You Could Call It Murder Read online

  It had been a long day. I put the snapshots of Barbara Taft in my wallet, took out Edgar’s check, looked at it reverently. I endorsed it over to my bank, stuck it in a bank-by-mail envelope, and dropped it in the mail chute in the hall. Then I went back to my room and finished my drink and got into bed.

  Sleep came quickly.

  Two

  CLIFF’S END is an elusive destination. First you ride the New York Central to Boston. You wait there for an hour or so, then change to a railroad called, strangely, the Massachusetts Northern. This leaves you in a hamlet known as Byington, New Hampshire. There, after a wait of another pair of hours, you board a bus which eventually drops you in Cliff’s End.

  I did this. The ride—or rides, really—was at least as bad as it sounds. Perhaps worse. It was late afternoon when I left the bus in Cliff’s End, deposited without ceremony at the main intersection of the town in knee-deep snow. I lit a cigarette and started looking for the college.

  It wasn’t difficult to find, since there wasn’t much more to the town. Girls with pony tails and boys with crew cuts hurried in all directions. Boys threw snowballs at girls. Girls ducked and giggled, or giggled and ducked. I asked one where the Administration Building was. She pointed vaguely to my left. It was a tactical error, because a callow youth promptiy beaned her with a snowball. She giggled anyway.

  I left her giggling and found the Administration Building more or less on my own. It was a large brick Gothic affair with huge and apparently pointless towers rising at either end into the blue sky. I went inside and had someone show me where the dean of women had her office. Her name, it turned out, was Helen MacIlhenny. I introduced myself and she beamed at me.

  “Sit down, Mr. Markham,” she said. “Mr. Taft called me this morning. He said you’d be up sometime today and asked me to help you as much as possible. I’ll be glad to.”

  She was nearly sixty and still growing old gracefully. Her black hair was only slightly salted with gray and her eyes were chunks of flint in a taut, keen face. She had a wedding ring on her ring finger and a fragile gold brooch on the front of her suit jacket. She smiled nicely.

  “Now I’m not too sure what help I can give you,” she said. “I told Mr. Taft as much as I knew. I don’t know that much, Mr. Markham. Barbara simply disappeared. One day she was here and the next day she was not”

  “When was she last seen?”

  “Let me see . . . today is Thursday, isn’t it? Barbara missed all her classes a week ago Tuesday. She attended an eleven o’clock French class Monday morning. No one has seen her since then.”

  “Then she could have left any time after noon on Monday?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Was she sharing a room with another girl?”

  Helen MacIlhenny nodded. “The girl’s name is Gwen Davison. Her room is in Lockesley Hall—Room 304. I’m sure she’ll cooperate to the best of her ability.”

  “Was she a close friend of Barbara’s?”

  “No—that’s why she’ll cooperate.” The dean’s eyes twinkled at me. “I can’t imagine a less likely pair than Barbara and Gwen, Mr. Markham. Gwen is the perfect student, in a sense. She’s not brilliant, never the shining star, but she does her work thoroughly and has maintained a B-plus average for three years now. Never in trouble, never emotionally upset.”

  “And Barbara’s not like that?”

  “Hardly. Do you know her?”

  I shook my head.

  “Barbara,” she said, “is not the perfect student.”

  “I gathered as much.”

  “Yet in a sense she’s a more rewarding individual, Mr. Markham. She’s a very deep person, a profound person. She’s subject to fits of depression that seem almost psychotic in their intensity. She will throw herself into a subject which interests her to the exclusion of all other subjects. She feels things deeply and reacts very dramatically. She falls in and out of love frequently. Is a picture beginning to emerge?”

  “I think so.”

  She leaned forward and fixed her eyes upon me. “It’s hard for me to find words for this. The girl’s dynamic—you have to know her to understand her. She’s not an easy girl to handle. But I have the feeling that she’s worth the effort, if you follow me. There’s a great deal of potential there, a lot of personality. She could turn into a spectacular person.”

  I switched the subject. “Where do you think she is?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Do you think she went to get married?”

  She pursed her lips and considered it. “It’s possible, Mr. Markham. The runaway marriage is always a possibility on any college campus. If it’s the case, she’s not marrying a Radbourne boy.”

  “None missing?”

  “None. But she could have married someone else, of course. Someone from another college. Someone from New York.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Why?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “I didn’t tell this to Mr. Taft,” she said. “I didn’t want to set him on edge. According to what I’ve learned so far, Barbara was in some kind of trouble.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I wish I knew. She may have been pregnant but I somehow doubt it. A few girls have mentioned that she was acting nervous lately, just before she disappeared. Nervous and withdrawn and tense. Worried about something and not saying what.”

  I said, “Pregnant—”

  “It happens in the best of families, Mr. Markham. And to the best colleges.”

  “But you don’t think it happened to Barbara?”

  “I don’t. Frankly, I don’t think it would have worried her that much. That seems odd, doesn’t it? But I suspect Barbara would simply have found herself a good abortionist and had an abortion. And would have returned without missing a single class that she didn’t want to miss.”

  I switched the subject again. “Was she going with any boys in particular?”

  “With several. Lately she was dating a boy named Alan Marsten. I’ve talked to him and he says he knows nothing about Barbara’s disappearance. You might want to talk to him.”

  I wrote the name down. “That’s all I can think of,” she said, rising. “If there are any other questions—”

  I told her I couldn’t think of any myself.

  “I have an appointment, then, which I might as well keep. You have the run of the campus, of course. And if there’s anything more, please call me. Will you be staying in Cliff’s End overnight?”

  “I might be.”

  “You’ll probably have to,” she told me. “The last bus passes through in an hour and a half and you’ll be here longer than that, won’t you?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “Mrs. Lipton rents rooms by the day and keeps a nice home. The address is 504 Phillips Street. I understand the rates are reasonable enough. For meals you might try either the school cafeteria or the tavern in town. I recommend the tavern. It’s been a pleasure, Mr. Markham.”

  I followed her out of her office, waited while she locked the door with a small brass key. Together we walked out the front entrance of the big building.

  “It must be interesting to be a detective,” she said idly. “Do you enjoy it?”

  “I enjoy it.”

  “I suspect it’s a little like being a dean,” she said thoughtfully. “You’ll want to see Gwen Davison now, no doubt. Lockesley Hall is that way—the three-story brick building along that path. Yes, that’s the one. Good luck, Mr. Markham.”

  I stood for a moment and stared after her. Her stride was firm and she moved along with surprising speed for a woman her age. Her mind was even faster.

  I turned and trudged off through the snow.

  I had the wrong mental picture of Gwen Davison. I went to Room 304 of Lockesley Hall expecting to meet up with a round-faced and sexless creature wearing tortoise-shell glasses and a frozen stare. She was not like that at all.

  In the first place, she was pretty. Her hair was jet black,
curling in little ringlets. Her complexion had sprung fullblown from a soap advertisement and her figure from a bra advertisement. Young breasts strained against the front of a pale blue cashmere sweater. Warm brown eyes measured me and held approval in abeyance for the time being.

  I revised my estimate of her. I’d expected a frigid student and she was not that at all. She was, instead, the perfect American coed. She was the girl who played everything by one book or another, who would play sex by the marriage manual and life by Norman Vincent Peale, who would marry a company man and have two-point-seven children.

  “I don’t know where Barb is,” she said. “I don’t know what happened to her. I bet she deserved it, whatever it is.”

  “You don’t like her?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t like her or dislike her. We had nothing in common but this room.” She gestured around. The room they had in common was nothing to go into ecstasies over. There were four walls and a ceiling and a floor, with the usual amount of dormitory furniture. It did not look like the sort of place somebody would want to live in.

  “And she was no bargain to room with,” she went on. “She was a pill. She would come at five in the morning, turning on lights and banging doors and raising hell. She’d drink too much and heave it up in the sink. She was a real pleasure, believe me.”

  “When did you see her last?”

  “Monday morning.”

  “Not since then?”

  “No. Somebody said she went to her eleven o’clock class. I don’t know for sure. But she didn’t stay here Monday night.”

  “Did you report it?”

  “Of course not.” She gave me an odd look. “Listen, I didn’t like Barb. I told you, she’s a pill. I can live without her. But if she wants to spend a night somewhere that’s her business.”

  “Has she done that before?”

  She let that one pass. “When I didn’t see her for two nights I called the dean. I thought something might have have happened to her. That’s all.”

  I asked her if she cared if I smoked. She didn’t. I lighted a cigarette and blew a cloud of smoke at the ceiling. I tried to concentrate. It didn’t work.

  I wasn’t getting anywhere. I wasn’t even getting pointed in the right direction. All I knew was that Barbara wasn’t on campus, which was something I managed to guess a long while back. The dean of women liked her but disapproved of her, her roommate neither liked nor approved of her, and I didn’t know where in God’s good name she was.

  A puzzle.

  “Did she take her car?”

  “Naturally,” Gwen Davison said. “Anybody with a car like that one would take it along.”

  “And her clothes?”

  “Just a suitcase full. She left more clothes than I own. Wouldn’t you know she’s two sizes bigger than I am?”

  I looked at the dark-haired girl, glanced at the front of her sweater. I was willing to bet that a certain portion of Barbara’s anatomy was not two sizes larger than Gwen’s. It was simply a biological impossibility.

  “I’d like to look through Barbara’s clothes,” I said. “And her desk and books. If it’s all right with you.”

  “I don’t care,” she said. “Just leave everything like you find it. That’s all.”

  She took that as a signal to ignore me. She picked up a book—a sociology textbook—and buried her face in it. I went over to Barbara’s desk and started to open drawers and look through papers. It was a waste of time.

  There were letters and papers. The letters were all from home, all from Marianne, and they were all bright and cheerful and insipid. The papers were mostly notes of one sort or another, scraps of poetry that Barbara had been working on, random lecture notes. They were arranged in no particular order.

  I looked through her dresser, feeling rather like a Peeping Tom as I went through mounds of undergarments. I checked her closet and came up with nothing. I learned a few things, but they all seemed to be things I had already known.

  “Gwen—”

  She turned to look at me.

  “She left in a hurry,” I said. “She threw a few articles of clothing into a suitcase and hurried off. And that’s puzzling. Dean MacIlhenny said that Barbara has been nervous lately. I’d expect that she would have been planning to leave, would have taken the time to pack everything. But she left almost all her clothing behind. It’s as though she ran off on an impulse.”

  “She’s an impulsive girl.”

  “What do you think happened?”

  She thought it over. “I think something was worrying her. She gets depressed every once in a while and sits around the room moping. She was doing that. And she got a little hysterical, if you know what I mean. You know—laughing very shrill and short over nothing at all, pacing the floor like a caged lion. It was getting tough to live with her.”

  “And you think she just left on the spur of the moment?”

  “I told you before,” she said. “I don’t know what she did and I don’t care. But if I had to guess, that’s what I would say. I think she grabbed a suitcase and hopped in that hot little car of hers and took off for awhile. Then she got involved in something and forgot to come back. You know what’s going to happen next?”

  “What?”

  “She’ll come back,” she said positively. “She’ll come back in her flashy car with her suitcase in her hand and a smile on her face and she’ll expect everyone to hug her and kiss her and welcome her with open arms. She’s in for a shock, I’m afraid.”

  “Why?”

  “Because this is a little too much,” Gwen Davison told me. “You can’t disappear for a week and a half without a word. They’ll throw her out of Radbourne for this one.” She frowned. “Not that it should matter to Barb. What does she need with a college degree? With her father’s money she can buy herself an honorary degree if she wants. She’s fixed for life with or without college. So why should she care?”

  We talked for a few more minutes but I didn’t get anything more from the girl. The only boy friend of Barbara’s she knew of was the one Helen MacIlhenny had mentioned, Alan Marsten. She didn’t care for him either.

  “One of the Bohemian element,” she said. “You know the kind. He never wears anything but paint-spattered dungarees and a dirty sweatshirt. Gets his hair cut once every six months. Sits around looking romantic and artistic. You can usually find him. hanging around at the little coffee shop in town. It’s called Grape Leaves. God knows why.”

  I thanked her and left. It was colder outside now and the sky was darker. Now it was snowing again, the flakes drifting down slowly through crisp air. I pulled up my coat collar, lit a cigarette, and headed toward town.

  The streets of Cliff’s End were cold and uninviting. Without the college, the town would have been a typical tiny New England village, a cluster of low buildings grouped around the inevitable village square with its inevitable colonial courthouse. The college changed this, and while it may have greatly enhanced the prosperity of the region, that was about all it did on the plus side. The stores aimed their displays at the student trade. The villagers sat on their stoops, rocking endlessly and mumbling mean things about the collegians. It was a cold little town, and the snow was only partially responsible for the coldness.

  I found Grape Leaves across the street from the tavern. It was closed; a hand-lettered sign in the window announced that it would open in an hour or so. I crossed the street to the tavern, remembering all at once that I hadn’t had anything resembling a meal since breakfast. The sandwiches I wolfed down in various bus and train stations had been little but a hedge against starvation. Now I was ravenous.

  The tavern was English in decor and had me momentarily homesick for London. I sat on a hard wooden chair at an old wooden table and ordered a mug of ale as a starter. An aproned student brought me the ale in a pewter mug with a thick glass bottom. It was full-bodied and delicious.

  The food didn’t quite match the ale but it was better than I had expected. I had a small stea
k with onions and a baked potato with another mug of ale to keep them company. The two ales had my head a little fuzzy and I cleared things up with a pot of black coffee.

  By the time I left the tavern, lights were on in the coffee house across the street. I went over, swung open a door and went inside. The place was furnished in imitation Greenwich Village, which may be a redundant description. Candles dripped over chianti bottles on the small tables. A handful of students, most of them the worse for wear, were draped over tables, lost either in conversation or thought or whatever esoteric reveries were provided by the paperbound books they were reading. A waiter asked me what I wanted. When I told him I was looking for Alan Marsten he pointed to a boy about twenty slouching over a small cup of coffee at a table set against one wall. Then he turned away and ignored me.

  I went over, sat opposite Alan Marsten. He looked up, stared blankly at me, then went back to his coffee. Moments later he looked up again.

  “You’re still here,” he said slowly. “I thought maybe you’d go away.”

  “You’re Alan Marsten?”

  “Why?”

  He was wearing the uniform Gwen Davison had described—blue denim trousers spattered with various hues of paint a sweatshirt similarly decorated, a pair of dirty chukka boots. His hair was long and needed combing. He could have used a shave.

  “I want to talk with yon,” I said. “About Barbara Taft.”

  “Go to hell.”

  The words were venomous. He fixed watery blue eyes on me and hated me with them. His fists were clenched on the table top.

  “Who are you, man?”

  “Roy Markham,” I said.

  “It’s a name, I guess. Who sent you?”

  “Edgar Taft. Barbara’s father.”

  He snorted at me. “So the old man is starting to sweat. Well, he’s got it coming. You tell him he can go to hell for himself, will you? What does he want?”

  I looked at him and tried to guess what Barbara could have seen in him. His features were good except for a weak mouth and chin. I wondered what he thought he was—hipster or beatnik or angry young man. I decided he was just a slovenly kid.