Death of Cecilia, page 2
“That’s impossible.” She closed the little book with a snap. “I’ll ask Mr. Webster if he can fit you in to-morrow.”
“I’ll make a deal with you,” I said.
“What kind of a—” When I leaned over the rail and propped my elbow on her machine she coloured slightly and drew back. “I’m afraid I can’t waste any more time. Leave your telephone number and I’ll call you.”
“Not interested in a little proposition?” I asked.
“Not interested in big or little propositions.” She stuck a sheet of paper behind the roller and began typing with a fixed concentration that was intended as my dismissal.
I made myself comfortable, and said, “You’re good on that thing.”
“Thank you.” She didn’t look up but she was knocking the daylight out of the keyboard.
“Unusual to see such a pretty girl so efficient,” I went on.
She stopped abruptly and pressed her lips firmly together. “Just what do you want? “She was even more attractive when she tried to look angry.
“Look, honey,” I said, “if you let me talk to the D.A. on your inter-com., in return I’ll—”
“You’ll what?”
“I’ll take you out to lunch,” I said.
Some sort of struggle seemed to be going on inside her. I didn’t know whether she intended to hit me with a chair or ring for the bouncer. So I sat and grinned at her, and wondered why I hadn’t seen her when I had last called on Webster.
After a moment she began to smile—the kind of smile a woman wears when her best friend says, “That hat is very becoming, dear. It makes you look quite young.” Then she leaned back and clasped her hands round a very fetching knee. “Mr. Bowman, there are one or two things you ought to know.” Her voice was dripping with molasses. “In the first place, if I told the District Attorney that you had tried to bribe your way in, he’d have you thrown out—”
“Maybe you’ve got something there,” I admitted.
“And secondly, I have absolutely no intention of going out to lunch with a perfect stranger on any conditions.”
“You flatter me,” I said. “No one is perfect.”
“Very clever.” She looked at me engagingly. “You’re what’s called a brash young man.”
“More flattery. I’m thirty-seven.”
She took a deep breath and half opened her mouth. I’ll never know how far the conversation would have taken me, because just then a light glowed on her desk-set and the buzzer sounded twice. Without removing her eyes from mine, she flipped a switch and murmured, “Yes, Mr. Webster?”
The D.A.’s voice said, “Fetch your notebook, Miss Colman.”
“Very good, Mr. Webster.” She got up and went towards the inner door. I sat and admired the straight lines of her back and the carriage of her head. She had smooth, stream lined hips and small-boned ankles. Some dames look all right front view, others are better when they’re going away—a long way. This one had almost everything, coming and going.
Over her shoulder she said, “Thank you for the lunch invitation, Mr. Bowman. Only two things stop me accepting.”
“Such as?”
“My boy-friend has a jealous disposition.” She paused with her hand on the door-knob.
“And the other thing?”
“I like to be asked for the sake of my company and not as a reward for services rendered.”
“Hold it,” I said, and she half-turned towards me. “If you have a boy-friend, he should have sense enough to take out an option on you by springing a ring. Unless he stakes his claim officially, his objections are entitled to be ignored.” I pushed open the swinging gate in the fence and walked over to her. “Your second point is better answered by actions than by words.”
She looked up at me and took a hasty step back. “What do you mean by that?”
I grinned and shook my head. “Not what you think. I never take liberties with a lady until I’m asked. This is what I mean.” I turned the knob and opened Webster’s door a crack. “You’re new here or you’d know that I don’t need to be announced. And I only put my invitation the way I did because I’m of a bashful nature.” As I went in, I added, “While you’re waiting, think up some nice place to eat. I won’t be long.”
Her eyes were frosty. “Of all the nerve—”
“Save it till lunch,” I said. “Bye.”
Webster looked up as I closed the door behind me, and he gave me a warm smile. “The only time you come to see me these days is when you want something. I’ve been expecting you since yesterday.” He pointed to a chair at the side of his big glass-topped desk. “Sit down and tell me what you’ve been doing for the last two or three months.”
I took a cigarette from the box he slid towards me and lay back in the chair. “As my bank-roll can prove, I’ve been doing nothing—but nothing—until the Misses Parsons called on me yesterday a.m. Thanks for the recommendation.”
He flicked his hand airily, and peered at me under his brows. “Think nothing to it. They were determined to hire somebody, and I thought it had better be you than some slick shyster who’d fill them up with a load of bull and take all the dough he could get out of them. Not that you or anybody else can turn suicide into either accident or murder, but at least you’ll give them something for their money. That’s if you proceed with your inquiries, although you’d be well advised not to. It’s suicide.”
“Not even a teeny weeny doubt?” I asked.
“Not the slightest.” His rimless eyeglasses flashed in the light and gave him a sightless appearance. On his smooth pink face was an expression of entire confidence. “We’ve checked up on everyone in and around the girl’s apartment house, and we’ve drawn a complete blank. She came alone, nobody was seen leaving her room, and nothing was disturbed. And”—he wagged a forefinger—“the gun she used was her own; we’ve proved that. Her room-mate saw it in a drawer months ago and asked her what she wanted it for. She said it had belonged to her father and she had brought it to New York unintentionally at the bottom of one of her grips.”
“Who’s this room-mate? Know anything about her?”
“Not much—but what there is doesn’t implicate her. She’s a hostess at the club where Cecilia Parsons worked as a cashier. They were friends, and we’ve no reason to believe that they ever had anything to quarrel about.”
“What about boy-friends?”
“The Parsons woman had one or two casuals, but—” He rubbed his fleshy chin thoughtfully. “Oh, I see what you mean. No, nothing like that. This Lorna Hill doesn’t go much for the opposite sex. No suggestion that one was trying to hijack the other’s man of the moment.”
“Does Lorna know who Cecilia’s casuals were?”
“She mentioned a guy called Martin Rowe. Seems he was paying more than a bit of attention off and on, some months ago. She couldn’t say that they’d ever gone out together, but he was a regular frequenter of The Golden Hourglass and he always seemed to be making the running when he stopped at the cash desk.”
I had a feeling that I’d heard the name Rowe some place before. “What have you got on him?”
Webster grinned. “That sounds like a leading question. If you’ve got any fancy ideas about young Martin, better be careful you don’t get your fingers burned. His old man is John K. Rowe. Does that tell you anything?”
“Sure,” I said. “Consolidated Steel, Trans-America Railroad, a ten-thousand-ton yacht and a string of ponies at Santa Fé. Right?”
“Same John K.” Webster pursed his lips and sighed. “I did a lot of thinking about Martin myself. In view of the girl’s condition and what the heavy father might have done if Martin had been responsible, there was a good enough motive. But we’d never have been able to make it stick. He spent the whole of that evening at home.”
“Who says?”
“A very charming lady—his mother.”
I looked into the D.A.’s flat, grey eyes, and said, “Pfui!”
He shrugged. “Maybe. But you’re letting yourself run loose on no evidence at all. We’re not investigating a homicide. Cecilia Parsons’ prints were on the gun and nobody else’s. She had good and sufficient reason to take her own life—I’d like a dollar for every case of its kind that happens each year.”
“Yeh,” I said, “could be. But if it weren’t for the fingerprints you’d be digging a lot deeper into one or two alibis.”
“But there wasn’t any need to check up on the people she knew. This was the clearest case of suicide I’d ever come across—motive, opportunity, and a farewell letter. It was only a matter of routine that I had any inquiries made at all. From the police point of view—”
“Never mind the police for the moment,” I interrupted. “What’s this about a letter?”
“Didn’t the old ladies tell you about it?”
“Not a word. I heard a long story on her upbringing in Hopeville, North Carolina, how much the local school thought of her behaviour, the enthusiasm of the Hopeville Amateur Dramatic Society over her acting ability, what a good girl she was at home, and a lot more that you’d expect from two doting aunts.”
“I have the letter here.” He riffled through a stack of files and extracted one entitled—“Cecilia Parsons: documents relevant to suicide on November eighteen.” I realised what a job I’d have to overturn the verdict of the inquest when everything relating to the dead girl was securely buried under that official label. If it hadn’t been for the fake voice on the telephone, I’d probably have refused the case when the two old dames wanted to engage me in the first instance. I never believe in banging my head against a brick wall. The guy who owns the wall might sue me for damaging his property.
Webster said, “This is it.” He handed me a square white envelope that hadn’t been sealed. It was addressed to—“Mr. James Drake, Central Garage, Hopeville, Nr. Greensboro’, N. Carolina.” Inside it was a single sheet of plain notepaper. Both envelope and letter were written in the same neat, careful hand.
“18th November
“MY DEAR JIM,
“I am afraid this letter is to say good-bye. So many things have happened since I left home that I am a different person now—I could never go back to the old way of living that you love.
“It is hard to tell you that I shall not see you again. I know that what I am going to do will hurt you, but I have no other choice. Put me right out of your mind; I have never been good enough for anyone like you.
“By the time you receive this, I shall …
It stopped there—the tail of the last “I” finished in a long scrawl, as though the writer hadn’t been able to lift her pen from the paper. Nothing else marred the prim tidiness of the smooth-flowing script.
When I looked up, I found the D.A. staring at me reflectively. “Well?”
“Well what?”
He put the tips of his fingers together and raised his blond eyebrows. “Does it satisfy you?” The trace of condescension in his voice annoyed me.
“I don’t know,” I said.” There’s no specific mention in it that she intended to take her life.”
“Oh, come, come,” he protested. “Surely it’s obvious—when you add it to what happened afterwards.”
“All right, so I’m being pig-headed. Do you expect me to take one look at an unfinished letter and then go back to my clients and say, ‘Sorry, ladies, but your niece discovered she was having a baby so she wrote half a letter of farewell and shot herself. That’ll be two hundred bucks. Good afternoon?” I could feel myself growing hot under the collar at the faint smile on Webster’s face. “Do you find that very funny?”
“No,” he said, “but you are.”
“Nothing could be farther from my intentions,” I told him “There’s no fun in trying to buck the New York Police Department.”
“Don’t put it like that,” he said, and his expression was friendly and disarming. “You’ll get all the co-operation you want from this end. Because we’re satisfied that it was suicide doesn’t mean that we’ve any interest in letting it rest that way. I don’t think you’ll get anywhere, but I’ll keep an absolutely open mind. If”—he reached out and took Cecilia Parsons’ letter from me—“if this doesn’t mean what we believe it does, that would put an entirely different complexion on the whole matter, fingerprints or no fingerprints.”
“Was the letter in the envelope when it was found?” I asked.
“No. It was lying face up on the dressing-chest in her bedroom, with the envelope near it. An uncapped fountain-pen was where you’d expect it to be if she had put it down while she thought over what else she was going to write.”
“Except,” I said, “that she never wrote any more.”
He nodded. “True. We assumed that she was so keyed up by then that she went completely off balance and shot herself before she could finish the rest of it.”
“Another possibility is that she was disturbed while she was writing, and didn’t live to come back to it.”
“We thought of that, too,” he admitted. “As a theory it’s all right, but there’s nothing we’ve been able to uncover that supports the presence of an outside party.” Webster shook his head slowly from side to side. “The gun was hers, she kept it in a drawer in her own room along with a box of shells, and only her fingerprints were on it. She was found in the sitting-room of the apartment. The inference is obvious.”
“Not to me it isn’t,” I said. “I come from a long line of dim-wits.”
“You know darn well what I’m driving at,” he protested. “Say some guy got in while she was alone in the apartment. He’d have had to go into the bedroom, rummage in the drawer for the gun, and—” His eyes were sardonic. “What happens after that?”
“He’d shoot her, wipe over the gun, and wrap her fingers round the butt.” I could tell by the look on his face that there was more to it than that.
“And then carry her from the bedroom into the sitting-room by way of light exercise?” He grunted and stirred restlessly. “It’s not feasible, my friend. There’s just no reason why he should do it.”
“Because you don’t know the reason, doesn’t mean that he hadn’t one,” I pointed out. “And you’re assuming that the unknown Joe Doaks took the gun from the drawer. What’s wrong with this for an explanation? Cecilia is writing in the bedroom. She hears someone snooping about in the sitting-room, goes for the gun, and surprises the intruder. He bluffs her into letting him get close, they have a struggle during which the weapon is turned against her, and she is shot. If hers is the only hand holding the gun all the time, naturally only her fingerprints will be on it. Anything wrong with that?”
“Ingenious,” he admitted, “but all based on the assumption that she was murdered.” His heavy face was set in stubborn lines. “You can’t create a priori conditions that Cecilia Parsons’ death was neither suicide nor accident and then proceed to show how it was possible for someone to have killed her. If the Police Department worked that way, we’d be looking for a killer in every case where a jay-walker steps off the sidewalk and is knocked down by a truck.” He grinned sourly. “After all, the truck driver might have had reasons for removing the poor dope who got flattened. Or the dead party could have been shoved off the kerb by a sinister member of an international spy ring.” He stopped. “What’s the matter?”
“It was all right for you to kid me when we were at college together,” I said, “but we’ve grown up since then. Why drag up something from the pages of sensational fiction? In the case we’re discussing, we don’t need to invent any motive—Cecilia Parsons was going to have a baby out of wedlock, which, to me at least, indicates association with some man who wouldn’t or couldn’t marry her. Or has the D.A.’s office some scientific method which does away with any need for the presence of a man in affairs of misconduct?”
Webster started to laugh. His face grew young, as though a sponge had wiped off the lines of the past twenty years. For a fleeting moment I could have believed we were back in our room in the old Alma Mater. The outward signs of position and responsibility vanished, and we looked at each other through the eyes of the inseparable buddies we had once been.
“In another couple of minutes we’ll be slanging each other,” he said lightly. “This isn’t taking us very far. I’ve told you the official attitude, and you can accept it or not as you wish. Obviously you have to punch holes in it—that’s what you’re being paid for. I don’t blame you for seeing this business the way your clients would like it to have happened.”
I didn’t fancy the implication, but I knew what he meant —and so far as I was concerned, he always meant well by me. “Thanks,” I said. “It’s nice to know that someone thinks of my bread and butter.”
He got up and squared his thick shoulders. “Anything else?”
“Only two questions.” I nodded at the folder open on his desk. “All right for me to borrow your dossier, or would that require a special Act of Congress?”
“Maybe it could be arranged,” he said, guardedly, after a moment’s hesitation. “Have to be kept quiet, of course.”
“Well, how do you expect me to keep it?” I asked. “Call a press conference?”
“O.K. I know. I shouldn’t have said that.” He thumped me playfully in the chest. “Only a guy with an advanced inferiority complex could be as touchy as you are. Why don’t you get married? A wife and kids would cure that for you.”
“As a form of treatment it sounds swell,” I said. “Only thing is—how do I get rid of the wife and kids when I’m cured?”
All he did was grin and throw up his hands in mock despair. “If you wait too long, no woman will want you.”
“Up to date, supply exceeds demand,” I told him. I stuffed the folder into the inside pocket of my top-coat, and he walked me to the door with his arm around my shoulders. I wondered why he wasted his time on a dead-beat like me, a man who feared social responsibility like a bird fears a cage, a shiftless dilettante who had had the same opportunities and thrown them away. The habit of old friendship was strong in Eric Webster; most of the trappings the world valued didn’t rate very highly with him, especially when they cut across intimate relationships. He was a nice guy.
