The bride wore black (13 page)

"Who?" Wanger jumped through the phone at him.

"Her. The Baker girl. I got her description. Must have headed straight over there as soon as she left you. How d'ya Hke that?"

"I hke it pretty well," answered Wanger with grim literalness. "Polish the rest of it off. The kid just came through with the color she was wearing that night. Another of those freak spills, like his popping the name. Dark blue, got it? Go over to the Residence Club, see if you can get a line on what color she had on when she left her room Monday evening; somebody might have noticed. And do it cagey; no badge. I don't want her to tumble we're taking stitches until the sewing up's all done. You're just a guy trying to follow up a crush on someone whose name you don't know; you can get to her by elimination."

Second phone call to Wanger, same place, half an hour later:

"Brad again. Holy smoke, is her alibi cheesecloth! I think we've got something now all right."

"All right, never mind the schoolboy ardor; when you've been at this as long as I have you'll realize that the time you think you've got the most is when you've got two big handfuls of nothing."

"Well, d'ya wanta hear it or should I keep it confidential to myself?"

"Don't get fresh, rookie. What is it?"

"She didn't eat in Karen Marie's that night! First the Swensky woman that runs it backed her up solid. 'Oh, ya, ya. Sure she vos dare.' Well, after what happened at that movie box office, I dunno why, but something gimme kind of a hunch, so I took a chance and played it. And it paid off! I threw a big bluff and got tough about it and told her, 'Whattaya trying to do, kid me? Don'tcha suppose I know she was just in here herself and told you to say that, if anyone asked you? Now, d'ya wanta get in trouble or d'ya wanta stay out of it?'

"She caved right in like wet cement. 'Ya,' she admitted, kind of scared, 'she vos here yust now. I like to help her if I could, but as long as you know dot already, 1 don't want to get in no trouble myself.'

"And wait, there's more yet. I spaded around over at the Residence Club lobby. The elevator girl and the desk clerk both remembered seeing her pass through that night, and she was wearing dark blue."

"Come to papa," intoned Wanger fervently.

Third phone call to Wanger, next day:

"Hello, Lew? This is Myers. I'm outside the school. I've got her safely nailed down until four this afternoon. I've been practically sitting on her shoulders ever since yesterday. But here's a Uttle something just turned up; I wanted you to get it right away. It might mean something and then again it might not. I picked her up when she came out of the Residence Club doorway just now, and on her way to the bus I noticed a fruit-stall keeper give her the old good-morning and she smiled back. So I dropped behind and cased him quick, so I'd still be able to make the same bus she did. He told me she bought

half a dozen Rorida oranges from him at six o'clock Monday evening. I'm remembering that two glasses of orange juice turned up in the Moran refrigerator the morning after that Mrs. Moran couldn't account for, that she was certain she didn't prepare herself before she went up to her mother's.

"I'm remembering that, too. At six she was on her way out, not in, even according to her own story. She took them somewhere with her. I'm going over there right now and have a chat with the cleaning maid that does her room. One good thing about oranges, from our point of view, is you can't eat the peel, too."

Wanger to superior:

"How's it looking up. Lew?"

"Almost too good to be true. I'm afraid to breathe on it for fear the whole thing'll collapse. Believe it or not. Chief, I've got a life-size, flesh-and-blood suspect at last, after chasing will-o'-the-wisps until now. I've actually talked to her and heard her answer me. I keep pinching myself all the time." "Pinch her, that'll be a little more constructive." "This girl has tried to palm off a tissue of lies on us for an alibi. I've heard of them with one weak link, and two weak links, but this thing is spun sugar in the sun! She wasn't at the restaurant where she said she was, she wasn't at the picture show, she left her room in a dark blue outfit. The Moran kid identified her to her face as having been with him and his father that night. A crayon drawing he did in school Monday afternoon was found there in the house in the small hours of Tuesday morning, and Mrs. Moran is dead sure he didn't have it with him when she called for him and took him away. And just to do it up brown: she bought half a dozen Florida oranges at a fruit stall near the club six o'clock Monday evening and

took them with her to wherever she was going. There were two large double glasses of the stuff found standing in the Moran Frigidaire afterward that Mrs. M is positive were prepared by some other hand than her own. True, there were already oranges in her bin, to the best of her recollection. But then where did the ones this Baker girl bought go to? They never showed up in her room from first to last; I've questioned the cleaning maid and she didnt remove any orange peel from that room all week long, not so much as a dried seed.

"Now, what does it look to you?"

"It looks like three strikes and out. Suppose you let her flounder for, say, another twenty-four hours and see if she goes in any deeper. Then get ready for the jump. But don't lose her whatever you do. Stick close to her day and night "

"And even at other times," amended Wanger remorselessly.

"This is Wanger, Chief."

"I've been waiting to hear from you. I think you better bring the Baker girl in with you now."

"I am. Chief. I'm caUing you from the lobby of the Residence Club right now. I wanted your okay before I go up to her room and get her."

"All right, you've got it. I just got a report that gives the kid's story grown-up confirmation for the first time, even if it's only partial. A man named Schroeder who lives on the other side of the street a few doors down happened to go to his bedroom window to pull down the shade and definitely saw the figure of a woman leaving the Moran house shortly before midnight. He couldn't identify her at that distance and in the dark, of course, but I don't see much sense in holding off any longer."

"No, there isn't. Not with her past record of disappear-

ances. HI be in in about fifteen or twenty minutes."

The girl elevator operator tried to bar his way. "I'm sorry, sir, no gentlemen are allowed up in the rooms."

"I'm not a gentleman, I'm a detective," Wanger was half-tempted to say, but didn't. He had to admit there had been pickups he'd like better than this one. "The desk cleared me," he told her gruffly. She looked out across the lobby and got a surreptitious high sign that it was all right to go ahead up with him. Wanger hadn't been willing to take a chance on his slippery quarry to the extent of waiting below and having them call her down.

The girl opened for him at the seventh.

"Wait here for me. And no other passengers on the way down, straight trip."

She was all eyes as he made his way down the peaceful, homelike corridor; she could tell it was an arrest.

He knocked on the door. Her voice said unfright-enedly, "Who is it?"

"Open the door, please," he answered quietly.

She did immediately, surprise at the male voice still showing on her face. She had a washbasin full of silk stockings there behind her.

"Would you mind coming over with me?" He was somber about it but not truculent.

She said, "Oh," in a weak little voice.

He stood there waiting in the open doorway. She fumbled around for her outer things in a closet, couldn't get what she was looking for. "I don't know why I'm not frightened," she faltered. "I suppose I ought to be " She was very badly frightened. She dropped the hanger with her coat and had to brush it off. Then she tried to put the coat on, forgetting to take the hanger out of it.

"Nothing's going to happen to you. Miss Baker," he said morosely.

"111 have to leave my stockings go, won't I?" she said.

"I guess you better let them go."

She knitted her brows, pulled out the stopper on her way past. "I wish I'd finished them before you got here," she sighed. "Am 1 coming back?" she asked just before putting the lights out. "Or should I should I take anything with me for the night?" She was very badly frightened.

He just closed the door for her.

"You see, I've never been arrested before," she said placatingly, accompanying him down the hall, quick nervous little steps to his longer slower ones.

"Cut it out, will ya?" he said gruffly, with a sort of querulous annoyance.

He came into the dim room, looked at her, lit a cigarette whose outer radius of slowly expanding smoke took a moment or two to reach the conical shaft from the shaded light over her. When it did it turned pale blue, like something in a test tube. "Crying won't do any good," he said with distant correctness. "You're not being mistreated in any way. And you have only yourself to blame for being here."

"You don't know what it means " she said in the direction his voice had come from. "You deal in arrests, to you it's nothing. You can't possibly know what goes through you, when you're in your room, secure and contented and at peace with the world one minute, and the next someone suddenly comes for you to take you away. Takes you down through the building you live in, in front of everybody, takes you through the streets and when they get you there you find out you're supposed to have to have murdered a man! Oh, I can't stand it! I'm frightened of the whole world tonight! I feel as though I were in the middle of one of those stories told to my own

children, suddenly come true; bewitched, held under the power of some ogre's spell."

And as she wept, she tried to smile into the darkness at them, in apology.

Another voice spoke up from the perimeter of gloom: "D'you think Moran had an easy time of it, that last half hour or so in the closet? You didn't see him when he was taken out; we did."

She pressed her hair flat to her head, soundlessly.

"Don't," Wanger said in an aside. "She's the sensitive type."

The unseen matron made a plucking sound at her lips with her tongue, to express her own opinion on that subject.

"I didn't know it was a murder. I didn't know it was done to him purposely!" the girl on the wooden chair said. "When you had me out there at their house the other day, I simply thought it had been an accident, that he'd locked himself in some way, and the child hadn't realized the seriousness of the danger, and then afterward perhaps, to escape the blame, as children will, had made up the story that I was there."

Wanger said, "That doesn't alter the case any. That's not what we're talking to you about now. You didn't eat at the Swedish woman's. You didn't go to the Standard. But you went to both of those places afterward and told them to say you did! Then you wonder why you're here."

She held one wrist with the other hand, twisting at it circularly. Finally she said, "I know I didn't realize I was being watched so soon you seemed so friendly that afternoon."

"We don't give warnings."

"I didn't know it was a murder; I thought it was just the child's little fib I had to contend with." She took a

deep breath. "I was with my husband. His name is Larry Stark, he he lives at 420 Marcy Avenue. I made dinner for him at his apartment and was there all evening."

It made no impression. "Why didn't you tell us that the first time you were asked?"

"I couldn't, don't you see? I'm a teacher, I'm not supposed to be married, it'll cost me my job."

"We've shot your first story to pieces, there's nothing left of it; naturally you've got to replace it, you can't just stand on thin air. Why should we believe this one any more than the first?"

"Ask Larry he'll tell you! He'll tell you I was there with him the whole time."

"We'll ask him all right. And he probably will tell us you were there with him. But the Moran child tells us you were there with him. And the crayon drawing tells us you were there with him. And the two glasses of orange juice in the icebox tell us you were there with/i/m. And your dark blue suit tells us you were there with him. And your own actions for the past few days tell us you were there with him. That's quite a lineup to buck, little girl."

She gave a wordless intake of breath and let her head tilt back across the chair back.

A shaft of yellow corridor light slashed through the foursquare darkness around her and a voice said, "He's ready for her now."

Wanger's chair scraped back. "It's a little late for that now. It won't do you as much good as if you'd come out with it in the beginning. This thing's well under way. Miss Baker, and it seldom pays to change trains in the middle of a trip you're liable to fall down between the two of them."

His hand became visible up past the wrist, reaching out into the downpouring cone of light for her.

She was crying again, soundlessly as ever, when the matron and Wanger brought her up before his superior's desk.

"So this is the young lady?" Under other circumstances it might have been misconstrued as a half-friendly opening remark. It wasn't meant that way.

A phone beside him stuttered, "D-d-d-d-d-ding, br-r-T'T-ring."

He said, "Just a minute." Then he said, "Who? Yes, there's a Wanger here, but you can't use his extension. Well, what is it you "

He lowered it, looked across the desk at him. "There's somebody has something to tell you about this girl you just brought in. Go ahead, see what it is."

He motioned, and the matron stepped outside with Miss Baker again.

"The husband, I guess," Wanger murmured, moving around beside him and picking up the instrument.

A woman's voice said, "Hello, is this Wanger?"

"Yes. Who is it wants to " he started to say warily.

The other voice cut through his like a knife through butter. "I'm doing the talking. You've just brought a girl in with you from the Women's Residence Club. A Miss Baker, a kindergarten teacher. That right? Well, this is just to tell you she had nothing to do with what happened to Moran in that closet; I don't care how it looks or what you think you know or what you think you've found out."