Death in the Back Seat

by Dorothy Cameron Disney

  “You bet we have! The local exchange has no record of a long-distance call made here yesterday afternoon. They don’t keep records of local calls, but neither of the girls remembers ringing this number at all. They’re both smart girls.”

  Standish glanced at his assistant in brusque reproof. “For the present we will accept that the telephone call was made, exactly as it’s been described. We will accept that Elmer Lewis announced his intention of coming to Crockford on business for Mrs. Coatesnash. We will accept that Lewis, for a reason of his own, lied. Now where does that get us?”

  I said, “It gets us back to the spot where we left off last night.”

  “Not quite,” said Jack with a suspicious mildness. “Today we have cleared Mrs. Coatesnash. We’ve done it on the strength of a single unsupported statement. Which is no mean feat!” Standish said patiently, “How could Mrs. Coatesnash be expected to recognize the name Elmer Lewis if the man were using an alias? She might be acquainted with him under his right name. On the other hand, she might never have heard of him.

  “The Coatesnash family is one of the most prominent in Connecticut. It would be very easy for a stranger to pick up the name, to learn certain things about Mrs. Coatesnash, to discover she was abroad and to take advantage of the fact.”

  I chimed in, “It wouldn’t be easy for a stranger to know we are tenants of hers. Elmer Lewis knew it. He knew about the cottage. He knew the make and model of our car.”

  Standish swung around to face me. “It’s easier than you imagine for unscrupulous persons to gather information about you, information you can’t dream they possess. Particularly when a large city is concerned. Let me show you. You’ve lived in Crockford since January—three months—and during that period you have returned to New York several times. How many times?”

  “Five or six.”

  “On those occasions you saw friends, visited restaurants, theaters, attended parties. You talked. What did you talk about? Let me guess. You talked about your life in the country; you mentioned your landlady. No doubt you described her, spoke of her eccentricities, the small differences of opinion between you. By and large, many people heard you were living in this cottage, just as many people saw you driving about in the gray roadster.”

  I became alarmed. “Our friends have nothing to do with this. It is entirely out of the question.”

  “I haven’t finished yet. These friends, also, talked. Don’t you see that idle gossip, started by yourself, may have traveled far and fast as gossip does, may have reached the ears of people who are not your friends and whom we cannot locate, until, at last, perhaps, it came to the notice of someone who had a use for it? Aren’t you willing to admit that Elmer Lewis, a stranger, might still have known a great deal about you and Mrs. Coatesnash? Enough to make, or delegate someone to make, the phone call?”

  Fascinated, as I always am, by logic that is quick, flashing and—fallible, I nodded. Jack said sourly:

  “That sounds well, but it misses on a pretty important point. Until last night our residence, our car, our landlady weren’t of interest to anyone except us. Our friends talk enough, but they have livelier material for conversation.”

  Standish was, for the moment, checked. A small-town man at heart, he liked to picture New York as a metropolis of plots and counterplots, a vast mysterious center of conspiracy and crime. Jack seized his brief advantage.

  “A while back we were going over possible reasons for Elmer Lewis’s behavior, and I suggest we continue. We decided he was scared, so his gun, his alias, his feeble disguise fit in. But the rest of it doesn’t fit in. Why didn’t he take a cab from the station? What purpose did he hope to serve by tricking us into driving him over from New Haven? What was in his mind? It’s a cinch he didn’t climb into our rumble seat to make it simple for his murderer.”

  Standish reluctantly abandoned his darkling vision of New York. Jack’s questions made him restless. “Certainly it’s extraordinary we don’t know more about Lewis by this time. We can assume he was wealthy, an important figure in his own world. Why don’t his friends and relatives appear? Even in New York, few men transporting a hundred thousand dollars in currency can drop out of sight.”

  “Have you established he was a New Yorker?”

  “He came to New Haven from New York. The conductor remembers him. The porter remembers him, clearly. Lewis allowed the darkie to carry one bag, and insisted upon handling the other himself. Apparently that was the bag containing the money.”

  Standish then enumerated various steps taken in the investigation. The press had been given free rein in the hope of obtaining additional information, and Boston, New York and Philadelphia newspapermen were already flocking to the village in droves. Metropolitan police, without result, had checked over the several “Elmer Lewises” listed in the city directory. Also without result, they had got in touch with the large New York banks. No one of these banks could report the recent withdrawal of $108,000. In Crockford prominent business men—including the baker, the plumber, the coal merchant, practically everyone except the unpopular Greek fruit dealer—had been requested to view the body which lay in the local undertaking parlors.

  Elmer Lewis remained unidentified.

  “I still believe,” said Jack, “Lewis is known in Crockford. What’s more, I think Mrs. Coatesnash knows him. If not as Elmer Lewis, then under some other name. Have you ordered her friends to visit the undertaking parlor?”

  “Certainly not!” said Standish. “In the first place, I haven’t the authority; in the second place, I don’t consider it necessary. I did communicate with Darnley and Elliott, the New York lawyers in charge of her affairs. Mr. Darnley was out of town; Mr. Elliott kindly offered to appear for Mrs. Coatesnash any time I call on him.”

  “No one can say,” remarked Blair, “that Mrs. Coatesnash isn’t cooperating.”

  Jack suppressed his exasperation. “Very well, we’ll drop the lady. But if Lewis wasn’t acquainted in Crockford why did he come here? Are you proposing he was shot down by someone who had never seen him before?”

  Standish studied the pattern in the carpet. “There’s always the chance of a homicidal maniac.”

  “It’s an astute maniac who picks a man carrying a hundred and eight thousand dollars. The notion of a maniac is patently absurd,” snapped Jack. “The only positive factor in the whole mess would seem to be the motive for Lewis’s murder. The motive was money. Lewis was killed by someone who knew he had a hundred and eight thousand dollars and who wanted it. As it turned out he didn’t get it. But he tried. The bag that disappeared last night and reappeared this morning was seized in mistake for the bag up front with Lola and me. Isn’t that your idea?”

  Standish had to smile. “You have a logical mind, young man.” Jack’s summation had appealed to him, and I saw it reflected, at least in part, his own reasoning. I felt a lightening of spirit. The police chief hesitated. “In a way, the second traveling bag hasn’t been a bad break for you, Storm. For the life of me I can’t see how you could have planted it in Durham—unless you had accomplices.”

  Jack said dryly, “I don’t wonder you’re puzzled. We met Lewis at five o’clock, arrived in Crockford at a little past six. From six-thirty until two we were steadily in your company. We left our car downtown, took a taxi home. Meantime, of course, we might have cached the missing bag somewhere. But Durham is a good fifty miles away. No doubt you asked our taxi driver if he took us to Durham, stopping en route so we could recover the bag.”

  The sarcasm proved a boomerang. “That’s just what I did. It helped me decide you hadn’t gone to Durham.”

  That was sensible enough but disconcerting. Although the second bag had developed a point in our favor, my spirits sagged. Henceforth I realized that an official microscope would be directed upon all our acts, and I didn’t like it.

  Standish now demanded a list of the New York friends with whom we stayed while visiting in the city—in case they might have a line on Lewis. Jack’s fray
ed good nature gained additional tatters. The desired list obtained, his brisk-stepping deputy at his side, Standish departed. In a husbandly fashion Jack immediately passed his irritation on to me.

  “A bird brain—though I doubt Blair could compete with a really sagacious bird—could comprehend that Luella’s friends should be investigated, not ours. She may be the great white cow of Crockford, but she’s greedy, grasping, filthy rich. She’s financially able to engage in shady transactions involving a hundred thousand dollars: we aren’t. And as for our unfortunate friends—put them all together and they aren’t worth a hundred thousand cents.”

  Outraged, indignant, Jack attempted to settle down but couldn’t rest or sleep. I brought his pad and pencils to the bed posed patiently for a sketch which he hoped to sell to a humorous magazine. He wasn’t feeling humorous. Toward the middle of the afternoon he tore up his sheets of drawing paper and announced an idea. He wanted to cable Laura Twining. “What for? She’d only show the cable to Mrs. Coatesnash.” Jack threw the fragments of his sketch into a wastebasket. “She might not. Laura’s something of a dunce, and I admit she always played the devoted slave, but I’ve a sneaking notion she harbored an occasional rebellious thought. We don’t know what she’s thinking now. If she has any suspicions in this case I’d like to share them.”

  “A cable costs a lot.”

  “It might be worth a lot.”

  “Besides we’d have to go to town. You should stay in bed.”

  “Something tells me” said Jack, “that the less I stay in bed while the investigation proceeds without me, the better. I’ve never craved a good close look at an electric chair.”

  “Don’t they hang in this state?”

  “Neither do I fancy rope.”

  We were joking, but we were scared. Blair, who had arrived in our little car, had left it parked in the garage. While this was not exactly an official procedure, it was typical of Crockford and of Standish in his more pleasant guise.

  I hadn’t wanted to go to the village, and after reaching there I discovered how right my instinct was. I suppose normal curiosity was to be expected, but what Jack and I were subjected to went beyond any decent limits. Our appearance in the small gray roadster created a sensation. Doors flew open, windows flew up, shopkeepers darted from stores, people stopped dead on the sidewalks, necks craned from passing cars. The town was crowded with Saturday shoppers, and if anyone missed seeing us, it wasn’t for lack of trying. Main Street was one long stare—a cold, unfriendly, measuring stare.

  “I feel like Gary Cooper,” said Jack.

  He sounded chipper, but he didn’t look it. Only a moment later at the telegraph office, we discovered that our errand was useless. The doors were closed and locked; we had both forgotten that in Crockford telegraph service ceases on Saturdays at noon.

  “We can cable Monday,” Jack said.

  I said, “We should have stayed at home.”

  “Nonsense. This costs us nothing. Let the public have its fun.”

  And then we saw a friendly face. Dr. Rand, whose office overlooked the square, spied us through his windows, hurried forth to scold Jack for getting out of bed, and finally dragged him off for an X-ray. “It only takes a minute, and you can’t grow another head.” Jack returned in a more cheerful frame of mind.

  Unfortunately, as was again impressed on us, Dr. Rand was not the whole of Crockford. An incident in the grocery store was more typical of village sentiment. Elsie Crampton—who represented the woman’s club opinion and didn’t care who knew it—was at the vegetable counter when we went in. She saw us, started, and then instantly swept out the door, leaving three pounds of cabbage swinging on the scale. Hahneman’s, it was plain, could not contain the three of us.

  A few minutes later there was a traffic jam at the post office. Half of Crockford found it needed stamps at the moment we stopped for mail. Jack pushed through the crowd, unlocked our box. The postmistress—as the village had it, a widow woman—leaned from her window to wag a humorous finger.

  “You’ve got one letter, Mr. Storm, that I been wishing was written on a postcard.”

  Along with a dozen of the interested, I glimpsed a thin French envelope, a foreign stamp, Luella Coatesnash’s cramped, old-fashioned script. I felt an edged surprise. Luella had never written to us before. Why now? The widow woman chuckled at her ancient joke; the crowd gawped. Jack stalked outside.

  Safe in the car, we read Luella Coatesnash’s note. Mailed ten days before, chatty, diffuse, dwelling on the beauties of Paris, it told us none of the things we desperately needed to know. That was a friendly letter. Nothing else.

  “It’s too damned friendly.” Jack’s eyes narrowed. “Why should Luella take it in her head to write us?”

  I, too, was puzzled. Our relations with our landlady, as I have said, had not been social. For the two months we lived within a stone’s throw of her home she had not troubled to call. Yet now we were blushlessly addressed as “Dear young friends.” Neither Jack nor I could fathom the apparent change in attitude.

  We put away the letter and forgot it.

  That was a mistake. I believe now if we had considered the small mystery more important, if we had speculated more earnestly upon the motives which might have caused Luella Coatesnash to write the letter, if we had recalled her character with more exactness, we might have saved ourselves and others from grief, worry and disaster.

  The road home went past Brownlee’s undertaking parlors, a dusty establishment bedecked with leather furniture and extravagant Boston ferns. The night before, Alfred Brownlee, the sad-eyed proprietor, had taken mournful charge of the mortal remains of Elmer Lewis. Today the body lay on display in a rear room on the chance that identification might be had. A knot of people was collected on the sidewalk, peering through the glass windows.

  “There’s Harkway,” Jack said, suddenly.

  Just then quitting the undertaking parlors, the traffic cop hailed us. Jack stopped the car.

  “Any news?”

  “None yet.” After glancing around, Harkway added in a low voice, “Unless you call it news that I’ve been put on the case.” Although he offered the expected congratulations, Jack looked perturbed. “You’re to represent the State?”

  Harkway nodded. “I was detached from traffic duty today Standish and I are going to work it out together.”

  He spoke cheerfully, and seemed much set-up over the promotion. Good news for him, it sounded like bad news to me. In Connecticut before State police enter a homicide case, the local police must either request their aid or show themselves helpless and in the dark. I felt sure Standish had not requested aid. Harkway’s promotion then meant two things. It meant that twenty-tour hours after the event the local investigation had got nowhere. It meant also, despite Harkway’s lip service to cooperation, that Jack and I would be under the observation of two rival police organizations.

  Flushed slightly with new authority, Harkway asked a few brisk questions about the attack upon Jack. He had received a report from Standish, but wanted to view for himself the closet, the broken window, the footprints in the field. When he proposed to accompany us to the cottage, we could not, of course, refuse.

  As the policeman climbed into the car, a woman emerged from Brownlee’s, came swiftly down the steps. The Harris Tweed suit, the modish hat seemed familiar. The woman passed the car closely, cast one look at us, passed on. The Storms had received the cut direct. The woman was Annabelle Bayne.

  “It’s a well-known fact,” Jack said cheerfully, “that those big, brown eyes are often myopic. Strange, too. I wouldn’t have dreamed that Annabelle Bayne was quite as near-sighted as she seems to be.”

  I smiled, but I was shaken. So shaken that it didn’t occur to me to wonder what Annabelle Bayne had been doing at the Brownlee funeral parlors. Or why she had gone there.

  Twilight was gray in the west when we started down the bumpy back road which wound to the cottage. At the Olmstead farmhouse, shuttered and melancholy, bea
ring the depressing aspect of a summer place in early spring, we saw John Standish poking about the yard. He came over to the car to speak. The meeting between him and Harkway confirmed me in my belief that he had not welcomed outside assistance. Their greetings were polite, but not effusive.

  Harkway spoke a shade too jovially. “Found anything here, Chief?”

  “Nothing.” Standish peered gloomily at the porch of the cottage, ankle deep in dead brown leaves. “I thought maybe the house had been entered last night. Apparently not. I’ve gone over the doors and windows.”

  “Then you’ve come to a dead end?”

  “Looks that way.” The failure to discover evidence of an unlawful entry into the farmhouse discouraged Standish. For the time being he discarded an idea he had entertained, quite without realizing that he had brushed upon a part of the truth. The man who had hidden in our closet had been running toward the Olmsteads’. Also he had run in that direction with a purpose.

  Harkway, Jack and I drove on. Daylight was fading rapidly. The two men would have gone at once into the field, but first I insisted upon a thorough tour of the house. With some little show of male superiority, they looked under beds and examined the closets until I was satisfied. Then they went outside.

  The house seemed very quiet. I began to pare potatoes for an early supper. Following the footprints, Jack and Harkway moved slowly toward the woods. Pan on my lap, I watched at the kitchen window. When they had progressed some yards the telephone rang. Four shrill rings, twice repeated.

  I ran to answer. In response to my voice came another voice, dreadfully familiar. The voice of the afternoon before! For an instant I was stunned, too appalled literally to speak or move. Then I stammered: “Wait a minute. I can’t hear you.”

  The telephone was located near a window overlooking the field. Covering the mouthpiece I pounded the glass until Jack turned, saw me understood. He started running toward the cottage, Harkway close behind.