“The police… looking for
me?”
“It was your teacher who was murdered. The police think you did it. They’re looking for you because they think you’re the killer.”
He stood up. He was wide awake now. He said, “Did you say Anita Farrell was murdered? That I… I’m the murderer?”
I handed him the newspaper, waited until he had read the story. Then I told him my story, starting with my trailing him downtown, ending with my reading in the paper that only he could be the Waltzer. I showed him the silhouette I had taken from the dead girl’s hand. I showed him the register I had stolen. He listened silently to it all.
“The police,” he said, “don’t know yet that I’m the Waltzer.”
“No, because I stole the appointment book.”
“But they’ll soon know. There must be other records at the school.”
“Yes,” I said. “It’s only a question of time. They’ll know… and they’ll be coming after you. Steve?”
“Yeah?”
“I know you didn’t kill her.”
“Thanks.”
“Deep down in my heart I know you’re not a murderer.”
“Thanks again.”
“But…”
“But what?”
Suddenly it was all too much for me. I collapsed into a blubbering heap. My eyes were streaming tears, my shoulders shaking, my hands trembling as I implored my husband to assure me, though it wasn’t at all necessary… but just for the records, to please say out loud for me to hear that he had not killed Anita Farrell.
“Connie,” he said and sat down beside me on the love seat. “Connie,” he said and put his arms around me. “Connie,” he said, “I went through grade school, high school and a certain amount of Sunday school without rubbing out any of my teachers. With an enviable record like that how can there be any doubt that I could do the same with dancing school?”
He dried my tears. He got up and walked around the room, then sat down again, this time on the arm of a love seat. He was thoughtful, wondering, and mostly worried.
“She was alive when I left her,” he said. “Somebody got into that studio between the time I left it and when you went in and found her dead.”
“No,” I said dismally, “nobody did. I was watching all the time.”
“Connie, somebody… somehow… got in there and put a bullet in her back.”
“How, Steve? There’s only one door, no windows.”
“Could anyone possibly have got through that door without your seeing him? Couldn’t you possibly be wrong about that? Think hard, Connie!”
I thought hard; I prayed that I could be wrong about it. I said, “I never took my eyes off that door. Nobody opened it between the times you and I did.”
“Well,” Steve said, “that’s that.”
“No, there’s an answer to this. We’ve got to find it.” Steve roamed the room as though he were physically searching for that answer. I stayed where I was. Neither of us was using the right method. The silence of our frustration lengthened into minutes; At last Steve dropped desperately into the love seat opposite mine. He looked at the silhouette on the coffee table. He picked it up, studied it.
“Yes,” I said, “and what about that?”
“The killer probably put it in her hand after he shot her.”
“But why, Steve?”
“I don’t know…”
“Steve,” I said, and what I was thinking sent a chill through me. “Steve, it’s like voodoo, isn’t it? That needle through her silhouette is like a needle through a doll’s heart… a hex. Maybe the murderer handed it to her before he killed her, let her get the significance of it. Maybe he wanted her to suffer for a horrible moment before she died.”
“You’re dramatizing.”
“What’s your explanation of it?”
Steve shook his head, signifying it was empty of an explanation. “The hell with the silhouette,” he said. “How was she killed? She wasn’t done in by a death ray. She wasn’t poisoned through the mail. She wasn’t bitten by a snake that crawled out of the woodwork. According to you and the newspaper, she was shot to death.”
“At close range. Even I could see that.”
“So she was shot by someone in the room with her.”
“But, Steve…”
“Yes,” he said, “I know! Nobody was in the room with her but me! Let’s stop proving I killed her!”
“The murderer’s already done that. Steve, do you think you should go to the police? I mean, before they come to you?”
“I don’t know. I’ve got to think about it.”
“You have some friends on the Homicide Squad. Nobody who knows you could believe you’re a murderer.”
“Connie, don’t be an ever-loving wife. Everybody who ever committed a murder surprised the daylights out of his friends.”
“Yes,” I said helplessly, “but if we explained everything to the police… wouldn’t it look better?”
“Everything? Even tell them that you stole the register? How would you explain that, Connie?”
“Why, I…”
“You wouldn’t have to explain it. They’d know. Baby, you stole it because you were afraid I had killed Anita.”
“No! No, I got panicky, that’s all…”
“If you told the cops the truth you’d prove to them I killed her. If you lied to them, they’d know it… and that would prove it to them, too.”
“Let’s not go to the cops. Let’s forget I ever mentioned it.”
There was a loud knock on our door.
“The register,” Steve said.
I scooped it up, took it into the kitchen, hid it under the bread box. When I got back into the living room, Steve was shaking hands with a man named Bolling. This Bolling was about fifty, not quite stout, but there was a lot of him. Mainly he was a genial man, but on occasions he could be rather pulverizing. We knew him pretty well. Steve had become friends with him in the line of duty. He was employed by the New York City Police. He was a lieutenant in Homicide.
He was alone, he explained to Steve, because his partner was busy elsewhere. It seemed there had been a murder this evening at the Crescent School of Dancing and a rather curious aspect of the case made it advisable for the team of Bolling and Hankins to split up temporarily.
Now he was speaking to me. “Mrs. Barton, I remember you being a brunette.”
“Those were the days,” I said wistfully.
“You make a fine blonde, Mrs. Barton. I don’t recall ever seeing a blonder blonde.”
“This man I have does good work. He’s very sincere. Won’t you sit down, Lieutenant?”
“In a minute.”
He went to our phone and called his precinct station. He was anxious to have his partner, Hankins, and another colleague named Lewine know that he was at the Bartons’. When they called in at eleven to report, they were to call here. It was now a little after ten-thirty. This was going to be a long, nervous half hour for me and the Waltzer.
The Lieutenant moved into the love seat nearest him. He said, “What’s come over the Barton family? The missus a blonde all of a sudden, the mister taking dancing lessons.”
“We were in a rut,” Steve said.
“I wish you still were,” Bolling said. “Barton, don’t you know better than to take lessons from a teacher who’s going to get herself murdered?”
“How,” I asked, “did you know that? I mean… we read in the paper that the register had been stolen.”
“Yeah, the killer stole the register all right. But the bookkeeping department had all the students’ names. And we boiled the list down to Anita Farrell’s pupils by having the other teachers eliminate theirs.”
Steve said, “You’ve been busy, haven’t you?”
“We got right to work.”
He took a sheet of paper from his pocket, spread it out on the coffee table. It was Anita Farrell’s teaching schedule. It was blocked off into neat squares. The vertical columns were labelled Monday through Saturday. The horizontal columns were marked with the hours from 2
p.m.
through Anita’s final lesson from 9 till 10
p.m.
A half dozen of the blocks were already filled in with students’ names. At one side of the schedule were three other names.
“You see,” Bolling said, “we’re getting in touch with each of Miss Farrell’s students. We find out what time he took his lesson. Now the killer is certainly going to lie about his time. He isn’t going to admit he took the seven o’clock lesson tonight, Wednesday. He’s going to say his lesson was at some other time. Therefore, we will get two guys both claiming the same time. One of them is the murderer. It won’t be hard to figure out which is.”
“This,” I said, “is going to be an easy case to solve, isn’t it?”
“You sound a little disappointed, Mrs. Barton.”
Steve said quickly, “What are these names on the side here?”
“Tolley, Grant, Culligan. They were out when I tried to reach them. I’ll get them in the morning. Now, Barton, tell me. Where shall I put your name? When did you take your…”
I interrupted the Lieutenant. Somehow I was going to keep Steve from answering that question. I wasn’t going to let him be one of the two guys who claimed the same time. I said, “Steve, had you actually started taking lessons? I mean, had you been assigned a time?”
“Sure he had,” Bolling said. He was looking at me as though I were a dumb blonde. “He’s paid for nine lessons already. How come you didn’t know that, Mrs. Barton?”
“Easily. I didn’t even know Steve was taking dancing lessons.”
“I was learning to dance to surprise her,” Steve said.
“If you learned to dance you’d surprise me, too,” Bolling said. “Now, Barton, what time…
”
“How about a glass of beer?” Steve said. “Cool, sparkling beer.”
“Sure, I’ll have a beer.”
Steve hurried into the kitchen.
Bolling looked at his watch. He said, “Hankins and Lewine should be calling soon. They’re out checking the lesson times of Miss Farrell’s other students. With any luck we might clear this up by morning. Thank God the killer was stupid enough to steal the register.”
“Maybe he wasn’t stupid,” I said. “Maybe he just lost his head.”
“Well, it was a break for us. It means the killer has to be her last student… the fellow learning to waltz. Nobody else would steal the register.”
Bolling’s voice trailed off and he was looking at me closely, curiously. I pressed my hands together to still their shaking. I tried to smile casually. I answered the question in Bolling’s eyes with one of my own.
“Yes, Mr. Bolling?”
“I was just wondering…” Steve came into the room with three glasses of beer on a tray. “Barton,” Bolling said, “what’s your opinion? You like her better as a blonde or a brunette?”
“Blonde or brunette,” Steve said, “she’s my wife. Three o’clock Saturday.”
“What’s that, Barton?”
“I take my lesson at three o’clock Saturday.”
“Oh, thanks.”
Bolling wrote the name Barton into the right block. Then he leaned back with his glass of beer. He could afford to relax, even though he didn’t know it. In a few minutes Hankins and Lewine would be calling. One of them would have found the dancing man who actually had his lesson at three o’clock on Saturday. Bolling would know which one was lying… I found myself wondering if Steve would go quietly.
“Barton,” Bolling was saying, “how well did you get to know this Anita Farrell?”
“You know that,” Steve said. “I spent exactly nine hours with her.”
“You must have talked a lot to her.”
“I guess so. Mostly I said, ‘Excuse me, pardon me, was that the same foot again?’ Things like that.”
“She must have been a hell of a good looking girl.”
“She was.”
“More than that, wasn’t she? Sexy?”
“Well,” Steve said.
I said, “Shall I step outside a minute?”
“No,” Bolling said amiably. “Stick around.”
He looked at his watch. I could have told him what he wanted to know. Hankins and Lewine would be calling in about four minutes or less. He took a long, happy pull on his beer.
He said, “This is what I’m getting at, Barton. A girl like this Farrell girl… she could drive a man a little bit crazy. If one of her students… well, if she kept saying no to him, that might upset him to the point where he might put a bullet in her.”
“That sort of thing happens,” Steve said.
“Almost every day, including Sunday,” Bolling said. “It’s alarming. She never talked to you about any of her students, Barton? Never complained about one maybe who bothered her especially?”
“No, she never impressed me as a girl who would complain about anything like that.”
“Oh. Would you say she was on the make? A tease, maybe? I want your opinion, Barton.”
I said, “What does motive matter? In a few minutes you’ll know which of two men killed her…”
The phone rang.
Bolling took his chart to the phone. He talked to Hankins through the precinct switchboard, then he talked to Lewine. He kept mumbling days, hours, names. He kept filling in his little squares. At last he hung up. He sat there then, endlessly, studying his chart. Abruptly he stood up. He was annoyed. “Damn,” he said. “We haven’t got it yet. No two have claimed the same time.”
“Tough,” Steve said.
I wasn’t able to speak at all.
Bolling snatched up his hat. “See you soon,” he growled.
He was gone.
“Steve,” I breathed, “you lucky, lucky boy!”
“What do you mean lucky?”
“You happened to pick the lesson time of someone they haven’t got in touch with yet.”
“It wasn’t luck. I knew they couldn’t locate guys named Tolley, Grant and Culligan. Out in the kitchen I looked up Tolley in the register. I took his time… Saturday at three o’clock.”
“You darling, you!”
“Now don’t get happy. This Tolley may pop up at any minute.”
“Steve, we’ve got to find him before Bolling does!”
“If we could, what would we do with him?”
“Keep him quiet!”
“How?”
“I don’t know. There are ways, aren’t there?”
“Connie…”
“All right! Then you’ve just got to solve this case before they do locate Tolley!”
“Just like that, huh? All of a sudden, I can solve murder cases.”
“Well, you’d better learn. Because that’s the only way to keep a murder rap away from you… you, personally, Steve. Do I make myself clear, darling?”
I fled into the bedroom. I didn’t want Steve to think I was the hysterical type blonde that was always crying all over men’s shoulders.