He stopped, as though he did not want to go on.
“A good Joe,” he said heavily. “The best ever. They don’t make many like him. But the way it looks, someone knew he was getting too close, so he was murdered.”
He drew a long breath.
“Sorry. It’s a long story, isn’t it? But you had a right to understand. I don’t want these local guys to gum things up. This is my case. In a way I’ve been on it ever since he died.
“I wanted to know who killed Flaherty. Maybe it’s an obsession with me now. It was a long time ago,” he added. “You never knew him, or heard of him. But he was like a father to me, only more than most fathers. People knew he was fair, even the ones he sent up. He was shot because the next day he was going to that town up the Hudson, the town the dead woman came from.
“That’s why I kept the ticket stub as well as the clipping,” he said. “Flaherty is my case. So was Shannon, if he was innocent. I didn’t want Fowler or any of the state cops going up there and spilling the beans. You’ll notice nobody from there has claimed the body. That’s suspicious in itself.”
I sat gazing at the return-trip ticket in my hand. The town was probably thirty miles or more away, and I was bewildered. I was seeing him the day I had met him in town, when he had insisted on buying me a Coke at the drugstore.
“Why did you come here?” I asked. “What have we to do with all this? None of us knew her, or Flaherty. Certainly not this Preston girl. I don’t understand it.”
“No,” he said, “you wouldn’t. You were pretty young at that time. Anyhow, what would you or your family know about a girl murdered in a tenement down on the East Side? Anyone could have killed the girl. She was that sort. All kinds of men visited her. As I said Flaherty was out to prove the Shannon boy was innocent. Beyond that, I think he didn’t care.”
“You still haven’t said why you’re here,” I persisted.
He hesitated.
“It doesn’t clear anything, Lois, but I’ll tell you. I got an anonymous letter after I came back from Reno. It said Mrs. Chandler was in danger. She may have had one, too. It would account for a lot if she did. But the postmark was from Kate Henry’s town, and I think she sent it.”
“But why?” I asked. “Didn’t it give any reason? Judith may have enemies. Lots of people don’t like her. But to threaten her—”
“The letter wasn’t a threat. It was a warning. Whoever sent it was trying to prevent trouble, not make it. You see, it’s pretty well known I never gave up the Flaherty case. Let’s say Kate knew something about it. Maybe she was scared. Maybe she needed protection herself. I don’t even know how she located me here, but it looks as though she had. She probably knew I had a car, too. She didn’t ask Ed Brown to come back for her. But I never saw her that night. Personally I think she was followed here, attacked and thrown into the pool.”
I felt slightly dizzy and certainly confused.
“Who would have followed her? She came by train. That’s pretty fast.”
“She came on a local. Anybody in a car could beat her time. There’s a damn good highway most of the distance, too.”
“Then it has nothing to do with us,” I said flatly. “Or at least with Judith. It doesn’t explain her at all. Yet you think she may be in danger. You came here to watch her, didn’t you? Why? Don’t tell me she killed the Preston girl, or Flaherty. That’s ridiculous. She was only seventeen.”
“Kids that age do commit murder. But I don’t think she ever killed anyone. No, this woman had some dangerous knowledge. Maybe her conscience troubled her, maybe she was afraid. That’s as far as I go.”
He got up and put the clipping into the drawer. Then he came over and put a hand on my shoulder.
“I’m wondering if a girl like you would be caring to help a bit,” he said, lapsing into the brogue I had noticed on the train. “I’ll tell you now it’s beyond me. I’ve been to that town and all around it since I saw you last. No woman has disappeared according to the police there. It’s a dead end in more ways than one.”
“And I suppose,” I said rather feebly, “that this town is where I come in?”
“That’s where you come in, my girl. And only God knows how I need you.”
Chapter 15
I SUPPOSE ALL THOSE small towns up the Hudson River have a basic resemblance. There is a shabby and usually dirty railroad station, a warehouse or two and perhaps a factory by the tracks, and one business street with a movie house, a drugstore, a couple of groceries, and nearly always a beauty parlor, a doctor and a lawyer, and possibly a dentist, usually the offices upstairs over a shop.
This one was a little better. It had two such streets, including a woman’s dress shop, a milliner, and a tobacconist, as well as a dozen or so small businesses, including a garage.
But it improved beyond the business section. There were houses neatly set in well-kept lawns, and I imagined that beyond them and up the hill there were some large estates. But I did not drive there. Whoever the woman was she almost certainly did not belong there.
I had our old car. I had left Phil at the station as usual, but I did not go home. It was Judith’s day to see Doctor Townsend and I suppose she was raving, but I knew Bill and the Ark would look after her. Nevertheless, the whole excursion looked like a wild-goose chase to me. As I told O’Brien I had only one clue, the bleached hair, but he only laughed at me.
“For a girl who writes fiction you show a lamentable lack of imagination. What’s the matter with her leaving her purse on the train and you finding it?”
“And keeping it all this time?”
“You were afraid to turn it in at the station. Somebody might take the money. So you watched the ads in the paper instead. You knew she came from here. There’s the return ticket.”
It sounded absurdly easy, put like that, but I was nervous nevertheless. Even the drive did not help much. I kept seeing that dreadful body at the end of the pool, the state police as well as Fowler and his men, and the crowd being held back along the road. I felt annoyed, too, at having let myself in for such an excursion. O’Brien’s story about Flaherty had moved me the night before. He had been on the case for twenty years, which in itself was touching. But what had I to do with Flaherty, or for that matter the dead woman?
Perhaps it was suspicious that no one had claimed her, but how did I know it was? Maybe no one had missed her, or nobody cared. Or, again, she was supposed to be away on a visit. She could still have had the return ticket.
One thing was sure. If she lived in that neighborhood she had no car. I stopped at the garage for gas, and I went into my spiel at once. It was easy, for the pleasant young man who waited on me was curious about me.
“Don’t live around here, do you?” he asked.
“No. I was just going through, but I meant to stop, anyhow.”
“Know some folks?”
“Not exactly. You see, I found a woman’s purse in the train the other day. No name in it and no papers, but it had a return ticket here.”
“Lot of money in it?”
“Just a few dollars. She hasn’t advertised it, so I kept it. I don’t know her name, you see.” I went on. “She was sitting across the aisle from me, a bleached blonde, maybe forty or so, in a black dress and a hat with a sort of wreath of flowers on it.”
He had lost interest, however, either because of her age or the amount.
“I wouldn’t know,” he said vaguely. “Half the women in this town could answer that description. Why don’t you just forget it? If she wanted it she’d have advertised. Did you try the Lost and Found Department at Grand Central? She may have reported the loss there.”
“Thanks, I hadn’t thought of that.”
He looked at me as though he thought my IQ was pretty low, and as he stood in the doorway watching me, I had to drive around for some time before I tried elsewhere. The conversation at both grocery stores followed practically the same lines, but I had kept my ace up my sleeve. That was the bleached hair and the
beauty parlor. And there I struck pay dirt.
Gertrude—that was the name on the window, Gertrude’s Beauty Shop—was busy when I went in. She was giving a permanent, but her young assistant was free. With inward qualms I asked her for a manicure, and seated at a small table received the usual disapproving query.
“Keep them pretty short, don’t you?”
“I use a typewriter,” I explained.
She glanced up at me quickly.
“Stenographer, eh?” she observed. “Well, the cuticle’s pretty good, anyhow. I’ll see what I can do.”
And it was there, to the rasp of an emery board, that I got my first clue.
“Bleached hair?” she said. “Well, if she’s from here, you can bet we did it. And that hat—Say, Gert,” she called “remember that bleach job you did last week. Old girl in the funny hat? Remember her name?”
“I should remember all the jobs like that I do. What’s the idea?”
“Girl here says she left her purse on the train and she found it. Wants to give it back, only don’t know who she is. Says the return ticket says she comes from here.”
Gertrude, however, was convinced that the woman in question never left her purse anywhere. “Nor a half dollar, either,” she added with some bitterness. But she was completely uninterested. “You might look in the appointment book, Edna,” she said. “Not that I give a damn.”
The manicure was better than I expected. I paid for it, added a tip, and suggested that Edna follow Gert’s suggestion. She got a dog-eared small ledger from a desk drawer and with a long nail ran down lists of names for the past week. On a Monday she stopped.
“Listen, Gert,” she said, “wasn’t it Benjamin? Seems like that rings a bell. Didn’t he run that tobacco shop before he died?”
Gert nodded indifferently.
“Guess that’s right,” Gert agreed. “Lives somewhere around here. Hair was a mess. She’d been doing it herself.”
They had no address for her, however. I got it finally from one of the grocery stores I had visited previously. But the clerk observed that she was probably not at home.
“Didn’t come in Saturday,” he said. “Regular as clockwork, she was. Lost her husband a few months back. He left her plenty, but if that’s her purse you found she’s probably having a fit. She’d squeeze a quarter until the eagle screamed. Funny she didn’t advertise.”
He gave me her address. It was up the hill a half mile or so, a small white-framed house set back from the road, with a gate in a picket fence and a path to the front door. It sat alone, with the next houses some distance away, and screened by shrubbery, and as I got out of the car and opened the gate I saw a curtain moving at a window. I began to feel rather awkward. If someone lived there with her, my story was no good, and I would have to get out as best I could.
No one answered the bell, however, and as I stepped back and looked at the window I saw the reason. A huge black cat was on the sill, scratching at the glass and meowing wildly. And behind it the curtain was torn almost into shreds, as though by its claws. That the poor thing was desperate was obvious. Possibly it had been shut in when the Benjamin woman left, and it must have been starving or dying of thirst.
Up to that time I had merely done what O’Brien wanted, managed to identify her and locate where she lived. The rest was up to him. The cat, however, changed things. I couldn’t leave it there to die. It was scratching at the glass again, its big eyes fixed on me appealingly, and when I tried the front door, I could hear it in the hall, still yowling.
The door was locked of course. I went around the house to the rear, where there was a small porch, but that door was locked, too, and I felt fairly discouraged, especially since the cat had followed through the house and was scratching frenziedly at the back door. I looked around, but there was no one in sight, so I tried a kitchen window. It was fastened but rather shaky, and I needed something with which to pry it open. There was nothing in sight but a garbage can, so at last I went back to the car, got a tire iron from the heterogeneous mass I call the tools and, praying I had not been seen, went back to the window.
The cat was there, on the sink. It seemed to know what I was doing, too, for now it was quiet and watchful. I had expected it to rush out once the window was open, but it did not. Instead it ran to an empty pan and equally empty water bowl on the floor by the stove, and waited for me to cooperate. I filled the bowl from the cold-water faucet, and it drank delicately, after the manner of all cats, but steadily and for a long time, giving me time to look around.
The Benjamin woman had been a good housekeeper. The kitchen was neat, the linoleum on the floor worn but clean, and a row of tea towels had been washed and hung up to dry. There was a door to a small dining-room, with a drooping fern on the table, four chairs, and a china closet rather sparsely furnished with dishes. I did not go to the front room at once. The cat was brushing against my feet, and I knew it was hungry, so I went back to the kitchen. I found a can of salmon in a cupboard and opened it. The cat was on the table before I could put it in the pan, so I emptied it onto the plate, and it was half gone before I could rinse out the can.
I was increasingly uneasy. Not only had I broken into the house, but my inquiries in the town might have aroused interest in the missing woman. And not only that. My car was sitting at the gate. I thought resentfully that O’Brien would never have left it there. He would have parked it elsewhere and walked unobtrusively to the house. Well, let him do it, then. I had attended to the cat. Now all I wanted was to get out and away from there.
But black cats are bad luck. When I looked out the front window a half-dozen schoolkids were standing around it and eyeing the house.
“She’s back!” one of them yelled. “The cat’s gone.”
“How do you know it’s her? She hasn’t got a car.”
“Well, somebody brought her. That’s easy.”
In time, however, they wandered on, and I stiffened my shaky knees and prepared to leave. It is due to what Bill calls my gluttonous curiosity that I did not. For, after all, the woman whose home this was was dead. I had been sure of that as soon as I saw the cat. She had left her house expecting to return either that night or the next morning.
Instead she had died in our pool.
The front room was a parlor. It had the unused look of such rooms in small houses, with a fan of paper in the empty fireplace, a suite of overstuffed furniture, a sofa and three or four chairs, and an old-fashioned marble-topped table. There was only one incongruity, a roll-topped desk, closed but not locked. I don’t know why I opened it. I was tired and hungry. I had a long drive back, and no business whatever being where I was. But I walked to it and rolled up the front as though no black cat, fed and grateful, had been rubbing against my ankles.
It looked innocent enough at first. Certainly it was tidy. A block of unused billheads announcing Walter Benjamin, Tobaccos had been stuck in one of the pigeonholes, and there was a photograph of an elderly and bearded gentleman who was, I presumed the said Walter beside them. Loosely in another compartment were a few receipted bills, one for a black dress from the village shop, several bankbooks, and two or three clippings. I glanced into the bankbooks. To my amazement they showed a balance of well over thirty thousand dollars in a New York savings bank, the deposits made almost twenty years ago, and with apparently no withdrawals since that time.
I stood staring at it. Sometime, somewhere, Mr. Walter Benjamin had had a windfall. In any event he had left his widow a considerable estate. If she owned the house and had sold the tobacco business, she was comfortably well-off. I thought O’Brien would be interested in the bankbooks as well as the unframed photograph, and I slid all of them into my purse.
The clippings seemed unimportant. They were largely local and New York notices of his death, the latter merely announcements in the obituary columns. I was standing with them in my hand when the doorbell rang, and it so jolted me that I dropped them also in my bag. I knew I was trapped. I had only time to cl
ose the desk before it rang again, and I had to open the front door.
There was a woman on the steps. She was in a housedress, a middle-aged stoutish person who eyed me with considerable suspicion.
“Oh!” she said. “I—has Mrs. Benjamin come home? My boy says she has.”
“I’m afraid not,” I said recovering as best I could. “There’s no one here but the cat and me. Why? Has she been away?”
“She’s been gone for days. I got sort of worried. Not that we were ever friendly. If you know her you know she doesn’t make friends easy. But the milkman said no one was taking in the bottles, so I stopped them. She may not like it, but it seemed such a waste.”
“I’m sure it’s all right,” I told her, and once again went into the story about the purse and the return ticket.
“So I stopped in to get a manicure, and when I said I thought her hair was newly bleached they sent me here. They thought they remembered her.”
She was still suspicious, however, until I told her about the cat and showed her the torn curtain.
“I declare,” she said. “I forgot all about him. She thought the world of that Tom of hers. Maybe the children saw him, but you know what kids are. That curtain’s ruined. She’ll have a fit.”
“You say she isn’t very neighborly. Do you mean she is quarrelsome?”
“Not exactly, but she and that old husband of hers were no mixers. He did pretty well with his business—tobacco, it was—but he had all sorts of things on the side. Pipes and cigarette cases and lighters. Magazines, too. But he had a bad heart, and he was too stingy to buy a car. I always said this hill would kill him, and it did.”
“She’s a widow, then? I wouldn’t have thought so. She wore a flowered hat.”
“She doesn’t believe in mourning. They were out in Indiana, visiting his sister, and he just fell over. I don’t believe she’s grieving much, wherever she is.”
The Swimming Pool Page 14
