Postmark Murder (32 page)

“She won’t show you her passport. She won’t tell you where she’s staying.”

“She’s still frightened. I mean—she’s either frightened or she’s giving a very good performance of being frightened.”

“She says she knows nothing of Catherine Miller. She denied that.”

“Yes,” Matt said. “Laura, that scarf. Tell me exactly what Peabody said.”

She told him quietly, her voice seeming to take on something of Maria Brown’s flat and toneless recital.

Matt’s face was like a hard, white mask. “When did you last see the scarf?”

“I think it was the day we went to the movies. I remember wearing a red one yesterday when we went to Doris’, but I don’t remember seeing the white one then.”

Matt rose. “I’m going to talk to Jonny.”

She followed him. Jonny looked up gravely. Suki, sitting on the table and watching, took advantage of Jonny’s distraction, pushed a piece off the table, and sprang to retrieve it. Matt said, “Jonny, yesterday afternoon you opened the door, you let me in, remember? Was anybody else here yesterday? Did you open the door another time?”

Jonny shook her head in a troubled way. “Please?”

“She doesn’t understand,” Laura said.

“I’ll show her.” Matt led the child out into the hall. He opened the door, he closed it. He got out the Polish dictionary.
“Nie,”
Jonny said, her eyes sad and anxious,
“nie.”
But then she went to the door, opened it, shook her head, said,
“Nie, nie!”
closed it, and stood with her hands at her sides.

“All right, Jonny. It’s all right;” Matt said. “Go back to your puzzle.”

The child sighed. Then she trudged along the hall. Matt sighed, too. “It’s no use getting an interpreter.”

“Do you mean she let somebody in—yesterday—when I was asleep?”

“I don’t know. I came in then. Jonny opened the door. You were sound asleep. You didn’t hear me.”

“She would have opened the door for Charlie,” Laura said slowly. “For Doris perhaps. Nobody else, Matt.”

“I’m not so sure. If Stanislowski, I mean Conrad the second, came and spoke to her in Polish— Look here, Laura, has anything at all been moved or—or searched, or is anything missing besides the scarf?”

“No. Not that I—”  A small memory struck her. “There was a bird, a toy, a yellow bird Charlie gave her. She fastened it on the tree. It’s gone. I thought Jonny had taken it to play with. But when I looked I couldn’t find it.”

Matt stared at her for a moment. Then he took the Polish dictionary and went to Jonny’s room. Laura followed. A long fifteen minutes later they knew only that the absurd yellow bird was not to be found anywhere.

Jonny was by then biting her lips to hold back tears. Matt took her in his arms. “It’s all right, Jonny. You don’t understand—it’s all right.” But he took her with him to the telephone, and dialed a number.

He asked for Miss Nowak. “Miss Nowak? This is Matt Cosden again. I wonder if you would ask the little girl a question or two right now, over the telephone? Will you ask her who came to see her yesterday afternoon?”

He then gave the telephone to Jonny. “Talk to her, Jonny. To please me—”

Jonny pressed the receiver against her ear. But at the first words Miss Nowak spoke, her little face turned a stony, rigid blank. She shook her head, she stared at the floor, then suddenly she turned and pushed the telephone receiver back at Matt and ran away into the back of the apartment.

Matt said, “Thanks, Miss Nowak. It’s no good,” and hung up. “Well, that’s that. Of course, the fact is anybody could have got in here, I suppose, while you were gone, and taken that scarf. But that yellow bird—why? It suggests Charlie because he gave it to her. But why should anybody want to point to Charlie in just that way? It’s fantastic. It makes no sense. Besides, who would know that Charlie had brought it. Laura, you’re sure it didn’t—oh, fall off, get thrown out? Something like that?”

“I’d have seen it.”

“I suppose so. Still—oh, it probably means nothing. Laura, I’m going to see Peabody.”

“What about Maria Brown?”

“I’ll give her an hour or so to think it over, then I’ll go back and talk to her. Unless,” he said wryly, “she’s disappeared again. I wish I knew whether she’s telling the truth or not. She says that she heard Conrad’s voice, it was very loud and clear, especially after he had had a drink or two. But I think she must have heard the murderer’s voice. No matter how much of the rest of her story is true, I think that part is a lie. I think that she is afraid to put herself in a position to identify the murderer. She’s afraid of revenge on the part of the Polish government party or one of their emissaries. And oddly enough, if she’s lying about that, the lie would make the rest of her story more credible. Are you going out this afternoon with Jonny?”

“Yes. She knows something’s wrong, Matt. She’s frightened. I’ve got to try to distract her.”

“I know,” he said dubiously. “As a matter of fact you ought to get out yourself. But it you do, go where there are crowds. Stay with other people. Take her Christmas shopping.”

But at the door he paused for a moment and went back to Maria Brown. “There’s another important angle to that Brown woman’s story. She said that Conrad did not tell the murderer that he had seen you and Jonny. He talked about Jonny, she says, you heard her. He went on and on, telling incidents of her childhood, that little song, but he
didn’t
say he had seen her and he didn’t say he had seen you. It must have given the murderer a terrific jolt to discover, after he had obviously left Conrad for dead, that Conrad not only wasn’t dead, but he had talked to Maria Brown and that you had actually gone to the rooming house. Well—my guess is eventually Maria will talk to Peabody. In any event, it’s the only way I see to play it.”

It’s the only way to play it, Laura thought, after he’d gone. Wait like a chess player for the next move. What exactly would the next move be?

The important thing was Jonny—and the troubled, sad look in her face. She went to Jonny, she helped with the puzzle, she cooked Jonny’s favorite lunch, she talked, gaily and constantly, she exerted every effort; by the time Jonny took her nap, Laura had succeeded in coaxing a spontaneous smile and some answering chatter from the child.

About two-thirty she and Jonny took a taxi to the Loop. Christmas shopping, Matt had said.

The day was still heavily overcast. Lights were already on in the shop windows. The traffic was thunderous and heavy. Again the Michigan Avenue bridge was up and they waited, with the throb of motors all around them, the occasional shrill hoot of the taxicabs and the lower yet piercing and eerie moan of a cargo boat making its way between the massive abutments of the bridge, which reared up into the foggy sky, and out to the gray, mysterious reaches of the lake. They had reached a door of the great department store, when Laura discovered again that someone was following them.

S
HE WASN’T SURE OF
it at first. She only noted that a taxi stopped behind her taxi as she and Jonny got out. Then she saw that the dimly outlined man’s figure in the second taxi was vaguely familiar. She couldn’t see his face.

She hurried Jonny across the sidewalk, through the revolving door into the lights, the familiar, the crowded and busy atmosphere of the great store.

The dimly seen figure in the taxi had had a bulky dark shape about his shoulders; a widely brimmed hat shielded his face. She had glimpsed that much. Clusters of shoppers intervened now between her and the door.

Murder is dangerous. Be careful.

Murder or attempted murder couldn’t happen then and there, with crowds of shoppers milling about, busy salesgirls, glittering lights. Nothing could happen there. All the same it was pursuit.

Her heart was thudding. She led Jonny to the nearest escalator, through the swirling, package-laden crowd. They would lose themselves, she and Jonny. They would go to the toy department.

Jonny loved the escalator. She stepped on it promptly; she clutched the moving rail and looked out over the brilliant scene below, with its festive Christmas decorations, huge loops of tinsel and red and green going from pillar to pillar. At the very top Laura risked a look downward. She did not see any dark-coated, foreign-looking figure. She hurried Jonny on around a corner and into the toy department.

The huge toy department was gayly decorated, too, with great festoons of red and gold and green, with Santa Clauses and tinseled Christmas trees. It was packed with shoppers, mothers, fathers, children and more children. Jonny’s eyes widened with excitement.

If there were somebody following them, then it was, it had to be, the second Conrad Stanislowski. What could he do?

He could try to take Jonny from her.

But she could ask for help. She could approach a salesclerk, ask for a manager. What could she say? A man who claims to be this child’s father is following us? Who would believe her? Besides, by that time the shadowy figure would have unobtrusively but completely vanished.

Perhaps she was mistaken.

She ought not to have come to the toy department! It was an obvious place for anybody to search for them.

She had made herself stare fixedly at the dolls on the counter before them; her neck muscles were stiff and rigid with her effort not to look back—and suddenly she could bear it no longer and gave a swift glance back toward the corner near the escalator. A shoulder in a bulky dark overcoat moved swiftly out of sight, away down at the end of the crowded aisle, and behind a huge pillar.

Laura caught Jonny’s hand.

“Come, Jonny. Come—”

Jonny gave her a startled glance and instantly obeyed. They ducked and dodged around other shoppers toward another flight of escalators that wound upward and downward through the great store. They’d go back down to the first floor, Laura thought, in full and panic retreat. They’d take another exit, opposite the door by which they had arrived, on another street entirely, a full block across. There were always taxis on that crowded street. Hurry, she thought. Whoever it was and whatever the motive, it was a surreptitious pursuit; therefore it was dangerous.

They went down the escalator. Jonny’s face was serious, now. Laura said, “It’s all right, Jonny. It’s all right—” Her voice was unsteady. They reached the first floor and started for the revolving doors ahead. The counters were stored now with jewelry. Diamonds and rubies and emeralds glittered against white velvet. They were almost at the door when Laura looked back and he was following them.

He was far back in the packed aisle. She couldn’t see his face, but through a sudden shift in the crowds of shoppers, she saw a movement like a shadow, sliding furtively again out of sight. The ranks of shoppers closed in. But he was there. And he knew that they were hurrying to the door. She looked around swiftly and saw the small, almost hidden elevator which went directly to the Fashion Shop.

She swerved and led Jonny into the tiny elevator. The Fashion Shop was a luxurious, small department where exclusive models, with famous labels, were sold. Doris bought most of her clothes there. Laura had rarely entered it. The elevator, like the Fashion Shop, was known mainly to the women who could afford to pay the prices famous couturiers demand. Once in the elevator, Laura sank into one of the little, gray French armchairs which made a tiny drawing-room of the elevator. Her heart slowed down a little. She managed to smile reassuringly at Jonny and Jonny returned her smile although her eyes were still serious and troubled. He wouldn’t know about the elevator. He wouldn’t know about the Fashion Shop, not Conrad Stanislowski. It was a refuge.

They emerged from the little elevator into the wide and luxurious room with its showcases, its gay “Boutique,” a counter or two laden with luxurious frivolities of dress. They were ushered into an enormous fitting room, with deep chairs upholstered in gray velvet. A neatly uniformed maid brought coffee. A pleasant, friendly saleswoman brought dresses for Laura to see. They were for the moment safe.

But she asked for a telephone and when it was brought and plugged in, she telephoned to Matt’s apartment; no one answered; if Maria Brown were still there she wouldn’t answer, of course. She tried Matt’s office; his secretary said that he was not in. She debated calling Lieutenant Peabody and after a time decided against it. He was already skeptical as to the reality of that furtive, shadowy figure, and it would disappear as if it had in fact no reality at the arrival of police.

She looked at dresses and dresses. Time passed and the windows beyond the thin silk curtains grew steadily darker. Presently it began to snow, great white flakes drifting down against the background of gray sky and the lighted tiers of windows, set like jewels in the massive buildings across the street. Laura looked at herself in a flame-colored dinner dress, thin and molded around her waist, leaving her shoulders white and bare, and swirling around her feet. The girl in the mirror was suddenly slender and lovely. Her gray eyes glowed. Her slender face took on a mysterious something which was almost beauty. It was as if she saw herself, Laura March, poised for a strange and lovely gift. A different girl, another woman.

Jonny touched the dress. She had been deeply interested in all the dresses, sitting there with her little red coat over a chair, her sturdy little legs dangling, her small face lighted. She had apparently forgotten the uneasiness which had touched her when Laura hurried her down the escalators, through the store, up another elevator. All at once going on eight she was intensely, completely feminine. She said softly,
“Ladna sukienka,”
and smiled up at Laura. “Pret—ty.” And all at once, not intending to, Laura said, “I’ll take it.”

Why? It was a holiday dress, a gay and luxurious dress meant for parties and dancing. Dancing, she thought unexpectedly, with Matt.

That was silly. But she stood watching herself again in the mirror, turning as the fitter knelt to adjust the hem. Another girl, another woman, not Laura March, not even a woman Laura March could ever be. She had never paid so much for a dress in her life; it was a silly extravagance; it would hang in a closet; it would give her usually very moderate charge account a shock, she thought wryly. Nevertheless she would take the dress.