“Hi, darling!” Jack said, and embraced her, held her tight. She smelt of her particular perfume, of clean but warm hair. She smelt delicious.
“I’m filthy—and plooped!”
“How was it? What’s been happening?”
“I’ve got her parents into the only hotel I could find in a hurry that—”
“Have you been on a trip, Mommie?” Amelia stood at the hall entrance, staring.
“I haven’t been away long!—A trip!” Natalia said with scorn.
By tacit agreement, Jack and Natalia spoke of Elsie as “she” and “her”.
“Her parents’re darling people,” Natalia said. “Not at all what I’d expected. They’re civilized—and not hicky.” Natalia had washed her face and hands in the bathroom, and was now leaning back on the sofa, drinking a beer out of the cold can. “At first they seemed sort of against Marion. I had to convince them about that. And they’re—they’re—” She glanced at Amelia who was listening. “They’re really bowled over, just knocked out by this.”
“Christ,” Jack said, imagining it. “How long’re they here for?”
“I suppose—two days more, not sure.”
“They have friends here?”
“The mother mentioned somebody, a woman here.”
“Was the brother with them?”
“What brother?”
“She has a brother, older, I think.”
“Oh, yes! No, he’s working in Atlanta now, they said. Not sure if he’ll come. But the mother—” Natalia gave a laugh as she lit a Marlboro. “She’s just like—her. Same kind of hair, eyes, same—Well, what was it?”
“Really?” Jack sat on the edge of the armchair seat, with his second tentative smile of the day. “I don’t believe it.”
“Whose mother?” Amelia asked.
“Sweetie—” Natalia took a deep breath. “Your daddy and I have to talk for a few minutes. It’s very boring like—income tax.”
Sometimes the boring ploy worked with Amelia, sometimes not. Amelia seemed torn, and went to look out a window.
“Talk any more with the fuzz?” Jack asked, barely audibly.
“Yes, this morning. They’re not sure about this Fran. They’re asking Marion for more names.”
“Oh?—Has she got any?”
“No.” Natalia crossed her extended legs and looked up at the ceiling. She wore black cotton trousers and sandals with nearly flat heels. “She could reel off half a dozen names, probably. Mostly with no fixed address.”
Jack frowned and whispered, “All girls? Surely not.—What’s behind all this?”
“You mean—”
“The reason for it.” Jack spoke softly and intently.
Natalia got up, and poured a smallish Glenfiddich into a glass from the bamboo bar. “Envy,” she said after her first sip. “Jealousy. Maybe drugs. Some drugged kook, I mean, did it.”
“But who?”
“Who is who?” asked Amelia, turning suddenly from the front window.
“Somebody at your mother’s gallery, honey,” Jack said. “Not someone you know.” Jack suddenly recalled that they had told Amelia that Louis was away on a long trip to Japan. That was so far working. Amelia had asked a couple of times about him. Japan wouldn’t work forever, of course.
Jack’s statement seemed to have created the uninterestedness that they both wanted. Amelia drifted off to her room.
“About who,” Natalia said, relaxing again on the sofa. “Marion can’t come up with anybody except Fran who would’ve had the—brutality—”
“And the cops spoke to Fran.” Jack still whispered, as if Amelia were present. “Marion said she had a half-assed alibi.”
“Oh, yes! And she was high on something and the police finally let her go.”
“Let her go?—You mean, after just talking to her a few minutes?”
“I dunno how long. Something about Fran being with friends in a bar that afternoon, and they could prove it. That’s what Fran’s present girlfriend said when she called up Marion this morning. The girlfriend sounded fuzzy, and she mainly wanted to scream at Marion for mentioning Fran’s name to the police.”
“But—could you tell what the police think?”
Natalia shook her head. “I couldn’t, Marion couldn’t, because the police aren’t saying yet.—The police’re probably watching Fran to see if she’ll spill something on herself.—Oh! Something else new since this afternoon!” Natalia’s face lit up. “Fran’s disappeared—from where she’s supposed to be living. Marion told me this. I phoned Marion from the restaurant just now. The police called up Marion to ask if she’d heard from Fran or if Fran had even turned up at Greene Street!”
“Not so loud, darling,” Jack said with a glance toward Amelia’s room. “They must suspect Fran or they wouldn’t be so interested.”
Natalia shrugged. “It’s really only Marion’s hunch.” She pushed her hair back, and sipped from her glass. “I didn’t mention Fran to the Tylers, by the way.”
“Was Fran hanging around Greene Street—around Elsie and Marion?”
“She was never in the Greene Street apartment, I know that.—But Fran’s got that old grudge, Elsie took Genevieve away from her.” Natalia’s face crinkled with suppressed mirth. “That Genevieve! Ha!”
Natalia needed a laugh, Jack realized. He could smile, too, recalling poor drippy Genevieve who sold cosmetics somewhere. “And what was the half-assed alibi of Fran?”
“One version is that she was in the East Village. Of course some barman can say he remembers her being there around four, but he’s not quite sure. Then there’s her own girlfriend or apartment mate—who’s supposed to be a sculptress, by the way, but both of them keep themselves going by selling coke and such—she says they were shopping together on Eighth Street and she’s got some junk they bought to prove it.—But there’s nothing concrete, Jack.” Natalia got up restlessly and moved toward the radio, but didn’t turn it on.
“What about the Tylers? You’re going to see them again?—Are they—” Jack had been about to ask if the parents were going to see Marion. And their daughter’s body. Jack felt suddenly weak, or shocked, and he stood up to get rid of the feeling.
Natalia said that the Tylers were going to some kind of funeral service tomorrow, which they had arranged with the help of the woman friend who lived in New York. The burial was tomorrow in Long Island, and no, she, Natalia, did not want to go to the burial, and had told the Tylers that. Natalia looked at him with something stern and brooding in her face as she said this, and Jack remembered that she had seen Elsie in the morgue, what was left of Elsie. Natalia said the Tylers had been friendly, they had heard all about her and Jack from Elsie’s letters, and the father said he was grateful to them for introducing Elsie to people who could help her. “Nice older people, the mother said.” Natalia smiled.
Jack was touched when he heard this. Maybe the Tylers had been thinking about Elsie’s success as a fashion model for photographers. The people he and Natalia had introduced Elsie to had at least been harmless. Her killer had come from among the people Elsie had met on her own.
“They’re a bit baffled by her,” Natalia went on. “They said they’d had no control over her. The mother sort of understands.” Frowning, Natalia took a cigarette from the coffee table, and poured another small drink. “You can see the mother must’ve been just like Elsie when she was younger. And really she’s not old now! The mother’s from Sweden. I remember Elsie said Copenhagen—deliberately, probably. The mother started out as a ballet dancer, and gave it up when she married, she said. The father’s good-looking, but sort of a failed type, I think. I think he had greater ambitions. He owns a furniture store in their town.—Mind if I play some music. Jack?’ she asked in a tone that sounded as if she were sure Jack wouldn’t mind.
“I’d adore some music. Whatever you want.”
Natalia put a Beach Boys cassette in the machine, listened as she drew on her cigarette, turned it off. She looked for someth
ing else on the shelf of cassettes under a front window.
“And what about the trip? The twenty-ninth?”
Natalia dropped a cassette in. “Yugoslavia,” she said. “I want to go just because I don’t want to.”
Jack understood, perfectly.
Natalia had chosen the “Country Dances” of Respighi. She stood near the window. “The police were good last night. Kept the journalists away from the front door.—And they were still questioning people all up and down the street, Marion said—about what they’d seen, you know?”
Jack listened, and waited.
“We took the phone off the hook for a while to get some sleep.”
“While I think of it, Bob called up this morning. And Elaine last night.—And Isabel this morning too.”
Natalia acknowledged this with a slight nod. “Did you buy a paper this morning?”
“No. Sorry. I frankly didn’t want to face it.”
“I did. Didn’t bring them with me, of course,” she added with a glance toward Amelia’s room.
Jack moved closer to her. “How well did Amelia know Elsie? Did you take her around—”
“Couple of times, yes. I remember one afternoon, we walked around Washington Square—went and had ice cream somewhere.” Still frowning, Natalia smiled a little, as if she remembered it pleasantly. “She’d know Elsie’s name—recognize the pictures.”
Jack thought of the morgue, and decided not to ask about that.
“You loved her too, didn’t you, Jack?”
“Well, in a different way, maybe. When you say love—”
“Different way?” Natalia finished her drink. She turned toward the window.
Had he seen tears in her eyes? Then the telephone rang, and Natalia, being nearer it, picked it up. Jack could tell from the tone that the caller was a man, and from Natalia’s words that he was Bob Campbell.
Jack went into the bedroom, not wanting to go to his workroom, because he was restless, and because Elsie’s photographs plus his drawing of her were still in view there…incredible that it happened in broad daylight…Which of them had said that? Elsie had been pretty good about writing and phoning her parents. She only told people she didn’t want to keep in touch…Jack went out of the bedroom, and saw that Natalia had finished her telephone conversation. She was lying on the sofa on her back, hands behind her head.
“I think I’ll go for a walk,” Jack said. “Do we need anything? Milk?”
“Milk?” Natalia said vaguely. “I dunno. Look.”
Natalia at least sounded like herself. Jack looked into the fridge, and found himself not caring if there was milk enough or not. He went out with his keys. Natalia must be shattered, he thought. And what about himself? Jack felt that he had to keep his emotions to himself. He felt that he was still suffering shock, as if he were a windowpane cracked into little pieces, still within a frame, but difficult to see through.
On the street, he looked far enough ahead not to bump into people, but in a way he saw nothing around him. He walked uptown, turned back before Twenty-third Street, and picked up some milk and the usual big bottle of Coca-Cola for Amelia when he was near home.
Natalia had news. The police detective McCullen had telephoned, because Marion’s telephone wasn’t answering, and he thought Marion might be at the Sutherlands’. McCullen said that a teenaged girl on Greene Street had said she heard some screams and then saw a woman run out of the building.
“She said it was a dumpy woman with short hair and light colored trousers, running in the uptown direction.”
“Does he think it’s Fran?” Jack remembered Fran’s short hair, and her figure could certainly be called dumpy.
“He didn’t say. But it fits Fran, doesn’t it? A woman!” Natalia’s face shone, as if the scent were getting stronger. “Nice of McCullen to tell me all that!—He wanted to know if we had a photo of this Fran, and I told him no. Imagine having one!” Natalia said with a laugh. “McCullen said they’ve both disappeared now, Fran and the girlfriend. The police broke into their apartment and saw signs of hasty packing.”
“Really!—Where do they live?”
“East Village. Good for the drug business.—And they left the cat.
“Lovely pair.” And how dumb of Fran, Jack thought, to try to disappear now, since the police had seen her drugged, and would surely want to see her in a more normal state at some point. “How about the girl on Minetta Street? She might have a picture.”
“Genevieve. The police’ve been there. She hasn’t any.—I can imagine Genevieve wants to keep out of it.”
“I’ve got a little cartoon of her, matter of fact.”
“Of Fran?”
“I did one that night at the Gay Nighties.”
Natalia wanted to see it. Jack found the little blank tablet with its spiral top amidst the stuff on his worktable. There was the lantern-jawed fellow leaning against the wall, the over-sized-evening-jacket girl, then the slit-lipped Fran with the piggish eyes, and the jagged line of bangs on her forehead.
“Oh, Jack—that’s great! Those eyes!”
And the awful jaw, Jack thought. He felt revolted now by the likeness done with his own hand.
“I’d recognize her in a flash—I bet the police could use this.”
“You think so? They can have it.” Jack’s drawing showed an ample bosom under the round-necked T-shirt. Jack didn’t want to see the cartoon ever again.
“We could make photostats. No, I’ll let the police do that.”
Jack took the little notebook from her, tore out the page and handed it to her. “My contribution.”
Natalia went to the telephone.
Jack lingered in the living-room. Someone was coming over to pick up the drawing. Natalia had said just the right words, as usual. “What about the people in Fran’s apartment building—or wherever she was. Didn’t the police question them?”
“Clams, all clams.—Look at the girl on Greene Street—waits till today to say a word to the police, when she knew what happened yesterday, the whole neighborhood saw the ambulance and the stretcher coming out.”
The police came half an hour later, in the form of a young officer, who was not McCullen, the Homicide detective.
“Yeah, hm-m,” said the cop, smiling, looking at the cartoon. “Well, it looks clearer to me than a lot of Identikits I’ve had to work with.”
“It’s Fran Dillon—or Bowman to a T,” said Natalia. “Don’t forget she goes under a couple of names.—If she really is the one you want.” Natalia was fishing, attentive.
“Dillon, yeah. We’re looking for her all right.”
“Do you work with Detective McCullen?” Natalia asked.
“Not directly, ma’am. I work with several. I’m just beginning.” He declined a chair, and declined a cold Coke. He left.
“Just occurred to me,” Jack said to Natalia, “could—the—the assailant,” he went on more quietly, having just seen his daughter emerge from her room, “have been another model?”
Natalia had also seen Amelia. “Not likely. I never heard of any trouble there.—A dumpy model?” she asked with smiling eyes.
“Dad-day—was that more parking tickets?” Amelia asked. “Why was that policeman—”
“Yes—They’re collecting ‘em while they can before we flee the country!—But it’s nothing to worry about. We’ll make it.”
The telephone rang, and Jack hoped it wasn’t for him, but it was, and it was Joel. Natalia had answered. “Can you tell him I can’t talk to anyone now? Tell him—You know.”
Natalia knew, and Jack knew that she would think of a good excuse.
“Going out again for a while,” Jack said when Natalia had hung up. “Won’t be long. Maybe an hour.”
Natalia understood that too, and asked no questions.
Jack walked to a flower shop at Seventh Avenue and Grove, and bought a dozen white roses, added six red roses on impulse, then took a taxi to the Mansfield Hotel on West Forty-fourth Street, where Natalia
had said the Tylers were. The florist had given him a little envelope and card, but Jack did not write on the card until he got to the hotel, and borrowed a pen at the desk.
From another who loved Elsie.
Jack Sutherland
Then he wrote Mr and Mrs Tyler on the envelope, and handed the long box to the man behind the desk.
“I think they’re in, sir. Would you like me to call them?”
“No.” Jack shook his head. “Thanks.” On Jack’s left, an elevator door opened, he saw a blond woman walk out. She was so like Elsie, that Jack’s eyes were held. She was a woman of about forty, hardly heavier than Elsie, of the same height, even walking with the same easy grace of Elsie, head high as she approached the desk. Her blue eyes fairly knocked Jack backward. “Mrs Tyler—”
“Yes?”
Jack saw that her eyelids were pinkish, probably from tears. “I’m Jack Sutherland. How do you do?” Jack bowed slightly.
“Jack Sutherland! Yes! Your wife’s been so nice to us! I’m happy to meet you.”
Jack felt absurdly choked, but happily no tears came. He shook his head like a shy adolescent. “The—I just brought—Well, these.” He gestured toward the still visible white box, and the man behind the desk handed it to her.
“How nice of you! Flowers.” She opened the box while Jack held it, and peeked in. She wore a black and white blouse and black skirt. “How beautiful!—You’ve both been very kind—and helpful to Elsie. You’ve no idea—”
“We—” Jack blinked a couple of times. “We never thought she was in touch with you. With her parents.”
“Oh, I know how Elsie always talked! She was independent! Well, she was” Mrs Tyler’s smile, her eyes as she glanced at Jack, showed courage. She looked toward the elevators. “Oh, here’s Bill—my husband. Bill!”
A man with graying hair, in a navy blue blazer and summer trousers, walked toward Jack with the start of a polite smile, though his eyes looked sad.
“Bill, this is Jack Sutherland. He’s brought us some lovely flowers.”
Jack’s hand gripped Mr Tyler’s politely. Words. Mumbles. Words of thanks for the Sutherlands’ friendliness toward their daughter.