Call After Midnight (21 page)

She was half afraid to look around her. Yet she must look around for some familiar face—yet unfamiliar, too. The face of murder can have no likeness to some known and familiar face, she thought strangely, and forced herself to turn. People sauntered past. People came up and went down the steps. She saw no one she knew, no back that looked familiar, no walk that struck a chord of recognition.

“Don’t wear a dress like that. Too bright. Too easy to follow,” the taxidriver had said. He had been friendly to her and angry because someone was following her and he, the taxidriver, was an unwilling partner. He’d left his fare. Where was his fare? Who was his fare? Go home, she told herself. Hurry. There was no other taxi and she wouldn’t have taken a taxi and enclosed herself in a space which could be invaded. Nothing could happen to her along a sunny city street. Don’t run, she thought. Walk along slowly as if nothing has happened.

Nothing
had
happened. Walk, then, deliberately; an instinct of the quarried warned her not to show that she knew herself pursued. She crossed to the east side of Fifth Avenue because there were doormen at the great apartment buildings. She saw a policeman on a corner and thought of going up to him and telling him that she was being followed.

She knew what he would say. “Who’s following you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know.”

She was very careful about street lights, red and green; once she found herself with horror too near the curb when the light changed. A sudden thrust from behind could send her into the path of the stream of cars. She slid back among the little cluster of people waiting with her. None of them seemed interested in her; there were two school children, an old lady, a delivery man in uniform, a woman with a shopping bag. Nobody she had ever seen before. She turned; she crossed Madison and nothing could happen there either; the street was crowded.

By the time she reached her own apartment house she was out of breath, yet she hadn’t been running. The hall seemed gloomy after the glare of the sun. Her heels rang out in its stillness. She didn’t stop to look in her mailbox, but turned swiftly toward the little elevator and a man stood within it. He wore a sports shirt and carried a black leather jacket over his arm. He was Waldo Dodson and as she drew back he caught her wrist and dragged her into the elevator.

“What do you want?” Her voice was high, almost screaming.

He had punched the elevator button, the right one, the button for the third floor. The door slid inexorably across. “Talk to you,” he said.

The elevator began to rise. She had a suffocating feeling of claustrophobia, shut into that little cage with Dodson.

“What do you want?” she said again.

He gave her a sullen but perceptive look. “Just to talk. No sense in your being scared.”

She could push the alarm button; it was red, there on the panel. What would happen? Probably the elevator cage would merely stall and hold her there, alone with Dodson, until eventually the superintendent came to see what was wrong.

The raisin eyes in his pudding face had a flicker of interest. “What’s the matter with you?”

But she hadn’t seen him anywhere that morning; she’d have recognized the black leather jacket. On the other hand he
could
have followed her from the Museum; he
could
have witnessed her departure, guessed her destination, taken a taxi and arrived to wait for her, hidden there in the little cage.

“Can’t you talk?” he said. “You look scared to death. I told you, I only want to talk. I’m not going to hurt you. Here we are.”

The door slid open.

She wouldn’t let him into her apartment. Surely there must be somebody at home, somebody behind the rank of closed doors leading to other apartments. Her feet seemed rooted to the floor. He gave a kind of exasperated shrug and led the way to her own door.

He knew that. He had known she lived on the third floor. He had known her address; Monday, the day of the inquest, when he had brought her and Blanche back to town, he had brought her straight to her address without being told. She had thought then only that someone, Blanche or Cal, had told him, if she thought of it at all.

“Well,” he said, “going to open the door?”

The new lock gleamed brightly in the small light on the corridor wall. She wondered if he’d known that, too, and if he had the key to the old lock. He was looking puzzled and impatient. “I’m not going to hurt you. What I’m going to tell you is important to you and important to Peter Vleedam.”

She found her voice. “What?”

“I’m not going to shout it out here in the hall. If you want to hear about it, okay. If not, I’ll leave now.”

She wanted to scream. She wanted to shout, leave now and never come back! Suppose he was speaking the truth; suppose he really had evidence—important to Peter, important to her. She avoided his eyes for fear he would guess her thoughts. She looked down. He was wearing rubber-soled tennis shoes.

She would never have heard the tread of rubber-soled tennis shoes echoing with a persistent little click through the long, nearly empty galleries of the Museum. It decided her. She unlocked the door and walked into her apartment. He followed and closed the door behind him. She could have walked into a trap. She faced him. “Well, what is it?”

He dropped the black leather jacket, which gave him a curiously tough look, like a rather over-age member of a juvenile gang.

He glanced around and without invitation sat down. “Hot this morning,” he said. “I came in early. Took the day off. I’ve been waiting a long time for you. Rang the bell. You didn’t answer. Came up here and knocked. No answer.”

“How did you know my address? How did you know what floor?”

He looked disgusted. “For gosh sake, somebody told me your address when I brought you into town—Blanche Fair, I think. And I looked at your mailbox in the foyer.”

Obvious. She said, “What is it you have to talk about?”

He puffed out his full lips, seemed to debate and said, “May as well put it in one word. Money.”

A kind of icy yet sweaty and hot clamp seemed to release her. She moved to a chair; she sat down. She was no longer afraid of him. He wanted to talk about money. Then her thoughts, released too, began to race. “You mean blackmail!”

“I wouldn’t call it that. But Vleedam’s got a lot of money.”

“You’d better explain.”

His eyes went around the apartment; he puffed out his lips broodingly again and finally said, “Maybe what I can tell you is worth something. Maybe it’s worth a whole lot.”

She was getting a firmer control. “Then you’d better talk to Peter.”

He shook his head. “No. I don’t want to do that.”

“There’s no use talking to me. Why not talk to Peter?”

He gave her a suddenly hard look. “Because I’m afraid of him if you want to know. You can talk to him yourself.”

She had opened the windows that morning. The air seemed sultry and hot. She didn’t want to approach the windows to close them. She didn’t want to take her eyes off his flaccid face with its little eyes.

“What do you want me to tell him?”

“Just that. Tell him I can do something for him maybe. If he pays me enough.”

“What do you know about Fiora’s murder?”

He shot her a sullen glance and did not reply.

“You
can’t
have—have any evidence involving Peter!”

He didn’t even look at her.

“He was with me! He has an alibi!”

He didn’t quite shrug; the effect was the same.

She said boldly, “Why don’t you go to the police?”

He lifted his eyes for one scornful second.

“You’d rather blackmail Peter.”

“I tell you I didn’t say that.” He leaned forward. The heat of the day, or anxiety which he tried to hide, made his face glisten wetly. “Listen. I’m doing him a favor and you, too. Why not get paid for it? The police are about to arrest him. You’re going to stick to his alibi but it won’t be worth a red cent, because they’ll say you had a motive, it’s all a put-up job, that’s why you went out there that night she was killed. Just to fake an alibi. You ask him whether he’d rather go to trial or fork over a little bit of money.”

He scooped up his leather coat, gave her a nervous but determined glance and left.

She couldn’t hear him in the corridor outside; she did hear the elevator when it started down and remembered that she now had a routine; she must put the chain bolt on the door. After she did that she stood for a moment at an open window, feeling as if Dodson had left some ugly fog in the room itself and fresh air might help dispel it.

S
HE COULDN’T TELEPHONE TO
warn Peter; she didn’t think she should telephone even to Cal in the event that police were in the house on the Sound or that their conversation would be overheard.

She did not believe that Waldo Dodson actually threatened Peter. Peter had not murdered Fiora and nobody could prove that he had. On the other hand there could be something of a hundred trivial somethings which might weigh the dangerous balance of the scales against Peter. Dodson could not be lightly dismissed.

Any act was better than doing nothing. She looked up Cal’s number in the telephone book and dialed it. She could safely tell Mrs. Cunningham that she wanted to see Cal and Mrs. Cunningham would pass on the message when next Cal talked to her. After a while a woman answered, said that Mrs. Cunningham was out and that she was a cleaning woman but she’d leave a message. Jenny gave her only her name. But Dodson would certainly wait; Dodson would want to bargain.

She took off her orange dress and resolved never to wear it again. She was now in fact a prisoner in her own apartment. It couldn’t go on, that dreadful kind of hiding. She made herself wait until four o’clock and then telephoned to Mrs. Cunningham again and this time got no answer at all. In a kind of desperation she tried Cal’s—and Peter’s—office number. The girl at the switchboard told her that Mr. Calendar had not been in that day.

Jenny could have cried when she put down the telephone, even though she had known—at least guessed—that Cal was with Peter. She was, however, wrong about that. A few moments later Mrs. Brown arrived.

She had found her way to Jenny’s apartment; she rang and knocked and when Jenny remembered to say, “Who is it?” before she so much as opened the door the slit that the chain allowed, Mrs. Brown said heatedly, “It’s me. Fiora’s aunt. Why don’t you open the door?”

Jenny reviewed possible danger from Mrs. Brown as swiftly as she had reviewed a possible danger from Waldo Dodson and even at that moment her caution seemed preposterous yet perfectly matter of fact and important, too.

She could not believe that Mrs. Brown had killed Fiora; aside from the fact that Fiora was her niece, there was no reason
to
believe that Mrs. Brown had been anywhere near Peter’s house at the time of the murder. Mrs. Brown could not have been so surprisingly adroit as to make her way to Jenny’s apartment Saturday night, announcing that she had a message, and at that time, according to Mrs. Brown, she had not even known of Fiora’s murder. Mrs. Brown could not have been so surprisingly adroit in following Jenny, yet evading her at every corner that morning in the Museum. Mrs. Brown could not have followed her again so adroitly in a taxicab. It simply was not a reasonable notion to entertain. Jenny opened the door and Mrs. Brown popped in like a balloon, but clad in black from head to toe.

She wiped off her face with a black-gloved hand. “Such weather. All at once like this. You don’t have any iced tea, do you?”

If Jenny had required reassurance that did it. “I’ll fix some. Do sit down.” But first she put the chain bolt on again.

Mrs. Brown who had plopped down in a chair eyed her with a shrewdness that reminded Jenny of Fiora. “What are you scared about?”

An unexpected and strong impulse to tell Mrs. Brown the whole story assailed Jenny. Mrs. Brown was shrewd, underneath her brassiness there was a kind of layer of common sense, and she could have had nothing to do with murder.

On the other hand, she was a talker. Jenny said evasively, “One gets in the habit in a big city.”

“Hmm, I suppose so,” Mrs. Brown said doubtfully and looked around the room with a growing air of disappointment. “Not much of a place, is it? I thought Peter would have set you up in fine style. After the divorce, I mean.” She brightened. “Maybe, you have a finer house somewhere in—oh, Florida or somewhere like that.”

“No, this is home. I’ll make the tea.”

“Make it strong,” said Mrs. Brown with a sigh and took off her black hat.

Getting out ice and waiting for the water to boil, Jenny wondered just why Mrs. Brown had come to see her. When she returned to the living room with the tea Mrs. Brown apparently heard her and emerged from the bedroom. “I was just looking around,” she said without the faintest embarrassment. “I must say it’s cozy. Not like Blanche’s place must be though. All I saw was the outside but it looked like a palace.”

“Blanche earns a larger salary than I do. Lemon?”

“Well, I didn’t get a chance to see inside Blanche’s apartment. I went to the door but they said she was out. I’ve got to get the five-thirty train. Thanks.” She took the tea and drank thirstily and said, “I came into town this morning with Peter and that friend of his, Mr. Calendar.”

“I thought they were both in the country,” Jenny said sharply.

Mrs. Brown put more sugar into her tea. “Maybe they are by now. I haven’t seen them since this morning.” She smoothed her skirt. “I really hate black. Never buy it. But of course I had to. The whole outfit in one of those village stores. For the services, you know.”

“The—oh—funeral?” Jenny suddenly recalled it had been set for yesterday, while she was walking or sitting in a movie without seeing it.

She said huskily, “More tea?”

“I don’t mind if I do.” Mrs. Brown leaned plumply forward to hold out her glass but would not be diverted. “Private services. Peter insisted. Not even Blanche. Only John Calendar. Of course I didn’t expect you to come. It wouldn’t have been proper.”

Jenny swallowed with a curiously dry throat.