Vanish in an Instant

6

611 Division Street was a three-story red-brick house on the outskirts of the college district. Light and noise poured from nearly every window. On the second floor two young men were bending over a microscope. In the adjoining room a boy sat at a table by the window, absorbed in the blare of the radio beside him, his head resting on an open book. Meecham couldn’t see into any of the rooms on the top floor, but it sounded as if a party was going on up there. There was a continuous babble of voices punctuated by sudden peals of laughter.

The left part of the lower floor was dark and the shades were drawn.

Following Cordwink up the sidewalk Meecham thought, it’s a funny place for Loftus to live — a dying man in the midst of all this noise and youth.

The sidewalk forked to the left. A little path no more than a foot wide had been shoveled through the snow and sprinkled with cinders. This was Loftus’ private entrance.

Cordwink took out the ring of keys that Loftus had given him. “Still want to tag along, Meecham?”

“Certainly.”

“What do you expect me to find?”

“The bloodstained clothes he was wearing Saturday night.”

“You seem to have a lot of confidence in that confession. Wishful thinking, Meecham?”

“Could be.”

“You and Loftus are kind of palsy for a couple of guys who never met before.”

“I’m palsy with everyone.”

“Yeah. You got a heart of gold, haven’t you? Cold and yellow.”

“You’re getting to be a sour old character if I ever saw one.”

Cordwink inserted one of the keys into the lock. It didn’t fit, but the second one did. The flimsy door, curtained at the top, swung inward. “By the way, it wouldn’t be quite ethical to take on a second client while your first client is still in jail.”

“She won’t be in jail long. Your forty-eight hours are nearly up, Cordwink. By tomorrow morning you have to charge her or release her.”

“And if she’s released, you’d take on a lost cause like Loftus?”

“One minute you’re implying that his confession is a phony and the next minute he’s a lost cause. Make up your mind.”

“He’s a lost cause to you, anyway. He hasn’t much money.”

“Well?”

“Or at least that’s what he claims.” Cordwink turned on the light switch inside the door, but he didn’t look at the room. He was watching Meecham. “Suppose you were in Loftus’ shoes and wanted some money.”

“Money isn’t much good, where’s he’s going.”

“Suppose he didn’t want it for himself. For a relative, maybe, or a close friend. It seems to me that Loftus had something very valuable to sell — his absolutely certain knowledge that he’s going to die anyway. No matter what he does, he has nothing to lose.”

“So?”

“So he committed a murder. For money.”

“Whose money?”

“Virginia Barkeley’s.”

“That sounds reasonable enough,” Meecham said calmly, “except for a few little things. First, Mrs. Barkeley only met Loftus once, in a bar, for about five minutes. That’s not quite long enough to arrange a big deal like murder.”

“She could have known him before. They’d both deny that, naturally, if there’s a deal on.”

“In the second place, if she paid him to kill Margolis, she wouldn’t have arranged the matter so that she’d be caught as she was.”

“Maybe she’s very, very subtle.”

“In the third place she hasn’t any money and neither has her husband. I’ve checked. They live up to their income, the house is mortgaged and the furniture isn’t paid for.”

“There are ways of raising money.”

“And in the fourth place you don’t even know that Loftus has any money.”

“I’ll find out.”

“Your trouble is stubbornness, Cordwink. You were sure Mrs. Barkeley was guilty and you can’t admit you were wrong even with Loftus’ confession staring you in the face.”

“What’s staring me in the face is a lot of funny coincidences and right in the middle of them is a lawyer called Meecham.”

“Is that a fact?”

“That’s one. Another one has just occurred to me. Suppose Loftus was paid for services rendered, what did he do with the money?”

Meecham said wearily, “He dug a hole in the back yard and buried it.”

“I figure he gave it to someone, either the party he wanted it for in the first place, or a go-between.”

“Me?”

“You.”

“Whom am I going between, or between whom am I going? Oh, hell. You know I never saw Loftus until today.”

“That’s your story.”

“His, too.”

“It would be, of course, if the two of you are working in collusion.”

Meecham lit a cigarette. There was no ash tray in the room that he could see, so he put the burnt match in his pocket. “So now you’ve dreamed up a place for the money you’ve dreamed up. Want to see my wallet? Check books? Or maybe I’m wearing a money belt. Why don’t you check?”

“Don’t worry, I will. When the time comes.”

“You can waste a lot of time chasing little bright butterflies, Cordwink.”

“I like the exercise.”

Meecham raised his head. He saw that the Sheriff was looking rather pleased with himself, and he wondered whether Cordwink really believed in his own theory or whether he was merely needling him. Cordwink hated all lawyers, but his hatred wasn’t a personal one. It was a matter of principle: he hated lawyers because he believed their sole objective was to circumvent the law.

Cordwink began to circle the room, his eyes moving from object to object with alert precision.

The room was fairly large, and fitted out for light housekeeping. In one corner, half-hidden by a painted cardboard screen, was a small sink and a two-burner gas plate and a table. The bed was a studio couch neatly covered with a blue and yellow chenille spread, and above it, high on the wall, a trio of college pennants was nailed:

Illinois. Arbana. Yale.

The pennants were very old and very dusty. They probably didn’t belong to Loftus, Meecham thought. They had been on the wall when he moved in and he left them there because they were too high to reach. Anyway, there they were, emphasizing the transient feeling of the room, symbols of college boys who were no longer boys, football teams that were forgotten, textbooks left to mildew, with silverfish camping, sleek and comfortable, between the pages.

A room for transients, with Loftus the last, the most transient of them all. It was as if Loftus had known this and had taken pains to obliterate his traces. The whole room, except for the pennants, was scrupulously clean. There were no clothes or shoes lying around, the top of the bureau held only an alarm clock with a glass bowl inverted over it, and the wastebasket beside the desk was empty. Whatever had been in the wastebasket — letters, bills, check stubs, pages from a diary? — they were all gone now. There was no clue to Loftus’ mind and personality in the room except for the books that filled the high narrow bookcase.

The books were oddly assorted: a few novels, two anthologies of poetry, How to Win at Canasta, a biography of Pasteur and a Bible — but most of them concerned psychology and medicine. Cecil’s Textbook of Medicine, Cancer and Its Causes, The Neurotic Personality of Our Time, Peace of Mind, Release from Fear, Alcoholism and Its Causes, The Alcoholic and Allergy, A New View of Alcoholism, How to Treat the Alcoholic, Drinking Problems, Glandular Deficiency in Alcoholism.

Cordwink, too, was staring at the books. “He doesn’t look like a lush,” he said finally.

“No.”

“You can’t always tell, though. One of the worst lushes I ever knew used to take up collection in the Methodist church. No one even knew he took a drink until one night he started hopping around the house trying to get out of the way of the fish. He thought there were little fish flopping all over the floor. Bats and snakes and beetles I’d heard of, but never little fish. It was creepy, made the bottom of my feet kind of ticklish. Funny, eh?”

“What happened to him?”

“He hit the real skids after that. Landed in jail four or five times that year for non-support, disturbing, petty theft. He always had a whale of an excuse. Drunks are the wildest liars in the world.”

“Loftus isn’t a drunk.”

“Maybe not.”

There was no closet in the room, but between the studio couch and the screen that hid the gas plate, a seven-foot walnut wardrobe stood against the wall. It was a massive piece of furniture, with a big old-fashioned plain lock. There was no key to fit it on the key-ring Loftus had given him, so Cordwink forced the lock with the small blade of his jacknife. When the door opened, the pungent smell of moth crystals filled the room. Cordwink sneezed, and sneezed again.

There was hardly enough clothing inside the wardrobe to justify the lavish use of moth crystals: two suits, well-worn but cleaned and pressed, a sweater, shoes, a pair of galoshes, a khaki baseball cap, some pajamas; and on the floor, three suitcases. Two of them were empty. The third Cordwink took out and placed on the studio couch.

Pasted across the top of the suitcase was a faded Railway Express consignment slip: From Mrs. Charles E. Loftus, 231 Oak Street, Kincaid, Michigan, to Mr. Earl Duane Loftus, 611 Division Street, Arbana, Michigan. Value of contents, $50.00

“His mother,” Cordwink said. “Or maybe his sister-in- law. Or maybe it doesn’t even matter.”

The value of the original contents might have been fifty dollars. The present contents had little monetary value: an old trench coat, a blue serge suit, and a pair of brown oxfords, all of them stained with blood.

Cordwink pressed down the lid of the suitcase. “I’d like to talk to the woman who runs this place. Loftus said she’s a Mrs. Hearst. Go and get her, will you?”

“Why don’t you? You have the authority.”

“This stuff is evidence. I wouldn’t trust you alone with it.”

Meecham colored. “What the hell do you think I’d do, grab it and take off for South America?”

“I don’t know and I’m not going to find out. Be a good boy now, Meecham, and co-operate, and some day you may be District Attorney, then you can kick me in the teeth if I’ve got any teeth left by that time.”

“Who are you kidding? You haven’t got any left now.”

Cordwink’s eyes narrowed, but he didn’t make any reply. He crossed the room to the door that led into the hallway of the house, unlocked it, and motioned Meecham out with a curt nod.

Meecham went out, quite meekly. He felt a little ashamed of himself for making the crack about Cordwink’s teeth. Nearly everyone in town knew that Cordwink had had his front teeth knocked out in a fight with two berserk sailors who were equipped with brass knuckles. The sailors went to a military prison, Cordwink went to the dentist, and the brass knuckles went into his pile of impounded weapons that included everything from sawed-off shotguns to paring knives.

Meecham followed the hall past an immense high-ceilinged dining room into the kitchen. It was a big old-fashioned kitchen, designed not merely for cooking and eating, but for all kinds of family living. There was a card table with a plastic canasta set, a rocking chair, a record player, a bookcase and a couch with a blanket neatly folded at the foot. A woman stood at the sink, wiping dishes and humming to herself.

Her voice and figure were youthful, and her light hair was cut girlishly short and curled close to her head. But when she turned, hearing Meecham approach, he saw that she was about forty. Her hair was gray, not blonde as it appeared at first, and the skin around her sharp blue eyes was creased and dry, like crepe paper.

She smiled at Meecham as she rolled down the sleeves of her dress and buttoned them at the wrists. Her smile was not artificial exactly, but facile, as if she was accustomed to smiling in all kinds of situations and at all kinds of people. “Were you looking for someone?”

“Yes, the owner of the house.”

“The bank owns it,” she said crisply. “Arbana Trust and Savings. I rent it.”

“You’re Mrs. Hearst?”

“Yes.”

“I’m Eric Meecham. I’m a friend of Mr. Loftus.”

“A friend of Earl’s? Isn’t that nice, it really is.” Out of habit, she spoke with a little too much emphasis. It made her enthusiasm, which was real, sound forced. “For a minute there I thought you were going to try and sell me something. Not that I wouldn’t like to buy something, but nobody ever got rich on college boys. They’re nice boys, all of them, boys from good homes. But what with taxes the way...” She paused, suddenly frowning. “You’re from out of town?”

“No, I live here.”

“I just wondered. Earl’s never mentioned you. He hasn’t many friends and he usually tells me things. I... is anything the matter? Where is Earl? Where is he?”

“I can’t say, definitely.”

“I knew something was up. He always has supper with me Monday nights. Tonight he didn’t come, didn’t phone. I waited an hour. Everything was ruined. Where is he?”

“In jail.”

“In jail? Why, that’s crazy. Why, Earl is one of the quietest, most refined...”

“The Sheriff is in his room now. He wants to talk to you.”

“To me? A sheriff? Why I... I don’t know what to say. This isn’t some kind of trick one of my boys put you up to? They play tricks on me sometimes, not meaning to be cruel.”

“There’s no trick,” Meecham said. “I’m a long way from college.”

“A sheriff,” she repeated, in a strained voice. “I’ll talk to him, if I must. But I’ve nothing to say. Nothing. Earl is a perfect gentleman. And more than that, too. You only see him now, when he’s sick.” She hesitated, as if she would have liked to say more about Loftus, but decided this was not the time or place. “All right, I’ll talk to him. Some mistake has been made somewhere, of that I’m sure.”

She preceded Meecham down the hall, wiping her hands nervously on her apron and casting uneasy glances up the staircase to her left, obviously afraid that one of the “boys from good homes” would come down and see her talking to a policeman.

Meecham followed her into Loftus’ room and closed the door. “Mrs. Hearst, this is the Sheriff, Mr. Cordwink.”

Cordwink acknowledged the introduction with a brief nod. “Sit down, Mrs. Hearst. I just want to check up on a few things about Earl Loftus.”

The woman didn’t sit down. She didn’t even advance into the room, but stood rigidly with her back against the wall, her hands clenched in the pockets of her apron. “I don’t understand why you’re here. Earl hasn’t — done anything?”

“That’s what I’m trying to find out,” Cordwink said. “How long has he been with you?”

“Lived here? A year, almost a year.”

“You know him pretty well, then?”

“I... yes. We are friends.”

“He confides in you?”

“Yes, you understand, I’m not like a mother to him, the way I am to some of my boys. No indeed, Earl’s different, more mature. Our conversations are very stimulating. Why, he talks as mature as any man my — my own age.”

“I notice that he has his own telephone and mailbox.”

“Yes, this little apartment is completely separate from the rest of the house.”

“Then you wouldn’t, naturally, be able to keep as close track of him as you would of your regular roomers.”

Mrs. Hearst’s mouth looked pinched. “I don’t have to keep track of anyone.”

“What I meant was...”

“I know what you meant. You meant, do I snoop in on other people’s telephone conversations and examine their mail. No, I don’t. And in Earl’s case it wouldn’t even be necessary. He tells me everything.”

There was a brief silence before Cordwink spoke again, in a quiet, amiable voice: “He seems, on the surface, to be quite an exceptional young man.”

“Not just on the surface. He’s exceptional all through. Very intelligent, Earl is, and very polite and considerate, doesn’t drink or smoke or run around with women.”

“He’s married, isn’t he?”

“Married? Why, of course not. He would certainly have told me, and he’s never mentioned a wife. Just his mother. He’s devoted to his mother. She lives out of town, but she came to see him last summer. A very refined type of woman. She’s ill most of the time, that’s why she doesn’t come to see him oftener. Earl himself isn’t very — very well.”

“Yes, I know that.” Cordwink went over to the studio couch and lifted the lid of the suitcase. “I suppose you’re familiar with Loftus’ clothes?”

“His clothes? That’s a funny question. I don’t understand.”

Cordwink picked up the wrinkled bloodstained trench coat, quite naturally and casually, as if it was an ordinary piece of clothing. There was no indication, in his movements or expression, of his extreme distaste for the sight of blood, the feelings it gave him, of loss, futility, vulnerability. The blood on this worn and dirty coat had been the end of a man and might be the end of another.

He said calmly, “Do you, for instance, recognize this coat, Mrs. Hearst?”

“I... don’t know. It’s so wrinkled. I can’t... What are those marks?”

“Blood.”

She drew in her breath suddenly, gaspingly, like an exhausted swimmer. “I don’t like this. I don’t like it, I say. Where’s Earl? Where is he? You’ve got no right prying into his things like this! How do I know you’re policemen? How do I know you’re not a pair...?”

“Here’s my identification.” Cordwink took his badge out of his pocket and showed it to her. “Mr. Meecham isn’t a policeman, he’s a lawyer. As for prying into Loftus’ things, I’m doing it with his consent. Here are his own keys. He gave them to me.”

The woman sat down, suddenly and heavily. “What... what did Earl do?”

“He says he killed a man.”

She stared, round-eyed, glassy-eyed, into the corner of the room. “Here? Here in this house?”

“No.”

“Earl didn’t... couldn’t... it’s impossible.”

“He says he did.”

“But you can’t believe him. I’ve often thought, time and time again I’ve thought, that someday that terrible disease would affect his mind, would...”

“His mind seems clear enough,” Cordwink said.

“But you don’t know Earl. He could never harm anyone. He hated to kill anything. Why... why, once there was a mouse in his room — last fall — I wanted to set a trap but he wouldn’t let me. He said the mouse was so tiny and harmless...”

“Mrs. Hearst.”

“I’m telling you, Earl wouldn’t.”

“This is his coat, isn’t it?”

She turned her head away and stared at the wall. “Yes.”

“And this suit? The shoes? Please look at them, Mrs. Hearst. You can’t identify something without looking at it.”

She glanced briefly at the suit and shoes and then away again. “They’re Earl’s.”

“No question about it?”

“I said they’re Earl’s. Now can I go? I’ve had a great shock, a terrible shock.”

“In a minute,” Cordwink said. “The trench coat, and the serge suit — were these the clothes Loftus usually wore when he was going out in the evening, say?’

“Why?” she said bitterly. “Don’t you think they were good enough to go out in? Well, maybe they weren’t! But they were the only ones he had. He couldn’t afford any more.”

“When I saw him an hour ago he was wearing a new topcoat, new suit, new shoes. All of them looked expensive.”

“I don’t care! I don’t know what you’re implying, and I don’t care!”

“Did you ever lend him money, Mrs. Hearst?”

“I... no! Never! He’d never have taken it, never have borrowed money from a woman, never!”

“All right,” Cordwink said. Privately he wondered how much, and when. “Then you didn’t lend him any money, say, this morning?”

“No!”

“Did you see him this morning?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“When I was shoveling off the walk, about seven-thirty.”

“What exactly did you say to him?”

“I said... I said, ‘Earl you can’t go like that, in just a sweater and slacks, it’s winter, you’ll catch cold.’”

“And he said?”

“That he’d sent his coat to the cleaner’s and that anyway he wasn’t cold. I asked him where he was off to, so early. And he said he was going downtown to see about selling his car. He said it wasn’t working so well, it was just a nuisance in the winter, so he thought he’d sell it, and then, in the spring, maybe he’d — he’d be feeling better and could work more and buy a... a new car. I said, just joking, how about a Cadillac, then you can take me for a ride. And he said there — wasn’t anyone he’d rather take for a ride in a Cadillac than... than me.”

She looked toward the window as if she was trying to see, not the dark of a winter night, but a morning in spring, with Earl well again and at the wheel of his new car.

“As you know now,” Cordwink said, “he didn’t send his coat to the cleaner’s. It was here all the time, locked inside the wardrobe. He had approximately forty hours to dispose of it, but he apparently made no attempt to. That’s curious, don’t you think, Mrs. Hearst?”

“Curious,” she repeated dully. “Yes. It’s curious. Everything’s curious.”

“Do you clean Loftus’ roo— apartment?”

“Go on, call it a room. It’s not an apartment, it’s just a room. I know it’s just a room, and Earl knows it and everyone...” She stopped, holding the back of her hand to her mouth. “I clean it twice a week, Tuesday and Saturday. I don’t have to do it, it’s not included in his rent. I do it for — because I like to,” she added defiantly. “I like to clean.”

“Take another look around now, Mrs. Hearst. Is this the way his room usually looked?”

“No.”

“What’s different about it?”

“A lot of his things are gone.”

“Clothes?”

“Not clothes. Personal little things, like his desk set, for instance. He had a very nice desk set, onyx, quite expensive. His mother gave it to him. His mother’s picture is gone too, it was in a silver frame. And his radio — he used to keep his radio on the table over there.”

“Have you any idea what happened to the missing objects?”

“They could have been — s-stolen.” But she stumbled over the answer. It was fairly obvious, both to Meecham and to Cordwink, that she didn’t believe the articles had been stolen.

“Or pawned, maybe,” Cordwink said. “Was he in the habit of pawning things?”

“He — when he had to, when he was desperate. He had such terrible expenses. And then there’s his mother, he sends her money. Last fall he scrimped and saved to send her some and when he did she blew it all in — went out and bought the desk set I told you about, and mailed it to him. It was a nice gesture, of course, only it was such a foolish thing to do. But then, she’s very refined, she doesn’t realize that people have to scrounge around for money these days.”

“You think, then, that Loftus pawned this stuff of his that’s missing?”

“Yes.”

“Any idea where?”

“There’s a little place in the east end, right next to the bowling alley. Devine’s, it’s called.”

“Did Loftus tell you that’s where he usually went?”

“I... no. No, he didn’t.” Her skin looked flushed. “I found a pawn ticket once when I was dusting his bureau. It was for his wrist watch. He never got the watch back. He told me he’d lost it. It wasn’t a real lie, Earl never lies. It was just a fib to save his pride. Being poor,” she said, “having to pawn things, that’s nothing to be ashamed of. But Earl isn’t used to it the way some people are. His father was well-to-do — he was a broker in Detroit before he died — and of course when Earl was working steadily he got a very good salary. Being poor is new to Earl. It’s his disease that’s dragged him down, his disease and his mom— No. No, I won’t say that. His mother can’t help herself, she’s very refined.”

Cordwink lit a cigarette. He rarely smoked, and the package from which he had taken the cigarette looked as though it had been in his pocket for months. He said, “When did you last see Loftus wearing this trench coat?”

“Saturday night. I was on my way to the hockey game, one of my boys is on the team. I met Earl on the sidewalk out in front of the house. I stopped to chat, I always do, and Earl said he’d just finished dinner downtown and that he was going to bed early because he was tired.”

“After the game you got home around...?”

“Eleven, it was just about eleven. Earl had gone to bed by that time.”

“Are you sure of that?”

“Well, I thought he’d gone to bed. It never occurred to me that he hadn’t, and his lights were off.”

“Did you see him on Sunday at all?”

“No, Sunday’s my day off. I always go over to Chelsea to visit my sister and her kids. My sister and I had a little disagreement, nothing serious, but I left earlier than usual. I got home around 8:30. Earl’s light was on, I saw it shining under the door when I went into the hall. I thought of dropping in on him a minute, I was upset and Earl always cheers me up. But when I stopped outside his door he was talking on the telephone so I went on up to my room.”

“How long did you pause there, in the hall?”

“Oh, half a minute, no longer.”

“And you heard him talking?”

“Yes.”

“But not necessarily on the phone.”

“I... no, not necessarily, but...”

“In fact, there may have been someone in here with him.”

“Well, I can’t swear to it, of course, but I’m sure there wasn’t anyone here. Earl never has company.”

“No girl friends?”

Mrs. Hearst frowned. “No, none. Of that I am sure. He doesn’t bother with girls, young girls.”

“Was it a question of money?”

“No. Earl considers himself... well, deformed. He told me once that he couldn’t expect any woman to go out with a freak like he was.” She rubbed her eyes with the corner of her apron. “He isn’t a freak. It hurt me, his saying that. He isn’t a freak. A lot of women would be glad to — to look after him, see that he got the proper rest and food and didn’t go traipsing around in the cold without his galoshes and overcoat. A lot of women would be... would be...”

She hid her face in her apron, in silent grief. Watching her, Meecham wondered if the grief was for Loftus, or for all the women like herself who wanted a man to look after.

His eyes shifted to Cordwink. Cordwink’s face was grim and the cigarette he was smoking was chewed at one end like a cigar. He opened his mouth, and Meecham thought he was going to say something to the woman. But the Sheriff didn’t speak. Instead, he went over and helped Mrs. Hearst out of the chair and guided her out into the hallway as if she were blind.

When he came back he slammed the door shut behind him and looked bitterly across the room at Meecham. “Okay, you got any smart cracks to make, Meecham?”

“No.”

“That’s good, because I’m not in the mood to listen to any.” He closed the suitcase with a bang, picked it up and turned off the lights. “I’ll drop you off at Barkeley’s so you can pick up your car.”

“Thanks.”

Cordwink didn’t speak again until he got into his car and pulled away from the curb.

“The fact is,” he said, “I’m a very emotional man where women are concerned.”