“So you were working,” said the policeman. “What of it?”
“I wasn’t in Santa Barbara,” said Mitch cheerfully. He reached over and plucked up Natalie’s handbag, the green one that matched the shoes.
“Now just a minute,” Maxwell growled.
“See if her checkbook is in there,” said Mitch, pushing the bag at the Lieutenant. “It’s a fat one. Her name’s printed on it, and all that: I don’t think she has much occasion to write checks. It may be the same one.”
The lieutenant had his hands on the bag, but he looked unen-lightened.
“Look at it. It’s evidence,” Mitch said.
The lieutenant’s hands moved and Maxwell said, “I’m not sure you have the right…” But the policeman’s weary lids came up, only briefly, and Maxwell was silent.
The lieutenant took out a checkbook. “It’s fat,” he said. “Starts February twenty-first. What of it?”
Mitch Brown leaned his head on the red leatherette and kept his eyes high. “Nobody on earth…unless Natalie remembers, which I doubt…but nobody else on earth can know what the balance on her check stubs was on Saint Patrick’s Day in the morning.
Even her bank couldn’t know. But what if I know? How could I? Because I looked, while she was snoring on my sofa and I had to find out who she was and how I could help her and whether she needed any money.”
The lieutenant’s hand riffled the stubs. “Well?”
“Shall I name it for you? To the penny?” Mitch was sweating.
“Four thousand six hundred and fourteen dollars, and sixty-one cents,” he said slowly and carefully.
“Right,” snapped the lieutenant and his eyes came up, wide-open and baleful on Julius Maxwell.
But Mitch Brown was not heeding and felt no triumph. “Natalie,”
he said, “I’m sorry. I wanted to give you a break. I didn’t know what the trouble was. I wish you could have told me.”
Her newly reddened lips were trembling.
“Not so I could buy off the consequences,” Mitch said. “I’d have called the police. But I would have listened.”
Natalie put her blond head down on the red-checked tablecloth where it had once rested before. “I didn’t mean to do it,” she sobbed.
“But he kept at me, Joe did. Until I couldn’t take any more.”
Julius Maxwell, who had been thinking about evidence, said too late, “Shut up!”
The lieutenant went for the phone.
Mitch sat there, quiet now. The woman was weeping. Maxwell said in a cold, severe way, “Natalie, if you…” He drew away from contamination. He was going to pretend ignorance.
But she cried out, “You shut up! I’ve told you and told you and you never even tried to understand. You said, give Joe a thousand dollars. He’d go away. You said that’s all he wanted. You wouldn’t even listen to what I was going through, and Joe talking, talking, about our baby that was dead…starved, Joe said, because she had no mother. My baby,” she shrieked, “that you wouldn’t have, because she wasn’t yours.”
Now her pink-painted fingernails clawed at her scalp and the rings on her fingers were tangled in her hair. “I’m sorry,” she wept.
“I never meant to make the gun go off. I just wanted to stop him. I just couldn’t take any more. He was killing me…driving me crazy…and money wouldn’t stop him.”
Mitch’s heart was heavy for her. “Didn’t you know what matters?”
he barked at Maxwell. “Did you think it was mink, diamonds — that stuff?”
“The child died,” said Julius Maxwell, “of natural causes.”
“Yes, he thought it was mink,” screamed Natalie. “And oh, my God…it was! I know that now. So he said he would fix it — but he can’t fix what I know, and I hope to die.”
Then she lay silent, as if already dead, across the red-checked tablecloth.
Julius Maxwell’s face was losing color, as the policeman came back and murmured, “Have to wait.” But the lieutenant was uneasy.
“Say, Brown,” he said, “you can remember a row of six figures for six weeks? You a mathematical genius or something? You got what they call a photographic memory?”
Mitch felt his brain stir. He said lightly, “It stuck in my mind. First place, it repeats. You see that? Four six one, four six one. To me that’s an awful lot of money.”
“To me too,” the lieutenant said. “Everybody in here heard what she said, I guess.”
“Sure, heard her confess and implicate him as the accessory. Take a look at Toby, for instance. He’s had it. There’s going to be plenty of evidence.”
The lieutenant looked down upon the ruin of the Maxwells. “Guess so,” he said tightly.
Later that night Mitch Brown was sitting up to a strange bar. He said to the strange bartender, “Say, you ever know that the seventeenth of March is not Saint Patrick’s birthday?”
“What d’ya know?” the bartender murmured politely.
“Nope. It’s the day he died,” said Mitch. “I write, see? So I read.
Bits of information like that stick in my mind. I’ve got no memory for figures and yet…Know the year Saint Patrick died? It was the year 461.”
“That so?” said the bartender.
“You take four sixty-one twice and put the decimal in the right place. Of course that’s not very believable,” Mitch said, “although it really happened — on Saint Patrick’s Day in the morning. How come I knew — me a person who doesn’t always read the newspaper — the year Saint Patrick died? Well, a fellow doesn’t want to be made a fool of, does he? And probable is probable and improbable is improbable — but it’s all we’ve got to go on sometimes. But I’ll tell you something,” Mitch pounded the bar. “Money couldn’t have bought it.”
The bartender said soothingly, “I guess not, Mac.”
The Purple Is Everything
DOROTHY SALISBURY DAVIS
Dorothy Salisbury Davis (b. 1916), born in Chicago and a graduate of Barat College, is clearly a person for the long haul. Her marriage to actor Harry Davis lasted from 1946 until his death in 1993, and she continues to contribute to a field of writing she entered more than half a century ago with the novel The Judas Cat (1949), most recently with a new story in the anthology Murder Among Friends (2000). Davis is, by her own account, an odd fit in the crime-fiction genre. She has bemoaned her inability to create a memorable series character, though Julie Hayes of her last few novels makes the grade, and she has a distaste for violence and murder. (One of the anthologies she edited for the Mystery Writers of America is called Crime Without Murder [1970].) However, her expressed enthusiasm for villains over heroes helps to explain her success in the field. Among her best-known books are the regional classic The Clay Hand (1950), the Roman Catholic-themed A Gentle Murderer (1951), and the 1969 bestseller Where the Dark Streets Go.
In introducing her collection Tales for a Stormy Night (1984), Davis credits her late friend and fellow mystery writer Margaret Manners with giving her the method for stealing a painting used in the Edgar-nominated “The Purple Is Everything.” “I even remember the spot,”
Davis wrote, “Sixth Avenue and Twenty-fourth Street, a few paces, in those days, from Guffanti’s Restaurant.” Though it is unquestion-ably a crime story, it has its author’s moral concerns at its heart and it is of a quality that might as well have been published in The New Yorker as Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.