by Frances
“That’s a good idea,” Shapiro said. “Why don’t I?”
“Only maybe,” the man said, “she don’t want to talk to you. Cop or no cop.”
“Maybe,” Shapiro said. “Suppose I just drive—”
“Nope,” the man said. “You stay here. I’ll go ask her. If she wants to talk to you, she says so. See what I mean?”
“Yes,” Shapiro said.
The man turned abruptly and walked up the drive. At the door of the house he waited for a minute or two, apparently for it to be opened. He went in. Almost immediately, he came out. He beckoned. Shapiro drove on up the drive. A tall old woman, who carried a cane and was dressed in a dark suit, stood at the door with the light behind her.
“You are prompt,” she said, when he went up onto the porch. Her voice was very old, but it was also without quaver. It was a weathered voice, as her face was a weathered face. “I telephoned only twenty minutes ago.”
She turned and went into the house. The man, who still carried the shotgun—if he pulled the trigger now he would get the left foot—motioned with his free hand. Shapiro followed the old woman into the house. He followed her into a living room. “Sit there,” she said, and indicated a rocking chair. Shapiro, cautiously, sat in the rocking chair. His mother had had a rocking chair. She had been very proud of it.
“As I said,” the old woman said, “you are very prompt.”
“We try to be,” Shapiro said. “Except—”
She waited. She had black eyes, very sharp in the ancient face.
“I’m a detective,” Shapiro said. “From the city, Mrs. Piermont.” He spoke the name with a slight question in his voice. She did not respond to the question. “Detective Shapiro,” he said. “We are trying to trace a young woman.”
“Certainly,” she said. “Why did you think I telephoned? My ward. My former ward. Julie Titus. Why are you beating around the bush, Mr. Shapiro? Why won’t you come to the point?”
The point seemed slightly elusive. He tried to come to it.
“Apparently,” he said, “you called the police. I didn’t know about that. I—”
“Don’t,” she said, “tell me you merely happened to be passing.”
He was patient. He told her why he had come.
“Oh,” she said, “Ebenezer told me about that. This young couple. Prying.”
“Is Ebenezer—” Shapiro began, and was interrupted.
“The man you just talked to,” she said. “Ebenezer Titus. He thought I was still in Florida. As if I didn’t have any gumption. He’s getting old, Ebenezer is. She’s this girl that man killed, isn’t she?”
“Your ward?” Shapiro said, and was asked, in a sharp voice, who he supposed she meant. “We don’t know who killed her,” Shapiro said. “But—we don’t know, either, that she was Miss Titus. She was known by a different name.”
“Evans,” Mrs. Piermont told him. “Nora Evans. Why do you think I came back? I explained all this to the officer I talked to.”
“Yes,” Shapiro said. “But—suppose you explain it to me, Mrs. Piermont. I don’t like to trouble you, but—”
“Young man,” she said, “I am quite in the possession of my faculties.” There was an implication that Shapiro was not. “If you will listen,” she said. He nodded; he listened.
She had been in Bradenton when she read of the murder of a girl named Nora Evans. “I always read about murders,” she said. “I am interested in human nature.”
“Oh,” Shapiro said, and listened.
“The name,” she said. “The address. She had written me from there using that name—Evans. Saying she was married. I suppose that was not true?”
“There’s nothing to show she was,” Shapiro said. “You knew there was a man? Before, I mean?”
She had, she pointed out, just told him. Certainly she knew there was a man.
“Not,” she said, “that she was straightforward. I hoped I had taught her that, but no.” And for a moment, he thought, the weathered voice seemed about to falter. It was reinforced. “However that may be,” she said. “Many years in vain. But, what may we expect? Since she was ten—”
She told him, now with no apparent emotion, of her adoption—except that it was not legally adoption—of the girl Julie Titus; of the pretty, red-haired little girl of Briggs Hill. It was news to Shapiro. It was told briefly, but he did not, for the moment, ask more than an outline.
“I did what I could to protect her,” Mrs. Piermont said. “It was not enough. In some fashion, she met this—this man. He persuaded her to desert me, without a word. Until, of course, some days later—then she wrote, saying she was sorry, and that she was going to be married. She hoped I would understand.” She paused. “Understand,” she repeated. She took a deep breath.
It had been inconvenient. She had expected the girl’s companionship in Florida, as usual. The young were inconsiderate. One expected that. But—
The first letter had given no address. That had been in October.
“You made no effort to find her?”
She seemed surprised.
“I?” she said. “When she had, voluntarily, left me at a time she knew I wished her companionship?”
“Oh,” Shapiro said.
It was after Mrs. Piermont had reached Florida—alone—that she had received the second letter. In it, the girl had said she was married, and had given the Eleventh Street address.
“I suppose,” Shapiro said, gently, “that then she told you her married name?”
“Yes,” the old woman said. “She said she was Mrs. Evans.” She looked at him with doubt. “I fear,” she said, “that you are very inattentive, Mr. Shapiro.”
He said he was sorry.
“But,” the old woman said, “if I wrote, I was to write her as Miss Nora Evans. The marriage was being kept secret. She did not say why. But now you tell me there was no marriage.”
They knew of none, Shapiro told her. It was almost certain there had been none. She nodded to that. She told him that blood would tell. She paused for a long time.
“I may as well tell you,” she said. “I was fond of the girl. I—I had great hopes for her. I had made plans for her. And—it was in a way of a test of something I, a good many years ago, believed in. That no blood was too bad—” She paused again. “She threw everything away. But—this does not interest you.” Then, “She sent me a picture of this—this creature. Appearances are deceptive.”
“You have this picture?” Shapiro asked her.
“Certainly,” she said, and reached down to a black leather bag on the floor beside her chair. She opened the bag and took a photograph from it. It was a small print but it was clear enough—clear enough and unsurprising enough. Shapiro looked at it. He nodded his head. Then he took the picture to a lamp and looked at it carefully.
“Well?” she said.
“It helps,” he said. He went back to his rocking chair. “There was no identification of the body,” he said, speaking as he was supposed to speak. “We’ll have to ask you to make that identification if—” He paused. “If you feel equal to it,” he said. “To be sure it is really the body of—was she a relative?”
“Oh,” she said, “a Titus only. As I was. But—there is no real kinship. Nothing traceable. Long before the Revolution there were Tituses in these parts. There are many branches. Many kinds. Of course I will identify, Mr. Shapiro. Why else did I come back from Bradenton? Tomorrow, Ebenezer will drive me into the city. You will have the proper arrangements made?”
He would have the arrangements made, Detective Shapiro promised. He put the photograph in his pocket.
Everything had been thought of. Each hole was stopped. It came to that. For months—since at least the summer before—someone had worked carefully, foresightedly, so that now each avenue which seemed to present itself led only more deeply into the trap. And it was still not evident to John Hayward, walking slowly home after garaging the car, what the purpose had been—the central purpose. To trap John
Hayward? To kill a red-haired pretty girl?
Driving back to the city through the spring night, they had stuck on that. (There had been no recurrence of the darkness of self-doubt, which was something—which was a great deal. As long as he was with Barbara—and now it seemed that she was walking with him, although he had left her at her father’s house—he did not think that that would come back again.) There was a plot which they could not fathom. And, John thought, until we know the reason, we cannot hope to know the plotter. He turned it over and over in his tired mind. If, he thought, I could work out one of the things—even one. A simple thing.
He went into the small lobby of the apartment house he lived in. The adversary must have gone in and out of the same lobby several times. He must have gone through it, and up to John’s apartment, and into it to get the laundry-marked shirts. He must have gone again to hang up the sports jacket—worn many times, no doubt, and certainly in the restaurant to which Father Higbee had taken them—to hang it in the closet, for the police to find and, as circumstances tightened the noose, make much of.
The adversary had a key. That was obvious. How he had got hold of it was not obvious. Nor was it obvious how he had, several times at any rate, got into and out of the apartment house unnoticed, by the elevator operators. There were only four apartments to the floor. If, several times, Harry or his alternate took a stranger to the same floor—the fifth—they might have become curious. At any rate, the adversary would have wanted to avoid—
Even before John went into the lobby, he had realized that he would have to wait for the elevator, which was not at the ground floor. Through the glass of the front door one could see the elevator door, and see it was closed. John had known this for years. Never before had he thought of it. The elevator car was trundling somewhere—and rather noisily—through the shaft. John would have to wait. Then, he would ask Harry if he remembered—
But another thought broke in. He thought of the fire stairs. The foot of the stairway was in sight from the elevator, so that the operator—in the car, or on his bench near the elevator gate—could see it. But not, evidently, when he had taken the car up with a passenger, or to get a passenger. So—
On impulse, to prove a self-evident point, John went to the staircase, opened the fire door, and climbed the cement stairs. So that part was easy, at least for a man vigorous enough to climb so many stair flights.
It was with the faint satisfaction of having proved something that John let himself into the apartment, and turned on the lights. He knew how the adversary had come in.
He found, and was annoyed to find, that he went into his own apartment tensed, as if to meet attack. But there was no attack. The apartment seemed empty. It took only seconds to find that it was as empty as it seemed. In the last few hours, at any rate, nothing new had happened—not here, within these familiar walls.
He remembered, then, that he had not looked in the hall closet. He opened the door—and found that, as he did so, he stood so that the door was, opening, between him and the closet. He swore, in exasperation, as he realized what he had done. If this went on, he thought, I’ll be looking under beds. He turned on the closet light.
The boldly patterned sports jacket was gone.
You get punch drunk if it goes on long enough, John thought. The jacket had been there when he left in the morning. Now it was gone when he came home in the evening. Well—it was gone. Somebody had come and taken it. And about this, John thought, I feel nothing in particular. It is as if I had all along expected it to happen. He closed the closet door.
I’m damned if I’ll even think about it, John Hayward thought. I’ll think of one thing at a time. I’ll think about that tree.
And then he bolted the apartment door. Whoever went in and out at will—the adversary; probably the police—would not come in tonight. John Hayward, numbly, poured himself a small nightcap, took one sip from it and put it on a table, and went into the bedroom and to bed. And almost at once he went to sleep.
He wakened at a little before eight. He knew where the tree was. It was as simple as that.
He showered and shaved. He made himself breakfast. He felt much better. His mind was rested. And there was more than that. In his mind, for the first time in many, many hours there was a kind of confidence.
He was smoking his first cigarette when the telephone rang.
“You’re all right?” Barbara said. “You sound all right.”
“Better,” he told her. “A lot better. And—I’ve remembered about the tree. It’s—” He told her where it was.
“I,” Barbara said, “will be waiting on the curb.”
Since it was not the cleaning woman’s day, John washed the dishes. He went out, locking the apartment behind him—for what good that would do. He walked toward the elevator and when he was near, heard it rumbling in the shaft. He opened the door to the fire stairs and went down them.
In the stair well, he could hear the elevator moving in its shaft. So—that was the way the adversary had got out unnoticed. He went on down the stairs, listening. The elevator, which had gone up, went down again. He waited out of sight near the foot of the stairs. He could hear the elevator doors close and the car start up again. John went out of the apartment house, pleased with another point proved. It was a. bright morning. He walked the two blocks to the garage. He ran the Corvette out into the sunshine.
Barbara Phillips was, quite literally, waiting at the curb. She wore a yellow suit, which somehow seemed the color of a spring morning.
They drove north into Westchester to find a tree by a tennis court.
X
Grady rang the bell. When it was not answered, he kept on ringing. Shapiro, who looked tired, and even more sad than usual, leaned against the wall. “Seems like he’s not there,” Grady said, with satisfaction, and Shapiro made agreeing sounds. Grady knocked on the apartment door and waited, and knocked again. Then he took a key out of his pocket and unlocked the door and they went in. Just inside, Grady, loudly, spoke John Hayward’s name. He was not answered.
“Been here,” Shapiro said. “Not long ago, either. Smoked a cigarette.”
“The educated nose,” Grady said. “Also, he slept here. Didn’t make the bed. Tut. Tut.”
Grady went to the hall closet and opened it. He said, “Uh-huh” and took the boldly patterned sports jacket off a hanger. He carried it back to a window and they looked at it. There was a rent in the back, and a small piece of the material was missing. Grady took an envelope out of his pocket, and fitted a small piece of colored wool where a piece was missing.
“Nice,” Grady said. “Isn’t it nice, Nate?”
“Fits,” Shapiro said. “Everything fits, you notice.”
“That’s what makes it nice,” Grady told him. He put the piece of cloth back in the envelope and the envelope in his pocket. He put the jacket over his arm.
“Anything else we want?” he said, and looked around.
Shapiro shook his head, sadly. They went out of Hayward’s apartment, and locked the door after them. They went down the corridor to the elevator, and rang for it.
“You,” Grady said to Harry, when Harry brought the car up. “When did Mr. Hayward come in last night?”
“Last night?” Harry said. “You want to know when he came in last night?”
“You’re bright,” Grady said. “Mr. Hayward. Last night.”
“Far’s I know,” Harry said, “he didn’t come in. Anyway, I didn’t take him up.”
“You were on all night?”
“Like always,” Harry said. “On at nine. Supposed to go off at nine. And look what time it is.”
Grady looked. It was nine-thirty.
“Like always,” Harry said. “Comes when he wants to. Me, I stay till he comes.”
“It’s very tough,” Grady said. “But you probably get some shut-eye.”
“So if I do,” Harry said. “They want to go up, they want to go down, they wake me up. Mr. Hayward didn’t go up. Or down.”
“All the same,” Grady said, “he was in the apartment.”
“Anyway,” Shapiro said, “somebody was.”
Harry didn’t know about that. All he knew was— He’d told them what he knew.
“’Course,” Harry said, “suppose he could have used the stairs. Don’t know why he would.”
“Maybe,” Shapiro said, “he didn’t want to wake you up.” At that, Harry laughed, with derision.
“Or maybe,” Grady said, “he didn’t want anybody to know what time he got in. Or went out.”
“How,” Harry said, “would I know? You want to go down?”
They went down. Harry stopped the car. “Mr. Hayward wear this coat much?” Grady asked, and lifted the arm with the jacket on it. Harry looked at it. He shook his head.
“Nice piece of merchandise,” Harry said. “Like they say. No, I never saw him wear it.”
“Sure you did,” Grady said. “Must’ve.”
“Listen,” Harry said. “I know what I see.”
“Just think about it,” Grady said. “Must’ve seen him wearing it. It’ll come back.”
Harry shook his head.
“O.K.,” Grady said. “When he comes in, call us. Here’s the number.” He gave Harry a card. “Going off,” Harry said. “If he ever gets the lead out.” He was told to pass the word along.
“Funny he don’t remember,” Shapiro said, in the police car, which was an unidentified black sedan.
“Lying,” Grady said. “You know how these guys are, Nate. Figure they admit anything it puts them in a jam.”
“Maybe,” Shapiro said.
They drove three blocks to a garage. The Corvette they sought was not there. The space it occupied, on the ground floor, was shown them. Regulars like Mr. Hayward simply drove into allotted spaces. Easier all around. Late at night there was only one man on and he was usually upstairs washing cars. Last night’s man was off by then, but he had a telephone. He was sleepy, but he answered it.
