Postmark Murder (30 page)

But he didn’t take Jonny to meet Maria Brown; instead he shunted her instantly into a tiny study at one end of the short hall. There was a jig-saw puzzle on the table. “Here, Jonny. Here’s a picture puzzle. Take your coat off first—”

In a moment he came back and nodded at Laura. “All right, she’s in here.”

He led the way into the living room. Maria Brown sat stiffly erect in a straight chair.

Her brown coat lay over the arm of the sofa. She wore a rather shabby black dress with a touch of white at the throat. Her black beret was pulled low over her short fringe of hair. Again her face seemed to have a greater pallor than was accounted for even by the lack of cosmetics; her mouth was a kind of ashy blue. She held her handbag in both hands, eyed Laura and said nothing.

Matt offered cigarettes and Maria Brown took one with a curious, almost greedy quickness, as if, Laura thought, cigarettes were a luxury to her. Matt held the light for her and the tiny flame touched her sallow face to a warmer tint. He lighted Laura’s cigarette, too. He pulled up a chair. He said in an easy, conversational way, “Now then, I’d like to go over your story again. I want Miss March to hear it.”

“Not the police,” Maria Brown said flatly.

“No, not the police until you are willing to talk to them. I promised you that.”

Maria Brown took a long puff of smoke. She looked at the wall, past Laura and past Matt. “Very well,” she said, her words flat and toneless, heavily accented, yet fluent, too. “Very well. Shall I start at the beginning?”

“Start at the beginning. When you left Poland.”

“Yes,” Maria Brown said. “Yes, when I left Poland—”

Matt said, prompting her, “The night when Conrad came home and told you that you were to be arrested the next morning.”

“Yes. I was to be arrested. I was part of what you would call a resistance movement, a movement against the government. I was outspoken. Conrad in his heart was in sympathy with me, but he was more careful, more discreet. I had written some pamphlets. I had helped distribute them. I was caught.” She took another long sucking breath of cigarette smoke. Then she went on as flatly and tonelessly as if she were reading some impersonal account from a book, which had nothing to do with her. “Conrad”—she glanced at Laura and said heavily but without any trace of feeling in her voice—“he was my husband, you see. The man you found murdered.”

Matt said softly, “The night you left Poland—”

“Yes. Conrad had discovered that I was to be arrested the next day. He said I must leave. He said that was the only thing to do. He said he would follow, and would bring Jonny with him, but I had to get out then. He said they wouldn’t do anything to him. They might suspect him; they might watch him, but that he and Jonny would be safe. He said that as soon as he could he would leave the country, too, but there was a way to get me out. He knew it. He said I had to go that night. I didn’t want to go.”

She paused. She didn’t want to go, yet her voice in speaking of it, was as devoid of feeling as if it had not happened to her. Or, Laura thought suddenly, as if she had learned that speech; as if she knew word for word what she was to say.

“BUT YOU DID GO
—”  Matt said.

“Oh, yes. I could see there was nothing else to do. It seemed the only way to protect Conrad, my husband, and my baby. There was no time to delay. I had to go. So I did. Eventually I got to England.”

“And you communicated with Conrad?” Matt said.

Her eyes flickered. She made an oddly baffled gesture with the cigarette. “I am sorry. I know the English language. I studied it. I have spoken English for years now but sometimes a word—”

Matt said, “Communicate. I mean, you wrote to Conrad.”

She gave Matt a queer, cold look. Her cheeks looked sunken below her broad cheekbones; there were brownish patches around her eyes. She nodded briefly. “Oh, yes! I wrote to him, very seldom, you understand, only general letters such as anybody might have written. I signed another name. The only important thing in the letters was that he would know I was well. Then I would put a return address on the letter so he would know where I was. He wrote to me the same way, very cautiously. Letters which anybody might read. You see, there is a sort of spot censorship and, of course, Conrad was by then an official. He was watched because I had escaped. They doubted his loyalty. But then gradually he grew to feel safer.”

She paused and suddenly seemed very far away, lost in some distant, shadowy world where they could not follow her. Matt said, “I know this is tiring. But as you know Miss March is a trustee—”

Maria Brown flicked a somber glance at Laura. “I understand. But that’s all, really. Conrad got the child to Vienna. He sent her with a friend.”

Matt said, “Did you know the friend? Could it have been the man who now claims himself to be Conrad Stanislowski?”

Maria shook her head. “I don’t know. I don’t even know his name. I think though that this man who came to you yesterday is someone from Poland. I think he is trying to get my child and the money and take them both back to Poland.”

Matt said nothing to that. After a moment he asked, “So then your husband came to Chicago?”

“Yes. I was in England for a long time, you understand.” She looked at Laura briefly and looked away again, staring at nothing as if she were reading from a book which was invisible to Matt and Laura. “Then I got my status regularized. I had a passport. I came to New York. I was there when I heard from Conrad. It was just a note but in it he mentioned Chicago. He said, as I remember it, Chicago would be an interesting place for anyone to visit; I knew of course that he was about to escape, that he had his plans made and that he wanted me to go to Chicago. I came to Chicago. I went to the rooming house there. It’s in the Polish section. I looked at several. This seemed clean and neat. I wrote a very short note to Conrad. I said nothing that could possibly give me away, or Conrad or my child. I merely put a return address, 3936 Koska Street, on the letter. So when Conrad reached Chicago he came there.” She stopped.

Matt waited; then he spoke to Laura. “They had a very short time together. Mrs. Brown worked mornings. She came home at noon. She says her husband was already there and he told her that Jonny was in Chicago.”

Maria Brown said suddenly, “I made a mistake! I wanted to be sure my child was in Chicago. Conrad only had the letter from the orphanage.”

“You saw the letter?”

She gave Matt a level look and shook her head. “No, no. We had so little time. I wanted him to find out about Jonny. I wanted him to see her. The letter—there might have been some mistake, some change. I felt I would be content if he saw Jonny with his own eyes and came back and told me he had seen her. Do you understand?”

She didn’t look at either of them. She stubbed out her cigarette with the strong hand which had clamped down on the telephone in Laura’s apartment. There was not a flicker of emotion in her face.

Do I believe her, Laura thought. She leaned forward. “When I talked to your husband, he started to speak of you and then he stopped and then said that he had taken care of the child. I assumed—”

Maria Brown gave her a long look. “You assumed I was dead? Conrad promised me to tell nobody that I was here in Chicago. You see—I am still frightened.”

“What are you afraid of?” Matt said gently.

Maria Brown looked at him as if he were a child asking foolish questions, and did not reply.

“But the government of Poland would not pursue you, here in America. You are perfectly safe. Conrad was safe.”

Maria Brown brushed it aside again as if it were the suggestion of a child. “I am afraid. I am afraid for Jonny, too. I made Conrad promise not to claim Jonny, not to do anything about it until he found a safe place for us. That’s all we wanted. He was going to find some place outside the city, where we could take another name, where we could live in peace. Then he would come back and show you all his credentials and take Jonny and bring her to me. That was our plan.”

Matt said quietly, “I don’t think either you or Conrad and certainly not Jonny could be in any way valuable to the Communists. There’s nothing you know that could endanger them—is there?”

Again the woman didn’t answer.

Matt went on. “I understand that it’s hard to accept security. If the habit of fear is engrained into you—yes, I understand it. But I wish I could make you see that now you’re perfectly safe. You can seek asylum.”

“Yes, that’s what Conrad said. That’s what he intended to do. But you see there’s something you don’t understand. This will of my husband’s uncle which would give him so much money—that money would make him valuable, don’t you see? And that money makes my child valuable.”

“But she can’t have the money, your husband couldn’t have had the money, unless he remained here and lived his life in America.”

“So you say,” Maria Brown said in a phlegmatic, flat voice which utterly denied Matt’s statement.

“It’s true. Now I want you to go on, if you please. I know this is hard but it is important. Wait a moment—” He went to a table at the other end of the room where a tray with decanters stood. There was a coffee service there, too, a thermos and cups from the hotel. He poured hot coffee, splashed in a liberal amount from one of the decanters, and brought the cup to Maria Brown. “I put some brandy in it. Drink it—”

Again, there was a pathetic suggestion of greediness in the gesture with which she took the cup and gulped the hot coffee. It suggested a long period of doing without any of the small luxuries of life. She put down the cup. “What happened, happened. I can’t undo any of it. Conrad went to find Jonny. I waited in the rooming house. He was gone a long time. I was impatient. And someone came into the house. Nobody had been there while Conrad and I talked. All the lodgers are working people; they’re gone all day. The landlady had gone out to market; I saw her go; it was only after that that Conrad came to me. While he was still gone someone came; it was not Conrad; he’d have come to my room. But this person came very quietly up the stairs. I thought he went into Conrad’s room. That was two rooms down from mine but the walls are thin. I was terrified. The moment we had reached each other after all those years—pursuit began.”

“Pursuit—” Laura said, and heard the doubt in her own voice.

“I was sure that it was some member of the government party who had either followed Conrad or received orders from Poland. I waited. I didn’t want him to see me. Then Conrad came home. He went to his room and the visitor there spoke to him. I listened. They had a drink. The visitor had brought it. Conrad got glasses. They both drank. Conrad never had a head for drinking and he was exuberant, he was gay, he was happy, he had found his wife again, he had found his child. Conrad talked. But he didn’t mention me. He said not a word of me. I could hear Conrad’s voice easily. He talked of Jonny. I think he answered questions about her.”

Laura said in a stifled voice, “Who was it?”

Maria Brown did not so much as glance at her. “I don’t know,” she said flatly. “I don’t even know whether it was a man or a woman.”

That, certainly, did not sound true. Laura glanced at Matt, who lifted an eyebrow. He said to Maria Brown, “Surely if you could hear the visitor’s voice—”

“I could not,” she said promptly. “The visitor’s voice was very low. I could hear only a sort of murmur. It was Conrad’s voice that was high and clear, especially when he drank. But I knew he was answering questions.” Maria Brown paused and seemed to consider her own words. “I was terrified. My head was not clear. I was only afraid. I knew that Conrad was deceived. I thought that his visitor was somebody he must have known, because he talked so freely. But I thought that he believed that person to be well disposed, harmless. The visitor asked questions, I was sure of that. The subject must have been Jonny because Conrad’s replies were about Jonny. He didn’t say that he had just seen Jonny. But he talked of her, little things—about her childhood.”

Her curiously monotonous voice stopped. Matt looked at Laura. “Among the incidents he told his visitor was a game he played with Jonny. When he came home, when he greeted her, he would swing her up in his arms and sing—”

“Oh, yes,” Marie Brown said, “that song, ‘I am a Cracovian—’ He told about that, laughing, proudly—fondly.” She reached for another cigarette and said flatly, “And there were other things they talked of. Conrad’s passport. It was not visaed for the United States. I think the visitor—”  Maria Brown paused to light her cigarette. She continued in as monotonous a tone as if she were talking of the weather “—I think the murderer threatened Conrad about the passport, for I heard Conrad say very clearly, ‘Oh, yes, yes, I understand. You will see to my passport. Very good of you, very good indeed. You will see to my passport. I’ll stay quiet. I’ll stay out of sight. I won’t talk to any of them until you see about my passport.’ ”  She nodded firmly. “Conrad said that. Then the visitor said something and Conrad said, ‘Oh, no, I don’t like officialdom. We in Poland do not like officialdom.’ ”

For the first time Maria Brown’s face and voice showed a touch of animation. She lifted her shoulders and a queer smile touched the corners of her pale lips. “Conrad was lying. The fact was he intended to seek asylum. He was not afraid about his passport! He knew that that could be arranged if he went to the proper authorities. He only pretended to be afraid because he, too, had a reason for wishing to keep his arrival secret. That reason, I’ve told you. He intended to take me to some safe place. Then he would come back for Jonny. That’s why he pretended to be afraid about the passport. But his murderer used it to keep Conrad from seeing you”—she looked at Laura—“or you”—her dark eyes went to Matt—“or his uncle’s wife or the other trustee or anybody.”

Matt said, “Drink your coffee. Is it still hot?”

“Thank you. Yes.” She drank with long hard, gulps, then she lifted her head. “There was then a sound. Just a—sound. Something fell hard on the floor. There was a moment or two. And then someone came out, very light, very soft, and down the stairs. I was afraid to look. I knew—I knew— The door downstairs closed. I ran to Conrad’s room. He had been stabbed. I did not know what to do. Conrad opened his eyes. I tried to help him. I took my handkerchief. I asked him questions. He said your name, Miss March. There was a telephone booth in the hall below. I ran down there. I telephoned to you. When I got back upstairs Conrad was dead.”