The bride wore black (8 page)

And this brings up a point I mentioned before. She's not a homicidal maniac by any means; she had a beautiful opportunity to kill the Hodges girl then and there. All she had to do was admit her to the room there was a screen around his body. She had plenty of time. Instead she warned the girl off, for the girl's own sake.

"There's the whole thing. More material than we need, in one way. But the keystone that would give it a meaning is missing; no motive."

"No conceivable motive, and they didn't know each other, and she vanishes as completely as a streak of lightning after it's struck once," Wanger summed up, baffled. "Well, he sent me over here to see if I could make anything out of it. I'm only sure of one thing: this case strings along with the Bliss one; it's an accurate copy."

Chambermaid, fourth floor, Helena Hotel:

"I never seen her before, so I knew for a fact she didn't live in the hotel. I thought maybe she was visitin' somebody. She was just passin' by the hall that day. This was about, um, two weeks before it happened. Maybe mo'. She stopped and looked in the open door while I'm cleanin' his room, I said, 'Yes'm, you lookin' for Mr. Mitchell?' She said, "No, but I always think you can learn so much about a pusson's character and habits just by lookin' at their rooms.' She talk so polite and refine' it's a pleasure to hear her. She look at the girls' pictures he have all over the wall and she say, 'He likes women to be mysterious, I can tell by them. Not one is an honest everyday pitcher of how those girls really look. They all tryin' to look like somethin' else, for his sake. Bitin' roses and starin' through lace fans. If one if 'em gave him her pitcher like she really was, he most likely wouldn't put it up.' ,

"That's all. And then before I knowed it, she gone away again, and I never seen her no mo' after that."

Clerk at Globe Liquor Store:

"Yes, I remember selling this. A thing as unusual as arak we don't sell more than a bottle a year. No, it was not her suggestion. I happened to come across it on the shelf and I thought it would be a good opportunity to get it off our hands, as long as she'd asked for something unusual and at the same time potent. She said she was making a present of it to a friend, and the more exotic it was the better pleased he would be. I'd already shown her vodka and aquavit. She decided on arak. She admitted she'd never sampled any of it herself. One funny thing: on her way out she gave me a peculiar smile and said, 'I find myself doing so many things these days that I've never done before.'

"No, not at all nervous. As a matter of fact she deliberately stood aside and told me to go ahead and wait on a man who wanted a bottle of rye in a hurry, while she was making up her mind. She said she wanted to take her time making a selection."

Wanger's SUPERIOR SAID a week later, "So you think the two cases are related in some way, do you?"

"I do."

"Well, in just what way?"

"Only in this way: the same unknown woman is involved in both."

"Oh, no, there's where you're wrong, it couldn't possibly be," his chief overrode him, semaphoring with both hands. "Ill admit I had some vague notion along those lines myself when I spoke to you last week. But that won't stand up, man, it won't wash at all! Since then I've

had time to look over the composite description Cleary obtained of her and sent in. That knocks it completely on the head. Take the Bliss one out of the files a minute, bring it in here. . . . Now just look at the two of them. Put them side by side a minute.

Bliss file Mitchell file

yellow blond hair red hair

five feet five five feet seven

fresh complexion sallow complexion

blue eyes gray blue eyes

about twenty-six about thirty-two

speech shows educa talks with slight tion and refinement foreign accent

There's not even a similar modus operandi involved, or anything like it! One pushed a young broker's clerk off a terrace. The other dropped cyanide into the drink of a seedy ne'er-do-well in a mangy hotel. As far as we know, the two men not only did not know the women who brought about their deaths but had never heard of each other. No, Wanger, I think it's two entirely different cases "

"Linked by the same murderess," Wanger insisted, unconvinced. "With these two diametrically opposite descriptions staring me in the face, I'll grant you it's like flying in the face of Providence to dispute. Just the same, all those physical differences don't mean much. Just break them down a minute, and look how easy it is to get the smallest common denominator.

"Blonde and redhead: any little chorus girl will tell you how transitory that distinction can be.

"Five feet five and five seven: if one wore a pair of extra-high heels and one wore flat heels, that could still be the same girl.

"Fresh and sallow complexions: a dusting of powder takes care of that.

"The difference in eye coloring can be an optical illusion created by the application of eye shadow.

"The seeming difference in age is another variable, likewise dependent on externals such as costume and manner.

"And what else is left? An accent? / can talk with an accent myself, if I feel like it.

"A point to remember is that no single person who saw one of these women saw the other. We have a complete set of witnesses on each of them separately. We have no single witness on the two of them at one time. There's no chance of getting a comparison. You say there's no similarity in modus operandi, but there is in every way. It's just the method of commission that was different; you're letting that mislead you. Notice these 'two' unknown women involved. Both have a brilliant, almost uncanny faculty for disappearing immediately afterward. It amounts almost to genius. Both stalk their victims ahead of time, evidently trying to get a line on their background and habits. One appeared at Bliss's flat while he was out, the other cased Mitchell's room also while he was out. If that isn't modus operandi, what is? I tell you it's the same woman in both cases."

"What's her motive then?" his superior argued. "Not robbery. Mitchell was a month and a half behind ia his room rent. She bought out an entire loge at $3.30 a seat and threw two of the seats away just to be sure of getting to meet him under favorable circumstances. Revenge would be perfect, but he didn't know her and she didn't know him. We not only can't fit a motive to it, but we can't even apply the explanation that usually goes with lack of motive. She's not a homicidal maniac, either. She had a beautiful opportunity to kill the Hodges girl and

the Hodges girl is the juicy, beefy, lamebrain type that's almost irresistible to a congenital murderer. Instead she passed it up, warned the girl off for the girl's own sake."

"The motive lies back in the past, way back in the past," Wanger insisted obdurately,

"You sifted through Bliss's past broke it down almost day by day and couldn't find one anywhere."

"I must have missed it then. I'm to blame, not it. It was there, I didn't see it."

"We're up against something here. D'you realize that even if these two men were still alive they themselves couldn't throw any hght on who she is, what she did it for because they didn't know her themselves, seem never to have seen her before?"

"That's a thought to cheer one up," said Wanger glumly. "I can't promise you to solve this, even though you've turned it over to me. All I can promise is not to quit trying until I do."

Wanger's record on Mitchell (five months later):

Evidence:

1 envelope, typed on sample machine on display at typewriter salesroom, without knowledge of personnel.

1 arak bottle, purchased Globe Liquor Store.

1 ticket stub, Loge A-1, Elgin Theater.

Case Unsolved.

Part Three

MORAN

Like the beat beat beat of the tom-tom When the jungle shadows fall, Like the tick tick tock of the stately clock As it stands against the wall

Cole Porter

THE WOMAN

M

IRIAM LAST NAME LONG forgotten within the confines of the Helena Hotel was a short pugnacious person the color of old leather. She had three things she clung to tenaciously; her British citizenship which had been passively acquired through the accident of birth on the island of Jamaica; a pair of gold-coin earrings; and her "system" of doing rooms. No one had ever made the slightest attempt to interfere with the first two, and the few abortive efforts at tampering with the latter had met with resounding failure.

Numerical progression of the rooms had nothing to do with it. Nor had their location along the dim, creaky, varileveled corridors. In fact, it was a sort of mystic algebra known only to the innermost workings of her mind. No one could disturb it not with impunity, anyway. Not without bringing on a long impunity, anyway. Not without bringing on a long malevolent tirade, down endless reaches of labyrinthine corridor, that went on or seemed to for hours afterward, long after the original cause of it had slunk away, frustrated.

"The fo'teen come after the seventeen. It got to wait tell I finish the seventeen. I ain't never yet do fo'teen first."

Nor did this precedence have anything to do with gratuities, which were in any case an almost nonexistent factor at the Helena. Habit, perhaps, would be the clos-

dage; not the logical "daddy," "Mista Moran," he parroted.

She said something about a door. "How doorable." Then she said, "Have you any brothers and sisters?"

"Nope."

"Ah, what a shamel Don't you miss them?"

How could you miss them when you never had them? However, he could vaguely sense some sort of personal reflection involved in not having any, so he immediately tried to make good the lack with substitutes. "I got a grandma, though."

"Isn't that lovely? Does she live right with you?"

One's grandma never did, didn't she know that? "She lives in Garrison." Another substitute came to mind with that mental image, so he threw her into the gap, too. "So does my Aunt Ada, too." Wasn't she ever going to let him go ahead bouncing his ball?

"Oh, all the way up there!" she marveled. "Were you ever up there to meet her?"

"Shoe I was, when I was little. But Dr. Bixby said I made too much noise, so mommy hadda bring me back home again."

"Is Dr. Bixby your grandma's doctor, dear?"

"Shoe, he comes there lots."

"Tell me, dear, have you started school yet?"

What an insulting question! How old did she think he was, anyway twol "Shoe. I go to kindergarten every day," he said self-importantly.

"And what do you do there, dear?"

"We draw ducks and rabbits and cows. Miss Baker gave me a gol' star for drawin' a cow." Wasn't she ever going to go away and leave him be? This felt like it had kept up for hours. He could have bounced his ball all the way up to the comer and back, the time she'd made him waste.

He tried to go around one side of her, and she finally

took the hint. "Well, dear, run along and play, I won't keep you any longer." She patted him twice on the bullet-shaped back of his head and moved off down the sidewalk, throwing him a fetching smile backward over her shoulder.

His mother's voice suddenly sounded through the screen of the oj>en ground-floor window. She must have been sitting there the whole time. You could see out through the screen, but you couldn't see in through it; he'd found that out long ago. "What was the nice lady saying to you. Cookie?" she asked benevolently. A grown-up would have detected a note of instinctive pride that her offspring was so remarkable in every way he even attracted the attention of passing strangers.

"She wanned to know how ol' I was," he answered absently. He turned his attention to more important business. "Mommy, watch. Look how high I can throw this!"

"Yes, dear, but not too high, it might roll into the gutter."

A moment later he'd already forgotten the incident. Two moments later his mother had.

MORAN

M,

ORAN'S WIFE HAD CALLED up the office while he was out to lunch; there was a message from her waiting there for him when he got back.

This didn't startle him; it was a fairly frequent occurrence, on an average of every third day. Something she'd found out she needed from downtown and wanted him to stop off and get for her on his way home, most likely, he thought at first. Then on second thought he saw it couldn't quite be that, either, or, having failed to reach him, she would have simply left the message with the switchboard girl. Unless, of course, it was something that needed more detailed instructions than could be conveniently conveyed at secondhand.

He made use of his brief after-lunch digestive torpor to phone.

"Here's your wife, Mr. Moran."

"Frank " Margaret's voice sounded emotionally charged, so he knew right away, before she'd got any further than his name, that this was more than just a purchase errand.

"H'lo, dear, what's up?"

"Oh, Fuh-rank, I'm awfully glad you got back! I'm worried sick, I don't know what to do. I just got a telegram from Ada half an hour ago "

Ada was her unmarried sister, upstate. "A telegram?" he said. "Why a telegram?"

"Well, that's just it. Here, HI read it to you." It took her a moment or two; she must have had to fumble for it in her apron pocket and unfold it with one hand. "It says, 'Mother down with bad spell, don't want to frighten you but suggest you come at once. Dr. Bixby agrees. Don't delay. Ada.'"

"I suppose it's her heart again," he said somewhat less than compassionately. Why'd she have to bother him in the middle of the business day with something like this?

She had begun to whimper in a low-keyed restrained way that was not quite outright weeping a sort of frightened watering of her conversation. "Frank, whatni I do? D'you think I ought to call them up long-distance?"

"If she wants you to go up there, you better go up there," he answered shortly.

She'd evidently wanted to hear this advice; it chimed in with her own inclinations. "I guess I'd better," she agreed tearfully. "You know Ada, she's anything but an alarmist, she's always been inclined to minimize these things before now. The last time mother had one of her spells she didn't even let me know about it until it was all over, to keep from worrying me."