So Lovely — and So Dead

Chapter Two Murderer’s Trail

I got patched at the infirmary on the campus and went back to the room I rented on Wadlow Street. It was eleven o’clock then. Lying there within the four pressing walls, I thought bitterly of the strange ends little beginnings come to. You meet a girl in a place where you’ve gone for a couple of beers and company, and what began as beer and company winds up as plans for matrimony just as soon as a guy can get that last big degree and scrape together a few bucks. And all the time, though you don’t know it, beer and company and all plans whatever are nothing but diversions on a short road to death. Death by strangulation in a shabby room.

Until tonight, I hadn’t realized how little I knew about Maggie. Trying to find something back of the present that would point to the killer with big hands, I couldn’t remember a thing of any significance. A giant, the medical examiner had said. But he wasn’t. I could swear that the man in Maggie’s dark living room had been no taller than I.

I lay there a long time, almost an hour, thinking of the killer with the hands of a giant who wasn’t a giant. I shivered, remembering those hands. The one that had reached out in darkness to grasp my coat, fumbling in passing at my face and throat, had felt huge.

The Stoneman library. I wondered if there might be anything there to explain Maggie’s brutal death. It seemed so innocent, the inheritance of some books. Something that happened frequently and uneventfully in the life of a University library. But it was the only connection of any kind that I could make. Maggie and Dr. Cross, the old librarian, had worked on the books together. If there were anything, anything strange in the inheritance art all, he might know about it. After a while, I got up and went downstairs to the telephone in the hall.

While the phone rang in long, persistent bursts at the other end of the line, I remembered Maggie’s mentioning that the librarian was alone in the house of a Mrs. Crowder, where he lived a rather solitary life in a single room. The landlady, it seemed, was currently making an extended visit with an ailing sister. I let the phone ring until the operator told me that my party didn’t answer, and then I thanked her and hung up.

Upstairs, I stood in my room and looked at my bed, but the long and sleepless hours of a morning there did not bear thinking of. I put on my coat and went back downstairs and out of the house. Walking south, I crossed the boundary of the campus and after a while moved into the great shadow of the library. The library where Maggie had worked, young and vibrant in the dim light of towering stacks, touching with fingers that had touched my face and hair the dry and brittle bindings of old books. Now she was gone, as if she had never been, and there was nothing saved for me. Not even in printer’s ink. No little particle between buckram or leather.

The library was built on the brow of a hill, so that the rear wall of the building plunged to its foundation several stories below the main entrance at the front. I went around the building and down the slope of the hill. The massive sack of gray stone grew in gloomy and menacing grandeur with every step I took. I came out of its shadow onto a curving drive and went on down into a street of old residences. It was here that Dr. Cross lived alone in the house of Mrs. Crowder.

There was a light in a rear room on the second floor of the house, visible only as a thin, verticle streak between drapes not quite fully drawn across a window. But no one answered my ringing. I stood on the porch with a thumb on the bell button and listened to the shrill clamor of the bell deep in the hall inside. When I had decided that there would be no answer, I opened the door and stepped into the hall. It was then that I heard the music.

It came faintly, from the rear of the floor above. The music was that of strings and reeds and brasses. It was a sigh of breath from the darkest depths of the most abandoned hell. It was the black despair of the last man in his last hour. There was no terror in it, and no fear, for it was beyond fear and beyond terror.

As I stood listening, the music stopped and the old house fell silent. Then the music began again, moving down the dark stairs upon me. Somewhere on the floor above, an automatic record player was repeating the final movement of Tschaikowsky’s Pathetique.

The music grew louder as I went up the stairs. I saw that it was coming from the room at the rear in which I had seen the light from outside. A thin yellow line marked the bottom of the closed door. I knocked on the door and waited, but there was no response beyond it except the continuation of that terrible musical sorrow. I turned the knob and pushed, and the thin line fanned into its source. Symphonic damnation swelled up around me.

The record player stood against a wall, its top braced open. From where I stood in the doorway, I could see the arm of the machine rise and fall smoothly above the platter that spun beneath it. Dr. Cross sat in a heavy leather chair facing the player. I could see no part of him except his left arm and hand, which trailed over the arm of the chair, the fingers of the hand curved slightly, almost touching the worn pile of the rug. I didn’t speak to him. I knew, even then, that there was no use. He was beyond hearing. My voice or Tschaikowsky’s, no matter to this old man. His senses were tuned only to silence and night and whatever comes with death.

I went over and looked down at him and saw without surprise the brutal marks on his throat. The glaring eyes, the swollen tongue. The strangler’s identification. For a time I looked, and then I turned and went out of the room and down the stairs and out of the house. The black music of death faded behind me, ending abruptly with the shutting of the front door, and I stood alone in the cold street, wondering what I should do. Wondering if there would ever again be anything worth the doing.

I didn’t call the police. A little time would make no difference now to the old librarian, and I couldn’t bear the thought of Muller so soon again. I found a stone bench behind the Museum of Natural History and waited there for day.

When the east began to wash a little with light, I had made up my mind about two things. The Stoneman library must somehow have been the link between a girl, an old man, and death. And I would find the strangler. Somehow I would find him, even if it brought his fingers to my own throat.

Before the campus came to life for early classes, I went back to my room on Wadlow Street. I shaved and changed my shirt and put on my other suit. I thought for a moment of the classes I should teach and the studying I should do. Then I went out on the job that had become bigger than all the others together. On the corner below the house, I caught an eight o’clock bus into the city.

The Stoneman residence was on Stoneman Place, a private street in a section that had once been exclusive. Stoneman Place itself still retained its distinction, but the surrounding area, with little consideration for the rich elbow it rubbed, had slipped with time into ungraceful decay. I carried the sense of its hopelessness with me up to the massive door of the Stoneman mansion.

A maid admitted me and put me into a room off the hall. It was a large room, and it could have been light if someone had drawn the drapes back from the windows. Apparently they preferred shadows in this house. The only sunlight came from windows at the end of the room that looked out on a rear lawn. A piano stood before the windows, and a man sat at the piano. He was playing, but nothing in particular. Just scales — and chords. I walked toward him, but he didn’t stop playing. The only concession he made to conversation was to reduce the volume of the piano a little. With the light behind him, I couldn’t get a clear view of his face, but I got an impression of gaunt somberness behind horn-rimmed glasses.

“My name’s Norman Grieg,” I said. “I’ve come to see Miss Stoneman.”

His voice, rising above the chords, still managed to carry the timbre of softness, almost dreaminess.

“I’m Oliver Moon,” he said. “I was the old man’s secretary. My present status is that of fiancé to Miss Stoneman. Perhaps I can do something for you.”

“Perhaps. I’m interested in the library that was left to the University.”

“Yes? Are you from the University?”

“I work there. I’m not acting officially in this matter.”

He shrugged, turning his head so that the light behind him struck a sudden flash from his glasses.

“Then I can’t see why I should talk to you about the matter.”

“Maybe Miss Stoneman will see it differently.”

“Maybe. Marion is usually very generous about impositions. Shall we wait and see?”

We waited through three chords and a scale, and Marion Stoneman came into the room. She was tall and heavily built, and none of the things that money buys had made her anything but plain. Her hand in mine was strong and firm but icy cold.

“Mr. Norman Grieg,” Oliver Moon said. “Or is it Doctor? One never knows with University people. He’s come about the books, my dear.”

Marion Stoneman’s eyebrows lifted a trifle.

“A Miss Hadley and a Dr. Cross have been here. I thought they were handling the library.”

“They were. Not now. They’re dead.”

Oliver Moon’s hands hung suspended over the keys for a moment, and then dropped to sound another chord. Marion Stoneman’s breath eased past her lips with a sigh.

“Dead? Both of them? That’s very tragic, of course, but I can’t see how I am concerned.”

“Miss Hadley and Dr. Cross were murdered. Strangled. There’s always a reason for murder. I’ve been thinking it might lie among the books your father left to the University.”

She turned, moving to the piano.

“How fantastic! They’re just books. Volumes my father gathered over many years. Are you connected with the police?”

“No. Miss Hadley and I were engaged to be married.”

“Oh. I’m sorry. But I’m sure you’re mistaken in thinking the books may be involved. Why should they be?”

Something oppressive lay against my ear drums, and I realized suddenly that it was silence. Oliver Moon had given up his finger exercises. From the piano, he said, “I worked with the books quite a lot. It was one of my duties. If you’re thinking of a rare volume valuable enough to induce murder, you’re wasting your time. Take it from me, there was no such book in the library.”

“It could have been a volume whose value was unknown,” I said. “Except to someone who was willing to kill to keep it from becoming known. Old Cross was an expert on such things.”

Oliver Moon laughed.

“I see. Someone, perhaps, who planned to recover the book from the University stacks after it was cataloged. A place it would never have reached if your Dr. Cross or Miss Hadley recognized its value.”

“That’s the general idea. It makes some kind of sense. Nothing else does.”

He laughed again, resuming his soft chords.

“My friend, the rare book motive is trite even in fiction. Besides, the old man was a scholar, not a collector. You better start over.”

On the polished surface of the grand, Marion Stoneman traced invisible designs with a long index finger. The sunlight touched her hair, and for a moment she possessed a beauty that was not her own.

“I’ve such an odd feeling,” she said. “About Miss Hadley. She was to see me this afternoon. Probably she told you.”

“No. She didn’t tell me.”

“She called yesterday for the appointment. Thinking hack, I seem to remember that she sounded rather distressed.”

Oliver Moon’s fingers were in the low keys, working lightly.

“My dear, your imagination is busy after the fact. You didn’t mention her distress at the time.”

“Sometimes it’s only after the fact that you see the significance of things,” I said. “Did she tell you what she wanted?”

“No. I suppose now that I shall always wonder.”

“Yes,” I said. “I suppose so.”

She turned and came to me across the shadowed room. Again her hand was in mine, and again I felt a little shock at its coldness.

“I wish I could tell you how sorry I am, Mr. Grieg. I’ve always found myself clumsy about such things. Please extend my sympathy to Miss Hadley’s family.”

“There’s only her mother,” I said. “I’m going to see her now.”

Behind me, as I shut the door of the room, there was no sound hut the spaced reverberations of Oliver Moon’s eternal chords.