Conspiracy of Silence Read online

  A window was yawning wide open. Through it you could almost make out—if you knew where to look—the clearing where the Crawford family gravesite lay.

  I went to the window at once.

  “No one has touched anything?” It was more a statement than a question.

  “That’s right,” Taber said.

  “I assume you’ve noticed that there’s no sign of forced entry,” I said. “The latch is open. All someone had to do was pull up the window and they’d be in.”

  I peered out the window to the ground a few feet below. The garden bed there had been violently disturbed, with flowers crushed and upturned and with what seemed like dozens of footprints in the wet earth.

  “There’s no doubt she was taken through the window?” I said.

  “That’s how I see it,” Taber replied.

  “Anyone hear a car drive off, or anything like that?”

  “No. It isn’t likely someone would pull up to the front door, go around to the side of the house, drag Miss Crawford out, and drive off. They must have taken her through the woods there”—he pointed in the direction of the cemetery, beyond which was the road that Gene Merriwether and I had driven along on that night we dug up Frank Crawford’s grave—“and had their car over there. That road isn’t used much, and no one would notice a car parked there for an hour or more.”

  “Yeah, you’re right,” I said. After a pause: “So what do you make of this?”

  Taber looked me in the face and said: “What do you make of it, shamus?”

  Suddenly I got steamed. “What do I make of it, Taber? I’ll tell you what I make of it! This is what I make of it!”

  And I pulled out of my pocket the note I’d received that morning and stuck it under Taber’s nose.

  He read it in seconds, then turned to me with both alarm and suspicion in his face.

  “What’s the meaning of this?” he said gruffly. “What’s been going on here? Whose business have you been poking your nose in?”

  “Lay off me, Taber,” I snapped back. “I was hired by Lizbeth . . . Miss Crawford to do a job. I’ve been doing it. Someone obviously doesn’t like some of the things I’ve found.” I held my hand up in his face before he could interrupt me. “You know I’m not going to tell you what those things are—they’re my affair and they don’t concern you.

  “What does concern you is finding Miss Crawford. And you’d better start by looking at that window.”

  “What about the window?” Taber queried petulantly.

  “You moron, look at that latch. It’s unlocked. What chance was there that Miss Crawford would have left it like that on a cold November night? Clearly it had been unlocked at some point yesterday when she was not here, precisely to make the job of snatching her easier.

  “In other words, Taber, this was an inside job. I’ll tell you this much: what I’ve found has a pretty direct bearing on several members of this family, and it’s as sure as anything that one of them had something to do with this. They’re obviously trying to scare me off, and they’re holding Lizbeth hostage until I walk away and promise to keep my mouth shut.”

  Taber peered at me closely, as if I were some baffling specimen he was gazing at through a microscope. “You’re accusing a member of the Crawford family for kidnapping one of their own?”

  “It doesn’t have to be one of them,” I said. “It could be any number of others. But someone had to have had access to Lizbeth’s room sometime yesterday, and that points very strongly to someone living here. They would have the opportunity, and I suspect they would have the motive.”

  I paused while I fished the envelope out of my pocket.

  “And look at this, Taber,” I resumed. “Take a look at that postmark: Pompton Lakes, 10:30 p.m. yesterday. This letter was mailed before Lizbeth Crawford was seized. Whoever wrote and mailed it was awfully certain he was going to succeed in this little kidnapping gig.”

  Taber just shook his head. “This is getting way too weird for me, Scintilla.” He took a deep breath. “I can’t risk my job arresting a member of the Crawford family unless I have pretty strong evidence. They’ll hang me out to dry if I make a mistake.”

  “No one’s asking you to arrest anybody. Our first priority is to find Lizbeth. After that, you can arrest the man on the moon for all I care.”

  “But Scintilla,” Taber warned, “you know you’re endangering Miss Crawford’s life by pursuing this case. For her sake, you gotta drop it. If someone’s so desperate to stop you, they’re not going to be shy about knocking her off. You better be careful.”

  “Don’t worry about me, Taber,” I said. “I want Lizbeth alive a lot more than you do.” I wasn’t going to say how much more—because I was trying not to think about that myself. “I have a plan, anyway.”

  We marched back into the parlor, where a certain semblance of order had returned.

  The first thing I did was to walk up to Dr. Granger and pull him aside.

  “Just out of curiosity,” I said with what I will admit was a certain snide tone of voice, “exactly what are you doing here?”

  In spite of the hint of fear that lurked in the back of his eyes, he wasn’t about to be intimidated.

  “Don’t try to bully me, Scintilla. I’m the family doctor, remember? Joseph called me because Florence Crawford was in a state of near-collapse. She’s still pretty worked up, but the sedative I administered has helped. I knew nothing about this until I came over here a few hours ago.”

  I looked into his face pretty much the way Taber had looked into mine a few minutes before.

  “So you have no idea what could have happened to Lizbeth?” I said.

  “How could I?” Granger replied in mingled confusion and outrage. “Surely you don’t think I had anything to do with this!”

  “No, I don’t think that,” I said honestly.

  As I began walking away, he grabbed me by the arm.

  “Scintilla,” he said nervously. “Listen . . . there’s no reason to . . . to spill the beans about Frank Crawford, is there? It could be the end of my career . . . I’m not made of money, Scintilla—my work is all I have . . .” He trailed off indecisively.

  “Calm yourself, Granger,” I said. “I’ll not blab about anything . . . yet. I gotta find Lizbeth. She knows most of the story, but not quite all of it. We’ll let her decide what to cough up and what not to—if she comes back alive.”

  I walked away without a backward glance.

  Making my way to the couch where Florence Crawford was still sitting, huddled in a ball and weeping quietly, I said:

  “Ma’am, I know this is rough on you, but I wonder if I could have a few words.”

  After a few seconds, she looked up at me, her tear-stained face the very picture of crestfallen despair.

  “Mr. Scintilla,” she almost wailed, “I just want my baby back. She’s all I have in the whole world. I have no reason to live if she’s . . . gone.”

  Either she was the greatest actress in the world or she was telling the plain truth. At least provisionally, I crossed her off the list of suspects.

  “Mrs. Crawford, I’ll do whatever I can to get your daughter back. I don’t think there’s any immediate danger of anything serious happening. I’m sorry to say this, but she seems to be a pawn in a larger game.”

  Maybe my choice of words was unfortunate, for Florence snapped back: “And what ‘game’ might that be, Mr. Scintilla?”

  “I think you have a pretty good idea,” I said. “It’s the case that Lizbeth had me investigate. As you know, it’s upset a lot of people.”

  I felt it was the better part of valor not to mention that note I’d received this morning: it would only unnerve her further and make her demand that I give up the hunt. I wasn’t quite ready to do that, if I could do so without harming Lizbeth.

  Florence Crawford just looked at me pleadingly and said: “I just want to see my daughter alive and well. I don’t care what happens to anyone after that.”

  I felt dis
missed, and I doubted that she had anything of value to say anyway, so I walked away without a word.

  My mind was, in any event, working furiously. A number of scenarios had to be considered, each more unsavory than the last.

  In spite of his protestations, I wasn’t ready to clear Granger. If his piteous pleas to me reflected his real feelings, then he in many ways had the most to lose if the truth about Frank Crawford came out. As he said, he could lose his license and his practice—and then where would he be?

  Florence Crawford was probably off the list, for I couldn’t see what motive she might have had in having her own daughter kidnapped. Why should she have cared if the fake “death” of Frank Crawford were exposed? I will confess that a suspicion lurked in my mind about her relatives, Daniel and Norma Bisland. Could they have wanted Lizbeth out of the way as a means of gaining the Crawford fortune? In the absence of any descendants, who else would the money go to except the Bisland clan? And yet, the overriding problem with this conjecture was opportunity: how could either Daniel or Norma have gotten into the house to unlock that window latch in Lizbeth’s bedroom? They would have to have persuaded Florence to do the job, and I couldn’t see her agreeing to that.

  And then there was James Crawford himself. He was still the mystery man in this whole case, deliberately confining himself to decades of prison for reasons no one could fathom. I wouldn’t be surprised if he had somehow heard of my findings and sought to nip them in the bud. Maybe it was a mistake for me to have seen him at all and thereby to have tipped him off to my investigation of the case that had led to his incarceration. I wouldn’t be surprised if he had various confederates whom he would persuade or pressure to do his bidding for him, no matter how unsavory that bidding might be.

  There was another prospect that I thought so fantastic that I refused to think of it—yet.

  But my first order of business was to settle one simple point. I came up to Joseph, who was hovering ineffectually in the parlor, face contorted with anxiety and hands wringing in a nervous tic. His devotion to Lizbeth was unquestioned, and I saw him as just about the only true ally in this whole twisted household.

  “Joseph,” I said, grabbing him by the arm and pulling him away to a far corner of the room, “let me ask you something.”

  “Yes, sir,” he breathed, looking at me as if I could somehow conjure Lizbeth back with a few passes of my hand.

  “Did any member of the household leave the house last night for any reason?”

  He looked me deeply in the face, his eyes bulging in fear. “Why do you want to know?”

  “Just tell me, Joseph. It could be of immense help.”

  Something was preventing him from speaking—terror, apprehension, concern for Lizbeth, concern for his own standing in the family, or something altogether different.

  Finally he said: “Yes, someone did go.”

  “Who?”

  It took Joseph what seemed to be an eternity to say: “Mrs. Crawford, sir.”

  “Florence Crawford!” I nearly shouted. “Are you sure?”

  “No, sir,” Joseph almost whispered. “Not her. The elder Mrs. Crawford.”

  I closed my eyes in wearied disbelief. It was my worst fear.

  Lizbeth had been kidnapped by her own grandmother.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The information Joseph provided seemed to make it pretty clear what was going on. Helen Ward Crawford had taken one of the family’s fleet of automobiles—she had driven it herself, without the use of the chauffeur, one Perkins—around 8:30 yesterday evening. She was gone for more than an hour. I had little doubt that she did more than mail that little greeting card to me at the nearest mailbox in town; and I had a fairly good idea where she had gone.

  For I was under no delusions that Helen had done the job of kidnapping Lizbeth herself—that would be beyond her powers and beneath her dignity. The footprints under the window of Lizbeth’s room made it clear that at least two people—at least one of them a man of sizeable bulk—were involved. But to my mind, there was no question that Helen was the one pulling the strings here—for what possible motive, I couldn’t even begin to fathom. It was obvious from the beginning that she was hostile to Lizbeth’s poking around in this whole matter; but would she have gone to the length of snatching up her own granddaughter just to shut her—and me—up?

  What, really, had I discovered? Only that James Allen Crawford had not killed his brother Frank, and that Frank was alive and kicking and seemingly content being out of the family. How was that a threat to Helen? What did she stand to gain by this incredibly desperate and foolhardy measure?

  The overriding question, therefore, was nothing more than this: Why did Helen Ward Crawford want to keep her own son James in prison? It was not as if she had someone else—at least, someone within the Crawford clan—lined up to take over the family business. The idea that Lizbeth could run the show after Helen’s passing seemed fantastic—not that Lizbeth wasn’t a smart, headstrong, dynamic person, but there wasn’t the slightest indication that she was being groomed to take on such a responsibility.

  Well, all that was a secondary consideration now. My prime concern was to get Lizbeth back—and get her back alive. Nothing else mattered, and nothing was going to stop me.

  I wasn’t quite so confident of my own ability—or quite so confident of Helen’s sanity—to think that Helen (if indeed she were the mastermind of the kidnapping) wouldn’t take drastic action, up to and including killing her own granddaughter, if I pursued my inquiries too boldly. So I made a show of announcing to all and sundry that I was suspending my investigation pending the release of Lizbeth Crawford.

  I did so as Helen Ward Crawford, who had drifted into the parlor like a kind of evil spirit, stared stonily at me from a dim corner. Her gorgon face revealed nothing except rage and malevolence. It quickly became clear to me that she was the toughest of tough nuts to crack, so my only option was to do a sort of end run around her.

  And for my ally in that undertaking, I chose Joseph the butler.

  Pulling him aside, I muttered a few comments and questions to him. Getting a satisfactory reply, I made my exit.

  I won’t say that I wasn’t glad to see the back of Thornleigh—for now.

  But I was back on the scene at around midnight.

  The most discreet of knocks at the front door brought an immediate response. Joseph opened the door hastily and silently. He was standing in front of me, dressed all in black—and I’m not referring to his usual monkey suit—and topped with a beret that made him look like some kind of cat burglar. I admired his diligence, but couldn’t resist cracking a grin.

  But this was no time for frivolity. Earlier I had asked him:

  “Can you handle a gun?”

  He had snapped: “Yes, sir, Mr. Scintilla.”

  “I’m not referring to that shotgun you like to carry around”—at this, he’d turned crimson at the recollection of how he’d (perhaps justifiably) tried to blow my head off during my unearthing of Frank Crawford’s grave—“I mean an automatic. Know how to use it?”

  “I do, sir.”

  “Good. That’s all I need to know.”

  Now, as he closed the door without the faintest hint of sound, we proceed to make our way through the forest to that deserted road where, I suspected, Lizbeth’s kidnappers had themselves stashed their vehicle to make off with her. A cold, steady rain had begun about an hour before, and my own Fedora was quickly ruined. The walk through the woods was dismal and cheerless, and we made no small talk to enliven the occasion. Only when we were well beyond the confines of the house did I feel safe enough to light the same kerosene lamp that I’d brought here for a very different purpose only a few days before.

  We reached my car in good time, although we were by this time soaked to the skin and shivering with cold. The drive into Pompton Lakes was also short, for I had a very specific goal in mind.

  We pulled up a block or so from the home of Myron Franklin, ex-police chie
f.

  It was, I admit, only a conjecture that he was involved, but I thought it a good guess. Who else could Helen Ward Crawford have manipulated to commit such a deed? Over whom did she have any kind of power or influence? Who else would feel pressured to commit an actual crime that could easily send them to jail? Lying about a fake death was one thing; kidnapping a young woman was something else altogether. None of Helen’s society friends was remotely ripe for this kind of seedy operation; but it may well have been right up Myron Franklin’s alley.

  Leaving the car and shielding ourselves from the omnipresent rain as best we could, we trudged in the direction of Franklin’s decrepit shack. How likely it was that Lizbeth was actually there, I was by no means certain. From my recollection of the place, it had only a couple of rooms on the one and only floor, and I don’t believe there was a basement.

  As we approached the house, I made it my task to confirm that last conjecture. I was right: the house consisted of nothing but a living room, bedroom, and kitchen. Peering through the windows, between the small gaps left by the tattered curtains, I could see nothing unusual. Franklin’s fancy and well-used Packard was parked crookedly on the street, and I had little doubt he was snoring his head off in his untidy bed.

  I’d already given Joseph one of my two automatics. I muttered a few more instructions to him.

  On my command, we both kicked in the front door.

  It made a thunderous noise as it crashed against the inner wall of the house. At nearly the same time, a hoarse shout emanated from the bedroom. Plunging into the house, Joseph and I took refuge behind what few sticks of furniture there were in the living room as I shouted:

  “Franklin! It’s Joe Scintilla! I know what you’ve done with Lizbeth Crawford, so give her up right now!”