Conspiracy of Silence Page 6

  I did so. A bit surprisingly, when the message was relayed to Crawford, he apparently agreed with some alacrity. I was led down a long corridor to a small interrogation room, where I waited for a prison official to bring Crawford in.

  When the door opened, I caught my first glimpse of the man I was attempting, in spite of himself, to get out of jail.

  James Allen Crawford had clearly been grievously wounded psychologically; whether it was self-inflicted or not was part of what I had to find out. A man of medium height, dark hair, and chiseled features, he impressed me at the outset as one who kept a tight check on his emotions, his desires, and his dreams. The deep-set eyes were clouded with a nameless sorrow, the hair was gray and receding with age and worry; and when I saw his tight-lipped mouth, I felt that his own mind was a far worse prison than the one he occupied—a prison that would bar the least flicker of self-revelation.

  He would be a tough nut to crack.

  Rahway was a minimum-security prison; murderers—or those convicted of murder, like Crawford—were a rarity. The guard was content to wait outside the interrogation room, making clear to me that I only had to call or gesture to bring him in if the prisoner caused any trouble.

  Crawford sat down in the chair across the table from me, and looked at me with understandable wariness as he glanced down at my card in his hand and said:

  “How may I help you, Mr. Scintilla?”

  “Mr. Crawford,” I began, “I don’t know if your daughter Lizbeth has told you what she has done . . . but she has hired me to look into the circumstances of the death of your brother.”

  From a man so seemingly in control of himself, I did not expect the response I got.

  He partially rose from his seat, his eyes bugged out of their sockets, and he almost screamed:

  “What right do you have to do that! How dare you probe into my family’s affairs!”

  He was actually huffing with anger and alarm.

  I looked at him blandly and, I hope, not unsympathetically. “Sir”—I wondered when was the last time anyone had called him that—“I’m only doing what your daughter has asked me to do. I gather she hasn’t informed you of her actions.”

  “Of course not!” he exploded. “I would never have permitted it!”

  “Well,” I said, “she’s paying me, and so I figure I have a job to do.”

  Crawford was quickly overcoming his initial burst of rage. He was no idiot: he realized that he had been put at a disadvantage by being kept ignorant of his daughter’s plans, but he had been in big business long enough to know that a level head wins a lot more battles than insensate anger. He calmed down rapidly, seating himself slowly and gingerly in the chair as if it might have been electrified.

  “So it would seem,” he said at last. “But I fear you’re barking up the wrong tree. I killed my brother, and that’s the end of it.”

  “Why?” I asked simply.

  My blunt question seemed to take him by surprise. He almost blubbered: “Well . . . he . . . he was trying to corrupt my wife. The scoundrel! If you know anything about him, you’ll know that no skirt was safe with him. And my own wife! Can you imagine what that means, Mr. Scintilla?”

  “And it was worth killing him over something like that?”

  He looked at me with incomprehension, as if I had denied the truth of the multiplication table. “Of course it was! The shame and dishonor to our family if something that ever got out! It would have been intolerable.”

  “I’m sure you know that your wife denies that Frank made any overtures toward her.”

  He glanced up at me quickly and appraisingly. “Oh, so you’ve talked to her, have you?” The tone of disdain he expressed in referring to his wife puzzled me. “Well, she can deny all she wants to, but there was something going on, let me tell you.”

  “So you think she’s lying?” I said, deliberately attempting to provoke him.

  “Of course she’s lying! Don’t let that ice-queen exterior fool you, Scintilla. Florence will spread her legs for any man she thinks is a better lay than her husband.”

  The coarseness of the statement almost flabbergasted me. How a man could speak of his own wife in this way, even one whom he accused of carrying on an adulterous affair with his own brother, was beyond my understanding. I recalled Lizbeth’s bitter admission that her mother had never visited Crawford in prison, not even once—so perhaps his hostility was not entirely surprising. But I also recalled the derisive laugh that Florence had given when I had asked her about Frank’s advances toward her. To her, the idea was so preposterous that it was hardly worth rebutting.

  Something wasn’t adding up here.

  I tried another tack. “It would seem, Mr. Crawford, that your incarceration has cast a cloud over the long-term future of your family business. Doesn’t that worry you?”

  He shrugged, as if the matter didn’t deserve a moment’s notice. “We have good managers at our plants—they keep things running well. Anyway, I’ll be out of here in ten or fifteen years. I won’t be an old man—I’ll take over the reins again. It’s true I had to give my wife power of attorney to handle financial matters, but my mother is there to keep her in line.”

  “Is there some reason why neither your wife nor your mother ever visit you?” Once again I was being deliberately provocative, but Crawford didn’t rise to the bait.

  “Look, Scintilla, what my family does is my affair. If they don’t want to visit, that’s their choice. I’d be mortified to see my mother in a place like this. It’s not her custom to hang around with thieves and murderers.”

  Crawford said this with a sneer, but it seemed incredible he wasn’t aware that, by his own admission, he was one of the murderers whom his mother shouldn’t be fraternizing with.

  “But your daughter does visit,” I said.

  The mere mention of Lizabeth seemed to have some kind of transformative effect on him. All of a sudden his face lost much of its tensity—its baffling fusion of fear, anger, depression, and resentment. I became aware that James Allen Crawford was both an accomplished and a handsome man—a worthy leader of a community if only he could get out of jail.

  “Lizbeth is a dear . . . she’s all I have, Scintilla,” Crawford said with a break in his voice. “She’s been so loyal to me . . . as no one else has,” he added with a faint trace of bitterness.

  “She thinks you’re innocent, you know,” I said quietly.

  “Yes, I know she does,” Crawford said with a kind of puzzled resignation. “I know she does. But she’s wrong, Scintilla. She loves me so much that she can’t stand to think badly of me—can’t stand to think I’ve done anything wrong. But I have, and I deserve to be here.”

  For that moment, at least, I believed him.

  Chapter Eight

  Something Crawford had said opened up a new avenue of investigation for me. So I made my way to the office of the New York Herald Tribune.

  A couple of years ago I’d struck up an acquaintance with a woman named Marge Schaeffer. She worked as a society reporter for the Herald Tribune, and she’d helped me on a case. We’d become friends, colleagues, pals. In fact, we’d become bedmates. Once I’d made her give up sticking a huge wad of chewing gum in her mouth, everything was fine. Well, not quite everything. We enjoyed each other’s company—and on top of that, I was no monk, and she was no nun. So what about marriage? Well, here’s the thing: Since Marge had to hobnob with the upper crust, she couldn’t exactly tag along with a shamus whose suits were all bought for $11.95 at one of the discount stores on 14th Street; and she didn’t exactly fit into my world of cheating spouses and bail bondsmen either. So we were an “item,” but that’s about all: whether we’d ever shack up and tie the knot was a big question that neither of us was anxious to answer anytime soon.

  But this isn’t about me. What I’d found was that Marge was an incredible source of information on people who were generally out of my league. She knew everyone worth knowing and kept files on everyone whether they were
worth knowing or not. She and her colleague, Gene Merriwether, had done me lots of good turns over the years.

  So when I sauntered up to their office on West 40th Street, it was not entirely a surprise. They were always glad to see me, and they liked feeling useful. Maybe, too, they liked vicariously slumming in my world.

  I got right down to business. When I told them I was poking around in the James Allen Crawford case, they were mildly interested. They of course had heard of the business, but it was almost ancient history to them; and, not knowing the details of the case, they wondered what there was to investigate. But they knew the Crawfords well enough, even if the social and financial aristocracy of New Jersey doesn’t cast much of a shadow on New York’s Four Hundred.

  But what I wanted to know was not anything about the Crawfords; it was about Daniel and Norma Bisland, Florence Crawford’s brother and sister-in-law.

  They remained the wild cards in this case. What, really, were they doing at Thornleigh in March of 1924? By what coincidence were they on the scene when the death of Frank Crawford had taken place? Maybe there was nothing suspicious, maybe there was. But it was an angle I had to follow up.

  The Bislands were only a little less of an enigma to Marge and Gene than the Crawfords. I’d recalled Lizbeth saying that they lived upstate, but for New Yorkers upstate begins north of Westchester county, and the farther you get from Manhattan the less interesting you become; and by the time you get up to Ithaca, you might as well be in Indiana.

  But Marge dutifully looked in her files for anything about the Bislands. There wasn’t much, but what there was proved pretty compelling. They owned plenty of land up in the Finger Lakes area and had extensive interests in wine making and some dairy farming. But what piqued my curiosity particularly were two tiny bits of information:

  In late 1923 the Bislands had declared bankruptcy.

  In the summer of 1924 they threw a lavish party at their home to commemorate their return to prosperity.

  It became clear that a trip upstate was on my agenda.

  Once again, the trip out of Manhattan proved a study in contrasts. The moment you left the city and entered Westchester, a new world dawned. The county was still largely rural, with scattered homes buried in the woods, and towns like Yonkers and Bronxville trying to maintain their suburban innocence while they served as bedroom communities to New York. The Hudson River, as you passed through Dobbs Ferry and Tarrytown, widened out to the dimensions of a small lake, and I couldn’t criticize our Chief Executive for wanting to spend as much time at his estate at Hyde Park as he could. It was only one of the many noble edifices you come upon as you head up to Newburgh and Poughkeepsie.

  Heading west and skirting the lower fringe of the Catskills, I made my way past Binghamton and Elmira, then headed north. The Bislands lived in a place called Moravia, a tiny village about twenty miles northeast of Ithaca. As I drove into the town, I saw that it was little more than a main street with a number of streets branching off of it, situated a few miles south of Cayuga Lake. And yet, it was a surprisingly bustling and prosperous place: I even saw an opera house there, and recalled that Caruso had performed there a few decades before.

  The Bislands lived in a house called the Jewett Mansion. For a mansion, it was on the smallish side, but its brick façade and several towers were imposing, not to mention the acre or more of land that encompassed it. Once again, I’d decided to come unannounced, but I was prepared to stay until I got something out of these folks.

  My knock was answered, of course, by a butler, and when I announced my business and handed him my card, he looked down at it—and up at me—as if I were some kind of derelict who had come here by mistake. But my gaze made it pretty clear I wasn’t going anywhere, so he grudgingly let me in.

  In a short period of time, a middle-aged woman came down the curving stairs to greet me hesitantly.

  “Mister . . . er, Scintilla,” she said, peering down at my card, which the butler must have given to her, “I’m Norma Bisland. I’m not sure how I can help you . . . .”

  I came to the point. “I understand you were present at Thornleigh when Frank Crawford met his death.”

  At that, she flushed a deep crimson. Norma Bisland was a would-be aristocrat who didn’t quite have the bearing and the manner to pull it off. She was short, dumpy, and not particularly attractive. Her gray hair and coarse features were an ill match to the expensive elegance of the dress she was wearing. She would have been more appealing if she’d made fewer attempts to conceal the middle-class housewife that she obviously was.

  “I . . . I don’t know what there is to investigate,” she said blunderingly.

  “I’m pursuing several angles. I wonder—”

  She interrupted me: “May I ask on whose behalf you’re making these . . . these inquiries?”

  “On behalf of Lizbeth Crawford, the daughter of James Allen Crawford.”

  “Little Lizbeth!” she exclaimed. “But she’s only a child!”

  “Not anymore,” I said bluntly. “She’s eighteen, and she has the money to pay me.”

  “Eighteen! My, how the time goes . . . ,” she trailed off.

  “Mrs. Bisland, I wonder if I may speak to you and your husband on this matter. Is Mr. Bisland available?”

  Once again she flushed. “Well, I don’t know . . . I think he’s out . . . .”

  “You think? Don’t you know?”

  She attempted to give me an imperious stare, as if it was not my place to speak to her like that; but she only managed to look scared and outraged.

  “If he’s not around,” I pursued, “I’ll be happy to wait.”

  Mrs. Bisland was getting so flustered that I wondered if she would faint on the spot. But her butler, whatever his name was, came to her rescue. Appearing as if out of nowhere, he sidled up to her and said: “Madam, shall I call the master?”

  She looked at him as if he were a kind of lifeline and said: “Yes, please do . . .”

  A bit ineffectually, she directed me into a sitting room. We both sat down, I in a fancily upholstered wing-back chair and she on a sort of divan. I looked at her stonily, saying nothing. She tried to look everywhere but at my face.

  After an excruciating several moments, a large, stocky man entered the room. Daniel Bisland, too, seemed not quite suited for the role of landowner and squire of the manor. He had the build of a prizefighter, and the bearing of one. The dark suit he wore seemed to hug his frame so tightly that it seemed he would burst out of it at any moment. His features, too, like his wife’s, were a bit on the coarse side; and his pencil moustache made him look like a villain out of a Charlie Chaplin movie.

  “Daniel Bisland,” he announced abruptly, extending a hand and scarcely allowing me to stand up to shake it. “May I ask your business here, Mr. Scintilla?”

  I repeated much of what I’d said to his wife, and I could see that, with each passing sentence, his temperature was rising. His face was becoming simultaneously flushed and livid, and it seemed he could scarcely control his rage and apprehension. When I suggested we sit down and talk the matter over, he almost exploded:

  “What is there to talk over? What do you want from us?”

  Once again, that bad habit of asking more questions than anyone can answer at once.

  I didn’t want to antagonize the Bislands even before I started, so I said quietly:

  “Sir, I’m just trying to get to the bottom of certain . . . irregularities in this case. I think your testimony will be very valuable.”

  Bisland peered at me keenly.

  “How do you think I . . . we can help?”

  “I’d just like to know what you remember of that night of March 19, 1924. I’m still not clear on the details.”

  This had the effect, oddly, of calming him down a bit, and he sat down abruptly on the divan next to his wife, even though there was scarcely room for the two of them there.

  “Scintilla,” he began, “that was one of the strangest days of my life.” Hi
s wife nodded vigorously as he continued: “I don’t even know what that whole dinner party was about. We’d been there a week already, and we really weren’t particularly keen on socializing. It certainly wasn’t for our benefit . . . .”

  “May I ask what was the reason for your visit?”

  At once Bisland became a bit nervous. “Just a social call...hadn’t seen my sister Florence for a while. It may not seem like a long way, but we didn’t visit often . . . and they certainly couldn’t trouble themselves to leave that palace of theirs and come up here.”

  I ignored the bitterness of the remark and said: “So can you tell me what exactly happened that day . . . or evening?”

  Daniel Bisland seized upon my words. “I’ll never forget it in a million years. . . . There was so much tension there, it was like a torture chamber. First of all, that high-and-mighty matriarch of theirs, Helen Ward Crawford, couldn’t help looking at us as if we were some kind of poor relations . . . and I guess we were, as far as that went. I won’t deny we were struggling just then.... And then there was that doctor . . . what was his name?”

  “Nathan Granger,” I supplied.

  “Oh, yeah, Granger. . . . Odd fish. I never heard of anyone inviting the family doctor to a formal dinner. And as for that little minx that Frank was squeezing—” Norma Bisland clucked at her husband’s indelicacy, but he forged ahead—“she was as out of place as a wine-soaked derelict would have been. Granted, she was nice to look at, and she barely said a word during the whole proceedings, but what she was doing there I’ll never know.”

  “So nothing unusual happened over dinner?” I said.

  “Not particularly . . . unless you think that the incredible number of awkward pauses and silences was unusual. Frank, oddly enough, was the only one who seemed to be having a good time—in fact, now that I remember it, he was in the best of spirits. As if he didn’t have a care in the world. Do you remember that, Norma?”

  “Yes,” she said in a small voice.

  “But it was after dinner that things began to get strange,” Bisland continued. “We all filed away into the parlor for coffee and after-dinner drinks. Mercifully, the grand old dame didn’t insist on separating the men from the women, so we all just hung around, not saying much and pretending to take an interest in what little anyone had to say.