18
Greer arrived as unobtrusively as possible, by the back road, in an old grey sedan that belonged to one of his sergeants. But in spite of the secrecy the news leaked out that there were policemen around the big house; and where there were policemen there was trouble; and where there was trouble was the place to be.
Maids abandoned their ironing. Gardeners threw down their spading forks. Housewives removed their aprons, applied a dash of lipstick and left junior in the playpen. The mailman paused on his rounds and the music box tinkle of the Good Humor truck stopped in the middle of a waltz. Small boys appeared out of improbable places carrying cap pistols and model airplanes and fat, moist snails and surprised grasshoppers.
For the second time within a week the Goodfield garden came alive with people. They stood in sedate groups and exchanged the wildest rumors in the most plausible manner. The man of the house had gone berserk, strangled his wife and children and shot himself. (Several people had heard the shot, though there was some discrepancy about the time, which ranged from the preceding afternoon to seven o’clock that morning.) There had been a rape, a robbery, a suicide, an explosion. Mr. Goodfield was a well-known mobster (anybody could tell by looking at him), or a banker (same reason). His wife was an ex-burlesque queen (that bleached hair and slinky walk), a society woman (the postman had seen her picture in a newspaper), or a hosiery clerk (one of the housewives had seen a very fair-haired woman working in the hosiery department at Magnin’s, and this woman was probably Ethel who had been forced to take a job to pay off the debts of her husband, who was a well-known gambler, as anybody could tell by looking at him).
None of the rumors came close to the story that Willett told Greer. They were in old Mrs. Goodfield’s bedroom, Greer pacing the floor and Willett standing in the doorway, his eyes fixed rigidly on the empty bed. From the broken French door that led out to the sundeck a cool fresh wind swept across the room, but the odor of ether still clung to the corners, subtle and tenacious as spider webs. On one jagged edge of the glass door a piece of blue silk was blowing in the breeze like a tiny flag. Greer had noticed the silk but he’d left it, as he’d left everything else in the room, untouched. A special F.B.I, unit was on its way from Los Angeles, and Greer was experienced enough to realize that this unit would handle the physical evidence much better than he could. Psychological evidence was a different matter. The piece of silk was for the specialists; the effect of the piece of silk on Willett was Greer’s business.
“I guess... I guess it’s part of her nightgown.” Willett took out a handkerchief and wiped his face, but within a minute it was damp again. “How did it — how could it get there?”
“I presume she was given the ether while she was asleep — not much sign of a struggle — and then carried out to the sundeck. Her nightgown caught on a piece of glass where the door was broken so it could be unlocked.”
“She would have, surely she would have wakened up when the glass was broken.”
“Maybe she did.”
“She would have screamed for help.”
“Not necessarily.”
“What does — what are you implying?”
“She and Murphy,” Greer said, “got along very well, didn’t they?”
“Mother despised Murphy.”
“Your wife doesn’t think so.”
“Take her word for it then. I don’t see why you’re bothering me with these details when Ethel has already told you everything.”
“I’d like to hear your version.”
“Version,” Willett bleated. “My God, man, this isn’t the kind of thing you have versions of. I can tell you the facts.”
“All right.”
Willett’s facts were, with a few exceptions, the same as Ethel’s.
He had last seen his mother the preceding evening, Willett said, between nine and ten o’clock. She was feeling somewhat depressed and wanted to be left alone. (“She was in a bitchy mood,” Ethel had said, “and told us both to get out and stay out.”) At midnight when Willett and Ethel went upstairs to retire, they knocked at Mrs. Goodfield’s door intending to say good night. Her door was locked and they presumed she was asleep. There had been no unusual odor in the hall at that time.
During the night Jack arrived.
“We had a drink and a little chat and then we all went to bed.”
“That isn’t quite what your wife—”
“Ethel,” Willett said, “exaggerates.”
“Oh.”
“Besides, Jack had nothing to do with this affair, this kidnapping.”
“Maybe not.”
“His arrival was pure coincidence.”
“Maybe.”
“Naturally you don’t know Jack.”
“Naturally. But I know Murphy, and I’ll eat my badge if Murphy was strong enough to carry a drugged woman out of that door and down that ladder. If Murphy is at the bottom of this, she’s sharing the bottom with somebody else.”
“Not Jack. I mean — great Scott, chaps don’t go around kidnapping their own mothers. Murder, now that might make sense. I’ve often thought of — But that’s getting off the subject.”
“All right,” Greer said. “You went to bed. Then what?”
“We got the phone call. That is, Ethel did; the upstairs phone is in her room. But the ringing woke me up, it was around seven o’clock, I think. I heard Ethel talking, arguing with someone. Arguing upsets me. I got up to put a stop to it. I found Ethel standing right in this doorway and there was a terrible smell of ether coming from somewhere. ‘We’ve got to pay it,’ Ethel said. I didn’t know what she was talking about. I went into Mother’s room. It was just the way it is now and M-mother was gone.”
Tears welled in Willett’s eyes, magnifying the irises so that they looked ready to pop out of their sockets. Greer wasn’t sure whether the tears were caused by mere annoyance or by genuine grief at his mother’s disappearance: the rejected boy crying for his mother who had died or been divorced or merely gone off to an early matinee at the Bijou. Greer wondered gravely if there would ever be any more matinees for Mrs. Goodfield. Though he had spoken optimistically to Ethel and Frank and Willett, his own feeling was that the old lady was dead, that whoever conceived such a drastic plan in the first place would take drastic measures to avoid being caught. It was easier to dispose of a dead woman than to conceal a reluctant and protesting live one.
“It was all so sudden,” Willett said. “So shockingly sudden. The demand for ransom came before we even knew she’d been taken away. They asked for three thousand dollars.”
“They?”
“Murphy. Ethel said it sounded like Murphy, not the voice so much as the words. Murphy has a way of talking.”
“What were her instructions?”
“She said that my mother was in safe hands and would be returned, providing we paid the money promptly and didn’t inform the police or anyone else of her disappearance. Ethel agreed. She had to. She acted right — I don’t care what your viewpoint is — Ethel acted right.”
Greer didn’t argue. “I hope so. The money was to be paid in cash?”
“Yes.”
“You had that much cash in the house?”
“Exactly that much. I’d been to the bank yesterday afternoon and drawn it out to lend to Jack. He’d phoned me in the morning from San Francisco and asked me for a loan.”
“Anybody else know about this?”
“Ethel, of course. And my mother. Oh yes, and Shirley, I guess. She’s my younger sister.”
“And Murphy?”
“I didn’t confide in Murphy,” Willett said. “Ethel did sometimes, but not about important things like money. Just,” Willett added rather wistfully, “about things like me.”