“A week tomorrow.”
“And you think somebody, probably her husband, killed her and concealed the body.”
“I think it’s a possibility. I’m only sure of one thing. Ben’s lying. If I find out why, I’ll know what happened to Carolyn. She was a nice girl. She was also a taxpayer. She deserves that much.”
“Take it easy,” Packer said. “I agree with you. The area around the Forbes house was thoroughly searched?”
“Thoroughly. We were looking primarily for a body, but we’d certainly have spotted a fresh grave.”
“What about opportunity?”
“That is going to be the toughest problem. She disappeared sometime between twelve-thirty and three-thirty, as near as we can figure. I don’t know how much of that time Ben can account for and I haven’t solved the problem of transportation, either. Carolyn had the car. Of course there’s always the possibility that Ben might have hired someone to do it for him. The way I see it,
somebody
came for her and she went away in a hell of a hurry, without even stopping for a coat. If she was running away with a boy friend she’d have packed a few things. She had all day to do it in.”
“Okay,” said Packer. “Take Drumm with you and see what you can turn up. And we’ll keep this quiet. I imagine that’s the way you want it.”
“The quieter the better.” Ernie went to the door. “Thanks,” he said, and went out.
He stopped long enough to pass the license number of the car that had visited Ben Forbes’ house yesterday afternoon on to BMV for identification. Then he picked up Bill Drumm and they drove to Blackstone’s. On the way Ernie briefed Bill on the salient points of the case. He did not have to draw diagrams for Bill, who was a lot smarter than he looked and who also knew Ben Forbes, though only slightly.
It was a profitable but disturbing day.
Ernie talked to Lorene Guthrie and Mary Catherine Brewer. From Lorene he got the name and address of Vernon Kratich without having to wait for word from the vehicle registry. He talked to Kratich. He put in a long-distance call to Carolyn’s parents in Pittsburgh. Then he looked up Grace Vitelli’s address and went there to talk to her.
She greeted him coldly and nodded to Bill Drumm when he introduced him. “I gather that this visit is official,” she said.
They had interrupted her in the middle of cleaning house. She wore blue jeans and flat shoes and an old sweater and her hair was untidy. She was a totally unfamiliar Grace Vitelli to Ernie, who had seen her only at Ben’s office, immaculately groomed. She looked somehow older than he had thought her, perhaps because she had left off both her girdle and her makeup.
He said, “Let’s put it like this, Mrs. Vitelli. Ben is in trouble. I am very anxious to get him out of it if I can, and I need your help.”
She sat down on the sofa, still reserved and wary. Ernie asked if he and Bill might sit too, and she said of course. Her eyes searched Ernie’s face.
“What do you want me to do?” she asked.
“Can you remember last Tuesday pretty clearly? The whole day, I mean, not just the part about Carolyn being missing.”
“I should hope so. That was only a week ago tomorrow.”
“Could you give me a run-down on what happened? From the beginning. What time did you get to the office?”
“The usual time. Eight-thirty. I opened the office, checked the appointment list for the day, and got out the first file that I knew Mr. Forbes would want.”
“Go on.”
“Mr. Forbes came in at the usual time too. About ten minutes to nine. Then at nine Mr. Morgan came—he was the first appointment. He was with Mr. Forbes until ten-thirty. Then it was Mrs. Babyan. She wasn’t there long, I think only about half an hour. Then Mr. Forbes worked on a brief until lunch time.”
“When was that?”
“Twelve-fifteen.”
“Go on.”
“Mr. Forbes had had a luncheon date with Mr. Frank but Mr. Frank canceled it. So we went around the corner to the Hotel Woodley grill and had lunch. We got back to the office around one-fifteen.”
There was more. What it added up to was that Ben Forbes had not been out of Grace Vitelli’s sight from ten minutes to nine in the morning until twenty minutes past five in the evening.
You could almost say that he had taken great pains not to be out of her sight.
“Mrs. Vitelli, please don’t get angry if I ask you this. I’m only trying to get at the truth so I’ll have something definite to work on. Do you have any reason at all to believe that Ben and Carolyn might have quarreled?”
“None.”
“And you had not observed anything erratic in either Ben’s or Carolyn’s behavior? Think hard now. Even a little thing.”
“In Mr. Forbes’ behavior, no. Of course, I didn’t see as much of Mrs. Forbes, but certainly everything seemed perfectly normal.”
“And you never noticed anything in Ben’s relations with Lorene Guthrie other than what you would consider normal with any client.”
“Certainly not. I don’t know what she may have said—”
“That’s exactly what she said, Mrs. Vitelli. Now what about Mr. Guthrie.”
“Mr.
Guthrie.” She stared at him. “What do you mean, what about him?”
“Did he come around the office very much?”
“He came just once, I guess as soon as he found out that his wife had been there. He seemed to think he could bully Mr. Forbes into dropping the matter, but Mr. Forbes just told him he’d have to go to court if he wanted to fight it, and he warned Mr. Guthrie that there were laws to restrain him if he made it necessary. A dreadful man. You should have seen the way that poor child was bruised when she first came to the office.”
“Did Guthrie contest the divorce?”
“No. I guess he didn’t have any grounds to contest it.”
“Did Ben have any further dealings with him?”
“Certainly none that I know of.”
“Is there any legal reason why Ben would be anxious to locate Mr. Guthrie now?”
“Well,” she said, “you’d really have to ask Mr. Forbes about that.”
“But you yourself can’t think of any.”
“No.”
“Has Ben said anything to you about moving either his home or his office?’
“No.”
“Well, I guess that’s all for now, Mrs. Vitelli. You’ve been very helpful.” Ernie stood up. “I’m going to ask you not to speak to Ben about this.”
“Officially?”
“Officially.”
“Very well.”
They went to the door and she opened it for them. As they went out she said:
“I still say, Mr. MacGrath, that you’d do better to be hunting for Mrs. Forbes instead of going around trying to play Judas to a friend.”
She shut the door before he could answer. Ernie sighed. He got into the car with Bill and drove away.
“Where to now?” asked Bill.
“Talk to some of those real estate people.”
“What do you think?”
“I’m damned,” said Ernie, “if I know what to think.”
“Forbes has an alibi for the time his wife disappeared. At least we know that.”
“Yeah,” said Ernie. “It makes me all the more curious to know why he’s in such a sweat to find this guy Guthrie.”
“If he is in such a sweat. Kratich thinks he’s just using it as an excuse to bother Lorene.” Bill shook his head and smiled. “I wouldn’t mind finding an excuse to bother her myself.”
Ernie grunted. “Fluff.”
“What do you mean, fluff?”
“Nothing to her. No insides. No brains.”
“With her outsides, who needs them?” He paused. Then he said, “The Brewer girl may have something, at that. She thinks Forbes is just plain nuts.”
“Yeah,” said Ernie. “I thought of that myself.”
They talked to three of the real estate people Ben had talked to. When they got the same answer from all three they did not bother with any more. They got back to headquarters late in the afternoon and checked the file to see if they had anything on Guthrie. They did not.
They reported to Packer.
“Your redheaded motive doesn’t look so promising now, does she?” Packer said when Ernie was through.
“At least she’s no party to it. But that doesn’t say how Ben feels about her. He could be using this Guthrie gag to put the pressure on her. She’s scared to death of her ex-husband.”
“Pretty thin,” said Packer.
“Sure,” said Ernie. “And I can show you a lot of motives so thin they were laughable, only the victims aren’t around to do the laughing.”
“We just don’t happen to have a victim on this one.”
“We don’t have Carolyn, either.”
Ernie walked up and down the narrow space of the floor, frowning.
“Even on the surface Ben’s acting crazy. All three of them, Mrs. Guthrie, Miss Brewer, Kratich, commented on his behavior. If he’s got legitimate business with this Guthrie why doesn’t he just say so? And why—and this is the most important of all—why did he tell these people that Carolyn was with her family?”
He stopped and faced Packer.
“From the time he called me Tuesday evening about Carolyn until Friday night he acted about the way you’d expect a guy in his position to act. Then when I dropped in on him Friday night he’d changed. He lied to me then, he’s lied ever since, and he’s been behaving like a lunatic. Something happened Friday night to upset him. I don’t know what it was, but it’s logical to assume that it had something to do with Carolyn and what happened to her. Now if there isn’t something damned dirty stinking wrong, why didn’t he tell me what it was?”
Packer said, “What’s your idea of what it might be?”
“I think it’s possible,” said Ernie slowly, “that he hired Guthrie to get rid of Carolyn for him, and that Guthrie is now holding him up for more money, and that that is why Ben is so frantic to find him but can’t do it in a reasonable way.”
“I thought,” said Packer, “that was about what you had in mind. Okay, go pull him in. We can see what kind of answers he has, anyway.”
Ernie nodded to Bill Drumm and they went out and drove to Lister Road. Ben’s house was dark and the car was not in the garage.
They parked a little way up the road and waited.
They had a long wait. That night Ben Forbes did not come home.
Ben Forbes had had a strange sort of a day. It lacked any form or detail. He had been in rooms, office rooms, and he had talked with people, but when he tried to remember any one of them they all blurred together into a vague mass from which nothing stood clear except that none of them had rented houses to a man who answered the description of Al Guthrie.
It was not until he reached South Flat that things began to take on a sharper outline. When he had finished with the last of the west-side agents—the room had had a glass-brick wall and a modern desk of bleached walnut, and the woman there had a fixed smile like something modeled in bone china—he was excited, almost feverish. The sky had looked bright overhead, the late afternoon shadows strongly defined as he drove into Trumbull Avenue, thinking, I’ve got him trapped now. Narrowed down. He has to be here. Somewhere here.
Smoke blew from the chimneys, over the slate roofs, over the sooty brick fronts. The stores had big gaudy signs. Credit furniture. Credit clothing for all the family. Credit jewelry. Aiello’s Supermarket, special today on pepperoni. Krejewski’s Supermart, fresh Polish sausage and braided strings of garlic. Smith’s Variety Store. Cut-rate drugs. The workingman’s optician, glasses on credit. Bars. Lots of bars. And on the side streets, rows and rows of houses. Four-room and double houses with narrow porches and tall windows, all stained gray with coal smoke from their own furnaces and the drift of the mills and the railroad junction. This was the place for Al Guthrie. Here he could hole in and never be noticed, just another guy in a section where part of the population was always in a state of flux, depending on the labor market. Ben was almost happy.
He checked the list of the local real estate agents. There were only four. One of them would have the answer. One of them would say, “Yes I rented a house to such a man and the address is—”
Only they did not.
They all said more or less the same thing, looking with some curiosity at his white shirt and Ivy League suit, his taut and distracted face.
“We’ve got an awful lot of foreign-born in this district, mister. The first thing they do when they get some extra money saved up is make a down payment on a house for income property. Some of these old birds own four and five houses, and they wouldn’t any more pay an agent’s percentage on them than they’d lend you their wife. Outside of store buildings and a few scattered properties most of the renting in South Flat is on a strictly personal basis.”
And they shook their heads. “Can’t help you.” So at dusk of a cold November day Ben Forbes stood on Trumbull Avenue with one hand on the door of his car and the skirts of his topcoat whipping around his legs, watching the cluttered chimneys fade out of sight, the rows of houses withdraw into the oncoming dark.
He had been so sure. And in the space of a couple of hours it had all slipped away.
Al Guthrie might be here, but he would never find him.
He wanted to howl and cry and beat his fists against the world.
What did he do now? Give up? Go home and call Ernie?
Go and see Lorene?
Horns blatted and taillights brightened and glared impatiently as evening traffic clogged the avenue. The cop on the beat, an alert young Negro, came up to Ben and asked if he was all right. Ben straightened up and assured him that he was. The young cop looked at him closely, decided he had not been drinking, smiled, nodded, and walked on, swinging his night stick.
Ben started to get into his car. Then he changed his mind and went instead to the nearest bar.
This one was called Jack’s Happy Hour. It was a half-lighted, beer-smelling cave, but it was warm. A jukebox played. The bar was crowded with men stopping in for a quick one on the way home. Ben ordered a double bourbon with water on the side and took it to a back booth. After a while he got another one. He watched the men come in and out. He was the only one there in store clothes. Everybody else wore a jacket and a cap and work pants. They looked at Ben, and the bartender acted as though he wondered what he was doing there. Ben could not have told him. He didn’t know himself.