Into The Night (14 page)

"And was she always there when you went over?"

The key! she thought in a panic. Here comes the key! My God, I've boxed myself in.

Another of those incriminating bleaches passed over her face. One of them reached out and held her arm a moment to steady her. It wasn't an encouraging hold and it wasn't a friendly one; it was a steadying one only. Like when you want to keep somebody up.

A flagrant lie was the safest, as risky as it was. It was her word against the doorman's. She couldn't afford to let them "place" her alone at the apartment. God knows what dangers might crop up out of that.

"Always. Without fail. You see, I never neglected to call up ahead of time to make sure she would be there. If she didn't answer, I didn't go."

"That brings up another point. When was the last time you were up to see her?"

They're coming to it now, she cautioned herself. Hang on.

"Let me see. Today's Monday. The last time I was over there was on Friday a week ago."

"You weren't up there today?"

"No."

"You didn't go up there at any time today?"

"No, I didn't."

Notice how they're pressing? she said to herself. This is very thin ice. It's the first time they've made me repeat a denial.

"Did the two of you speak with one another on the telephone?"

Here was a bad one. Did the hotel switchboard keep a record of incoming calls, if they were answered? Probably not, but one of the girls might remember that a woman had called her up. Dell's voice had been excited enough to attract attention.

She didn't want to bring the association up this close to the deadline. It was too dangerous. And deadline was the right word. She took a chance on an out-and-out lie instead. They couldn't prove that it had been Dell. They certainly hadn't tapped, because Dell had still been alive, and her calls hadn't yet become police business.

"No."

The large one said, like a huge but deadly silent tiger landing on its prey with all four paws, "Who was the woman who called you up at about five o'clock, approximately, this afternoon?"

With every word I sink in deeper, she thought, appalled. How the hell did they find out about it? Or hadn't they, was itjust a shot in the dark? Either way, she had to stick to her lie, she was stuck with it now. She groped desperately. Hairdresser? They'd check. Relative? They'd check. Nurse in doctor's office? I haven't been to any doctor's office.

"A woman who used to go to the same church I did, a few years back. She lost her daughter, and I was kind to her at the time, and she's never forgotten it since. Today was the anniversary of the death. She's a Mrs. Bartlett." (How much more plausible than that can you get? she thought.)

They didn't press further on this. It's strange, she said to herself. Sometimes when there's nothing there, they dig and dig and dig. Then sometimes when there's something there just waiting to be dug up, they muff it. Maybe they're only human after all, and it's foolish to be so afraid of them.

"Did you ever meet any of Miss Nelson's other friends?"

"No. Not one."

"Did she ever discuss them with you?"

"No. She was extremely close-mouthed."

What were they fishing for there, she wondered, a jealousy motive on her part, over one of the men?

"Didn't you ever hear her even talk on the phone with any of them?"

"Once or twice the phone rang, but I didn't pay attention. The music covered it up."

"Did she ever show you any of her belongings?"

"She showed me a fur piece once. And some pieces of jewelry."

"Didn't you wonder who gave them to her?"

"It was none of my business," she said piously.

"Just for a moment, didn't you wish that you owned them, that they were yours?" the tiger one said craftily.

She jumped to her feet, infuriated, then abruptly sat down again, just as infuriated. "What are you implying?" she said in an anger-cracked voice. "That I had my eye on them? That I took something without permission? There's my clothes closet. Go over and look inside it. See for yourself."

To her utter complete consternation and then complete infuriation, he took her at her word and got up and did so.

When he came back, ignoring the blazing look she gave him, he said unconcernedly to his partner, "Not a fur in there."

But once she'd allowed herself to cool off sufficiently, she understood why he'd done it. He hadn't seriously expected to find anything in there. It was just a psychological trick, to jangle her, undermine her self-confidence, if possible. Put her on the defensive.

She felt by now as if their questioning had been going on forever. The strain was beginning to tell, particularly so soon after the not-yet-worn-off shock of finding the body. And she had an uneasy feeling she hadn't come through it as well as she might have. For one thing, by not asking from the beginning what had happened to Dell, which would have been the normal reaction of anybody placed in her situation. What had kept her from it, probably, was the guilty knowledge that she already knew, and the fear of letting this slip out in some way if she asked at all. It was too late now to do so with any degree of plausibility or grace.

They were at it again. The technique was to keep the person bouncing, and if possible off-balance. Somewhat like dribbling a basketball or swatting a punching bag this way and that.

"Did you leave the hotel at any time this evening?"

How could she say no? The elevator boy, the desk man, the man on door duty, had all seen her.

"I went out about seven."

"And where did you go?"

She had taken a taxi a few yards offside to the door. She took a chance on those few yards covering her up. Because a taxi meant a destination, you didn't take it without one.

"Nowhere. I went just for a walk. I needed some exercise and I needed some fresh air."

"Do you go for a walk every evening at about that time? Is that your custom?"

"No. Tonight was the first time."

"And where did you walk?" came from the tiger one, who by this time had become a personal enemy.

"On the street," she snapped.

The other one made a strangled sound down in his throat, and murmured half audibly, "One down on you, Smitts."

"And what street was that?" he asked dulcetly.

She recited six of them in a row. "Satisfactory?" she asked sarcastically.

"For a walk, yes," he said imperturbably. The implication, somewhere down deep, being, "If you had taken one, but you didn't."

"And you came back--"

"By around eight."

She knew why all this. That was the time slot that encompassed Dell's death.

"Had you had your dinner before or after?"

"Neither. I did without it tonight."

The tiger one purred, "Did something happen to make you lose your appetite?"

This time she couldn't hold back. "Not at the time. But it has now." And she left his partner out of the incinerating glare she sent him. He was making her very angry, which is a bad thing for a person under questioning to be.

Suddenly he got to his feet, and as if at a given signal the other one did too.

She let out a long, unconcealed sigh of relief, and let her head go limply back against the top of the sofa. The next thing she knew, he was saying, "I'm sorry, but we'll have to ask you to accompany us."

Her head jerked upright again. "But why?" she wailed almost tearfully. "Haven't I answered all your questions?"

"Yes," he said briefly.

"Haven't I answered them satisfactorily?"

"You would know more about that." Meaning, whether the answers were true or not.

The other one, standing by the door, said, "Coming, Smitts?" but she knew he meant it for her and not his partner.

"After Miss Chalmers," Smitts said pointedly, and brought up the rear.

She shuddered uncontrollably as she walked between them down the long carpeted hotel corridor, which seemed to stretch ahead for miles. "I feel terrible about this," she said in a fearful whisper. "I never was taken anywhere under police escort before."

"Weren't you?" Smitts said laconically.

The glass-prismed chandeliers, the offside mirrors, the offside needlepoint chairs. The offside desk, not meant for anything more serious than RSVPs and thank-you notes. You weren't supposed to walk along here with two detectives for company, involved in an act of violence. Going down to their place, at their order. You were supposed to walk along it in furs, with diamonds on your fingers and on your neck, owning the world. The only thing that hurt you, maybe a little corn because your Italian shoes are too tight.

And then, far too late, she finally asked, "What is it about? What's happened to her?"

"Shouldn't you have asked that before?"

"It could have been anything, how was I to know?" she said defensively. "She drinks a lot. Sometimes when a person's drunk they make all sorts of bad accusations against others."

"But when they're dead," he said, "they make the worst accusation of all."

"Dead?" she breathed, appalled, and only hoped she did it right.

"You'll never win an Academy Award." He gave her the look you give a cat that's come in out of the rain. It's all bedraggled, but you feel sorry for it, you have a heart. You even want to give it warm milk.

The transit from hotel to street to car was made fairly painlessly. No one looked at her a second time, or if they did, seemed to see only a pretty girl escorted by two young men in business suits. Detention was the last thought anybody would have connected with her graceful free-swinging arms.

The car was unmarked. Or at least, it definitely wasn't a piebald "Mickey Mouse" prowl car. Riding in it with them, she tried to analyze her feelings. Actual fear was minimal. But there was an uncomfortableness other than that. For the first time in her life she felt gauche, awkward, unsure of herself. That was probably because the initiative had gone over to them; she was no longer a free agent.

At the precinct house she was shown into an unoccupied room and asked, as politely as if she were a visitor or a guest, if she minded waiting there a minute. "We'll be right with you," one of them promised, and they both went out through a door ahead of the one they had entered by.

The room was depressing, but not particularly ominous or threatening. It was painted an ugly darkling green halfway up the walls, and the rest of the way up was just white plaster. Why the green stopped where it did was problematical. Either they'd run out of paint or they'd run out of money. Or someone had walked off with the painter's ladder. The window was of the oldfashioned proportions of the windows of sixty years ago: tall and narrow. Its glass was protected by a pattern of wire mesh embedded in it. The purpose of this she couldn't conjecture; certainly no one would be foolhardy enough to throw rocks at a police-station window, would they? It, the window, overlooked a backyard which it shared with a soot-blackened tenement backing up toward it from the other side. In some of the windows of this, people could be seen going about their daily lives without even a glance at the punitive place across the way, so used to it were they by a lifetime of propinquity. Which argued, at any rate, that suspects were not beaten or otherwise roughed up in these exposed rear rooms. And then again, did it? The tenement tenants might have even been immune to that.

Finally, the room had a number of scarred and scarified wooden chairs in it, ranged in a row against the wall, and a wooden table, likewise scarred, likewise scarified, cigarette burns galore scalloping its edges, and likewise back against the wall.

She turned her head, and a woman in uniform, a matron, had come into the room. She nodded pleasantly but impersonally to Madeline, sat down on one of the chairs, opened a narrow-spread paper, and lost herself in it.

Madeline could feel herself becoming highly nervous over her presence in the room. It seemed to predicate a rigorous forthcoming questioning, and perhaps even arrest, with the woman present to comply with regulations because the detainee was a woman herself.

As though she could read Madeline's thoughts, the matron murmured, gruffly but kindly, without even looking up from her paper, "Take it easy, snooks. Probably just routine. Be over with before you know it."

Suddenly, as if she had found something she was looking for, she exclaimed: "Libra. That's me! Let's see what's in store for today."

But what was was never made known, because the door reopened at this point, and Smitts and cohort came back in again, along with two others, one a man with bushy silver hair, who obviously upranked the rest of them. A full quorum was going to question her. One of them, though, was only a stenographer; she noticed he'd brought out a pad with carbon inserts with him.

Unexpectedly she found herself being introduced to the captain, which took a good deal of the curse off the imminent questioning and lent her added confidence. A person in line for arrest isn't usually introduced formally to the arresting officer-- or at least to his superior--beforehand.

"This is Miss Chalmers, Captain. Captain Barry."

He even held out his hand toward her, and when she'd placed her own in his, turned hers first on one side, then on the other, as if in friendly reluctance to part with it.

The table was shifted out from the wall just enough to give clearance on all sides of it, chairs were ranged, and they all sat down, including Madeline, who acted on a wordless nod from the smaller of the two who had been up to the hotel, the nontiger one, and took one of the chairs. The top leaves of the stenographer's pad gave a preliminary rustle as he furled them back out of the way until he came to a blank space.

The matron remained obliviously against the wall, poring over her tabloid, lost to the world.

The damn thing started in all over again, only with three of them now, instead of two. (And the distance to a detention cell, she couldn't help reflecting ruefully, that much shorter than it had been.) Unavoidably, much of the ground covered had already been gone over at the hotel. This was no hazard in itself. She had an acute memory. And the three things she had to remember to stay away from still remained the same they had been before: possession of a key to Dell's apartment, knowledge of who the two men in her life were, and that final phone call for help an hour before her death.

The interrogation seemed endless. There were times when it proceeded like a fencing match, with her parrying their thrusts and deflecting everything they threw at her. There were times, too, when the three of them went through the motions of searching jointly for the truth.

The captain's eyes, when they caught hers, seemed to have a fatherly glint in them. I have a daughter your age at home, they seemed to say. And she knew it would be easy to relax into the embrace of those eyes, to let them put her entirely at ease, but somehow she sensed that was how he wanted her to react. She couldn't afford to let her guard down, no matter how warmly some man turned his eyes on her.

She steeled herself and went on playing her part.

A patrolman stuck his head in the door, said, "Captain Barry says Miss Chalmers can go home whenever she wishes."

She got to her feet at once, the current instant being the "whenever" of her wishes.

One of the men said, "Good night. Hope we haven't been too rough on you."

She knew she ought to answer. She didn't feel much like it, but reciprocal politeness is a habit hard to break. "Good night to you men too," she said without any warmth.

She closed the door after her. A moment later she reopened it and stuck her head back inside the room. "Did I leave my handbag over there by the table?" she asked them.

Smitts glanced down at the chair she'd just been occupying, gave his head a shake. "I didn't see one with you when we left the hotel. It's my impression you came away without it."

She backed a hand between her eyes. "What'll I do for taxi fare?" she blurted out without stopping to think. A moment later she realized the hotel desk could pay it for her easily enough.

But Smitts's teammate, who seemed to be a decent sort of person, had already reached down into his pocket. "I'll stake you," he offered.

To her surprise she saw Smitts slice the edge of his hand at him in dissuasion. She wondered why.

He turned around to her and said, "I'll drop you off, if you don't mind waiting for me a couple minutes outside by the sergeant's desk. I'm going off at twelve."

She would have preferred the offer to come from someone else, but the heat of battle had subsided now, and with it her grievance. She was too tired even to dislike him very heartily anymore.

She sat down on a bench out there. The desk sergeant looked her over curiously, then went back to his own concerns.

The "couple minutes" became ten, the ten, fifteen, the fifteen, twenty. She started to steam up again inside. She fidgeted, but she clung stubbornly to the bench. She kept hoping she could get some hint out of him as to where she really stood in the case. "Miss Chalmers can go home whenever she wishes" was too indefinite. She had to know: Was she in or was she out?

When he finally came outside to her at twelve-twenty, he put a worse finish to an already bad situation by clapping himself dismayedly on the forehead and exclaiming, "I clean forgot about you!"

"Obviously," she said coldly, getting to her feet. The cutting look she gave him, if he had passed a finger in front of her eyes he would have lacerated it badly.

They got into the same car she'd been brought down in, and this time she was able to make out clearly that it had no markings.

"The cap had us all in for a last-minute briefing," he remarked as he pushed off. "That's what held me up."

She wondered if it had had to do with her, and wondered if she asked him, would he answer. Before she could get up nerve, a man with an itchy pedal foot in the adjoining lane started across the intersection before the light had changed.

"Wait for the light, bud. That's what it's there for," Smitts said in a low-register growl.

The man turned and looked at him. She held her breath for a minute, remembering there was no insignia on the car. Then the man looked forward again and glided off, this time permissibly. He didn't know what a close shave he'd had just then, she said to herself. One word spoken out of turn and.