The Theban Mysteries (12 page)

“Isn’t it possible to tell if a body has been moved after death?”

“Sometimes. If there’s been bleeding, so that the wounds correspond with the stains, if—oh, a hundred things—you can tell the body’s been moved. But if I were to hit you over the head, hard enough to kill you but not hard enough to break the skin on the skull, say there,” he pointed to Julia’s head, “or if I were to press on one of the major blood vessels till all went black, or various other ghoulish things, once you were dead, if I picked you up and dumped you somewhere, I don’t think medical evidence could necessarily discover it, unless, of course, I wounded the body after death. Wounds inflicted after death are identifiable as such.

“One should add,” he finished up, putting his coffee cup down and wrenching himself with difficulty from the chair, “that moving a dead body is not all that easy. In fact, it’s downright difficult. Apart from the fact that even in New York, where people sooner or later get used to everything, someone carrying a dead body, or even the body of an unconscious woman, would be bound to be noticed and remembered, if not commented upon. The point really is whether she was killed here or, as we still hope, died here.”

“Any fascinating clues discovered by the police?” Kate asked.

“A few. For one thing, the victim had, in the pocket of her skirt, the label from a tie.”

“A tie?”

“You know, a necktie, what those of us males who earn our living in the conventional world wear to work and even occasionally at other times. We know at least that whoever she was grappling with didn’t go in for turtleneck evening wear, which surely tells us something. The label comes from a rather exclusive custom shirt shop on Madison Avenue, and will be looked into.

“Nothing in the room had been disturbed. She didn’t back up, knocking over furniture and hitting her head the way her son did, which might mean anything, really.”

“Including the fact that she was dead when she got to the room after the dogs were through.”

“So you keep saying. But, if you want to get someone to the third floor of a building without leaving a trace, it is probably easier to get them there alive; certainly if you can think of a cock-and-bull story for getting them to walk the three flights, that’s easier than carrying the body all that way.”

“Was she heavy?”

“One hundred and thirty-five pounds, say, at a rough guess. She could be carried, but it wouldn’t be easy. And she would have had to be carried at least some way on the streets, though I’ve already mentioned that. We’re beginning to have circular conversations, which always happens in a crisis.”

“Mightn’t the middle of the night be a fairly safe time to tote a body around?” Julia asked.

“It might be, but in New York you can’t count on it. Lots of tomcats come slinking home at all hours, not to
mention lady cats. Plus all the people who work at night.”

“Can you tell anything about the time of death?”

“Not all that much. The autopsy will tell us something, if we’re lucky. If rigor had set in, as Dr. Green thought, that means she had been dead a certain length of time, certainly from before the dogs were through, probably five hours or more, but you’ll never get any one medical expert on the witness stand to be absolutely certain about good old rigor, and if you do, someone will flatly contradict him. For one thing, the rooms are heated, which affects rigor, as does everything else under the sun.”

“Will the police let us open the school tomorrow?” Julia asked.

“Oh, I should think so. And since there’ll be so much buzzing and whispering and speculating, the sooner the routine gets back to something approximating the usual the better, I should think. Shall we go and confer with Miss Tyringham, if she’s ready?”

As they started for the stairs and Miss Tyringham’s office, the machinery of Homicide East moved into action. A detective set out for the custom shirt shop whose name appeared on the label found in the dead woman’s pocket.

D
ETECTIVE
George Young found that the custom shirt shop bore its name, “The Gentleman’s Gentleman,” discreetly upon the door. When Young entered, there was a customer in the shop, and he waited patiently until the customer concluded a, to Young, unbelievably protracted discussion of shirt cloth, stripes, cuffs, and colors. Young himself, when he needed a shirt, wandered into some store, named his neck and sleeve size, and walked out almost with the first thing he saw. He supposed the rich had more time and didn’t mind spending it this way, not to mention money, though money was not mentioned between the gentleman’s gentleman and his customer. The owner of the store, pausing for a moment in his momentous deliberations, and apparently sizing Young up as unlikely to be a very remunerative proposition, asked if he could
do something for him. “I’ll wait,” Young said, in a voice indicating he intended to.

When the customer had at last exhausted all alternatives, decided upon his shirts, and retired, Young approached the counter, flipping open the case which held his identification. “We have a label from your shop found under circumstances of interest to the police. We wonder if you can help us. The owner of the shop is a man named Sam Meyer. Is that you?”

“Yes, but I don’t see how I can help you. I have many customers. As most of them are well-to-do, when they tire of their shirts they give them away, perhaps to their servants. You see the problem.”

“Did this label come off a shirt?”

Mr. Meyer glanced at it. “No, that’s off a tie. They’re even given as gifts. I’m afraid I can’t be much help.”

“Try. Do you have a customer named Jablon?”

Mr. Meyer looked concerned. “Mr. Cedric Jablon is one of my oldest customers. Is that whom you mean?”

“Let’s talk about him and see.”

“I met Mr. Jablon years ago, when I was a salesman at a big chain of elegant men’s stores when I began, and Mr. Jablon used to get his suits and all his accessories from me. When I left to open this shop, he came to me for his shirts. He couldn’t be mixed up in anything the police had to do with—it’s impossible.”

“Did Mr. Jablon’s grandson ever come in for a tie?”

Mr. Meyer eyed Young uneasily. “Look, I don’t want …”

“Just answer the question.”

Mr. Meyer sighed. “The old gentleman brought the boy in, oh, perhaps a year or two ago, to have some
shirts made for him. Made rather a thing of it, you know, now the kid was grown and Grandpa was going to give him some fine shirts. But it didn’t turn out that way.”

Young, impassive, continued looking at Mr. Meyer.

“This younger generation,” Mr. Meyer said. “The boy asked me the price of the shirts—it was fifteen dollars then, which it was worth, considering each shirt is individually tailored and made of the finest Egyptian cotton; they’re over twenty now—and when he heard the price he became, I regret to say, rude. He said it was a crime to spend money like that when there were kids being bitten by rats in the ghettos.” Mr. Meyer shuddered, at the recollection of the whole scene, which clearly had reached traumatic proportions in his mind, and particularly at the unforgettable mention of rats in his exclusive and elegant shop. “I pointed out to the boy, though perhaps it was not my place to do so, that I too had begun in a ghetto—that the word, in fact, was invented for Jews who were not allowed to live anywhere else—that I had worked to get here, and that if he wanted to fight rats in the ghetto he did not have to insult me before beginning. I became angry, I’m afraid, and I called up later to apologize to the grandfather, Mr. Jablon, but he was nice enough to say he didn’t blame me, and that he wanted to apologize for his grandson. Did you find the label in Harlem?”

Young, who had come to ask questions not to answer them, ignored this. “Your labels haven’t changed any?” he asked. “There’s no way of telling what year the tie was sold?”

“None,” Mr. Meyer shortly said, obviously feeling he
had spoken too freely and would henceforth confine himself to monosyllables. “Of course, if you had the tie …”

“Right,” said Young. “Be prepared to sign a statement setting forth what you told me.”

“Oh, dear. It’s all true, of course, but I don’t want …”

“Don’t sweat it,” the detective said, and was gone.

Mr. Sam Meyer, the gentleman’s gentleman, waited a few minutes, perhaps to see if the detective would return, perhaps to make a decision. Then he picked up the phone and dialed.

The medical examiner, meanwhile, had completed his work. There were still more refined tests to be done on some of the organs, and a specialist in cardiac pathology would have to be consulted before any official report could be made, and there was always room for later indications which might affect the detailed diagnosis but, the M.E. reported, and the officer at Homicide East, who knew Reed, passed on the information: Esther Jablon had died of a heart attack. She had died, though naturally they would not put it so close officially, sometime between nine and eleven the previous night. Certainly, the officer told Reed, she might have been stricken earlier, but she did not actually die much earlier. There was no way of knowing if the body had been moved after death, but there were no special indications that it had.

There would have to be a long conference with the victim’s physician—that was set up for late today. But there seemed no question that the dead woman had suffered
from a genuine heart ailment, even while she was extremely hypochondriacal and a nervous wreck generally. Were the symptoms congruent with her having been scared to death by two vicious-looking dogs? Certainly they were. Any evidence of drugs, liquor, et cetera? She had had a drink, probably before dinner, not enough to make her drunk. She had eaten two to three hours before dying, so if you can, find out when she had dinner; we’re working on it anyway. She had recently taken a tranquilizer, meprobamate; according to her doctor she took them regularly; she also had sleeping pills on her bathroom shelf next to the meprobamate, but she had not taken one before her death. Death must have been fairly rapid. So it was really true that someone could be scared to death? Oh, yes, given all the proper conditions of the heart and so forth. Things were kind of humming around here now, but would Reed be sure to call back if he wanted any further information—sure, Reed would be the first to know if the additional tests or the woman’s doctor revealed anything of interest. See you around.

“Which doesn’t get us much further,” Reed said to Miss Tyringham that evening as she sat in the Amhearst living room sipping a brandy. “What it will come down to, I’m reasonably certain, if you play your cards right, is that it will be decided she was killed by the dogs, just seeing them, that is. If you’re lucky, you may even get away without a case at all, unless the insurance company acts up.”

“Why should the insurance company act up?”

“If the Jablons sue you for enough money, it may be
worth the insurance company’s while to try to prove that she was the victim of some involved nefarious plot. Will the Jablons sue you?”

“I very much doubt it. I spoke to old Mr. Jablon only briefly, to offer condolences and inquire about Angelica.”

“How is Angelica?” Kate asked.

“Very bad, I regret to say. This, coming on top of the incident with her brother, has been too much. She has apparently become morose and silent, having first been hysterical. They have put her in the hospital. Mr. Jablon knew about the dogs, of course, because of his grandson’s experience; he felt it very foolish of his daughter-in-law to have gone to the school, and he certainly didn’t mention suing.”

“Some lawyer may yet get hold of him; it’s a case with infinite possibilities.”

“I doubt a lawyer could persuade Mr. Jablon to do something he didn’t want to do,” Kate said. “But one can’t be certain what he may decide is owed him. He seemed to hold the school responsible for Angelica’s radical opinions, and he may sue in general outrage at the
Antigone
seminar. I hope not.”

Miss Tyringham leaned back in her chair and twirled the brandy snifter around in her hands. “Let me put a supposition to you, and when I finish, give me your reaction.” They nodded their agreement with this.

“Let us suppose,” she said, “that everybody concerned accepts the explanation you have just indicated. That, for reasons we will never know since she is dead, Mrs. Jablon went to the school, somehow gained admittance and, around midnight, was confronted with two Dobermans, became terrified and, having a heart
ailment, died of a heart attack brought on by extreme fright. Suppose that—let me be absolutely blunt here—suppose that using all the influence the Theban could muster, and frankly that is an impressive amount of influence, we could get such a verdict. The whole case is dropped, greater precautions are taken about the dogs; perhaps we will have to get rid of them altogether. Gradually, the whole thing is forgotten, and the school continues on its perilous way in these difficult times. Would you be satisfied?”

“We?” Reed asked. “Kate and me?”

“Yes. You. You two.”

“Satisfied in what way? Miss Tyringham, some years ago a society woman in New Jersey shot and killed her husband as he entered her bedroom, nude, in the middle of the night. She claimed that she thought he was a housebreaker. There was evidence the two had not been getting on too well. A jury of twelve good citizens and true acquitted her of murder in the first
or
second degree, and turned in a verdict of accidental death. We all forget about that and we can all forget about this. Suppose they had decided it was murder, premeditated or not? What would have been the good? Her children would not only have been fatherless, they would have had a convicted murderer for a mother. She wasn’t likely to go on and shoot anyone else; quite the contrary. Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.”

“It seems to me,” Miss Tyringham said, “that what is monstrous about your story is the sense of the law bending with the prevailing winds. Surely the young are right: if we are going to fret and scream and thrash about because the streets are not safe, nor even our houses, and heaven knows they are not, we must be
certain that we do not demand for the criminals a retribution, law and order if you like, which we do not follow through on—shall we say among the three of us—for the upper classes?” She sipped her brandy.