Call After Midnight (22 page)

“Besides,” Mrs. Brown said, “it’s too soon. For you and Peter to make up, I mean.”

“Oh,” Jenny said.

Mrs. Brown gave her a shrewd glance. “I’m nobody’s fool. No, it wouldn’t look right. Too much of a hurry for you and Peter to think about marrying again. Yet in another way, of course—well, Fiora was my niece and all that but she did get your husband away from you. I guess you have a right to take him back. You shouldn’t have lost him in the first place. You ought to have known better.”

Jenny opened her mouth and shut it again. Mrs. Brown shook her head with a kind of friendly disapproval. “You’re the head-in-the-clouds type. Idealistic, I guess is the word. Now Fiora was practical. She knew how to get Peter. Good old sex appeal, you can’t beat it,” she said in a kind and matter-of-fact way as if she were giving a recipe for a cake.

“But he—he married her.”

Mrs. Brown looked surprised. “Why, of course. Even a donkey will move if you hold out carrots that look good enough.”

“But that—that doesn’t last.” The cake gets stale, Jenny thought weirdly. So Peter began to telephone me. No, that’s wrong; he never stopped telephoning me.

“Oh well, by then she’d got him married hard and fast. Now mind you, she was my niece. But I knew her through and through. The minute she mentioned him I could guess she was going to get him. First time she’d ever had a chance at money, poor girl. That brings me to what I wanted to say,” she said briskly. “I appreciate your telling Peter to give me an allowance. More than I’d expect of you. I don’t mind saying that it makes all the difference to me. I got the letters.”

It was beginning to be a peculiar kind of Alice-in-Wonderland conversation. “What letters?”

“Fiora’s letters to me. I thought you knew. Mr. Calendar asked me to send for them and I did right away. He said I’d better have them sent to the hotel where I was staying before I read about Fiora. He said it would be quicker. So sure enough I went around there this morning and the desk clerk had them for me and gave them to me. I have the whole bundle of them. Right there in my handbag.”

Jenny looked at the big black handbag which did in truth seem to bulge. “
Cal
told you to send for them?”

“He asked me one morning—Monday it was, we were walking along that wall by the water—if I’d saved any of Fiora’s letters and I told him every one since she left home. Not that she wrote often. But anyway I phoned my next-door neighbor to go into my house and get them out of the top dresser drawer. She had the house key in case of fire or anything. So she did and mailed them and I’ll give them to Mr. Calendar as soon as I see him. Tonight I expect. He’ll likely come back with Peter. I do hope so.” For just an instant Mrs. Brown looked rather glum. “I’m not sure I want to stay in the house alone all night.”

Jenny remembered Mrs. Brown and Cal, walking along the sea wall, Mrs. Brown talking and Cal listening so intently. Fiora’s letters of course, which just might tell something of that long blank space in Fiora’s life, and just might tell of some motive for murder.

Jenny wanted those letters. It struck her coldly that somebody else might want them, too. She had a strong impulse to warn Mrs. Brown.

But Mrs. Brown went off on another tangent. “You’re not a bit like what I expected you to be,” she said confidingly.

Again it took Jenny by surprise. Mrs. Brown said, “I thought from Fiora’s letters that you were—oh, different. Kind of haughty and pretty hard, rich and then married to more money and didn’t care about Peter at all, just his money.”

Jenny said stiffly, “I cared about Peter.”

“It’s not going to be easy though,” Mrs. Brown said with one of her flashes of common sense, “going back to Peter, I mean. A lot of water’s flowed under the bridge. Maybe you’ve both changed more than you think. Frankly if I were you, money or no money, I’d take Mr. Calendar.”

“You—I mean—” Jenny matched Mrs. Brown’s candor. “Cal hasn’t asked me and never will.”

“Why not?” Mrs. Brown asked with interest.

“Why, because he—I—we are friends and that’s all—”

Mrs. Brown interrupted. “The more fool you. Oh, well, it’s none of my business. I’d better be getting to the train. I just thought I’d run up and see you and rest a little—as long as Blanche wasn’t at home. My, how she’s come up in the world. I can remember when she didn’t have a second pair of stockings to her name. Oh, they always kept up a good front, Blanche’s folks. Big house, mortgaged to the roof. Big ideas—at least her father had, he was always going to make a lot of money somehow, never did. Mother was all prunes and prisms. Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. Wouldn’t let Blanche go out with the boys in town. She thought Blanche was too good for them.”

“Perhaps she was.”

Mrs. Brown gave her a penetrating glance. “Don’t go feeling sorry for Blanche. She can take care of herself. Her father died and Blanche got the insurance money and left town so fast you couldn’t see her for dust. Fiora was determined to go with her. Fiora had the beauty and the charm, I’d guess you’d call it. Blanche had the brains.” Her eyes fastened upon Jenny’s desk clock and she sprang up. “I must run. Peter said he didn’t know when he’d get back so I’d better take this train and have Victor meet me and—thanks for the tea. I do feel cooler. Good-bye,” said Mrs. Brown and was out the door, her full black skirt billowing, her handbag clutched firmly against her bosom. The firmness of her grip rather reassured Jenny but not entirely. She hurried after Mrs. Brown, who stood with her thumb on the elevator button. “Mrs. Brown, do be careful.”

Mrs. Brown gave her one glance. “About these letters? I wasn’t born yesterday. Not,” she said thoughtfully, “that I think there’s any motive for murder they can find in them. But then you never know.”

“Wait, Mrs. Brown, is there anything in those letters, anything you can remember that could possibly—”

The elevator door opened and Mrs. Brown said, “Not a thing that I can remember,” gave a jaunty wave and entered the elevator. “Thanks for the tea. And thanks for telling Peter to give me an allowance—”

The door closed. Jenny went back slowly. It was a perfectly impossible, erratic kind of visit on Mrs. Brown’s part and at the same time, somehow, typical of Mrs. Brown. She’d wanted to rest so she went to Blanche’s apartment; Blanche wasn’t at home so somehow she’d found Jenny’s address—the telephone book was the likeliest way—and calmly marched in, asked for iced tea, spoke whatever came into her mind, filled in the time before her train and departed.

She hoped Mrs. Brown fully understood the possible importance of those letters. Yet, as Mrs. Brown said, she was nobody’s fool. If there was by any chance some explanation of Fiora’s murder in those letters she felt sure that Mrs. Brown by now would have fished it up.

Yet she had an uneasy picture of Mrs. Brown going through the crowded Grand Central Station, her handbag snatched adroitly out of her grip—and the snatcher vanishing swiftly among the crowds of commuters. In any event, whoever had stalked Jenny that morning could not have stalked Mrs. Brown also; nobody could be two places at once. She wondered what Peter and Cal were doing in town. Mrs. Brown had given her almost too much to think about. Mrs. Brown had an unnerving way of being right.

Someone walked along the corridor and Jenny jumped up and listened and didn’t take a long breath until the footsteps went on past her door, and another apartment door opened and closed with a bang. The point now was that she would permit nothing in the world to induce her to venture out of her safe, newly locked apartment until—well, until she was safe. Ten minutes later, however, she left it in headlong flight.

She had gone into her bedroom to get something, she never remembered what, and saw on the dressing table a small bottle, labeled Mrs. Vleedam, two for sleep. This time it was full of yellow capsules.

Mrs. Brown. Only Mrs. Brown had entered the bedroom. She had come out when she heard Jenny with the tea in the next room. Dodson had sat stodgily on a chair near the door and had hurried away, as if it had been he, not Jenny, who was the frightened one.

Her whole concept of Mrs. Brown wavered, cracked and shot into a new picture. Mrs. Brown had been—she’d said—in New York quite by chance the night when Fiora was killed. If the police had investigated her whereabouts and activities that night Jenny knew nothing of it. Mrs. Brown had claimed that Fiora had made a will in her favor. Mrs. Brown had frankly demanded Fiora’s “three fur coats,” her jewelry, her personal possessions.

Mrs. Brown could conceivably have got into Peter’s house without the knowledge of Blanche, or Peter—or Fiora. It was hard to guess just how but it was hard to guess just how anybody could have entered the house and shot Fiora and it had been done.

For a moment Jenny toyed with the unlikely idea that Fiora had invited Mrs. Brown and installed her secretly in the house, awaiting perhaps an auspicious moment to tell Peter that her aunt was there, but it was too unlikely; she discarded it.

Jenny couldn’t guess either just how Mrs. Brown could have returned secretly to New York, used the stolen key, tried to enter her apartment, pretended to have a message for her. She didn’t see just how Mrs. Brown could have spent that morning stalking her without being seen.

But Mrs. Brown and only Mrs. Brown could have left that full bottle of sleeping pills on the dressing table. So why? There was no possible motive attributable to Mrs. Brown. There was no possible motive attributable to anyone Jenny knew, either, but it had happened.

She was holding the bottle, staring at it when the telephone rang. It could be Cal or Peter and she had reached the end of her rope of endurance; she only wanted Cal or Peter to come, to take her away, to take care of her. She cried, “Hello—hello—”

A voice whispered into her ear, “Go ahead. Take the pills. It’s the easiest way.”

Jenny literally could not speak. Whoever was at the other end of the wire seemed to sense it. “Scared, aren’t you? It’ll get worse. Take the pills. They’re right there—in your hand, aren’t they? I thought so. Take them. It’ll be easier for you than—are you listening?”

She had a fantastic impulse to say, no, I’ve fainted. No sensible words came to her mind or her tongue.

“Easier,” the voice whispered. “You’ve not got a chance. You may as well give up. The pills are easier—quicker—” The telephone clicked.

Jenny’s throat unlocked. She screamed, “Who are you? Who are you?” and heard only the hysteria of her own voice and thought, this will never do. She had to save herself, keep her head, save herself.

She put down the telephone. She could see Mrs. Brown in her black clothes, sitting in a stifling telephone booth somewhere. A whisper has no gender, a hoarse kind of whisper yet all too clear. It could have been a man or a woman, there was no way to identify a whisper.

Mrs. Brown or someone else? A curious notion thrust itself into her mind. She couldn’t remember the name of the locksmith who had put on new locks for her. She could find his shop again, over on Third Avenue. She looked at her watch; if she hurried he might still be there.

But first, quickly, somehow change her appearance. She snatched out a raincoat; she tied a scarf over her head; she snatched out sunglasses. She saw herself in the mirror and knew it was all wrong; she
looked
disguised that hot evening. It would have to do. She took her handbag and opened the door of her apartment.

The corridor was safe; people were now coming home from work. A couple she vaguely remembered, laden down with grocery sacks, nodded at her in a friendly but rather puzzled way—that was because of her raincoat and dark glasses. No one was in the elevator but several people were waiting for it in the foyer when she emerged. No one so much as looked at her.

Better not take a taxi. The streets were always full between five and six o’clock. But too full, perhaps; it would be too easy for someone to approach her. A taxi drove up to the door, a woman got out and paid the driver and Jenny hailed him. “Third Avenue, please. Turn right. After you turn the corner, go slowly. I’m trying to find a—a certain locksmith.”

It was in the middle of the block. A large gilded key hung above the door. She thrust money at the taxidriver and said, “Wait for me, can you?”

“I’ll try,” he said nonchalantly. “Lost your key, huh?”

“I’ll not be a minute.”

The door was still open; the little store was lighted and the man who had changed the locks for her was there and recognized her. “I was about to shut up for the night.” He frowned. “Didn’t you get your key?”

Jenny leaned against the counter. “What key—”

“Well, I gave you two last night but I had a duplicate here in case—anyway I gave it to the messenger you sent”

“What messenger—”

“Why, the one you sent. You phoned and told me you’d locked yourself out and asked me if I had another key and I said yes, so you said you’d send a boy for it and you did and I gave it to him. Look out lady, you’d better sit down. You look queer.”

I
T WAS, OF COURSE,
an obvious place to inquire. A telephone book, the yellow pages, the address of a locksmith near her apartment. Anybody could have found it with a little patience.

She said, “When did the messenger get here?”

The locksmith looked surprised. “This morning. Early.”

So during the previous night which had seemed so quiet someone had entered the apartment house, approached her door, discovered the new lock.

She said, “Thank you. I’ve got a taxi waiting—”

He was looking troubled and puzzled. “Lady,” he called after her, “Wasn’t it all right? The key, I mean—”

She didn’t have any idea what she said if anything. The taxi was still at the curb. The taxidriver opened the door for her. “Good thing you came out. There’s a cop beginning to look at me. Get your key all right?”

“No, that is, yes. I mean—wait a minute.”

“Can’t wait, lady. Back to where I picked you up?”

“No!”

“Well, make up your mind, I’ve got to keep moving.”

Where? She gave him Cal’s address.

She ought to have questioned the locksmith about the voice over the telephone; he had said “you” telephoned. It must have been a woman’s voice; no, a man could speak in a high falsetto. A man could imitate a woman’s voice. It was harder for a woman to imitate a man’s voice. It would not have been hard for Mrs. Brown; her voice was naturally hoarse and deep.