Time Off for Murder (4 page)

  As she walked slowly down the street, a man slouched out of an areaway and swung into step beside her.

  "Hi, Mary."

  "Oh, Chris. It
was
you."

  "Sure it was me."

  "Why did you follow me?"

  "Personal reasons. Have a nice visit?"

  "Don't be nasty. I didn't get in."

  "That's good."

  "Oh it is, is it?" Temper flared. "You think it's fun to be given the bum's rush?"

  He linked his arm in hers. "Not fun, but safer. You don't know what's good for you. Sweetheart, has it occurred to you that these people don't want you sticking your nose into their business? They're making that perfectly clear. Lyman Knight doesn't want you to look for his daughter. He's not worried about her. Nobody is but you."

On Saturday, the twenty-ninth of October, Lyman Knight asked the Police Department to find his daughter, Phyllis, who had been absent from home for a fortnight.

  
"All cars. All cars."
The police radios rasped:
"Be on the lookout for Phyllis
Marie Knight, female, white, age: 34; height: five feet; weight: ninety-nine
pounds. Long blonde hair, blue ayes, fair complexion. Distinguishing features:
protuberant front teeth, hair worn braids, coronet style. Wearing navy blue
wool suit, white silk blouse, blue cloth turban hat, navy slippers, light tan silk
stockings, carried large blue leather handbag. That is all. All cars…. All cars…."

  The teletype alarm ticked out to every police precinct, to all state police headquarters in the near New England and Middle Atlantic States:
"Phyllis Marie
Knight, attorney, prominent society and civic affairs, reported missing since
Oct. 19. Please check all amnesia, accident cases, all hospital admissions."

  The afternoon papers and the press associations which served the world its daily ration of sensation ran to greater detail. With something akin to glee, they spread the news that a lady had disappeared. The lady was Social Register. The lady was blonde. With that beginning, a mystery might go far.

  A photographer who had tempered justice with mercy had taken the lady's picture. It made a fine display: two columns wide, on page one in all the afternoon dailies, a classic head, with chiseled features, high, thoughtful brow below the braided hair, white drapery under a firm chin, unsmiling mouth. A pose suggesting Portia, without the banal black robe and mortarboard.

  
"Miss Knight,"
the press informed such of its readers as were unaware of the lady's eminence,
"was one of New York City's better known attorneys. Last April
she successfully defended Sophie Duda in Bronx County Court from a charge of
homicide in the slaying of her infant son, born out of wedlock. Miss Knight chose
the legal profession in preference to a life of ease and social activity which
would have been hers, normally, as the only daughter of Lyman Knight and the
late Marianna Schuyler Knight. Her mother was descended from one of the
most famous families of early New York."

  The doors of the house on Washington Square swung open.

  The black-clad housekeeper stamped sourly back and forth to admit detectives, reporters and press photographers to a dusky Edwardian parlor where a diminutive gray man sat in a throne-like arm chair before a marble mantelpiece.

  Thus Mary Carner found him, holding court, on Sunday morning.

  She had rung the bell while Washington Square's babies and dogs were frolicking in the winey autumn sunshine in the park, while Washington Square's elders were sleeping behind their drawn shades.

  The housekeeper had recognized her. "Oh, it's you again."

  "May I come in this time?"

  "What do you want? Miss Knight ain't home."

  "I know that. I'm a detective."

  "Police?" The woman stuck out her lower lip and chin. Belligerently, she examined Miss Carner's autumn leaf tweed coat, her red felt hat. She said: "You don't look like a cop to me."

  Miss Carner turned back the flap of her purse, to which her metal shield was pinned. The woman's expression altered just the slightest.

  "All right. You can come in," she said. Then, apparently thinking better of the matter, she dropped her voice to a conciliatory whisper. "Listen," she said, "I'd of let you in the other night …but he," she jerked her head toward the drawing room, "he didn't want it."

  "If you had," Miss Carner said coldly, "Miss Knight might have been found by now."

  The servant's lips tightened. "I did what he told me to do," she mumbled. "I always do."

  Miss Carner stepped into the hall, and back into the nineteenth century. The years had passed by this house leaving only their fusty accumulation of the odors of bacon and coffee, moth-balls and must, disinfectant and coal gas, to tell that living persons had dwelt there since that hour in the single digit years of the century, when Marianna Knight was carried through its door, separated forever from the chairs and tables and rugs and curtains she had lovingly assembled.

  Phyllis and her father and the servant who had tended their wants had stepped so lightly on the turkey red hall and staircase carpet that it seemed still new. The dark wood panelling climbed shoulder high. Above it magenta wallpaper, dyed deeper by soot and dust, defied the decades. A brass wall bracket with frosted bowl belonged to the gas-lit days, its single electric bulb an interloper. Behind the street door, a coat tree stretched its bare, bronze arms above a carved wood bench. A tall jardiniere beside the coat rack held a man's umbrella and a matching cane, each topped by the ivory head of a dog. Brown plush curtains, looped back from brass rings upon a wooden pole over closed solid doors, barred the entrance to the parlor. The housekeeper slid the doors open.

  "Go on in," she said. "Here's another one," she announced.

  A thin voice piped, "Come in. You, too."

  The parlor doors rolled together behind Mary Carner.

  The autumn sunlight trickled through dingy Nottingham curtains and overdrapes of dark plush into a long, high-ceilinged room. Near the window stood a grand piano, its keyboard closed, its rack holding yellowed music sheets; in front of that, a polished, mahogany swivel stool, and in the corner behind it, a rubber plant, nearly ceiling tall. The carpet was Aubusson, splashed with huge flowers and leaves of faded green and pink and blue. Against the brown wallpaper hung dark, oil-painted landscapes in heavy gilded box frames, glass covered. The marble mantel, with its black coal grate, in which a bright fire burned, had a simple dignity, but its classic lines went down in despair under the weight of an ormolu clock and a pair of rearing bronze horses. Against a wall stood a long sofa, with elaborately carved wooden frame and thin seat upholstered in a faded damask that once was salmon pink, and opposite, in the corner nearest to the portiere-hung sliding doors, a small gilt chair with square seat, right-angled back, beside a marble topped table which held a red plush photograph album and a painted glass lamp. The chairs and sofas sagged under the ladies and gentlemen of the press.

  Two tall armchairs of green velvet, with matching ottomans, high tufted backs, and crocheted antimacassars, stood vis-a-vis, before the fireplace. In one sat Lyman Knight, seeming cut out of the same piece of gray cloth as the sack suit that hung loosely on his frame.

  Lyman Knight had a long mustache, shaggy, ends curling upward, and furry eyebrows that made a fringe across his forehead. His blue eyes were faded, deep sunk in a cadaverous face, his nose high-bridged, aristocratic, his lips thin and blue. Two long yellow teeth projected like fangs over his upper lip as he talked. The aroma of camphor hung over him.

  He seemed to Mary Carner something that had long been shut up in a closet. His eyes on this morning were as though they were seeing the light for the first time in years.

  In the armchair opposite him sat a very young man, in a neat business suit, with a dark fedora on his curly brown hair, rosy cheeks, one of them scarred in a jagged line from eye to chin. The young man frowned over a notebook.

  Mary Carner looked at the young man's feet. She walked across the room, bent over his shoulder, said: "Hello. You're from headquarters?"

  The young man cocked his head. "Uh huh?" The affirmation had a question mark.

  "I'm Mary Carner of Blankfort's store."

  "Pleased to meet you." The young man looked vague but amiable. "This ain't no bargain sale," he added helpfully.

  "I know that." Miss Carner was faintly irritated. "Do you know Inspector Heinsheimer? I'm a friend of his. Worked with him on the McAndrew case."

  "Never heard of it," said the young man blandly. "But who am I to ask for references? I ain't running this. It's open to the public, like Central Park. Reese is the name. Sit down and behave yourself." He patted the arm of his chair.

  Mary Carner sat down gingerly on the arm of Detective Reese's chair.

  Lyman Knight's eyes pounced on her. "We do not abuse the furniture," he said pontifically.

  Miss Carner jumped up. The young detective drew her down. "It's O.K., Mister. The lady's the law, too."

  "Yes," said Mary quickly. "I'm the law, but I'm Phyllis' friend, too. I'm the person who called up here every day. I'm the person who came here Monday night."

  "Oh, did you?" Lyman Knight's eyes went blank.

  The reporters and Detective Reese looked at Miss Carner with quickened interest.

  "I'd like to ask a question." Miss Carner got off the arm of the chair. "What, Mister Knight, made you suddenly decide to ask the police to help you find your daughter?"

  Lyman Knight frowned down at his hands. His thin gray fingers moved nervously. "Why, she didn't come home," he said at last. His voice rose to a crack at the end of the sentence.

  "But she had failed to come home for ten days before you thought of asking for help in locating her. Weren't you disturbed before?"

  "Not at all. Not at all. My daughter never told me where she went." There was a little whine of self-pity. "I never knew what she was doing."

  "Didn't anyone in the household know? Someone knew whether to expect her for dinner or not, didn't they? As I remember her, she was always very precise."

  "Not at all…. Not at all." Lyman Knight waved a deprecatory hand. "My daughter …gentlemen and ladies, you must realize how difficult it is for me to discuss my family affairs with strangers…my daughter was a…how shall I put it?…very peculiar person. She bad none of the proper…proper filial instincts. She never confided in her father. She followed her own whims in everything."

  "Then," a newspaper woman on the sofa spoke up, "you did not approve of your daughter's activities? You didn't like her being a lawyer?"

  Lyman Knight's eyes narrowed. "She failed to ask my approval or disapproval," he said. "She came and went as she pleased. She had her private income - her inheritance from her sainted mother. I was in no position to forbid her to do what she wished to do."

  "But you tried to stop her? You didn't approve?"

  "Understand me." Lyman Knight was cackling with excitement now. "I could merely counsel. I could merely advise. Fathers have, unfortunately, in these days, no control over their daughters, no control whatever. The world has changed sadly. In her mother's day - in my dear Marianna's day . . .

  "Got a picture of Marianna around?" a photographer demanded.

  Lyman Knight glared. "Young man, learn to respect the sainted dead." He bit his lips. He pulled a yellowed silk handkerchief from his pocket, raised it to his eyes. "My daughter, unfortunately," he went on, after he had composed himself, "did not resemble her mother. Not in any single feature. She had no proper affection or respect for her father. She was completely selfish. The most selfish, self-centered person I have ever known." His voice was bitter. "She went her foolish course among places and persons where no lady should ever have gone. No, I did not forbid her this house. Perhaps I should have asserted my parental authority. But I am a lonely old man, who could not bear to drive a willful daughter from his hearth." Again the handkerchief at his eyes. He seemed more shrunken, more pathetic than before.

  Detective Reese looked up from his notebook. "Did you and your daughter quarrel?" he asked.

  Lyman Knight's head jerked up. "I do not quarrel," he said with dignity.

  "But this could hardly have been a happy household," Mary Carner ventured, "with your daughter going her own way and you disapproving."

  Lyman Knight's furry eyebrows bristled like a dog's hackles. "It was a peaceful household," he replied. "I did not interfere with her. Now mind, ladies and gentlemen, and please do not misunderstand me…. I have no desire whatever to impugn my daughter's character. She is a lady. No daughter of mine would be anything save a lady. She has never descended to vulgar language or behavior. She does not smoke cigarettes. She does not, as far as I have been able to learn, drink intoxicating liquors . . ."

  "How about love life?" a reporter interrupted. "Any boy friends?"

  Lyman Knight drew himself up against the back of his chair. "I object to your manner of address, young man. It is, to speak mildly, vulgar and common. My daughter may have flouted my wishes in many respects but her name is not to be bandied about. You will remember that, all of you…You will note also that my daughter had a fiancé. His name is -"

  "Now we're getting somewheres," Detective Reese whispered.

  Lyman Knight stopped to glare at the young detective. "My daughter's fiancé," he went on, "was Wilfred Van Arsdale. He resides at Troy, New York. His family has long been friendly with my family. He is, I believe, in the collar manufacturing business."