling. I left Germany to get away from this!”

  Jon Jonsson tried to comfort her while in the distance Susan heard the first sound of a police siren. “Did you recognize any of them?” he asked.

  “I barely saw them before they pulled down the masks. I couldn’t describe any of them.”

  “How much did they get?” the president asked. “All the cash. They knew right where to look.”

  Sergeant Oxara himself arrived in the first police car. He issued an immediate command for road blocks as soon as Brentnor and their cabdriver had given a description of the getaway car, then listened quietly to Mrs. Schwartz’s account of the robbery, confirmed by another woman who’d been working in the department.

  “The first one through the door fired the only shot,” Mrs. Schwartz told Oxara. “He seemed to be in charge. We both just froze and he directed the other two behind the counter to scoop up the trays of payroll envelopes. Then one of them went to the cash drawer and took all the big bills that were still in it. They even looked in the safe where we keep extra cash for emergencies.”

  Oxara turned to Bjorn Arnarson. “How much would that be?”

  “If they got everything it could have been around 95,000 kronurs,” the president replied. “We won’t know until we do an inventory.”

  “Is it covered by insurance?”

  “Of course.”

  Mike Brentnor, calculating quickly, whispered to Susan, “That’s more than one hundred and forty thousand dollars.”

  Sergeant Oxara glanced around at them, then back to the president. “How many people knew the money would be here?”

  “Just about everyone in
the city, I imagine. We pay our hourly workers every second Friday. There are nearly two hundred of them on the various shifts.”

  Others from the mill, including the manager, Hermann Steingrim, had crowded into the payroll department, and the sergeant finally ordered everyone out so fingerprints and photographs could be taken. “They won’t find anything,” Mike Brentnor predicted. “Those guys were wearing gloves.”

  Susan turned to their driver. “You may have saved our lives, Patrick. Thank you for the fast action.”

  “It was nothing, ma’am.” He gave her a smile. “Just part of my service.”

  They shook hands again with Yggdrasill’s president, and expressed proper outrage at the robbery. “It has been a bad week for us,” Arnarson agreed. “First the Kristjan woman’s murder and now this!”

  Suddenly it occurred to Susan that the two crimes might well be related.

  On the way back to the hotel she pursued her theory with Mike. “Don’t you see? Sjofn Kristjan worked in the payroll department with Mrs. Schwartz. Oxara told me it didn’t appear to be a sex crime, even though her underwear had been ripped. Someone wanted it to appear like a sex crime, but it was something else entirely. Mrs. Schwartz said the robbers knew right where to look. They knew because the dead girl told them. Then, with the actual armed robbery approaching, she either got cold feet or they were afraid she’d talk about it afterward. So they killed her Wednesday night.”

  “Since you’re not with the Reykjavik Police Department, what difference does it make? We’ll be flying home tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Maybe I should speak to Sergeant Oxara about it.”

  “And maybe you shouldn’t. Suppose they make you stay here as a witness of some sort?”

  “But I think—”

  “Oxara seemed fairly intelligent. I’m sure he’ll come up with the same theories as you.”

  “I suppose so,” she admitted.

  But back in her room she started expanding on her original thought. If Sjofn Kristjan had been involved in planning the robbery or supplying information to the gang, it seemed most likely it would be through someone with whom she was romantically linked. A boyfriend. That sort of thing happened all the time. It was not something she’d discuss with her family, but someone she worked with might remember a key fact—a phone call, perhaps, or even a handsome young man who picked her up one day after work.

  That afternoon, when she thought the police would have gone, Susan called the payroll department at the mill and asked for Mrs. Schwartz. When she heard the familiar German accent she explained who she was. “I was wondering if we could meet after work. I wanted to ask you about the girl who was killed.”

  “Not the robbery?”

  “Well, that too,” Susan admitted. “I’m at the Hotel Loftleidir. Would that be a convenient meeting place?”

  “Yes, I suppose so.” Her voice was tentative. “This won’t get me into trouble, will it?”

  “Of course not. I just have a few questions.”

  “I finish up here at four-thirty. I could be there fifteen minutes later.”

  “I’ll meet you in the lobby,” Susan said.

  Mike rang her in the early afternoon to suggest some sightseeing but she put him off. “I’ve got a headache from this morning. I guess I’m not used to being thrown to the ground while gunmen run by.”

  “Take a couple aspirin. I’ll check with you later.”

  She left her room by midafternoon to avoid another call from him, and spent an hour exploring the small shops near the hotel. In one she purchased a pair of bookends made from the island’s lava. The clerk told her that ten percent of Iceland’s total land mass was made up of lava, and Susan found herself thankful that none was flowing at the moment. A volcano eruption on top of a murder, a robbery, and Mike’s unwanted advances would just about finish her.

  She returned to the hotel lobby at twenty to five to find Mrs. Schwartz waiting for her. “Mr. Jonsson told me to leave early because of what happened,” she explained. “He’s a nice man, very considerate of the employees.”

  “Would you like some tea or a bit of wine?” Susan asked. “Some sherry would be nice.”

  When they were settled in the hotel’s lounge with their glasses, Susan worked into her questions slowly. “I gather things were unpleasant for you back in Germany.”

  “That’s true enough. I’ve only been here five years. I could see when the wall came down there would be trouble. All the poor from the east pouring into the west, and immigrants from Eastern Europe as well. In my town they killed a Gypsy family and I decided it was time to leave. I had a sister in Reykjavik so I came here. A year later she married the captain of a fishing boat and they moved to Nova Scotia. I’m still here.”

  “But you’re Mrs. Schwartz. Where is your husband?”

  “In prison back home. He was one of those who killed that Gypsy family.”

  “I see.”

  She took a sip of her sherry. “But you don’t want to talk about me. You were asking about Sjofn.” Away from the mill she seemed younger, more relaxed, even after what she’d been through that day. “What did you want to know?”

  “Did she have boyfriends?”

  “Of course. She was an attractive twenty-four-year-old woman. Why wouldn’t she have boyfriends?”

  “Did any of them ever come around to the mill?”

  She looked away, as if uncertain how to answer that. “For a while there was someone at work.”

  “Who was that?”

  “Steingrim, the plant foreman.”

  “The bearded man. He took us on part of our tour yesterday.” Susan wondered what to do with this information. “Did you tell the police?”

  “Not yet. They didn’t really ask, and I didn’t want to get him in trouble.

  He has a wife and family. Besides, it’s been over for some time.”

  “Who had she been seeing lately?”

  “I think there was someone but I don’t know who.”

  “Someone at Yggdrasill?”

  She shrugged. “Sjofn didn’t talk about it.”

  “Did you like her?”

  “She was friendly. I enjoyed working with her. We didn’t see each other outside of work.”

  “Could she have tipped off someone about the payroll money? From what you told the police it sounded as if they knew just where to look for the money.”

  “I can’t believe it was Sjofn.”

  They chatted a bit more about the city while she finished her sherry. Then Mrs. Schwartz said she really must be going. “I don’t even know your first name,” Susan suddenly realized.

  The woman smiled sadly. “It’s Myra.”

  “That’s a pretty name. You should use it more often.”

  She smiled. “My divorce will be final soon. Then I’ll feel like a woman again.” Myra Schwartz got up to leave, then remembered something else. Sjofn’s new boyfriend might have been someone at the mill too.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “I asked her once how she’d met him and she said he gave her a ride home one night.”

  When she returned to her room Susan found a message from Mike suggesting dinner at a nearby restaurant. She phoned his room and agreed to meet him in the lobby at seven. It was, after all, their final night in Iceland. “Is your headache better?” he asked as they met.

  “Much better, thanks.”

  They walked to the restaurant and ordered drinks. Mike Brentnor frowned at her across the table and said, “You’re playing detective again, aren’t you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I saw you in the lounge with Mrs. Schwartz.”

  “She seemed like a nice woman. I wanted to get to know her better before we went home.”

  “Do you think she’s involved in the murder and robbery?”

  “I doubt it. She seems quite nice.” Susan didn’t intend to share what little she knew with Mike.

  “Of course that girl’s killing might have nothing
to do with the robbery.

  She might have been attacked by some man on the prowl for a woman.”

  “Like you, Mike?”

  He almost spilled his drink. “What in hell are you talking about?”

  “You saw me with Mrs. Schwartz and I saw you sneaking out of the hotel last night.”

  “I went to a disco. Anything wrong with that? You can’t seriously believe I’d attack someone on the street. My God, Susan!”

  “I’m sorry, Mike, but you see how these things can look. I turned you down so you went out on the prowl. But Sjofn Kristjan hadn’t been sexually molested, and her death wasn’t a spur of the moment murder brought about by resisting a man’s advances. The killer brought a hammer to the scene, probably from his car. He meant to silence her, and chose the swimming pool because the night mists from the water helped obscure the scene.”

  “You should tell that to Sergeant Oxara,” he said, settling down a bit. “Perhaps I’ll tell the killer instead.”

  The food was good and when they’d lingered over dessert and coffee long enough, Susan said, “I have to get back to the hotel. There’s someone I have to call.”

  “Susan, don’t do anything foolish.”

  “I won’t.”

  She found Patrick Culhane waiting for customers outside the hotel. “Patrick, we’re leaving tomorrow but there’s something I need to do tonight. I want to call someone and then go to meet him. Will you take me?”

  “Glad to,” he said with a smile. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  She went up to her room and looked up the number in the phone book. When he came on the line she identified herself and said, “I have something very interesting to tell you. Can you meet me in a half-hour out at the Laugardalur pool?”

  “Where Sjofn Kristjan was killed.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I’ll be there,” he said and hung up.

  She sat on the bed for a moment, hoping she was doing the right thing.

  Then she hurried downstairs to the waiting taxi.

  As they drove toward her destination, Culhane said, “It’s a cold night. There’ll be lots of steam coming off that pool tonight. Who are you meeting there?”