“You know who it is?”
“Not yet. Not entirely. But that’s where we’re going now.”
“To the city? Where? Back to my place?”
“No. I want to see Frank Donner.”
Rembek leaped on the name. “It was Frank? How could it be Frank?”
“It isn’t Frank,” I told him. “Frank Donner didn’t kill Rita, I know that much.”
“Then what do you want to see him for?”
“You’ll come along when I talk to him,” I said. I leaned forward. “All right, Dominic. Back to the city.”
“Yes, sir.”
We slid like a launch through the rain, the tires hissing, leaving delicate wakes behind them. The space between Rembek and me gradually filled with packets of bills as he counted the money with which the black bag was crammed. No one spoke.
We were nearing Easton before Rembek was finished. Then he announced, “It’s a grand short.”
Kerrigan turned his head, glanced at me, then said to Rembek, “Forget it.”
“Damn it,” said Rembek. “A grand short, damn it.”
So Betsy MacNeill had held off failure for one more winter after all.
twenty-six
THE RAIN FOLLOWED US back to New York, slowing us badly, so that it was almost four when we pulled to a stop by a fire hydrant down the block from Frank Donner’s apartment building. We had come back by way of the George Washington Bridge, because Donner lived so close to the bridge, and the rain and dimness were such that it had been like driving across a great concrete ribbon between worlds, with nothing but the chasm of space beneath and all around us.
Kerrigan and Rembek and I trotted comically through the rain to Donner’s building. None of us had raincoats, because the weather had seemed unthreatening when we’d left New York. We filled the elevator with the rank smell of wet suits. Rembek glared out bullishly from under his brows, spoiling for action, sensing the end but not yet seeing his target.
We had not phoned ahead, and were not expected. Ethel Donner opened the door to us and was instantly gracious and welcoming, taking our wet coats and ushering us into the living room while she went to get Frank.
He was less gracious. He came into the room in undershirt, slippers and old trousers, carrying a hammer; apparently he was doing some home repairs. He said, “Damn it, Ernie, it’s Sunday. You know I like to keep my Sundays separate.”
“It’s my fault,” I said. “I wanted to talk to you about that note you wrote.”
Everybody looked at me. Ethel Donner, coming in after her husband and feeling the sudden tension in the air, said hesitantly, “Is everything all right? Frank? Is something…” It trailed off.
Rembek said, very slowly, “What note? Frank? What note does he mean?”
Donner abruptly shook himself and gave a heavy laugh, saying, “He’s out to earn his dough the cheap way, Ernie. I’m just some hood anyway, it don’t matter, he’ll tie a can on me and take his dough and go home.”
Kerrigan said, “Mister Tobin, fill us in. Are you saying Rita didn’t write that note?”
“That’s what I’m saying.”
“Why?”
“It was wrong from the beginning,” I said. “The note was written in the wrong style, in the dumb-bunny manner that was her public put-on. If she had really meant to leave Rembek, and wanted to be cruel, the way that real-man business was cruel, she would have chosen a different way. I know her that well now, better than Donner knew her. He saw the public face and thought it was the real her and wrote the note to match.”
Kerrigan said, “What would she have done herself, if it was her note?”
“She’d have let him see who she was, now it was too late. She’d have shown him just how bright and complicated and aware she really was, just how little of her he’d ever been allowed to see before.”
Rembek said, “I don’t like any of this.”
Kerrigan said, “Be quiet, Ernie.” To me he said, “I think you re right. That would be more her style. So what else have you got?”
“There were three things in life that Rita really cared about,” I said, “and they were money, Ted Quigley, and her acting career. Now she—”
Rembek interrupted violently, shouting, “Quigley! That little sheep? He was out of the picture years ago.”
Kerrigan said, “Ernie, argue later if you want. Go on, Mister Tobin. What else?”
I said, “It never seemed in character for Rita Castle to run out that way. The closest thing to a real man in her life was Ted Quigley, and she’d managed to make do on a very small diet of him. And the phrase itself, real man, is something she would never have said in her own voice. And no man at all, not even Quigley, could make her turn her back on financial security and a theatrical career.”
Kerrigan said, “You make a good case. All right, what next?”
“If the note’s false,” I said, “then we’ve been working from false assumptions all along. We’ve been looking for the man Rita ran away with, and Rita didn’t run away with any man.”
Rembek very nearly interrupted again, this time joyously, but controlled himself in time.
I said, “The things we thought were done all by the same person were done by different people. No one took the money away from the motel. If the MacNeills had anything to do with the disappearance of the money, they still didn’t murder Rita. Aside from the improbability of their knowing about the money before her death, there’s simply insufficient motive for them.”
Kerrigan said, “What about the cash? They could have found out about it, and they probably needed it.”
“They’ve needed money all their lives,” I said. “They never have killed for it and they never will.”
“I think you’re right,” said Kerrigan. “Let’s get back to the note. If it’s a phony, why was it done? She wasn’t dead yet when it was written.”
Donner spoke for the first time in a long while, saying, “The frame falls apart there, don’t it? You got nothing that makes sense.”
“There was a frame, all right,” I agreed, “but you’re the one who did the framing. You were out to keep Rembek from divorcing your sister and marrying Rita Castle, and you figured the way to do it was discredit Rita, frame her so Rembek wouldn’t have any more to do with her.”
“Bull,” he said.
Kerrigan said to me, “How did he do it?”
“While Rembek was out of town over the weekend,” I said, “Donner went to Rita with some sort of story, an emergency of some kind, maybe a tax fraud indictment, I don’t know what. He told Rita the story, and told her Rembek was going to have to stay out of New York State for a while, or maybe entirely out of the country. Just for a while. So what she was supposed to do was take the cash from the apartment, go to the motel in Allentown, and wait for Rembek to meet her there. Donner probably told her it might take a week or more before Rembek could show up.”
Donner laughed heavily, shaking his head, and said, “Stupid. What’s the point? So a week later she comes back and says to Ernie, What’s up? Then Ernie’s down on me.”
Rembek said, “Not if you killed her, Frank.”
“It wasn’t like that,” I said. “If Donner had meant to kill her, he’d just have done it, without complications. But what he wanted was to discredit her, and do it so badly you wouldn’t look at Rita Castle or any other woman except your wife for the rest of your life.”
Kerrigan said, “So how does he make the frame stick?”
“He finds her,” I said. “A week goes by, everybody’s looking for Rita Castle, and all of a sudden Frank Donner finds her. Maybe he fixes it so someone working for him finds her, he smooths that part of it over, and back he comes with Rita in one hand and the cash in the other. He tells Rembek the man got away, and Rembek by that point should be so disgusted with her he won’t bother to question the story very much. And when Rita accuses Donner of framing her, all it sounds like is a wild shot aimed at making trouble for the one who found her and d
ragged her back.”
Kerrigan, looking at Rembek, studying him, said, “It might have worked, too. Yes, it probably would have worked. You’ve got a big temper, Ernie, you would have blown up and never listened to Rita at all.”
Rembek said, belligerently, “I would have listened. I would have known it was a frame. For Christ’s sake, you think I’m that easy to sucker?”
“Frank Donner did,” I said. “And I’m inclined to agree with him.”
Donner said, “How come it’s me? Why not anybody else? Just because I’m Eleanor’s brother?”
“You did a stretch for forgery once,” I reminded him. “You’re the best bet to have written the note. You were also up for arson once or twice, which connects with the explosion in my office, which we haven’t gotten to yet.”
“Let’s get to it,” said Kerrigan.
“That’s easy,” I said. “What he wanted to do was destroy the note. It was a safe forgery when it was simply a part of a frame-up, but when it was a piece of evidence in a murder it was too chancy to leave around. So he snuck into the office to get it. Stealing it would have pointed a finger at it, so he figured to destroy it in the explosion. I don’t know why he had to make it a booby trap, and turn it into a killing, but he did.”
Donner said, “This is a great fairy story, but let’s see the footprints under the window.”
I told him, “I don’t know if you bothered to bribe the doorman at Rita Castle’s apartment building or not, but even if you did, it was a bribe that could only hold up as part of the frame. It won’t hold up now. It may take a few minutes, but Rembek can get that doorman to tell at what point that weekend you went into the building to leave the note.”
Rembek said, “I’ll make a phone call right now.”
I said, “Is it necessary, Donner?”
He wouldn’t give an inch. He said, “Ernie, if you listen to this bullshit, I’ll remember it. The phone’s right over there. If you believe this hard-on cop over me, go ahead and use it.”
Rembek didn’t hesitate. He went over and made his call. When he was done, he turned back to us and said, “They’ll call as soon as they get it.”
Kerrigan said, “Mister Tobin, you’re answering all the questions but the big one. We know about the money, we know about the note, we know about the explosion. What about who killed Rita?”
“That’s for Donner to answer,” I said. “He was the only one who knew where she was. I can’t think of any reason he’d change his plans and kill her himself, though it’s vaguely possible. I think it more likely he told someone else where she was, and that someone else went and killed her.”
Kerrigan shook his head. “I don’t like that,” he said. “Why would he tell anybody?”
Rembek said, “He killed her himself, the bastard. He knew the frame wouldn’t work, and he killed her himself.”
I said, “Who did you tell, Donner?”
“Me,” said a woman, stepping through the doorway.
We all turned and looked at her, and before Rembek said, hoarsely, “Eleanor!” I knew who it had to be.
She was a thin woman, bird-thin, as painfully thin as Ethel Donner was painfully fat. Her black dress, with a narrow belt at the waist, hung loosely on her, as though she’d suffered a recent weight loss. Her hair was black, heavily mixed with gray, and piled without neatness atop her head.
It was her eyes that told who she was; black, bright, intense, with the stare of a hawk, but behind the brightness was a fog of pain and confusion. I remembered eyes like that from my early days on the force, when I was on a beat. I’d seen men and women like this before, the chronic asylum-dwellers, the people who spend their adult lives in and out of mental hospitals, who function normally for periods of time and then—abruptly or slowly—go off again on a high wailing curve to some far mountaintop the sane can never reach. I remember being called upon from time to time when one of these people had suddenly reached the stage where the hospital was necessary again. Sometimes they would be huddling in a corner of the bed, sometimes sitting docile and quiet in the living room with their bags packed by their feet, sometimes hiding in a dark closet with their bright eyes peering out at a world too complex to be borne.
I had thought it would be her, but never having met her I couldn’t be sure. I had wanted Frank Donner to mention her first, but this was even better. She had come out to us herself.
I said, “Good afternoon, Mrs. Rembek. I’m sorry to have to meet you this way.”
“It’s gone on long enough,” she said. “We might as well end it now.” She made a thin apologetic smile for her brother, saying, “I’m sorry, Frank, but it is all over.”
I said, “You overheard Frank and his wife talking about it, didn’t you?”
“I listen,” she said. “Nobody knows, but I do. I know everything that happens. I heard Ethel tell you about the snoring, I heard everything.”
She was, at the moment, being absolutely rational, with only the faintest hint of wild winds in her voice. Still, I felt the tremendous pressure she was under, the strain of her control on herself. I said, “You don’t have to talk about it now if you don’t want, Mrs. Rembek.”
But she wanted to. She said, “Ernie thinks he hides things from me, but he never could. I’ve heard him talking on the telephone with his women, I heard him talking to Sam Goldberg about a divorce.”
“That’s impossible!” shouted Rembek, in a kind of horror.
“Sit down, Ernie,” said Kerrigan, and for the first time the full cold weight of the corporation could be heard glinting in his voice. “Sit down and shut up.”
I said, “Mrs. Rembek, excuse me. Is that why you came to stay here, at your brother’s? Because you knew about the divorce proceedings?”
“I couldn’t stay there any longer,” she said, faint remembered panic in her voice. “Pretending, pretending, making believe I was deaf and blind, I couldn’t do it any more.” She looked suddenly around the room, back and forth, like a trapped animal, but all she said was, “I would like to sit down, please.”
Kerrigan and Frank Donner both hurried forward with chairs; with an apologetic thank-you smile to Kerrigan she chose the one brought by her brother, who hovered over her as she gingerly settled down. Continuing to stand beside her, Donner then turned to glare at me, saying, “You can’t use any of this stuff and you know it. She isn’t responsible.” He looked vaguely comic in his undershirt, the hammer still held forgotten in his right hand, his face and neck red with rage and frustration and confusion.
His sister took his other hand, saying, “Please, Frank, let me talk. It’s really all right.”
And all at once I was sick of it. At the end of all the lies, all the false trails, the bloodshed and violence and intrigue, was a beaten and lonely woman. Of everyone I had met in the course of the hunt, this woman was the least criminal, the most to be pitied, the least to be feared, and yet she was the prey I’d been tracking.
“No more,” I said. “No more, Mrs. Rembek. Tell your story to the police, if you want, I can’t have it.” Turning to Rembek, I gestured at his wife and said, “There she is. You sent me to find her, and I found her. Do what you think you should do with her.”
I considered adding something more, telling him a bit of the truth about Rita Castle, some of the things Ted Quigley had told me, but I left them unsaid. Rembek was staring with glazed eyes at his wife, seeing her for what must have been the first time; to learn the truth about both the women in his life at once would have been too brutal.
I went over to the telephone, picked it up, and started dialing. Donner shouted at me, “Who do you think you’re calling?”
“The police,” I said, turning to look at him.
“You can’t touch Eleanor,” he said angrily, “she isn’t responsible, the whole thing’s something she made up in her head!”
“It isn’t for Eleanor,” I said, “it’s for you. There’s the Mickey Hansel killing, that one’s yours. And you are responsible, and it
will stick.”
The dam burst. Donner’s hand came up with the hammer in it, his face reddened, and with a roar he lunged across the room at me.
I acted without conscious thought. My hand dropped the phone and reached back, flipping the tail of my jacket clear, closing on the butt of the revolver, bringing it out as I leaned to the left, all the movements I’d learned years ago on the pistol range and done so often they were now mechanical. The gun came out, Donner rushed toward me with the hammer swinging in his hand, and I shot him twice in the head.
twenty-seven
THE NEXT TWO DAYS were full of questions. My testimony was taken several times, by both tape recorder and stenographer.
The others were asked questions, too; Rembek and his wife and Mrs. Donner. Kerrigan had asked to be allowed to fade out of the picture before I called the police, and I saw no reason to refuse him.
Talk is an antidote to pain, so though Rembek (who was not charged with anything) would do no talking at all, both women were more than willing to explain what had happened and why. I had been right about Donner’s motive and method in getting Rita Castle to take Rembek’s money and hide out in Pennsylvania. Mrs. Rembek insisted that she had gone to see Rita Castle—having overheard in a conversation between the Donners where Rita was—not to kill her but only to talk with her, in hopes of getting Rita to promise to keep away from Rembek in the future. She’d brought along a pistol of her brother’s, with which she hoped to frighten Rita, but the pistol hadn’t been loaded. However, Rita wouldn’t scare, and Mrs. Rembek made a slip that told her of the frame that had been set up. After that, Rita was apparently deliberately cruel; she had just finished a shower, and now she stepped out of her robe and, in Mrs. Rembek’s words, “paraded herself around to show me the difference between us.” That was when Mrs. Rembek clubbed her with the butt of the pistol, all her pent-up feelings coming out in one violent lethal blow. Later, on the way back to New York she’d thrown the pistol and room key from the Easton-Phillipsburg bridge into the Delaware River.
The two women differed on one point, Mrs. Rembek insisting that no one had learned what she’d done, Mrs. Donner insisting she for one had known it all along. Whether or not Frank Donner himself had been aware of the truth, there was no way to be sure, though he had probably at least suspected it.
Kinds of Love, Kinds of Death Page 16
