Case Pending - Dell Shannon (12 page)

It occurred to Mendoza that he was simply wasting
time in the vague superstitious hope that the cosmic powers would tap
his shoulder and drop that extra ace into his lap. He tossed his
cigarette out the window, which was now by law a misdemeanor carrying
a fifty-dollar fine, and drove on a block and a half: glanced at the
neat white frame bungalow where Carol Brooks had lived, and turned
left at the next corner. This was a secondary business street, and it
marked one of the boundaries: that side Negro, this side white. The
streets deteriorated sharply on the white side, he knew, lined with
old apartment buildings only just not describable as tenements. He
turned left again and wandered back parallel to Tappan, turned again
and then again and came to the corner where the bus stopped, past the
two duplexes, and drew into the curb in front of the bungalow
numbered 2214.

A woman came up the sidewalk from the opposite
direction, turned in at the white house, hesitated and glanced at the
car, and turned back toward it. Mendoza got out and took off his hat.
"Mrs. Demarest. I wondered if you still lived here."

"Why, where else would I be?" She was a
tall, slim, straight-backed woman, and had once perhaps been
beautiful: the bones of beauty were still there, in her smooth high
forehead, delicate regular features, small mouth. Her skin was the
color of well-creamed coffee. She was neat, even almost smart, in
tailored navy-blue dress and coat, small gold earrings. She might be
seventy, she might be older, but age had touched her lightly; her
voice was firm, her eyes intelligent. "It’s Mr. Mendoza,"
she said. "Or I should say ‘Lieutenant.’ You know, if I was
a superstitious woman, Lieutenant, I’d say there’s more in it
than meets the eye, you turning up. Did you want to see me about
something?"

"I don’t know. There’s been another,"
he said abruptly. "I think the same one."

"Another colored girl?" she asked calmly.

"No. And miles away, over on Commerce Street."

"That one," she said, nodding. "I
think you’d best come in, and I’ll tell you. It’s nothing much,
though it’s queer—but it’s something you didn’t hear about
before, you see. At first I thought I might write you a letter about
it, and then I said to myself"—they were halfway up the walk
to the house, and he’d taken the brown-paper bag of groceries from
her—"I thought, it’s not important, I’d best not trouble
you. But as you’re here, you might as well hear about it." She
had been away from Bermuda half her life, but her tongue still
carried the flavor, the broad A’s, the interchange of V’s and
W’s, the clipped British vowels. She unlocked the front door and
they went into the living—room he remembered, furniture old but
originally good and well cared for. "If you’ll just fetch that
right back to the kitchen, Lieutenant—you’ll have a cup of coffee
with me, we might as well be comfortable and it’s always hot on the
back of the stove. Sit down, I’ll just tend to the Duke here and
then be with you."

The cat surveying him with cold curiosity from the
hallway door was a large black neutered tom; he established himself
on the kitchen chair opposite Mendoza and continued to stare. "I
didn’t remember he was the Duke," said Mendoza.

"The Duke of Wellington really, because he
always thought so almighty high of himself, you know. We got him
Carol’s second year in high, and she was doing history about it
then. Cats, they’re like olives, seem like—either you’re crazy
about them or you just can’t abide them. I remembered you like
them. It’s why I was out, after his evaporated milk. Fresh he won’t
look at, and the evaporated he lets set just so long till it’s
thick the way he fancies it. You see now, he knows I’ve just poured
it, he won’t go near. You take milk or sugar?—well, I always take
it black too, you get the flavor."

She set the filled cups on the table and sat in the
chair across from him. "You’ll have missed your
granddaughter," he said. It was another absurd superstitious
feeling, that if he asked, brought her to the point, it would indeed
be nothing at all.

"Well, I do, of course. Sometimes it doesn’t
seem right that there the Duke should be sitting alive, and her gone.
It’d be something to believe in some kind of religion, think there
was a God Who’d some reason, some plan. I never came to it somehow,
but maybe there is. I’ve had two husbands and raised six children,
and luckier than most in all of them—and you could say I’ve
worked hard. It was a grief to lose my youngest son, that was Caro1’s
dad, but I had to figure I’d five left, and the other grandchildren
too. Take it all in all, there’s been more good than bad—and what
you can’t change, you’d best learn to live with content. I enjoy
life still, and I don’t want to die while I’ve still my health
and my mind, but you know, Lieutenant, I won’t be too sorry in way
when the time comes, because I must say I am that curious about the
afterward part."

"It’s a point of view," he agreed
amusedly. "So am I now and then, but I’d rather be curious
than dead."

She laughed, with a fine gleam of even white teeth.
"Ah, you’re lucky, you’re half my age! But I said I’d
something to tell you. It’s just a queer sort of thing, maybe
doesn’t mean much." She sipped and put down her cup. "Maybe
you’ll remember that that night when Carol was killed, I told you I
hadn’t been too worried about her being late home, because sl1e’d
said something about shopping along Hawke Street, that’d be when
she got off the bus. It was a Monday night, and all the stores along
there, they stay open till nine Mondays and Fridays. There’s a few
nice little stores, and it’s handy—not so crowded as downtown,
and most everything you’d want, drugstore and Woolworth’s,
besides a Hartners’, and a shoe store and a couple of nice
independent dress shops, and Mr. Grant at the stationery-and-card
place J even keeps a little circulating library—and then there’s
Mrs. Breen’s."

He remembered the name vaguely; after a moment he
said, "The woman who had a stroke."

"That’s right. She’s had that little shop a
long while, and sometimes you find things there that’re, you know,
unusual, different from the big stores. You mightn’t remember, no
reason you should, but on the one side she’s got giftware as they
call it—china figures and fancy ash trays and vases and such—and
on the other she’s got babies’ and children’s things. Real nice
things, with handwork on them, the clothes, and reasonable too.
You’ll remember that your men asked around in all the shops if
Carol had been in that night, to get some idea of the time and all.
And that was the very night Mrs. Breen had a stroke, so you couldn’t
ask her if Carol’d been in there, and it didn’t seem important
because you found out that she’d been in the drugstore and a couple
of other places."

"Yes—nothing unusual anywhere, no one speaking
to her, and she didn’t mention anything out of the way to the
clerks who waited on her."

"
That’s so. It didn’t seem as if Mrs. Breen
could’ve told any more. She was alone in her place, you know, and
all right as could be when her daughter come at nine or a bit before,
to help her close up and drive her home. It was while they were
locking up she had her stroke, poor thing, and they took her off to
hospital and she’s been a long while getting back on her feet.
Well, Lieutenant—let me hot up your coffee—what I’m getting to
is this. It went out of my mind at the time, and when I thought of
it, I hadn’t the heart to bother about it, didn’t seem important
somehow—and Mrs. Breen was still in the hospital and her daughter’d
closed up the shop. It’d have meant asking her, Mrs. Robbins I
mean, to go all through the accounts and so on, and with her so
worried and living clear the other side of town too, I just let it
go."

"You thought Carol had been in and bought
something there?"

"It was for Linda Sue," she said, and the
troubled look in her eyes faded momentarily. "My first
great-grandchild, see, my granddaughter May—that’s Carol’s
cousin, May White—Linda Sue’s her little girl. May and Carol were
much of an age, and chummed together, and Carol was just crazy about
Linda Sue. It was along in June, I remember, Carol saw this in Mrs.
Breen’s, and she wanted to get it for Linda Sue’s birthday in
October. She told me about it then, and if I thought it was foolish,
that much money, I kept still on it—she wanted to get it, and it
was her money. Twenty dollars it was, and she asked Mrs. Breen if she
could pay a bit on it every week or so. Mrs. Breen’s obliging like
that, and she said it was all right, but she left it in the window
for people to see, case anybody wanted one like it she could order
another."

The Duke, who had been drowsing between them,
suddenly woke up and began to wash himself vigorously. Mrs. Demarest
finished her coffee and sighed. "It was a doll, Lieutenant—and
while that seems like an awful price for a doll, I must say it was a
special one. It’d be nearly as big as Linda Sue herself, and it was
made of some stuff, you know, that looked like real flesh—and it
had real hair, gold hair it was, that you could curl different ways,
and it had on a pink silk dress with hand smocking, and silk
underwear with lace, and there was a little velvet cape and velvet
slippers, rose color. Well, Carol was buying it like that. I wasn’t
sure to a penny how much she still owed on it, up to that night. And
of course Monday wasn’t a payday for her, I didn’t think it was
likely she’d stopped in at Mrs. Breen’s that night, because she’d
do that the day she got paid, you see. It was just that she had paid
on it, but as say, way things were, I didn’t bother about going
ahead with it. There was time to sort it out, Mrs. Breen and Mrs.
Robbins are both honest. I got other things for Linda Sue’s
birthday, and once in a while I just said to myself, some day I’d
best ask about it, straighten it out with Mrs. Breen.

"Well, just last week Mrs. Breen came into her
shop again. She was sick quite a while, and then up-and-down like at
her daughter’s, and now she’s better, but not to be alone any
more, and she’s selling off what stock she has and going out of
business. So I went round, last Thursday it was, to ask about Carol’s
doll.

"And Mrs. Breen says that Carol came in that
night and paid all the rest she owed, and took the doll away with
her. She remembers it clear—the stroke didn’t affect her mind,
she’s a bit slower but all there. She didn’t hear about Carol for
quite awhile, naturally, being sick and all, and of course when she
did, she naturally thought everyone knew about the doll. Because you
remember—"

"Yes," he said. He remembered: in the glare
of the spotlights, the stiffening disfigured corpse and the several
small parcels scattered on the sidewalk. A card of bobby pins, two
spools of thread from the dime store: a magazine, a bottle of
aspirin, a candy bar from the drugstore: an anniversary card from the
stationery store. He looked at Mrs. Demarest blankly. "That’s
very odd," he said. "She had it—the woman’s sure?"

 
She nodded vigorously. "She showed me the
accounts book, Lieutenant. There’s the date, and while there’s no
time put down, it’s the next-to-last entry that night, and she says
the last customer came in was a woman she knows, a Mrs. Ratchett, and
it was just before nine. She thinks Carol came in about eight-thirty,
a few minutes before maybe. Probably it was the last place Carol
stopped, you see—nobody else remembers her with a big parcel. She
paid Mrs. Breen seven dollars and forty-six cents, all she still
owed, and she didn’t have the doll gift-wrapped because she wanted
to show it to May and me first. And she took it with her." Mrs.
Demarest held out her hands, measuring. "Like that it’d have
been—a big stout cardboard box, white, a good yard or more long,
and maybe eighteen inches wide and a foot deep. Heavy, too. And
inside, along with the doll, three yards of pink silk ribbon and the
tissue paper for wrapping it, and a birthday card. The whole thing
was wrapped up in white paper and string, and Mrs. Breen made a
little loop on top for her to carry it by."

They looked at each other. "But that’s very
damned odd indeed," he said softly. "Not much time there,
you know. She was dead by nine, at the latest. It’s possible that
someone else came by and found her first, didn’t want to get
involved, but picked up the biggest parcel, maybe the only one he
noticed in the dark, on the chance that it was worth something. But
you think, in that case, he—or she, of course—might have taken
time to snatch up the handbag too, after cash . . . . and that hadn’t
been touched, the strap was still on her arm."

"I guess you’d better hear how she came to get
the money, not that it matters. One of the girls worked at the hotel
with her came to see me, two-three days afterward—a nice girl she
was, Nella Foss—to say how sorry they all were, and give me a
little collection the hotel people’d taken up. They thought maybe
I’d rather have the money, you know, instead of flowers for the
funeral—it was real thoughtful of them. Well, Nella said that very
afternoon there’d been a lady just checked out of the hotel came
back after a valuable ring she’d left, and Carol’d already found
it, doing out the room you know, and turned it in. And the lady gave
her five dollars as a present. I expect Carol decided right off she’d
finish paying for the doll with it. At the time, I thought of course
what was in her purse, three-eighty-four it was, was what she’d had
left out of the five."

"Yes . . . . but so little time! Do we say it
was the murderer took it away? Just that?—not a finger on her
handbag after cash? And why?"