Hoch's Ladies

by Edward D. Hoch

  Susan remembered something else. “While I’m here I’d like to speak with the chaplain if I could.”

  “Well, I don’t know about that. Let me ring up Warden Coyne.”

  Five minutes later, Susan met the warden. He was a bit older than DeMarco, and possibly a bit more intelligent. “I understand you’re a lawyer, Miss Holt.”

  “No, I never said that. I said I was working with Simon Feltzer. Actually, I’m in promotions.”

  DeMarco’s face reddened. “Then you can just promote yourself out of here, young lady! What’s your game, anyway?”

  “The truth. That’s never a game.”

  Warden Coyne removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Why do you want to see Father McGee?”

  “Whether it was suicide or murder, there has to be a motive. The chaplain might be able to suggest one.”

  The warden turned to Captain DeMarco. “See if Father McGee is available. She can speak with him here, in your presence.” He started for the door, then remembered to say, “I hope that will be satisfactory, Miss Holt.”

  “Perfectly.”

  DeMarco made the call and went back to his paperwork. Presently Father McGee appeared, a small white-haired man who spoke with a trace of an Irish accent.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Miss Holt,” he told her. “I understand that you know David’s brother.”

  “I’m working with him. I came in from New York to help with the merger plans.”

  “Yes, the merger. It’s big news here in West Caroline. I hope it doesn’t hurt employment.”

  “I’m sure it will benefit the entire region,” she answered diplomatically. “I was wondering if you could tell me anything about David’s last days. What was his mood like?”

  “Are you hoping to comfort his brother?”

  “Perhaps. Do you know Simon?”

  The priest shook his head. “Nor David’s wife. I never met either one. He talked of them, of course.”

  “Did he ever talk of the crime, of this girl Meagan Brady whom he kidnapped and killed? I’m not asking you to violate the seal of the confessional—”

  “David Feltzer never confessed to me. He was not a Catholic, though I think I was able to offer him some spiritual guidance. He told me he wanted to write out a statement when I visited him for the final time, in case he didn’t survive his execution.”

  “Didn’t survive—?”

  “David was not an educated man. He had an idea that if he took some sort of antidote before his execution it would counteract the effects of the lethal injection. He’d seen an old movie once on late-night television about a man who was revived after being put to death in the electric chair. I assured him the doctor would have to certify his death before his body was removed.”

  “So he was finally prepared to die?”

  “I think so.” Father McGee hesitated. “Comforting men like David Feltzer is a very difficult part of my job here. Like my Church, I am opposed to capital punishment.”

  “Would you have sanctioned his suicide?”

  “No, of course not.”

  Captain DeMarco stood up. “I think that’s all the time we can grant you, Miss Holt.”

  “I’m finished. Thank you, Father McGee.”

  “It was a pleasure speaking with you.”

  A guard escorted Susan to the front gate.

  By the time she returned to their hotel, Mike Brentnor had gone out again, leaving her a message that he was over at the Brookline store with Feltzer. It was getting past midafternoon and Susan opted to wait until morning for another business session. Instead she turned her attention to the scrapbooks she’d borrowed from Millie Feltzer.

  The first day’s reports of the bank robbery and kidnapping were sketchy. It wasn’t until the second day, when the press focused on the shocking nature of the crime and started more extensive coverage, that the paper ran a sidebar interview with the bank teller. The man had handed her a note saying he had a bomb and would blow them both up unless she gave him all her hundred-dollar bills. She handed over a dye-pack triggered to explode in two minutes.

  He’d made it to the parking lot when it went off, enveloping him in red dye and smoke. Teenaged Meagan Brady, on her way into the bank, had been grabbed as a shield by the robber and forced into his car. When the state police apprehended David Feltzer that night, he still had stains from the dye on his hands and face and clothing.

  Susan turned over several pages quickly, until she came to the accounts of Feltzer’s trial. No bomb was ever found, nor was the murder weapon located, and Feltzer recanted his confession to the girl’s murder. But the evidence was overwhelming. The teller identified him as the bank robber, and the bank’s security cameras had caught him as well. Several witnesses across the street had seen him force the girl into the car, and one of her shoes had been found in the backseat. The dye-stained money was recovered from his car, and from the beginning he had admitted the robbery. He only denied that he had killed Meagan Brady after first admitting it. As the District Attorney commented at the time, he changed his story when he realized he could get the death penalty.

  She turned to the final pages of the second scrapbook, but there were no clippings about David Feltzer’s death. The ending of the story, for her, remained a blank.

  Susan puzzled over it and went back through the pages again. She was convinced the motive for David Feltzer’s murder lay deep in the past. But what motive? Could a relative of the murdered girl be so obsessed with revenge that he was not content with capital punishment administered by the state? That seemed doubtful. Such a person would want to kill Feltzer with his bare hands, or with a gun, not with a quick-acting poison he could not even watch.

  Or could he watch it? Warden Coyne and Captain DeMarco had been in the cell at the time. Might one of them—?

  No, if they wanted vengeance the death chamber was only hours away, with no risk to them.

  Then she remembered something the priest had said. She backtracked through the conversations in her mind, saw again the Lucky Dragon restaurant where the food had been prepared, and considered the possibilities. An idea began to form itself in her mind. No evidence, nothing but an idea.

  She opened drawers in the hotel room until she found one containing envelopes and writing paper. Did people still write letters from hotel rooms? Apparently some did. She folded the sheet of paper and slid it into an envelope which she sealed.

  There was a knock on the door. She looked through the peephole and saw Simon Feltzer. “Just a minute!” she called. Then, after a pause, “Come in, Mr. Feltzer. I was just thinking about you.”

  He settled down in one of the chairs, tossing his blue trench coat on the bed. “I finished up with Mike and thought I’d see if you were back.”

  “I just got in,” she told him. “I was out at the prison talking to the warden and the chaplain.” She picked up the sealed envelope, careful not to show the back with its hotel logo on the flap. “Father McGee says your brother left him this envelope for the police. I’m to give it to Sergeant Green.”

  “I’ll take it,” Feltzer said, reaching for the envelope. “No, his instructions were to give it only to the police.”

  “Then why would he give it to you, a woman he doesn’t even know?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Simon Feltzer didn’t fully believe her, but he couldn’t take any chances. He went over to the bed and yanked the belt from his trench coat with one quick motion. Susan was on her feet, running for the door, when he grabbed her arm and whirled her around, the belt looping easily around her neck. “You meddled in this too much,” he growled, and pulled the belt tight.

  “Don’t—!”

  There was a pounding on the door and the grip on her throat loosened for a split second. Then it tightened again as the door burst open and two burly men pulled him away from her. She coughed, gasping for breath, and finally managed to speak. “I called hotel security before I opened the door, Mr. Feltzer. If you killed Mea
gan Brady and your own brother, I figured you wouldn’t hesitate with me.”

  Later they met in Mr. Ziegler’s office, with Sergeant Green and Mike Brentnor both in attendance. “I only want to tell it once,” Susan said, “so I figured we should all be here. The whole thing hinged on motive, of course. Why would anyone poison a condemned man about to be executed by lethal injection? It couldn’t have been an accident, not with that much cyanide spread throughout the Chinese meal. Suicide was also out of the question. He had no opportunity to poison the food with the warden and captain of the guard watching him. So it was murder. In revenge for killing the girl? Why take the risk when the state was doing the job? In revenge for something that happened in prison? Same objection. Financial gain? All the killer had to do was wait till midnight. The risk involved in poisoning the food—and I’ll explain that in a minute—meant that it had to be done. It was no mere whim.”

  “Why did it have to be done?” Sergeant Green asked.

  “What was David Feltzer going to do before he died? Meet with his brother and his wife, and the prison chaplain. My first thought was that he was going to make a dying confession to another murder. It’s not that unusual among condemned prisoners. And Father McGee confirmed that David Feltzer wanted to leave a statement with him. I assumed it was for the police, and that was what I faked in my hotel room. Simon Feltzer took the bait too well, and tried to kill me. It confirmed what I’d suspected—that David was killed because someone feared a last-minute confession.”

  “A confession that he killed someone else?”

  “No,” Susan said softly. “A confession that he never killed anyone. Think about it. Is there the slightest confirmation of this in the facts of the Meagan Brady case? Yes, there is. No one doubts that David Feltzer panicked after robbing the bank and kidnapped the girl. But did he kill her? Feltzer’s note to the bank teller threatened a bomb, not a gun. No gun was mentioned, no gun was seen. Why would Feltzer threaten to explode a bomb, a far-fetched threat at best, when he could mention the very real gun, and even show it? Was the answer that he had no gun? Surely his story of letting the girl out of the car alive could not be believed. Even in her frightened state she’d have taken her shoe for the long hike ahead. She died in Feltzer’s presence, but if he didn’t shoot her, who did? He was alone in the bank, apparently alone in the car. If he had an accomplice, what would that accomplice have been doing while he robbed the bank?”

  “What?” Mike Brentnor asked. “Robbing another bank!”

  “Another—”

  “Millie Feltzer told me there was another bank robbery at the same time, carried out by a masked gunman. There was the gun, the missing gun! The two bank robbers met as planned after the robberies, probably to divide the loot. The second robber, the gunman, hadn’t expected the girl. She’d seen too much, so he shot her. Who was this second gunman? Someone very close to David Feltzer, because he confessed to the killing at first. Even after changing his mind, he never implicated this person. He was going to the death chamber this week without revealing that name. For twelve years he’d kept the secret. Only two people in the world were that close to him—his brother Simon and his wife Millie. Would Millie, quite pregnant at the time, have murdered Meagan Brady in cold blood? Of course not! And she was working at her bakery job at the time of both robberies. Millie could not have done it, either physically or psychologically. Then how about Simon? Twelve years ago he was bumming around without a job, to use his own words.”

  Sergeant Green shook his head uncertainly. “You still have to tie him in to the poisoning and tell me how he did it.”

  Susan thought she could do just that. “Consider this. If Simon or any outsider poisoned the food, it had to be done at the Chinese restaurant. The delivery girl had no way of knowing it was for the condemned man. Who would David have told in advance that he had a craving for Chinese food at his last meal? Again, either his brother or his wife. Simon could easily have known the request would be made, and that it would be phoned to the only Chinese restaurant anywhere near the prison. He went to the Lucky Dragon that night, ordered a meal of egg foo yung to go, and added poison in the parking lot. Then he went back inside, as if waiting for someone, until he saw a bag addressed to the state prison lined up to be delivered. While the owner was on the phone or otherwise diverted, Simon switched bags, clipping the state prison note to his poisoned meal. I tried it myself, going up to the bags while the owner was taking a reservation. He never noticed me.”

  “I’d never believe it if he hadn’t tried to kill you,” the detective said. “As it is, we might just get a confession out of him. I can’t believe, though, that David Feltzer would keep quiet about this for twelve years, taking the blame for his brother.”

  “What would it have gotten him to tell the truth?” Susan pointed out. “He was still an accessory to a felony murder, still facing a death penalty. I doubt if he would have told the priest anything, in the end. I think he would have protected Simon right into the death chamber. But Simon wasn’t willing to risk that.”

  After they arranged to start over again with Ziegler the following morning, Mike Brentnor said, “I hope we can get through this merger without your finding any more mysteries to solve.”

  “I’ll try,” Susan told him. “How about dinner tonight?”

  “You know, you might tempt me with some Chinese food.”

  A PARLIAMENT OF PEACOCKS

  Susan Holt was dining with two executives from Harrods department store, at one of London’s most fashionable restaurants. The appetizer was delicious and the music sublime. She was enjoying the stimulating conversation about the world of international retailing, and only wished she could stop yawning.

  The middle-aged man seated next to her, a store manager from Istanbul, had joined their party at the last minute. He smiled sympathetically and said in a low voice, “Did you fly in last night from New York?” “How did you guess?”

  “You’ll feel better after a good night’s sleep.”

  His name was Abidine Tekin, and his silvery hair and moustache gave him the appearance of an exotic movie star. She guessed him to be in his mid-forties, and, like herself, he was in London to learn the techniques Harrods and other stores used for their promotions.

  “We are much impressed by the way you handle these things at Mayfield’s,” one of the Harrods people was saying to her, yanking her mind back to the business at hand. “Was yours the first store in Manhattan to use a fully painted city bus to carry your advertising message?”

  “Mayfield’s was the first department store. The technique had been used previously to promote a TV series and individual products.”

  The restaurant was located on the top floor of one of the city’s newer hotels, the Princess of Wales. Its windows commanded a breathtaking view of London by night, with tables running along three walls. The fourth wall, backing up to the kitchen, was given over to a small bandstand where a quartet of piano, drums, bass fiddle, and saxophone played show tunes and songs from the sixties while a young blond singer named Yolanda filled the room with her strong but subtle voice.

  Susan guessed her to be around thirty, with a slender figure that showed to effect beneath her blue satin gown. Straight blond hair, ending just above her shoulders, fell in front of her face as she sang, with the microphone held almost to her lips. She was not really attractive, but her voice gave her a certain charm.

  The group played for almost an hour, then took a fifteen-minute break while Susan’s party waited for its main course. It seemed the perfect opportunity to slip off to the ladies’ room and Susan did just that. “Hurry back,” Abidine Tekin urged, obviously enjoying her company more than that of the Harrods executives.

  Susan glanced at her watch and subtracted the five-hour time difference with New York City. It would be five o’clock there now and her boyfriend Russell should be at their apartment. She’d promised to phone if she had an opportunity. When she left the ladies’ room she slipped into one of the gl
ass-enclosed booths and inserted her phone card in the slot. Almost at once she heard a woman’s voice from the booth to her right and realized that the soundproofing was none too good. “I got your page. What is it? I’m working.” Susan Holt recognized the blue dress and blond hair. It was the singer, Yolanda, on her break. After listening for a moment she continued, “No, I told you last time I was out of the business. I’m singing regularly now. I don’t need anything else.” Another brief silence and then, I know the money is good, but I’m steering clear of the peacocks. It’s too dangerous.”

  Under ordinary circumstances Susan would never have eavesdropped on a private conversation, but she’d just heard the woman singing and was fascinated by this sudden revelation of her private self. Then, as if sensing she might be overheard, Yolanda dropped her voice and the rest of the conversation was lost.

  Susan quickly dialed her Manhattan number and was disappointed when she got the answering machine. She left a brief message for Russell and then returned to her table. The three men politely stood up as she slid into her chair. “Does Mayfield’s have dining facilities on the premises?” one of the men asked.

  “We have a coffee shop in the basement, near the entrance to the subway—”

  “She means the underground,” the Turk translated for the Harrods people, a bit to Susan’s annoyance.

  “—and a larger restaurant upstairs that serves beer and wine.”

  The older of the two Englishmen nodded. “We find customers linger longer if there is some nourishment available.”

  Susan was quick to agree. “In the States even large bookstores and some libraries now have coffee bars and cafes.”

  Their main courses arrived as the music resumed with a lively rendition of “The Girl from Ipanema.” Susan remembered from her previous London trip that it was a perennial favorite in restaurants and clubs. They were finishing dessert after a leisurely meal when the band took its eleven o’clock break. As one of the Harrods executives was paying the check, Abidine Tekin smiled and invited her for an after-dinner drink. I’m afraid I couldn’t keep my eyes open another ten minutes,” Susan answered honestly. “Perhaps another time.”