Who Has Wilma Lathrop?

by Keene, Day

  “Why should you do that?”

  “From force of habit, I suppose.”

  “Then you know how to handle the boiler?”

  Lathrop wondered where the questioning was leading. “I do.”

  “How come. Were you ever a janitor?”

  Lathrop explained. “No. But when I was a boy going to school back during the depression when flats were hard to rent and every dollar counted, I used to fire the boiler and vacuum the halls and carry down the garbage to save paying a janitor.”

  “I see,” Harris said. He nodded to one of the men with him. “Take a walk downstairs, will you, Ed, and find out if the coroner has anything for us yet. I’m particularly interested in the time of death.”

  “Sure thing,” the detective said.

  When the detective had left the room, Harris looked back at Lathrop. “One more thing, Mr. Lathrop.”

  “Yes?”

  “I notice, as boiler rooms go, that your fire room is very clean.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “As a rule, especially during a cold spell like this, aren’t there usually a lot of ashes standing around in cans?”

  “Usually,” Lathrop admitted.

  “Then why aren’t there any ashes in your boiler room?”

  Lathrop was tired. He was worried about Wilma. The trend of Harris’ questioning was beginning to irritate him. He said, rather sharply, “I don’t see how that concerns your investigation.”

  “Just answer my questions, please. And I assure you I have a right to ask them.”

  “That’s a long story,” Lathrop said.

  “We’ve plenty of time.”

  “Well, to begin with, the fire was out when I came home last night.”

  “From where?”

  “From Central Bureau, where I had been trying to identify the two men who slugged me from the pictures that Captain Kelly and Lieutenant Jezierna showed me.”

  “What time was this?”

  “About seven o’clock.”

  “Go on.”

  “Mr. Metz, that’s my first-floor tenant, was coming out of the boiler-room door as I came back through the areaway. He said the fire was out and that his wife had told him there hadn’t been any heat all day. Then Mrs. Metz came out on her porch and jumped me. So before I came upstairs I built a fire. And while I was waiting for it to catch and some steam to show on the gauge, I shovelled the ash pit clean and rolled the ash cans out in the yard.”

  “You did this for exercise?”

  “Let’s say for something to do.”

  “Isn’t that a rather unusual occupation for a high-school teacher?”

  “I’ve done it a hundred times.”

  “And the cans of ashes are still in the yard?”

  “As far as I know.”

  The detective who’d gone downstairs to check with the coroner returned to the living-room.

  “Well?” Harris asked him.

  The detective said, “He was killed around midnight last night, give or take a few hours.”

  “Do you keep the door to the boiler room locked?”

  “Not usually.”

  Harris lighted a cigar and smoked for a few moments in silence. “This all begins with the two men in the parking lot.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Two men, as yet unidentified, slapped you around as a warning to Mrs. Lathrop if she persisted in being greedy. Then they gave you an envelope filled with fifty- and one-hundred-dollar bills to give her with instructions for her to meet them at ‘Louie’s’ between one and two o’clock the following afternoon.”

  “That’s what happened.”

  “Did you show this envelope to anyone else?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Did you report the attack on your person to the police?”

  “No.”

  “Despite the fact it occurred in the parking lot of the Juvenile Court Building.”

  “That’s right.”

  “After it happened you drove straight home and gave the envelope to Mrs. Lathrop?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “She denied knowing the two men and said she hadn’t the least idea what they were talking about.”

  “So you let it go at that and resumed your normal marital relations with her.”

  Lathrop said, hotly. “Our normal marital relations, as you call it, had never been interrupted.”

  “You knew Mrs. Lathrop had a police record.”

  “No.” Lathrop got up from the window sill on which he was sitting. “Now would you mind telling me why you are so interested in me and my movements?”

  “Not at all,” Harris said. “Along with the alias we knew her by, the New York police have your wife listed as the girl friend of Raoul Contini, who, some six or seven months ago, robbed a wholesale jeweller of two hundred thousand dollars worth of unset diamonds. Contini is dead, has been dead about the same length of time. Your wife is wanted for questioning in the matter. None of the jewels have ever been recovered. Now she, too, has turned up missing. According to your story, after having been threatened, through you, by two unidentified men, Mrs. Lathrop walked out of this flat in nothing but her nightdress and a pair of slippers on one of the coldest nights in the year. And now we have another dead man. Put yourself in our position, Mr. Lathrop. Doesn’t such a series of events strike you as more than coincident?”

  “Y-yes,” Lathrop admitted. “It does.”

  Harris said, coldly, “Then I’m certain you won’t mind getting your hat and coat and coming down to the Bureau with us and answering a few more questions.”

  Chapter Nine

  A SERIES OF small interrogation rooms opened off the big room housing Homicide on the fourth floor of Police Headquarters. From where he sat, Lathrop could see a constant coming and going of detectives. Detectives and technicians. As tired as he was he couldn’t but admire the efficiency of the set-up. Whatever else the police were, they were thorough. Nothing was left to chance. The various departments worked in close co-operation. All conversations were typed or recorded. All physical evidence was photographed or bottled or smeared on slides to be studied and analysed by chemists and men trained in criminal pathology. Lathrop wished his high-school students could see what he was seeing. One glimpse behind the scenes would be twice as effective as twenty lectures on the subject. It made a man realize that while he might be able to outwit one or a dozen policemen, he couldn’t outsmart the system. The system was as infallible as the law of diminishing returns and as immune to human error as a geometric theorem.

  Lathrop tried to find room in the ash tray so he could snuff his cigarette. Standing beside him, Detective Jethro said, “Here. Let me empty that, Mr. Lathrop.”

  It had been like that all night. The pattern hadn’t varied. None of the detectives assigned to his interrogation had in any way attempted to coerce or degrade him. All of them had been infallibly polite. On the other hand, none of them had let him forget for one moment who was wearing the badge. They were the cats and he the mouse. If they let him rest for a moment, if they sent out for coffee, they immediately pounced again and from a new and even more intimate angle. By now they knew more about him than he knew about himself.

  Jethro emptied the ash tray into a metal waste basket and returned it to the desk. As he did one of the three phones on the desk rang and Detective Harris, currently conducting the questioning, said, “Excuse me.”

  “Certainly,” Lathrop answered.

  As he waited for the questioning to resume, he tried to identify the voices in the other interrogation rooms. A few minutes before, he had seen Stanislawow senior and junior being escorted past the door of the room he was in. Now Vladimir was protesting there had been no ulterior motive in his bi-weekly calls on his sister, other than brotherly affection.

  “You didn’t know she was wanted by the police?” a detective asked him.

  “No, sir,” Vladimir lied.

  Lathrop co
nsidered the he. And it was a lie. Vladimir had discussed the New York job with him and the fact that the loot was still missing. Vladimir was in this thing much deeper than he had realized. For all his glib talk, the blond youth knew a lot more than he was telling.

  Closer by, in the big outer room, some woman, possibly Mrs. Nielsen, was crying, sobbing she wanted to die, that she no longer had anything to live for. In one of the other rooms he could hear the voices of Eddie Mandell and Juvenile Officer Cave. As he listened, both his former student and the juvenile officer substantiated the story he had told about the two men in the parking lot, at least to the point they had seen him talking to two men.

  Detective Harris finished his phone call. He made a few notes on the pad in front of him, then nodded to Detective Jethro. Jethro pushed the button that started the tape recorder and Harris said, “Now to get back to the night you met your wife, Mr. Lathrop. Who did you say was giving the party?”

  “A friend of mine by the name of Bill Hendry.”

  “What does he do for a living?”

  “He is a high-school teacher.”

  “He teaches at the same school you do?”

  “No. At Manley High School.”

  “Where did he give this party?”

  “At his studio on Rush Street.” Lathrop explained, “Hendry’s an artist as well as a teacher. In fact he teaches art.”

  “And Mrs. Lathrop was a friend of his?”

  Lathrop shook his head. “N-no. I don’t think so. That is, not an intimate friend. It was one of those studio affairs.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Well, no formal invitations. Just casual acquaintances and their friends dropping in for a few drinks.”

  “I see,” Harris said. “And you and Mrs. Lathrop hit it off right from the start?”

  “Right from the start.”

  “You took her home from the party?”

  “I did.”

  “To her room in the Devonshire Hotel?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Did you go up to her room with her?”

  “No, I didn’t. I said good-night in the lobby.”

  “And you courted her for how long?”

  “Two months.”

  Harris studied the notes he’d made. “Now tell me this, Mr. Lathrop. During the two months you courted your wife and the three months you were married, did Mrs. Lathrop ever give you the impression she was worried about anything?”

  Lathrop thought back through the past five months. “N-no.”

  “You seem hesitant to answer that question.”

  “Well, she did prefer that we be alone. By that I mean whenever I offered to take her to the Chez Paree or one of the name Loop night clubs, she usually suggested we dine at some smaller, off-the-beaten-path club.”

  “Did she ever suggest you take her to any bar or grill or night club known as Louie’s?”

  “No, she didn’t.”

  “Do you know of any such place?”

  “No.”

  “As far as you know, yours was a normal, uncomplicated courtship and marriage?”

  “It was.”

  Harris doodled on his pad. “Up to and including the night she disappeared?”

  Lathrop was truthful with him. “No. Looking back, I wouldn’t call our last evening together exactly normal.”

  “In what way was it different?”

  “I’m almost certain Wilma had been drinking before I got home. And every time I tried to tell her about the two men who had slugged me she made conversation.”

  “Made conversation?”

  “The little happenings of her day.”

  “You dined by candlelight, I believe you told us. With Mrs. Lathrop wearing a black net négligé?”

  “That is correct.”

  “Did Mrs. Lathrop customarily wear a négligé at the dinner table?”

  “No.”

  “And after dinner you retired to the living-room, leaving the dishes unwashed and listened to a stack of records on the record player?”

  “We did.”

  “Was this usual?”

  “Definitely no. It was the first time it ever happened.”

  “Was this before or after you told Mrs. Lathrop about the two men in the parking lot?”

  “After I’d told her about them.”

  “And she agreed you should go to the police in the morning and give them the envelope containing the uncounted sum of money?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What time did you retire to the bedroom?”

  “Shortly before midnight.”

  “With everything normal between you? I mean you didn’t quarrel about these two men who had slugged you and given you a message to carry to her?”

  “We did not.”

  “You believed her when she said she didn’t know them and didn’t know what it was they were talking about?”

  “I did.”

  “You didn’t accuse her of having a past she hadn’t told you about?”

  “Definitely no.”

  “You just kissed her good-night and opened the window and went to bed. And when you awakened in the morning she was gone, with all of her clothes, including her heavy coats, still hanging in the closet?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What was your reaction?”

  “I felt like a fool.”

  Harris pressed a button on the inter-office annunciator and spoke into the screen. “Kelly? If Ed isn’t busy ask him to bring in those things that the boys sifted out of the ashes.”

  “What ashes?” Lathrop asked.

  Harris told him. “The ashes in the cans in your back yard. The ones you admit shovelling out of the ash pit of your heating plant.”

  Lathrop waited, sick with apprehension, wondering why the police should have sifted the ashes he had cleaned out of the heating plant, afraid that he knew.

  A moment later Ed Madigan entered the room and laid four envelopes on the desk. “Thanks, Ed,” Harris said. “Tell the lab boys they can have them back in a few minutes. It won’t hurt to handle them, will it?”

  Madigan shook his head. “Not after the heat they’ve been through.”

  Jethro had switched off the tape recorder. He switched it back on. Harris removed a small object from one of the envelopes and moved it around on the blotter with the point of a pencil. “Recognize this, Lathrop?”

  Lathrop studied the object closely. “No. I haven’t the least idea what it is.”

  “It’s what’s left from a heel of a woman’s slipper,” Harris said. “Had Mrs. Lathrop thrown away any slippers recently?”

  Lathrop felt his throat constrict. “Not that I know of.”

  Harris spilled the contents of a larger envelope. “And these are pieces of bone,” he informed Lathrop. “The lab boys think from a human body.” He admitted, “Although the fragments are too badly charred for the boys to tell much about them.”

  Lathrop gripped the edge of the desk so hard that his knuckles turned white. “For God’s sake, what are you getting at? How much am I supposed to be able to take without blowing my top? Are you trying to tell me that Wilma is dead, that someone burned her body in our furnace?”

  “That we don’t know,” Harris said. “But such things have happened. We have several such cases in our files.” He emptied another envelope on his blotter. From where Lathrop sat they looked like pieces of melted metal. Harris could have been a professor lecturing a class. “And these are bobby pins. I might add, bobby pins very similar to those we found on Mrs. Lathrop’s dressing table.”

  Lathrop continued to grip the desk. Wilma couldn’t be dead. She couldn’t.

  Harris returned the objects on his blotter to their envelopes and extracted a small object from the fourth envelope. It was more easily recognizable than the others. All it could be was a partially melted ring. “This, of course,” Harris said, “is a ring.” He touched it with the point of a pencil. “And this black speck is a partially carbonized diamon
d. You gave Mrs. Lathrop a diamond engagement ring?”

  “I did.”

  “What weight?”

  “Three-quarter carat.”

  Harris studied a notation on the envelope. “Approximately the original weight of this one.” He turned the melted metal over with his pencil. “A shame that it is so badly melted that the boys in the laboratory are unable to decipher the inscription. The inscription could have made things much easier. Still, very few people are in the habit of throwing diamond rings into furnaces.”

  Lathrop stared at the melted metal. “I don’t believe it.”

  “You don’t believe what?”

  “That Wilma is dead.”

  Harris returned the ring to its envelope. “That may or may not be. At the moment, I’m not in a position to say. However, all of these objects I’ve shown you came out of the cans of ashes you admit you shovelled out of the ash pit of your heating plant. More, an intensive survey of the residents of Palmer Square and its environs has failed to turn up a single person who saw a blonde girl wearing nothing but a nightdress and a pair of high-heeled slippers leave your address between the hours of midnight and six o’clock in the morning you say you discovered her missing.”

  “That doesn’t mean she didn’t.”

  “No,” Harris admitted. “It doesn’t. But to substantiate the possibility that she didn’t, an all-car search of the city has failed to turn up one bartender or B-girl or hotel clerk, or others of kindred occupation, who admit knowing Wilma Stanislawow, alias Gloria Fine, more recently known as Mrs. Lathrop, who have seen her. And young and pretty young matrons don’t just disappear into thin air. So draw your own conclusions, Mr. Lathrop.”

  Harris stood up back of his desk, then walked over to the window. “This seems to be one of those things we get every once in a while.”

  “What do you mean by that?” Lathrop asked him.

  Harris turned and sat on the window sill. “In you we have a substantial citizen, a respected high-school teacher with an excellent war record, who married a girl about whom he knew absolutely nothing. In my opinion you’ve tried to co-operate with us. You haven’t complained about being pushed around. You haven’t stood on the fifth amendment. You haven’t yelled for a lawyer. You’ve answered some very intimate questions. But the fact remains that your wife, a girl with a known police record is, putting it in its best light, mysteriously missing. Now look at it from our viewpoint and the viewpoint of the state’s attorney’s office. Even our most respectable citizens, bankers, doctors, lawyers, Sunday School superintendents, blow their tops sometimes, usually over a woman. When God made sexes he really handed all police departments a lulu. We could assume that during that business in the parking lot you learned your wife’s true character for the first time. We could assume that, furious at the realization she had used you for a hide-out, made a sucker out of you, that you went home and, instead of the happy conjugal scene you paint, had one hell of a row with her. A row during which in your hurt and anger you lost your head and shot, choked, struck or otherwise killed Mrs. Lathrop. Then, realizing what you had done, you successfully disposed of her body in the only manner available to you. And, following that line of reasoning, it’s also easy to assume that Nielsen caught you in the act of stuffing her body into the fire box and you were forced to kill him, too.”