The Viola Brothers Shore Mystery

by Viola Brothers Shore

  Janicek’s square hand was clenched around his cup. He set it down deliberately. “She was in Philly on Friday.”

  “My, my,” Fernanda mocked. “By miracles known only to modern science, the Wizards of 20th St dug up the Chelsea Super who broke down and confessed he put her in a Yellow cab.”

  “It was a Green,” Janicek said, making no attempt to keep his voice down. The china had stopped rattling in the kitchen. “Took her to Penn Station. Conductor remembers a redhead in mink. Porter told her where to buy a car and she priced a green Buick and picked up a folder on Mexico.” He always got a kick out of all the gears meshing—gears that stretched across the country.

  Fernanda laughed. “Law Enforcement Agencies from here to the border are watching for a red-haired woman in mink, driving a green car.” She smashed out her cigarette. “She certainly handed you a green light.”

  Janicek’s match burned out in midair…

  * * * *

  Redheaded women in mink were seen everywhere, and Sheriffs’ offices from here to Texas were tracking down leads. Janicek was on a different track. His ace investigator, Lombardi, had dug up her bank account. It had been closed out and the $120 balance withdrawn. “It don’t match,” said Lombardi. “Not with mink it don’t.” Janicek told him to keep digging. You can’t buy much car with 120 bucks.

  The boys wanted to go through Emma’s room while she was out, so he walked Fernanda along to The Chelsea, steering the talk around to women’s furs. He let her poke through the closets while he went through the desk. The only thing the boys had overlooked was a column of figures jotted on the flyleaf of a book of detective stories. They added up to a total of 98 grand.

  “Maybe you’re right about detective stories,” he said, putting the book in his pocket.

  Fernanda was frowning at two green dresses left on hangers. “Homemade,” she remarked. “The drapes too. Why did such a thrifty girl leave two perfectly good new dresses?” She herself had given the answer. Because he was supposed to follow a green line.

  Lombardi almost split a gut when he heard. “Then she ain’t even headed for Mexico!” No, and not dressed in green or in mink. He had learned from Fernanda that good muskrat can fool a lot of train conductors and cabbies and even cousins.

  “And not redheaded either,” Janicek added. “She used to work in a beauty joint.”

  “We should have known this case started off too easy,” Reagan said. “She might be working in a beauty parlor right now.”

  “I’m on that angle—and Lombardi’s sticking with Schuyler’s books.” Janicek sounded quite cheerful. Now they were rid of the camouflage, they could concentrate on the other angles—the money, Cousin John, Emma, and the beauty parlors. He felt better about chasing down a character who thought she could make a monkey out of Reagan’s Department.

  * * * *

  When she was with people she was all right, keeping her ears open and her wits about her. Only when she was alone, she had this feeling of someone walking over her grave.

  She shut the door of her small, airshaft room and went down the hall to pick up Gabrielle Laroche, who did facials. Nobody ever looked at you and wondered if you were Karen Smith, because their minds were fixed on a colorful figure in flight, not a plain dark-haired woman going to a movie with a friend. Gabrielle didn’t read much English and so paid little attention to headlines, and she incuriously dropped a letter in a postbox, together with her own.

  The letter was the one move she could make with safety. The black-and-white bag was still lying in a baggage room in Nashville, because her friend Janicek had jumped the gun and it was impossible to move with the whole country alerted. My friend Janicek, she thought bitterly, making no attempt to follow the newsreel.

  She had really liked him the day they sat and talked—not the way she liked Wally—but Wally treated her like a possession, there to serve his pleasure and his needs. The solid man across the coffee table had made her feel like a person. She had liked the squareness of his shoulders—his jaw—his whole face topped by the even ridges of dark hair. Maybe if there’d been no Wally—

  No use figuring Ifs. He was against her now, and not for any gin-rummy stakes. She knew the three danger points were Emma, the money in the vault, and Cousin John. The letter, typed on her employer’s machine, should take care of the Cousin John angle. Emma would stay clammed up. And she was living off her salary. It would be a long time before she had to go near that Newark bank vault, taken out in the name of her old pal Leona, because that seemed better than making up a name which you might forget. She hadn’t seen Leona Lewis in seven years.

  She sat back and relaxed. Gabrielle wanted to walk home and they turned down a side street. On the 7th floor of The Chelsea there was a light and figures moving behind the Venetian slats. Everything in her turned to stone and ice. Somehow she made her feet carry her to the Avenue. Why did she have this crazy urge to walk past The Chelsea? To reassure herself that the Super wouldn’t recognize her without red hair and make-up? She had already done that. No, it was because Karen Smith was still inside her. And that was the real danger point. Not relatives, acquaintances, old friends. She had broken with all her old friends because of Wally. Karen Smith’s life for seven years had been a sheet of glass. Looking into it, Janicek would see only Wally. Wally…

  Janicek was free to look. Only she mustn’t.

  * * * *

  The D.A. was ready to put the screws on Emma to make her cough up Cousin John’s address. But the morning mall brought a letter, typed and posted at Times Square.

  Dear Cousin Em—

  I called you but got no answer, so take this way of letting you know I have left town till this terrible thing is over, as I would not like to testify for or against. A tourist driving to Maine offered me a lift and it seemed like the Hand of God. I will continue to pray to Him for help for us all.

  Your cousin,

  Karen

  “This is one sweet case,” said Reagan’s Boys. “Every blasted lead blows up in your face.”

  But Lombardi’s spade had turned up pay dirt. Even an incomplete audit of Schuyler’s books showed that he had been juggling accounts in his three offices since ’44, siphoning off around twenty grand a year. “A hundred grand of his own dough. Where the hell did it so?”

  “When we know that we’ll have Karen Smith,” said Janicek, thinking of the numbers on a flyleaf. Somewhere, under some name there should be a safe-deposit box—They found it, of course, rented in 1944 to Walter and Caroline Smith. But it was empty. Karen Smith had been there on the morning of the murder. “With a hundred grand she can be anywhere,” Reagan said. He didn’t nag his boys, but this one had him worried. “For cryin’ out, Yanny, what’s about the Beauty Parlors?” The N. Y. Bureau had no record of any license issued to Karen Smith or any Carrie or Caroline Smith that wasn’t accounted for. “She must have supported herself before she met Schuyler.”

  “I’m digging, Chief,” Janicek said, and dredged up a sentence out of that rambling talk over the apple cake. “I was living with another girl and we came over here to a dentist where I met Mr. Smith”—Came over here. Over here to New York City. Came over the River?

  The State of New Jersey had issued a beauty parlor license in 1940 to Caroline Smith at an address in Newark. And to a Leona Lewis listed at the same address. Leona Lewis was still living in Newark. He stopped off for Fernanda Freed.

  “Redheaded Borgia! Garrote Girl!” She had the afternoon papers and was raging at the headlines. “Why can’t they give her a break?”

  “Somebody ought to do a piece with a human angle,” Janicek suggested, and took her along to Newark.

  Leona Lewis turned out to be a marble-eyed character who hadn’t come forward because she didn’t want to get mixed in, and anyway she hadn’t seen Karen in seven years. None of the old crowd had. “Not since she left here and went to live with Wal
ly. He was scared to death it would get back to The Leech in Syracuse that he was spending money keeping a girl.”

  “My husband my ducats,” muttered Fernanda. But it was the ducats that interested Janicek. He left Fernanda soaking up human interest while he went out to call his office. When she first came East, Newark had been home to Karen Smith. A woman with something to salt away would think of home…

  That night he dropped around but Fernanda had gone for a walk. “I want to talk to you,” he told Emma, and was following her when a paper in the Corona caught his eye. Fernanda had been typing before she went for a walk.

  She grew up in a small Ohio town where her father had a job on the force.

  he read. So that’s how she got the idea of playing games with Reagan’s boys.

  Her mother spent her life dreaming of Better Things. But the only distinction Charlie Smith ever achieved was the bang-up funeral they gave him when he dropped dead in harness.

  Karen went to work in a Toledo Beauty Shop. She could have been a beauty herself, with all that handsome copper hair, and the other girls urged her to have her front teeth fixed and get some fun out of life. But she made her own clothes and banked her pay, dreaming about a home of her own with Jerry Clay.

  They warned her about “Gentleman Jerry,” but Karen knew he was a perfect gentleman and gave him her savings for the down payment on a little house. When both disappeared Karen sold her hope chest and went East. And located Jerry Clay in Newark. But the money was gone.

  She decided then to get some fun out of life. And in the office of a fashionable dentist who did undetectable bridge work, she met Walter St. John Schuyler. Much more of a gentleman than Jerry Clay. And she fell more in love with him, pouring all her bubbling energy into the single job of making a little flat into a home for him.

  But she wanted a real home and a real marriage. His wife wouldn’t give him a divorce without bleeding him dry. Karen, who didn’t take things lying down, must have helped with the idea of putting by enough to start somewhere else, and then signing over everything visible in return for a divorce.

  But by that time Karen had become an old story and he had met a girl who had family, looks, and above all, youth. When Karen followed him to Boston, he left her lying in an alley like a common tramp… Karen Smith who had built her life around the hope of marrying him… Karen Smith who didn’t take things lying down… If there had been anything else in her life—meaningful work to give her the assurance of a place in the world—she might have found another outlet for the rage that must have consumed her after she picked herself up out of that alley. Perhaps a friend—one friend—might have saved her…

  “Sorry I had to run out,” said Fernanda Freed from the doorway behind him, “but I left it where you could find it. Can’t you see how things were stacked against that girl?”

  “Behind every deal there’s people with reasons. That’s why we have courts,” Janicek said, and went into the kitchen to beard Emma. The Kansas Sphinx, Lombardi called her, but for once she was willing to talk. She was sick of New York, sick of being followed every step she took. She wanted to go back to Kansas where a woman could go to church without a long horseface trailing behind her.

  Fernanda had told her about Leona Lewis and she was getting the wind up, Janicek thought. Fine. “I’m sorry, Emma, but the D.A. wants you right here in New York. He’s going before the Grand Jury and if you don’t answer what they ask, they’ll clap you in jail.”

  She was scared all right, but she didn’t crack. “If it’s a crime to stick to my own flesh and blood, go ahead. You’ll never get anything out of me to hurt Karen.”

  That’s why they’d given her rope, instead of cracking down sooner. But now—“Okay, Emma, that’s up to you. But your cousin thinks she hasn’t left a clue since she walked out of that auto agency. Only that’s a clue. It means she’s holed up somewhere nearby. If she doubled back to New York, in any color dress and with any color hair, we’ll find her. And the money too.”

  Let her get that to Karen Smith—through the laundryman, the neighbors, however she was doing it. He used to get gophers, when he was a boy, by smoking them out…

  * * * *

  She had to take the heat off Emma. Dressed in black, with a veil half-hiding the fringe of black hair, she boarded a Boston plane on Saturday. Her hand shook as she presented the check for the small fitted bag she had not reclaimed the night she picked herself out of the alley. It matched the famous black-and-white bag the Super had carried to the taxi. There must be thousands of that pattern, she told herself. Just the same, it burned her hand when she took it from the checkroom. It had been a gift from Wally on their first trip—

  She mustn’t think about those trips, about those days, about Wally, she told herself as she signed the register at the hotel where Wally had been staying…

  “Wally—” she moaned, hours later into a wet bunched pillow. But there were no tears left. Everything in her was dried up. The rest of her life stretched ahead that way—dry—like a desert. Stretched ahead to what—?

  There was a knock at the door and from habit she braced herself and powdered her face. The chambermaid carried clean towels into the bathroom. “Why don’t I give her the overnight bag?” she thought wearily. “I might as well…”

  * * * *

  He was in a rotten humor Monday even before they brought him the letter from Boston. Because he knew now he had been taken for a ride. Not only by Karen Smith. “Employer away for the weekend. Subject stayed at home,” read the report on Emma. But he knew that part of the time the radio had played to an empty room. The search of the room had yielded nothing. The locked closet held only a few Sunday-best clothes. It had struck him too late, the meaning of that locked closet. A man never pictures clothes put together, but there was nothing to stop Emma from putting them together with a girdle and even a set of store teeth, and walking past his boys to meet anybody.

  “She beat us all along the line,” Lombardi said, when they opened the letter on Parker House stationery, airmailed to Emma. It was written in a small, familiar script. Only it was no longer neat, no longer under control, and the paper was water-blurred.

  Dear Em—

  I thought they wouldn’t look for me up here and maybe I’d join John in Canada—but it all came back—I don’t want to go on—every hand against me and against anybody who tries to help me. Don’t feel bad, Em—it’s the only way I’ll ever be happy—with Wally—Goodbye, Em—

  At the Parker House in Boston the room assigned to Kate Selby was empty. A scared chambermaid brought out a black-and-white overnight case and a claim check for another bag in Nashville, Tenn. “She said she wouldn’t be using them any more—”

  * * * *

  At Rockport, Mass., some boys found a hat with a false bang on the rocks above the surf. And a green bag with the Schuyler clippings and a key to the room at the Parker House.

  “Goodbye, Karen Smith,” Reagan said, and told Janicek to go home and get some sleep. But he couldn’t sleep. GARROTE GIRL SUICIDE IN ROCKPORT, the headlines screamed—before the tone changed and the sob brigade went to town.

  “De mortuis,” Fernanda Freed said bitterly, but her own piece was no different. It was mostly the stuff he had read. Except the end.

  What happened when Walter St. John Schuyler came in from Boston to see his lawyer? Her plans were made. But for seven years she had loved him blindly and selflessly. Surely if he had faced the fact that she needed tenderness and help, he might have been alive today. But Walter Schuyler never faced anything. There were no signs of a quarrel. Perhaps some little thing snapped the last hairline between love and hate—some added humiliation—one more shoddy lie. It always takes one last degree of heat to turn water into steam.

  If there is any moral in this story, it is not that Walter Schuyler paid the piper for his dance of love. But he took what was best in a human being and t
urned it into its opposite. Stripped of her human dignity and all hope, Karen Smith was an animal at bay. And an animal at bay strikes to kill.

  But probably the real moral lies in the waste of all that woman—ingenuity and courage. Karen Smith should have used them to build a life which did not depend on her appeal for one man. Maybe there was a better man somewhere, who would have helped her become the full, rounded human being every woman is meant to be. All of us, by the shoddy values we assign to women, helped Karen Smith murder Walter Schuyler. And all of us had a hand in murdering Karen Smith.

  Janicek told Emma she could leave as soon as they recovered the body. “I know you’ll want to take her home. I can’t understand why she didn’t leave you anything—” Emma shrugged. She had got along all her life without anybody giving her anything and she’d rather not talk about it. But Janicek went on thoughtfully, “All that money I figure is in a box under some other name. Too bad it’ll all go to Mrs. Schuyler. Because we know the date she must have rented a box and she couldn’t have gone far between the time she emptied the first one and the time she left The Chelsea. So we’ll find that second box, you can see that.”

  Yes, Emma could see that, all right.

  There were no men following her when she went to market. Emma had become fairly expert at spotting them and giving them the slip. Just the same, she took three buses to the tube. She was certain nobody trailed her to the bank in Newark.

  Only the old man was in the vault and a young guard in uniform. Still her hand shook as she signed the slip. The old man consulted the file and then he looked over at the guard, and she knew, even before she felt the hand on her shoulder, that she had walked into a trap. When Janicek said, “We’ll find that second box,” he had already found it and they were there waiting for her at the bank.

  He came down the stairs and said, “Hello Emma,” and then he picked up the slip on which she had written Leona Lewis with her right hand. And if he didn’t know it before, he now had all the proof he needed that Emma and Karen Smith were the same person…