Sinners and Shrouds

by Jonathan Latimer

  ‘Okay. Third person. After the mother escaped from the convent dressed as a nun, she married Larry Trevor. In 1931. Convent records, marriage records will prove this.’ He paused for objections, but nobody made any. ‘Then, wearing the stolen nun’s habit, she helped him rob a dozen or so Oklahoma banks. In the middle of ’32 she turned informer, got Larry caught in a trap (I bet she figured on his being killed, but a hundred and fifty years was almost as good) and went off with the money. Mary came and was left on the Baumholtz porch, probably with a note identifying her as Larry’s child. So Esther, being some kind of a relative, would keep her. Then the mother set herself up in Fort Worth with the stolen dough and a fake name. Four years later, in ’36, she hooked old man Palmer.’

  Mrs. Palmer smiled at the others. ‘To the last charge I plead guilty.’

  ‘No divorce was possible,’ Clay continued grimly. ‘She couldn’t use the Trevor name because police and the Banker’s Association were still hot after the money. So she married Simon bigamously under the fake name.’

  ‘But Trevor …’ I. P. Geisel began.

  ‘How would he find out in prison?’

  ‘Wouldn’t,’ said Diffendorf.

  Eyeing him gratefully, Clay went on: ‘For sixteen years, from ’36 to ’52, everything was dandy. Simon died in ’47, never having had the slightest idea of deception, and she became ruler of the Palmer empire. Then in ’52, Mary Trevor appeared.’

  He paused dramatically, but it wasn’t the right place. ‘Am I boring you?’ he asked.

  ‘It ain’t so much that it’s boring,’ Diffendorf said, eyeing him dubiously.

  ‘Go on,’ said Mrs Palmer.

  ‘Mary wasn’t so bad as long as she represented exposure of the bigamy angle. Worst that could happen was loss of the empire, and over the years the mother had probably stashed away a fortune. But next Mary, to get a bigger share of the loot, accused her of being the Hooded Nun. Exposure of that meant hanging or the gas chamber or whatever they use in Oklahoma. Because there’s no statute of limitations on murder.’

  ‘That’s true,’ Diffendorf agreed. ‘But what gives you the notion Mary rang in the Hooded Nun?’

  ‘Laura Peterkins’ note. Read the second paragraph.’

  The lieutenant found the papers Clay had given him in a coat pocket, found the note. He read slowly:

  ‘“Just can’t name names until we talk—the thought so terrible, so repugnant, so impossible!”’

  Clay said, ‘Words like those wouldn’t be applied to bigamy. Have to be something worse.’

  ‘But not necessarily a Hooded Nun,’ Mrs Palmer murmured.

  ‘No. Not necessarily,’ Clay admitted. ‘You got some other idea?’

  ‘One second, please.’ I. P. Geisel’s long face was thoughtful. ‘Let us recapitulate. Let us admit Larry Trevor’s wife was the girl who escaped from the convent. Let us admit she was the Hooded Nun. But what proof have you that she was Mary Trevor’s mother? Or that Larry Trevor was the father?’

  ‘The warden’s letter.’

  ‘Inadmissible as evidence.’

  ‘The Mother Superior.’

  ‘Dead, I believe.’ The lawyer smiled frostily. ‘As is Esther Baumholtz.’

  ‘You’d better settle for Widdecomb, son,’ Diffendorf said.

  ‘It’s got to be!’ Clay said desperately. ‘It’s the only way it makes sense!’

  They stared at him, their faces patient, almost sympathetic. Finally Diffendorf spoke again. ‘If you could prove Mrs Palmer did the murders here,’ he said, ‘then maybe the other stuff would hold water.’

  ‘Yes,’ I. P. Geisel agreed. ‘As a background motive.’

  ‘Try,’ Mrs Palmer urged.

  Strangely, they were helping him, like people trying to ease the embarrassment of someone who’d committed a faux pas at a dinner table. To hell with that! ‘Maybe I can,’ he said savagely. ‘That part began a couple of weeks ago when Mrs Palmer …’

  Someone coughed in the doorway. A blond man in a blue gabardine suit, holding with both hands a heavy canvas-wrapped object the size of a case of beer.

  ‘Guy named Clay here?’ he demanded.

  ‘Me.’

  ‘What d’you want done with this?’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Recorder I picked up at the airport. Miss Dewhurst tried it. Said something crazy. Said to tell you it played lovely music. Chopin from cherry blossoms.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You got me.’

  While Clay stared, bewildered, I. P. Geisel moved forward. ‘I suggest you defer the music, soothing as it might be. We’ve all had an exhausting day. Mrs Palmer especially …’

  ‘And you were just at such an interesting place in the story,’ Mrs Palmer said.

  ‘Okay.’ Clay turned to the man. ‘Leave it in the outer office.’

  ‘Miss D. said I was to stick around.’

  ‘Then stick.’ As Clay frowned at the man’s retreating back, Diffendorf prompted, ‘A couple of weeks ago …?’

  ‘That’s when Mrs Palmer decided murder was the only way out. When she dressed up as a nun, met Clarissa Simpson at the Holy Name Cathedral, got the key from her and had a duplicate made.’

  ‘The nun was a man!’ Diffendorf exclaimed disgustedly. ‘You told us yourself the maid said so.’

  ‘Believed so from the whisky on her breath. Whisky on her breath now.’ Eyeing Mrs Palmer’s startled face, he went on: ‘Again dressed as a nun she used the key to get into the apartment Saturday night. Around four-thirty, after I’d passed out and the girl had gone to sleep, she went to work. Murder. Plus such fancy touches as ripping the clothes and slashing the body to make it look as though I’d done it. And planting the scissors at my place. That’s when Gwen Pearson saw what she thought was me in a cloak, when the janitor saw his “Angel of the Lord”. Then, informed of the girl’s death back in Washington, she flew back to Chicago in her private plane, knocked off Laura Peterkins and sat down to see what happened.’

  There was a long silence. At last Diffendorf said, ‘I like Einstein’s theory better.’

  I. P. Geisel said, ‘Theory? A disordered dream …’

  ‘Yeah.’ Diffendorf grinned sardonically at Clay. ‘This hop-scotch between Washington and Chicago, for instance. Your apartment at five and then home in time to be told of the girl’s death?’

  ‘Brother!’ Clay exclaimed. ‘I almost forgot. Plane. Under three hours. Look at the passenger list I gave you.’

  The lieutenant found the papers again. ‘She travelled as Horace Widdecomb …’

  ‘The other list.’

  Diffendorf studied it, said, ‘Sister Angelica?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘What’s to prevent its being a Sister Angelica?’ I. P. Geisel protested.

  ‘You ever hear of a nun travelling alone?’

  For the first time Diffendorf was impressed. He made a whistling noise around his pipe, cautiously eyed Mrs Palmer. The skin over her nose was wrinkled in a puzzled frown.

  ‘I must admit it’s odd,’ she said. ‘But I’m sure there’s an explanation.’

  ‘Some kind of an emergency,’ suggested I. P. Geisel.

  ‘Very likely.’ She regarded Clay thoughtfully. ‘To go back for a moment to my convent childhood. What if I told you I grew up on a farm near Waco, Texas? And that my foster-parents are still living there?’

  Clay didn’t answer.

  ‘They would dispose of the first part of your story, wouldn’t they? And Sister Angelica. Finding her would dispose of the second part.’ She lifted her glass, then put it down again. ‘I almost forgot. My breath.’ She smiled at Clay. ‘The most shocking thing of all.’

  He knew then that he’d lost. Foster-parents, a Sister Angelica, all she needed would be produced with the money that could produce anything. Records would be altered, officials greased, inquiries hushed, a proper criminal background framed for Widdecomb. And if he persisted in his charges, the money would produce a little accident.
Might produce it anyway. With about thirty-nine million nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand dollars to spare. He should have had better sense.

  ‘You got anything more to say?’ Diffendorf asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Clay said. ‘I generally get my strait-jackets from Brooks Brothers.’

  Chapter 28

  ‘Do you know,’ Mrs Palmer mused, ‘I don’t believe there’s even a word for it.’

  The glasses were full again, the Scotch poured this time by I. P. Geisel. Some sirens had wailed far out on the west side of the city, fire trucks answering a call. An airplane had gone by low over the lake front. A drink had been given to the blond man waiting in the reception room. What conversation there was had been uneasy, the conversation of strangers at a funeral. A funeral in which the deceased, Clay kept thinking gloomily, was a gent named Sam Clay.

  ‘Matricide,’ Mrs Palmer mused. ‘Patricide. Infanticide. But what is it when a mother kills a grown-up daughter?’

  Nobody answered.

  ‘Not a very nice thing to do, anyway.’ She nibbled reflectively on the edge of her glass. ‘Nor to be accused of.’

  ‘He has admitted he was wrong,’ I. P. Geisel said placatingly.

  ‘Half-cocked,’ Clay muttered.

  Mrs Palmer eyed him, her lips still touching the glass. ‘That’s just it. Mr Clay’s thinking he should have waited. Obtained more evidence. Built up a better case. He’s not convinced.’

  ‘I’m the most convinced man you ever saw.’

  ‘No. Not really.’ She frowned, puckering the skin above her nose. She didn’t look sick now. She was alive again, her eyes smoky and wise. ‘But one or two things occur to me that might set his mind at rest now.’

  ‘It couldn’t be more at rest.’

  She ignored this. ‘One is: how could I have talked to Mary Trevor in Washington if, at almost the same time, I was murdering her in her apartment?’ When Clay didn’t reply, she continued, ‘Of course I could have invented the conversation, but how could I invent the telephone call? When it’s a matter of record?’

  ‘There’s no need …’ I. P. Geisel began.

  ‘And then Laura Peterkins. Why would I have gone back to Washington and then returned to Chicago before killing her? Why wouldn’t I have killed her the same night?’

  ‘I figured you got some sort of a message,’ Clay said weakly. ‘About her having the warden’s letter.’

  ‘But how? Who sent it? Who gave it to me?’

  ‘Mr Clay was understandably confused,’ I. P. Geisel said in a conciliatory voice. ‘After all that had happened.’

  ‘I want him unconfused,’ Mrs Palmer said. She looked at Clay for a long time, her tawny eyes steady. ‘A final thing. Don’t you think that if Miss Trevor, or anyone for that matter, were threatening me, I could find some way of removing the threat without involving myself?’

  She stared at Clay for a second longer, then smiled ruefully. ‘That sounds like a threat itself, doesn’t it? It wasn’t meant to.’

  It did and it didn’t, Clay thought tiredly. It depended upon what he believed. He didn’t know what he believed. It didn’t matter anyway. On the record he was wrong. Would always be wrong. He went to the bar, bumped shoulders with the blond man.

  ‘Just freshening her a little,’ the man whispered, hastily putting down a bottle of Scotch.

  Retrieving the bottle, Clay recalled Miss Dewhurst’s message. Chopin from cherry blossoms. What in hell did that mean? The recorder, of course, was Bundy’s mechanical man. And maybe what Cleo heard the girl mention at the Minuet. But Chopin?

  Back of him Diffendorf was refusing a final drink. ‘I’m due for some shut-eye, Mrs Palmer,’ he said. ‘Been due for about two days.’

  Tilting the bottle, Clay let whisky dribble into his glass. ‘Chopin,’ he said. ‘Polonaise. Mazurka. Prelude. But what for a time like this?’

  ‘I can think of something very appropriate,’ said Mrs Palmer. ‘Probably his best known composition. Marche Funébre.’

  ‘Funeral march!’ Scotch from the inverted bottle overflowed the glass, pooled on the bar. ‘Jesus!’ Clay swung around to the blond man. ‘You know how to work that thing you brought?’

  ‘Natch. That’s why they had me get it at the airport.’

  ‘Hook her up!’

  Back of one of the chintz couches the blond man found a plug-in for the cord that dangled from the canvas-wrapped bundle. The cord was short so he put the bundle on the couch. He drew off the cover disclosing a duplicate of the machine in the outer office. ‘Seal on it when it came,’ he said. ‘Miss Dewhurst had me watch her take it off. In case we had to testify.’ He turned a dial; green lights glowed and the machine began to hum.

  ‘What in hell is it?’ Diffendorf asked.

  ‘Telerecorder!’ Clay said excitedly.

  The blond man turned another dial and the machine squawked. He hastily turned back the dial. ‘Should be a cinch,’ he said. ‘Use one almost like it for wire tapping.’

  ‘We want the play-back,’ said Clay.

  ‘What would I think you’d want?’ the blond man demanded. ‘Toscanini?’ He pulled down a lever.

  Mrs Palmer was watching them curiously. ‘Where did it come from?’

  ‘Cherry blossoms,’ Clay said.

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Where they have ’em. Washington, D.C

  ‘It’s mine …?’

  Another squawk came from the machine, followed by static and a deeper hum. ‘Got it!’ the blond man exclaimed triumphantly, adjusting dials with both hands. The static cleared and an angry voice said:

  ‘Thirty seconds! We’re paying for this call, not you! Whose residence is this?’

  They waited but nothing else happened. The machine resumed its humming, the green lights soft. ‘That was me,’ Clay said. ‘Calling the Dupont number.’

  ‘We never doubted that you made the call, Mr Clay,’ said Mrs Palmer. ‘We believe your story.’

  Clay spoke to the blond man. ‘Won’t it go further back?’

  Bending over the machine, the man peered through a slit at the rear. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘We’re in the middle.’ He depressed a lever and the telerecorder began a delirious chattering of words said backwards. The delirium ended and he raised the lever. The machine purred again.

  Seconds went by like Sunday drivers on a two-lane highway. Hours went by. Days. Seasons changed, geological ages passed. The earth lost its air and turned to pumice. Nobody was left alive to hear a girl’s frightened voice saying:

  ‘She’s not there? Oh, of course. Not there … But just in case … The evidence is safe. Safe with a family friend—a friend … where it can’t be touched …’

  The voice faded away on a breathy note that was almost a sigh. Clay turned from the machine. Everybody was alive after all. ‘The girl!’ he said. ‘The message! From the Minuet!’ He turned back to the machine. I. P. Geisel and Diffendorf moved closer, fascinated.

  This time they recognized the place where another recording had been made. The hum was different and there was a crackling noise. But for a while nothing came out. Someone had called the Dupont number, but was leaving no message.

  Suddenly Mrs Palmer’s voice, sharp and imperative, demanded: ‘What do you want? What are you doing in here?’

  Another voice, Clay’s, blurred but gradually getting louder, said. ‘Couch too li’l. Wake up … pretzel.’

  ‘Go back to the living-room!’

  ‘Wanna bed. Wanna light, too. Can’t see. Washwrong … this bed?’ There was a sound of springs, a satisfied groan. ‘Won’ful bed. Mary?’

  ‘What?’ demanded Mrs Palmer’s voice.

  ‘Bye-bye.’

  ‘All right! Bye-bye!’

  ‘Ravelled sleave … of care,’ Clay’s voice mumbled. ‘Unravelled now … Say! Tha’s funny ni’gown you got on, Mary. Black.’

  ‘Go to sleep!’

  ‘Am. Funny though … black nightie. Look like … a nun … a nun …’ />
  A long rumble that might have been a snore or a defect in the mechanism followed. After half a minute the machine signalled the end of the recording by resuming its faint humming. Slowly, their faces reflecting the same blend of awe and horror, the men turned to the kidney-shaped desk.

  But Mrs Palmer was no longer there. As the ballad said: Like smoke she’d gone; like a spectral sight that fades to mist on a summer’s night …

  Chapter 29

  BY two massive wooden doors, above steps worn smooth by ten million feet, they waited uneasily. The false dawn was coming and the false wind of a hot morning poked tentatively at paper scraps in the street. The wind smelled of sweat and sleeping people. It was breath warm, but the men by the doors were cold. They waited uneasily, the silent cathedral towering above them.

  Two stood together, each enveloped in his own particular chill. One was Lieutenant Diffendorf and the other was Sam Clay. The policeman was thinking of a swarthy man who long ago wet the smooth stone with his life blood, of Hymie Weiss, machine-gunned by rival gangsters as he climbed the steps to sanctuary. Clay was thinking of a dead girl.

  After a time he stopped thinking, asked softly, ‘How long?’

  Lost in the past, the lieutenant didn’t reply.

  ‘Crazy hunch, anyway,’ Clay whispered.

  Diffendorf heard him this time. ‘Not if she was convent raised, like you said.’ His face, pale in the half light, floated closer. ‘And this is where she met the maid.’

  ‘Still a hunch.’

  ‘No. It figures, like the others. They all figured … except maybe the one about the recorder. That kinda flew in from nowhere.’

  ‘Flew in from Bundy.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘Just being thorough, his secretary said.’ The whispering made Clay feel like a conspirator plotting an assassination. ‘Guessed the mechanical man was a recorder at the Dupont number. Already working on the four-thirty call. So he told his Washington pals to grab it.’

  ‘It sure grabbed her,’ Diffendorf said sombrely.

  A dissolute-looking pigeon, evidently on the way home from an all night brawl, dropped on to the landing. They watched it unhappily.