The Clairvoyant Countess (8 page)

Madame Karitska had invited Lieutenant Pruden to dine with her—a simple Hungarian goulash with spaetzls, she said—and he arrived at seven, bringing with him a bottle of red wine.

“But such a fine wine,” she exclaimed, holding it to the light. “It has been a long time since I have seen this.”

“Well,” Pruden said, flushing slightly, “I asked the man at the shop what he’d recommend for a distinguished lady of Russian extraction who was serving goulash. He said he would first of all recommend my bringing
him
along to dinner too, and, if not that, a worthy bottle like this one. Myself, I’m a beer man.”

She laughed, but her glance, moving from the wine bottle to his face, sharpened. “Something is troubling you, I think, and it is not the wine.”

He grinned. “I wish you’d stop reading my mind. Anyway, nothing should interfere with goulash; it’s a favorite of mine.”

“Good. We speak of it later then,” she told him.

She had placed a card table with a checkered cloth over it near the windows, and had drawn the curtains and lighted candles. There were even two wilted white roses in a bud vase. “Plucked from a basket of trash on Walnut Street,” she said with a smile. “It remains incredible to me what things of value are tossed away on Walnut Street.” Sitting down to dine they began to talk about Walnut Street, and then about other parts of the city, which Pruden knew thoroughly and obviously loved.

Over the demitasse Madame Karitska inserted a cigarette into a long gray holder and looked at him frankly. “You have told me many things about this city and your work, Lieutenant, but always there lurks the faint shadow behind your eyes. It has to do with your job?”

“Unfortunately not any longer,” he said.

She was at once sympathetic. “You have perhaps been taken off a case?”

He sighed. “In a way, yes, but not by anyone in the department. I learned late this afternoon—it’ll be in the newspapers tomorrow, undoubtedly on a back page—that a woman named Mazda Lorvale died in a mental hospital today, apparently a suicide.”

“This is very sad,” said Madame Karitska. “You knew her?”

“I handled the case three years ago. It was never solved and now I don’t suppose it ever will be, and I’ll wonder for the rest of my life if she was guilty or
innocent.” He lifted his gaze from the coffee and added, “One does, you know.”

“Why don’t you tell me about it?” suggested Madame Karitska.

He said impulsively, “I’ll do more than that if you’ll allow me. It’s a hell of a way to thank you for a delicious goulash-and-spaetzl dinner, but knowing I was coming here I smuggled her suicide note out of headquarters. I’d give a great deal to know whether she really killed three people. If you can tell such a thing by examining the note.”

“Three people,” mused Madame Karitska. “I think perhaps you must first tell me her story.”

“All right. You know the Dell section of Trafton? It’s on the outskirts of the city, a very modest suburb: frame houses, tiny immaculate lawns, vegetable gardens and clotheslines in the rear. Basically it’s a Ukrainian neighborhood, with a Russian Orthodox church in its center, like the hub of a wheel.”

“I know,” said Madame Karitska, nodding. “I have seen the church.”

“Well, three years ago a man from the Dell section was rushed to the hospital here in Trafton. His name was Charles Windham, he was sixty-seven, retired, a widower, and he lived alone at 52½ Arbor Street. He was dead on arrival, and the lab established that he’d died of cyanide poisoning.

“Two days later a forty-one-year-old woman was found dead in her home at 48½ Arbor Street, two houses removed from Windham’s home. Her name, if I remember correctly, was Polly Biggs and it was discovered that she too had died of cyanide poisoning.”

“Ah,” said Madame Karitska, nodding.

“Swope was assigned to the investigation at that time. Myself, I was busy investigating the disappearance of a professor from Trafton University named Dr. Ulanov Bugov. This man lived across town near the university campus and he’d not returned to his Russian history classes. Much to my surprise, in investigating his disappearance, I discovered that he’d been a fairly regular visitor on Arbor Street. He’d sent Christmas cards to both of the deceased, and he’d been very friendly with the woman who lived alone at number 50, whose house was between Polly Biggs’s and Windham’s. This was Mazda Lorvale.

“Swope had been checking out Mazda Lorvale, as he had all the neighbors. Now we discovered that someone in that neighborhood had pawned Dr. Bugov’s gold watch. The pawnbroker gave us a very precise description of the woman who had pawned it, and it exactly matched that of Mazda Lorvale. Next the bank produced several checks made out to Mazda and signed by Dr. Bugov several days
after his disappearance.
These checks proved to be forgeries, and Mazda had forged them.”

“So she was arrested,” said Madame Karitska.

“Not then. We first had a warrant issued and searched her house. We hit pay dirt all right. We found Dr. Bugov’s attaché case under her bed, his checkbook in her bureau drawer, and a quantity of cyanide hidden away in her pantry. That’s when she was arrested on suspicion of murdering Charles Windham and Polly Biggs, but of course we felt pretty sure by that time that she must have murdered Dr. Bugov too.”

“But you say she has just died in a mental hospital?”

Pruden nodded. “She was put on trial for the two poison murders while we continued searching for Dr. Bugov’s body. We even dug up the basement of her house. We had men searching the grounds of every nearby park, looking under culverts, and checking every piece of empty ground in the Dell section. The professor,” he said with finality, “was never found, dead or alive.”

“Extraordinary,” said Madame Karitska with interest. “And in this trial, was she found guilty?”

He shook his head. “It was a long trial, a rather sensational one at the time, but if it had been concluded, I seriously doubt that a verdict of guilty would have been brought in. There just wasn’t enough evidence, certainly nothing conclusive. She’d forged his name to those checks, yes, and she’d pawned his gold watch but there was no binding evidence of murder. She’d known Dr. Bugov for two years, we established that, but we never discovered how they met. There was the possibility that they’d been lovers—he was forty, she was thirty-five and quite attractive in a candy-box way. But when it came time for her to testify—they put her on the stand—she was rambling and incoherent, and made wild, extreme statements. She had to be removed from the stand. Ultimately the jury found her legally insane and she was ordered confined.”

“So the truth was never unearthed,” said Madame Karitska thoughtfully. “A strange story. She denied the murders?”

“Oh yes, and denies them even in her suicide note.” He removed a brown manila envelope from his pocket and carefully extracted a note written in pencil on lined notebook paper. “The note was written to the lawyer
who defended her three years ago and it reads, ‘It doesn’t matter really but I will say this. I didn’t kill Uli or Polly or Charlie. I went wild with grief from losing them. Nothing has been worth anything since.’ ” He handed the slip of paper to Madame Karitska and sat back.

Madame Karitska placed the letter on the table and gently inserted her fingers under it until the letter rested across the palms of her hands. After a moment she closed her eyes and Pruden sat in silence, watching her. The candles flickered and wavered; in the dim light he thought Madame Karitska’s face looked infinitely sad. When she opened her eyes her expression was thoughtful.

“Well?” asked Pruden.

“Tell me,” she said, putting down the note, “would there be any possible way to bring me—at this late date—any objects handled by Dr. Bugov or by this Polly Biggs or Charles Windham?”

Pruden was startled. “That’s a rather tall order after three years. It’s possible, though, I suppose. Dr. Bugov’s papers are still somewhere at headquarters—we sifted through them all for leads but found nothing. And Mrs. Biggs’s mother carried away Polly’s jewelry and is in a nursing home not far off my route. As for Mr. Windham—”

“That would be quite enough,” Madame Karitska told him.

Pruden smiled. “You’re not going to tell me any impressions you received, as you put it?”

“No,” said Madame Karitska. “Not tonight.”

“But you did catch something?” he asked eagerly.

“Oh yes,” she said, “a great deal, and I am most
curious. If you will bring me objects belonging to two of the three persons I think I may be able to tie certain threads together for you. Your case,” she added with a faint smile, “is not yet over.”

It was two days before Pruden reappeared, looking triumphant, which was not surprising because it had taken a certain amount of resourcefulness and digging to produce the objects he presented to her. He gave her the gold watch belonging to Dr. Bugov that had been pawned by Mazda Lorvale, and which was still marked “Exhibit B” from the trial, and a leather checkbook of his as well. From Polly Biggs’s mother he had secured a ring and a silver necklace. He placed them on the carved wooden table in the center of the room and then noticed a neatly clipped newspaper item already there. He picked it up.

“
MYSTERY FIGURE APPARENT SUICIDE
,” he read aloud. “I thought you didn’t read newspapers, Madame Karitska.”

“I don’t usually,” she admitted, “but you said the story would be carried in the newspapers today and I was most curious to read a second version of her trial and the murders. For instance,” she said, “you did not tell me how Mazda ‘babbled,’ as the paper expresses it, of knowing influential people in very high places, and of doing important intelligence work.”

Pruden shrugged. “That’s one of the reasons she was judged insane. I told you she grew incoherent at the trial. An uneducated, simple woman ranting and raving—”

“Exactly,” said Madame Karitska, and sat down and picked up Dr. Bugov’s watch and held it in her hand. She sat bemused for some length of time, nodded several
times, removed the watch and picked up the ring and necklace. After several minutes she removed them and restored the watch to her hand.

At last, looking somber, she put down the watch and walked into the kitchen to return with a pot of Turkish coffee. Abruptly she said, “I will tell you now. Your Mazda Lorvale was innocent.”

“Oh God,” said Pruden.

“She was not insane either,” said Madame Karitska, pouring coffee into two cups.

Pruden stared at her blankly. “Now you’ve surely gone too far; you’ve got to be kidding.”

“I do not, as you say, ‘kid,’ ” she told him distastefully. “You described this woman to me yourself only a few moments ago. You called her an uneducated, simple woman, and this is precisely what her suicide note has told me. She lived in much agony, poor woman, and probably never fully understood what happened to her. Her intelligence, you see, was below average. She was not stupid, you understand, or retarded in the physical sense, but her intelligence was limited—stunted, probably, by overwhelming emotional deprivation in her childhood. She was, in a word, the perfect dupe.”

“Dupe?” echoed Pruden incredulously.

“It astonishes me that no one paid any attention to her so-called babblings about doing important work. She believed it, didn’t anyone realize this? She was not insane and she believed it, but why did she believe it?”

Pruden looked astonished and then interested. “I don’t understand.”

Madame Karitska picked up Dr. Bugov’s gold watch and held it lightly in her hand. “The man to whom
this belonged was not born in this country. From his watch I gain the impression of a man of ice, a man callous and devious and brilliant of intellect. I do not think you will ever find the body of Dr. Bugov, Lieutenant. I believe he is still very much alive.”

“Alive!”

“Yes, under a new name, no doubt, but alive.
He
is the man who poisoned your Mrs. Biggs and Mr. Windham.”

“Biggs and Windham! But why?” protested Pruden.

“To rid himself of Mazda Lorvale,” she said. “She babbled about doing important intelligence work at her trial but no one wondered why.
He
is the man who was doing the important intelligence work, Lieutenant, although I doubt seriously that it was for this country. You have here a love-starved woman of modest good looks, submissive disposition, and low intelligence. It is just the sort of woman this man can use, even confide in for he could never risk intimacy with a peer. Mazda becomes his mistress, his slave, you might say. With her he can let down a little, relax, brag a little, and to her he is the sun, the moon, and the stars. She gives herself heart, body, and soul, you understand? It is very sad.”

Pruden stared at her, dazed. “But the others—Biggs and Windham?”

She nodded. “He is very clever, do you not think so, your Dr. Bugov? The time comes for him to break up this constricting alliance. He has grown bored, perhaps, or the liaison has become dangerous, but it is more likely that he has received orders to go elsewhere. How then is he to dispose of this poor creature
who would be an embarrassment and a danger to him when he has left?”

She shrugged before continuing. “To kill her directly I think would be too risky. He has been perhaps a little too open; he has become known to her friends and the trail would lead straight to him. So instead he poisons first one and then another of Mazda’s neighbors and thus he disposes of two witnesses to their relationship and throws suspicion squarely on Mazda.”

“And the watch, the checks?”

“He leaves them with her, of course, or, as you police say, plants them upon her? Perhaps he has even encouraged her to sign his checks for him. He then disappears, thus in every way tightening the noose about her neck.”

“Good God,” he said faintly.

She nodded. “Yes, I feel for this bewildered woman. Her suicide note struck you as sincere? It is a very sad note. And this man—”

“This man,” said Lieutenant Pruden grimly.

“I would hope,” she said gently, “that among the many things you have of his, there may be a fingerprint or two remaining that belong to him. This checkbook, for instance, or something untouched among the possessions you hold. It would be wise to present these prints to a much higher government agency to see if there are any records, any prints that match. A simple professor at a university who disappears does not merit such research but the man behind this façade—”