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  SLAYER OF NEW YORK ADVERTISING MAN FOUND

  8-Month-Old Mystery Slaying of

  Malcolm McRae Solved

  With a spoonful of grapefruit poised in mid-air, Vic pored over it. The police had picked up a man working as a clerk in a haberdashery shop in the state of Washington who had confessed to the crime, and there was "no doubt" that he was the murderer, though they were still checking the facts. The man's name was Howard Olney. He was thirty-one and a brother of Phyllis Olney, an entertainer, who had once been "on intimate terms" with McRae. Olney, said the paper, blamed McRae for separating himself and his sister as a professional team. They were nightclub entertainers, specializing in magic tricks. Phyllis Olney had met McRae in Chicago and had broken her contract to come with him to New York a year and a half ago. Olney had run out of money, his sister had never sent him any though she had promised that she would (who'd ever been able to squeeze a nickel out of Mal?), and, according to Olney, McRae had abandoned his sister, leaving her destitute. Nearly a year later Olney had hitchhiked to New York for the express purpose of avenging himself and his sister by killing McRae. Psychiatrists who had examined Olney said he showed manic-depressive tendencies, which would probably be taken into account when his trial came up.

  "Daddy!"Trixie had finally got his attention."I said I'm going to finish your belt today!"

  Vic had the feeling she had yelled it at him three times. "That' great. You mean the braided belt."

  "The 'only' belt I'm making this summer," Trixie said in a tom that showed her annoyance with him. She dumped some puffed wheat from the little package in front of her onto her corn flakes stirred them together, then reached for the bottle of ketchup Trixie was in a ketchup period. Ketchup had to be on everything from scrambled eggs to rice pudding.

  "Well, I'm looking forward to it," Vic said. "I hope you made it big enough."

  "It's a whopper."

  "Good." Vic stared at her brown, smooth little shoulder crossed by the denim overall straps, thought vaguely of telling her to take a sweater this morning, then returned to the paper in his hand.

  The remoteness of the murderer's relationship to his victim and the fact that he left no clues [said the paper] made this a nearly "perfect" crime. It was only after months of patient inquiry into every friend and acquaintance of the murdered man that the police were able to pick up the trail of Olney ...

  Whether the story would be in the 'New Wesleyan' this evening or not, Vic thought, many people in Little Wesley received the 'Times' every morning. Everybody who was interested in the story was going to know about it by tonight.

  "Aren't you going to have any bacon and eggs?" Trixie asked.

  Trixie usually claimed one piece of his bacon. He didn't want any bacon and eggs now. He saw that she had a big pool of ketchup in her bowl and that the cereal was probably inedible, even for Trixie. He got up slowly, went into the kitchen, and mechanically lit the fire under a skillet. He put in two pieces of bacon. He felt faintly nauseous.

  "Daddy? I've just got fi-yuv 'min-n-nits'!" Trixie yelled to him in a minatory tone.

  "Coming up, puss," he called back.

  "Hey! Since when do you call 'me' puss?"

  Vic didn't answer. He'd tell Melinda this morning, he thought, before she had a chance to hear it from anybody else.

  He had barely set the bacon down in front of Trixie when he heard the low moan of the school bus coming up the road. Trixie scurried about, collecting her badminton racket and the big red workman's handkerchief she was crazy about and wore around her neck most of the time, holding a piece of bacon in the fingers of one hand. She turned at the door, popped the bacon into her mouth, and Vic heard the crunch of baby teeth on it. "'Bye, Daddy!" and she was gone.

  Vic stared at the sofa in the living room, remembering a time when Mal had passed out there and had had to spend the night—though Mal had revived enough to ask to be put into a guest room, Vic recalled. He thought of Ralph lying there, that last evening, his head in the same spot Mal's head had been. Ralph was going to be amused by the story, Vic thought. Ralph might be back before long.

  Vic went into the kitchen, heated the coffee for a moment, then poured a cup for Melinda, adding a scant teaspoon of sugar. He carried the coffee to her door and knocked.

  "Umm-m?"

  "It's me. I've got some coffee for you."

  "Com-me in-n," she drawled, half with sleepiness, half with n annoyance.

  He went in. She lay on her back, her arms under her head. She wore pajamas, she slept without a pillow, and there was always something peculiarly Spartan about her, to Vic, on the rare occasions when he went into her room to awaken her, and when he saw her lying in her bed alone. There would be the wind sweeping the room, billowing the curtains as he opened the door on the coldest winter mornings. There would be a blanket kicked off onto the floor, because even in a temperature nearly freezing Melinda could keep warm under practically nothing. There was a blanket kicked off on the floor now. Melinda lay under a sheet. Vic handed her the big cup of coffee. It was her own blue and white cup, with her name on it.

  She winced at the first hot sip. "Oh-h-h-ah-h," she groaned, falling back on the bed, letting the cup tip dangerously in her hand.

  Vic sat down on the hard little bench in front of her dressing table. "Read some news this morning," he said.

  "Yes? What?"

  "They found the man who killed Mal."

  She raised up on one elbow, all her sleepiness gone. "Did they? Who was it?"

  Vic had the paper under his arm. He handed it to Melinda. She read it avidly, with a twinkling amusement that kept Vic staring at her. "Well, what do you know," she said finally.

  "I trust you're pleased," Vic said, managing a pleasant tone. She shot a look at him, hard and quick as a bullet. "Aren't 'you'?"

  "I doubt if I'm as pleased as you," Vic said.

  She sprang out of bed and for a moment she stood beside him in white pajamas, on bare feet with crimson nails, looking at herself in the mirror, pushing her hair back from her face. "That's right, you're not. You couldn't be." Then she ran into the bathroom, as agilely as Trixie might have run.

  The telephone rang by Melinda's bed, and at once Vic suspected it was Horace. Horace subscribed to the 'Times', too. Vic went out, crossed the living room to the hall phone and picked it up. "Hello?"

  "Hello, Vic. Did you see the paper this morning?" Horace had a smile in his voice, but a friendly smile, not a malicious one. "Yes, I saw it."

  "Did you know the man?"

  "No, I've never heard of him."

  "Well—" Horace waited for Vic to speak. "This'll end all the talking, anyway."

  "I haven't heard much of this talking," Vic said rather crisply. "Oh-h—I have, Vic. It hasn't been entirely good."

  "Well, Melinda's very happy, of course."

  "You know my opinion on that, Vic." Horace hesitated again, but now he was groping for words. "I think you've—Well, I think she's come a long way in these last couple of months. I hope it keeps up."

  Vic listened to the shower running in the bathroom. Melinda was in the bathroom, hadn't picked up the telephone in her room, he knew, but still he found himself tongue-tied. He couldn't discuss his personal problems with Horace. "Thanks, Horace," he said 'finally'.

  Usually Vic was at the plant by a quarter past nine or nine-thirty, but he sat in the living room now, at ten past nine, waiting for Melinda to finish dressing, waiting for her to say whatever else she was going to say to him this morning, waiting to find out where she was going. He could tell by the haste of her preparations that she had some objective. He heard her dial a number on her telephone, but her voice did not come through the closed door, and he would not have wished to hear what she was saying, anyway.

  Vic couldn't see her going back to Ralph, really, after he'd shown himself such a coward. Joel was in New York, but that was not an impossible distance if Melinda was determined to see him. Vic took a cigarette from the box on the rosewood cock
tail table. He had just made the table, had polished its very subtly concave top as carefully as if it had been a lens. He had made it to replace the old cocktail table which he had also made, that dated from Larry Osbourne and had become so stained with cigarette burns and alcohol, in spite of the protective waxes he had always kept on it, that he had had no desire to refinish it. He wondered how soon the rosewood table was going to be stained with rings from highball glasses and burns from neglected cigarettes. When he heard Melinda's door open he sat down on the sofa so that he would appear deep in his newspaper when she came in.

  "Are you memorizing that thing?" she asked him.

  "I was reading something else. There's a new book on mountain climbing I'd like to buy."

  "There's a nice safe sport for you. Why don't you try it?" She took a cigarette from the box and lit it. She had on a white shirt, her flaring brown corduroy skirt, her brown moccasins. She slapped her key case into one empty, restless hand. She looked nervous and wild, the way he had seen her look many times at the start of an affair. This was the kind of mood that always got her tickets for speeding.

  "Where're you off to?" he asked.

  "Oh, I—just made a lunch date with Evelyn. So I won't be home for lunch."

  Vic was not sure if she was lying or not. Her reply hadn't told him where she was going now. He stood up and stretched, and tugged his sweater down evenly over his trousers. "How about cocktails this afternoon? Can you make it to the Chesterfield by about six?"

  She lowered her brows, swung a leg around, pivoting on a toe, like an adolescent. "I don't think so, Vic. You don't really like it. Thanks, anyway."

  "Sorry." He smiled. "Well, I'll be going."

  They went into the garage together and got into their cars. Vic took a couple of minutes to warm his car up, but Melinda in her pale-green convertible was gone down the lane in a matter of seconds.

  Chapter 7

  Two or three days after the denouement of the McRae case, Vic received a telephone call in his office from a Mr. Cassell. Mr. Cassell said he was an agent of the Binkley Real Estate Company of East Lyme and that Vic's name had been given as a reference in regard to Mr. Charles De Lisle, who wanted to rent one of their houses.

  "Charles De Lisle?" Vic asked puzzledly. He had never heard of the man.

  "I'm sorry to trouble you at your office, Mr. Van Allen, but we weren't able to reach your wife at home. It's actually 'Mrs.' Victor Van Allen on my record here, but I thought you might be able to vouch for Mr. De Lisle as well as she. Can you tell us what you know about him as to his reliability? You know—it's just so we can have something to quote to the landlord."

  Vic had suddenly recognized the name: it was the name of the pianist in the Lord Chesterfield bar. "I don't exactly—I suppose he's all right. I'll speak to my wife at noon and ask her to call you this afternoon."

  "Very well, Mr. Van Allen. We'd appreciate it if you would. Thanks very much. Good-bye."

  "Good-bye." Vic hung up.

  Stephen was waiting for him with some new paper samples. They began to examine them together, holding them in front of a naked two-hundred-watt lightbulb, scrutinizing their areas for consistency of thickness. The paper was for the next book of the Greenspur Press, a book of poems by a young instructor at Bard College named Brian Ryder. Stephen had better eyes than Vic for the delicate marbling that showed up under the bright light, but Vic trusted his own judgment more when it came to the general quality of paper and how it would take the ink. They looked at six grades of paper, eliminated four after a few minutes, and finally concurred about one of the two remaining grades.

  "Shall I send the order off now?" Stephen asked.

  "May as well. They took an age the last time." Vic returned to his desk, where he was writing letters of rejection to three poets and one novelist who had sent him manuscripts in the previous month. Vic always wrote his rejection letters himself, and by hand, because he hated writing them and would not have wished the task on Stephen and because he considered a courteous, handwritten letter from the publisher himself the only civilized way of communicating to the people whose work he had to reject. Most of the manuscripts he received were good. Some were very good, and he would have liked to publish those, but he could not publish everything he liked, and to the authors of manuscripts he considered very good he gave thoughtful advice as to where they might send them next. Most of his letters went something like: "... As you probably know, the Greenspur Press is a small one. We have only two handpresses, and because of our slow methods of operation it is impossible for us to print more than four books per year at most …" His tone was modest, in keeping with the spirit of the Greenspur Press, but Vic was exceedingly proud of his slow methods, proud of the fact that it usually took the Greenspur Press five days to set ten pages.

  Vic was especially proud of Stephen Hines and grateful to Providence that he had found him. Stephen was thirty-two, a married man with one small child. He was a quiet fellow, even-tempered and endlessly patient with all the corrections and adjustments that printing entailed. He was as meticulous as Vic, and Vic never thought, in his first difficult two years, that anyone as painstaking as himself would ever come along. But Stephen presented himself one day, six years ago, and had asked him for a job. Stephen had been working for a small commercial printing firm in Brooklyn. He wanted to live in the country, he said. He thought he would like working for the Greenspur Press. Vic put him on at union wages at first, but after two weeks gave him a twenty per cent raise. Stephen had not wanted to take it. He loved the plant, loved the green, mountainous countryside—he was from Arizona, And his father's farm had blown away in a dust storm, he said—and at that time he had not been married. Five years ago he brought his girl Georgianne up from New York, and they were married, with Vic standing as best man. Georgianne was the right girl for him, quiet, modest, and as in love with the country as Stephen. They bought the guest house of a large estate between Little Wesley and Wesley, a house set deep in the woods on a road that Stephen had to clear with his own hands to make wide enough for a car. Vic had helped them finance the house, and now Stephen had paid back three-quarters of it. He was devoted to Vic, though lie never made a display of his devotion. It showed mostly in his attitude of respect toward Vic. He had called Vic "sir" until Vic, after a couple of months, made a joking remark about it. Now Vic was not quite "Mr. Van Allen" or "Vic," and Stephen called him nothing, to his face.

  The other member of the Greenspur Press staff was old Carlyle, a small, stooped man of about sixty whom Vic had rescued from dereliction on the streets of Wesley. Carlyle had been begging, begging a quarter for a drink. Vic had bought him the drink and started talking to him. Vic had offered him a job as handyman and floor-sweeper in his plant, and Carlyle had accepted. Now his drinking was confined to two times per year—at Christmas and on his birthday. He had no family. Vic paid him enough to live comfortably in a room that he rented from an elderly woman whose house was on the north side of Little Wesley. Carlyle's tasks, in the four years he had been with Vic, had been enlarged to include mail sorting, press greasing, helping Stephen to lock up the chases, and carrying and fetching packages to and from the railroad station in Wesley. He had become a more or less reliable driver of the lightweight Dodge truck that stood always at the back entrance of the plant. It was debatable if Carlyle earned his $60 a week salary, but the Greenspur Press did not financially earn its keep, either, Vic reasoned, and he felt that he was contributing a great deal toward making the last years of Carlyle's life happy by employing him when nobody else would. So long as the worst Carlyle did was run the Dodge off the edge of the culvert bridge at the end of the lane, get drunk twice a year, and chew tobacco—Carlyle was an inveterate tobacco chewer and maintained a spittoon in the corner of the printing room which he emptied reasonably often—he could stay on until he died of old age.

  The plant itself was a one-story structure painted dark green so that it was almost camouflaged among the dense, overhanging tree
s that grew all around it. It had a weird shape, having originally been a smallish barn of the kind used to store tools. This room was now the room that held the presses and the composing tables. Vic had built a smaller square room on to one end, which was his office, and another room at the other end, which was a storeroom for paper and types. To make the building moisture-proof Vic had covered the outside with roof insulation and then covered the whole with sheets of tin which he had then painted. A somewhat rutty road wound from the plant to a larger dirt road about two hundred yards away. The plant was a ten-minute drive from where Vic lived.

  On the day that he received the call about Charles De Lisle, Melinda was not home at one o'clock. Vic ate a solitary lunch and read a book at the table. He felt curiously disturbed, as if somebody were looking at him from behind as he walked around in the empty house. He put on the Gregorian chants and turned them up loud so that he could hear them when he went out to put his herb boxes back into the garage just before three. There had been no note from Melinda in the house. Vic had even looked in her room for one, though Melinda had never left one there. She usually put a note in the middle of the living room floor when she left one.

  Was she with Charles De Lisle? The question had risen to the surface of his mind like a bubble, making a small, unpleasant explosion when the words had come. Why should he think that? He remembered Charles De Lisle's face, but very vaguely, as being on the swarthy side—narrow, dark, and he had heavily brilliantined hair. Vic remembered thinking that he looked like an Italian crook. He had seen him only once, he thought, one afternoon about three weeks ago when he had had a cocktail with Melinda in the Lord Chesterfield bar. Melinda hadn't made a sin comment about his piano playing, Vic thought, which was unusual.

  He put Charles De Lisle out of his mind. One thing he didn't want to be guilty of was suspicion before suspicion was necessary. Melinda was always innocent until she proved herself guilty.