Out of Time

by Michael Z. Lewin

  Wisman and the patrolman left.

  Glass Albert stayed for a quick beer, but we were both too tired and too confused to say much. Before he left I asked, ‘You going to fire me then?’

  ‘Not tonight,’ he said, but there was nothing of the usual vitality or bonhomie about him.

  Chapter Fifteen

  I woke up before eight, but lay in bed for a while thinking.

  At nine I called the Belters. Douglas Belter answered and when I identified myself he said, ‘Oh.’

  ‘I’m sorry to bother you,’ I said.

  ‘That’s all right,’ he said. ‘I should have contacted you. But life here is still rather confused.’

  ‘I can understand that,’ I said.

  ‘You have things you want to talk about.’ It was a statement.

  ‘I think I have identified your wife’s biological mother.’

  ‘Daisy Wines?’ he said, as if it were already known.

  ‘That turns out to have been a stage name.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I think I know her real name and some of her background. I can also make a guess why she left Paula with Mrs Murchison.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said.

  ‘However, some of the information is not very pleasant and in the circumstances maybe it’s not the right time for me to go through it. I am continuing to follow the leads which have been thrown up and, as much as anything, I’m calling to let you know that I am making a little progress.’

  Belter thought for a few moments. He said, ‘Come out, Mr Samson. Paula is taking everything pretty well and there will be no real advantage to spinning the shocks out, if shocks are what you have. Tamae has been a source of strength for her, as usual, and I am staying at home today. Frankly the thing that is upsetting her most is that the police have requested an autopsy. We hadn’t expected that and it is delaying the funeral.’

  ‘An autopsy doesn’t usually take very long,’ I said.

  ‘The police have said that we will have to put a cremation off until their lab test results have come back. It may be as much as a week. Until that’s all over, there will be no chance of an even keel here.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ I said, ‘but it’s probably just routine.’

  When I arrived the door was opened for me by Paula Belter. ‘Hello,’ she said.

  ‘Hello.’

  She smiled, formally. ‘Doug says you have some things to tell us.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Come in. Come in.’

  She led me to the kitchen. She said, ‘The kitchen seems to be the centre of action during the morning in this house. I don’t quite know why, now that the boys are away so much.’

  Douglas Belter came in from another part of the house as I sat on a comfortable, padded, straight-backed chair. ‘Ah, Mr Samson. Would you care for a drink, or is this a little too early for you?’

  ‘It’s a lot too early for me,’ I said. ‘Unless we’re talking about something like coffee.’

  ‘Don’t be disappointed, Douggy,’ Paula Belter said playfully.

  Douglas Belter frowned. I felt he was struggling to contain an explanation that if one of them were likely to hit the bottle at ten in the morning it was her and not him. Loyalty beat self-defence. He said nothing.

  ‘So, coffee it is.’ Paula Belter went behind a kitchen bar to a U-shaped surface littered with appliances. After a moment standing still, she came out again. ‘Tamae will do it. I’d like her to be here anyway.’ She left the room. Belter sat at the table.

  ‘You see how she is,’ he said.

  Something must have been clearer to him than to me, but I said, ‘Yes.’ Then, ‘Mrs Murchison’s death must have come as quite a shock.’

  ‘Paula and Tamae went in to see her in the morning. Then by evening she was gone.’

  ‘Did they ask her any of the difficult questions, about Daisy Wines?’

  ‘Paula says not. But that doesn’t exclude the possibility that she said something like, “We’ve hired a private detective to track down my real mother,” as if in passing. Realistically speaking, I don’t know whether the subject was raised or not.’

  ‘We could ask Tamae, perhaps?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  Paula Belter and Tamae returned to the room and Mrs Belter was saying, ‘. . . and I completely forgot where the coffee was. Would you mind terribly making it?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  Paula Belter came back and started to sit at the table. But before she landed she rose again and went to a sideboard and took out four woven mats. ‘Will we need utensils?’ she asked, but as if to herself Then to me she said, ‘How about something to eat? Bacon and eggs? A croissant?’

  ‘Nothing, thanks.’

  ‘You’re no fun at all, are you, Mr Samson?’ She exchanged the mats for four coasters which she put on the table. Then, from a cupboard, she took four large mugs and put them on the coasters.

  ‘Well, I’ve done my bit,’ she said, ‘and I’m absolutely exhausted.’ She exaggerated a fatigued drop into the chair she had almost used a few moments before. Then she straightened and said to me, ‘Not really. I’m just joking.’

  I nodded. I said, ‘I was very sorry to hear about Mrs Murchison.’

  ‘Mmmm. So was I. She was like a mother to me, you know.’

  ‘I think you’re going too far, Paula,’ Belter snapped.

  ‘Oh, do you?’ she asked lightly. To me she said, ‘You know the police have delayed the funeral?’

  ‘Your husband told me. I’m sure it’s just routine.’

  ‘Do you think so?’

  ‘Since she died unexpectedly.’

  ‘I thought that it might be because they thought she committed suicide.’

  ‘Is that what you think?’

  ‘It might be what they think.’ She wagged her head. ‘I don’t know what I think.’

  ‘Did she ever talk about taking her own life?’

  ‘No,’ Paula Belter said.

  Tamae Mitsuki brought a pot of coffee to the table and filled the four mugs. ‘Do you like cream or sugar, Mr Samson?’ she asked.

  ‘No, thank you.’

  ‘I’ll have both today,’ Paula Belter said.

  We all watched while cream and sugar were brought to the table and Paula Belter put a lot of each into her coffee. She sipped from her mug without stirring.

  Tamae sat down, and Mrs Belter said, ‘Well, Mr Samson, the floor is yours. Or should I say table?’

  I was tiring of Paula Belter’s self-indulgent stranglehold on group attention as a means of making sure no one forgot her suffering. There was no way to go in but hard.

  ‘When I saw you last I had found a birth certificate which strongly suggested that your biological mother was named Daisy Wines. Later you remembered a woman called Auntie Vee who visited you at Mrs Murchison’s.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, I have learned that Daisy Wines was the stage name of a nightclub singer named Vera Wert who married a man named George Bennett Raymond Edwards. After less than two years she shot him dead in some sort of domestic fight. She was tried for his murder, but was acquitted in 1940. Immediately after her acquittal she left Indianapolis and . . .’

  ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute,’ Douglas Belter said. ‘You’re saying this woman was Paula’s mother?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘For everyone’s sake, let’s take things a little more slowly.’

  Paula Belter said nothing. She just sat with her jaw loose, as if the puppeteer were out to lunch.

  I took them through what I had been doing and what I had found and I went on to a tentative reconstruction. ‘She came to Indianapolis from Logansport in late 1935 or early 1936 when she was fifteen or sixteen. I don’t know whether Vera Wert was pregnant when she came to town or whether she became so soon after. Either way, before the birth she found a singing job and obtained her new name. One could speculate that she was pregnant when she came to Indianapolis. That might be a reason
for her to leave home.’

  ‘The pregnancy?’ Douglas Belter asked rigidly.

  ‘Produced Mrs Belter.’

  We all looked at Paula Belter, but she sat, quiet and grave.

  I said, ‘Vera, as Daisy Wines, was considered to be an innocent. Her singing style projected it, and while she was being courted by the man she later married, she took no gifts from him and, it seems, gave none either. It may well be that around the club nobody knew that she had a child. One woman, who knew her slightly, wondered whether she would know how.’

  ‘It’s not something that takes a lot of knowledge,’ Tamae suggested, suddenly breaking her silence when no one else spoke as I paused.

  ‘That’s true,’ I said. ‘Eventually, in 1938, she married Edwards. I don’t know what she felt for him, but there is little question that his people presumed that her motives were mercenary. He was the wild scion of a significant family in this city. It could not have been easy for her, whatever it was for him. His sister remains convinced that Vera murdered him for the money and still manages to take pleasure in the fact that she didn’t inherit as much as she might have. Nevertheless, as Mrs Edwards Vera came into a substantial amount. And my guess is that from that money she funded your upbringing, Mrs Belter. Her husband bought the New York Street property which the Murchisons ran as a boarding house the same year he married her, surely no coincidence. And I assume she was the source of the money to buy the house you lived in on 42nd Street and to pay for things like your piano lessons. I don’t see where Ella Murchison came by it otherwise. Vera Wert may not have been around Indianapolis to visit you after the trial finished in 1940, but I strongly suspect that her influence and interest in your life remained for a long time.’

  Paula Belter sat cupping the mug of sweet white coffee in her hands. Her glossy defences were gone. She looked sober and introspective and haunted and needful.

  Having lost one mother so abruptly and finally, I felt that she would have given a lot to meet her other mother at that moment.

  Chapter Sixteen

  I said, ‘The problem with weaving a reconstruction from a string of facts is that more holes are left than fabric. Maybe we have some of the main strands now. But a lot of questions and directions remain.’

  Near to tears, Paula Belter put down her coffee. ‘Whatever else happens, at least now I know she cared.’ She dropped her face into her cupped hands, but she made no sound.

  Then Douglas Belter coughed and asked, ‘What additional lines of inquiry are you thinking of, Mr Samson? Whether she was actually guilty of murder?’

  Paula Belter looked up.

  ‘I had in mind Vera Wert’s background in Logansport. Where she went when she left Indianapolis. Whether she is alive now and if so where. What happened to her. And whether we might find out who Mrs Belter’s biological father was.’

  I paused. Nobody filled the silence.

  I said, ‘But maybe you don’t want me to go on. You hired me in the first place to get Mrs Belter a passport. That should be possible now, at least if you involve a lawyer to put it to the passport people in the right kind of way.’

  ‘I see,’ Belter said.

  ‘And, the potential this kind of inquiry has for absorbing money is very great indeed. The trail is old and cold and there is no certainty of any further success.’

  Douglas Belter looked at his wife.

  She became weary before us. ‘You decide, Doug.’ She rose slowly. Tamae helped her and the two women left the kitchen.

  Belter and I looked after them, then at each other.

  He said, ‘She can be the most wonderful woman in the world.’

  In a moment we heard a piano being played in a nearby room.

  ‘A little emotional,’ Belter said, ‘but wonderful.’

  I could see how his life would never be dull and that is a wonder of one sort.

  Tamae came back into the kitchen and sat at the table. ‘She’ll be all right. It’s just hard for her,’ she said. ‘So many surprises.’

  We both nodded.

  To Belter she said, ‘Have you decided whether Mr Samson is to continue digging into the past?’

  ‘I don’t think there is much choice.’

  She thought. ‘I suppose not,’ she said. Then to me, ‘Do you have any other information for us now?’

  ‘Only a picture.’

  Tamae swallowed. Belter took deep breaths.

  I took Charlie Carson’s photograph of Daisy Wines, George Edwards, Mike Carson, Ginny Tonic and a third couple and showed it to them.

  ‘Which one?’ Belter asked haltingly.

  I pointed out Daisy Wines.

  ‘She looks so young,’ Tamae Mitsuki said.

  I was back in my office by eleven-thirty. That was the time Albert Connah had arranged to meet the insurance representative for an inspection of the damage.

  They arrived together and we looked the place over. First the yard and the perpetrators’ escape route. In the daylight we found some tyre burn trails which might have been made by the car they left in. I didn’t remember hearing a squeal, but I could have been deaf to anything but the too fresh sound of breaking glass.

  The insurance adjuster talked to me alone, but not for long and with no complications. Then he rejoined Glass Albert for a detailed stock-taking and they no longer needed me except for some form filling.

  It meant I finally had time to face my unfinished business with Normal Bates.

  I called him and said, ‘I want to come and see you.’

  ‘Does this mean you have freed yourself from your other client, Mr Samson?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I see. You recall that I want you to start immediately?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But you won’t?’

  ‘I am not able to, Mr Bates.’

  ‘In that case, I’m not clear what it is that we have to talk about.’

  ‘I have some questions to ask you,’ I said.

  ‘Have you?’ he said quietly, even tiredly, and without stress on the interrogative. ‘When did you have in mind?’

  ‘I thought I would come over now,’ I said.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me you were a private detective?’ I’d taken my usual chair. Bates sat before his vast window scanning the city.

  ‘You didn’t ask,’ he said.

  ‘What kind of reason is that?’

  He didn’t answer the question, but he turned to face me. He said, ‘You can’t see the Marott Hotel from here.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The Marott Hotel. The poor bastard. George Marott made his money in shoes and then he built the hotel. First major hotel north of White River. You know it?’

  I knew it, but I said nothing.

  ‘Huge place, and when it was finished Marott laid on big opening festivities. A hot dog with the works. Except. . . .’

  He paused. I waited.

  ‘Except,’ he continued, ‘that it opened in 1927. You’ve heard of the Depression, Mr Samson? Within a few years Marott was turning on lights in empty rooms so that people would think that somebody was staying there.’

  Bates made a despairing exhalation that sounded like ‘chew’ drawn out. ‘That’s the way things were, and there was nothing that Reggie Sullivan or F.D.R. or Paul V. McNutt could do about it.’

  Sullivan was mayor and McNutt governor in the thirties.

  ‘What are you trying to tell me, Mr Bates?’

  ‘That circumstances can make things different from how they appear,’ he said sharply. For a moment his eyes and manner burst into life, but then he faded again. He was notably less positive, less definite, than when I’d visited him before.

  But I was getting annoyed with digression.

  ‘The George Bennett Raymond Edwards murder trial,’ I said.

  ‘What about it?’ Bates asked matter-of-factly, as if he spoke of it every day.

  ‘The woman my other clients hired me to search for is Mrs Vera Edwards.’

  He seemed sur
prised. But he said nothing in response.

  ‘I found out yesterday that you testified.’

  ‘That’s true,’ he said. He closed his eyes for a moment. ‘I did.’

  ‘Will you tell me about it?’

  He didn’t speak immediately. I thought he was going to say ‘no’, but he said, ‘I followed her for a few months. I worked for an agency then. Apart from hole-in-the-wall outfits like yours, there were only two agencies in Indianapolis. Mine and the Pinkertons.’

  ‘The Horse Thief Detective Association?’

  He raised his eyebrows. ‘Nowadays to look in the Yellow Pages you’d think people have nothing else to do but hire P.I.s. Fifty-three entries in there, last count. Fifty-three, including yours.’ He shook his head.

  ‘Mrs Edwards’ husband hired you?’

  ‘He thought she was screwing somebody on the side. I hated the job after the first couple of weeks. It’s bad enough following someone every day when you have the sense that you only need to be patient to learn something. But when nothing happens, and days become months. . . .’

  ‘When were you on the case?’

  ‘Spring of 1940. I kept making negative reports and they kept telling me to stay at it. I began to think that at least I would get a summer at Maxinkuckee out of it, but then she went and shot him in April.’

  ‘Maxinkuckee?’

  ‘The gentry,’ Bates said, ‘used to send their womenfolk away for the summer. Either to select lakeland areas in Indiana like Maxinkuckee or Wawasee, or farther north, in Michigan, Petosky or Harbor Springs.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘It was meant to be good detective country. Husbands in the city at work, lonely wives far away. Personally, I preferred cases with more meat on them, but most P.I. work then concerned errant spouses. You had to do it. Couldn’t make a living otherwise.’

  ‘Tell me about Mrs Edwards,’ I said, trying to keep him on my point.

  ‘There’s not much to tell,’ he said slowly. ‘She lived the life of the well-to-do ladies of the time.’

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘All right. What was the husband like?’

  ‘Totally obsessed with whatever he wanted at the moment, until he got it.’