Postmark Murder (11 page)

“He was here this morning. He didn’t question her then.”

“He will though,” Charlie said. “He’ll have to. This is a most unusual situation, Laura. I don’t know what to say. In fact, I don’t know what to think. But just now the point seems to be,
was
that man Stanislowski?”

“I THINK SO, CHARLIE
.” He considered that deliberately for a moment as he considered everything. Then he said, “According to Matt and Lieutenant Peabody, Jonny did not recognize him.”

“She didn’t speak to him. But I think she may have been—oh, frightened. Surprised. It was all so sudden. You know how Jonny shrinks into herself when she’s confused, or uncertain. But then after he’d gone she began to cry.”

“Is that your only reason for believing he was Stanislowski?”

“N-no. That is—”  Laura thought for a moment. “I can only say that I believed him.”

“Matt says that you asked him for his credentials and he put you off. The police say there were no credentials found in his room.”

“I know. But that doesn’t really prove anything, does it?”

Charlie sighed, rose with his usual neat deliberation, walked to the windows and looked out. It was an overcast day, threatening rain or snow. He said, “Laura, I don’t like to say this; it was suggested by the police. Understand me, I believe every word you say; I’ve known you a long time. But the police believe that Stanislowski—if he was Stanislowski—lived for some time after he was stabbed—”

Laura interrupted. “He had to tell Maria Brown my name and my address. Matt thinks and I think that it was after he died that she became frightened and ran away.”

“Maybe,” Charlie said, “or maybe her telephone call to you was part of a plan. However, what I want to ask you, Laura”—he turned to face her—
“did
Stanislowski speak to you when you arrived at the rooming house?”

“No! I told the police that!”

He waited a moment, scrutinizing her face. Then he said, “The police feel that he might have talked to you.”

“I told them exactly what happened.” Anger touched her suddenly; she knew that her voice was impatient and sharp.

Charlie heard that sharpness. “Forgive me, Laura, for questioning you like this. But it is important, I mean the question of this man’s identity. It does seem doubtful whether or not Jonny really recognized him. There might have been some other reason for her tears. Even when we question her we may not get anything like satisfactory or convincing answers. The fact is, the child’s sobbing is no real proof of the man’s identity. He had no papers of any kind. The police say they have searched the room; I’m sure they would have overlooked nothing. And it is important to prove whether or not he was Stanislowski.”

“But the trust fund goes to Jonny, anyway,” Laura began.

Charlie interrupted. “We can consider the fund later. The point is now that the police feel that money is the motive and that Stanislowski’s death—well, I’ll put it to you straight, the police believe that Doris, you and I had an interest in his death. We are, in short, their only suspects. So far, at least,” Charlie said, “and until they find this Maria Brown. But the case, such as it is, is built on his claim to be Stanislowski. If there were any way to prove that he
wasn’t
Stanislowski”—Charlie lifted one eyebrow and sighed rather wistfully—“then I must say we’d all be in a rather more comfortable position. Now, my dear, if you still insist that he was Stanislowski—”

“I don’t insist. But I—I believed him,” Laura repeated with a sense of her own inadequacy.

The door buzzer sounded. “I’ll go,” Charlie said.

It was Lieutenant Peabody again, still hurried, still preoccupied. “Good morning, Stedman. Miss March, I’d like you to go out to Koska Street with me. Only to take a look at the room, see if it is as you left it. I’d like you to come out there now.”

Charlie said, “Is that necessary, Lieutenant Peabody? It was a very shocking experience for Miss March—”

“I’m afraid it is necessary. We’ve a car waiting, Miss March.”

Charlie turned to Laura. “Well, it won’t take long. I’ll go with you.”

“I don’t want to take Jonny out there again.”

“No,” Charlie said. “No—well, then, I’ll stay with Jonny.”

The Lieutenant did not say, “Hurry up,” but he looked it. Laura went to her room and changed quickly into her gray suit. She put on red lipstick with a kind of defiance, as if it were a banner. She put on her small gray hat and the white silk scarf Matt had given her. It folded softly and warmly under her chin; she took up her red handbag.

They went down in the elevator quietly, Laura and Lieutenant Peabody and a policeman who was with Peabody. No one was in the foyer. The girl at the switchboard did not turn as they passed. A police car was waiting.

It was a typical December day, cold, with an overcast sky which seemed to press close above them and a few sparse snowflakes drifting down. They turned on Wacker Drive and then again west.

Peabody sat beside Laura in the back seat. A policeman drove and the other policeman sat in front, beside the driver. As they went west and farther west, all at once they seemed to enter a city within a city; the signs on the shop windows were again in a strange and incomprehensible language. The Polish neighborhood, the taxi driver had called it. There was the drug store where she and Jonny had gone the night before. Peabody eyed it but said nothing. They turned into Koska Street.

The street looked different by daylight; there was nothing shadowy or ominous about it. It was instead a remarkably neat and clean street, lined with substantial, well-cared-for houses. Lieutenant Peabody said suddenly, eyeing the houses, “There is a large Polish settlement here. There is in any big city. I should say Polish-Americans. They’ve made good citizens, reliable, thrifty, honest. It’s a sturdy blood.”

They stopped at 3936 Koska Street. There were the white steps, there was the door with the transom above it. A passer-by, a woman with a market basket, looked at them curiously as they went up the stairs. Lieutenant Peabody opened the door and this time a woman came out from the back of the hall.

Peabody introduced them briefly. “This is Mrs. Radinsky, the landlady. This is Miss March.”

The landlady, neat in a blue print dress, her dark hair tight under a net, gave Laura a sharp glance, nodded and said, “Good morning.” Her dark eyes shifted to Peabody. “You’ll want to see that room again. I hope you will be through with it soon. I’ll have to have it all cleaned and painted. This is a bad thing to happen in a rooming house.”

“I want Miss March to take a look at it.”

Mrs. Radinsky shrugged in a fatalistic way. “You have the key.”

Again Laura went up the creaking stairs, this time with Lieutenant Peabody and the policeman following her. They emerged into the narrow brown-painted hall. Lieutenant Peabody took a key from his pocket and unlocked the door which Laura had opened in the silence and dusk to find Conrad Stanislowski.

It was dark in the room, shadowed as it was by the yellowish brick wall of the flat building next door. Snowflakes drifted in a desultory way beyond the window, looking large and white against the wall. Objects in the room, the bed, the shape of a chair, loomed up dimly. Then Lieutenant Peabody snapped a light switch and instantly the room sprang into being. There was the writing table. There was the armchair. Peabody said, “We’ve taken his suitcase and his coat and hat. We took the glasses which were on the writing table and, of course, the handkerchief we found. But will you look closely around the room—aside from his suitcase and his clothes, and the two glasses, is there anything at all different?”

Chalk marks made the irregular outline of a man’s body on the floor. This time Laura saw, too, a brownish smear on the cretonne-covered armchair.

“I didn’t see that.”

Lieutenant Peabody understood her. “There’s a couple of smears on the floor, too.”

“I didn’t see them. But otherwise I can’t see that anything is different.”

“And you’re sure you didn’t see a knife anywhere?”

“I’m sure of that. I’d have remembered that.”

“All right. Sit down, Miss March.”

She hesitated, feeling that nothing in the room, no small detail should be disturbed. He understood her hesitation. “Oh, it’s all right. We’ve gone over everything. Fingerprints, photographs, everything. Found the fingerprints of your right hand on the door, as a matter of fact,” he said and pulled a straight chair forward for her. He then went to lean against the writing table, and said, on an unexpected tangent, “After Conrad Stanley’s death, what was done about his estate?”

“That was all settled in the will. He knew that his wife, Mrs. Stanley, could not run the business. He advised that it be sold immediately and his patent rights retained. It was a good business and Charlie and Matt, we all, agreed that that was the thing to do. It was essentially a one-man business. There was nobody in the company who could take over. It was sold, oh—perhaps four or five months after Conrad Stanley’s death.”

There was a short silence. Almost certainly Laura thought, he had asked Matt Cosden that question; he had asked Doris and Charles Stedman. But then perhaps he only wanted to know whether all four of them told exactly the same story. Yet how could there by any inconsistencies in the account of so open and frank a transaction! Presently the Lieutenant nodded and with what seemed to be habitual abruptness, rose. “All right,” he said briskly. “We’ll go.”

As they went single file down the stairs, their footsteps echoing through a house which again seemed to be empty of tenants, the landlady came to wait for them in the hall below. Peabody said, “All right, Mrs. Radinsky, we can turn over the room to you now. I left the key in the door.”

He added casually, as if merely as an afterthought, “You are sure, Mrs. Radinsky, that you did not see Miss March when she came yesterday afternoon?”

Mrs. Radinsky shook her head. “No, I told you, Lieutenant, that I was at the delicatessen and then at the butcher store, at exactly that time. I’ve talked to the butcher. He says your policeman questioned him, too. I was there!”

Peabody said pleasantly, “We had to check on your story, but it’s only a matter of form.”

A little flush rose in the woman’s broad face. “I understand that, Lieutenant. But I am a good citizen, I have always been a good citizen. I hold my head up among my neighbors. They will tell you, all of them, anything you want to know. I’ve never had anything like this happen in my rooming house before. I keep a good rooming house.”

“Yes, we know that, Mrs. Radinsky. This is only part of an investigation. Have you ever seen Miss March anywhere before?”

I
T WAS SAID AGAIN
so casually and so quietly that for a second Laura did not quite take in its significance. But then she realized that Peabody wanted to find out whether or not Laura had known of the rooming house, had visited it at any time—whether, in short, she had come there in order to investigate it, to send Stanislowski there—to plan a murder. Mrs. Radinsky gave her a slow, painstaking look. “Many people come here. Many people inquire for rooms, I don’t take everybody, you understand. But, no”—her bright dark eyes searched Laura’s face—“no, I don’t remember Miss March.”

“Ah,” the Lieutenant said. “All right, Mrs. Radinsky. Thanks. I’ll have to ask you to attend the inquest—merely to answer a few questions. But that will not take place until—well, I’ll let you know. And when we find Maria Brown we’ll want you to identify her.”

The landlady nodded. They went down the steps and got into the police car. The murder, of course, had attracted a certain amount of interest and observation on the part of the neighbors. A woman and a man were standing across the street, watching them with frank interest. The lace curtain of a window in a neighboring house moved surreptitiously. “We’ll go back to Miss March’s apartment,” Peabody told the policeman who was driving the car.

It seemed a long way back. Snow was still falling but in a half-hearted, indecisive way, so the flakes slid from the shining black hood of the car and melted as soon as they touched the pavement. Lights were on everywhere, that dark day, making gleaming tiers of amber and gold high into the gray sky.

At the entrance of the apartment house, Peabody got out, opened the car door politely for her, said, “Thank you, Miss March,” and got back into the car again.

Laura took a long breath of the crisp, cold air. The police car started out into the traffic again and she entered the foyer. Curiously, her knees were shaking as she entered the elevator and pressed the button for the ninth floor. The visit to Koska Street had not been difficult really; it was in no sense what could be called police grilling. Yet she felt obscurely frightened and she didn’t like Peabody’s attempt to discover from the landlady, Mrs. Radinsky, whether or not Laura had ever visited the rooming house before. The elevator stopped.

Charlie and Jonny were in the living room. He rose as she came in. “Well, how was it?”

“Not too bad. They only wanted to know whether anything about the room was different. I suppose they wanted to know whether anyone had entered the room after I left it last night.”

“And was there any difference?”

“No, nothing that I could see.”

“There were a couple of telephone calls while you were gone, Laura. One was a wrong number, I suppose. At least I answered it and nobody replied. It was—rather odd though because I felt sure somebody was on the line. But then later there was another telephone call. I think I’d better have Jonny stay with me for a while.”

“Jonny! What do you mean?”

“The second time the phone rang somebody asked for you, very distinctly, Laura March, and then said something in Polish. I couldn’t understand it. But I’m sure two words came out of it. Jonny’s name. Jonny Stanislowski. I said, ‘Who is it? Speak English,’ but whoever it was hung up.”

Laura’s throat tightened. “But what did he mean?”

“I don’t know,” Charlie said slowly. “But I’m inclined to think it was either a threat or a warning.”

“A threat—”  The tightness in her throat made it difficult to speak. “To Jonny?”