A GOOD many macabre legends cling to that big gloomy building on First Avenue, most of which are false. It isn’t true, for instance, that a huge black Negress, without any nose, sews up the dissected bodies when the doctors have finished their work. A young girl does this, a young girl whose father was in the business before her. Certainly the atmosphere within the walls that house the city’s unfortunate dead needs no aid from fiction to add to its gruesome sordidness. And a riotous night with the fumes of alcohol floating around in one’s head is bad preparation for the things to be seen there, seen—and heard.
Lily Henderson, with her landlady on one side, Donaher on the other, went through the gates reluctantly. The back entrance to the morgue in the harsh gray light of early morning has about as much impressiveness as the approach to a brokendown livery stable. She faltered on the threshold, was swept relentlessly forward. In the basement, outside the door of the particular mortuary chamber in front of which they came to a stop, Lily tried to twist herself out of the grasp of her tormentors. “I can’t,” she cried hysterically. “I can’t! Let me go. I tell you it’s her all right. I knew she got this job in that speak. Let me go!”
The landlady said, “Hush, my dear!” with a shocked glance. Donaher said: “Take it nice and easy, sister.” And McKee said: “Courage, Miss Henderson. It will be over in a minute.” A businesslike attendant, with dull eyes above black handle-bar mustachios, moved the door out of the way.
Donaher supported Lily’s hundred and fifty pounds of buxom flesh towards the slab where the attendant had already turned back the sheet. He eyed Lily sympathetically. He had always had a weakness for that particular shade of Titian hair. Financial difficulties attendant upon identification of the deceased were often a prominent feature of a relative’s grief. He said unexpectedly in a confidential tone: “If the lady’s worried about the undertaker, she’ll keep. She’s on ice. And if she don’t have her friend embalmed it’ll take twenty-five dollars off the——” Lily’s scream cut him short.
“It’s Rita, all right,” she whispered. “Take me out of here. Take me out of here—quick!” Donaher obeyed McKee’s signal. He was a tenderhearted man, and he had no wish to linger, himself. They got her into the little office upstairs. There the lieutenant said something in a low voice to the inspector, who went away and came back accompanied by another attendant. This man produced a flask. Miss Henderson drained reviving drops thirstily, kept the flask in her gripping hands. There was no need to urge her to talk.
“Floradora …” she cried with a queer twisted brokenness. “Oh, she was lovely. Only sixteen then. I used to recite ‘The Wreck of the Hesperus’ … Hyatt’s parlor and the funny smell in it. And she used to dance and sing that thing from Floradora—‘Oh, tell me, pretty maiden …’ ” Lily beat time with the bottom of her flask on a plump knee rigid under too much flesh.
McKee said gently, “You are talking of Miss Rodriguez?”
“Mrs.—Mrs. ? She was Rita Gonzalez then. She married that bum. He wasn’t ever any good. God knows why she did it. Look, it was this way: We were both boarders at the same farmhouse in Dutchess County, six dollars a week and all the milk and eggs you could cram into you. Rita lived with an aunt in Brooklyn, a horrible old devil, widow of a cigar manufacturer. This Rodriguez she married was Rita’s cousin. Rita always wanted to go on the stage. The aunt was very strict. My God … think of it, that’s almost twenty years ago. Twenty years! And life is so short … and now we’re old!” Lily began to cry. Donaher jogged her elbow, and she fortified herself against the world and time with another long swallow. McKee asked: “And you’ve kept in touch with her since her marriage—that would be about 1912?”
“No. I never saw her again after that last summer in Willow Brook until she turned up at Frascati’s in London two years ago. You could have knocked me over with a feather when she walked out on the floor. Well, Rita’d made the grade. She was the star act in the cabaret. I went round to see her after the show. She told me her husband was dead and that she had to make her own living. I’m not telling you she was a little Alice Ben Bolt. Kind of disagreeable girl, but … Oh, I don’t know … old times, I guess … anyhow, I kinda wanted to keep in touch. Not that she’d lend you a copper. She was in the money then. Some man. There generally was a man. You know the old saying, ‘Neck ’em and nick ’em.’ That was her. I lost my job there and came back to America. Before I left I gave her the names of some agents here in case she was thinking of making a change. And if it wasn’t April Fools’ Day when she turns up in that crummy little office over on Sixth Avenue looking as beautiful as ever! But I could see that she was on her uppers. The old hoof and horns that runs the dump got her a job right off with this speak called the Sanctuary.…”
Lily was beginning to ramble, didn’t seem to be getting any place. If they could fill in that long gap between 1913 and now. “Didn’t Rita have any other friends whose names you could give us?” McKee asked. Lily wiped a smudge of mascara out of an eye corner and winked at him. “There were only men—and they weren’t friends.” Watching her, McKee said, “Go on, Miss Henderson, please.”
“Well, I found out where she was living through the agency, and I went to see her at her hotel over on Thirty-seventh Street, and I guess maybe … I shouldn’t be surprised if …” Lily’s glance sharpened … “Something funny happened there. Darned funny, now that she’s dead. Rita was scared. It was like this: I wanted to borrow a little money from her, just an accommodation over the week-end, so I went to the hotel, but she wasn’t home yet—she’d only been dancing in this speak about a week then, so I waited in the corridor outside her room. She came in about half-past twelve. And the minute she opens the door she goes kinda floppy and white and says: ‘This room has been searched’—something like that. Of course you could see it with half an eye. You know … the way things are mussed up, bureau drawers pulled out and put back crooked, stuff sticking through … dresses off the hangers. The window was open, too. And she said it was closed when she left. There was a fire escape a few feet away. Anyhow …” Lily stifled a wide yawn composed in equal parts of fatigue, shock, alcohol. “I know she moved out of that place a few days later, and I haven’t seen her since—not until tonight.”
After that, McKee asked some questions, tested her with the bit of greenish stone, the platinum chain and the empty ring on the end of it, and didn’t get any result. Consigning her to the care of her landlady outside in the corridor, motherly for a consideration, he told her to go home and to bed, that he would probably want to talk to her later.
Back at the office Tannin was waiting for them; red-eyed, jerking heavy lids apart to give the result of his vigil outside that narrow handsome house in the Sixties. Nobody at all had come out—the colonel was evidently spending the night—but a man had gone in. He drove up in a cab at one thirty-five. It wasn’t Archer, because the sergeant got a good look at him in the flare of a match with which he was lighting a cigar while he crossed the pavement. He had a key.
McKee stretched a lean hand towards the phone, drew it back again, said softly, “Mr. Barcley, I think.”
Donaher stared. “You mean it was the Barcley woman’s husband who wrote that note you found in the fireplace? I thought he was out of the city.”
“Waring merely told me that Barcley was away, had gone to Canada and was expected home. I think I see it—I think I see it now …” Then: “Tannin, go to bed; I’m going to need you later.” And when the sergeant stumbled towards the stairs leading to the dormitory: “Donaher, here’s what I want done. Take this bit of green stone up to Claubertson at the Museum of Natural History. Tell him I’m in a hurry. As you go out, ask them to send me up a cup of coffee and a sandwich.”
There was a canvas bag on the back of the desk labeled, “Contents of Miss Rodriguez’s desk,” a smaller sack labeled, “Trash basket.” McKee began to go through the mass of stuff. He interrupted himself from time to time to answer the phone, use it himself, rescind one order, issue another. A half-dozen major problems to be solved: Archer had to be found. Who was the buyer of the camellias, who the people who had rushed up to the dancer’s apartment in advance of the police and why? … He kept turning over papers … eight o’clock half-past eight; outside, constantly rising clamor of New York rode swiftly into a new day.
It was at a few minutes of nine that Telfair woke up in the bedroom of the little house in Grove Street. He lay still for a moment, watched a fly moving across the ceiling, tried to resolve the fog inside his head and didn’t succeed very well. He remembered the first part of the night with scorching clarity, seeing Judith home after the bust-up at the Sanctuary, McKee’s visit, their trip to the dancer’s apartment, but after that couldn’t … there was something … He couldn’t recall what had happened.
The room was full of diffused light seeping from behind drawn shades. His temples were pounding. Begin at the beginning and work forward. He had met Enderby as he was turning the corner, had gone up to the reporter’s room for a drink. Damn Enderby’s apple! Must have picked it up at a filling station.… Telfair went on laboriously unraveling. After he came back here … Oh, he was crazy … it was just the liquor. Everything was all right … and suddenly he knew that it wasn’t.
Nine o’clock. Not quite—for the clock on the table outside in the hall was giving its first premonitory wheeze. It was an old clock and had to gather strength before putting its striking mechanism into play. One deep-bellied stroke, two … then Telfair knew what the trouble was. The door into the hall was open now and he had closed it when he stumbled upstairs at around four o’clock in the morning. That much was plain: a repeated vision of himself closing doors along an endless corridor as though he were trying to shut himself away from something!
Leaping out of bed, he started across the floor, caught sight of himself in a mirror, and stood stock-still. His body was blue silk, his legs red-and-white-striped madras, and he distinctly remembered that when he came up here last night he had thrown himself down fully dressed on the bed, too miserable to take off his clothes!
Suddenly like a streak he was down the stairs and into the living room. For it was coming now. The sound he had heard in the night! The sound of a window being raised. It was the window on the landing, and after he had closed it he had gone back to the bedroom and had automatically undressed, putting on the top of one suit, the bottom of another, and leaving the door open as a precaution.
Someone had tried to get into the house. He knew that now, knew also with heaviness in the pit of his stomach that that nocturnal visit had something to do with the green suede purse that he had dropped into the humidor just after Enderby saw him home.
He started slowly across the floor, stopped with a jerk when he was still in the middle of the room. There was someone at the door. He had to try twice before he produced a loud, “Who is it?”
And astoundingly it was Judith who answered, her voice muffled through the thickness of wood. Telfair pulled himself together with an effort and answered in an almost normal voice: “Give me a minute to get some clothes on. I’m just up—I’ll unlock the door,” and did so.
He was at the top of the stairs when she came in. She called up to him: “I’ll make some coffee.” Telfair went into his room and began to dress. When he came down, Judith was busy with cups and saucers on the table near the bookcase. She glanced at him quickly, reached for the sugar out of the cupboard, and said, her back turned: “You must have had a heavy night. Nine o’clock’s late for you, isn’t it, Jim?”
By this time Telfair had made up his mind. Anything was better than this uncertainty. And the sight of her standing there very trim and alert in a tweed coat and skirt, a soft white blouse open at the throat, a little hat crushed down on her dark hair, made last night a bad dream. He was putting too much on a single throw of the dice. After all, there were a lot of green pocketbooks in the world, hundreds, thousands of them, and the dancer didn’t have an option on every Chinese lily in the universe. For all he knew they were selling the essence in drugstores. He said quietly:
“Never mind that now. Never mind the coffee for a minute, either. Listen, Judith, I want to ask you a question. I have a good reason for asking it, and I don’t want you to be angry. Do you know anything about the killing in the Sanctuary last night, and were you—innocently, of course—I don’t need to say that—tangled up with the dancer in any way?”
The pause was too long. The cheeping of sparrows came loudly into the little room against the muted murmur of the streets. The girl put the pitcher of evaporated milk down on the tray, turned round, and said very deliberately: “Jim, are you crazy?” There was amusement in her voice and on her lips but not at the back of her eyes.
Two pieces of flashing steel came together with a bang inside Telfair’s head. He simply stood and looked at her, was incapable of doing anything else just then. She went on in the same light tone: “What in heaven’s name makes you ask me that? How often have we been in that place together? If I had known her, don’t you suppose I’d have said so long before this?”
She was lying. Stupid with shock, for it was as though the ground had opened under his feet, precipitating him into strange subterranean depths where he couldn’t find his way, he said slowly: “It was the first time you went there alone.”
Her answer was patiently indulgent: “But I wasn’t alone, Jim. I was with Sue Gair. She had a date to meet Gerry, and I took her around. You said a minute ago”—her movements were casual, lift the pot, pour the coffee slowly, put the pot down—“that you had a good reason”—sugar and cream?—“for asking. What was the reason?”
She was looking at him out of wide, clear gray eyes, brows raised in inquiry.
If he could shock her into telling the truth … “McKee’s a friend of mine. You know that. He was here last night after he left the Sanctuary. He asked questions about you, questions about the Gairs.”
“Did he really? How thrilling!” But her face changed, and he noticed with detached curiosity that the hand with which she put the cup aside was not quite steady. “Will it be a breach of confidence to tell me what his conclusions were?” She strolled towards the windows, stood there with her back to the room.
“McKee didn’t tell me. But then, Judith, I couldn’t really give him much information. I only met the Gairs last spring. How long have you known them?”
She said without moving: “Oh, ages and ages. We all drank out of the same christening mug.” Telfair glanced past her small head at an acanthus tree just bursting into leaf, ugly and insipid against a brick wall. In its spotted shade Miss Fenwick’s canary was chirping weakly at sparrows hopping around. The passion in the girl’s voice, when she spoke again, startled him.
“And all this fuss about that—horrible woman! I don’t know who killed her. I don’t know anything about it. But the person who removed her is a public benefactor. It was not murder—it was an act of social surgery. Circumstances alter cases. Rita deserved killing. It was justifiable homicide. Shooting was too good for her. She should have been cut into little bits, roasted alive. She should …”
“You seem,” Telfair said when she stopped at last, “to know quite a lot about her.”
“Know? What do you have to know? Couldn’t you tell by just using your eyes?” But she was calmer now, turning round, moving towards the couch, picking up her gloves. Telfair continued to wander around in blackness filled with ugly shapes, but he was pulled sharply back to consciousness when Judith said a moment later, standing on the doorstep, pulling her hat down over her hair, straightening the lapels of her coat: “Well, anyhow … do see your inspector, Jim, and find out all the news. How about dinner tonight? If you can make it, call me.” Then she was gone. Telfair went back into the little house, closed the door and stood with his shoulders against it. So that was why she had come. To find out what the police were doing. There was no longer any doubt in his mind that the purse he had picked up in the dancer’s apartment had been in Judith’s hands earlier the night before. Beyond that he couldn’t go. He knew, too, that he was concealing important evidence and that his integrity was seriously involved. He glanced at the humidor but didn’t move. The very memory of that square green purse was like a blow; he couldn’t bear to look at—to touch—the thing. With an oath that startled him in its reverberations through the room that seemed so empty now that Judith had gone, he went upstairs to work. The clock struck half-past nine as he sat down at his drawing board.
At almost the same moment the telephone on McKee’s desk rang. The Scotsman pushed away Rita’s checkbook with a balance of thirty-four dollars and twenty-two cents showing on the last stub and picked up the receiver. Hickson, the man who had relieved Tannin on the Barcley house, was at the other end of the wire. Hickson said, and he seemed in a hurry:
“I just put Mrs. Barcley and that guy, Waring, into a law office—Keely and Fancher—over there in the Stillwell Building. Want me to stick?”
And McKee answered curtly after a momentary pause: “Yes. Hold it down, give me a call if there’s anything new.” He put the receiver back on the hook. Donaher had just entered the room. The lieutenant repeated the names. “Keely and Fancher? Keely was the chap who got an acquittal for Two-punch Hunt last fall, has a lot of luck with criminal cases.”
McKee nodded thoughtfully. “These people are beginning to interest me a lot, Lieutenant.” He reached for his hat, stood up.