The Theban Mysteries

by Amanda Cross

  “He’s going to have to be,” Reed said, reclining happily in a large chair and stretching his legs before him. “I’d like to go up and see them, by the way, but only after asking nicely and being invited. I’ve no official standing.”

  “Did you know those detectives?” Julia asked.

  “Oh, yes. One does, you know. That’s why I thought I might as well tag along. Besides, Kate was getting to look rather haunted, and I didn’t want her to faint in a corner only to be discovered by those unfortunate dogs, who would never live that down.”

  Kate grinned at him. Indeed, the news this morning had rocked her more than she would have thought possible. She had great affection for the Theban, as one does for one’s school if one has been happy there, but more than that she knew how all private schools and colleges were making their perilous ways on the thin line between financial and educational bankruptcy. She hated to see the Theban sacrificed to the peculiar fate of the Jablon family.

  Miss Tyringham had telephoned at seven, not the crack of dawn certainly for someone connected with a school which opened its doors at eight-fifteen, but for Kate, a late riser, the bell appeared to be ringing in the middle of the night. She answered it, since Reed was showering (Tallulah Bankhead, when asked why she had never married, explained that all men rose early and took showers, which Kate, on marrying, was astonished to find true, however much it infuriated Reed to be referred to as “all men”) and heard that there was a crisis. There was, indeed, a body.

  “Mr. O’Hara discovered it this morning on his way downstairs,” Miss Tyringham explained over the telephone. “Never mind how it got there, or if it died there. Perhaps your clever husband, with all his criminal experience, you know what I mean, can tell us. Anyway, the police doubtless will. Does your husband know the police personally?” she had gone on to ask with less than her usual finesse. Still, Kate thought, finesse under these circumstances would have bordered on the cold-blooded.

  “Have you made sure …” Kate began, and then stopped. “Shall I come over now,” she asked, “with Reed in tow if he hasn’t fifteen unbreakable appointments?”

  “My dear, would you? Julia is on her way. You both were here, really so comfortably here the other time, and this does seem so similar, alas, except of course that the poor woman is dead. First the boy and now his mother—they really are a most unfortunate family.”

  “But what on earth was the mother doing there—I mean, she wasn’t hiding out, surely?”

  “What she was doing here, my dear, is the whole point, I’m certain. But dead men tell no tales, unless the criminal investigation department can make them, if it is called the criminal investigation department. Mr. O’Hara says if they say the dogs did it they’re not worth a tinker’s damn, which is the nearest he gets to cussing before ladies, even under extreme provocation. In my more frivolous moments I used to amuse myself by wondering how he cussed in the army.”

  “Not with any words your fourth graders don’t know these days, I assure you,” Kate said. “We won’t be long, I hope. Reed’s shower has just stopped. I guess he only sang one show this morning.”

  “One show?” Miss Tyringham sounded pitifully willing to have the conversation achieve a note of lightness.

  “He sings his way through Rodgers and Hart or Cole Porter. Occasionally Berlin or Kern, but only if he’s feeling springlike, which he rarely is, even in spring.”

  “Tell him to sing ‘June Is Bustin’ Out All Over’ for me,” Miss Tyringham said. “Maybe it’ll bust out sooner.”

  “He hates Rodgers and Hammerstein,” Kate said. “Too gooey, too wholesome, and too many missing final g’s. But I’ll suggest ‘Easter Parade’ and he might feel near enough to the occasion to try that. I’ll hang up now and see you soon.”

  It was all very well to try to pretend that life goes on, but when Reed and Kate had arrived at the school and talked with Miss Tyringham in the lobby, the sense of doom began settling over them like a cloud.

  “Tell me what happened, from the beginning,” Reed said.

  “The police are upstairs now,” Miss Tyringham nervously observed.

  “Never mind. They’re doing the usual routine, and waiting for the medical examiner. Who found her?”

  “Mr. O’Hara. Will they remove her soon?”

  “Oh, yes. As soon as they get pictures, measurements, and the rest. Go on.”

  “Mr. O’Hara called me at, oh, about six I guess. I was up as usual practicing the cello. He had taken the dogs out in the usual way. When …”

  “What is the usual way?” Reed asked, ignoring the fact that Miss Tyringham’s usual way was to play the cello at six in the morning. He had often pointed out to Kate that one of the most extraordinary aspects of murder investigations was the habits you discovered being practiced by the most conventional-appearing people. He supposed to so busy a woman, six o’clock in the morning provided the only undisturbed hour she could count on when she was not too weary from the demands of the educational world to hold the cello up between her knees.

  “Very early in the morning he takes the dogs out for their run in the park. He takes them down in one of the elevators to distinguish this outing from business—I gather that’s important with dogs. Seeing-eye dogs, I understand, are taken out for their personal tours by someone other than the blind person they lead. Not that that’s either here or there. I have unfortunately noticed that one of the effects of the strain of all this is that I tend to go on, and on, and on. Perhaps,” she added sadly, “it’s age.”

  “Don’t worry,” Reed said. “It’s your way of holding on in the dark, and not a bad way either. So he didn’t see the body, one supposes, on his way down in the elevator.”

  “No, he did not. After the dogs have gone back up in the elevator, however, he brings down the second elevator and waits for Mrs. Shultz, who’s in charge of the kitchen, to come, which she does at seven. He lets her in, and she runs him back up to the roof, and brings the elevator down again so that they are both on the main floor when the children and faculty arrive, the elevator operators having arrived in the meantime. I do hope that’s clear.”

  “Perfectly.”

  “Good. Then he walks down having a final look at each floor and turning off the alarms on each floor.”

  “Can’t they be turned off by a central switch upstairs?”

  “That would have been expensive and, in any case, he fastens some sort of bolt on each one as he turns it off so that the children, should they bounce up and down on the darn thing, won’t rattle it.”

  “I see.”

  “She was in the room—the body, I mean, Mrs. Jablon I should say—right across from the alarm on the third floor; it’s an art studio, and the sun comes in in the morning. He couldn’t miss seeing her, which was fortunate, considering what might have happened if he hadn’t, if she’d been in some other room, and the children had all trooped in …” Miss Tyringham’s voice trailed away at the impossibility of describing that. “As it was, you see,” she went on, “we were able to call through and stop most of the children, and the ones who had left too early to get the message were turned back at the door with a vague story about breaking and entering. Not,” she drearily added, “that I have any hopes of keeping this out of the newspapers. A body is a body, and in a schoolroom it’s a damn bloody corpse—the adjective is vulgar, not descriptive: I gather from Mr. O’Hara that there was no blood.”

  “It may not be important,” Reed asked, “but how in the world could you call five hundred children in what must have been well under an hour by then, or slightly fewer, I suppose, allowing for siblings.”

  “TAS,” Miss Tyringham said, clearly happy to be back on familiar ground. “The Theban Alert System—it’s been called TAS affectionately since long before my day. No doubt Kate remembers it?” She turned questioningly to Kate.

  “Oh, my, yes,” Kate said. “When there was a snowstorm one always hovered over the phone to see if TAS would call. If it didn’t by eigh
t, off to school you went.”

  “As you suggested,” Miss Tyringham explained, “it would be close to impossible to call five hundred people, certainly in under an hour. And we must have an absolute rule that, if there is any question about the school opening, no one, no one, is to telephone to ask. We would simply have a swamped switchboard, Miss Strikeland would have hysterics, and everyone’s phone would be so busy while they were trying to call that they couldn’t be reached. If the school is to be closed for any reason, and I make such a decision in consultation with the section heads, four parents are called. They in turn each call three parents, one from each class, and these mothers now call others in her daughter’s class, who call others, all pre-arranged. It works very well, though I’m not explaining it as clearly as I might.”

  “It couldn’t be clearer. So you managed to close the school for the day, a wise decision. Then what happened?”

  “It wasn’t so much ‘then’ as ‘meanwhile.’ When Mr. O’Hara had called me, I told him to get in touch with Dr. Green as soon as possible, before calling the police, and to leave Mrs. Shultz downstairs to prevent anyone’s entering the building except Dr. Green—that seemed sensible.”

  “I do admire people who can think clearly in a crisis,” Kate said.

  “Thank you for those kind words. Dr. Green came quickly; she’s the school doctor and is used to our ways and devoted to the school. She realized immediately that she mustn’t move the body, but she did make certain that the body was dead, something I have always thought to be rather difficult, unless one held a feather before the mouth like King Lear, and of course he was fooled even by that. But Dr. Green said not only was she positive, but rigor had set in, so the woman must have been dead some hours. ‘You’d better call the police,’ she said to me, ‘and let them take over. There’s no question of my signing a death certificate, even if I suspected what the woman had died of, and I don’t. I don’t want to move the body, which apparently doesn’t appeal nearly so much to the police once it’s lost its first fine careless rapture, but I don’t think she was shot, or stabbed, or hit over the head. She may have been poisoned, but not by anything corrosive or cramp-inducing. Cheer up; she probably had a fit and died from natural causes’, were her last kind words.

  “ ‘But why here?’ I of course asked. Dr. Green couldn’t answer that, needless to say, so the police came and here we are. Julia as always came round and rallied. I don’t know why I should have screamed in Kate’s direction for help, except that she seems to have been rather involved with the Jablon family lately and—oh, I don’t know, but I’m glad you’re here.”

  “Don’t worry more than you have to,” Reed had said. “These things are like shouts from mountain tops, terribly loud and attention-getting at first, but dying down eventually to inaudible echoes.”

  “Time heals all, I know. Or at least covers it over with the scar tissue of forgetfulness. But, oh Lord.”

  And then Reed had gone upstairs to look at the body and talk with the police.

  • • •

  Now he sipped his coffee, leaned back yet further in his chair, and addressed himself to Julia’s question.

  “Could the body have been dumped here? I don’t know what the medical examiner will find, but the answer is probably yes. It could have been. That doesn’t mean that it was.”

  “Isn’t it possible to tell if a body has been moved after death?”

  “Sometimes. If there’s been bleeding, so that the wounds correspond with the stains, if—oh, a hundred things—you can tell the body’s been moved. But if I were to hit you over the head, hard enough to kill you but not hard enough to break the skin on the skull, say there,” he pointed to Julia’s head, “or if I were to press on one of the major blood vessels till all went black, or various other ghoulish things, once you were dead, if I picked you up and dumped you somewhere, I don’t think medical evidence could necessarily discover it, unless, of course, I wounded the body after death. Wounds inflicted after death are identifiable as such.

  “One should add,” he finished up, putting his coffee cup down and wrenching himself with difficulty from the chair, “that moving a dead body is not all that easy. In fact, it’s downright difficult. Apart from the fact that even in New York, where people sooner or later get used to everything, someone carrying a dead body, or even the body of an unconscious woman, would be bound to be noticed and remembered, if not commented upon. The point really is whether she was killed here or, as we still hope, died here.”

  “Any fascinating clues discovered by the police?” Kate asked.

  “A few. For one thing, the victim had, in the pocket of her skirt, the label from a tie.”

  “A tie?”

  “You know, a necktie, what those of us males who earn our living in the conventional world wear to work and even occasionally at other times. We know at least that whoever she was grappling with didn’t go in for turtleneck evening wear, which surely tells us something. The label comes from a rather exclusive custom shirt shop on Madison Avenue, and will be looked into.

  “Nothing in the room had been disturbed. She didn’t back up, knocking over furniture and hitting her head the way her son did, which might mean anything, really.”

  “Including the fact that she was dead when she got to the room after the dogs were through.”

  “So you keep saying. But, if you want to get someone to the third floor of a building without leaving a trace, it is probably easier to get them there alive; certainly if you can think of a cock-and-bull story for getting them to walk the three flights, that’s easier than carrying the body all that way.”

  “Was she heavy?”

  “One hundred and thirty-five pounds, say, at a rough guess. She could be carried, but it wouldn’t be easy. And she would have had to be carried at least some way on the streets, though I’ve already mentioned that. We’re beginning to have circular conversations, which always happens in a crisis.”

  “Mightn’t the middle of the night be a fairly safe time to tote a body around?” Julia asked.

  “It might be, but in New York you can’t count on it. Lots of tomcats come slinking home at all hours, not to mention lady cats. Plus all the people who work at night.”

  “Can you tell anything about the time of death?”

  “Not all that much. The autopsy will tell us something, if we’re lucky. If rigor had set in, as Dr. Green thought, that means she had been dead a certain length of time, certainly from before the dogs were through, probably five hours or more, but you’ll never get any one medical expert on the witness stand to be absolutely certain about good old rigor, and if you do, someone will flatly contradict him. For one thing, the rooms are heated, which affects rigor, as does everything else under the sun.”

  “Will the police let us open the school tomorrow?” Julia asked.

  “Oh, I should think so. And since there’ll be so much buzzing and whispering and speculating, the sooner the routine gets back to something approximating the usual the better, I should think. Shall we go and confer with Miss Tyringham, if she’s ready?”

  As they started for the stairs and Miss Tyringham’s office, the machinery of Homicide East moved into action. A detective set out for the custom shirt shop whose name appeared on the label found in the dead woman’s pocket.

  Eight

  DETECTIVE George Young found that the custom shirt shop bore its name, “The Gentleman’s Gentleman,” discreetly upon the door. When Young entered, there was a customer in the shop, and he waited patiently until the customer concluded a, to Young, unbelievably protracted discussion of shirt cloth, stripes, cuffs, and colors. Young himself, when he needed a shirt, wandered into some store, named his neck and sleeve size, and walked out almost with the first thing he saw. He supposed the rich had more time and didn’t mind spending it this way, not to mention money, though money was not mentioned between the gentleman’s gentleman and his customer. The owner of the store, pausing for a moment in his momentous delibe
rations, and apparently sizing Young up as unlikely to be a very remunerative proposition, asked if he could do something for him. “I’ll wait,” Young said, in a voice indicating he intended to.

  When the customer had at last exhausted all alternatives, decided upon his shirts, and retired, Young approached the counter, flipping open the case which held his identification. “We have a label from your shop found under circumstances of interest to the police. We wonder if you can help us. The owner of the shop is a man named Sam Meyer. Is that you?”

  “Yes, but I don’t see how I can help you. I have many customers. As most of them are well-to-do, when they tire of their shirts they give them away, perhaps to their servants. You see the problem.”

  “Did this label come off a shirt?”

  Mr. Meyer glanced at it. “No, that’s off a tie. They’re even given as gifts. I’m afraid I can’t be much help.”

  “Try. Do you have a customer named Jablon?”

  Mr. Meyer looked concerned. “Mr. Cedric Jablon is one of my oldest customers. Is that whom you mean?”

  “Let’s talk about him and see.”

  “I met Mr. Jablon years ago, when I was a salesman at a big chain of elegant men’s stores when I began, and Mr. Jablon used to get his suits and all his accessories from me. When I left to open this shop, he came to me for his shirts. He couldn’t be mixed up in anything the police had to do with—it’s impossible.”

  “Did Mr. Jablon’s grandson ever come in for a tie?”

  Mr. Meyer eyed Young uneasily. “Look, I don’t want …”

  “Just answer the question.”

  Mr. Meyer sighed. “The old gentleman brought the boy in, oh, perhaps a year or two ago, to have some shirts made for him. Made rather a thing of it, you know, now the kid was grown and Grandpa was going to give him some fine shirts. But it didn’t turn out that way.”

  Young, impassive, continued looking at Mr. Meyer.

  “This younger generation,” Mr. Meyer said. “The boy asked me the price of the shirts—it was fifteen dollars then, which it was worth, considering each shirt is individually tailored and made of the finest Egyptian cotton; they’re over twenty now—and when he heard the price he became, I regret to say, rude. He said it was a crime to spend money like that when there were kids being bitten by rats in the ghettos.” Mr. Meyer shuddered, at the recollection of the whole scene, which clearly had reached traumatic proportions in his mind, and particularly at the unforgettable mention of rats in his exclusive and elegant shop. “I pointed out to the boy, though perhaps it was not my place to do so, that I too had begun in a ghetto—that the word, in fact, was invented for Jews who were not allowed to live anywhere else—that I had worked to get here, and that if he wanted to fight rats in the ghetto he did not have to insult me before beginning. I became angry, I’m afraid, and I called up later to apologize to the grandfather, Mr. Jablon, but he was nice enough to say he didn’t blame me, and that he wanted to apologize for his grandson. Did you find the label in Harlem?”