And Dangerous to Know

by Elizabeth Daly

  “How about if we pinned the murder on him? He needn’t have left then, there’s no evidence when he left. He says he took a bus home.”

  “It’s a wonderful idea,” said Gamadge. “I like it as much as you do, but we mustn’t get infatuated with it; he took a bus home because I let him down. If I hadn’t, we’d have driven home in my car.”

  “Didn’t he know you’d say so? That’s when he planned it—when you wouldn’t leave with him. Why look at it: he knew Alice Dunbar well, and what’s more he knew Richfield Tanner and could have borrowed his gun. He wouldn’t care if it was traced back to Mrs. Tanner—nobody was going to suspect him. He’s alone in the city, alone in a brownstone house. Haven’t I heard that he and his mother are hard up now, just manage to get by?”

  “They’re not well off, no,” said Gamadge.

  “He wanted that Woodworth money. When he knew she wasn’t going to get it he had to get rid of her—she’d have denounced him to the Social Register.”

  “That’s as good a motive as I’ve heard yet for that murder.”

  “Tell me a motive,” said Nordhall, suddenly scowling.

  “A killer like this one would have to have the best.”

  “He would; what is it?” Nordhall leaned back again. “Where were we before we began talking about Jennings? Oh yes. Did Mrs. Tanner say anything interesting before she passed out?”

  “She thought the body you found couldn’t be her sister’s, because her sister wouldn’t have bought or worn those things—like the red macintosh.”

  “We’ve got the dentist’s report—it’s Alice Dunbar all right, and as for the clothes she bought, she was just trying to look different.” Nordhall shuffled through papers. “Here’s the shopping list; everything’s been traced back to three stores, ending with Stengel’s.”

  He pushed the list towards Gamadge. “Hat, stockings, a white collar, a pair of ‘costume’ earrings, red raincoat, and make-up. Labels on some of the stuff, decipherable by experts because the raincoat was protection for it. The shopping bag—that’s been traced too—protected her own things. They were all in it; her stockings and gloves, her hat, her handbag. Oh—the make-up was in the handbag. Nothing else in it but a handkerchief and some money—five dollars in small bills and change.”

  Gamadge looked down the list. He pushed it back at Nordhall. “I agree with you, she just wanted to look different.”

  Nordhall was reading another statement: “Here’s Mrs. Lynch. Nothing much you wouldn’t know already. She tells about Dunbar showing up and singing Osterbridge off the map. In the circumstances, would that show a certain amount of lack of human feeling?”

  “Well, it was a breach of etiquette; he apologized afterwards for it. He wasn’t known there, and”—Gamadge smiled—“it’s a melancholy little song.”

  “O.K. Here’s Miss Bean. You blew her to a snack in the supper room.”

  “Yes. She seems to be a grateful little thing,” remarked Gamadge, looking amused.

  “Doesn’t like Mrs. Tanner. It looks as if she had to play gooseberry up in that suite. But apart from describing the party, and telling how she and Mrs. Lynch had to put the casualty to bed, she had no information. Oh—Osterbridge was worried because he felt all this sympathy for Mrs. Tanner.

  “Dunbar says he got to the hotel around twenty to eleven—Mrs. Lynch corroborates. That right?”

  “I should think so.”

  “Left just before the intermission. The only thing that looks funny at all about his doings last night is that he took a bus home too. I wouldn’t have thought he cared for buses, especially buses on a rainy night. But he says there was a wait for a cab, and people getting their cars, and as it had stopped raining he just walked to Fifth. It would be a convenient way for him to get back to the Dunbars’. He has a key, nobody heard him come in.”

  Gamadge raised his eyebrows, and said nothing.

  “It’s how you look at it,” continued Nordhall. “At that hour he could have slipped past the car lot without being noticed and gone into the garden. You know the way it’s fixed there? The parked cars back up against a raised walk on that side, and the walk goes through an opening in a fence, through the garden and along the side of the hotel to another gate on the next block. And in a few minutes, if we believe Bishop, Osterbridge was out in front of a side door back there, smoking a cigarette. We did find one of his cigarettes there.”

  “Would Dunbar expect to find Osterbridge there?”

  “That’s it. That’s why we go on to Mr. Bishop, who has a very interesting story to tell; it places him right on the spot, but then the bar he went to does the same, so perhaps it was just as well for him to be frank. He’s frank, all right.” Nordhall half-closed his eyes and looked at Gamadge narrowly. “What do you think of that personality?”

  “He’s wonderful.”

  “Isn’t he, though? Mind you, we haven’t a thing on either of those birds, not a thing. Well, his story is that he went out by that side door as soon as he got a raincoat on after the intermission started, and Osterbridge was standing on that raised walk smoking. The rain had stopped. They exchanged a few ordinary remarks; Bishop didn’t notice anything wrong with him, and went off alone to this bar he patronizes on Lexington. Osterbridge wouldn’t go.”

  “Did he usually go?”

  “If he hadn’t anything better to do, such as going up to entertain Mrs. Tanner.”

  “Who let that out?”

  “Bean.”

  “I see.”

  “Well: Bishop says he came back about ten minutes before the end of the intermission, eleven-twenty. He looked around and couldn’t find Osterbridge anywhere. The musicians and Miss Bean had been together in a sort of lounge they have back there, and they hadn’t seen Osterbridge at all. Bishop told Miss Bean she’d have to play piano if he didn’t show up. She went on stage to look over the music—that’s right: she did. Bishop didn’t know what to do or where to look. Never entered his head, he says, that Osterbridge would be outside in that wet garden, with all the chairs and tables upside down. He had to go on himself at eleven-thirty sharp. And that’s his story.”

  “You say he got in and out by some gate there?”

  “Yes, and the management’s a little sore at him about leaving it ajar so he could get back in. The lock’s fixed so you can’t get at it to open it from outside. But Bishop showed us what he did about it, and though he calls it ‘ajar’ it was really not noticeably so from the street. You couldn’t see that it wasn’t shut. However, he won’t be doing that anymore.”

  “It looks as though Osterbridge must have been killed soon after eleven, whether Bishop’s telling the truth or not. Would he hang around long in that place?”

  “So far as they can tell he was killed soon after eleven; anyway, he could have been. If Bishop didn’t do it he just missed it. As for the shot being heard, if it was it wasn’t noticed. There’s a lot of horn blowing and backfiring and engines taking hold on both those streets at that time of the night, even in summer.”

  “Why should Bishop kill his best singer and piano player?”

  “Only for the set-up. There’s no other reason. He certainly wasn’t jealous of him about Mrs. Tanner—even Bean admits she liked Bishop best. Why would she, Gamadge?”

  “He was infinitely the more attractive of the two. More personality, more everything.”

  “Less hair. And he’s a sick man—perhaps he’s slipping.”

  “He can be attractive.”

  “He’d be a natural for a disguise. I never saw anybody so cool in my life. Take him or leave him—that’s Mr. Wayne Bishop. He was right there in the garden at the right time, he didn’t have to sneak past the car attendant or take a bus home. But his lawyer would say that anybody else could have got in there through either end of the place, both ends were open; and nobody says he ever met Alice Dunbar. Perhaps he’s got reason to be cool. Know what I think? There’ll never be a conviction for either of those murders.”

  Ga
madge, his elbow on Nordhall’s desk, was playing with the lid of the corroded inkstand. He said: “Perhaps not.”

  Nordhall slammed his papers together and shot them into the folder. Suddenly he looked up. “I was forgetting all about you.”

  “Were you? I didn’t notice it. No hard feelings.”

  “I mean why did you want to see me? Didn’t you say it wasn’t about this case?”

  “Not directly. I’m afraid it will sound rather an anticlimax, after all your fireworks.”

  “Never mind, you’re always interesting,” said Nordhall. “Let’s have it.”

  “Just an idea of mine. I thought you might help me out on it.”

  “Go ahead, what is it?”

  “Well, perhaps you remember that Alice Dunbar was an artist?”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Black Valentine

  NORDHALL LOOKED ASTONISHED at this introduction of new material. “She was if you say so.”

  “Surely you remember that she used to design gift cards for her friends?”

  “It slipped my mind.”

  “She used to work at it down at her art teacher’s studio—woman who taught her from the time she was in school.”

  “I’m beginning to remember something about it. The teacher was up in Vermont or somewhere with a class, and Missing Persons and the newspapers got in touch with her, trying to find out if Alice Dunbar had gone there or written.”

  “Some of the papers made a feature of the gift-card business, it helped with the background of the case. I had an idea that a lot of that work—designs and so on—might still be in the studio. Miss Bransome was the name, wasn’t it?”

  Nordhall sat chewing his lip and looking blank.

  “And if there’s any finished work,” continued Gamadge, “and there might be—she’d do some of it a long time beforehand, months ahead—she’d letter the cards herself.”

  Intelligence was beginning to take the place of the blankness in Nordhall’s eyes: “You mean messages?”

  “Each card was different, I suppose; she wouldn’t send them out to a printer. She’d do the lettering for each in some appropriate way, perhaps; Old English script, Gothic letters. It’s just an idea.”

  “I get it.”

  “If she was in love with this Fuller, might there be some hint of it on a card? Even a name?”

  Nordhall pushed out his lower lip. “She seems to have been mighty careful not to leave any evidence against him.”

  “But nobody’d see the cards; the art teacher wouldn’t even be interested in them, apart from the cover designs. If she’d found anything, she’d have produced it long ago.”

  “You want me to get in touch with her?” Nordhall was still puzzled, and sceptical.

  “I meant to have a look myself, but of course I wouldn’t dream of touching the things without at least two witnesses, both of them policemen.”

  “Well, we can call her.”

  “She’s still away. I got her address, forwarding address, and I—er—wrote to her. She seems very nice; she sent me her keys.”

  Nordhall sank back in his chair. “She sends her keys to a total stranger because he asks for them, and gives him permission to dig around in her apartment?”

  “Well, she’s as anxious as we are to get at the bottom of this mystery, Nordhall; old pupil and all. I gave her references. And I don’t suppose there’s much in her place that we’d want to lug away with us; she’d have her valuables with her or in storage.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Up in Westchester. She doesn’t feel like coming into town herself, the hot weather gets her.” Gamadge added: “She can’t be young.”

  “So you want me to take the sergeant and go down with you and look through those cards?” Nordhall was gazing at Gamadge earnestly. “This is a very goody-goody streak you’ve developed, Bud. I’d have expected you to go down there yourself, and break into the place, and come back with Alice Dunbar’s boyfriend’s name in the bag.”

  “Sorry I’ve impressed you as a complete crackbrain. I know when I need a witness.”

  “When do you want to go?”

  “I thought this evening.”

  “Can’t do. I’m too busy.”

  Gamadge was playing with the lid of the inkstand, snapping it up and down. He said: “I rather wondered whether this Fuller mightn’t have had the same idea that I had.”

  “You what?” asked Nordhall.

  “Why shouldn’t he? Don’t you think that the discovery of the body has alerted him to danger as he wasn’t alerted before? He’ll think of everything. But until this evening he won’t have had a chance to get in there and look those cards over.”

  Nordhall sat back and began to smile.

  “Miss Bransome’s away,” continued Gamadge gently. “‘There’s a sign on her mailbox that says so. But this evening I could take the sign off. He wouldn’t go there in the daytime.”

  “He wouldn’t go there at all,” said Nordhall with assumed patience. “He’d be giving himself away. Or do you think he’ll go in there shooting, perhaps? Just to get a look at those cards?”

  “Would Fuller mind doing that?”

  “He’d mind putting the spotlight on himself,” said Nordhall, aggravated. “Osterbridge—”

  “Have you officially written Osterbridge off as a suicide?”

  “No. But—”

  “Have you arrested Dunbar or Bishop or held them for questioning?”

  “No, it’s too soon.”

  “I can tell you just when he’ll get to the studio building, Nordhall,” said Gamadge; he relinquished the lid of the inkstand, looked at his stained finger, rubbed it on Nordhall’s blotter, and went on in a tone that seemed almost to lack interest. “Not by daylight; that, as you imply, wouldn’t do. Not too late—Miss Bransome is alone in that building after five, and she wouldn’t be likely to click that door switch after nine o’clock at night. I’d say about eight. Couldn’t you make it? By dark, perhaps? I’d go down first and let you in.”

  “Why first?” asked Nordhall.

  “Well, he might come a little early. I couldn’t bear to miss him.”

  “Now don’t put yourself out in front, Gamadge,” said Nordhall with pretended anxiety. “We’d miss you.”

  “I wouldn’t let him in till you came; but I might get a look at him from the windows as he came and went.”

  Nordhall was reduced to silence. He sat thinking, his face a study in doubt.

  “This party,” said Gamadge, “has supreme self-confidence. What happens when such a character suddenly finds his props knocked out from under him? The shock alone would do for him.”

  “Think so? And how much good will a confession in those circumstances do us?”

  “If he pulled a gun you could arrest him, anyway. Don’t you even want to know who Fuller is, Nordhall?”

  Nordhall laughed. “All right, I’ll be there with the sergeant at half past seven. But I won’t wait all night.”

  Gamadge rose. “Here’s the address. I’m awfully sorry, Nordhall, but I have to break it to you that the elevator won’t be running. It’s only four flights up, though.”

  “That’s nothing,” said Nordhall jovially. “May kill the sergeant, but Murphy isn’t the only one; and what’s a few lives in a big experiment?”

  “Then that’s settled.”

  “Quite a scoop for us,” said Nordhall, laughing.

  “I’ll work out a plan of campaign and submit it when you get there.”

  “I bet you will.”

  Gamadge went home and asked for high tea. Theodore served him reluctantly with sandwiches, salad, and coffee, and he had a couple of drinks. At six-fifteen he started on foot for the Bransome place.

  Feeling as though he were performing an act of doom, he removed the sign from her bell. He let himself into the dark hallway, climbed the dark flight of stairs, switched on the light at the head of the last flight, and picked up Miss Bransome’s clean and empty garbage can. He l
et himself into the flat and shut the door after him.

  He put on lights, took the garbage can into the front room and shoved it into the cupboard under the wall-kitchen. Walking back through the passage he hesitated, stopped, returned to the living-room, and picked up two small felt rugs. He carried them into the passage and laid them end to end between the studio door and the bathroom. There was already a rug inside the studio doorway, extending as far as the end of the work-table. He straightened it.

  Lamp on in the living-room, lamp on in the studio; all shades well down. He brought a wicker chair with a cushion in it to the end of the work-table nearest the door, placed another chair at the table, shoved other chairs and the painting stool to the other side of the room. Then he went over to the cupboard which Miss Bransome had indicated, and opened it.

  It was full of artists’ materials, from charcoal sticks and chalks to tubes of oil paint, bottles of turpentine, stretched canvases, and big portfolios of Whatman paper. But one shelf had been devoted to Alice Dunbar. There was a large open box of her cards and designs, there were tracing paper, Indian ink, fine pens, and pencils; there was a flat tin full of pans of watercolour; there were an agate burnisher, and a tray full of little pieces of white blotting paper cut into sharp-cornered squares and diamonds.

  Gamadge took out the box of cards, put it on the work-table, sat down, and began to sort through its contents. Charming things he found; little snow scenes for Christmas cards; illuminated oblongs like pages from a Book of Hours, all bright colours and burnished gold; small clusters and bouquets of flowers in watercolour. There were two lace-paper cards that must be intended for valentines. One was a pinkish mauve with a delicate little cluster of flowers on it and no greeting inside; the other had more brilliant flowers, against a black background, with verses in Gothic lettering.

  Gamadge sat with his head in his hands reading the black valentine; five short lines of interior poetry. The doorbell went off like a fire alarm, startling him half out of his senses. He recovered himself, glanced at the daylight still showing at the edges of the window shades, and said: “Can’t be.” But his mouth felt dry as he got up and clicked the switch that opened the front door.