Who Has Wilma Lathrop? (9 page)

“So they just told me.”

Vladimir shook his head. “A shame. A dirty shame.” He filled his lungs with smoke from the cigarette he’d just lighted and exhaled slowly. “But, if you get what I mean, Wilma’s panties never did quite fit her. We weren’t good enough for her. She had to break into the big time. Well, I hope she’s satisfied. But it’s a shame she got you mixed up in the mess. She’s really done it to you, but good.”

The blond youth gripped his father’s arm and guided him to the door. Lathrop watched them into the hall. He wanted to talk to Vladimir again — alone. Wilma’s brother was much too glib about the whole affair.

Lathrop followed the old man and the youth through the doorway and once in the hall he was immediately surrounded by camera men and reporters. “No comment,” he parried all questions.

Jenny was standing in the hall. She forced her way through the circle of reporters and laid her hand on Lathrop’s arm. “I waited and waited,” she told him. “Then one of the case workers recognized me and took me in to Judge Arnst and I told him everything just like you said I should. And he says that while Eddie’s motive doesn’t excuse what he did that he will be as lenient on Eddie as he can. And before Eddie is sent away, Judge Arnst is going to marry us and send me to a home to have my baby.”

Lathrop had forgotten all about Eddie Mandell and Jenny. He patted the small hand on his arm. “That’s fine. That’s just fine, Jenny.”

She admitted, “When you didn’t show up at Juvenile Court like you promised, I was sore at first. Then I read the morning paper. And I don’t believe it, Mr. Lathrop. They couldn’t make me believe it in a hundred years. And I rode down here with Eddie and Officer Cave to tell you.”

Now that Lathrop had let down he was no longer mentally alert. His head ached dully. Seen without his glasses, the girl’s face was slightly blurred. “Tell me what?” he asked, “What couldn’t they make you believe?”

Her face radiant with her own happiness, Jenny said, “What it says in the morning paper. Well, practically says. That you killed Mrs. Lathrop. You didn’t, did you?”

“No,” Lathrop assured her. “I didn’t.”

He continued down the hall to the elevator bank, escorted by popping flash bulbs and reporters shouting questions. When the elevator came they filled it and rode down with him and crossed the foyer with him to the street.

There was a cab rank not far from the door. Lathrop opened the door of the first cab in line. “Just drive,” he ordered the driver. “I’ll tell you where to go after we shake these reporters.”

They were through the Loop and a mile on the other side when the driver slid back the glass partition. “That does it, Mister. I shook our last tail when I ran that red light. Now where?”

Lathrop gave him the address of the Lynn Optical Company. He was tired of being half blind. He rode trying not to think and thinking of everything. The cold snap persisted. The wind was brisk and off the lake and even with the heater turned on full it was cool, almost cold in the cab. Lathrop hoped that when the police finished with his heating plant that one of them would start a fire or permit the new janitor to do so. If they didn’t, he would undoubtedly lose two tenants and the pipes would freeze and he’d have a big plumbing bill to pay. The thought amused him. A man’s mind was a curious thing. The woman he loved had turned out to be a little tramp. The police suspected him of killing her. Due to the unfavourable publicity he was almost certain to lose his job and possibly be forced to give up teaching as a career. Still, conditioned by the economic stress under which all modern men laboured, one convolution of his brain had time to think about a possible plumber’s bill.

When they reached the optical company he told the driver to wait. Dr. Lynn had stepped out for coffee but the optician’s assistant had his glasses ready. The man fitted them to Lathrop’s nose and adjusted the bows. It was a relief-to have familiar objects clear-cut and in focus again. As he waited for his change, Lathrop glanced at his watch and was surprised to see that it was almost noon.

When he had re-crossed the walk, the cab driver asked, “Where now, chum?”

Lathrop considered his destination. He didn’t want to return to the flat. He had to have time to think. More, if he was to be questioned again, he had to have some sleep before going through another such ordeal. There were a number of small hotels on the near north side. There was even the Devonshire. “Take me to Clark and Rush,” he said. “You can let me off at the corner. And stop at the first news-stand you come to. I want to buy a morning paper.

The driver thrust a slightly dog-eared newspaper through the opening in the partition. “Compliments of the house. I finished with mine while I was moving up in line at Central Bureau.”

“Thanks,” Lathrop said. “Thanks a lot.”

When they were under way again he unfolded the newspaper. The headline read:

There was no picture of him, as yet, but there were several pictures of Wilma. One was a reproduction of the framed photograph that stood on the record-player in his apartment. The other two pictures were blown-up front and profile views from the police file, complete with Wilma’s police record and the fact that she was wanted for questioning in the death of Raoul Contini.

The worst was a picture of the sofa in their living room, with Wilma’s black net négligé half on the rumpled cushions and half on the floor. Lathrop felt suddenly furious.

The story was worse than the pictures, mainly guess work and innuendo skilfully woven together with known facts. The reporter assumed that he had learned of Wilma’s slightly scarlet past from the two thugs in the parking lot and had hurried home to confront her with what he had learned. According to the story they had quarrelled violently. The fact that none of Wilma’s clothes except a night dress and a pair of high-heeled slippers were missing was stressed throughout the story. It had been an excessively cold night. There had been a hot fire in the furnace. Wilma hadn’t been seen since Mrs. Metz had seen her returning from buying five pounds of flour late Tuesday afternoon. Now she was missing and the janitor, the one man who might have witnessed what had happened, was dead. Fragments of bone and bobby pins and a slipper heel and a carbonized diamond ring had been found in the ashes from the heating plant. The public was invited to draw its own conclusion.

Lathrop folded the newspaper carefully and put it in his overcoat pocket. He knew he hadn’t killed Wilma. He didn’t know if she was dead or alive. But thinking in terms of his own future, in Vladimir’s vernacular, Wilma had really done it to him — but good.

THE ROOM
was over warm and smelled faintly of perfume and an aromatic antiseptic. Lathrop fumbled for his glasses in the dark, then raised his wrist and looked at the luminous dial of his watch. He’d checked into the hotel at noon. It was ten o’clock. He should feel rested. He didn’t.

He lay wondering if the police were looking for him and how the investigation was going. He supposed he should phone Harris and tell him where he was but he was damned if he would. If the police wanted him, they could find him. The only crime of which he was guilty was of falling in love with one hundred pounds of golden-haired girl. All he had done was fall in love. Neither he nor Wilma had laid undue emphasis on the physical aspect of their marriage. They’d been a normal young couple. Now this.

As Lathrop’s mind oriented itself to consciousness, he became aware of the night noises on the street and in the rooms opening off the hall.

The Devonshire was a good hotel, well furnished, capably managed, patronized mainly by theatrical people, actors, musicians, night club entertainers and chorus girls with a leavening of better-paid office workers who wanted to live within walking distance of the Loop buildings in which they worked.

And Wilma had worked in an office, for a lawyer named Carl A. Ramsey. Lathrop considered her police record as he had read it on her file cad at Central Bureau. She had been arrested twice for disorderly conduct, one of the arrests for acting as a shill for a gambling joint. She had been arrested for passing a bad cheque and once she had been arrested on suspicion of grand larceny but, as he remembered the card, she hadn’t been convicted on any of the counts. All were the sort of things that could happen to a girl who had been forced to quit high school and, without education or training, make her living as best she could. At least she hadn’t taken the easy way. Even Lieutenant Jezierna had admitted that none of her arrests had been for voluntary prostitution. The only man mentioned on her record was Contini. It wasn’t much to cling to. It was something.

Lathrop laid his glasses back on the bed table, then lighted a cigarette and lay blowing smoke at the ceiling. He doubted that Wilma was dead. Her death was too pat a solution. If she had been smart enough to pull the wool over his eyes as she had and get away with it, she wasn’t the type to stand still while someone who wanted her out of the way put her in the fire box of a heating plant. The ring, the bobby pins, the heel of a slipper, the pieces of human bone, could easily have been planted in the ashes by someone who wanted the police to think she was dead.

Lathrop continued this trend of thinking. There had been no disorder nor any sign of a struggle in the flat. If some outsider had entered and attempted to force Wilma to leave against her will, she would have cried out and he would have heard her. No. Wilma wasn’t dead, at least not in the manner suspected by the police and assumed by the reporter who’d written the story for the morning paper. For some reason known only to her, Wilma had left the flat of her own free will. But why leave in her nightdress and slippers? And who had killed Nielsen and why? What part had the janitor played in the affair? The crushed-in skull smacked of the blackjacks with which the two thugs had slugged him. But why should the two men have come to the flat? They’d told him to tell Wilma to meet them at Louie’s. Then they’d slapped him around as an example of what would happen to him if she didn’t.

What would happen to him?

Wilma had been concerned about that. When they had talked it over in the living-room she had stressed the words “what will happen to you.” And it had been shortly after that that she had advised him to go to the police the first thing in the morning.

The whole affair was beyond Lathrop. He knew that pi was the sixteenth letter of the alphabet, that it denoted the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter and that its value when carried to eight decimal places was 3. 14159265. But he knew little or nothing about the workings of a woman’s mind or the art of criminal detection. Anyway, it was out of his hands now. This was police business. He was strictly an injured bystander. Still, if Wilma was dead he could be in trouble, serious trouble. And Wilma was his wife.

Lathrop sat on the edge of the bed and felt through the dark for an ash tray. In one of the rooms a few doors down the hall someone was practising a tap step. Still farther down the hall, or on the floor below, a clarinet player with a moody trend of mind was playing a saccharine arrangement of Melancholy Baby. In the room adjoining his a couple were quarrelling. Judging by the timbre of their voices, they were young.

“You did so flirt with her,” the girl said. “I saw you with my own eyes.”

The boy attempted to placate her. “Now, baby.”

“Don’t you baby me.”

“Why not? You’re acting like one.”

Lathrop turned on the light and walked into the bathroom and ran hot water in the tub. A hot bath, as hot as he could stand it, would take some of the soreness out of his muscles. And once he’d bathed and dressed he’d get back on his horse again. He had no reason to hide. He might have a rough time with the police before this thing was over. But he could take whatever he had to take and eventually the truth would be established. The law didn’t persecute the innocent. It prosecuted the guilty. Occasionally an innocent man might go to jail but such instances were rare and usually quickly rectified.

The hot water felt good on his body. Lathrop lay submerged to his chin, blowing smoke at the ceiling. He wished the couple in the adjoining room would either make up or stop harping on the same subject. The air vent connected the two bathrooms and the tile walls acted as a sounding board. With the door of their bathroom open, he might as well be in the same room with them.

“Why should I want to flirt with Mona when I have you?” the boy asked.

The girl weakened. “Well, it looked like you were flirting with her.”

“I just asked how her act was going.”

“Her act. All she does is a strip tease.”

“Even so. Now, please. Stop yakity yaking and come on to bed.”

“You do love me, don’t you?”

“You know I do.”

“And you wouldn’t cheat on me?”

“Take a look at yourself in the mirror. Go on. I dare you. Why would any man want to cheat on you?”

A long silence followed. When the girl spoke again she was having trouble with her breathing. “Is this why you wanted to make up?”

“Can you think of a better reason?”

“No, Bill,” the girl said. “No.”

Lathrop stood up in the tub and turned on the cold shower. In the chemical analysis of man listing his various components, whoever had made the tabulation had forgotten to list the hormones necessary for the preservation of the species. If Wilma, Lathrop decided, was to walk into the hotel bathroom right now, despite what she’d done to him, the odds were ten to one that he would make a fool of himself.

Lathrop studied his face in the mirror over the dresser. He had a stubble of beard that made him look like a stumblebum but there was nothing he could do about it without a razor. Perhaps he could find an all-night barber shop. Then what? The only other person he knew of who might have knowledge of Wilma was the lawyer for whom she had been working when he’d met her.

He sat back on the bed, lifted the room phone from its cradle and asked the hotel switchboard girl if it was possible to get the home address and phone number of an attorney with offices in the Loop if the man lived in one of the suburbs. The operator said it was. Lathrop moved a pillow against the headboard and leaned against it. “Then I’d like the home phone number and address of Attorney Carl A. Ramsey, with offices in the New York Insurance Building on LaSalle Street.”

Speaking over-distinctly, the girl said, “I will try to get the information for you.”

While he waited, Lathrop listened to the noises in the hall. The dancer was still tapping. The clarinetist’s mood had brightened and modernized. The couple next door were still engaged in making up.

The switchboard girl came back on the wire. “Mr. Carl A. Ramsey’s phone number is listed as Oak Park seven-oh-oh-two-seven-three. And his address is one-five-two-one Fair Oaks Avenue, Oak Park.”

Lathrop thanked her and cradled the phone. He would need a lawyer. Attorney Ramsey handled criminal cases. He would do as well as any and better than most. At least he had known Wilma. Wilma had worked for Ramsey for several months.

Lathrop started to pick up the phone again to call the number the girl had given him and changed his mind. He wanted to talk to Ramsey in person. Being an attorney, the man had a trained legal mind. It would be worth paying a substantial retaining fee to see if Ramsey could come up with a plausible solution.

Lathrop finished dressing and rode the elevator to the lobby. The lobby hadn’t changed since he had waited for Wilma in it. A few bored older men sat in the over-stuffed chairs looking at nothing in particular, but glancing up every time a girl entered the lobby. A couple with a small mountain of baggage well plastered with foreign labels were checking in. The bell captain, a middle-aged man, his face deeply lined by dissipation, was standing back of his desk checking a racing form against some information of his own.

On impulse, Lathrop walked over to the desk. “How long have you worked here, Captain?”

The bell captain looked mildly surprised. “A little over five years. Why?”

“Do you remember a guest named Wilma Stanis?”

“You mean that broad the police think got stuffed into a furnace by some high-school teacher?”

“That’s right.”

“Yeah. Sure. I remember her. Why?”

Lathrop laid a ten-dollar bill on top of the racing form. “What can you tell me about her?”

The bell captain put the bill in his pocket. “You’re not a cop, that’s for sure. And they’ve been all over the place all day. What do you want to know about her?”

“How did she conduct herself while she lived here?”

“Like a lady.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Just that.”

“Didn’t she ever have any guests?”

“You mean did she ever run short and make her rent on her back?”

“That’s one way of putting it.”

The bell captain shook his head. “Not her. Not that we don’t have a few babies living here who are willing to be sociable.” He shook his head. “But not Miss Stanis. You could have knocked me over with a fifth of Three Feathers when I read she had a police record and a two-hundred-grand sock-full of ice. What’s your angle? You a private eye or an insurance man?”

“No,” Lathrop said. “Nothing like that. I’m just the high-school teacher the police suspect of stuffing her into the furnace.”

There was a small Chinese restaurant not far from the corner. Lathrop sat at the counter between a blowzy brunette and a drunk and drank two cups of black coffee. He felt better, much better, after his talk with the bell captain. Not once since this thing had begun had he heard anyone make a derogatory remark about Wilma’s morals. She might have used him as a hideaway but she had obviously been trying to go straight. All fingers pointed in that direction. And if she wasn’t, and had never been a pushover, it stood to reason that she had cared for him when she had accepted his proposal, that she had been trying to build a new life and had done so successfully until the two men who had slugged him in the parking lot had caught up with her.

The missing jewels were another matter. It was logical to assume she had them. But why she had kept them, or where, was beyond him. Then there was another matter. How had the two men located her? For some reason Lathrop thought of Vladimir. The blond youth was the type of man who would sell his own sister for a dime, if the dime went into his pocket. His seeming concern for his feeble-minded sister could be a pose.

“You can look but don’t try to touch her. If you do, so help me, God, I’ll kill you.”

It had sounded theatrical at the time and a little out of place. Then there had been Vladimir’s behaviour at Central Bureau. Vladimir had talked to him openly about Wilma’s police record. Still, at Central Bureau he had denied knowing she had one. There were also Vladimir’s bi-weekly calls on Wilma to consider. Lathrop doubted if they were inspired by fraternal affection. It was much more likely he had been bleeding her for what he could under the threat of exposure.

On a hunch Lathrop asked the Chinese back of the counter, “How much is standing rib roast a pound?”

“I beg your pardon?” the counterman asked in flawless English.

“How much is standing rib a rpound?”

“I think we pay around sixty cents. Wholesale, that is.”

“How much would it be retail?”

“Seventy, possibly seventy-five cents.”

Lathrop considered the information. Seventy-five from ninety-eight cents left twenty-three cents, a small amount in itself but capable of building to a substantial sum when multiplied by six or seven and added to by a five-cent overcharge on every can of beans or tomatoes or corn or peck of potatoes that Wilma bought. He had never paid much attention to Wilma’s household account. When she said she needed so much for groceries or other household necessities he had given her what she had asked for without question. If Vladimir had been blackmailing her she could easily have held out ten to fifteen dollars a week, in addition to the money he had given her for clothes.

Lathrop ordered a third cup of coffee.

“Are you making a survey of some kind?” the counterman asked him.

“You could call it that.” Lathrop’s mind raced on. Vladimir dressed and looked like a small-time poolroom shark. He had been very indignant about Wilma breaking into the big time. But even petty chisellers could be ambitious. What if Vladimir had known about the jewels? What if he had contacted the remnants of Raoul Contini’s mob and had offered to finger both Wilma and the jewels for a share of the missing diamonds?

It was a distinct possibility. Vladimir had been in a position to make an impression of Wilma’s house key. If she had awakened to find him in the flat at one o’clock in the morning, it was unlikely that she would scream. It was much more likely she would have attempted to reason with him, in her anxiety to keep both her family and her past hidden. Vladimir could have persuaded her to go with him and have a talk with the two men. Then, on their way out, he could have stopped to drop the ring and bobby pins and slippers in the fire box and have encountered Nielsen making a late tour of his fires.