“All right,” she said.
She knew very little about the murder of Irma Black. Only what she’d heard on the late news, and read in the morning Times. They hadn’t played up the story too much, apparently not yet connecting it with the Craigthorn killing. She’d been unable to reach Barney, and so she knew no other details. But in her own mind she saw the makings of a fabulous story. She wished for perhaps the first time in her life that she worked on a daily newspaper—that she didn’t have to wait for a weekly deadline to roll around.
Arthur Rowe entered in his shirt sleeves, looking somehow dishevelled. She wasn’t really used to seeing him like this, and the sight startled her for a moment.
“All right,” he said. “Give me what you’ve got.”
“What I’ve got is next to nothing. You read in the paper about this woman, this Irma Black?”
He nodded.
“She’s the one that sent the telegram to the programme.”
“Did you go down there yesterday with him?” He picked her notes out of his basket
“That’s my rough draft. Read it and weep. As near as I can tell, we were there about an hour before the murder.”
“Great.” He slumped in his chair. “Look, we’re on to something big. I don’t want you to blow it. This can be the making of the magazine. With you on the inside track, we just might beat Mr. Barney Hamet to the solution.”
“I don’t know about that,” she said. “I’m no detective.”
Rowe lit his pipe, drew on it, took it from his mouth, and studied it for a moment. “Clogged again. These new pipes are never any good until they’re broken in.”
“I’ll buy you an old one for Christmas.”
“Thanks.” He puffed a bit. “So what’s next for the boy detective?”
“I don’t really know,” she answered honestly.
“I’ll try to hold the deadline as long as I can for you. See if you can get enough to make a really meaty article.”
She went back to her apartment after work and found a message there to call Barney Hamet. She looked up his phone number in the book and called his apartment
“I got your message,” she said. “What’s up?”
He sounded tired. “How would you like to go on a little trip with me?”
“Business or pleasure?”
“This would be all business.”
“Where to?”
“A place called June, Nebraska.”
“June? Where that woman was from! Of course! You think you might find something in her background!”
“I don’t know what I might find, but it seems worth a try. It’s the sort of thing we could probably do better than the regular police. I’m not taking you along to give Manhattan any news beat on the story. I simply need a research assistant. There might be a lot of digging through old newspapers, talking to people around the town. I need another pair of feet to cover all the territory. Are you in?”
“I’m in,” she said. “Just try and keep me out!”
16 Barney Hamet
AFTER HE TALKED TO Susan Veldt on the phone, Barney scrambled an egg and fried some bacon for supper. He was just finishing it when the downstairs buzzer sounded, and he walked to the intercom system. “Yes. Who’s there?”
Far below, someone cleared his throat “This is Frank Jesset. I was on the programme with you Sunday night I’d like a few words with you, if you’re free.”
“Sure,” Barney said. “Come on up.”
“Miss Sweeney is with me.”
“Bring her along.”
Well, Barney mused, Frank Jesset and Miss Sweeney. Ross Craigthorn’s closest friends. Perhaps in the privacy of Barney’s apartment, Jesset would prove more talkative than he had on Sunday night’s radio show.
The two came hurriedly, glancing nervously about the room, taking in Barney’s books and typewriter and the few remaining mementoes of his married life. It was Miss Sweeney who spoke first, her dark head bobbing. “You seem to be getting further on this case than the police. We thought we should have a talk with you.”
“Thanks for the compliment, but I’m not doing anything they wouldn’t do.”
“You’re finding bodies,” Jesset said. “This woman, Irma Black …”
“Yes,” Barney admitted cautiously.
“Miss Sweeney here has some information …”
“Wait a minute,” Barney interrupted. “Perhaps we should, be on a first name basis. Miss Sweeney, I’m sure you have some very sweet, sincere, first name we could use.”
She blinked her eyelashes at him and hardened the line of her lips. “My name is Mary, and I don’t like it much. If you want to use it, you can, but I prefer to be called Miss Sweeney.”
Barney shrugged. “All right, Miss Sweeney. You have some information?”
“I was telling it,” Jesset said, with growing belligerence.
“She has some information. But we don’t want to get further involved with the police. Do you know they actually suspect us of having something to do with that murder? One detective even hinted that the two of us were … well… having an affair!”
“I can’t imagine that,” Barney said, with a touch of irony.
“Whatever our personal relationship is, it has nothing to do with Ross Craigthorn, or with his murder. Miss Sweeney was his secretary. I was a close friend. That’s it. We’ve come to give you this information. Do you want it?”
“I want any information I can get,” Barney said. “It’s about Irma Black?”
“That’s right.” Miss Sweeney took over the story at this point. “A few weeks ago, Ross Craigthorn received a letter. It was marked personal, but I still saw the return address. And I remembered. Irma Black. It had an address someplace in the midwest.”
“Nebraska?” Barney prodded. “A town called June, Nebraska?”
“That’s it! I knew it was a funny name! June, Nebraska. The letter was postmarked from New York, though. I got the impression she might have moved to New York and didn’t have a permanent return address here yet.”
“Do you think you could find this letter? Is it still among Ross Craigthorn’s papers?”
“I don’t know,” she answered, playing coy.
“Come on! You didn’t come here just to tell me about a letter you saw in an envelope three weeks ago. You’ve gone through his papers, and you have the letter. Let’s get on with this business and cut out beating around the bush.”
She shot a glance at Frank Jesset, then reached into her handbag. “You realise, of course, that Amalgamated Broadcasting would fire me if they ever knew I took this from his desk.”
He took the letter and unfolded it.
Dear Ross,
Excuse the informality, but I do feel that I know you quite well, even after twenty-two years. I have seen you on television, and I recognised you after a while. You didn’t change your name all that much—Craig to Craigthorn. It makes you sound wealthy, like someone in government service.
Ross, I’m writing you because I’ve been ill. My husband died and my life is at loose ends. I need some money to make a fresh start. There are two of you I could turn to. You and Victor. But I have not yet been able to locate Victor. I assume he is in New York, and perhaps in time I could find him. But I have come here to the city and taken an apartment mainly in the hope of talking with you. Even in the old days you were always the better of the two.
I must have money. And so I’ve come to you. You’re a wealthy man. I read somewhere that you make more than a quarter of a million dollars a year, with your television show and other interests. I don’t want that much, because I realise you have other responsibilities. Say, a hundred thousand dollars. Enough money to keep me for the rest of my days, Ross. And it would hardly be missed by you.
Could you see your way clear to do that for me? One last gesture for those old days? Could you? This is in no way a threat, but I must say, of course, that if I do not receive any money from you, or from Victor, that I would have to look
for it in other ways. One way would be to sell the newspapers an account of that week in detail. Yes, I can remember all the details. I could tell them all about Caesar and Raven, and how it was back then.
I’m not certain of my address yet, but I’ll be contacting you. I’ll phone you within the next day or two to hear your decision. I hope that it will be favourable for both our sakes.
The letter was signed—Love, with a little scrawly question mark after it, and then, Irma Black.
Barney read it over a second time, trying to puzzle it out There was much meat to it, confirming what he already suspected. And one thing hopped out at him, more than any other. Caesar and Raven. He remembered the shattered Raven at the MWA dinner. Ross had been trying to tell him something. The Raven. Raven.
“Was there any other correspondence?” he asked Miss Sweeney. “Any phone calls?”
“I don’t know about that. Mr. Craigthorn always got a number of phone calls in the course of a day, many from unidentified women. The newscasting business is like that I tried to screen them as best I could. I don’t remember anyone identifying herself as Irma Black, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t call.”
“I think you’ll agree,” Jesset interrupted, “that this letter clears Miss Sweeney and myself of any complicity in the crime. Obviously this thing has its roots in the past.”
Barney Hamet leaned back in his chair. “That’s what we’re led to believe. As a mystery writer, of course, I must offer other explanations as well. You and Miss Sweeney might have made this whole thing up—forged the letter. There’s nothing here to prove that it was sent to Ross Craigthorn. You don’t have the envelope. You don’t have the postmark you mentioned.”
“Are you implying that we killed Ross?”
“I’m not implying anything. I’m just stating the possibilities. On the face of it, the letter seems genuine though, and it fits in with what Irma Black told me before she was killed. Is there anything else?”
“No,” she answered. “We just wanted to show you the letter.”
“I’d like to keep this, if I could.”
They looked at each other again, and finally Miss Sweeney nodded. “All right. I’ve made a Xerox copy of it in the office. I do hope you’ll use it with our best interests in mind. We don’t want to get any more deeply involved in this.”
“Don’t worry,” Barney said. “I’m only looking for a murderer. If you two are having an affair, you have nothing to fear from me.” He had a sudden thought. “But tell me one thing. What about Craigthorn’s wife?”
“She’s in Mexico,” Miss Sweeney answered. “Getting a divorce from him.”
“Another woman?”
“Another man for her, according to the stories. An airline pilot.”
He saw them to the door and waited until the elevator descended. Then he phoned the airline ticket office and asked them how to get to June, Nebraska. It was not easy. But soon they had a route plotted by way of Chicago.
17 Susan Veldt
SHE HAD LITTLE TROUBLE with Arthur Rowe over the expense account He okayed the trip to June without a second thought. He was hot on this whole thing now, and she probably could have padded it enough to buy a mink coat without his ever noticing. She was to meet Barney at MWA headquarters on Thursday morning, and she arrived early to find Betty Rafferty alone in the place, typing bills.
“It’s dues time,” Betty explained. “May first, every year.”
“Well, it breaks the routine, at least.”
“Yes. It breaks the routine.”
Soon Barney arrived with his suitcase, looking happily refreshed. “Well, we’re off,” he told Betty. “You know the motel we’ll be at. You can reach us there any time.”
Betty looked up from her typewriter, suddenly sarcastic. “I won’t call too late at night. I wouldn’t want to disturb you two.”
Susan snorted and led the way through the door. She certainly didn’t want this to appear as any sort of an assignation, some lovers’ trip halfway across the country, and she feared that’s what some of them were thinking.
They caught a morning flight to Chicago, sitting next to each other, mostly in silence. She, reading the latest novel by John Updike; he, intent on a paperbound anthology of science fiction stories edited by Hans Stefan Santesson.
“Are you going to visit the Chicago chapter of MWA while you’re there?” Susan asked at one point.
“There won’t really be time between planes. I might call one or two people.”
He did have time for just one call while they were on the ground, to an old friend he hadn’t seen for years. Then they were airborne again, bound for Lincoln, a city he’d never visited. From there it was still more than an hour’s drive to June, a town of a few thousand people in the south-east corner of the state.
18 Barney Hamet
HIS FIRST VIEW OF June, Nebraska, came as their rented blue Ford topped a small hill and started down the other side. It was countryside. That was the best word to describe it Fields, ripe with rich brown earth, being ploughed by farmers on massive yellow tractors. In other fields the spring planting was already completed. Corn, he supposed.
“Nice country,” Susan Veldt remarked from the seat at his side.
“Great country. Great.”
“A bit of sarcasm there, Mr. Hamet?”
“A city boy at heart.”
“That’s a cow over there—that big brown thing.”
“Sure.” He slowed the car to a stop and called to a muscular young man on a tractor. “Say, fella, can you direct us to the newspaper office in June?”
“No newspaper in June. Haven’t had a newspaper in ten years.” He eyed them with open curiosity.
“Well, I guess it’s the old newspaper we want, then. Where might we find its editor, or somebody like that?”
“Gee … I guess you want Mrs. Phillipps at the general store and post office.”
Barney agreed. “I guess we want Mrs. Phillipps.”
The young man’s directions took them to the combination general store and post office, at a crossroads where the paving was beginning to crack and the dust from a dry spring was rising along the roadway in both directions. He went in and talked to Mrs. Phillipps, a middle-aged woman as dry and wrinkled as the road outside.
“The editor of the newspaper,” he said. “The newspaper that used to be published here ten or so years ago.”
“Oh, that editor is gone! He fooled around too much with the ladies,” she said, perhaps a bit sad that she hadn’t been one of them. “I don’t really know where you’d find any information about it.”
“Back copies is what I was thinking of.”
“Oh, no back copies! Who’d ever keep back copies of a little weekly paper that went out of business ten years ago?”
“Do you have a sheriff?”
“There’s a county sheriff, but he’s not in June. He’s over at the county seat. There’s nothing in June.”
But there had been at one time, Barney thought. “We’re looking for information about Irma Black.”
“Well, why didn’t you say so in the first place? I know Irma. She had a little farm just outside the town, until her husband died. She’s all alone now. She went to New York a month or so back. Haven’t heard anything from her since.”
“Irma Black is dead,” he told her. “I’m sorry.”
“Dead? Irma, dead? My God … I wonder if it was just being so heartbroken about living alone in the world. You know, us country people are funny that way. We live lonely lives, but then we get attached to somebody and when that somebody is gone, we just crumple up like an autumn leaf and blow away.”
“That’s not what happened to Irma. She was strangled, I’m afraid.”
“Irma! In New York! Terrible city I Terrible! Why she wanted to go there was beyond me! She said there were some friends that could give her money. What’s money to her now that she’s dead?”
“You don’t know who the friends were? What their names were?�
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“No, I don’t know. She never mentioned any names. I wasn’t that friendly with her. I just saw her when she came to get her mail.”
“Did she ever receive mail from New York?”
“No. Never.”
“From any place else? Any place far away?”
“No. Nothing but the usual junk. Her whole world was here.”
“What about her past?” Barney asked. “Did you know her when she was young?”
“Not really. Before she was married, you mean? No, Irma wasn’t the sort whose childhood you ever thought about.”
“But she must have had one,” Barney said. “She didn’t grow up here in June?”
“In the area. Maybe over in the next town, or across the state line. I don’t know.”
“Was Black her maiden name?”
“Yes. Her husband’s name was Tyron, I believe. I didn’t know him very well.”
Barney took out his wallet and slipped five dollars across the counter to the woman. “Come on, now. You can do better than that. You said you didn’t know Irma Black at all before her marriage. Yet you knew the name right away. You knew it was her maiden name. How did you know that?”
“Well, she was using it again after her husband died.” But the woman was flustered. Her hands were flying—trying to keep occupied. She looked at the five dollar bill, and then away. “I don’t know anything, really!”
“Irma’s dead, and whatever you tell me can’t harm her now.”
“Really, I don’t know anything,” she said. “I never speak ill of living or dead. Go and talk to the sheriff.”
“I guess I’ll do just that,” he told her. “Come on, Susan.”
Outside, she pressed him for information. “What did you find out?”
“Nothing—except that there is something to find out. We just have to dig for it a little more deeply.”
“Leave it to me,” she said. “I’m being a sort of Watson, aren’t I?”
“You mean you really read Sherlock Holmes once in your youth?”
“I saw a movie,” she admitted. “It was pretty good. All about a big dog who killed people.”
The Shattered Raven Page 9
