She stalked out of earshot. The man, who was appreciably shorter and had a camera on a strap around his neck, followed her toward decency. He was red-faced; he muttered as he walked.
“Got into the wrong place,” Susan said. “They should have gone to see Mary Poppins.”
“So camp,” the dark girl said on the stage. “So deliciously camp, darlings.”
“From fairyland,” the shaggy man said.
The line apparently capped an exchange to which neither Susan nor Merton Heimrich had been listening. The audience chirped.
The skit ended.
“She carries it,” Susan said. “Not that it’s carried far.”
The Negro and the blond girl went off stage with the others. But almost immediately they returned, and the piano started up off stage. They met at the microphone and sang together, baritone and contralto blending. The man’s voice was vibrant in the long room. They sang old spirituals but with new words; they sang of integration, hand rather too symbolically in hand. “It’s glib,” Susan said across the table. “The whole thing is too important to be glib about. My glass is empty, darling.”
Her hint was obvious and did not, Merton Heimrich knew, suggest a refilling of her empty glass. He shook his head and beckoned the waiter and, when the waiter came, drew a circle in the air over their glasses. She raised her eyebrows.
“We’re country cousins on the town,” Heimrich told her. “We are innocently enjoying ourselves. If anybody had any other ideas—” He shrugged his shoulders as the waiter came with drinks.
“Does it matter?”
“Now, Susan,” Heimrich said. “I don’t know, naturally. But, to the girl it might. It mattered to Leslie Brennan. She may have been lucky to end up in a ditch. Hidden in a ditch.”
“You’re more convinced now, aren’t you?” Susan said. “It was—what did you call it?—a moth of theory. Because?” But then she shook her head, staying his answer. “Of course,” she said. “Because the man at the door called you ‘Captain.’ And men talk about women relying on intuition.”
All four were on stage again and, as at the start, clustered around the microphone. Again, this time briefly, they pattered a satiric version of the news. The stage lights went off and the dim lights on the tables became a little brighter. The people in the audience stirred at their tables and became more audible, although they had never sat in silence. The waiters moved more quickly from table to table.
The softly heavy man who had greeted them—maître d’ or owner of The Bottom Drawer—did not move quickly. But he moved from table to table, nodding and smiling. He did not stop at any of the tables until he reached the Heimrichs’ table. He stopped there and bent down, smiling.
“First time you’ve visited us, isn’t it?” he said. There was the sound of a purr in his voice. “Hope you’re enjoying yourselves, Captain. Lady.”
“Very amusing show,” Heimrich told him. “The blond girl’s particularly good, we both thought.”
“Glad,” the man said. “Very glad, Captain. We all think she’s going places. Glad you’re—”
“Fact is,” Heimrich said, “we’d like to buy her a drink. Think that’s possible, mister—?”
“Shively,” the man said. “’Fraid not, Captain. Against the rules. Entertainers fraternizing with customers. Tell her you thought of it, though. That she’ll like to hear.”
Heimrich closed his eyes briefly. Without opening them, he said, “Why the ‘captain’ business, Mr. Shively?”
He opened his eyes.
“Or,” he said, “do you call everybody ‘captain’?”
The light from the little electric candle on the table was dim. But there was enough light from it for Heimrich to see the slight narrowing of the soft man’s dark eyes.
“Way of speak—” the man began, but Heimrich interrupted him.
“Because,” Heimrich said, “happens I am a captain, Mr. Shively. State police. Did you check that out after I called this afternoon? With somebody who was interested?”
“Don’t know what you’re getting at,” Shively said. “O.K., your name was familiar. Got to thinking about it after you called. Tried to place it. Then I remembered I’d seen it in the papers. In charge of the investigation of Annette LeBaron’s murder. Simple as that, Captain. Nothing wrong with that, is there?”
“Nothing,” Heimrich said. “The blond girl’s Cynthia Williams, isn’t she? I’d like to have a word with her.”
Shively said he didn’t get it.
“Now, Mr. Shively,” Heimrich said. “No reason you should, really. She’ll be in her dressing room? Between shows?”
“Doubt it,” Shively said. “Doubt it very much. Lives down the avenue couple of blocks. Usually she goes home between turns. Rests. Takes a shower, maybe. Hot backstage weather like this. Tell you what, I’ll call backstage and make sure.”
“Yes,” Heimrich said. “You might do that, Mr. Shively.”
Shively said, “Sure thing,” and went back to the entrance of The Bottom Drawer. There was a standing desk there, and a telephone on it. Heimrich watched the softly big man use the telephone. He watched Shively walk back, shaking his head. When he was at the table Shively said, ” ’Fraid you’ve just missed her, Captain.”
“Where does she live?”
Shively’s eyes narrowed again.
“Not supposed—” he began, and Heimrich closed his own eyes.
“Guess it’s O.K.,” Shively said, and gave Heimrich an address. It was on a side street off Second Avenue, a few blocks from The Bottom Drawer. “Hotel,” Shively said. “Hotel Steuben. Look, Captain …”
He paused. Heimrich opened his eyes.
“Cyn’s a nice kid,” Shively said. “She in any trouble?”
The purr had gone out of his voice. His voice was the better for its absence.
“Now, Mr. Shively,” Heimrich said. “I hope not.”
XIV
It was a little cooler on the sidewalk at the top of the steps they climbed from The Bottom Drawer. Susan breathed deeply. “It’s almost like air,” she said.
“A little,” Merton Heimrich said, and waved at a taxi which was turning into the avenue from the cross street a quarter of a block away. The loft building above The Bottom Drawer extended to that corner.
The taxi’s roof light was on as it turned into Second Avenue and the light signaled its availability. But as it completed the turn, the light went off. Which meant, probably, that the cabdriver had just picked up a fare and started his car, shooting for a green light, before he knocked down the meter flag and so turned the roof light off. What served as a stage door for The Bottom Drawer in that block? It was possible …
There was no other cab in sight with a roof light on.
“We’ll walk it,” Heimrich said, and they began to walk down the avenue.
“You’re surer now, aren’t you?” Susan said. “And worried about the girl?”
“Still guessing,” Heimrich said and walked a little faster and Susan hooked to his arm. “One guess—that our friend Shively made a telephone call when we came in. To report we’d showed up.”
The cab, which had made the green light a block up Second, was stopped by a red light at the next corner. It was on the far side of the one-way avenue. As they neared it, the traffic light changed and the cab started up.
“Two people in it,” Susan said. “A man and a woman, I think. I couldn’t make them out, could you?”
“No,” Heimrich said. “I think the woman was a blonde, but No.”
He turned and looked back up the avenue. There was still no cab with a roof light on. They kept on walking. When they reached the cross street they had to wait what seemed a long time for the light to change to green so that they could cross the avenue.
The Hotel Steuben was one of the small, old hotels which cling to Manhattan side streets, although newer buildings shoulder and push at them. It would be familiar, Merton Heimrich thought, as he started the revolving door for Susan. It w
ould be, in a slightly musty way, sedate. There would be a lobby and, opening off it, the “dining room.” Most of its residents would be as permanent as their ages would permit, and most would be elderly, with permits slowly running out. Widows would live there, nurturing small incomes, and men eking out their seventies and eighties. There would be few Cynthia Williamses living there; it was odd that there should be even one. But it was near the place she worked in. It was a refuge easily available between shows. And the rates would be low.
The lobby was large, wasting space. The Steuben had been built when there was space to waste. Double doors at one side of the lobby were closed; the electric sign which said “Dining Room” was turned off. An old man sat under a light near the opposite wall of the lobby and read the Wall Street Journal. A cane was hooked over one arm of his chair.
They crossed the lobby to the desk. There was nobody in sight behind the desk. There was a bell on the desk and Heimrich tapped it. Nothing happened and he tapped it again, and a door beyond the desk opened and a small man with gray hair combed unconvincingly over a bald head came through the doorway. He appeared slightly surprised, as if by an intrusion. He said, “’Do for you?” and at the same time turned a registration card holder toward Heimrich.
Heimrich said, “Miss Williams? Miss Cynthia Williams?”
“Don’t know if she’s in,” the desk clerk said, and turned and looked at the clock above the rack of letter boxes behind the desk. It was a quarter of eleven by the clock. “It’s pretty late, mister,” he said. “Course, she works nights. Ring her if you say so.”
“No need to,” Heimrich said. “Just give me her room number.”
“Can’t do that. Against the rules to do that. People here like things quiet.”
“We won’t make any noise,” Heimrich told him, and the clerk shook his head. The gray hair combed long over his bald head parted slightly.
Heimrich reached to his hip pocket and the clerk, simultaneously, reached under the counter. Presumably, Merton Heimrich thought, to put a hand on a ready gun. It was quiet in this side street, as quiet goes in New York. It was oddly secluded here in the lobby of the Hotel Steuben.
Heimrich took his billfold out of his hip pocket and showed the clerk his identity card. The clerk took the billfold and held it under a light, and read slowly and handed it back.
“Not the kind of young woman’d do anything out of the way,” he said. “Had no trouble with her. We don’t like trouble here, Captain.” He remained uncertain; time crept. There might not be that much time.
Heimrich got his badge out of a jacket pocket.
“Just want to talk to her,” he said. “There won’t be any trouble I know of. Her room number?”
“Says state police,” the clerk told him. “I don’t know if—”
“Room number,” Heimrich said, and now there was impatience in his voice.
“Five-seventeen,” the clerk said. “Rule is, I call her first. Probably not there, anyway.”
“The rule’s off,” Heimrich told him. Much time was being wasted over a simple thing. “Where’s the elevator?”
The clerk pointed.
“And,” Heimrich said, “don’t call her to tell her we’re coming up.”
He made his voice hard; a cop’s voice.
“Well …”
“That,” Heimrich told him, “would be obstructing the police in the performance of their duty.” He said this very firmly. “There’s a rule about that, too,” he added.
He turned away, with the assurance of a man who knows that all has been settled. Susan turned away with him and they walked toward the elevator across the wide lobby.
When they were out of earshot, Susan said, “Is there? A rule like that?”
“As of now,” Heimrich said. They reached the elevator. There was a staircase beside it. “We’ll walk,” Heimrich said. “Good exercise, climbing stairs.”
“I don’t—oh.”
“Yes,” Heimrich said. “Elevator doors make quite a clanging, sometimes. As the clerk says, this is a quiet place.”
The central fifth-floor corridor was dimly lighted. There were open transoms over the room doors and here and there snores sounded through them. A long time, Heimrich thought, since builders had put ventilating transoms above the doors of hotel rooms.
They found Room 517 and there the transom was open, too. But there light came through the transom.
The corridor floor was carpeted. Susan and Merton Heimrich moved almost soundlessly along it. At the door of Room 517 they stopped and Heimrich lifted his hand to knock on the door. He lowered it again.
“Just keep out of it,” a man said in Room 517. “Better all around.”
Susan looked up at her husband in the dim light. Merton Heimrich nodded his head. Needlessly, he put fingers over his lips.
“I tried not to believe it,” Cynthia Williams said. Her voice was lower than the man’s; there was a hushed quality in her voice. “I just wouldn’t believe you’d do—” She stopped for a moment. “What you did do,” she said. “You told me it was only—”
“I know what I told you,” the man said, and his voice had in it the rasp Heimrich had heard before—heard several times before. “And, Cyn baby, you think anybody’d believe that?” The “Cyn baby” had no affection in it. The endearment was as harsh as the rest.
Sergeant Charles Forniss partly closed the door of the hospital room behind him. There was no point in closing it entirely because it would immediately be opened again. In the corridor outside the room he said, “All right, you can go in now,” to James Brennan. Brennan took a step toward the door, but for a moment Forniss blocked his way.
“You weren’t much help,” he said. “You weren’t any help at all.”
“She’s all right?”
“Uncomfortable as hell,” Forniss told him. “Mind’s clear. Oh, she wants to see you.” He looked beyond Brennan at Father Cunningham behind him. “Wants to see him alone, Bishop,” Forniss said.
Cunningham nodded his head. He said, “Way it should be, Sergeant.”
Forniss moved aside and James Brennan went into the room where his wife waited for him.
“She remembers now?” Cunningham said, and Forniss said, “Yep. She remembers.” He started away and turned back. “She thought her husband did the killing,” he said. “He was there and she was there. And he told a lot of lies. Last time round thinking he was protecting her. Don’t envy him the explaining job he’s got now, Bishop.”
“His job,” the Right Reverend Dr. Jonathan Cunningham said. “Their job together, Sergeant.”
Forniss walked down the corridor he had walked up less than half an hour before, after a fast drive from the barracks. It hadn’t taken long. There had been only a few questions he had had to ask. Not nearly as many questions as a defense attorney would ask, if it came to that. He doubted it would ever come to that. Whether it did wasn’t his job to decide. His job was to pass along, first to the captain, what he had been told. He didn’t, personally, doubt the truth of what he had been told. The trouble was, it wouldn’t hold. Walking toward the elevator and, after it, the nearest telephone, Forniss could almost hear a defense attorney:
“Now, Mrs. Brennan,” a counselor-at-law would say to a slender young woman on a witness chair (if it came to that), “this man you say telephoned you. Said his name was Knight. You thought the voice was familiar? But you couldn’t place it, could you?”
She could make only one answer to that.
“It was only some time later that you decided it was the voice of the defendant. Isn’t that correct, Mrs. Brennan?”
The same answer to that. There wasn’t any other answer. She had said, “Yes,” when Forniss himself had asked much the same question.
“As a matter of fact, it wasn’t until your father mimicked a voice he’d heard on a telephone that you became so sure the voice was that of the defendant. Isn’t that true, Mrs. Brennan.”
The same answer to that.
&nb
sp; “Now, Mrs. Brennan, doesn’t it seem rather tenuous to you yourself? Considering that a man’s freedom is at stake?”
There wouldn’t be an answer to that. There would be an objection to that, as calling for a conclusion of the witness. Which wouldn’t matter, with the question asked, the implication in the ears of the jurors. (Not that, with what they had, it would ever come to a jury.)
“This man you say followed you up from New York, Mrs. Brennan. Chased you, you say, through these fields. You can positively identify him as the defendant? Remembering a man’s freedom is at stake? … The sun visor of his car was down, wasn’t it? … And when you ran from your car into this field you’ve told us about, you didn’t look back to see who was chasing you? Just—how would you put it yourself, Mrs. Brennan?—jumped to the conclusion that it was the defendant? Isn’t that what it comes to, Mrs. Brennan? All it comes to?”
True or not, Forniss thought, it was all it came to. Oh, he didn’t doubt it was true. He didn’t doubt they had the picture. A bit smudgy around the edges, but whole enough. No reasonable doubt in his mind about that, and there wouldn’t be in M. L.’s mind. But murderers are not tried in the minds of detectives.
The two telephone booths in the entrance lobby of the Van Brunt Memorial Hospital were occupied. Forniss waited. He listened again to a counsel for the defense; heard him say, “The defense recalls Mr. James Brennan.” Heard him say, “Now, Mr. Brennan, you admit you were in the vicinity of the Weaver house at about the time Mrs. Weaver was shot to death? And that you went across a field to the house, instead of driving up to it? We want to make this perfectly clear to the jury, don’t we, Mr. Brennan? As I understand your testimony on direct examination, you went there because Mrs. Weaver called you at your office and asked you to? Dropped everything and …”
(A man came out of one of the booths. He was smiling; he was bouncy. New father, Forniss guessed, and went into the booth and dialed a number.)
“Now, Mr. Brennan. Wasn’t the car you saw parked in front of the Weaver house your wife’s car? Not this big car you first told the police you had seen? No, that wasn’t what you told them first, was it? First you told them you hadn’t been there at all, didn’t you? A little hard to keep your stories straight. But—didn’t you see your wife’s car there, Mr. Brennan? Remember you are under oath.”
17-Murder Roundabout Page 18
