“Later I decided to settle down in New York—to make a business of what had formerly been a hobby, so I set up a stamp shop, and in the course of the last three years my work has kept me in frequent touch with Prentice Crossley.”
He paused again letting his thoughts drift back silently over that association.
“Three years,” he repeated, “and yet I can tell you so little about him. In all that time I do not think we ever talked about anything but stamps. His health was very bad and it was difficult for him to get about, so I usually went to his house when he summoned me.
Once or twice a month, sometimes oftener. He used me principally as his agent at stamp auctions, and through my European connections I was able to arrange certain trades for him with German and French collectors. I was able, for instance, to get for him the famous six-reel Spanish stamp with the color—”
“Remember,” Spike interrupted and there was an ominous edge to his tone, “we’re talking about him. Not his damn stamps. What was he like? What sort of a person was he?”
Koenig considered the question carefully before he answered. “He was not—not exactly—Well, what is the use of beating about the bush just because he is dead. He was not a pleasant man in any way, my friend. He was harsh and stubborn and he had an implacable belief in his own rightness in everything. For fifteen years he has lived shut up in that house with not another human interest in his life but his stamps. His damn stamps! You are right. They were an obsession with him, a mania. He cared for nothing else on earth. He pored over them like a miser with his money bags. If he had no enemies, at least no enemies capable of murdering him, neither had he any friends.”
“What about this fellow Watson? I understand he and Crossley made occasional trades with each other.”
“They did. And their meetings were like an armed truce. There was a bitter feud between them.”
“How’d it start?”
“Oh, that was years before I knew either of them. Watson was not a collector then. He didn’t know a thing about stamps. His people came from Lockport, New York, and one day in an old trunk belonging to his mother, he found a letter written from Lockport in 1846. That was before federal postage was adopted in this country and each individual post office used to issue its own stamps. This one from Lockport happens to be very valuable. I think it is catalogued now at something like eight or ten thousand dollars. Watson, because he knew Crossley was a collector, took it to him and asked him what it was worth. Crossley realized its value, of course, but he pretended that it was not worth much, and offered to buy it for ten dollars, and Watson let it go. Afterward Watson found out the real value of the stamp.
“That incident started him studying stamps, hoping that some day he would get a chance to get back at Crossley. Then he got genuinely interested, started collecting himself. Now he is almost as bad as Crossley was. He has a remarkable collection. He came into money about ten years ago, I understand, and has been able to indulge his taste for valuable stamps. He and Crossley were the two greatest rivals in this country in the collection of rarities. And they hated each other like poison.”
“And I suppose,” Spike said, “Crossley had a number that Watson wanted.”
“He would have given his eye-teeth, as you say, for the British Guiana one cent. And, of course, he wanted back the Lockport 1846. On the other hand, he had the one- and two-penny Mauritius ‘post office’ on cover, worth something like $50,000. Crossley would have given his eye-teeth for that.”
“And there were, I suppose, others in the Crossley collection that Watson coveted?”
“Many of them. The nine-kreuzer Baden, 1861; the six-reel Spanish with the color error; the 1849 French ‘tête-bêche’—to mention just a few.”
“All of which,” Spike remarked quietly, “are now missing. Does that suggest nothing to you, Koenig?” Koenig turned on him a face that was slightly puzzled. “What do you mean?”
“I should think it would be plain enough.”
“Are you suggesting that Watson—” Suddenly light seemed to dawn. The puzzled expression disappeared and he laughed.
“No, no, my friend, you are wrong there if you are thinking that Watson murdered Crossley and took his stamps.”
“Why?” Spike challenged.
“I am afraid you do not understand about these great stamp rarities. They are all known, catalogued, kept track of by dealers and other collectors all over the world. They know just who owns which and what. Any change of ownership is published in a hundred philatelic magazines from New York to Shanghai. It would be safer, far safer, to steal the Kohinoor than to steal a famous stamp. The Kohinoor could be cut up and sold in unrecognizable pieces. You can steal money and bonds and jewels and profit by it. But not stamps. And remember that Watson is a collector and knows all this.”
Spike was thoughtful and a bit dashed. “But couldn’t—No, of course not. You’re right. I never thought of it that way.” He reached for another cigarette and lit it from the glowing butt he held in his hands. For a while the two men smoked in silence.
“How about the granddaughter? You haven’t told me about her.”
“I know,” Koenig said quietly.
“You seem to—ah—to be on a bit more intimate terms with her than with the old man.”
“Yes, she is very dear to me, and she trusts me.”
“I could see that.”
“I have been her friend. Almost the only friend she has had for so long.”
“Her grandfather was not her—friend?”
“He was her—” He broke off, hesitated. “Bu t perhaps I had better tell you from the beginning. I used to see her sometimes when I first went to Crossley’s house. He depended on her a lot. She was a sort of secretary to him, wrote letters for him, made telephone calls. She was so lovely to look at. I found myself looking at her when I should have been looking at stamps. And so sad. It touched my heart. Her eyes were so sad.
“I tried to lighten them, to bring a little pleasantness into her life. Sometimes after I was through with Crossley I would linger in the drawing room across from the library and talk to her. We grew to be friends. She told me how lonely her life was, how empty, shut up with the old man. He was very demanding. He wanted her constant attention. He cared for her, I suppose, in his selfish, strange way, but her life with him was no life for a girl.”
“Girl? She seems hardly that.”
“I know. She is a woman, really. She is thirty-four, but I always seem to think of her as—just nineteen.” Koenig’s voice had softened as he talked of Linda Crossley. It was infinitely tender, not with the tenderness of a lover, but with the deeper, more protecting tenderness of a father.
“You knew her when she was—just nineteen?”
“No. I have known her only three years.”
“Has she always lived there in that gloomy old house with her grandfather?”
“Always. Her parents were killed in a railroad accident when she was a baby.”
“Had she no other friends beside you?”
“A few acquaintances, yes. But no real friends. Friendship, you know, does not thrive on gloom and harsh, decaying age. He discouraged it. He was too selfish to wish for her any world of her own. He ruined her life.”
Koenig spoke the damning accusation quietly without rancor—a simple, hard statement of fact.
“Tell me something,” Spike said, “something I’ve been wondering about ever since this afternoon when she talked to us. She said something about a woman. She said, ‘I remembered Saugus and what that woman had told me.’ ” He paused and tamped out his cigarette. “What did she mean? Who is ‘that woman?’ ” He sensed rather than actually saw a sudden stiffening in Koenig. There was a long pause before Koenig answered, and when he spoke his voice was low, restrained, as if he were suddenly on guard against something.
“That I cannot tell you.”
“You mean you don’t know?”
“I mean—I cannot tell you.”
&n
bsp; Spike considered this refusal in silence for a few minutes. Then he spoke again.
“But perhaps you can explain this: she kept repeating ‘what I must know,’ ‘what I’ve got to know if I’m to go on.’ Something her grandfather knew, some information he had that she wanted. What was it?”
Koenig’s cigar had gone out again and he was sitting, staring now into the darkness. He did not look at Spike as he answered. “That too, my friend, I cannot tell you.”
“Why?”
Another long pause.
“Because it is not mine to tell. It is—hers.”
“I see.” Spike hesitated. Then: “Had it—anything to do with that clause in Crossley’s will?”
“I have never seen Crossley’s will. What did it say?”
“Oh, something about putting upon Fairleigh the task of—I think the exact words were, ‘saving her from the consequences of her own indiscretions.’ ” Koenig made no answer.
“Well?” Spike said at last.
“Well, what?”
“I mean, has that clause in the will anything to do with this other thing that Linda Crossley must know?”
“I am sure,” Koenig replied, “that I am not in a position to know what was in Prentice Crossley’s mind when he wrote his will.”
This was plainly an evasion, but Spike did not feel that he could press the point further. Instead he picked up the new lead inadvertently suggested by Koenig.
“How about Fairleigh? Do you know him?”
“No, I have never met him.” Koenig tossed away his dead cigar and rose. “I have never even seen him,” he added, “but I dislike him extremely.”
“Why?”
“Because he is a man of honor.”
“Aren’t you?”
“No—thank God.”
“But you—keep confidences?”
“I have my own code.”
His round face broke into a gentle smile as he looked down at the younger man. “It is a strange code, perhaps, but—” He paused, then shook his head. “No, it is too late now to go into that tonight. Some other time perhaps. Good night.”
CHAPTER XIV - A Very Private Secretary
FOR A LONG TIME after Koenig went upstairs to bed, Spike sat on the verandah, gazing out across the moonlit waters of the bay—thinking.
Koenig left early the next morning, for he and Spike agreed that it might be just as well were it not generally known that he had spent the night on Sark Island. Linda Crossley’s hiding place must be kept secret at all costs until…
It was with that ‘until’ and its implications bearing down on his mind that Spike took a long, solitary walk Sunday afternoon, skirting the north shore, following the meandering stream that cut diagonally across the small island, wandering aimlessly through the woodland to the south.
When he returned it was late. He met Mrs. Parsons in the hall descending from the upper bedroom with a supper tray.
“She’s very much better,” the housekeeper told him. “She ate a good supper and she seems much stronger. She sat up for almost two hours this afternoon.”
For a moment Spike played with temptation. Go up to her now. Put it up to her direct… ‘Saugus— what that woman told me’… ask her straight off… ‘what I must know if I’m to keep on living’… ‘saving her from the consequences of her own indiscretions’…
His foot was on the bottom step of the stairs. He paused, his inner vision suddenly blurred by the picture of a white face against pillows, a face over whose loveliness lay dark shadows of tragedy and pain.
He turned and went out onto the verandah.
On Monday Spike went into New York. He was obsessed by a restlessness for which he could not entirely account. Perhaps, he argued, he needed diversion.
Monday night he went to a show alone. There was a fight at the Garden on Tuesday. He tried to think of a possible companion, but in his strange, erratic frame of mind he could find no one who quite fitted. Again he went alone. He left before it was half over. On the way home he stopped in at a bar and had a drink and bought an early edition of the Wednesday morning Tribune.
He leaned up against the counter and sipped his drink and scanned the paper. The Crossley murder no longer rated front page space. It was inside now, ignominiously rubbing shoulders with the advertisements. And just a couple of sticks at that, full of the things which Inspector Herschman and District Attorney Tracy usually said when they had nothing to say.
Spike stuck the paper in his pocket and called for another drink… and another… A taxi driver took him home, put him to bed. It was ten the next morning before he wakened. His head ached and his mouth felt furry, but a cold shower banished these slight ill effects of the previous night’s indulgence. It would not, however, banish that vague but persistent restlessness.
He dressed, fixed himself coffee and toast on the kitchen table. After breakfast he lit a cigarette and slumped down into an easy chair. So what now?
He didn’t know. His gaze wandered about the room. The paper he had bought the night before was lying, folded and crumpled just where it had fallen from his pocket as he was assisted to bed by the obliging taxi driver. He picked it up, yawned and turned pages. Old stuff. What he needed was tomorrow’s news. He had already read today’s news last night. Modern tempo was confusing.
His eye strayed down a column. He read in a desultory way, skipping, skimming.
It was on the fourth inside page, dwarfed beside a seven-column automobile ad that he found it. Or perhaps it would be better to say chanced upon it. For it was just that—chance. And it was only the last line that really caught his attention. But after he had seen that last line, he went back and read carefully from the beginning.
“Mrs. Deborah Ealing, of 143 West 110th St., was found dead in her apartment last night with a stab wound in her back. She had apparently been dead some hours. No property was missing and nothing was disturbed in the apartment. The apartment house is near the Spanish district and police expressed the view that the killing was part of a vendetta which has been raging in that district for some weeks. The body of the woman was discovered by her daughter, Maysie Ealing, 33, when she came home from work late Tuesday evening. The daughter is employed—”
Spike thrust the paper from him and grabbed the directory, looked up a number and reached for the telephone.
“H’ya baby,” he said when presently there came a response. His voice was as vapid as his words. “Remember me? You know, the guy you were out to dinner with the other night… Oh yeah, I know. Don’t rub it in. I’m just one of a crowd… Come on now, dearie, no wise cracks. You know I can’t take it…”
The conversation drifted on. There was some talk of a date. There were frequent long waits. The party at the other end was apparently interrupted. It was after one of these long waits that he sprang it—oh so casually, as if it had just popped into his head.
“Say, did you read the paper this morning? You’re right in the news, aren’t you?… I bet you got about ten cops hanging round you down there, and you’re giving them all the eye, aren’t you?… Oh, she did?… Well, I wouldn’t think she would be ” At last he laid the telephone back in place and snatched up the paper once more, read the final unfinished sentence.
“The daughter is employed by the Nassau street law firm of Schwab, Fairleigh and Morrison.”
He rose and reached for his coat. There was a decisive set to his jaw. He was thinking of what the telephone operator had just told him.
“… She’s Mr. Fairleigh’s private secretary. She’s only been working here six months…”
He was remembering too what she had told him that evening he had taken her out to dinner.
“… and on Monday afternoon just when it was all over the papers about him being killed, Miss Crossley calls up and wants to speak to Fairleigh’s private secretary, a dame named Ealing, and when I says, ‘Miss Ealing’s out,’ she says…”
CHAPTER XV - Gossip on the Doorstep
“WELL, THAT’S
the newspapers for you!” Mrs. O’Brien leaned out of the front window of her apartment on the ground floor of 143 West 110th St. and addressed Mrs. Quigley on the sidewalk below. Mrs. Quigley lived next door at 145.
“ ‘Spaniards!’ ” said Mrs. Quigley, and her voice had the same contemptuous tone as Mrs. O’Brien’s. “Why, there ain’t been any Spaniards since that Estrellos family that got so rich with the bootleggin’ moved out.”
“What,” inquired Mrs. O’Brien, “is a vendetta?”
“Oh, that’s where they go round murderin’ each other with daggers.”
“What for?”
“Oh—I dunno. Spaniards, you know.”
“Well, I told ’em different this morning,” Mrs. O’Brien affirmed decisively.
“Who, the Spaniards?”
“No, no, the police and the newspaper reporters. Every family livin’ in the house had to be questioned. Us and the Bartons and the new people on the top floor and the Torrences and the Helvigs and all of us.”
“Yes?” Mrs. Quigley was eager. Here was something new in her limited experience. It lent a certain flutter of excitement to her dull life to be talking to someone who had actually been questioned by the police. “What’d you tell ’em?” she demanded eagerly.
“I told ’em all about seein’ the old lady yesterday. I’m supposed to be,” Mrs. O’Brien boasted with swelling importance, “the last one to see her alive. I went up there about two o’clock yesterday to borrow a cup of sugar, and Mrs. Ealing was sittin’ in the front room right in the very chair where she was murdered. And I set down and talked with her a few minutes and then I came on downstairs. Well, I told ’em all about that and then they began askin’ how long we’d known Maysie and her mother and I told ‘em…”
The young man leaning idly against the iron railing around the basement entrance to number 145 lit a cigarette and slouched a little closer to the two women. He blew a long, lazy cloud of smoke into the air, and gazed up and down the street as if he were waiting for someone. But no one came, so he continued to lean and slouch and listen to the two women.
A Most Immoral Murder Page 8
