The Viola Brothers Shore Mystery

by Viola Brothers Shore

  * * * *

  He finally read all the stories in the book and one of them was called The Purloined Letter. He wondered if Fernanda Freed had known it all the time. The Cousin John letter had been typed on Fernanda’s machine. Or the dyed hair might have tipped her off. Or the coat that was cloth outside with the muskrat lining. Or the fact that she could use both hands. Women notice those things. It didn’t matter. The case was closed and Reagan had advised him to go out and celebrate. But he didn’t feel like celebrating. There were times when he was fed up with his job—when a deal was washed up and there was no more X to find. Only the memory of a woman named Karen Smith whom somebody might have saved…

  ’BYE ’BYE BLUEBEARD

  Originally appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, October 1951.

  The case of Johann Meier is closed. The gruesome entries in his Little Black Book hold a tragic lesson for lonely, credulous women. It seems incongruous to preface them with my own personal problems, but if I, as Prosecutor of the case, know a version which did not appear in the miles of newsprint, it is because the Meier matter was unofficially ushered into the County Attorney’s Office by a visit from the lady who is and is not my mother-in-law. I am a widower but my loved and lovely wife had, during a parentless childhood, been foster-mothered by Mrs. Bendovid, who is Tante Fayga to hundreds of synthetic grandchildren, nieces, and nephews, including my staff and my only daughter Stefanie.

  I looked up from my unfinished brief on the Holman case to say, as heartily as I could, “Well, I didn’t know you were in town! I hope you’re staying with us for a while?” Although I respect her many great human qualities, I disagree with her views on politics, psychiatry, the upbringing of my motherless child, and the prosecution of vice. As I cannot be wrong about all these things all the time, I do not precisely relish the visits of the lady who seems bent on proving that I am.

  “Thanks, Don, I’m staying with a friend in Maple Park.” I would describe my foster-mother-in-law as a wholesome, buxom woman dressed unobtrusively in tailored clothes but with gray hair so youthfully unruly and a smile so all-embracing that on a recent hitchhike with some Youth Group, she received marriage proposals from a Progressive farmer, a Democratic storekeeper, and a Republican banker. Frankly, as a politician myself, I don’t know how she does it. “It’s good to see you, Donnie. And you, Miss Harris, how is your mother?”

  “I hope to find out one of these days,” replied my model secretary.

  I tamped down the tobacco in my pipe, determined to make the visit short and as sweet as possible. “Does Stefanie know you’re in town?”

  “Who else could drag me out of New York before Election? Monday she called and I dropped everything.”

  “What’s wrong with Steffie now?” I demanded. My daughter had always been a withdrawn, undemonstrative child, subject to endless minor ailments which, according to competent medical opinion, would disappear with adolescence.

  “Well, she had a shock, but she’s over the crisis. I just wanted to make sure you’re going home for dinner.”

  I glanced uneasily at the brief under my hand.

  “It’s her birthday, Don.”

  Ye gods! I flipped over the calendar to the notation, Dinner with Steffie. I’d have to take the brief home. Mrs. Bendovid beamed maternally. “I told her you’re bringing the present for a surprise.”

  A present, of course! It was 5:30—“What does she want?”

  I saw the look that passed. A father is supposed to know those things. “Well, she saw a wrist watch—”

  “No!” I banged my desk. “Absolutely not. Anything else her heart desires.”

  “But if her heart desires mostly a wrist watch?”

  I am not an unfeeling parent. But—“I told her if she lost the last one, it would be the last one! Do you know how many watches that girl has lost?”

  Mrs. Bendovid gathered up her sundry newspapers and pamphlets. “Do you know why a girl keeps losing what she treasures most?”

  I have no patience with psychiatric mumbo-jumbo, although I admit that a stream of governess-housekeepers can’t take a mother’s place. “If there’s anything I can do, short of remarrying, I wish you’d tell me.”

  “She’ll tell you herself,” promised Mrs. Bendovid, but it held more of a threat than a promise.

  I handed her the issue of a little magazine on Art, Science, and Society which always “happens” to turn up on my desk after her visits. “And will you send one of the girls to pick out something pretty?” I asked, without looking at my secretary.

  “I’ll go myself, Mr. Daniels. The girls have worked late every night.” She had too, of course, and there was no mistaking the martyred undertone.

  From the depths of her capacious purse Mrs. Bendovid extracted a square envelope. “Here, Donnie, write something nice. I’ll have it wrapped inside and put it in your coat pocket. And if you don’t like what I pick, Steffie can change it.”

  I thanked her heartily and wrote the card, knowing very well I would meet it next across the dial of a wrist watch. But seeing Steffie’s face later as she took the oblong package out of my coat, I knew that any other gift would have been tragic stupidity. She was wearing her long party dress and I noticed with a stab how much she had grown to look like her mother, and, indeed, how much she had suddenly grown.

  “I won’t lose this one, Father.” There was a new sureness in her voice and a sparkle in her eyes, and even her short brown hair had a new glint.

  “There must be some magic in a sixteenth birthday,” I commented gallantly, inwardly pleased at my medical friend’s vindication. “Even your coloring’s changed.”

  “Oh, ducky, that’s make-up,” said my little daughter. “I want you to stop regarding me as a child, and men always go by appearances.” The brat. The two brats. “Of course I have to stop acting like a helpless, motherless child, because we are our actions. Isn’t that a wonderful thought, Father, we are our actions?”

  Yes, indeed, a wonderful thought, and I knew whose. I poured her a thimbleful of cocktail and toasted her new adult status. “And after dinner, how about a picture? Something with music.”

  “Thank you, Father, but we have something terribly important to discuss.” Her mother had that same trick of snagging her short upper lip and drawing one dark brow over a troubled eye. “You see, I’ve been carrying a load of guilt for three years.”

  I choked on my drink. “Sorry I’ve been so preoccupied—”

  “Oh, you mustn’t blame yourself entirely. I let myself become a problem child, because I didn’t see that’s the wrong kind of attention. But Monday I had a shock—”

  Oh, yes. I’d forgotten. “What kind of shock?”

  “A very good shock, Father—very therapeutic.”

  Maybe for me, too, it was a therapeutic shock, hearing this brand of ventriloquism out of that little heart-shaped face. I seated her at the formal, candle-lit table like an actor doing his bit of stage business. “You didn’t tell me your grandmother was in town.”

  “I haven’t had much chance, ducky, and it’s not your most favorite news.”

  “I have the greatest admiration—” I began.

  “Of course you have, darling, and everybody can’t love everybody. Tante Fayga says if everybody likes you, it means you’re avoiding battle on important issues. That’s what we’ve been doing instead of facing them squarely.” I was facing one right then. If I didn’t want this little monkey turning into a hand-hammered Bendovidite, I’d have to direct her thinking into other channels, see that she met the right kind of boys—

  “Oh, poof!” She tossed the sons of our best families over a scornful shoulder. “We have a job to do, Father. A job that’s right up your street!” I waited for the blow, but it hit me on an unguarded sector. “We have to catch a murderer, Father! A modern Bluebeard! You remember Ilse?”

  Of cou
rse I remembered Ilse—Kraemer?—Schaeffer?—the little blonde Alsatian who was with us when Fannie died and for seven years afterward, until she left us to marry and we never heard from her again. I had always resented her callous indifference toward my child.

  “For years I used to dream that she came back and said, ‘I left Mr. Meier—I don’t love him—I love you, Steffie’. And on the street I’d run after somebody with blonde hair like Ilse’s—” Her fists clenched suddenly on the tablecloth. “Ilse’s dead, Father. He murdered her.”

  “Meaning the man she married?”

  “If he ever married her. And if he didn’t have a dozen wives already. But you can easily find that out.”

  I said I’d need more facts. I guess I can’t help sounding like a County Attorney.

  The eagerness went out of her eyes and we were strangers fencing. “Of course. Could I have a cigarette?”

  I reached for my case reluctantly. “Your grandmother approves of your smoking?”

  “Oh, no, but if I’m determined to smoke, she says I must do it openly, and I’m determined, so—thank you, Father.” They all do it at Eastern High, but I would have sworn mine didn’t. She handled it prettily at that, this little stranger seen through a veil of smoke.

  “When my mother died I was too little to realize what it meant—just something was gone and something hurt—and Ilse was there to keep it from hurting too much. You were very busy and Tante Fayga belongs to everybody, but Ilse belonged to me—and she was the only thing that did. I’m sorry if I say anything to hurt you—”

  I begged her to disregard my feelings. I obviously hadn’t concealed them very successfully.

  “I didn’t know about Mr. Meier. It all happened so fast, and he made her promise not to tell anyone, because people would laugh. You knew she met him through a matrimonial ad in the German Paper?”

  Well, no, I hadn’t. The girl had said she was leaving and I gave her a generous check and asked her to find someone to take her place.

  “To take her place, Father! For ten years she lived with us. To me she was more than a—a place. She was Ilse—my mother and my family and my playmate and—don’t mind if I c-cry, I can’t help it—”

  I reached for her hand, but she blinked away the film.

  “But she had to tell me because we’d always shared our secrets. You can’t imagine how excited I was. As if at last something wonderful was happening to me! That’s what you always dream about—a wedding with a veil and flowers and everybody dancing. And I pictured him like you, tall, and with square shoulders and a square chin. And I’d be a bridesmaid and catch the bouquet.”

  I was a little startled at this glimpse into the twelve-year-old mind. But then, I’d never taken the trouble to look into it.

  “But Ilse said that women who live in other people’s homes don’t have the kind of marriage you see in the movies. That the one thing she wanted was a home of her own. And she showed me a picture of Mr. Meier’s, before it burned. He’d lost his wife and child in the fire, but Ilse was going to fix it all up with her $1300, and she’d learn to love him because he was so kind. I remember she said, ‘He has such a sweet smile, Steffie—’

  “I believed it all, of course, but I still wasn’t satisfied, and I asked, ‘Wouldn’t you rather have the other kind of love—the real kind?’ Father, she nearly had that kind, once. He used to come to the house and he played the zither and he wanted her to come to Canada. But it was right after Mother died and she couldn’t leave me, so he went without her and up there he forgot about her and married somebody else. You see, that’s why a check wasn’t enough.”

  She blew out the birthday candles and while she cut cake for the housekeeper and the handyman and a piece to take to Tante Fayga, I had the grace to feel ashamed of where the “callous indifference” had lain, and asked whether any of the household had met Mr. Meier—the cook, or any of the adults?

  “He never came to the house except very late, when everybody was asleep. But I was so excited about Ilse’s house and what fun we’d have fixing it up, that I couldn’t sleep and so I heard her bring him up the stairs. And I slipped out of bed and opened the door a crack to get a peek at Ilse’s Mr. Meier.

  “It was the most dreadful shock! He was short and fat and partly bald with pointy ears and a thick, horrid mustache. He kissed her hand and worms crawled over me. And then he locked her trunk and suddenly I knew it was all packed and she was going far away. My mother had gone away and now Ilse. I couldn’t move—I just stood there as if—as if—and then he put his arm around Ilse and I knew he was going to kiss her mouth and—I couldn’t bear it!”

  “Easy, baby.” Every day I listen to stories of robbery and rape and murder. But your own child’s suffering is different even if it is childishly overdrawn or imagined.

  “I—I guess I fainted. I remember Ilse’s wet cheek and her arms around me. She carried me back to bed and she kept saying over and over, ‘My little Steffie. I’ll write you. And you’ll come to visit in my home. And you write me every week, everything that happens to my little Steffie. Promise—’ But I wouldn’t. And I wouldn’t kiss her goodbye. I hated her mouth. And finally I screamed, ‘Get out! I don’t want any letters! I hate you! I hate you!’”

  All the new poise was gone and I saw the little girl whose world had been knocked from under her. “My poor baby—”

  But she wasn’t ready to come into my arms. “That’s why I couldn’t get well. I wanted to be sick so Ilse would have to come back. I couldn’t stand any of the others.”

  “Of course, honey. Because they weren’t Ilse.”

  “And because I’d cared for my mother and she was gone. I’d c-cared for Ilse and she—And so I couldn’t bear to love anybody—not even you—”

  I gathered her in then, and held her tight. I can’t say the things I felt as my arms closed around the little girl who had been dosed with vitamins and iron when all she ever wanted was to feel safe inside. Maybe there are no words for them. But at last I said, “I guess it’s my birthday too,” and we both knew what I meant. “But you mustn’t blame yourself, baby—”

  “I know.” She withdrew from the circle of my arm. “I know if Ilse were alive I’d have heard.”

  I didn’t argue. But when they find themselves abandoned and their money gone, shame often keeps these poor women silent. “What happened Monday?”

  She carried my coffee into the study and perched on the arm of my leather chair. “I saw him on 5th Street, coming out of a furniture store—first the ears and then—that face! He was with a stout woman with high cheekbones and I ran up to him and said, ‘Mr. Meier! I’m Steffie Daniels! Where’s Ilse?’

  “He turned green and his eyes were terrible! A murderer’s eyes! And then he smiled, a horrible sugary smile, and he said, ‘I think you have me mixed. I am Jules Mohr and this is Mrs. Mohr.’ And when I came to my senses they’d driven away in a cab.”

  “That was all? I mean, that was—?”

  She looked down at me pityingly. “That was all. I couldn’t get you, so I called Tante Fayga and she helped me bring the whole thing into my Conscious. And yesterday we went back to the furniture store, but the owner didn’t know the Mohrs—they’d only priced a refrigerator. But they must have a house and you can trace him. Because he has to pay for what he did to Ilse! I’ll never rest till he does!”

  I explained as kindly as I could that Ilse’s case, if it were one, was almost four years old. There was no complainant, no corpus delicti—no proof, even, that this was the same man.

  “Johann Meier—Jules Mohr—And I couldn’t forget that face! Father—”

  “I’ll tell Chief Petrie to keep an eye out. I’m sorry, darling, but you want to meet issues squarely? Well, there’s no evidence against this man, as we understand evidence in a Court. A good attorney would make a monkey out of you and your identification—” A face glimpsed through a d
oor crack by an admittedly hysterical child! “For God’s sake, Steffie, for years you’ve been moping over this thing. Forget it and be the healthy, happy girl you have every right to be.”

  She remained beside me but I couldn’t reach her. “I know you’re disappointed, but I’m not the Superman they write about in fiction—just an overworked County Attorney who can’t handle the load we already have on hand. Please don’t let it spoil our birthday.”

  At last she said gently, almost condescendingly, “I’ve got to stop expecting you to be a story-book hero. You’re my most favorite father and this is my most favorite birthday and my most most wonderful present. I’d like to show it to Tante Fayga because we had a bet on. And she’s waiting for a piece of cake and I know you’re dying to get at your brief.”

  I was but—“I’ll drive you over to Maple Park.”

  She took my keys and dropped a kiss on the top of my decrepit old head. “If I run over anybody I’ll tell them my father is the County Prosecutor.”

  I knew they would be cooking up something and I didn’t want my girl mixed up in that kind of mess. But if I tangled with Mrs. Bendovid I’d come off a poor second. I always do. So I exacted Steffie’s promise to let me know if they located “Mr. Meier,” and told myself that ours is a large community, and a guilty man would skip out after being recognized. So the chances of making contact were one in a million. Still, it was an hour before I opened my briefcase. It’s a disturbing experience to make the acquaintance of your only daughter…

  * * * *

  Maple Park used to be a medium-priced real estate development with blocks and blocks of undistinguished and undistinguishable little red brick houses. But that was before a little man with a naked upper lip played out a scene in one overfurnished living room, with fatal consequences for one of the actors. We have the data for reconstructing it almost verbatim, though no way of knowing his thoughts as he looked around at the solid symbols of German comfort.