The Cairvoyant Countess (1.1)

by Dorothy Gilman

  "Yes, I understand," Madame Karitska said, and nodded. "If I were you I would ask them to make further inquiries. There must be some way. Teeth, fingerprints-"

  "But we just buried her," cried Mrs. Heyer. "Fritz, what is she talking about, what does she mean?"

  Mr. Heyer gave Madame Karitska a reproachful look and stood up. "I think we'd better go, Mother, we've taken up too much of this lady's time."

  The woman said blankly, "All right, but Fritz, I don't understand."

  "She can be of no service to us, Mama," he explained gently, and helped her to her feet. Turning to Madame Karitska he said simply, "I'm sorry for you. I've heard of people like you but I thought-I'm tempted to report you to the police but we've had enough heartache. We came to you freely so I leave a dollar with you, for I'm a man who pays his debts, but to raise false hopes-this to me is the most despicable crime in the world." He spoke it like a curse.

  "As you wish," said Madame Karitska. "I quite understand your feelings." She saw them to the door, closed it behind them, and glanced ruefully at the dollar he had left in the basket. For a moment she experienced doubt-enough to question herself severely, for it was very hard to be taken for a charlatan-but no, she could not doubt the impressions she'd received.

  Nevertheless it was not until several appointments later that she was able to forget the searing accusations in Mr. Heyer's eyes.

  That night Madame Karitska slept fitfully. She woke up at one o'clock, at two, and again at three, and found this difficult to understand because she was by custom a sound sleeper. At four o'clock she fell asleep and experienced a vivid dream. She was walking down a long hallway lined with windows. She stopped suddenly and said to the man who was escorting her-it was Pruden-"I have to look in that window."

  "Why that one?" he asked.

  "I don't know." She moved to the window and looked inside. Sitting on a bare cot was a young woman in blue-jeans and a faded sweat shirt. She glanced up and saw Madame Karitska and her lips silently framed two words: Help me.

  Madame Karitska woke up and knew that the girl was Jan Heyer. It seemed a very natural dream, since the grandparents' visit was still on her mind, but on the other hand there were differences that made her thoughtful: the girl in the dream was not a copy of the photograph Madame Karitska had been shown earlier in the day. It was the same girl, yet different. Madame Karitska, for instance, remembered her from the photograph as aloof, rather like a model in a fashion magazine, with high cheekbones and a smooth blond head. In the dream the girl was not like that at all, she was almost urchin-like, her face alive and full of passion.

  Pruden, stopping in early the next morning, found Madame Karitska troubled. "Something bothering you?" he asked, accepting a cup of coffee from her.

  "Frankly yes, my friend. I am becoming convinced that a girl who was killed three days ago is still alive."

  He said, "Perhaps you'd care to tell me about it?"

  She described the Heyers' visit on the preceding day and he listened attentively. When she had finished he said, "I certainly know better than to ignore these impressions of yours, but as a detective I have to point out a few flaws in your theory that she may still be alive. For instance, if this accident took place on Tuesday-and this is Friday morning-then where is Jan Heyer?"

  "I don't know."

  "She was about to fly off on a plane to Europe. She was on her way to the airport in a car licensed and registered in her name. There was-or so we have to assume-no one else in the car with her, and it was her passport found beside the car."

  Madame Karitska stirred restlessly. "Yes, yes, I know, I admit at once to you that every fact points to its being Jan Heyer who was in the car. But why, then, do I feel that she's alive?"

  He looked at her so doubtfully that she laughed. "Oh, my dear Lieutenant, you wish to tell me that I am demented or, how do you say, losing the touch? This is in your mind, admit it."

  His smile turned rueful. "Buddhas, not-so-innocent stepfathers, a murderess who is not a murderess-how can I believe you're demented?"

  "Then help me to find her," pleaded Madame Karitska. "Prove to me that she's dead."

  "Which?"

  "Either."

  He nodded. "It's the latter I'll have to take on, then. I can only prove to you that she's dead."

  "Good," said Madame Karitska, her eyes brilliant. "And I shall try to prove to you that she's alive. Where do we begin?"

  "Wait a minute," he said, "this is simple police work, doublechecking all the facts."

  "But the facts will not change," she pointed out. "Only their interpretation can change."

  "What does that mean?"

  "It means that since I am convinced that Jan Heyer was not driving the car, I must look for the young woman who was in the car. Could you, I wonder, secure for me a list of all the young women reported missing since Tuesday?"

  Staggered, he said, "Good Lord, there must be at least fifty women reported missing since then in a city the size of Trafton."

  "But there is a list, with addresses and pertinent data?"

  "Oh yes."

  Madame Karitska nodded. "Good. I have a 9 A.M. appointment, after which I will stop in at your headquarters and collect this list. You do not look pleased. Why?"

  "You're pushing me to the wall," he said dryly, and then, responding with equal efficiency, he added, "All right, you win, I'll look into it. Suppose we meet at the Green Door Restaurant for dinner at six, and we'll compare notes." With this he put down his coffee cup, reached for his coat, and fled.

  A promise was a promise, no matter how artfully wangled, thought Pruden, and after a busy morning wrapping up the threads of a burglary Pruden turned his attention to Jan Heyer, lately deceased: age twenty-four, psychologist, private office at the Community Medical Building, North Broad Street, consultant and psychologist at Harlow Settlement House. He conscientiously drove to the scene of Tuesday's accident, which had taken place just beyond the underpass on Clinton Avenue near the airport. He talked to a witness, the owner of a diner, who said the car had shot out of the underpass traveling at seventy miles an hour and skidded off the road into the utility pole.

  "Not much left," the man said. "Outside the car there was a shoe and there was this passport and there were parts of a radio strewn all over the place."

  "You're sure they came from the car?"

  "Bloody sure. I keep my place free of litter and I'd picked the drive clean at 9 A.M. Things flew out, I could see it. A pity the girl didn't too; the car caught fire inside of a few seconds."

  Pruden found the shoe still at the morgue. "We gave the passport to the old man-her grandfather, he said he was-and turned over the remains to the Jacobs Funeral Home. There didn't seem much point in giving the old man the shoe, he was in bad enough shape as it was."

  It was a size-six shoe: Pruden wrote this down.

  The police report was straightforward enough: the accident had yielded the charred body of a young female. The car license was H10567, a red Datsun registered in the name of Jan Heyer, 206 Boulevard, Apartment 3. Passport and left shoe found near car. Charred framework of two suitcases inside car; a sifting of ashes yielded one gold ring and the remains of a gold watch, both identified by grandfather as belonging to owner of car. Next of kin: Mr. and Mrs. Fritz Heyer, 37 Eighth Street. End of case.

  There was only one more thing he could do, and after thinking about an approach to this, he telephoned the girl's grandfather. He was sorry to trouble them, he said, but a shoe had turned up at the scene of the accident and he wondered if Mr. Heyer could tell him Jan Heyer's shoe size. The old man accepted the question without curiosity. Pruden heard him call to his wife and then he came back to the telephone and said in a depressed voice, "Size seven and a half."

  Pruden had expected him to say size six. It was the only piece of evidence that hadn't been checked out and he had been sorely tempted to overlook it but he was too good a policeman. This discrepancy jarred him. He said, "You're positive of this?"r />
  "Oh yes. My wife, she has all Jan's sizes written down on a piece of paper."

  It was a very small discrepancy, thought Pruden since everything else belonged to the girl, the car, the passport, the ring, the watch, but he realized that it had startled him. He wondered if this was because it proved to him how impervious he was to Madame Karitska's wild suggestion the girl might be alive. He thought in dismay, "I've been humoring Madame Karitska," and he wondered if she knew this.

  "Yes, of course," she told him when they faced each other across a table at the Green Door Restaurant that evening. "But this is very natural under the circumstances, is it not so? I am very glad that something has made a small dent in your complacency."

  "It doesn't change anything," he reminded her quickly. "The shoe could have been tossed from a passing car only moments before Jan Heyer drove out of the underpass, or a friend might have left a pair of shoes in the car."

  "Yes," said Madame Karitska, regarding him with such amusement that he hastily asked her what she had learned today.

  "Not much," she said. "This-how do you call it, leg work?-is very tiring. You gave me the names of twenty-one young women reported missing since Tuesday. I can tell you that Consuelo Sanchez returned home this morning, and that Nina Abbott's parents heard from her in today's mail that she has eloped and is in California." She brought the list from her purse and placed it on the table. "I have visited fifteen from the list, with four more to go. In five cases I knew at once they were wrong-they did not know how to drive, or were too old or too young-and at ten places I did readings."

  "Nothing?"

  "Nothing yet," she told him with spirit. "I shall visit the remaining four addresses after dinner."

  Surprised, he said, "What about clients this evening?"

  "I canceled them, this is the more important."

  "Why?" he asked, staring at her curiously. "Ego? Vanity? To prove you're right?"

  She gave him a steady, thoughtful glance. "It has not occurred to you, Lieutenant, that if Jan Heyer was not killed on Tuesday then wherever she is she could be in some danger?"

  "No," he said calmly, "because it hasn't occurred to me yet that she wasn't killed."

  "Then you have kinder dreams than I," she said shortly, and put down her coffee cup. "This has been delightful but I must go."

  "I'll go with you," he said. "You shouldn't be walking all over the city alone at night."

  Their third call brought them to a fourth-floor walkup on Fourth Street where the city had lately enjoyed an invasion of young people looking for low rents. The card on the door of the apartment read "Grahn and Shilhaus." A heavily made-up girl with bright red hair answered their knock.

  "Is this where Carol Grahn lives?" asked Madame Karitska.

  The girl looked with interest at Pruden and with undisguised indifference at Madame Karitska. "Look, she's not here and I don't know where she is. I'm not going to ask you in, I go to work in two hours-I'm a nightclub dancer-and I got to save my energy."

  "Then we'll talk in the hall," said Madame Karitska.

  "Is Miss Grahn a dancer too?"

  "No, she floats." At the look on Madame Karitska's face the girl explained tiredly, "Floats around. Works when she needs the bread. You know, typist, stock clerk." She added quickly. "But she's trying to break into acting. Very artistic, you know? Look, who are you anyway?"

  Pruden brought out his wallet and showed her his ID card. "She's been missing since Tuesday?"

  "Actually since Sunday," the girl said with a shrug. "We room together-strictly a financial arrangement, you understand, you can't call us friends. Never knew her before, and we never butted into each other's affairs but we had this agreement. I mean, we found out fast that we're both nervous as hell about the city, especially at night, you know? So we made this pact that we'd sort of keep tabs on each other. If one of us didn't turn up for twenty-four hours we'd report it." She sighed. "I waited even longer, you know? Two nights. I kept thinking she'd show up but she didn't. I don't know, maybe she forgot our agreement but we had it and at least I kept my part of the deal."

  Pruden said, "You think she'd forget something as important as that?"

  "Hell, I don't know, she certainly hasn't been the same since she met Tommy; she forgets everything."

  "Tommy," said Madame Karitska, suddenly alert.

  "Yeah. A real clown. I don't think he's worth the time of day but she thought he was great. Me, I think he was on drugs. A crazy, hipped-up kind of guy."

  Madame Karitska said hopefully, "Do you know his last name, or where we could find him?"

  The girl looked tired. "Don't know a thing about him, really I don't. No, wait a minute, I think he's the guy she met at the settlement house."

  It was Pruden who said sharply, "What settlement house?"

  "Harlow. Two blocks from here. You know. Carol practically lived there."

  "Would you," said Madame Karitska in a practical voice, "have a photograph of Carol in the apartment, or one of Tommy?"

  The girl sighed. "Hell, I guess you'd better come in, it's drafty enough in this hall."

  The apartment looked as if nobody had touched anything since the movers walked out. The girl rummaged in a bureau drawer, contributing further to the disorder, and drew out a piece of cardboard. "Here's her graduation picture, 1972, from Oak Falls, Nebraska. The one she had of Tommy, I've seen it, she must be carrying with her."

  Madame Karitska took the picture and studied it: a girl with long dark hair, high cheekbones, laughing eyes; a young face, immature, not beautiful but eager for life. Perhaps too eager for life, thought Madame Karitska, and thanked her. "May we borrow this?"

  "Be my guest."

  As they descended the narrow stairs Madame Karitska said quietly, "Jan Heyer worked at the settlement house two days a week."

  "I know," Pruden said grimly. "That's where we're heading next."

  The Harlow Settlement House was a square, decaying brick building adjoining the old Harlow Hospital. As money had begun to flow out of Third Street in the fifties, an exodus that soon turned into a rout, the hospital and the settlement house had been left stranded, rather like middle-aged widows suddenly confronted with a vast number of children to raise and only wit and imagination to bridge the gap. Both institutions had survived, and had even acquired a kind of brash youthfulness. Life raced through their walls now like blood through an artery, pulsating, sometimes anemic, frequently needing transfusions but always managing to narrowly surmount disaster.

  It was eight o'clock when they entered the building. Pruden headed first for the director's office to explain their presence to Miss Brylawski.

  "Oh, it's a terrible loss," said Miss Brylawski with feeling. "Terrible. You can't replace people like Jan Heyer. The kids loved her, she talked their language. She was a darling."

  "How about this girl?" asked Pruden, handing her Carol's photograph. "Her name is Carol Gratin and she spends time here. Would you know if her path ever crossed Miss Heyer's?"

  "I wouldn't have the foggiest, you'll want to see Harry Jones on that," said Miss Brylawski. "You'll find him downstairs in the lion's den. Me, I sit up here doing paperwork and supplying the glue that holds the place together."

  Harry Jones proved easy to find: he was huge and black and he looked as if he could supply considerable glue to hold things together too. His glance assessed both Madame Karitska and Pruden before he said amiably, "Sure, I know Carol. Used to hang around with Tommy Brudenhall."

  "Ah," said Madame Karitska triumphantly.

  "Used to?" repeated Pruden.

  "Haven't seen Carol since Tommy split. He worked here-janitor work. We gave him a room in the basement. Sunday he just left."

  "What's his background?" asked Pruden, and meeting that level stare again he sighed and brought out his wallet. "Police," he explained.

  "I see." The eyes didn't waver. "Miss Brylawski clear this?"

  "We stopped there first. She knows me."

  "Okay, t
hen. Tommy had a police record, he'd been in prison. We try to give a break to kids like that."

  "Do you know whether Carol was ever a patient of Jan Heyer's?" asked Madame Karitska.

  His eyes flickered. "That girl's death cost me something, man. One hell of a sweet kid, Jan. Just out of school, you know? Really with it."

  Madame Karitska tactfully asked her question again.

  "Patient? I wouldn't know, but Chick or Deirdre would. They saw Jan regularly, and the kids with regular appointments always seemed to know who else went. Like a club." He pointed to a door down the corridor. "You go in there-that's my office-and I'll send along anybody I can find. We're having basketball play-offs, there should be someone."

  Actually Harry found several young people who had been patients of Miss Heyer when she visited the settlement house. Chick's appointments were on Wednesday, and he said he'd never seen Carol Gratin leaving the office or waiting to go in. Miranda knew Carol but had no idea whether she had ever had therapy with Jan Heyer. Then Deirdre bounced into the office, eager, joyous, and winsome. Deirdre was sixteen, with a fine-boned black face and a smile as brilliant as a sunrise. Yes, Carol had visited Miss Heyer twice as a patient, she reported, because Carol had told her so. Carol had hated the psychologist after seeing her, because Miss Heyer had suggested that she come in regularly for help, and Carol hadn't liked that at all. It was, Deirdre announced with authority, a typical love-hate relationship because although Carol hated the psychologist she imitated her too. Like the wig, for instance.

  "Wig?" said Madame Karitska quickly.

  "It was about a week ago," explained Deirdre. "I had a Saturday-morning appointment with Miss Heyer, nine o'clock, and the door to her office was open so I walked in and Miss Heyer was standing with her back to me looking out the window. On Saturdays, you see, she often came in wearing blue jeans-it was on weekdays she always wore suits and stuff-so I really thought it was Miss Heyer. Then she turned around and it was Carol, wearing a blond wig. She looked so much like Miss Heyer I couldn't believe my eyes."