“I meant the date, Mrs. Van Cleve.”
“The-—? Oh, the date! January the something. Sixteenth? A Sunday. I’m sure it was the sixteenth, because Edna’s birthday—Edna’s my sister—her birthday was exactly one week later.”
You sat and listened or you stood and listened. And when the calluses got thick enough so you didn’t fidget, then you could be a private detective.
She went on babbling but I had stopped listening and started thinking. Seven times out of ten the alias starts with the same initials as the real name. That helps them remember and explains the initials on the suitcases and the handkerchiefs. Louise Fairchild. Laura Fremont.
I ground out my cigarette and stood up and went over to the bird cage. The canary sat on its perch and looked sullenly at me out of beady eyes. It probably didn’t like cops either. I returned to the couch and sat down on a different broken spring and inspected the life line in my right palm. It wasn’t a very long line and that cheered me a little.
I said, “The description I gave you a moment ago—does it fit Louise Fairchild?”
“Yes, sir.” She fumbled a handkerchief from the torn pocket of her robe and dabbed at the corners of her eyes. It wasn’t a very clean handkerchief and her eyes were as dry as Carrie Nation’s cellar. “That’s exactly the way I told the captain she looked. Although I must say he didn’t seem very interested.”
That failed to surprise me. The police didn’t make a practice of working too hard on obscure killings in LaSalle Street kitchenettes. If they happened to pick up the guilty party with the knife in her hand and blood on her sleeve and the urge to sign a forty-page confession, that was one thing. But when it meant a lot of hard work running down blind leads, then the file would drift into the unsolved drawer to collect the dust of disinterest.
“Tell me what you can about both girls, Mrs. Van Cleve,” I said.
“I really don’t know a thing about them, Mr. Pine.”
“Oh, cut it!” I snapped in my best servant-of-the-people tone. “Those two girls lived here for months and you couldn’t help picking up something we can use. Where they worked, who they bought their groceries from, who their boy friends were. This is murder, madam, and you’ll either give us a little co-operation or we’ll get it another way. Just make up your mind which it’s to be.”
It didn’t scare her into crawling under a chair but it did melt down what was left of her House of Hapsburg pose and start-her talking. Skimmed down, it revealed that they were strange girls who kept to themselves and said little to Mrs. Van Cleve and nothing to the other tenants. No boy friends ever called on them, although two girls, no description furnished, came to visit them a few times. Miss Fairchild worked days and the Purcell girl worked nights, although just where they worked Mrs. Van Cleve had no idea.
“The check!” she said suddenly.
I leaned back and groped for a cigarette. I said, “The check. Tell me about the check, Mrs. Van Cleve.”
“It was from a night club. I remember now! With a long name. I remember thinking it was such a strange name.”
It couldn’t have been any except one. The name came automatically to my lips. “The Tropicabana?"
“That’s it! That’s the one!” She sounded pleased and proud of herself. “A pay check, it was. I could tell because they took out for Social Security and so on. And they used a check-writing machine. I distinctly remember! She paid the rent with it. The only time it wasn’t in cash.”
“Which of the two girls gave you the check, Mrs. Van Cleve?"
“The one that worked nights. Ellen—Ellen Purcell. The poor unfor—”
“Why didn’t you tell the captain about this, madam?”
“Didn’t even think of it! If you hadn’t kept asking me . . .”
I rolled the cigarette thoughtfully around in my fingers. “So Louise Fairchild murdered Ellen Purcell, then quietly packed up and eased out of the picture. That’s the last you heard of her?”
“Well, she didn’t take any luggage. Left everything upstairs.”
“What happened to the stuff?”
“Now really!” She gave me an upper-class frown. “You must know that, officer!”
“Oh, sure. Nothing the captain overlooked?”
“He even took the toothpaste!” She sounded bitter about it, as though she had been out of toothpaste at the time.
It seemed this well was now pumped dry. The time had come for me to do a chore of thinking—of putting together the jigsaw of facts and guesses I had managed to accumulate during the past two hours or so. The place for that was behind my scarred oak desk on the eighth floor of the Clawson Building, with only the telephone and this month’s Varga girl for company. . . .
I stood up and retrieved my hat. “We’ll keep in touch with you, Mrs. Van Cleve. Don’t bother seeing me to the door.”
She hadn’t intended to. She gave me a blank lidless stare and moved one of the white pomponed mules about an inch and folded her hands in the lap of her bathrobe.
While I was turning the doorknob Gilbert looked up from where he sat slumped on the day bed and gave me a full-lipped sneer. I took my hand off the knob and bent and picked up the blueberry-stained plate and dropped it on the blanket next to one of his legs. I said, “Wear it in your buttonhole, Junior. So the girls will know you.”
He didn’t move. I went past him and quietly along the hall to the porch. Above the wind I could hear him yelling words at her but all they amounted to was noise.
I waited until I got back downtown before having an early dinner. I ate at the Ontra near Adams Street, not far from the office. They had fresh blueberry pie among the desserts.
But not for me.
CHAPTER 13
AT SIX-THIRTY I was back in my office, standing at the window, its shade drawn all the way up and Jackson Boulevard spread out below me. The sun was gone behind the uneven line of towering buildings at the Loop’s western edge, leaving the sky there a harsh gritty red from layers of dust kicked up by the wind.
The evening rush hour had already tapered to a trickle. Late shoppers and the folks who did the locking up were edging out cautiously into the bludgeoning wind, holding desperately to hats and packages. The newsstands had their backs up, horseshoes and strings with weights tied to the ends holding down the papers. There was no sound beyond the lonely keening wail of the wind among the cornices and setbacks of the stone jungle.
It was an evening for taking in a movie, for sitting in a bar, for shooting hooligan at the corner cigar store. It was an evening for going home and having the radio on without really hearing it while you drank highballs over a book by Roy Huggins or Kenneth Patchen or some other streamlined intellectual.
I left the window open a crack from the bottom and sat down at the desk and leafed through a late edition of the Daily News. The cone of light from the desk lamp looked pale and artificial under the fading daylight from the window behind me. From down the corridor came the clatter of mop buckets and the dim echoes of a laugh that had its roots somewhere east of the Vistula.
The phone rang.
A woman’s voice—a voice I didn’t recognize. “Mr. Pine?”
“That’s right.”
“Are you alone?”
“There might be a fly or two around,” I said. “Who is this?”
“Your good deed for the day—Susan Griswold. This is the third time I’ve called you this afternoon. I was beginning to think they’d thrown you in a dungeon or something.” Her voice had the light, unhurried, very clear way of speaking they seem to teach in finishing schools.
“They couldn’t be bothered,” I said. “They sat me down and asked me some questions. Not many—not nearly so many as they would if Mary Conrad had amounted to anything.”
“That’s not a very nice thing to say.”
“Tell it to them,” I said. “It’s the way they look at it.”
After a short pause she said, “Was I left out of the conversation? Or did your change of heart fall
through?”
“As far as I know,” I said, “you’re in the clear. If they know about you it didn’t come from me.”
“How else could they know?”
“I haven’t any idea how much work is going into their investigation,” I said. “The district captain’s in charge and he acts too dumb to be anything but smart. If he runs this all the way to the Tropicabana he may come up with the fact that the dead woman was once very thick with your stepmother. From there he could arrive at the fact that you don’t like your stepmother and that you had been seen talking to Mary Conrad. From there he could go in any one of several directions, depending on how much help he got.”
There was the sound of an unsteady breath against my ear, but when she spoke again her voice was unruffled. “You don’t actually think he’s that smart, do you?”
I turned a page of the News with my free hand and looked at an advertisement showing a boy and a girl leaning on the rail of a boat under a full moon. They were talking about what the right cigarette could do for one of their zones.
“I went straight home,” Susan Griswold was saying, sounding suddenly very far away. “She wasn’t there. At home, I mean.”
“Where are you calling from?” I asked.
“A drugstore booth. There’s no one around.”
“Well, my wire isn’t tapped either. You’re telling me your stepmother wasn’t at home when Mary Conrad was killed?”
“That’s right. She left right after lunch and didn’t get back until less than an hour ago. You see what that can mean, don’t you?”
“It can mean whatever you want it to mean, Miss Griswold. Is that why you called me?”
“Partly. And partly because I got to thinking about what you said this afternoon. You know—about Eve being afraid that Mary Conrad might say too much to me.”
”Uh-hunh,” I said. She was leading up to something: the tone of her voice telegraphed it.
“Well, you tried so hard to sell me on the idea that I started wondering why, and that led to something else.”
“And what would that be, Miss Griswold?”
“To what you were doing in that apartment this afternoon.”
“Oh—that.”
“You didn’t tell me, you know,’ she said reproachfully. “So I tried to figure it out for myself. I think I did pretty well, too. Would you like to hear what I figured out?”
She made it sound sweet and deadly—like a five-pound box of chocolate creams loaded with curare. “By all means,” I said cordially. “By—all—means!”
“I decided,” she said, “that your reason for being there was the same as mine—that you wanted information about Eve Griswold. Only you didn’t know then that her name was Eve Griswold!”
“Try it once more,” I said flatly. “This time through left tackle.”
“Very funny!” she snapped, dropping the mask. “You know what I mean. When I started telling you about Eve it was all you could do to stay awake—until I happened to mention that she once roomed with Mary Conrad. I thought you were going to fall off the couch! You put on a poker face to end all poker faces, and you wanted to know if Eve had roomed with her at the Surf Street apartment or where. And it wasn’t two minutes after that that you were trying your damnedest to talk me into turning Eve over to the police for murder! How’m I doing, Mr. Pine?”
“Your badge will go out in tonight’s mail, Miss Griswold.”
“Oh, there’s more,” she said sweetly. “I wouldn’t want a badge just because of my ‘stunning figure and nice honest eyes’—if you don’t mind being quoted. No, you ended up by letting me go—after so carefully pointing out earlier what the police could do to you for doing it—but you said you’d expect a favor in return . . . I guess that’s about all I can think of right now.”
“One minor point,” I said. “Since I was out to get your stepmother, wouldn’t it have been smart to hang on to you until the cops came—then tell them the story?”
“You were too intelligent to do that,” she said admiringly. “You realized Eve is married to thirty million dollars. No policeman is going to fight that much money—not unless there’s more to go on than a fancy story handed out by a private detective. If you could have talked me into backing you up, it might have worked out—without me you were licked. .Are you still there, Mr. Pine.?”
“I’ m here,” I growled. “Nothing’s happened to drive me away. You must have some reason for telling me all this, or are you the gloating type?”
“Don’t take it so hard,” she said, amused. “I thought we might work on this together—my way.”
“Doing what?”
“I want the truth about Eve Shelby Griswold,” she said, no longer amused. “And I think you do too, after what happened this afternoon.”
I said, “Does the name Ellen Purcell mean anything to you?”
“No—o-o. Should it?”
“How about Laura Fremont, alias Louise Fairchild?”
“No.”
“Grace Rehak?”
“I’m sorry but it’s still no. Who—?”
“Okay,” I said. “We’ll work together, if that’s what you want. Your first job is to get me a good clear photograph of Eve Griswold. One of these cabinet-sized pictures will do the trick.”
“Well, I suppose I . . . ” Her voice faded away and there was a lengthy silence from the other end of the wire. “That’s funny,” she said finally. “Come to think of it, I don’t remember seeing any pictures of Eve around. . . . Paul!”
“Yeah?”
“You know something? There aren’t any pictures of her! I mean it! Father wanted some wedding photographs made but she kept putting it off and they never were taken. Even the papers weren’t allowed to take any pictures at the wedding. Doesn’t that prove she—?”
“Not necessarily,” I cut in. “The camera’s no good for some people. Well, nice having you in the firm, Miss Griswold. Get in touch with me in a day or two and I’ll let you know how we’re doing.”
She sensed the dismissal in my tone. “Wait a minute,” she protested. “Isn’t there something I can be doing?”
“You bet there is,” I said. “You can keep out of this. Two women have had the nylon treatment already, and I don’t want you ending up wearing three stockings!”
“Two women?” she echoed. “But I thought Mary Conrad was the—”
“Not over the phone,” I said. “Anyway it’s past our closing time. Thanks for calling, Miss Griswold, and good-by.”
I dropped the receiver back where it belonged and sat there and stared at my nails. Quite a girl—Susan Griswold. Lovely enough to rest the eyes of any man. A little stiff in the back and high in the nose, but that could come from having three stepmothers in rapid order, none of them what you’d call the motherly type. Inclined to be suspicious of people and their motives, probably for the same reason. And a nice gift for logic, judging from the conversation just finished.
I broke the cellophane on a fresh pack of cigarettes, lighted one and leaned back to put my heels on the blotter. What was supposed to be a simple case of skip-tracing was now as complicated as Blackstone on Torts.
Still, I had made some progress. Laura Fremont had once roomed with Mary Conrad, whose present address was now the morgue. Grace Rehak had also roomed with Mary Conrad within a few days after Laura had moved out. According to a statement made by Miss Conrad shortly before her death, either Grace Rehak or Laura Fremont had adopted the name Eve Shelby, taken a job at a night club and there met and later married-thirty million dollars by the name of Lawrence Griswold.
Both Laura and Gracie had excellent reasons for not wanting their true identity brought out. Laura presumably was wanted for the murder of one Ellen Purcell, a former roommate. Grace was the graduate of a Lincoln, Nebraska, cathouse —not the best reference for the wife of a socially prominent millionaire. The best method of hiding secrets like those is to stop the breathing of anyone in a position to blow the lid off.
The fact that Ellen Purcell and Mary Conrad had died in the same manner would tend to show Laura Fremont as the killer—provided, of course, that Laura had actually knocked off Ellen Purcell. All else being taken into consideration, it seemed Laura, rather than Gracie Rehak, was now the wife of Lawrence Griswold. Laura Fremont had destroyed all pictures of herself before leaving Lincoln; Eve Griswold was also camera shy.
I stood up, creaking a little in the joints, and closed the window. The first shadows of night were beginning to crowd in on the street below and the lights and neon signs were springing up. Under the lash of the wind the sidewalks were almost completely deserted now.
I leaned a shoulder against the frame and kept my thoughts churning. There were other pieces to the pattern, minor perhaps, but still necessary to fit in before the true design could stand out clear and bold. For one, Bertha Lund’s interest in my affairs—an interest strong enough for her to send some gowed-up muscle to search my hotel room and, in passing, to bash in the skull of a nice open-faced youngster who had happened to get in the way.
Still another piece—a soiled piece and probably not really important—was the Lesbianism angle that had cropped up during the police investigation of Mary Conrad’s murder. Judging from some of the details Mrs. Fremont let out about her daughter, added to the story given by Mrs. Van Cleve, it would seem Laura Fremont did all her swinging at female curves. It didn’t help the theory that she was now the wife of Lawrence Griswold, although such things have been known to happen.
I went back to the desk and spat in the wastebasket and sat down again. Two more pieces to the puzzle were Susan Griswold and a well-dressed, clean-necked number who called himself Smith.
Which reminded me. I rummaged through my pockets and came up with what I was after—a matchbook folder with the license number of an automobile scrawled in ink on the inside of the cover.
Mr. Smith need no longer remain the puzzle he was at present. A phone call to a cubbyhole in the Criminal Courts Building out on Twenty-sixth and California would get me the number of whoever owned that big black Cadillac. I thought I already knew who owned it but it would be nice to be sure.
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