35
It was three o’clock in the afternoon and there were five pieces of luggage inside the apartment door, side by side on the carpet. There was my yellow cowhide, well scraped on both sides from being pushed around in the boots of cars. There were two nice pieces of airplane luggage both marked L.M. There was an old black imitation walrus thing marked M.D. and there was one of these little leatherette overnight cases which you can buy in drugstores for a dollar forty-nine.
Dr. Carl Moss had just gone out of the door cursing me because he had kept his afternoon class of hypochondriacs waiting. The sweetish smell of his Fatima poisoned the air for me. I was turning over in what was left of my mind what he had said when I asked him how long it would take Merle to get well.
“It depends what you mean by well. She’ll always be high on nerves and low on animal emotion. She’ll always breathe thin air and smell snow. She’d have made a perfect nun. The religious dream, with its narrowness, its stylized emotions and it grim purity, would have been a perfect release for her. As it is she will probably turn out to be one of these acidfaced virgins that sit behind little desks in public libraries and stamp dates in books.”
“She’s not that bad,” I had said, but he had just grinned at me with his wise Jew face and gone out of the door. “And besides how do you know they are virgins?” I added to the closed door, but that didn’t get me any farther.
I lit a cigarette and wandered over to the window and after a while she came through the doorway from the bed room part of the apartment and stood there looking at me with her eyes dark-ringed and a pale composed little face without any makeup except on the lips.
“Put some rouge on your cheeks,” I told her. “You look like the snow maiden after a hard night with the fishing fleet.”
So she went back and put some rouge on her cheeks. When she came back again she looked at the luggage and said softly: “Leslie lent me two of his suitcases.”
I said: “Yeah,” and looked her over. She looked very nice. She had a pair of long-waisted rust-colored slacks on, and Bata shoes and a brown and white print shirt and an orange scarf. She didn’t have her glasses on. Her large clear cobalt eyes had a slightly dopey look, but not more than you would expect. Her hair was dragged down tight, but I couldn’t do anything much about that.
“I’ve been a terrible nuisance,” she said. “I’m terribly sorry.”
“Nonsense. I talked to your father and mother both. They’re tickled to death. They’ve only seen you twice in over eight years and they feel as if they had almost lost you.”
“I’ll love seeing them for a while,” she said, looking down at the carpet. “It’s very kind of Mrs. Murdock to let me go. She’s never been able to spare me for long.” She moved her legs as if she wondered what to do with them in slacks, although they were her slacks and she must have had to face the problem before. She finally put her knees close together and clasped her hands on top of them.
“Any little talking we might have to do,” I said, “or anything you might want to say to me, let’s get it over with now. Because I’m not driving halfway across the United States with a nervous breakdown in the seat beside me.”
She bit a knuckle and sneaked a couple of quick looks at me around the side of the knuckle. “Last night—” she said, and stopped and colored.
“Let’s use a little of the old acid,” I said. “Last night you told me you killed Vannier and then you told me you didn’t. I know you didn’t. That’s settled.”
She dropped the knuckle, looked at me levelly, quiet, composed and the hands on her knees now not straining at all.
“Vannier was dead a long time before you got there. You went there to give him some money for Mrs. Murdock.”
“No—for me,” she said. “Although of course it was Mrs. Murdock’s money. I owe her more than I’ll ever be able to repay. Of course she doesn’t give me much salary, but that would hardly—”
I said roughly: “Her not giving you much salary is a characteristic touch and your owing her more than you can ever repay is more truth than poetry. It would take the Yankee outfield with two bats each to give her what she has coming from you. However, that’s unimportant now. Vannier committed suicide because he had got caught out in a crooked job. That’s flat and final. The way you behaved was more or less an act. You got a severe nervous shock seeing his leering dead face in a mirror and that shock merged into another one a long time ago and you just dramatized it in your screwy little way.”
She looked at me shyly and nodded her copper-blond head, as if in agreement.
“And you didn’t push Horace Bright out of any window,” I said.
Her face jumped then and turned startlingly pale. “I—I—” her hand went to her mouth and stayed there and her shocked eyes looked at me over it.
“I wouldn’t be doing this,” I said, “if Dr. Moss hadn’t said it would be all right and we might as well hand it to you now. I think maybe you think you killed Horace Bright. You had a motive and an opportunity and just for a second I think you might have had the impulse to take advantage of the opportunity. But it wouldn’t be in your nature. At the last minute you would hold back. But at that last minute probably something snapped and you pulled a faint. He did actually fall, of course, but you were not the one that pushed him.”
I held it a moment and watched the hand drop down again to join the other one and the two of them twine together and pull hard on each other.
“You were made to think you had pushed him,” I said. “It was done with care, deliberation and the sort of quiet ruthlessness you only find in a certain kind of woman dealing with another woman. You wouldn’t think of jealousy to look at Mrs. Murdock now—but if that was a motive, she had it. She had a better one—fifty thousand dollars’ life insurance—all that was left from a ruined fortune. She had the strange wild possessive love for her son such women have. She’s cold, bitter, unscrupulous and she used you without mercy or pity, as insurance, in case Vannier ever blew his top. You were just a scapegoat to her. If you want to come out of this pallid sub-emotional life you have been living, you have got to realize and believe what I am telling you. I know it’s tough.”
“It’s utterly impossible,” she said quietly, looking at the bridge of my nose, “Mrs. Murdock has been wonderful to me always. It’s true I never remembered very well—but you shouldn’t say such awful things about people.”
I got out the white envelope that had been in the back of Vannier’s picture. Two prints in it and a negative. I stood in front of her and put a print on her lap.
“Okay, look at it. Vannier took it from across the street.” She looked at it. “Why that’s Mr. Bright,” she said. “It’s not a very good picture, is it? And that’s Mrs. Murdock—Mrs. Bright she was then—right behind him. Mr. Bright looks mad.” She looked up at me with a sort of mild curiosity.
“If he looks mad there,” I said, “you ought to have seen him a few seconds later, when he bounced.”
“When he what?”
“Look,” I said, and there was a kind of desperation in my voice now, “that is a snapshot of Mrs. Elizabeth Bright Murdock giving her first husband the heave out of his office window. He’s falling. Look at the position of his hands. He’s screaming with fear. She is behind him and her face is hard with rage—or something. Don’t you get it at all? This is what Vannier has had for proof all these years. The Murdocks never saw it, never really believed it existed. But it did. I found it last night, by a fluke of the same sort that was involved in the taking of the picture. Which is a fair sort of justice. Do you begin to understand?”
She looked at the photo again and laid it aside. “Mrs. Murdock has always been lovely to me,” she said.
“She made you the goat,” I said, in the quietly strained voice of a stage manager at a bad rehearsal. “She’s a smart tough patient woman. She knows her complexes. She’ll even spend a dollar to keep a dollar, which is what few of her type will do. I hand it to her. I’d like to hand it to her with an elephant gun, but my polite breeding restrains me.”
“Well,” she said, “that’s that,” And I could see she had heard one word in three and hadn’t believed what she had heard. “You must never show this to Mrs. Murdock. It would upset her terribly.”
I got up and took the photo out of her hand and tore it into small pieces and dropped them in the wastebasket.
“Maybe you’ll be sorry I did that,” I told her, not telling her I had another and the negative. “Maybe some night— three months—three years from now—you will wake up in the night and realize I have been telling you the truth. And maybe then you will wish you could look at that photograph again. And maybe I am wrong about this too. Maybe you would be very disappointed to find out you hadn’t really killed anybody. That’s fine. Either way it’s fine. Now we are going downstairs and get in my car and we are going to drive to Wichita to visit your parents. And I don’t think you are going back to Mrs. Murdock, but it may well be that I am wrong about that too. But we are not going to talk about this any more. Not any more.”
“I haven’t any money,” she said.
“You have five hundred dollars that Mrs. Murdock sent you. I have it in my pocket.”
“That’s really awfully kind of her,” she said.
“Oh hell and fireflies,” I said and went out to the kitchen and gobbled a quick drink, before we started. It didn’t do me any good. It just made me want to climb up the wall and gnaw my way across the ceiling.
36
I was gone ten days. Merle’s parents were vague kind patient people living in an old frame house in a quiet shady street. They cried when I told them as much of the story as I thought they should know. They said they were glad to have her back and they would take good care of her and they blamed themselves a lot, and I let them do it.
When I left Merle was wearing a bungalow apron and rolling pie crust. She came to the door wiping her hands on the apron and kissed me on the mouth and began to cry and ran back into the house, leaving the doorway empty until her mother came into the space with a broad homey smile on her face to watch me drive away.
I had a funny feeling as I saw the house disappear, as though I had written a poem and it was very good and I had lost it and would never remember it again.
I called Lieutenant Breeze when I got back and went down to ask him how the Phillips case was coming. They had cracked it very neatly, with the right mixture of brains and luck you always have to have. The Mornys never went to the police after all, but somebody called and told about a shot in Vannier’s house and hung up quickly. The fingerprint man didn’t like the prints on the gun too well, so they checked Vannier’s hand for powder nitrates. When they found them they decided it was suicide after all. Then a dick named Lackey working out of Central Homicide thought to work on the gun a little and he found that a description of it had been distributed, and a gun like it was wanted in connection with the Phillips killing. Hench identified it, but better than that they found a half print of his thumb on the, side of the trigger, which, not ordinarily being pulled back, had not been wiped off completely.
With that much in hand and a better set of Vannier’s prints than I could make they went over Phillips’ apartment again and also over Hench’s. They found Vannier’s left hand on Hench’s bed and one of his fingers on the underside of the toilet flush lever in Phillips’ place. Then they got to work in the neighborhood with photographs of Vannier and proved he had been along the alley twice and on a side street at least three times. Curiously, nobody in the apartment house had seen him, or would admit it.
All they lacked now was a motive. Teager obligingly gave them that by getting himself pinched in Salt Lake City trying to peddle a Brasher Doubloon to a coin dealer who thought it was genuine but stolen. He had a dozen of them at his hotel, and one of them turned out to be genuine. He told them the whole story and showed a minute mark that he had used to identify the genuine coin. He didn’t know where Vannier got it and they never found out because there was enough in the papers to make the owner come forward, if it had been stolen. And the owner never did. And the police didn’t care any more about Vannier once they were convinced he had done murder. They left it at suicide, although they had a few doubts.
They let Teager go after a while, because they didn’t think he had any idea of murder being done and all they had on him was attempted fraud: He had bought the gold legally and counterfeiting an obsolete New York State coin didn’t come under the federal counterfeiting laws. Utah refused to bother with him.
They never believed Hench’s confession. Breeze said he just used it for a squeeze on me, in case I was holding out. He knew I couldn’t keep quiet if I had proof that Hench was innocent. It didn’t do Hench any good either. They put him in the lineup and pinned five liquor store holdups on him and a wop named Gaetano Prisco, in one of which a man was shot dead. I never heard whether Prisco was a relative of Palermo’s, but they never caught him anyway.
“Like it?” Breeze asked me, when he had told me all this, or all that had then happened.
“Two points not clear,” I said. “Why did Teager run away and why did Phillips live on Court Street under a phony name?”
“Teager ran away because the elevator man told him old Morningstar had been murdered and he smelled a hookup. Phillips was using the name of Anson because the finance company was after his car and he was practically broke and getting desperate. That explains why a nice young boob like him could get roped in to something that must have looked shady from the start.”
I nodded and agreed that could be so.
Breeze walked to his door with me. He put a hard hand on my shoulder and squeezed.
“Remember that Cassidy case you were howling about to Spangler and me that night in your apartment?”
“Yes.”
“You told Spangler there wasn’t any Cassidy case. There was—under another name. I worked on it.”
He took his hand off my shoulder and opened the door for me and grinned straight into my eyes.
“On account of the Cassidy case,” he said, “and the way it made me feel, I sometimes give a guy a break he could perhaps not really deserve. A little something paid back out of the dirty millions to a working stiff—like me—or like you. Be good.”
It was night. I went home and put my old house clothes on and set the chessmen out and mixed a drink and played over another Capablanca. It went fifty-nine moves. Beautiful cold remorseless chess, almost creepy in its silent implacability.
When it was done I listened at the open window for a while and smelled the night. Then I carried my glass out to the kitchen and rinsed it and filled it with ice water and stood at the sink sipping it and looking at my face in the mirror.
“You and Capablanca,” I said.