Postmark Murder (16 page)

Matt stopped at the window, which now reflected the room with its soft gray and clear yellows, the glittering glass walls of the French clock, Laura herself, erect and white, against the green armchair, watching him. He said, over his shoulder, “Since Conrad did not die when he was stabbed, and apparently the murderer thought he was dead and left him for dead—that is, assuming that the murderer was not Maria Brown—then the murderer might get a terrific jolt when he learned that not only you, but Maria Brown, had actually been in the rooming house. Maria Brown must have had some conversation with him. Again assuming that she is not the murderer, the murderer might jump to the conclusion that Conrad Stanislowski had also talked to you before he died. And what would be more likely, if that had happened, than to tell you who stabbed him!”

“He didn’t. If he had, I’d tell the police. Whoever murdered him would know that I would tell the police!”

Matt pulled the yellow curtains across the windows and came back to lean one elbow on the mantel. “The point is we can’t let it happen again. I’ll get Peabody to give you police guard.”

“Oh, no! I’ll keep the doors bolted after this!”

“Darling,” he said in an odd voice, half gentle half stern “you opened the door for Maria Brown.”

She could feel the quick flush in her cheeks. “I thought it might be Doris. It was stupid—”

Matt took three strides to her and put his hand under her chin, tilting up her face so she met his eyes directly. “Don’t do it again. I—” He stopped “Well, just don’t do it again.” He took his hand from her chin, lighted a cigarette and sat down, his eyes suddenly very blue—and altogether enigmatic.

Laura said, still feeling the warm pressure of his hand around her chin, absurdly confused by it and hoping he did not observe her confusion, “I’ve been warned. If anybody really wants to get in, I can stop it. I’ll be careful—”

Matt looked at her for a long moment. Then he said abruptly, “This woman, Maria Brown, knew your address. Of course she could have looked it up in the phone book. She managed to get up here without being seen by the switchboard girl, but then, of course, that wouldn’t be hard. Certainly she got away in a hurry. She’s hiding and she intends to stay hidden, so she’s afraid of the police. Her reason for coming here apparently was to find out certainly whether or not Jonny is here. So it comes back to the business of Jonny somehow being a—a motive, a focus, for this whole affair. Laura, this time you had a good look at the Brown woman. Describe her, will you?”

Laura did so, in detail, her broad face with a trace of the Slavic in her cheekbones, dark eyes in which scorn had flickered when Laura spoke of the police. Her pale firm mouth, the strength of the hand which had clamped down on the telephone, her purposeful movements, her implacable determined manner.

“How about her voice?” Matt said. “Are you still sure she telephoned to you?”

“Yes. She has an odd voice, flat, toneless, rather husky.”

Matt said, so gravely that it seemed a very important question, “Were you frightened?”

“Yes. I thought she might have a gun—”

“I mean were you—oh, instinctively frightened, with your nerves, not your reasoning process?”

“Oh. You mean because she murdered him—”

“If she did,” Matt said shortly.

Laura thought back to that brief interview “Yes. I was frightened. Yet I had to talk to her, try to reach the phone. I wished you were here. I wished you would come. You’d have known what to do.”

The flicker of a grin touched Matt’s mouth. “Don’t rate me too high. I can’t think of anything I’d have done that you didn’t do.

Except I might have managed to hang onto her. Perhaps not. She sounds a little violent.”

“No,” Laura said slowly, “there was nothing hysterical or emotional about her. It was all cut and dried. As if she had planned every word. As if she knew exactly what she was doing.”

“Well, that’s not good either,” Matt said. “Did she see Jonny?”

“No, she only heard her voice. That’s when I caught her by the wrist and she pulled away and left.”

“You say she looked young? How young?”

“In her thirties I think.”

Matt eyed her for a moment. “I wonder if she was Conrad’s wife.”

“His wife! But she’s dead! Conrad told me.”

“Did he say that exactly?”

He hadn’t, of course. “I thought that’s what he meant. He started to speak of his wife. He said, ‘I married—’  and then he stopped and said, ‘I was left to see to the child’—something like that.”

“Perhaps that’s literally what he meant.”

Again Matt rose and began to pace around the room, circling the sofa and chairs, his dark head bent thoughtfully. “Perhaps that’s exactly what he meant. Perhaps his wife did leave him, and she left Jonny, who would have been a baby at the time. Suppose she got to Chicago, heaven knows how. Suppose Conrad knew her address and went to the rooming house because she was there. He as good as told you that there was something he wanted to do, something he had to do, before he could come forward openly and present his credentials, make himself known to all of us and claim Jonny and of course the money. Perhaps the thing that he had to do, or settle, concerned this woman, his wife. And she killed him.”

“But she phoned to me for help! She asked me to bring a doctor!”

“And then he died and she ran away. Look at it this way, Laura. If Maria Brown was his wife, if she had left Conrad and deserted her baby, she’d have had to be certainly a ruthless woman. If she had quarreled so desperately with Conrad that she’d leave her baby—yes, she might have the cruelty and ruthlessness to kill him. And she may have had a pretty solid motive.”

He was talking now, Laura thought, like a lawyer, concisely, analytically, assembling his case. He stood facing her, hands in his pockets, his face intent. “Suppose he met her and told her of the will! As a matter of fact they must have been in communication, somehow, if he knew her address. So suppose she knew of the will. Suppose she decided to kill Conrad and escape, then later she intended to come forward and establish her claim to Jonny and the money. Certainly if she’s Jonny’s mother, she would have every reason to expect some of the money to go directly to her after Conrad’s death. Certainly she would be the obvious guardian for Jonny.”

“Jonny’s mother. Oh,
no,
Matt!”

“She left Jonny when she was a baby.”

“But she—she did phone to me for help.”

“She could have phoned to you after stabbing Conrad, or even before, for that matter, with the intention of trying to establish her own innocence, or to tell some story about someone else killing Conrad, and that she tried to help him and phoned to you. Oh, there could be a dozen twisted reasons for it. Murder is a twisted, stupid affair; a murderer is innately stupid, twisted, unaccountable by reasonable and normal standards. Then after she phoned perhaps she changed her mind. Oh, I realize that all this is only supposition. But there’s a kind of logic about it!”

He sat down, with a kind of dissatisfied plunge, in the chair near her. “The fact is, of course, there’s no way of knowing exactly why she phoned to you. But we do know that she was in the rooming house with Conrad. We do know she was escaping when you reached the steps. So she could not have expected you to get there so soon, and she was trying to get away before you came.”

“But she said, ‘Go away.’ ”

“And she said, ‘I shouldn’t have done it.’ Perhaps she meant exactly that! Perhaps she regretted it.” Matt stared at the rug, lost in surmise, and Laura thought of the moment on the steps in Koska Street and, perhaps, a murderer almost literally red-handed, within moments of murder—in the dusk, above a street deserted except for the taxi driver. She thought of Maria Brown’s drawn, pallid face in the dim light and the way her dark eyes fixed themselves upon Jonny.

Matt said slowly, as if presenting a case to himself as judge, “She may seem unemotional and hard now. Certainly she would have to be hard. But she couldn’t have simply killed a man and gone coolly away. She must have vacillated a little, changed her mind, got in a flurry, although”—he shook his head—“she doesn’t sound like that kind of woman either. Yet all this is only supposition. Nothing much to go on except she is trying to find Jonny. So there’s some reason for that.”

“Suppose he was murdered for—oh, revenge, something like that.”

“You mean a blood feud, extending to Jonny. How did Peabody come out with the interpreter and Jonny?”

“He didn’t come out at all.” Laura told him wearily. “He was here this morning. You knew that.”

Matt nodded. “Peabody told me he intended to question her. I take it Jonny wouldn’t talk?”

“No. The man spoke Polish. He was really very gentle. But Jonny wouldn’t say a word. They had to give up. But I don’t think Lieutenant Peabody feels they can give much weight to a child’s testimony anyway.”

“It’s important all the same. See here, Laura—let’s try it ourselves. Where’s the Polish dictionary?”

They questioned Jonny, the kitten listening with alert black ears, Matt with a Polish dictionary beside him doggedly looking up words, and Jonny on his knees chuckling at his labored pronunciation—and giving them no information whatever. When Matt contrived a labored sentence
“Ty widzisz ojciec wczoraj”
— “you see father yesterday,” she laughed.
“Nie, nie!”
She sought for English words. “You—say—
funny
—”

“It wasn’t yesterday,” Laura said, “it was the day before.” Matt gave her a disgruntled look. “How am I going to say day before yesterday? Yesterday is good enough so long as I get the word father across.”

He studied the bristling consonants and tried again. This time there was undoubtedly a flash of comprehension in Jonny’s blue eyes, which then went perfectly blank.
“Nie,”
she said.
“Nie.”
And suddenly put her arms around Matt’s neck and hugged him and hid her face against his shoulder.

Matt gave Laura the same hopeless look the interpreter had given Peabody over the child’s brown head. “She understands all right.”

“Why doesn’t she answer you?”

“Perhaps she was taught not to,” he said slowly. “Conrad must have been out of sympathy with the party in control in Poland for some time. Perhaps there were times when he had to make sure that if anybody questioned her about him, any question at all, she would shut up like a little clam. Refuse to say anything. How can we know, how can we guess the kind of life a man in Conrad Stanislowski’s position had to live? Certainly he told you, and I believe it, that he had been making plans to get Jonny out of the country and then escape himself. He must have felt that there was danger every time somebody knocked at the door. Danger with every breath he drew. Yes, Jonny would have been a danger to him unless he taught her not to reply to any question at all, no matter what it was. Even a child can hear and see things. Even a child can be ruthlessly questioned. Well—that’s that.”

He gave Jonny a hug and put her down. “All right, no more talk.”

Jonny waited a moment, looking up at him earnestly. Then she put her hand in an odd, almost apologetic gesture upon his face, leaned forward confidingly and kissed his cheek. It was an infinitely touching little gesture.
“Dobre,”
she said gently. “Good.” She gathered up Suki then and ran out of the room.

Matt said, “That settles it. She knows exactly what I was trying to ask her. And she’s not going to say a word, not anything at all concerning her father. I think even the Polish language frightens her a little. It puts her on guard. Conrad trained her not to speak, not to answer questions. There’s no other explanation for it. He must have been terrified after he made up his mind to escape. Terrified for himself and terrified for Jonny. Yes, he’d fix it so nobody could get anything out of Jonny.”

“Matt, if Conrad
was
her father, all that fund goes directly to Jonny. Doesn’t it?”

“There’s a lot of things to check up on. We’ll have to prove he was her father. It’ll all take time.”

“But whether he arrived here in America, or didn’t arrive, we had planned for the fund to go to Jonny.”

“That was our idea, yes.” His eyes were sharp and intent. “Has anybody objected to that?”

Laura said slowly, “I don’t think Doris wants her to have it.”

“OH.” MATT’S FACE CLOSED
in upon itself.

Laura said, “But if this man was her father, Jonny would inherit all the fund automatically from him, wouldn’t she? I mean—unless Maria Brown is her mother—”

“That would complicate things, certainly. But aside from that, if the man was Conrad Stanislowski and if he died intestate, yes, Jonny would inherit directly. The way things are, of course there’ll be some red tape to unwind.”

Laura hesitated, aware of his closed-in, uncommunicative face, aware, too, that she was treading on delicate ground. She said carefully, “Has Doris told you how she feels about the money?”

Matt replied promptly. “Not in so many words, no. I can’t say she was overjoyed about finding Jonny and bringing her here. But Doris has got plenty of money, or at least she did have.” He caught himself up shortly.

Laura said, “She
did
have! What do you mean?”

“Nothing. Really, nothing, Laura. At least nothing of importance. Don’t forget,” he said, with a flicker of laughter in his eyes, “she’s my client. But I assure you she doesn’t need the Stanislowski fund. If you and Charlie, as trustees, agree that the fund should be continued for Jonny and take it to court, I’m with you. And I don’t think Doris will object or contest it with her own claim. Not if she follows my advice. Besides, she really feels that the fund ought to go to Jonny. She’s a good egg, you know, Laura.”

And you’re in love with her, Laura thought. She said stubbornly, “I think we should have something settled about that.”

“It will have to be settled in January. Now then, I’m going to tell Charlie about this Maria Brown’s visit to you and about that affair last night.” He went to the telephone.

Charlie was not in his room at the club; he was not in the bar, he was not in the dining room. Matt tried Doris’ number.