A Moment on the Edge:100 Years of Crime Stories by women

by Elizabeth George

  Mitch looked up and said with an air of pure detached curiosity, “What ever made you think that I would?”

  “Look, give me something,” said the lieutenant with sudden anger, “give me something to go on.”

  Maxwell said contemptuously, “He can’t. It’s all moonshine.”

  Mitch was scrambling for something that would help him. “I never thought of a car,” he murmured. “But I should have guessed from the shoes she wears, that she hadn’t walked here. I don’t suppose she has walked much since she married so much money.”

  Mitch knew that Maxwell was swelling up with rage, or simulated rage. But he thought that Natalie was listening. It came to him, with conviction, that in spite of everything she was a human being.

  So he looked at her and said, “Why did you leave this Joe Carlisle, I wonder? What kind of man was he? Did you quarrel? Did you hate him? How did he still have the power to hurt you that much?”

  She looked at him, lips parted, eyes bright, startled. Her husband was on the point of getting up and hitting someone, and Mitch knew whom.

  Lieutenant Prince said, “Sit down, Maxwell.” He said to Mitch, “And you, hold on to your tongue. Don’t analyze me any characters. Or emote me any motives. She’s got an alibi unless you can break it, and evidence is what the law requires.”

  “But what about my motive for lying?” Mitch demanded. “Money? That’s ridiculous!” He stopped, staring. Natalie Maxwell had opened her bag, taken out a lipstick. Murder, prison…she

  paints her mouth. Slander, blackmail…she paints her mouth. How

  probable was that?

  “Give me proof,” the lieutenant said angrily.

  “In a minute,” Mitch said, as his heart bounced upward. He leaned back. “Let me pursue the theme of money. I imagine Natalie’s got whatever money can buy. Her living is paid for. She has charge accounts.”

  Maxwell said, “Let’s go. He’s rambling now.”

  The lieutenant began to push at Mitch’s thigh, nudging him out of the booth.

  “Know what I can prove?” Mitch said.

  “What?” said the lieutenant.

  “That I was working in my apartment all that day and into the night on the sixteenth, seventeenth of March. Those walls are cardboard and I am a nuisance—well known in the building.”

  “So you were working,” said the policeman. “What of it?”

  “I wasn’t in Santa Barbara,” said Mitch cheerfully. He reached over and plucked up Natalie’s handbag, the green one that matched the shoes.

  “Now just a minute,” Maxwell growled.

  “See if her checkbook is in there,” said Mitch, pushing the bag at the Lieutenant. “It’s a fat one. Her name’s printed on it, and all that: I don’t think she has much occasion to write checks. It may be the same one.”

  The lieutenant had his hands on the bag, but he looked unenlightened.

  “Look at it. It’s evidence,” Mitch said.

  The lieutenant’s hands moved and Maxwell said, “I’m not sure you have the right…” But the policeman’s weary lids came up, only briefly, and Maxwell was silent.

  The lieutenant took out a checkbook. “It’s fat,” he said. “Starts February twenty-first. What of it?”

  Mitch Brown leaned his head on the red leatherette and kept his eyes high. “Nobody on earth…unless Natalie remembers, which I doubt…but nobody else on earth can know what the

  balance on her check stubs was on Saint Patrick’s Day in the morning. Even her bank couldn’t know. But what if I know? How could I? Because I looked, while she was snoring on my sofa and I had to find out who she was and how I could help her and whether she needed any money.”

  The lieutenant’s hand riffled the stubs. “Well?”

  “Shall I name it for you? To the penny?” Mitch was sweating. “Four thousand six hundred and fourteen dollars, and sixty-one cents,” he said slowly and carefully.

  “Right,” snapped the lieutenant and his eyes came up, wide-open and baleful on Julius Maxwell.

  But Mitch Brown was not heeding and felt no triumph. “Natalie,” he said, “I’m sorry. I wanted to give you a break. I didn’t know what the trouble was. I wish you could have told me.”

  Her newly reddened lips were trembling.

  “Not so I could buy off the consequences,” Mitch said. “I’d have called the police. But I would have listened.”

  Natalie put her blond head down on the red-checked tablecloth where it had once rested before. “I didn’t mean to do it,” she sobbed. “But he kept at me, Joe did. Until I couldn’t take any more.”

  Julius Maxwell, who had been thinking about evidence, said too late, “Shut up!”

  The lieutenant went for the phone.

  Mitch sat there, quiet now. The woman was weeping. Maxwell said in a cold, severe way, “Natalie, if you…” He drew away from contamination. He was going to pretend ignorance.

  But she cried out, “You shut up! I’ve told you and told you and you never even tried to understand. You said, give Joe a thousand dollars. He’d go away. You said that’s all he wanted. You wouldn’t even listen to what I was going through, and Joe talking, talking, about our baby that was dead…starved, Joe said, because she had no mother. My baby,” she shrieked, “that you wouldn’t have, because she wasn’t yours.”

  Now her pink-painted fingernails clawed at her scalp and the rings on her fingers were tangled in her hair. “I’m sorry,” she wept. “I never meant to make the gun go off. I just wanted to stop him. I just couldn’t take any more. He was killing me…driving me crazy…and money wouldn’t stop him.”

  Mitch’s heart was heavy for her. “Didn’t you know what matters?” he barked at Maxwell. “Did you think it was mink, diamonds—that stuff?”

  “The child died,” said Julius Maxwell, “of natural causes.”

  “Yes, he thought it was mink,” screamed Natalie. “And oh, my God…it was! I know that now. So he said he would fix it—but he can’t fix what I know, and I hope to die.”

  Then she lay silent, as if already dead, across the red-checked tablecloth.

  Julius Maxwell’s face was losing color, as the policeman came back and murmured, “Have to wait.” But the lieutenant was uneasy. “Say, Brown,” he said, “you can remember a row of six figures for six weeks? You a mathematical genius or something? You got what they call a photographic memory?”

  Mitch felt his brain stir. He said lightly, “It stuck in my mind. First place, it repeats. You see that? Four six one, four six one. To me that’s an awful lot of money.”

  “To me too,” the lieutenant said. “Everybody in here heard what she said, I guess.”

  “Sure, heard her confess and implicate him as the accessory. Take a look at Toby, for instance. He’s had it. There’s going to be plenty of evidence.”

  The lieutenant looked down upon the ruin of the Maxwells. “Guess so,” he said tightly.

  Later that night Mitch Brown was sitting up to a strange bar. He said to the strange bartender, “Say, you ever know that the seventeenth of March is not Saint Patrick’s birthday?”

  “What d’ya know?” the bartender murmured politely.

  “Nope. It’s the day he died,” said Mitch. “I write, see? So I read. Bits of information like that stick in my mind. I’ve got no memory for figures and yet…Know the year Saint Patrick died? It was the

  year 461.”

  “That so?” said the bartender.

  “You take four sixty-one twice and put the decimal in the right place. Of course that’s not very believable,” Mitch said, “although it really happened—on Saint Patrick’s Day in the morning. How come I knew—me a person who doesn’t always read the newspaper—the year Saint Patrick died? Well, a fellow doesn’t want to be made a fool of, does he? And probable is probable and improbable is improbable—but it’s all we’ve got to go on sometimes. But I’ll tell you something,” Mitch pounded the bar. “Money couldn’t have bought it.”

  The bartender sai
d soothingly, “I guess not, Mac.”

  The Purple Is Everything

  DOROTHY SALISBURY DAVIS

  Dorothy Salisbury Davis (b. 1916), born in Chicago and a graduate of Barat College, is clearly a person for the long haul. Her marriage to actor Harry Davis lasted from 1946 until his death in 1993, and she continues to contribute to a field of writing she entered more than half a century ago with the novel The Judas Cat (1949), most recently with a new story in the anthology Murder Among Friends (2000). Davis is, by her own account, an odd fit in the crime-fiction genre. She has bemoaned her inability to create a memorable series character, though Julie Hayes of her last few novels makes the grade, and she has a distaste for violence and murder. (One of the anthologies she edited for the Mystery Writers of America is called Crime Without Murder [1970].) However, her expressed enthusiasm for villains over heroes helps to explain her success in the field. Among her best-known books are the regional classic The Clay Hand (1950), the Roman Catholic-themed A Gentle Murderer (1951), and the 1969 bestseller Where the Dark Streets Go.

  In introducing her collection Tales for a Stormy Night (1984), Davis credits her late friend and fellow mystery writer Margaret Manners with giving her the method for stealing a painting used in the Edgar-nominated “The Purple Is Everything.” “I even remember the spot,” Davis wrote, “Sixth Avenue and Twenty-fourth Street, a few paces, in those days, from Guffanti’s Restaurant.” Though it is unquestionably a crime story, it has its author’s moral concerns at its heart and it is of a quality that might as well have been published in The New Yorker as Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

  You are likely to say, reading about Mary Gardner, that you knew her, or that you once knew someone like her. And well you may have, for while her kind is not legion it endures and sometimes against great popular odds. You will see Mary Gardner—or someone like her—at the symphony, in the art galleries, at the theatre, always well-dressed if not quite fashionable, sometimes alone, sometimes in the company of other women all of whom have an aura, not of sameness, but of mutuality. Each of them has made—well, if not a good life for herself, at least the best possible life it was in her power to make. Mary Gardner was living at the time in a large East Coast city. In her late thirties, she was a tall lean woman, unmarried, quietly feminine, gentle, even a little hesitant in manner but definite in her tastes. Mary was a designer in a well-known wallpaper house. Her salary allowed her to buy good clothes, to live alone in a pleasant apartment within walking distance of her work, and to go regularly to the theater and the Philharmonic. As often as she went to the successful plays, she attended little theater and the experimental stage. She was not among those who believed that a play had to say something. She was interested in “the submerged values.” This taste prevailed also in her approach to the visual arts—a boon surely in the wallpaper business whose customers for the most part prefer their walls to be seen but not heard. In those days Mary was in the habit of going during her lunch hour—or sometimes when she needed to get away from the drawing board—to the Institute of Modern Art which was less than a city block from her office. She had fallen in love with a small, early Monet titled Trees Near L’Havre, and when in love Mary was a person of searching devotion. Almost daily she discovered new voices in the woodland scene, trees and sky reflected in a shimmering pool—with more depths in the sky, she felt, than in the water.

  The more she thought about this observation the more convinced she became that the gallery had hung the picture upside down. She evolved a theory about the signature: it was hastily done by the artist, she decided, long after he had finished the painting and perhaps at a time when the light of day was fading. She would have spoken to a museum authority about it—if she had known a museum authority.

  Mary received permission from the Institute to sketch within its halls and often stood before the Monet for an hour, sketch-book in hand. By putting a few strokes on paper she felt herself conspicuously inconspicuous among the transient viewers and the guards. She would not for anything have presumed to copy the painting and she was fiercely resentful of the occasional art student who did.

  So deep was Mary in her contemplation of Claude Monet’s wooded scene that on the morning of the famous museum fire, when she first smelled the smoke, she thought it came from inside the picture itself. She was instantly furious, and by an old association she indicted a whole genre of people—the careless American tourist in a foreign land. She was not so far away from reality, however, that she did not realize almost at once there was actually a fire in the building.

  Voices cried out alarms in the corridors and men suddenly were running. Guards dragged limp hoses along the floor and dropped them—where they lay like great withered snakes over which people leaped as in some tribal rite. Blue smoke layered the ceiling and then began to fall in angled swatches—like theatrical scrims gone awry. In the far distance fire sirens wailed.

  Mary Gardner watched, rooted and muted, as men and women, visitors like herself, hastened past bearing framed pictures in their arms; and in one case two men carried between them a huge Chagall night scene in which the little creatures seemed to be jumping on and off the canvas, having an uproarious time in transit. A woman took the Rouault from the wall beside the Monet and hurried with it after the bearers of the Chagall.

  Still Mary hesitated. That duty should compel her to touch where conscience had so long forbidden it—this conflict increased her confusion. Another thrust of smoke into the room made the issue plainly the picture’s survival, if not indeed her own. In desperate haste she tried to lift the Monet from the wall, but it would not yield.

  She strove, pulling with her full strength—such strength that when the wire broke, she was catapulted backward and fell over the viewer’s bench, crashing her head into the painting. Since the canvas was mounted on board, the only misfortune—aside from her bruised head which mattered not at all—was that the picture had jarred loose from its frame. By then Mary cared little for the frame. She caught up the painting, hugged it to her, and groped her way to the gallery door.

  She reached the smoke-bogged corridor at the instant the water pressure brought the hoses violently to life. Jets of water spurted from every connection. Mary shielded the picture with her body until she could edge it within the raincoat she had worn against the morning drizzle.

  She hurried along the corridor, the last apparently of the volunteer rescuers. The guards were sealing off the wing of the building, closing the fire prevention door. They showed little patience with her protests, shunting her down the stairs. By the time she reached the lobby the police had cordoned off civilians. Imperious as well as impervious, a policeman escorted her into the crowd, and in the crowd, having no use of her arms—they were still locked around the picture—she was shoved and jostled toward the door and there pitilessly jettisoned into the street. On the sidewalk she had no hope at all finding anyone in that surging, gaping mob on whom she could safely bestow her art treasure.

  People screamed and shouted that they could see the flames. Mary did not look back. She hastened homeward, walking proud and fierce, thinking that the city was after all a jungle. She hugged the picture to her, her raincoat its only shield but her life a ready forfeit for its safety.

  It had been in her mind to telephone the Institute office at once. But in her own apartment, the painting propped up against cushions on the sofa, she reasoned that until the fire was extinguished she had no hope of talking with anyone there. She called her own office and pleaded a sudden illness—something she had eaten at lunch though she had not had a bite since breakfast.

  The walls of her apartment were hung with what she called her “potpourri’: costume prints and color lithographs—all, she had been proud to say, limited editions or artists’ prints. She had sometimes thought of buying paintings, but plainly she could not afford her own tastes. On impulse now, she took down an Italian lithograph and removed the glass and mat from the wooden frame. The Monet fit quite well. And t
o her particular delight she could now hang it right side up. As though with a will of its own, the painting claimed the place on her wall most favored by the light of day.

  There is no way of describing Mary’s pleasure in the company she kept that afternoon. She would not have taken her eyes from the picture at all except for the joy that was renewed at each returning. Reluctantly she turned on the radio at five o’clock so that she might learn more of the fire at the Institute. It had been extensive and destructive—an entire wing of the building was gutted.

  She listened with the remote and somewhat smug solicitude that one bestows on other people’s tragedies to the enumeration of the paintings which had been destroyed. The mention of Trees Near L’Havre startled her. A full moment later she realized the explicit meaning of the announcer’s words. She turned off the radio and sat a long time in the flood of silence.

  Then she said aloud tentatively, “You are a thief, Mary Gardner,” and after a bit repeated, “Oh, yes. You are a thief.” But she did not mind at all. Nothing so portentous had ever been said about her before, even by herself.

  She ate her dinner from a tray before the painting, having with it a bottle of French wine. Many times that night she went from her bed to the living-room door until she seemed to have slept between so many wakenings. At last she did sleep.

  But the first light of morning fell on Mary’s conscience as early as upon the painting. After one brief visit to the living room she made her plans with the care of a religious novice well aware of the devil’s constancy. She dressed more severely than was her fashion, needing herringbone for backbone—the ridiculous phrase kept running through her mind at breakfast. In final appraisal of herself in the hall mirror she thought she looked like the headmistress of an English girls’ school, which she supposed satisfactory to the task before her.

  Just before she left the apartment, she spent one last moment alone with the Monet. Afterward, wherever, however the Institute chose to hang it, she might hope to feel that a little part of it was forever hers.