Conspiracy of Silence Read online

  “I don’t have to wait for anyone,” I said gruffly, finding my clothes hung up in a closet. “Do you mind leaving while I get dressed?”

  Lizbeth continued to flutter around me like a mother hen. “Joe, please, you have to rest. . . . Anyway, I think the police want to talk to you. They have a guard outside, I think. You’ll have to meet with that police chief first.”

  “Yeah, OK, I can do that. But I’ll see him—he doesn’t have to come here and see me. Now out you get.”

  I shoved her out the door, closed it, and put my clothes on.

  The policeman outside the door was startled to see me up and about, but I told him bluntly that if Police Chief Taber wanted to see me, somebody’d better take me to the station. Lizbeth had mentioned that Joseph had had to take my own car back to Thornleigh, and she called him to bring it to the station.

  My talk with Taber confirmed what Joseph had told him earlier. Nolan had confessed that Franklin had pressured him and his wife Effie to do the actual kidnapping; Franklin had then pointed the finger at Helen Ward Crawford. Joseph had admitted that Mrs. Crawford had taken a drive into town the night before the kidnapping. That was enough for Taber, who had roused the household at Thornleigh at something like two in the morning and taken an outraged and fuming grandmother in handcuffs to jail.

  I suspected, however, that it wouldn’t be long before some expensive and high-powered attorney got her out on bail. So I said to Lizbeth:

  “You’re staying with me tonight.”

  Her eyes opened wide at this. “Joe, but I couldn’t . . . .”

  “You can and you will. I can’t risk having you stay at Thornleigh until this matter is settled. Don’t worry,” I went on. “My girl Marge will be there.”

  She looked down at her feet. “I wasn’t worried about anything like that.”

  “Good. Then it’s settled.”

  Joseph brought my car over. He was grinning from ear to ear—whether from the recollection of his thrilling feats of the night before, or because the gorgon matriarch of the clan had been clapped in jail, or both, I couldn’t say. I grinned back at him and gave him the thumbs up.

  Then I drove Lizbeth to my crummy little flat on West 14th Street in Manhattan. By this time it was mid-afternoon, and I’d given Marge a call to tell her to come by after work. After that, I collapsed in my bed.

  I awoke to find two mother hens clucking over me.

  One of them was fixing up some kind of witches’ brew—which turned it to be a pretty good beef stew—in my primitive kitchen, and the other was pulling up the blankets over me as if I was some little boy with the mumps. I was so exhausted I didn’t know who was doing what.

  Sleeping arrangements that night had to be improvised. Both girls refused to let me sleep anywhere except in my own bed, saying I needed to recover my strength. I hate being babied by women, but there wasn’t much I could do about it. Marge would share my bed, while Lizbeth professed herself to be happy on the couch in the living room. I didn’t relish the thought of her spending two uncomfortable nights in a row, but I guess we all had to rough it.

  I was propped up on the left side of the bed, since lying flat still sent shooting pains all down my shoulder and back. The latest issue of Black Mask should have held my attention, as a new guy named Chandler was doing good work; but the painkillers I was still regularly taking made me feel woozy and confused. I was thinking of just calling it an early night when Marge sidled into her side of the bed. She had a file folder in her hand.

  “This afternoon I looked through the files for anything relating to the Crawfords,” she said. “You’d asked me to look up the Bislands, but I thought maybe the Crawford file might be useful too.”

  I tended to doubt it, but I took the file from her and began leafing through it. It was surprisingly ample, but at a superficial glance it seemed to be anything but promising. The usual society column fluff—parties at Thornleigh where the New Jersey haut ton gathered like a herd of zebas at a watering-hole; the redoubtable Helen Ward Crawford making a name for herself by donating to local charities; even a brief notice, on November 8, 1918, of the birth the previous day of a little girl named Lizbeth Allen Crawford.

  Nothing here that I didn’t know already.

  Then a clipping fell out of the folder and fluttered to the ground. I tried to snatch it out of the air with my right hand, but even that motion caused jolting pains all up and down my left side. Slowly and gingerly, as Marge looked on with a mask of concern on her face, I reached to the floor and picked up the clipping.

  “What do you have there, Joe?” she said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe it’s nothing.”

  But it was something.

  It was a short, simple notice of the wedding of James Allen Crawford and Florence Bisland, which occurred—if the handwritten date scribbled on the top of the clipping was accurate—on March 6, 1918. That itself was unremarkable, but a single sentence in the notice caused me almost to fall out of the bed.

  “. . . the celebrations were festive in spite of the cloud of gloom that hung over the family from the death of James’s elder brother, William, at Thornleigh only a month before.”

  The death of James’s elder brother at Thornleigh.

  If this clipping was right, then something was seriously wrong. Everyone had told me that Bill had died in the war. But according to the notice, he hadn’t died in the war. He may have died during the war, but not in it.

  He had died at Thornleigh.

  The next morning, as soon as I was able, I got dressed and made plans to head back to Pompton Lakes.

  Marge, leaving for work early, did her best to get me to promise not to overstrain myself. I didn’t even reply to that, and she left in a bit of a huff, complaining about the pigheadedness of the male sex. Lizbeth, for her part, continued to flutter around me, trying to help me do things that no self-respecting man would let anyone help him with. Finally I had to speak to her a bit sharply, after which she flushed, backed off, and just looked at her toes.

  When she said she wanted to accompany me back to New Jersey, I said:

  “Not a chance, Lizbeth. There are things I gotta do alone. You’ll have to stay here.”

  “But Joe, please,” she pleaded, “maybe I can help . . . .”

  “Maybe you can,” I said, as gently as I could, “but it’s really best if I do this by myself. Please take my word for it.”

  By this time I had taken her by the shoulders and was looking right into her eyes. She tried to match my gaze, but eventually she gave up. Choking back tears, she slumped down on the couch and said:

  “OK, Joe. Do what you have to do.”

  I can’t remember what I said to that. It wasn’t much. But I got out of there as quickly as I could.

  That police station in Pompton Lakes was beginning to feel like a home away from home.

  Taber and others looked at me in surprise as I marched in.

  “What’s up, Joe?” Taber said with the faintest whiff of apprehension.

  “I need to look at your records again.”

  “I thought you already saw everything pertaining to the Crawfords.”

  “I saw the file for Frank Crawford. Now I need to see the file for William Crawford.”

  Taber wrinkled his forehead in puzzlement. He was obviously unaware that there even was such a file. But I had to believe there was.

  And, sure enough, there it was.

  Why hadn’t I seen it before? Even though everyone called him Bill, his given name was of course William. It had been placed, properly enough, directly behind the file for Frank. But a stray sheet of paper had protruded above the file and covered over the tab that had William’s name on it.

  OK, call me careless. But at the time I was looking at Frank’s file, I had no reason to believe there even was a file for William. So that fraction of an inch of paper had sent me on something of a wild goose chase.

  Anyway, the file contained much of interest. William Alle
n Crawford had indeed died at Thornleigh, on February 8, 1918. He was on furlough and had been home for close to two weeks. I saw that he hadn’t even gone overseas to the war zone; instead, he had spent his entire military career stationed as a reserve officer at Fort Standish in Boston. I didn’t doubt that his mother’s influence had kept him out of harm’s way. She may have had to give up at least one of her sons to the war effort, but she could at least contrive it so that he came back in one piece.

  But it hadn’t worked out the way she wanted.

  The police report was ambiguous in some particulars, but from what I could piece together, it seemed that William had, on that morning of February 8th, fallen into the lake that abuts the rear of Thornleigh and drowned. There was some little mystery about this, because William had been known to be a reasonably good swimmer. A wound to the back of the head had been assumed to have been the result of his hitting a submerged rock.

  The death had been reported by William’s brother, James Allen Crawford.

  So James Allen Crawford may or may not have killed his brother.

  But it wasn’t his brother Frank.

  It was his brother William.

  Chapter Eighteen

  “So why did you kill your brother William?”

  I was sitting across a tale from James Allen Crawford in the interrogation room at Rahway State Prison.

  Maybe I shouldn’t have been so blunt. His response was explosive.

  He shot up violently from the chair, sending it hurtling back against the wall. He himself, after making an initial move in my direction, backed himself into a corner like an animal at bay. His eyes blazed, and a curious choking sound emerged from deep in his throat.

  The tumult roused the guard, who was standing outside the door. He made a move to enter, but I stopped him with a gesture of my hand.

  I turned back to the prisoner.

  “I know the whole story, Mr. Crawford,” I said. I didn’t, but I had to claim that I did to get Crawford to cough up what had actually happened.

  Still cowering in the corner, but seeming ready to leap in my direction at any moment, Crawford said: “What do you know? How could you know anything?”

  I closed my eyes for a moment and let out an exhausted sigh.

  “I have the goods on you, Crawford. I dug up your brother Frank’s empty grave—and I found Frank himself, alive and kicking, in Mexico. And I now know that it wasn’t him you killed, but William. The sainted William whom everyone said died in the war.

  “The only thing I don’t know, Crawford, is why.

  “Why did you weasel out of a murder you did commit and confess to a murder that you didn’t commit?

  “What gives with you, Mr. James Allen Crawford?”

  For a time, Crawford just looked at me, his expression mutating from outrage to a kind of crestfallen self-pity. His face crumpled in wretchedness, and his slipped to the floor, burying his head in his hands.

  I just stood there looking down at him.

  After a long time he peered up in my direction. He seemed to want to plow himself as deep into the corner of this stark little room as he could, as if he could somehow vanish from my sight, and from the sight of the world.

  Finally he said very softly: “Scintilla, can you even begin to imagine what kind of hell my whole life has been?”

  “Oh, come off it, Crawford,” I snapped. “You mean to tell me you can’t buy happiness with all that money you and your family have?”

  I didn’t mean that, of course: I was beginning to have some inkling of the truth of what he had just said. But I needed to prod him into spilling the beans.

  My tart comment may have done the trick.

  Now enraged again, he sprung up from the floor and seemed intent on throttling me with his bare hands—just the kind of throttling he pretended to have given his own brother a dozen years ago.

  I stood motionless, and some innate restraint held him in check. Trembling from head to foot, he quietly picked up the fallen chair, carefully restored it to its position by the table, and sat down in it.

  “You want to know the score, Scintilla?” he almost whispered. “OK, I’ll tell you. If you want to be my father confessor, then you’ll get the whole story. God knows I’ve kept it locked inside me long enough. Maybe that’s why I’ve become what I’ve become . . .”

  Those last few sentences seemed to have been spoken to himself, and he wasn’t even looking at me anymore.

  I quietly sat down in my chair as Crawford resumed.

  “Do you know what it’s like to have a brother who overshadows you in every way? ‘The sainted William’—yes, that’s exactly what he was. Bright, quick-witted, handsome, good in sports—and you better believe my parents made no secret of the fact. Bill was always being groomed as the head of the family and the natural successor to his dynamic father. And after Dad died, just before the war, Bill became the savior of the Crawford clan—the great white hope for the next generation.

  “I don’t know that Bill ever regarded me as anything but a joke. Everything came easy to him—the girls, the honors, the adulation of his peers. I had to fight tooth and nail for everything I got—and that wasn’t much. I was only two years younger, but it could have been a century. He never wanted me hanging around him—he looked at me as if I were some kind of worm or insect; said I ‘held him back.’”

  Crawford looked at me with a kind of pleading look.

  “Scintilla, do you know what it’s like to look upon someone with this twisted mix of love, hate, envy, admiration, and longing? I wanted to be William more than anything in the world—and I wanted it all the more exactly because I knew I never could be.

  “There was a time”—Crawford almost choked at the memory—“when, as teenagers, we were swimming in the lake behind our estate. Yes, yes, Bill was a great swimmer, and I was only average—dogged but mediocre. And for no reason at all but for the fun of it, he held me down—with one hand—under the water until I almost drowned. I can still hear that dreadful laughter of his as I was blubbering under the surface. Was this to be the end of me? Was I going to die hearing my own brother laugh at me while he killed me for sport?

  “That’s how it was, Scintilla. He got everything, I got nothing.

  “And so the war came. My mother couldn’t keep all of us out of it, but she still managed to pull enough strings to get Bill into a safe stint at Fort Standish, where there wasn’t the slightest chance of his coming into harm’s way. She said she needed me at home to help run the business, so I got exempted altogether. And even that was a humiliation: Bill could parade around in his shiny officer’s uniform, while I was stuck being a glorified accountant.

  “And then there’s Florence . . . .”

  At this point Crawford’s expression turned from self-pity to blazing anger.

  “That was in some ways the most humiliating thing of all.... Mother of course wanted to make sure that at least one of her boys produced offspring to carry on the family name. But the sainted Bill could never just be set up with a suitable female like a stud thrown into a field with a heifer: he was given the luxury of finding his true love—so long, of course, as it was one of our own class. But as for me . . . well, it was just fine for me to get paired up with Florence, a kind of consolation prize thrown into my lap as good breeding stock. We’d known the Bislands for years, but they were decidedly second-tier—almost like poor relations. . . .

  “So there I was, working like a dog to keep the family business going while Bill was playing at being soldier. . . . And as for Frank—well, he dealt with things in his own way. He didn’t seem to care that Mother thought him even more contemptible than me; he just wanted to have a good time. Was he a skirt-chaser? So what? He didn’t care! As long as he had enough money to buy an endless parade of willing female flesh, he was happy.”

  Once again Crawford peered into my face with eyes slitted and blazing.

  “So you want to know what went down that day in 1918, Scintilla? OK, here’s
the scene. . . .

  “So my wedding had been set for March. I can’t say I was looking forward to it; not that I disliked Florence—then—but I resented being some kind of pawn that my mother was moving around as if she owned the board. Nothing mattered to her save that everyone play the parts she had assigned to them; and woe betide anyone who struck out on their own! . . . Well, the joke of it is that, after all this careful planning, everything blew up in her face!”

  He laughed mirthlessly at the memory.

  “Florence was already ensconced in Thornleigh . . . God knows there was enough room for her in that cavern of a house, and she and Mother were planning the whole wedding themselves, no expense spared. Not that she cared one way or the other about our happiness; but she knew that a Crawford wedding at Thornleigh had to be a spectacle if it was to bring due credit to the family.

  “And so Bill shows up on a furlough. And what does he proceed to do? He seduces my own fiancée under my nose.

  “Oh, it was nothing so crude as what Frank would have done—and I can assure you that his advances were fully returned by their recipient. Florence had known Bill for years, of course, but I suppose something about that uniform he strutted around in turned her head. Or maybe it was just that she saw that he was in every way a new and improved version of me—money plus brains plus good looks, and now an army career to boot. Who wouldn’t want that over a dull plodder like myself?”

  I sat silent, letting Crawford wallow in self-pity for a few moments. If he was going to get things off his chest, he had to do it in his own way.

  “So, yes,” he resumed, “I could tell that Bill was getting pretty chummy with his future sister-in-law. He actually came up and told me that she had just the kind of delicate good looks that always appealed to him. I was on the verge of saying, ‘Well, why don’t you marry her, then?’ but didn’t have the guts. Anyway, I knew that, as far as Mother was concerned, Florence wasn’t quite well-connected enough for her favorite son.

  “But that didn’t stop him from paying a visit to her bedroom one night in February.