The only news about the murder of Jennifer Morley, when it came on, was negative. The Undersheriff said that every available deputy had been assigned to the case and “we will work overtime on this thing.” Asked if it could be definitely assumed, in this light, that the appearance of robbery in the earlier crime had been a diversionary tactic, he said with official caution, “It’s one of the lines we’re working along, yes.” With scarcely a pause a caroling commercial began, and Eve clicked it into silence.
She had lied by omission, the night before, in giving the impression that the interruption at Mrs. Morley’s end of the line had come almost immediately. She had made no mention of that wry “Some guardian of my morals” or “The fact is that Henry Conlon and I—”
How would that have continued?
“—are old friends” would have been Conlon’s version.
Eve hadn’t seen the scratch on his wrist when she gave her statement, and she avoided to herself now the question as to whether it would have made any difference. Inevitably, since the matter of Bill Cox, she had a strong disbelief in feminine intuition; still, she found it impossible to believe that Henry Conlon would kill anyone, let alone a woman.
Richard Morley, now, with his barely controlled tension—
Aghast at herself, Eve called Ambrose for his eggs and toast and cocoa, and went outside to hang his pillow-slip remnant on the line. Now that she thought about it, which she was only doing to escape her other thoughts, he had had another favorite piece of cloth not long ago, with a small oblong of vivid print, looking not unlike a pocket, patched onto it by Iris Saxon. Ambrose hadn’t sucked on it, or taken it to bed with him, or put it to any of the other legendary uses of small children with such objects, but he had been extremely fond and careful of it. Eve had not seen it lately; undoubtedly Iris had washed and ironed it and folded it into the depths of the linen closet.
. . . As to scratches, Henry Conlon’s might have come from anything at all—a cat, a protruding nail, a bent piece of chrome on his car. Eve herself, somehow immune to injuries as an apartment dweller, was constantly discovering on her own person, now that she was taking care of a house and child, bruises and small cuts and burns which she had no recollection of incurring, simply because she had been too busy and involved at the time.
It was not the happiest train of thought.
By only a little after ten o’clock, the sun was so strong that except for a glimmer of silver on the underside of a leaf or in the tremble of a spider web, it might never have rained. Roads and driveways would be puddled, and the lawn damp, but Ambrose was certainly able for that. In spite of the cold nights there were still grasshoppers leaping springily about, and Eve cut holes in the lid of a coffee jar and suggested that Ambrose capture some to put over the wall.
“Why?” asked Ambrose, sensible and staring.
“Because they like it over there and they can’t fly high enough. We have to help them.”
“Can’t fly, we help them,” said Ambrose, captivated, and set off on his task.
A throaty voice at Nina Earl’s telephone advised Eve that Mrs. Earl was at a meeting; could she take a message? Yes, if she would, said Eve, attaching a face to the voice instantly; would she have Mrs. Earl call this number? “Oh, and I want to say thanks for sending the clipping about Mr. Cox’s engagement. I mightn’t have seen it otherwise.”
There was a thunderstruck silence—the receiver, certainly, pressed under the beautiful coppery hair. “Tell Mrs. Earl there’s no terrible rush,” concluded Eve gently, and hung up. That was one small mystery resolved.
Ambrose, looking like a straw hat which had grown legs, toiled away after the grasshoppers which sprang elusively in every direction. Eve did the breakfast dishes, grateful to have her hands and at least the very surface of her mind occupied; she even cleaned the overworked toaster. The muffled sound of a car door closing did not seem to have any relation to her until someone rapped briskly at the front door.
It was the deputy of last night. Ambrose lurked at his heels, fearful but fascinated.
“I wonder,” he said after shaking his head at Eve’s first instinctive query, “if you might know where I could find Mr. Henry Conlon? I’ve checked his home and his office, and I thought maybe you had—”
He broke off politely as the telephone rang. Eve, going to answer it, had time to realize that this question was not really surprising: Conlon’s presence here late last night had created a natural but false impression. In her ear, Nina Earl said briskly, “Eve? For heaven’s sake, what’s going on out there in the woods?” Unaware that Eve was in any way involved, she barely paused. “After you brought up the Lockwood School the other day I happened—”
“Oh, pretty well, thanks,” Eve broke in brightly. “How’s Dave?”
Dave was Nina’s husband. There was a short astonished pause, into which she said somewhat testily, “Apart from having been carried off by a gorilla, fine. I take it this means you can’t talk right now. Call me back, why don’t you?”
“I certainly will,” said Eve, still social and airy. “Thanks again.”
Logic had known that she could have received information and even have asked cautiously framed questions about a subject which had produced that sharp reaction in Henry Conlon, and the deputy would have been none the wiser. Instinct had been afraid.
Returning to the living room, she said, “Sorry . . . No, I have no idea where you can reach Mr. Conlon if he isn’t at his office.” To the unspoken comment that they had appeared to be on fairly close terms the evening before, she said, “He’s my landlord, you know, and he happened to be here when Mr. Morley telephoned last night.”
“I see. Well, he’ll turn up,” said the deputy agreebly, and Ambrose, usually shy with strangers, reached up and tugged imperatively at the leather holster just within his reach. “I have a bug,” he announced, holding up the coffee jar.
“So I see.” The deputy tweaked the hat from Ambrose’s head by its conical crown, inspected Ambrose, and clapped the fringed straw back on. “That’s a fine-looking hat,” he observed soberly, and thanked Eve. “I don’t suppose you’ve remembered anything further about . . . ?” He broke off, disconcerted by the unwinking regard from below.
Eve said no, but she would certainly let them know at once if she did. She thought as she closed the door that she could give a very good guess as to where Henry Conlon was.
Ambrose had tired of chasing grasshoppers and, before the patrol car’s motor had died away, demanded to go to the store. “Maybe this afternoon.” Eve told him distractedly. She remembered to add on her way to the telephone, “But I’m not at all sure it’s Wednesday,” and his face fell.
Like most young children he loved any and all stores; unlike most, he created appalling scenes when he could not have everything that took his fancy. His range was not limited to candy and toys; he also wanted leashes, brightly colored mixing bowls, ornaments for goldfish tanks. As Eve could not leave him at home while she shopped, and it was certainly not safe to lock him in the car, she had finally informed him with sternness that it was against the law in New Mexico for children to buy things in stores except on Wednesdays.
After a single bald exchange of “Why?” and “Don’t ask me,” Ambrose accepted this, and although Eve supposed that she ought to worry about what it was doing to his psyche, if indeed he had one, she did not. The whole arrangement worked like a charm, because Wednesdays could be summoned or skipped at will. Ambrose enjoyed his small presents far more, Eve shopped in peace, everybody benefited.
She said now, when the other woman’s voice came on the fine, “Sorry, Nina, there was someone here on the brink of leaving at last and I wanted to get the goodbyes done.” Better not mention the deputy and his errand; Nina seemed protective toward Henry Conlon and might decide to keep her own counsel. And certainly not, at this juncture, brace her about having been engineered into Conlon’s orbit. “You were saying, about the school—?”
“Yes, that I
happened to remember that I know someone who did the layouts for the brochures when the place first opened, and I thought he might have kept track. It’s pretty much what I thought. The fees were stiff and they went overboard on the proper-young-lady business. Even the parents were getting rebellious. It’s since been turned into a very plush rest home if you ever feel like cracking up.”
“Thanks, I’ll keep it in mind,” said Eve. She didn’t know quite what she had expected when she dialed, but it was not this. “Really just another failed enterprise.”
“So it would seem. Of course, mind you, it didn’t help—” There was an odd sound here, some kind of flurry, and “Damnation, I just knocked over my coffee. Hold on a second.”
Eve waited, listening to a distant shifting of objects, someone offering paper towels and advice about trying cold water first. Nina came back and said crossly, “How can one stingy little paper cup hold a full gallon? But you don’t care about my new avocado suit. It didn’t help, I was starting to say, that one of the housemothers committed suicide.”
14
SUICIDE. How black and suggestive that sounded, under the circumstances: a fatal leap, for instance, that was really a violent push . . . Briskly, somewhat dryly, Nina Earl dispelled any such picture.
Her friend the artist had apparently dug deep. The housemother, an unmarried fiftyish woman who came originally from Canada, had been suffering from periods of depression; both her doctor and her colleagues testified to this. It was believed that she had financial worries and had begun to fear dismissal from the school, but this was not definitely established because her discarded starts on a To Whom It May Concern note did not go far enough. Neat to the last, she had crumpled these into a wastebasket and then taken an overdose of barbiturates, incontrovertibly by her own hand.
“Even so, not the best example for the young ladies, and I don’t suppose the parents liked it much,” Nina said in a judicial tone, “but it certainly didn’t close up the school.
That lasted another year, into 1952, and then what finished it was something else entirely, some fuss about the land. And I don’t see how Henry could have had the remotest connection with the place.”
The usually well-informed Nina was clearly unaware that at this moment the Sheriff’s office was anxious to locate Conlon, and Eve did not enlighten her. She began, “Thanks a lot—”’ and Nina said aggrievedly, “I had to have lunch with Al Wasek to dig all this up, and he only eats at health bars. The least you can do is tell me what’s going on.”
But at that point a background murmur of voices grew; a layout was apparently missing and Eve was delivered. She said, “Later,” to Ambrose’s importunate demands to find out if it was Wednesday, and made herself another cup of coffee.
Henry Conlon had not been connected with the Lockwood School; just as obviously, Jennifer Morley had. The anonymous letter Mrs. Morley had brought him must have had its original basis there, to judge from his reaction —and yet the suicide of the housemother had to have been just that, because surely the authorities would have been especially meticulous under the circumstances.
It seemed unlikely that Jennifer had been a student at the school as late as 1951. Her sister, then, Mrs. Pulliam? But, “I barely knew Molly,” Henry Conlon had said. And both of them were dead, no longer concerned with anonymous letters or anything else.
Eve jumped up and went to the little calendar on her desk. (She must, she would break out of this clinging web her mind was spinning, almost as stickily tangible as some frightful fabrication from the tool shed.) Gravely, and because it was part of the ritual, she inspected September, which she had forgotten to dispose of, and said to Ambrose’s upturned face, red with hope and suspense, “Let’s go and get you dressed, because it is Wednesday after all . .
Henry Conlon, who had not been in Colorado where Eve’s imagination placed him, was turning away from a woman with startling green eye makeup and steady, competent hands. A typewriter clacked, an occasional figure passed by the windows, industriously busy about the manicured lawn and flower beds. He said, “Thanks very much. I was sure anyway, after telephoning, but it was one of those things. I can find my way out.”
The woman smiled at him, a wry attractive smile. “Just be sure you don’t find your way in,” she said.
The Sheriff was on his way back from Colorado, having drawn a complete blank. A teletype to his opposite number there had assured him that there was nothing officially on the Vane family; he had hoped that, in a smallish community, there might be something unofficial.
If there was, it was buried too deep for recovery. Rufus Vane, dead for the past six years, had been a mild, widely liked, highly ineffectual rancher. His wife had died when a cloudburst swept her small car down an arroyo, leaving him with two daughters. Jennifer, the elder by five years, had more or less brought up Molly, taking a secretarial course after high school and going to work to help pad out the family finances. This was especially necessary after Vane had suffered a heart attack, making him incapable of keeping even an erring hand on the ranch.
Jennifer was remembered with respect and a liking tinged with caution. “No nonsense about that one—well, it stands to reason. Molly was always a gay little thing, pretty as a buttercup, but Jennifer had the responsibilities and she showed it. When that swank school opened up here, years ago, she got a job in the office and helped put Molly through. She got engaged around that time but she wouldn’t have the wedding until her sister graduated. You have to hand it to her.”
You had to hand it to the whole family, the Sheriff reflected sourly. No escapades, no scandal, not so much as a parking ticket among the bunch of them. Even the published accounts of the sisters’ deaths by violence had waked no spiteful reminiscences in a community which had known them well, no voice to say, as so often happened, “Well, I’m not entirely surprised . . .”
It was nice to know that people could live such open and blameless lives, but it was not helpful. Even the school to the north where Jennifer had worked to help with her sister’s tuition had gone out of existence, but Molly’s prowess as a student and Jennifer’s ability with a typewriter could hardly enter in.
Were they looking for a nut, then? A psychopath with a fancied grudge? You had only to read the newspapers to know that such people existed, wearing the skins and the outward demeanor of normal citizens, but their grudges seemed to be against all humanity, their pressured, bottled-up illness to explode upon living targets who simply happened to be in the same place at the same time. The seeking-out of two sisters, a week apart, did not appear to fall in that category at all.
In this frame of mind, the Sheriff was all the more pleased at the report waiting for him.
Arthur Pulliam had spent a large part of the morning making funeral arrangements, as his brother-in-law hardly seemed to know what he was doing; his dazedness was like an alcoholic trance. He said to all of Arthur’s proposals, “Whatever you think,” or, docilely, “Yes, that’s probably best.” Once he said with a terrible intentness—Richard, who would once have bitten his tongue through before confiding anything of an intimately personal nature to Arthur Pulliam—“We’d had a rough few days, you know, Jen and I, but that was all over and everything was fine.”
“For God’s sake, don’t go telling that to the police,” said Arthur alarmedly, but Richard was already back in his own driven world. Staring through Arthur, he said, “I’m going to see that girl again. It’s inconceivable that she could have been on the telephone and still not have the slightest inkling—”
But Jennifer could not have transmitted information which she herself did not possess, and they had proved that last night. Even if the murderer had passed boldly by the window of the room where she was telephoning, she would have heard but not seen him.
The room itself was tiny, hardly bigger than a spacious closet. The curtains at the single shoulder-high window did not meet, but on the wall directly opposite hung an oil abstract presented to the Morleys long ago by a frie
nd and showing a really striking lack of talent. When the room was lighted, the uncurtained glass was painted impenetrably with silver and orange daisies, one impaled on a church steeple.
But going to see Miss Quinn was something active for Richard to do, and Arthur patted him on the shoulder and escaped to his office. He was himself shocked at the loss of his sister-in-law, but rather in the sense of the relict who had been overheard to say at the side of the ornate casket, “You know, somehow I never liked her.”
Mr. Heatherwood, wearing a bow tie which made him look like a voodoo doll, was at first dubious about the propriety of Arthur’s return to his duties, but his triumph at having ousted the previous vice-president was even stronger. “Perhaps work is best,” he said, and added with only a faint hint of menace, “I trust that this whole sad business will be cleared up very soon. For your sake, my boy.”
Arthur cleaned out his files, with the newly hushed and respectful assistance of Miss Haines, and tried not to start at every ring of the telephone: surely this second tragedy would silence even Rosalinda, for the time being at least. Apparently it had. At four-thirty, the consensus being that it was unseemly for a man with a new bereavement in the family to finish out a full afternoon, he left the building and walked to the employees’ parking lot. There, without warning, he came face to face with Rosalinda’s stepfather.
Seen from a distance the man had looked to be a hulking brute; close up, he was even more so, with bronzed and pitted skin and a big curved nose as fierce as a scimitar. His stained white coveralls, his contemptuously leaning stance against the fender of Arthur’s car, the fact that he had not shaved very recently combined to add inches and pounds. He said with open belligerence, “You Pulliam?”
“I’m Mr. Pulliam, yes.” The guard in his booth a hundred feet away—and how extremely distant that seemed at this moment—must have obligingly identified the car.
Arthur made himself busy with his keys, and said with a bold attempt at nonrecognition, “If you were looking for the employment office, it’s two blocks west and south. You just turn at the—”
Don't Open the Door Page 10
