Inspector Queen’s Own Case (17 page)

Jessie made an instinctive move toward her. But the Inspector shook his head emphatically, and she sank back.

“I'm sorry.” The Coy girl stopped crying as suddenly as she had begun. “Yes, I was desperate, all right. That slug Finner hung around a club I was singing at. I don't know how he knew I was pregnant. I suppose one of the girls suspected and sold him the information. What do you want to know?”

“Was that morning—June 3rd—the last time you saw your baby?”

“Yes.”

She was twisting her hands in her lap, biting her lip.

“Now tell me this. Where were you on the afternoon of August 20th? That would be Saturday a week ago.”

“I was in Chicago,” she said dully. “That's where I just got back from. I did a three-week singing engagement at the Club Intime.”

“Do you remember what you were doing that Saturday afternoon?”

“Sure. I was working a TV show. The club press agent arranged it.”

“You were in a TV studio in Chicago all afternoon?”

“All day. We went on the air at 4:30.”

For the first time his face softened. “That's an alibi nobody can improve on. I'm glad for your sake.”

The girl was staring at him. “What do you mean, Inspector? Alibi for what?”

“On Saturday mid-afternoon, August 20th, A. Burt Finner was murdered in his office on East 49th Street in New York.”

“Finner … murdered?”

“Didn't you know that, Miss Coy?”

“No! Finner murdered … Who did it?”

“That,” the old man said gently, “is why we're here.”

“I see,” she said. “You thought I murdered him … I hope you never get the one who did! She ought to get a medal. Maybe you didn't know Finner the way I got to. He was the lowest thing that crawled. He was a creep, a fat creep. This baby racket wasn't just business with him. He got kicks out of it. The filthy bastard.”

He let the bitter voice run on. His silence finally stopped her.

“You're keeping something from me,” she said slowly. “Does Finner's murder have something to do with my baby?”

“Miss Coy.” He stopped. Then he said, “Miss Coy, don't you know about the baby, either?”

“Know? About my baby?” The girl clutched the arms of her chair. “Know what, Inspector?”

“Don't you know who bought your baby from Finner?”

“No. That was part of the deal. I had to sign all kinds of papers Finner pushed in front of me. Promise never to try to find out who the adopters were. Promise never to look for him.” She jumped up. “You know who they are! Who are they? Tell me! Please?”

“A millionaire Massachusetts couple with a summer home in Connecticut and an apartment in New York. Mr. and Mrs. Alton K. Humffrey.”

Her mascara had run, and she kept blinking at him, blinking as if she could not stop. Suddenly she went over to the end table and snatched a cigaret from an open box. Her gesture pushed the book lying there into Jessie's lap. The girl turned away, thumbing a table lighter savagely.

“Tell me more,” she said. “These Humffreys. They bought my baby from Finner, and what happened? Because something happened, I know it. What was it, Inspector?”

He glanced at Jessie.

“Well, Miss Coy, I'll tell you——”

“I'll tell her, Richard.” Jessie got up, holding the book, and went close to the girl. “Take a good drag, Miss Coy. This is going to be very hard. I was your baby's nurse in the Humffrey household. He's dead.”

She touched the girl's shoulder.

Connie Coy turned around. Her lips were apart and the smoldering cigaret was dangling from her lower lip. Jessie took it from her mouth and put it in an ash tray.

“You may as well hear the rest of it,” Richard Queen muttered. “Your baby was murdered.”

“
Murdered …
?”

Jessie lunged, and he bounced forward. But the girl pushed their arms blindly aside, went over to the wing chair, sat down on the edge with her hands clasped between her knees, staring.

Jessie hurried into the kitchen. She came back with a glass of water.

“Drink this.”

Connie Coy sipped mechanically, still staring.

“No, that's enough. Murdered. When did it happen?”

“August 4th, a Thursday night,” the old man said. “Over three weeks ago. Didn't you read about the death of a child named Michael Stiles Humffrey up on Nair Island, in Connecticut? It was in all the papers.”

“So that's the name they gave him. Michael. I always called him just Baby. In my thoughts, I mean. Michael …” She shook her head, as if the name meant nothing to her. “Papers? No, I guess I didn't. Thursday night, August 4th … I left for Chicago on the 5th. I was busy packing, I didn't get a paper that Friday. I didn't see a New York paper all the time I was away.” She shook her head again, violently this time. “It's so confusing. You know? Getting hit this way … Murdered … All this time I've kept kidding myself it was for his good, the advantages he'd have, and never knowing he was illegitimate. How he'd grow up tall and happy and well adjusted, and … And he's murdered. At two months old.” She laughed. “It's crazy, man, crazy.”

She threw her head back and laughed and laughed. Jessie let her laugh it through. After a while the girl stopped laughing and said, “Can I have a cigaret?”

“I wish I had a good stiff drink to give you,” Jessie said. She lit a cigaret and put it between the girl's lips. “How about some coffee?”

“No, thanks. I'm all right.” She seemed completely composed, as if the laughter, the enormous hazel stare, had never happened. “Let's get this straight. A rich couple named Humffrey bought my baby from Finner. The baby was murdered. A couple of weeks later Finner was murdered. I don't see the connection.”

“We don't know yet why the little tyke was murdered, Connie.” The Inspector dragged a chair over to her and sat down eagerly. “But the way we see it, Finner got it because he was the only outsider who knew the baby's real parentage. A while ago you said you didn't know how Finner found out you were pregnant—you supposed one of the girls at the club you were singing in suspected and sold him the information. Did you have any real reason for believing that?”

“No,” she said slowly. “I never let on to anybody, and it certainly didn't show at that time. But it's the only way I can imagine Finner got to know it.”

“It isn't likely. But there's one way Finner could have found out that is likely. Connie, tell me: Did the man who got you pregnant know it?”

Her eyes flickered.

“Yes,” she said. “I told him. He wanted me to go to some dirty abortionist. But I was afraid. So then he bowed out.” She shrugged. “I didn't blame him. It was my own fault. I thought I loved him and found out I didn't when it was too late. I knew all the time he was married.” Then she said, “Pardon me for going into my memoirs. You were saying?”

“Three people knew it,” Richard Queen said. “You, the man, Finner. You didn't tell Finner. Then how did Finner find out?
The man must have told him.”

“That's real touching,” Connie Coy murmured. She got up and ground the cigaret out in the ash tray on the end table. She ground it hard. “Keep going, Inspector.”

“So Finner knew the identity of both parents. If he was killed because he knew—” the old man rose, too—“then you're in danger, Connie.”

“Me?” She swung about to face him, expressionless. “How do you figure that?”

“The only ones with reason to shut Finner's mouth for good about the child's parentage are the parents themselves. You're one of them, but you have a solid alibi for the day of Finner's murder. That leaves the other parent. It's my belief, Connie, that Finner was murdered by the baby's real father, and if that's so he may well come after you, too. With Finner dead, you're the only one left who can expose him. That's why I want you to tell us who the father is.”

The blonde girl walked over to her grand piano. She ran her left hand soundlessly over the keys.

“Certainly you can't have any sentiment left about him.” The Inspector spoke softly from the center of the room, above Jessie's head. “You say he's married. Am I right in supposing he's also somebody prominent—someone who might be ruined if a story like this came out? A certain type of man will run amok under a fear like that. Your protection is to share your information, Connie. The more people know who he is, the safer you are. He can't kill us all. Who is he? Tell us.”

There was another cigaret box on the piano, and the girl took a cigaret from it and put it to her mouth. She looked around. He picked up the lighter from the end table and walked over to her.

“Tell us,” he said again. He held the lighter up, but he did not finger the flint lever. She took the lighter from him and worked the lever herself.

“Arthur Dimmesdale,” Jessie said from the sofa.

The flame remained an inch from the cigaret.

“What, Jessie?” Richard Queen said, puzzled.

The open book from the end table was still in Jessie's hand. She tapped it. “I thought it sounded familiar, Richard. Arthur Dimmesdale is the name of Hester Prynne's lover in Hawthorne's
Scarlet Letter.”

“Oh, that.” Connie Coy laughed. “I picked the book up one day in a secondhand shop. I'd always meant to read it. And I'd just found out I was pregnant.
A
for
Adultery
… Hester's lover's name seemed like just the thing when I had to invent a husband. My mother always warned me my romantic streak would get me into trouble.”

“Only a person who's married can commit adultery, Connie,” Jessie said. “You're not the adulterer. He is. And now it seems he's a murderer, too. That's the thing to remember, isn't it?”

“So,” Inspector Queen repeated, “who is he?”

“All right,” the blonde girl said suddenly. “I'll tell you.”

She brought the flame of the lighter to the tip of the cigaret.

The flame seemed to explode with a sharp crack, and a black hole appeared in the middle of her forehead.

Then the hole gushed red, and the lighter fell, and the cigaret fell, and the girl fell.

She fell sidewise, glancing off the piano keys. She crashed to the floor before the brilliant clang of the keys stopped.

“
Get down, Jessie!”

Jessie found herself in a crouch on the floor, with the sofa between her and the studio window. The old man was skittering like a crab toward the wall switch. Jessie heard two more explosions. Something shattered behind her.

The room plummeted into darkness.

He was pounding through the kitchen now. Undoing the latch chain.

The service door opened and closed. The sounds were definite but not loud. Before the door closed she heard the voice of the ex-detective, Giffin. And soft running steps.

Then silence.

Jessie Sherwood sat up in the dark, rested her head against the sofa seat. Her ears were ringing and it bothered her.

She shut her eyes.

But even with her eyes shut she could see him.

He had shot a gun off from the roof of the house twenty feet on the other side of the court, through the open window. The flame of the lighter had made Connie Coy's blonde head a perfect target. A blurry-black figure against the glow of the city sky. As the girl fell. With a glinting something held in front of him. A figure vaguely male. Then she had tumbled off the sofa.

Amazing how quiet everything was.

Not really quiet. Just normal-quiet. As if there had been no man on the roof, no sharp crack, no hole in a human head. It wasn't quiet. TV sets were going all over the place. The court was full of them. Auto sounds from the streets. Buses going by on Broadway. Not the kind of sounds they would make if they knew a girl had been shot. Not the rasp of windows, cries, questions, doors, running.

Girl shot.

Jessie came alive.

The girl …

She crawled toward the window, reached up, got hold of the short end of the drape pull, and yanked. Before she climbed to her feet she felt for the drapes to make sure they were drawn.

She located the lamp on the piano, felt for the button, found it. The lamp remained dark. Why didn't it turn on? The wall switch. It controlled all the lights in the room.

She groped toward where Richard Queen had scuttled at the first shot. After a while she located the switch.

Connie Coy was lying between the Steinway and the pulled-out piano bench, on her back. Her robe had twisted open in her fall. She was wearing nothing underneath.

The blonde girl was staring intently at the ceiling, as if something were written there that she could not understand.

4.

EVEN IN THE CANNON'S MOUTH

“Don't touch anything, Jessie.”

Jessie had not heard him come in. He was just inside the doorway from the kitchen, breathing in heaves, getting his breath. Perspiration was streaming down his cheeks.

“She's dead, Richard.”

“I know.”

He had a handkerchief on his right hand again. He went into Connie Coy's bedroom, wiped the knob of the bathroom door. He came back and went to the piano and picked up the fallen lighter and wiped it clean and put it back on the end table. He wiped the chair he had used. He glanced at the glass of water Jessie had brought the girl from the kitchen, then at Jessie's hands.

“You're still wearing your gloves. That's good.” He went over to the sofa, picked up Jessie's purse, looked around the living room. “You've pulled the drapes.” He did not sound angry. He said it like a man taking inventory. He came over to her and led her to the kitchen doorway. “Stay right here.” He went to the wall switch and rubbed it with the handkerchief.

Then he flipped the switch.

The room got dark again.

She heard him making his way to the window. The drapes hissed open again.