Jonathan Craig - The Case of the Petticoat Murder

“Any luck?”

“Not a bit.”

“Tough. What kind of a guy is this Miller, anyway?”

“Big,” I said. “How'd you know about him?”

“Sid Kaplan called. He said he just wanted to know how you'd made out on that telegram.”

“He wanted to bet me I wouldn't make out at all,” I said. “I'm glad now I didn't take him up.”

“Dead end?”

“Looks that way. All I got was a good workout.”

“You had another call. From BCI. They said to tell you they don't have anything on Miller at all. Not ever a traffic ticket.”

“Good for him,' I said. “What'd you find out from the Joyner Translation Bureau?”

“Very cooperative outfit, Pete. The boss came down right away.” He paused. “Boy, what a head on that one! The guy speaks seventeen languages. Can you imagine?”

“No,” I said. “What'd you find out?”

“Well, it seems this bill Nadine had in her strongbox was for translating an item from a French newspaper.”

“New York paper?”

“No, this was published in France, in Bordeaux. I can't pronounce the name of it, but it was published almost eight years ago.”

“What's it about?”

“Pretty interesting, Pete. Just what good it is to us, I don't know. But those French cops are on the ball.”

“Stan…”

“All right, keep your hair on. It's about this joker that knocked off his wife and planted her in the flower garden behind his house. Guy's name was Maurice Thibault. He was a linguist with some kind of import-export outfit in Bordeaux. That's a seaport city, Pete.”

“So they say,” I said. “What's the rest of it?”

“Well, the guy was a pillar of the community, and all that, and all at once he turns up missing. So does his wife. After a while the neighbors call the police, and the police toss the guy's house and yard and ask around a bit; and then one of the cops happens to notice that all but one of Thibault's flower beds aren't doing so well. But this one flower bed looks like it could nose out the champ flower bed in the whole country. The plants are all up and blooming like crazy. But it's the only one. The flower beds all around it have just about had it. And so do you know what the payoff was?”

“I've got a pretty good idea,” I said. “And even if I didn't, I know I can depend on you to tell me. Not necessarily tonight, of course, but—”

“Knock off, will you? It was terrific police work.”

“All right; so the cops found Thibault's wife beneath the champion flower bed. Terrific police work. And then?”

“Well, then they find out Thibault's pulled a disappearing act. They put a lot of men on it, and they stayed with it a long time, but they never came up with a single lead on him. Nothing. It was like he'd just jumped straight up in the air and kept right on going.”

“Is that all there is to the item?”

“No. It goes on to say that they dug up so much evidence that he'd knocked off his wife that they were able to go ahead and try him for it, anyway. In absentia, it says here.”

“How'd the trial come out?”

“Guilty. If they ever do find the guy, he'll get the guillotine.”

“And you say all this happened eight years ago?”

“Just about.”

“Damn few people ever just disappear into thin air, Stan. Funny they wouldn't have come up with at least a nibble or two in all this time.”

“It says they figure he could pass as just about anything. Speaking all those languages, and all, he could blend right in, anywhere he went. This export-import outfit he worked for in Bordeaux had sent him all over. He even spent two or three years in Canada — in Quebec, it says — and five or six years, off and on, here in New York.”

I listened to the water running in the bathroom, wishing I'd had time to wash my own hands, and wishing even more that I'd gotten something to eat before I came up here. I'd put off eating for so long that I was getting a little nauseated.

“I've got the clipping right here,” Stan went on. “It was stapled to the carbon copy of the translation. The boss at the Joyner outfit said they'd asked Nadine if they could hold on to it. Everybody around there was pretty interested in this Thibault, seeing as how he was a fellow linguist.”

I cocked my head to hold the phone against my shoulder and tried to clean some of the grime off my hands with my handkerchief. “You think our girl may have been pulling a little blackmail?” I said.

“She sure didn't have that thing translated just for the hell of it. If it wasn't blackmail, what was it?”

“With what little we know about her so far, it could have been anything.”

“Look at it this way, Pete. Say you had to bet your life on it, one way or the other. Either it was blackmail, or it wasn't. Which way would you bet?”

“Well, in a case like that…”

“You see? Remember that, Pete. Any time you've got to decide on something, one way or the other, just pretend you have to bet your life on being right. It'll cut through all the ifs and maybes and on-the-other-hands just like they weren't even there.”

“I'm sure that's very sound advice, Stan,” I said, “but—”

“Damn right. You just try it next time; you'll see.”

“I will. But even so, Stan—”

“Didn't you tell me that woman down at the antique shop — what's her name? — Pedrick. Iris Pedrick. Didn't you tell me the prowler that walked in on her in Nadine's apartment that night had some kind of accent? She said he just stood there for a while with this flashlight in her face and kind of talking to himself in some kind of foreign language. Right?”

“Yes, but what's a foreign language in New York, Stan? You can't walk more than two blocks without hearing half the foreign languages there are. And as far as just plain accents go … My God, how long've you been around this town, anyhow?”

“Long enough to know a girl like Nadine Ellison doesn't pay to have an eight-year-old newspaper clipping translated just for the fun of it. And she kept it in her strongbox, too, don't forget.” He paused. “That Pedrick woman have any idea at all what kind of language this guy was using?”

“She thought it might be Slavic,” I said. “But that's as close as she could come.”

“Slavic, eh? Well, that could be a lot of things, but it sure couldn't be French.” He paused. “You say she just thought? She wasn't sure?”

“Slavic was the best she could do,” I said. “But now that I think about it, Stan, I'm beginning to wonder how a man's French — or any other language, for that matter — would sound if he'd just raised his knife to kill a woman he thought was Nadine Ellison, and then suddenly realized the woman he was about to kill wasn't Nadine after all.”

“Maybe I don't hear so good any more,” Stan said. “How was that again, Pete?”

“A man in that position would be downright stunned, Stan. He'd be wondering just what had happened, and maybe mumbling to himself while he tried to figure it out. He'd be so choked up that his voice and tone and inflection would be completely changed. Chances are, whatever came out of his mouth would sound like just about anything you cared to call it.”

“Go, man,” Stan said, laughing. “Go! Go! Go!”

“What's the matter? You think it couldn't happen?”

“You kidding? I'm with you all the way, Pedro.”

“Well, it gives us something to hunch with, anyhow. If this Maurice Thibault did make it to this country, and if Nadine did tumble to him and start blackmailing him, it's easy to see why he'd show up some night with a knife.

“You know it,” Stan said. “Those guillotines give me the crawling sweats, just to think about them.”