Time Off for Murder (10 page)

  "'I have
gone
away,'" Mary read. "That's explicit enough. No indication she's kept anywhere against her will."

  "Yep. No ransom. No help asked for. Just to let her mind her own business." Johnny rose. "I guess she knows what she's doing. Even if nobody else does. I guess this closes the case."

  Mary said: "Do you really think it does?"

  He answered: "Why, sure. Rorke thinks so. Struthers thinks so. He feels terrible about losing his job."

  She shook her head. "I think you're wrong - all of you. The mystery of the disappearance of Phyllis Knight is just beginning."

  Detective Reese shrugged his shoulders. "It's over as far as I'm concerned. Say, it's been nice knowing you. Would you mind if I called around sometime? We could take in a movie."

***

By the end of the week, the newspaper furore over the disappearance of Phyllis Knight had died down to a two inch item on an inside page, saying that clues were still coming in from all parts of the country.

  On Friday of the week following, Rockey Nardello was convicted of violating the law by operating a lottery. His trial had enlightened the entire country on the ramifications and possibilities of the gambling pastime known as "policy" or "playing the numbers." The defense had been successful only in keeping out of court-room testimony any mention of other illicit activities in which Nardello was rumored to have been engaged. The prosecution, on its part, failed to achieve Chris Whittaker's hope that the town would be taken apart. Testimony of policy bankers and runners, of their dealings with Nardello, was sufficient to convince the jury. Hints of police bribery, of the connection of unnamed "higher-ups" with the racket, were ruled out by the presiding judge. Phyllis Knight's name was never mentioned. Nardello's attorney announced that he would appeal the case and asked for his client's release on a certificate of reasonable doubt. It was denied.

  On the third Thursday of November, Contempora met again and elected Henrietta Wickliffe president. The members debated whether resolutions of sympathy should be sent to Lyman Knight on his daughter's disappearance, but decided that it would be bad taste to do so.

  On November thirtieth, furniture and files were removed from Miss Knight's office to a storage warehouse, the landlord relinquishing his claim for the balance of a year's lease in view of the unusual circumstances. The court gave a limited power of attorney to Miss Getch, Miss Knight's clerk, to pay outstanding bills. Mr. Ben Struthers, who made the first application for power of attorney, was refused, because of knowledge made available to the court of his past record.

  In January, Lyman Knight, bundled to the eyes in shawls and attended by his housekeeper, sailed for Nassau, telling ship news reporters that he was going away to recuperate from the strain of his daughter's disappearance, and expressing his certain belief that she was dead - a conviction he reaffirmed on his return two months later.

  In February, the rotogravures printed photographs of Saxon Rorke in batik bathing trunks, sunning himself at Palm Beach in the company of a bevy of debutantes. The captions under the pictures read: "Saxon Rorke's attraction for the fair sex seems to have increased since his publicized engagement to Phyllis Knight, Socialregisterite attorney, whose disappearance last October started a country-wide search."

  The same month, Nardello's appeal was denied and the prison van drove around to start him on his journey to Sing Sing. Reporters who sought a statement from him, got only a surly: "My lip's buttoned up."

  In March, the first night audience at the opening of the new musical show, "Moonlight for Two," was convulsed by the topical dialogue of one skit:

  Irate husband, returning unexpectedly, finds man under wife's bed, says: "What are you doing here?"

  Man under bed: "Believe it or not, I'm looking for Phyllis Knight."

  On the first of April, Phyllis Knight was found. George Lobel, the housewrecker, found her. But in the beginning, he thought he had merely happened upon a quart of Scotch.

George Lobel, ("Let George Wreck It!") had a contract to raze three old brownstone private houses, numbers 57, 59, and 61 in the West Nineties, just off Central Park, for the Seymour-Shirley Realty Corporation which planned to erect a modern apartment house on that site.

  Mr. Lobel's men and crowbars were due on the premises on Monday morning. In the manner of a surgeon, mapping a torso before incision, Mr. Lobel was taking a preliminary look-around on Saturday forenoon.

  He unlocked the basement door of 61. He strolled leisurely through the building from cellar to roof trap door, filling his lungs with aroma of must and mice, and his notebook with the numbers and condition of mirrors, mantels, light and plumbing fixtures, doors and window frames. Then he moved on to 59.

  He had no key for 59, and it took time and patience to break the rusty padlock of the grille at the areaway entrance.

  When he pushed open the wooden door behind the iron bars, a sunbeam came with him into the fusty hall. The sunbeam shot straight down the passageway, raised an amber glint in a bottle on a table in the kitchen at the rear of the basement. The bottle was full.

  Mr. Lobel followed his directing sunbeam. Not immediately, because there were a few little matters to take care of on the way. But with a sense of pleasure briefly deferred.

  Abandoned houses were full of surprise. People left all sorts of things when they moved out. On the floor of the hallway, just outside the kitchen door, Mister Lobel had gleaned a metal flashlight, a pair of silver spectacles, one lens broken, but frame intact, and a nickel-plated revolver. That was a housewrecker's gravy. You could sell other things beside old brass, lead pipe and window sashes. A dime here, a dime there, added up to a dollar.

  But whiskey. That was something to cut the cobwebs and plaster dust in the throat, and to drive out of a man's head the queer notion that ghosts haunted a closed and boarded house - notions that were hard to shake until the roof was off and the dead rooms open to sun and breeze. Even a housewrecker has nerves.

  Mr. Lobel strode at last across the kitchen. He jerked up the shades over the barred rear windows. He turned back to pick up the bottle. His elation changed to amazement.

  The bottle of Scotch stood like a sentinel, guarding the remains of what the newspapers were to refer to, each after its fashion, as the "Phantom Feast," "The Banquet of Death," "The Last Supper."

  A cloth had been laid on a table. At four places a china plate, a napkin, cutlery, and a tumbler had been put down.

  On a center platter, the carcass of a fowl reposed, the shards of its once succulent flesh, sere against the bones. A stinking mold crawled over the rosy shells of lobster.

  Spiders had spanned the table with their webs. Rats had left their foul tracks on cloth and plates. A thick gray veil of dust and plaster had sifted down over bones and shells and plates and cloth and spiderwebs.

  Mister Lobel stood stark still, fat folds of chin dragging on his chest. "I'll be damned," he said. "I'll be a son of a gun."

  Then, he saw the chairs. The chairs were eloquent. One lay on its side. Another leaned crazily against the rusted coal range. Two more tipped back against the wall. There was no mistaking the story they had to tell. Surprise. Impetuous flight.

  Mr. Lobel moved nearer to the table. Butts and ashes of four cigars, long dead, lay side by side in a saucer.

  Mr. Lobel shrugged. The world was full of crazy people. Run away from a feast like that. But why had they fled? And what, come to think of it, had they been doing here in the first place? This was an unoccupied house. The doors were boarded up. The windows at the front were boarded up. The place was locked. Tight as a drum. Oh wait, now, was it locked? Sure it was. Nobody had had a key to 59. That was funny, too. Nobody at the Seymour-Shirley had had a key to 59. Keys to 57 and 61. No key to 59.

  The back door? Mr. Lobel crossed the kitchen again. He touched a knob. The wooden door swung open. He looked out into a small backyard. His head bobbed up and down, affirming: "So that's how they did it. So that's how they got in."

  Something slithered against his ankles. He jumped back, looked down. It was a long black cable, coiled like a snake around an electric bulb in a wire cage. He picked up the cable. He followed it along outside the house. The wire led to a hole in the fence between 59 and 57, and through the opening, to the basement of 57. "So that's how they got their light," said Mr. Lobel to himself. "Stole it from the house next door. A good trick. A good old-fashioned trick."

  Sure enough, those rotten old boards couldn't keep anybody out of a yard. You could swing them aside like a door. You could go back and forth between 57 and

59. No trouble at all. Weren't they afraid somebody'd see them? Mr. Lobel looked up. The blank wall of an apartment house towered over him. Sure, somebody could spot them easily from that house. Oh no, they couldn't. Mr. Lobel, thinking for the vanished diners of 59, sighed with relief. Those bare, spiked branches were an ailanthus tree. Its spreading foliage would make a thick screen in summer and fall. As good as a curtain.

  "Very smart people," thought Mr. Lobel. "Slick." He spread his palms apart, gesticulating to himself. "You go away and leave a house standing. Suppose somebody wants to use it. Who's to stop them? And why not? You ain't using it, why not let somebody else use it?"

  But then he began to worry and he no longer was amused by the idea that there had been trespassers in 59. Trespassers stole fixtures. Trespassers broke glass. A trespasser could take out plumbing, sell lead, brass and scrap iron just as well as George Lobel could. He stamped back into the kitchen. He began to search in earnest. And he noticed something he had missed before.

  He saw a brown stain, etched deeply into the wooden floor at the kitchen threshold, a lintel's breadth away from the spot where he had picked up the flashlight, spectacles and gun. The stain ran, catty corner, across one end of the kitchen, drop after drop, to the cellar door.

  He opened the cellar door. The foul miasma of decay smote his nostrils.

  His flashlight's beam cut the pitch blackness of the stair-well, played down steps that were steep and narrow as a ladder. There it was again: the brown stain like paint, a trail, on rung after rung, down to the cellar floor. And on the fourth step from the top, there lay, jammed into a corner, a tiny woman's slipper, and on the rung before the lowest, a second slipper. Mr. Lobel balanced the slippers on his palm, marveled at their smallness, tucked them, one in each coat pocket, with the pistol and the flashlight and the silver spectacles.

  His flash beam danced over the maze of pipes and flues on the ceiling of the cellar, over the vaulted brick arches which held the building up. It dropped to the stone floor. It picked up the brown trail, followed it under the center arch to a huge, square, brick furnace.

  On the floor in front of the furnace lay a woman's handbag. A large leather bag, dark in color under a coating of dust. Mr. Lobel opened the bag. There was money in it. Clean bills, folded together, coins. He hung the bag over his arm. "Count it later," he told himself.

  He opened the furnace door. He drove his light beam in. In the bright circle he saw a mat of human hair, a tiny hand, an arc of teeth, a huddle of dark cloth.

  He slammed the furnace door. He leaped up the steps. He ran, pop-eyed, down the street to the corner Coffee Pot.

  "Call the cops. Call the ambulance," he shouted to the counterman. "Quick. There's a girl in the furnace of fifty-nine."

  He plopped the handbag on the counter. "Here. This was there. Must belong to her."

  "Has it got a name in it?"

  "How do I know? Get the cops. Quick."

  "Wait'll I see. Sure it has a name. Phyllis Knight. Hey, that's the lady lawyer. Hey, that's who it is. Operator, get me the police, quick. There's a guy here found Phyllis Knight."

  "Signal 30. (*In police code: A serious crime has been committed) Signal 30. Cars 29 and 45. Cars 13 and 102. Go immediately. Signal 30."

  Sirens wailed. The brakes of police cars screeched. Blue coats, plain clothesmen, leaped out, dashed through the basement door. An ambulance dingdonged. A white coated interne hurried across the pavement. Law and order swarmed.

  Tenement, store, garage, rooming house, playground, spewed a crowd into roadway and gutters - mothers with their babes in go-carts, shopkeepers in shirtsleeves and aprons.

  Within the hour, the news was uptown and down, and on the streets, and at the subway stations and railroad terminals, in the bold black and white of newspaper extras: "Phyllis Knight has been found. Dead. In a furnace."

  Mary Carner put the "extra" on Chris Whittaker's desk. Her face was ashen. "Chris, you'll have to let me off today."

  Chris Whittaker caught her wrist. "You can't go away. You've got a job to do, here, at this store."

  "Don't you understand? Phyllis has been murdered."

  "Makes no difference," he said stubbornly.       "Larceny's your line. Not murder."

  "You've forgotten McAndrew."

  "That was different. That was here, in the store. We had to work on it."

"This is different, too. This was my friend."

  "Listen, sweet, what makes you think the police can't handle this without your help? You've got delusions of grandeur. Nobody's as good a detective as Mary Carner. Nobody can solve a crime but Mary Carner. Darling!" He held her hand tightly. He pleaded: "The police force is wonderful. Honest, it is. Your old pal, Heinsheimer, he knows his stuff. He'll find the murderer without you."