Conspiracy of Silence (12 page)

It was pure luck that I got the notice as early as I did. That morning I trudged to my office to take care of some paperwork relating to another job; without that work to occupy me, I would have headed out for Rahway at the crack of dawn. Instead, I found, in the morning mail, the following letter—if it could be called that—enclosed in an unmarked sheet of paper:

DROP THIS CASE IF YOU WANT

TO SEE LIZBETH ALIVE

The writing was in plain block letters; the writer had used a blue fountain pen in a hand that seemed to shake slightly.

The first thing I did was to pick up the phone and call Thornleigh.

The phone was answered by Joseph, whose voice was almost shrill with consternation and worry. It didn't take me long to find out the essentials of what had happened.

“Is Lizbeth missing?” I barked.

“Y-yes, sir,” Joseph stammered. “Taken in the night. . . . The whole household is in an uproar . . . .”

“Have you called the police?”

“Yes. They're here now.”

“Good. Keep 'em there. I'm coming right away.”

Stuffing the note and its envelope into my pocket, I flew out the door and into my Ford. I had no choice but to take the Miller Elevated Highway, the western backbone of Manhattan, up to the still new George Washington Bridge, which had opened only five years before. Across the bridge, I roared through Englewood, Teaneck, Hackensack, and what seemed like dozens of other deceptively placid communities until I finally came to the southern outskirts of Pompton Lakes. At this point I floored the pedal until I skidded recklessly into the interminable drive up to the front door of Thornleigh.

Police cars were littered like untidy children's blocks near the entrance, and I nearly rammed one of them in the back in my haste to pull up and get out in one motion. My pounding on the door raised a thunderous din within, but in seconds Joseph had opened the door and let me in.

What I found was pandemonium. Servants seemed to be running around to no apparent purpose; Florence Crawford was collapsed on a sofa with her head in her hands, weeping loudly; police were everywhere, hardly less confused than the servants; and, to my surprise, Dr. Nathan Granger was on the scene.

So was Frederick Taber, the Pompton Lakes police chief. I went up to him.

“What can you tell me, Taber?” I snapped.

He looked me up and down for a second and was on the verge of saying something he might regret; but he settled for: “What's it to you, Scintilla?”

“Lizbeth Crawford is my client, Taber. I need to know what's going on.”

He relented grudgingly. “I don't know much more than what I've been told. Miss Crawford was apparently seized in her bedroom a little past one in the morning. Some of the servants heard a scuffle and maybe a scream, but this house is so huge that no one could immediately figure out where the disturbance was coming from. By the time they realized it was from Miss Crawford's room, she was long gone.”

“Have you been to that room?” I asked.

“Yes, of course,” Taber replied with some asperity.

“Let's go there.”

I waited for him to move. Once again he looked me over; then, with ill-concealed irritation, he led me off to the west wing.

To my surprise, Lizbeth's bedroom was on the ground floor. It was a spacious room, and every object in it spoke powerfully of her presence, not least the faint trace of her usual perfume. The furniture was slightly disarranged, but somewhat less than I had expected; the bedcovers had been pulled violently back and were partially on the floor, and a chair seemed to be knocked over, but otherwise the place seemed to be in good order.

A window was yawning wide open. Through it you could almost make out—if you knew where to look—the clearing where the Crawford family gravesite lay.

I went to the window at once.

“No one has touched anything?” It was more a statement than a question.

“That's right,” Taber said.

“I assume you've noticed that there's no sign of forced entry,” I said. “The latch is open. All someone had to do was pull up the window and they'd be in.”

I peered out the window to the ground a few feet below. The garden bed there had been violently disturbed, with flowers crushed and upturned and with what seemed like dozens of footprints in the wet earth.

“There's no doubt she was taken through the window?” I said.

“That's how I see it,” Taber replied.

“Anyone hear a car drive off, or anything like that?”

“No. It isn't likely someone would pull up to the front door, go around to the side of the house, drag Miss Crawford out, and drive off. They must have taken her through the woods there”—he pointed in the direction of the cemetery, beyond which was the road that Gene Merriwether and I had driven along on that night we dug up Frank Crawford's grave—“and had their car over there. That road isn't used much, and no one would notice a car parked there for an hour or more.”

“Yeah, you're right,” I said. After a pause: “So what do you make of this?”

Taber looked me in the face and said: “What do
you
make of it, shamus?”

Suddenly I got steamed. “What do I make of it, Taber? I'll tell you what I make of it!
This
is what I make of it!”

And I pulled out of my pocket the note I'd received that morning and stuck it under Taber's nose.

He read it in seconds, then turned to me with both alarm and suspicion in his face.

“What's the meaning of this?” he said gruffly. “What's been going on here? Whose business have you been poking your nose in?”

“Lay off me, Taber,” I snapped back. “I was hired by Lizbeth . . . Miss Crawford to do a job. I've been doing it. Someone obviously doesn't like some of the things I've found.” I held my hand up in his face before he could interrupt me. “You know I'm not going to tell you what those things are—they're my affair and they don't concern you.

“What
does
concern you is finding Miss Crawford. And you'd better start by looking at that window.”

“What about the window?” Taber queried petulantly.

“You moron, look at that latch.
It's unlocked.
What chance was there that Miss Crawford would have left it like that on a cold November night? Clearly it had been unlocked at some point yesterday when she was not here, precisely to make the job of snatching her easier.

“In other words, Taber, this was an inside job. I'll tell you this much: what I've found has a pretty direct bearing on several members of this family, and it's as sure as anything that one of them had something to do with this. They're obviously trying to scare me off, and they're holding Lizbeth hostage until I walk away and promise to keep my mouth shut.”

Taber peered at me closely, as if I were some baffling specimen he was gazing at through a microscope. “You're accusing a member of the Crawford family for kidnapping one of their own?”

“It doesn't have to be one of them,” I said. “It could be any number of others. But someone had to have had access to Lizbeth's room sometime yesterday, and that points very strongly to someone living here. They would have the opportunity, and I suspect they would have the motive.”

I paused while I fished the envelope out of my pocket.

“And look at this, Taber,” I resumed. “Take a look at that postmark: Pompton Lakes, 10:30
p.m
. yesterday.
This letter was mailed before Lizbeth Crawford was seized.
Whoever wrote and mailed it was awfully certain he was going to succeed in this little kidnapping gig.”

Taber just shook his head. “This is getting way too weird for me, Scintilla.” He took a deep breath. “I can't risk my job arresting a member of the Crawford family unless I have pretty strong evidence. They'll hang me out to dry if I make a mistake.”

“No one's asking you to arrest anybody. Our first priority is to find Lizbeth. After that, you can arrest the man on the moon for all I care.”

“But Scintilla,” Taber warned, “you know you're endangering Miss Crawford's life by pursuing this case. For her sake, you gotta drop it. If someone's so desperate to stop you, they're not going to be shy about knocking her off. You better be careful.”

“Don't worry about me, Taber,” I said. “I want Lizbeth alive a lot more than you do.” I wasn't going to say how much more—because I was trying not to think about that myself. “I have a plan, anyway.”

We marched back into the parlor, where a certain semblance of order had returned.

The first thing I did was to walk up to Dr. Granger and pull him aside.

“Just out of curiosity,” I said with what I will admit was a certain snide tone of voice, “exactly what are you doing here?”

In spite of the hint of fear that lurked in the back of his eyes, he wasn't about to be intimidated.

“Don't try to bully me, Scintilla. I'm the family doctor, remember? Joseph called me because Florence Crawford was in a state of near-collapse. She's still pretty worked up, but the sedative I administered has helped. I knew nothing about this until I came over here a few hours ago.”

I looked into his face pretty much the way Taber had looked into mine a few minutes before.

“So you have no idea what could have happened to Lizbeth?” I said.

“How could I?” Granger replied in mingled confusion and outrage. “Surely you don't think
I
had anything to do with this!”

“No, I don't think that,” I said honestly.

As I began walking away, he grabbed me by the arm.

“Scintilla,” he said nervously. “Listen . . . there's no reason to . . . to spill the beans about Frank Crawford, is there? It could be the end of my career . . . I'm not made of money, Scintilla—my work is all I have . . .” He trailed off indecisively.

“Calm yourself, Granger,” I said. “I'll not blab about anything . . . yet. I gotta find Lizbeth. She knows most of the story, but not quite all of it. We'll let her decide what to cough up and what not to—if she comes back alive.”

I walked away without a backward glance.

Making my way to the couch where Florence Crawford was still sitting, huddled in a ball and weeping quietly, I said:

“Ma'am, I know this is rough on you, but I wonder if I could have a few words.”

After a few seconds, she looked up at me, her tear-stained face the very picture of crestfallen despair.

“Mr. Scintilla,” she almost wailed, “I just want my baby back. She's all I have in the whole world. I have no reason to live if she's . . . gone.”

Either she was the greatest actress in the world or she was telling the plain truth. At least provisionally, I crossed her off the list of suspects.

“Mrs. Crawford, I'll do whatever I can to get your daughter back. I don't think there's any immediate danger of anything serious happening. I'm sorry to say this, but she seems to be a pawn in a larger game.”

Maybe my choice of words was unfortunate, for Florence snapped back: “And what ‘game' might that be, Mr. Scintilla?”

“I think you have a pretty good idea,” I said. “It's the case that Lizbeth had me investigate. As you know, it's upset a lot of people.”

I felt it was the better part of valor not to mention that note I'd received this morning: it would only unnerve her further and make her demand that I give up the hunt. I wasn't quite ready to do that, if I could do so without harming Lizbeth.

Florence Crawford just looked at me pleadingly and said: “I just want to see my daughter alive and well. I don't care what happens to anyone after that.”

I felt dismissed, and I doubted that she had anything of value to say anyway, so I walked away without a word.

My mind was, in any event, working furiously. A number of scenarios had to be considered, each more unsavory than the last.

In spite of his protestations, I wasn't ready to clear Granger. If his piteous pleas to me reflected his real feelings, then he in many ways had the most to lose if the truth about Frank Crawford came out. As he said, he could lose his license and his practice—and then where would he be?

Florence Crawford was probably off the list, for I couldn't see what motive she might have had in having her own daughter kidnapped. Why should she have cared if the fake “death” of Frank Crawford were exposed? I will confess that a suspicion lurked in my mind about her relatives, Daniel and Norma Bisland. Could they have wanted Lizbeth out of the way as a means of gaining the Crawford fortune? In the absence of any descendants, who else would the money go to except the Bisland clan? And yet, the overriding problem with this conjecture was opportunity: how could either Daniel or Norma have gotten into the house to unlock that window latch in Lizbeth's bedroom? They would have to have persuaded Florence to do the job, and I couldn't see her agreeing to that.

And then there was James Crawford himself. He was still the mystery man in this whole case, deliberately confining himself to decades of prison for reasons no one could fathom. I wouldn't be surprised if he had somehow heard of my findings and sought to nip them in the bud. Maybe it was a mistake for me to have seen him at all and thereby to have tipped him off to my investigation of the case that had led to his incarceration. I wouldn't be surprised if he had various confederates whom he would persuade or pressure to do his bidding for him, no matter how unsavory that bidding might be.

There was another prospect that I thought so fantastic that I refused to think of it—yet.

But my first order of business was to settle one simple point. I came up to Joseph, who was hovering ineffectually in the parlor, face contorted with anxiety and hands wringing in a nervous tic. His devotion to Lizbeth was unquestioned, and I saw him as just about the only true ally in this whole twisted household.