The Specialty of the House Page 14

  ‘Evidence?’ Robert said in bewilderment.

  Yes, evidence. There had been that screaming in the Principal’s office, and Miss Benson had been the only one left in the whole school. She had run to the office, flung open the door, and that was how she found them. The girl sobbing hysterically, her dress torn halfway down; Mr Price standing behind her, glaring at the open door, at the incredulous Miss Benson.

  ‘Mr Price?’ Robert said. He had the sense of swimming numbly through some gelatinous depths, unable to see anything clearly.

  Mr Price, the Principal, of course. He stood glaring at her, his face ashen. Then the girl had fled through the door and Mr Price had taken one step after her, but had stopped short. He had pulled Miss Benson into the office, and closed the door, and then he had talked to her.

  The long and the short of what he told her was that the girl was a wanton. She had waltzed into his office, threatened him with blackmail, and when he had put her into her place she had artfully acted out her little scene. But he would be merciful, very merciful. Rather than call in the authorities and blacken the name of the school and of her decent, respectable father he would simply expel her and advise her father to get her out of town promptly.

  And, Mr Price had remarked meaningfully, it was a lucky thing indeed that Miss Benson had walked in just in time to be his witness. Although if Miss Benson failed him as a witness it could be highly unlucky for her.

  ‘And he meant it,’ Miss Benson said bitterly. ‘It’s his family runs the town and everything in it. If I said anything of what I really thought, if I dared open my mouth, I’d never get another job anywhere. But I should have talked up, I know I should have, especially after what happened next!’

  She had managed to get back to her room at the far end of the corridor although she had no idea of where she got the strength. And as soon as she had entered the room she saw the girl there, lying on the floor beneath the bulletin board from which usually hung the sharp, cutting scissors. But the scissors were in the girl’s clenched fist as she lay there, and blood over everything. All that blood over everything.

  ‘She was like that,’ Miss Benson said dully. ‘If you reprimanded her for even the littlest thing she looked like she wanted to sink through the floor, to die on the spot. And after what she went through it must have been the first thing in her head: just to get rid of herself. It was a mercy of God that she didn’t succeed then and there.’

  It was Miss Benson who got the doctor, a discreet man who asked no questions, and it was she who tended the girl after her father barred his door to her.

  ‘And when she could get around,’ Miss Benson said, ‘I placed her with this office over at the county seat. She wasn’t graduated, of course, or really expert, but I gave her a letter explaining she had been in some trouble and needed a helping hand, and they gave her a job.’

  Miss Benson dug her fingers into her forehead. ‘If I had only talked up when I should have. I should have known he’d never feel safe, that he’d hound her and hound her until he …’

  ‘But he isn’t the one!’ Robert said hoarsely. ‘He isn’t the right man at all!’

  She looked at him wonderingly. ‘But you said …’

  ‘No,’ Robert said helplessly, ‘I’m looking for someone else. A different man altogether.’

  She shrank back. ‘You’ve been trying to fool me!’

  ‘I swear I haven’t.’

  ‘But it doesn’t matter,’ she whispered. ‘If you say a word about this nobody’ll believe you. I’ll tell them you were lying, you made the whole thing up!’

  ‘You won’t have to,’ Robert said. ‘All you have to do is tell me where you sent her for that job. If you do that you can forget everything else.’

  She hesitated, studying his face with bright, frightened eyes. ‘All right,’ she said at last. ‘All right.’

  He was about to go when she placed her hand anxiously on his arm. ‘Please,’ she said. ‘You don’t think unkindly of me because of all this, do you?’

  ‘No,’ Robert said, ‘I don’t have the right to.’

  The bus trip which filled the remainder of the day was a wearing one, the hotel bed that night was no great improvement over the bus seat, and Mr Pardee of Grace, Grace, & Pardee seemed to Robert the hardest of all to take. He was a cheery man, too loud and florid to be properly contained by his small office.

  He studied Robert’s business card with interest. ‘Credit research, eh?’ he said admiringly. ‘Wonderful how you fellows track ’em down wherever they are. Sort of a Northwest Mounted Police just working to keep business healthy, that’s what it comes to, doesn’t it? And anything I can do to help …’

  Yes, he remembered the girl very well.

  ‘Just about the prettiest little thing we ever had around here,’ he said pensively. ‘Didn’t know much about her job, of course, but you got your money’s worth just watching her walk around the office.’

  Robert managed to keep his teeth clenched. ‘Was there any man she seemed interested in? Someone around the office, maybe, who wouldn’t be working here any more? Or even someone outside you could tell me about?’

  Mr Pardee studied the ceiling with narrowed eyes. ‘No,’ he said, ‘nobody I can think of. Must have been plenty of men after her, but you’d never get anything out of her about it. Not with the way she was so secretive and all. Matter of fact, her being that way was one of the things that made all the trouble.’

  ‘Trouble?’

  ‘Oh, nothing serious. Somebody was picking the petty cash box every so often, and what with all the rest of the office being so friendly except her it looked like she might be the one. And then that letter she brought saying she had already been in some trouble – well, we just had to let her go.

  ‘Later on,’ continued Mr Pardee pleasantly, ‘when we found out it wasn’t her after all, it was too late. We didn’t know where to get in touch with her.’ He snapped his fingers loudly. ‘Gone, just like that.’

  Robert drew a deep breath to steady himself. ‘But there must be somebody in the office who knew her,’ he pleaded. ‘Maybe some girl she talked to.’

  ‘Oh, that,’ said Mr Pardee. ‘Well, as I said, she wasn’t friendly, but now and then she did have her head together with Jenny Rizzo over at the switchboard. If you want to talk to Jenny go right ahead. Anything I can do to help …’

  But it was Jenny who helped him. A plain girl dressed in defiant bad taste, she studied him with impersonal interest and told him coolly that she had nothing to say about Amy. The kid had taken enough kicking around. It was about time they let her alone.

  ‘I’m not interested in her,’ Robert said. ‘I’m trying to find out about the man she married. Someone named Vincent Snider. Did you know about him?’

  From the stricken look on her face Robert realized exultantly that she did.

  ‘Him!’ she said. ‘So she went and married him, anyhow!’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘What about it? I told her a hundred times he was no good. I told her just stay away from him.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I knew his kind. Sharp stuff hanging around with money in his pocket, you never knew where it came from. The kind of guy’s always pulling fast deals, but he’s too smart to get caught, that’s why!’

  ‘How well did you know him?’

  ‘How well? I knew him from the time he was a kid around my neighborhood here. Look,’ Jenny dug into a desk drawer deep laden with personal possessions. She came out with a handful of snapshots which she thrust at Robert. ‘We even used to double-date together, Vince and Amy, and me and my boyfriend. Plenty of times I told her right in front of Vince that he was no good, but he gave her such a line she wouldn’t even listen. She was like a baby that way; anybody was nice to her she’d go overboard.’

  They were not good photographs, but there were Vince and Amy clearly recognizable.

  ‘Could I have one of these?’ Robert asked, his voice elaborately casual. />
  Jenny shrugged. ‘Just go ahead and help yourself,’ she said, and Robert did.

  ‘Then what happened?’ he said. ‘I mean, to Vince and Amy?’

  ‘You got me there. After she got fired they both took off. She said something about Vince getting a job downstate a-ways, in Sutton, and that was the last I saw of them. I could just see him working at anything honest, but the way she said it she must have believed him. Anyhow, I never heard from her after that.’

  ‘Could you remember exactly when you saw her last? That time she told you they were going to Sutton?’

  Jenny could and did. She might have remembered more, but Robert was out of the door by then, leaving her gaping after him, her mouth wide open in surprise.

  The trip to Sutton was barely an hour by bus, but it took another hour before Robert was seated at a large table with the Sutton newspaper files laid out before him. The town’s newspaper was a large and respectable one, its files orderly and well-kept. And two days after the date Jenny Rizzo had given him there was the news Robert had hoped to find. Headline news emblazoned all across the top of the first page.

  Ten thousand dollars stolen, the news report said. A daring, lone bandit had walked into the Sutton Bank and Trust, had bearded the manager without a soul around knowing it, and had calmly walked out with a small valise containing ten thousand dollars in currency. The police were on the trail. An arrest was expected momentarily …

  Robert traced through later dates with his hands shaking. The police had given up in their efforts. No arrest was ever made …

  Robert had carefully scissored the photograph so that Vince now stood alone in the picture. The bank manager irritably looked at the picture, and then swallowed hard.

  ‘It’s him!’ he told Robert incredulously. ‘That’s the man! I’d know him anywhere. If I can get my hands on him …’

  ‘There’s something you’ll have to do first,’ said Robert.

  ‘I’m not making any deals,’ the manager protested. ‘I want him, and I want every penny of the money he’s got left.’

  ‘I’m not talking about deals,’ Robert said. ‘All you have to do is put down on paper that you positively identify this man as the one who robbed the bank. If you do that the police’ll have him for you tomorrow.’

  ‘That’s all?’ the man said suspiciously.

  ‘That’s all,’ Robert said.

  He sat again in the familiar room, the papers, the evidence arranged before him. His one remaining fear had been that in his absence the murderer had somehow taken alarm and fled. He had not breathed easy until the first small, surreptitious noises from next door made clear that things were as he had left them.

  Now he carefully studied all the notes he had painstakingly prepared, all the reports of conversations held. It was all here, enough to see justice done, but it was more than that, he told himself bitterly. It was the portrait of a girl who, step by step, had been driven through a pattern of betrayal.

  Every man she had dealt with had been an agent of betrayal. Father, school principal, employer, and finally her husband, each was guilty in his turn. Jenny Rizzo’s words rang loud in Robert’s ears.

  Anybody was nice to her she’d go overboard. If he had spoken, if he had moved, he could have been the one. When she turned at the top of the stairs to look at him she might have been waiting for him to speak or move. Now it was too late, and there was no way of letting her know what these papers meant, what he had done for her …

  The police were everything Robert had expected until they read the bank manager’s statement. Then they read and reread the statement, they looked at the photograph, and they courteously passed Robert from hand to hand until finally there was a door marked Lieutenant Kyserling, and behind it a slender, soft-spoken man.

  It was a long story – Robert had not realized until then how long it was or how many details there were to explain – but it was told from start to finish without interruption. At its conclusion Kyserling took the papers, the handkerchief, and the photographs, and pored over them. Then he looked at Robert curiously.

  ‘It’s all here,’ he said. ‘The only thing you left out is why you did it, why you went to all this trouble. What’s your stake in this?’

  It was not easy to have your most private dream exposed to a complete stranger. Robert choked on the words. ‘It’s because of her. The way I felt about her.’

  ‘Oh.’ Kyserling nodded understandingly. ‘Making time with her?’

  ‘No,’ Robert said angrily. ‘We never even spoke to each other!’

  Kyserling tapped his fingers gently on the papers before him.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s none of my business anyhow. But you’ve done a pretty job for us. Very pretty. Matter of fact, yesterday we turned up the body in a car parked a few blocks away from your place. The car was stolen a month ago, there wasn’t a stitch of identification on the clothing or anything; all we got is a body with a big wound in it. This business could have stayed up in the air for a hundred years if it wasn’t for you walking in with a perfect case made out from A to Z.’

  ‘I’m glad,’ Robert said. ‘That’s the way I wanted it.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Kyserling said. ‘Any time you want a job on the force you just come and see me.’

  Then he was gone from the office for a long while, and when he returned it was in the company of a big, stolid plainclothesman who smiled grimly.

  ‘We’re going to wrap it up now,’ Kyserling told Robert, and gestured at the man.

  They went softly up the stairs of the house and stood to the side of the door while Kyserling laid his ear against it for some assurance of sound. Then he briskly nodded to the plainclothesman and rapped hard.

  ‘Open up!’ he called. ‘It’s the police.’

  There was an ear-ringing silence, and Robert’s mouth went dry as he saw Kyserling and the plainclothesman slip the chill blue steel of revolvers from their shoulder holsters.

  ‘I got no use for these cute little games,’ growled Kyserling, and suddenly raised his foot and smashed the heel of his shoe hard against the lock of the door. The door burst open, Robert cowered back against the balustrade of the staircase – And then saw her.

  She stood in the middle of the room facing him wildly, the same look on her face, he knew in that fantastic moment, that she must have worn each time she came face to face with a betrayer exposed. Then she took one backward step, and suddenly whirled toward the window.

  ‘Ahh, no!’ she cried, as Robert had heard her cry it out once before, and then was gone through the window in a sheet of broken glass. Her voice rose in a single despairing shriek, and then was suddenly and mercifully silent.

  Robert stood there, the salt of sweat suddenly in his eyes, the salt of blood on his lips. It was an infinity of distance to the window, but he finally got there, and had to thrust Kyserling aside to look down.

  She lay crumpled on the sidewalk, and the thick black hair in loose disorder around her face shrouded her from the eyes of the curious.

  The plainclothesman was gone, but Kyserling was still there watching Robert with sympathetic eyes.

  ‘I thought he had killed her,’ Robert whispered. ‘I could swear he had killed her!’

  ‘It was his body we found,’ said Kyserling. ‘She was the one who did it.’

  ‘But why didn’t you tell me then!’ Robert begged. ‘Why didn’t you let me know!’

  Kyserling looked at him wisely. ‘Yeah?’ he said. ‘And then what? You tip her off so that she gets away; then we really got troubles.’

  There could be no answer to that. None at all.

  ‘She just cracked up,’ Kyserling said reasonably. ‘Holed up here like she was, not knowing which way to turn, nobody she could trust … It was in the cards. You had nothing to do with it.’

  He went downstairs then, and Robert was alone in her room. He looked around it slowly, at all the things that were left of her, and then very deliberately picked up a chair, held it high ov
er his head, and with all his strength smashed it against the wall …

  The House Party

  ‘He’s coming around,’ said the voice.

  He was falling. His hands were outflung against the stone-cold blackness of space, and his body tilted head over heels, heels over head, as he fell. If there were only a way of knowing what was below, of bracing himself against the moment of impact, the terror might not have been so great. This way he was no more than a lump of terror flung into a pit, his mind cowering away from the inevitable while his helpless body descended toward it.

  ‘Good,’ the voice said from far away, and it sounded to him as if someone were speaking to him quite calmly and cheerfully from the bottom of the pit. ‘Very good.’

  He opened his eyes. A glare of light washed in on him suddenly and painfully, and he squinted against it at the figures standing around him, at the faces, partly obscured by a sort of milky haze, looking down at him. He was lying on his back, and from the thrust of the cushions under him he knew he was on the familiar sofa. The milky haze was fading away now, and with it the panic. This was the old house at Nyack, the same living room, the same Utrillo on the wall, the same chandelier glittering over his head. The same everything, he thought bitterly, even to the faces around him.

  That was Hannah, her eyes bright with tears – she could turn on tears like a faucet – and her hand was gripping his so hard that his fingers were numb under the pressure. Hannah with the over-developed maternal instinct, and only a husband to exercise it on … That was Abel Roth chewing on a cigar – even at a time like this, that reeking cigar! – and watching him worriedly. Abel with his first successful production in five years, worrying about his investment … And that was Ben Thayer and Harriet, the eternal bumpkins … And Jake Hall … And Tommy McGowan … All the old familiar faces, the sickening familiar faces.

  But there was a stranger, too. A short, stout man with a look of amiable interest on his face, and splendidly bald, with only a tonsure of graying hair to frame his gleaming scalp. He ran his fingers reflectively over his scalp and nodded at Miles.