Markham: The Case of the Pornographic Photos

Three

I found a mercenary student with an ancient Packard and bribed a ride to Byington. The buses weren’t running and I can’t say I blamed them. Snow carpetted the roads while wind blew more snow across the road at us. But the old car was tough as nails, built for rough weather and bad roads, and the boy knew how to drive. He got me to Byington in far less time than the bus would have taken, pocketed his bribe with a huge smile, turned the Packard around and aimed it at Cliff’s End once again. Less than twenty minutes passed before the Massachusetts Northern came to take me to Boston. I picked up the Central there and rode it to New York, then got off it and onto another which carried me back up the Hudson Valley as far as Bedford Hills. I called the Taft home from a pay-phone in the station — it was late and no cabs were handy. The policeman who said his name was Hanovan answered and told me he’d send a car around for me. I waited until an unmarked black Ford pulled up and a hand waved at me.

I went over to the car, got into it. The man behind the wheel was wearing a rumpled gray business suit. His hair was black, his nose broad, his eyes tired. I asked him if Hanovan had sent him.

“I’m Hanovan,” he said. “So you’re Markham. I was talking to Bill Runyon about you. He said you’re all right.”

“I worked with him once.”

“He told me.” He took out a cigarette and lighted one without offering me the pack. I lighted one of my own and drew smoke into my lungs. The car’s motor was running but we were still at the curb. I wondered what we were waiting for.

“I wanted to talk to you,” he said. “Without Taft listening. That’s why I stayed around his place. There’s nothing to do there but I wanted to talk to you.”

I said nothing.

“The kid killed herself,” he said. “No question about it. We fished her out of the Hudson around Pier Eighty-one — that’s the Hudson Day Line slot near Forty-second Street. Death was by drowning — no bumps on the head, no bullet holes, nothing. She took a jump in the drink and drowned.”

I swallowed. “How long had she been dead?”

“That’s hard to say, Markham. You leave somebody in the water more than two days, you can’t tell too much. The doc says she was in for three days minimum. Maybe as many as five.” He shrugged heroically. “That’s as close as he would make it. Look, let me tell you what we got. The way we figure it, she hit the water from one of the piers between Fifty-ninth Street and Forty-second. Her car turned up in a garage on West Fifty-third between Eighth and Ninth. It’s been there since late Monday night and the guy we talked to didn’t remember anything about who parked it. That fits the time, Markham. It’s Thursday night now. That would be four days in the water, which checks with what the medical examiner guessed.”

I nodded.

“We figured she garaged the car and went for a walk. The docks are empty that time of night. She walked out on a pier, took off her clothes—”

“She was naked when you found her?”

He nodded emphatically. “Suicides usually work that way. The ones who go for a swim, anyways. They take everything off and fold it up neat and then go and jump.”

“Did you find her clothes?”

“Nope. Which is no surprise, if you stop and think about it. You leave something on a pier and you’re not going to find it three days later. She was a rich kid, wore expensive clothes. Somewhere a longshoreman’s got a wife or girlfriend with a pretty new dress.”

“Go on.”

He turned his hands palms-up. “Go where? That does it, Markham. Look, she went and she jumped. Period. She was a moody kid and she wasn’t doing well in school. So she took what looked like an easy out, turned herself into a floater. It happens all the time. It’s not nice, it doesn’t look pretty or smell sweet. But it happens all the time.”

“Was she pregnant?”

He shook his head. “We checked, of course. She wasn’t. That’s why a lot of ’em go swimming. Not this one.”

I dragged on the cigarette and watched him out of the corner of an eye. He seemed perfectly at ease, a rational man explaining a situation in a straightforward manner. I rolled down the side window and dropped my cigarette to the ground. I turned around and looked at him again.

“Why?”

He looked back at me. “Why did she kill herself? Hell, I don’t know. She probably—”

“That’s not what I mean. Why give me such an elaborate build-up? I’m not your superior. You don’t owe me a report or a favor. Why tell me all this?”

He colored. “I was just trying to help you out.”

“I’m sure you were. Why?”

He studied his own cigarette. It had burned almost to his fingertips. “Look,” he said. “This girl — Taft’s daughter — killed herself. I know it. You know it. Even Taft’s wife knows it.”

“But Taft doesn’t?”

“You guessed it.” He sighed heavily. “Now ordinarily if a suicide’s old man wants to make noise, I just nod and gentle him and then leave him alone. I don’t sit and hold his hand all night long. The hell, I’m a New York City cop and this is Westchester. Why worry about him?”

I didn’t say anything.

“This is different, Markham. Taft is rich. He knows a lot of people, throws a lot of weight. I can’t tell him he’s full of crap, can’t brush him off. I have to be nice.”

“And you want me to tell him she killed herself?”

“Wrong.” He put out the cigarette. “He wants you to investigate,” he said. “I told him we’d follow it up but he doesn’t have any faith in us, mainly because I already told him how sure I am that it’s suicide all the way. What I want is for you to tell him you’ll work on it, you’re not too sold on the suicide bit yourself. Then you move into the case.”

“And look for a mythical killer?”

“I don’t give a damn if you sit on your hands, Markham. I want you to make like you’re working like a Turk. Gradually you can’t find anything. Gradually he wakes up and realizes what I been trying to tell him all along. Gradually he sees it’s suicide. And in the meantime he stays off my back.”

I didn’t say anything. He asked me if I got it, and I told him that I got it, all right. I didn’t like it.

I didn’t enjoy the notion of wasting my time and Edgar Taft’s money just to do the New York police a favor. I didn’t enjoy the “gradual” routine — a gradual let-down of Edgar Taft, a gradual change in tone.

“You’ll do it, Markham?” I didn’t answer him. “Look at it this way. You’ll be doing the old man a favor. Right now he’s all broken up. He can’t stand believing any daughter of his knocked herself off. It’s a big thing with him. Okay — so you got to let him believe somebody killed her. And he wants action. So you give him what he thinks is action until his mind gets used to the idea of what really happened. It makes things a lot easier for a lot of people, Markham. I’m one of them. I admit it. But it makes it easier for Taft, too.”

“All right,” I said.

“You’ll go along with it?”

“I said I would,” I told him, my voice tired now. “Now why don’t you try shutting your mouth and driving?”

He looked at me and thought it over. Then he put the car in gear and stepped down heavily on the gas pedal. Neither of us said a word on the way to Taft’s house.

Edgar Taft was crushed but strong, broken but surprisingly firm. He didn’t rant, didn’t rave, didn’t foam at the mouth. Instead he talked in a painfully placid voice, explaining very earnestly to me that the police were a bunch of fools, that deep down inside he knew Barbara as he knew himself, that she couldn’t kill herself any more than he could.

“A batch of damn fools, Roy. They couldn’t find crap in a latrine, not even if you took them and stuck their heads down the holes. I’m giving you full authority and all expenses. I’m telling them to cooperate with you. That’s one nice thing about money, Roy. If I tell them to cooperate with you they’ll let you do any damn thing you want. Roy—”

There was more. But it was all in the same vein, all stamped from the same mold. What it boiled down to was that he wanted me to find his daughter’s murderer. That was all there was to it. I let him know that it was a tall order, agreed that the police were being far too quick to write the case off as suicide, and told him I’d do what I could.

Marianne was different, though.

She was as well-mannered as ever, as neat and sweet and soft-spoken as she had always been. She was the gracious lady, accepting reality and greeting it with decorum, maintaining her position and being what she was supposed to be.

“Roy,” she said. “I’m... I’m very glad to see you, Roy. This is all very hard for me. My daughter committed suicide, Roy. Barb killed herself, jumped into the water and drowned herself. This is hard for me.”

It was hard but she was handling it nicely. I had always thought of her as a person with internal strength and now she was proving me correct. I took her arm. We found a sofa and sat side-by-side on it. I lighted cigarettes for us both.

“Poor Edgar,” she said. “He can’t believe it, you know. He’ll scream at imaginary killers forever.”

“And you?”

Her eyes clouded. “Maybe I’m more realistic,” she said. “I... I was afraid this had happened... or would happen... from the moment we found out she had left school. I think I got my tenses scrambled in that sentence, Roy.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it. Edgar says Barbara wasn’t the type of girl to commit suicide.”

“Edgar is wrong.”

“He is?”

She nodded. “He’s wrong,” she said again. “He has never understood her, not really.”

“He says he knows her as he knows himself”

That brought a smile. A joyless one. “Perhaps he does,” she half whispered. “Or did. Because there’s very little left to know now, is there?”

“Marianne—”

“I’m all right, Roy. Really, I’m all right. To get back to what I was saying — Edgar and Barbara were very much alike. She was the same sort of person. Maybe that’s why they fought so much. I used to think so.”

I looked at her. “He wouldn’t choose suicide, Marianne.”

“You think not?” Her eyes were amazingly firm. “He’s never failed, Roy. He’s never had any reason to kill himself. Barb evidently failed, or thought she did. I suppose it amounts to the same thing, doesn’t it?”

Hanovan drove me back to New York. He turned on the radio and we listened to some sort of teen age craze playing a guitar and groaning horribly. I suppose it served its purpose — at least Hanovan and I were relieved of the necessity of speaking to one another, which was fortunate.

Actually, I had no reason to dislike him. In a sense he was advising a course of action which was probably the best thing all around for the people involved. Naturally it made his life a great deal simpler, but it also made for a psychological solution to Edgar Taft’s traumas.

I managed to ignore both Hanovan and the ersatz music until he let me out of the car at Times Square. I was exhausted without being sleepy. I was as hungry as I was tired — the small steak at the tavern in Cliff’s End had been far too small, and far too long ago. I found an all-night restaurant, went in and sat down. A waitress brought me a mushroom omelet with home fries and a cup of black coffee. I ate the omelet and the potatoes and tried not to listen to a juke box which gave forth with the same sort of pseudo music I’d tried not to listen to in Hanovan’s car. I drank the coffee, smoked a cigarette.

Outside on 42nd Street it was cold. Not so cold as the lumble hamlet of Cliff’s End, but cold enough to make me give up the idea of walking across town to the Commodore. The wind had a snap to it and my breath smoked in the cold air. I stepped to the curb and flagged down a taxi.

He pulled over. I opened the door, stepped inside. I muttered Commodore at the husky driver and started to close the door. Then all at once somebody was yanking it open again and piling into the cab with me.

“You’ve got to help me!”

The somebody was a girl. Her hair was black and short, her eyes large and frightened. She was struggling to catch her breath and it seemed to be a lost cause.

I asked her what the matter was. She tried to tell me, opened her mouth without getting any words out, then whirled in her seat and pointed. I followed the direction of the point. Two grim characters, short and dark and ugly, were grabbing a cab of their own.

“After me,” she stammered. “Trying to kill me. Oh, help me, for God’s sake!”

The driver was staring at us and wondering what in God’s name was happening. I couldn’t say I blamed him. I was wondering pretty much the same thing myself.

“Just drive,” I told him.

“You still want the Commodore?”

“No,” I said. “Just drive around. We’ll see what happens.”

He drove around while I saw what happened. He turned downtown on Broadway, held Broadway to 36th Street, headed east on 36th as far as Madison, then swung north again. I kept one eye on the girl and the other gazing out through the rear window. The girl stayed in her seat and the cab with the two grim ones in it stayed on our tail. Whoever they were, they were following us.

“They still got us,” the driver said.

“I know.”

“Where next?”

I leaned forward in the seat. “I’ll wager ten dollars you can’t lose them,” I said.

He grinned happily. “You lose, buddy.”

“I’d love to lose.”

The grin widened, then disappeared entirely. He had no time for grinning now. He instead devoted himself wholeheartedly to the task of losing our tail. He was a professional and he gave me my money’s worth.

He gunned the car north along Madison Avenue, slowed down a little, then shot through 42nd Street on the yellow light. The light was red for the boys behind us. This didn’t bother them. They ran the signal, narrowly missed a light pickup truck, and stayed with us.

The cab driver swore softly. He took a corner on two wheels or less, put the pedal to the floor for the length of the block, ran a red light on his own and went the wrong way on a one-way street. Then he ripped around another corner, shot along an alleyway between two warehouses, drove three blocks normally, and let out a long sigh.

“Ten bucks,” he said. “Pay the man.”

Our tail was gone, if not forgotten. I put a crisp ten dollar bill into his outstretched palm and watched it disappear. I turned to the girl, who was as wide-eyed as ever, if not so frightened. I noticed for the first time that she was quite beautiful, which was fine with me. If one is going to make a practice of rescuing maidens in distress, one might as well select lovely maidens.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, thank you.”

I asked her where she wanted to go next. She was flustered. “I really don’t know,” she said. “I... I was so frightened. They were going to kill me.”

“Why?”

She looked away. “It’s a long story,” she said.

“Then suggest a place where you can tell me all about it.”

“I don’t know where. They have my address so we can’t go to my apartment. I—”

The cab was still cruising in traffic and the meter had an impressive total upon it already. I thought quickly. There was a girl I knew rather well named Carole Miranda. She had an apartment on the western edge of Greenwich Village, and she was in Florida for a month or so. Which meant that her apartment was vacant.

I had a key to it. Never mind why.

“Horatio Street,” I told the driver. “Number Forty-nine, near the corner of Hudson.”

He nodded and headed the car in that direction. I had a few dozen questions to ask the girl but they would all keep until we got to Carole’s apartment. In the meanwhile we both sat back and enjoyed the ride. She fell back in her seat in an attitude of total collapse, which was her way of enjoying the ride. I looked at her, which was my way.

A beautiful girl. Her hair was short and jet black and it framed a pale oval face. Her skin was cameo white. Her small hands rested in her lap. She had thin fingers. Her nails were not polished.

It was hard to tell much about her figure. Her body was wrapped up in a heavy black cloth coat that left everything to the imagination. My imagination was working overtime.

“We’re here,” the driver told me.

“We’re here,” I told her. She opened the door on her side and I followed her out of the cab. The numbers on the meter were high enough for me to give him a five dollar bill and tell him to keep the change.

We stood on the sidewalk in front of a remodelled brownstone with a vaguely cheerful air about it. The windows had windowboxes which held flowering plants in better weather. The building’s wooden trim was freshly painted in bright reds and blues. A wreath of holly decorated the blue front door.

“Where are we?”

“A friend’s apartment,” I told her. “The friend is out of town. You’ll be perfectly safe here.”

This satisfied her. On the way to the door she held my arm and relaxed a little against me. I opened the front door, unlocked the inner door in the vestibule with one of the keys Carole had given me. We walked through a hallway lit with shaded blue bulbs and up two flights of stairs. The stairs squeaked in protest.

“This is exciting,” she said.

“It is?”

“Like an illicit affair,” she said. “Where is this place? The top floor?”

I told her it was.

“God,” she said. “Then it’s not so exciting. Nobody would be able to carry on an illicit affair after a climb like this. Besides, my nose bleeds at heights.”

We managed the remaining two staircases. I found the door to Carole’s apartment, hoped that she was really out of town, stuck a key in the lock and opened the door. I fumbled for a lightswitch, found it, and brightened the room.

“Now you can tell me all about it,” I said.

“I—”

“But first I’ll build some drinks. Wait a moment.”

She waited a moment while I remembered where Carole kept her liquor supply. I found a bottle of good scotch and a pair of glasses. I put the scotch in the glasses, kept one for myself and gave her the other. We clinked them together ceremoniously and drank.

“My name’s Roy Markham,” I told her.

She said: “Oh.”

“Now it’s your turn. But you’ve got to tell me a great deal more than your name. You’ve got to tell me who you are and who those men were and why they were chasing you.”

“They wanted to kill me.”

“Start at the beginning,” I said. “And let’s have all of it.”

She asked for a cigarette and I gave her one, lighted it for her. I took one for myself, then sipped more of the scotch. We sat together in silence on Carole’s big blue Victorian sofa for a few moments. Then she started.

“My name is Linda,” she said. “Linda Jeffers. I live here in New York. On East End Avenue near Ninety-fourth Street. Do you know where that is?”

I nodded.

“I’m a secretary. Well, just a typist, really. I work at Midtown Life in the typing pool. It’s just a job but I like it, sort of.”

I waited for her to get to the point. While she was on her way there she told me that she was twenty-four, that she’d come to New York after going to college in southern Illinois, where her family lived, that she wasn’t married or engaged or going with anyone, that she lived alone. This was all interesting, but it hardly explained why a pair of thugs wanted to murder her.

“You see?” she said suddenly. “I’m just an ordinary person, really. Just like everybody else.”

I could have told her that was not true. She had taken her coat off, and she was wearing a mannish paisley shirt and a black wool skirt, and the body that filled them was not at all like everybody else. It was a superior body.

Her waist was slim, her bust full-blown and good to look at. She had very long legs for a short girl, and when she crossed them I could see that they were as good as they were long, with trim ankles and gently rounded calves. It was a fine body and it went nicely with her fine face.

“Just like everybody else,” she repeated oddly. “Except that they want to kill me.”

“Who are they?”

“A man named Dautch. I don’t know his first name.”

“Was he one of the ones following us?”

She nodded. “The shorter one.”

“And why is he after you?”

“It’s very simple,” she said. “I saw him kill a man.”