Cold Morning (16 page)

Aleck was reciting poetry to me. “‘I like to see it lap the miles and lick the valleys up.' Or, in my version, I like to crawl the miles long to pick my spirits up. Much better than dear Emily, the spinster of Amherst you must have known in your childhood, Edna.”

“Yes, dear Aleck, but…” I stopped, gob-smacked. “Aleck!”

He turned, alarmed.

I sputtered, “Emily.”

“Yes, I know who wrote that poem. Emily”—still the sly grin—“Bronte.”

“No,” I hissed, “the waitress at the Peanut Grill yesterday, Aleck. That man mentioned a girl's name. Emily.”

“I was there, Edna. I have a good memory.”

“Obviously not good enough.”

“And why is that?”

I whispered into his neck. “Violet Sharp's sister is named Emily. Annabel's cousin. Another maid, but one who scooted back to England right after the kidnapping.”

He stared into my face, his eyebrows raised. “Edna, Edna, where are you going with this madness? You're running off into a madman's wonderland.”

So I ignored him for the remainder of the ride, pouting a bit, which I regretted, but thinking. Aleck paid me no mind, though he kept telling Marcus to step on it. A noisome refrain:
I'm late I'm late I'm late
. Marcus ignored him. In Princeton, of course, we were gloriously late, the tweedy professor peeved and serving us cold chicken and informing Aleck that he'd reconsidered an appearance on Aleck's radio program, but perhaps in the future. Aleck fumed, but the professor's wife, joining us, seemed inordinately interested in me and went on and on about
So Big
and
Show Boat
until Aleck, furious, struggled to his feet and announced, “This show has closed out of town.”

And with that he headed to the car where Marcus, dozing over a newspaper, apologized for something he didn't do.

The ride back to Flemington was icy, Aleck now and then beginning some cruel jibe, fashioning some nastiness but never quite finding it.

When Marcus dropped us off at the Union Hotel, his eyes narrowing at Aleck who was huffing and puffing, I strode on ahead, tired of the childish man. I felt a headache coming on—and probably a colossal feud with the argumentative Aleck. Our skirmishes were the stuff of Broadway legend. But Aleck, primed for an argument—I understood the signs: the flicking of his tongue against the side of his mouth, his index finger twitching against his nose, his walk a pronounced and prim waddle, his cheeks the color of blood—trailed after me.

I skirted by Nellie's Taproom, already bursting with noisy drinkers, and stepped around the mongrel black-and-white dog—called Nellie—whose presence helped name the makeshift tavern, a dog that, I'd heard, received twenty fan letters a day from the American heartland. I walked into the café where I spotted Horace Tripp slumped in a chair. Aleck, ready for a fight, followed me in. Past the dinner hour, only a few tables occupied, but Horace sat with his head dropped into his lap, a cigarette burning in an ashtray at his elbow. He looked up, and I saw a ravaged face, deep lines around his mouth, bloodshot eyes. He lifted a hand in greeting, but his arm shook as he dropped it back into his lap.

“What?” I demanded, stunned.

He said nothing but looked into my face, vacant-eyed.

Aleck walked up to him and leaned in. “What, Mr. Tripp?”

His head fell to the side like a doll's head loosened from its strings.

“Tell me.” I softened my voice.

“Peggy Crispen is dead.”

Stunned, I shut my eyes, saw flashes of brilliant light, jagged waves of scarlet and white. My head swam, and I gripped the rail of a chair.

“Tell me.” Louder now.

“They found her body a little while ago. Outside of town on a country lane. She—she
froze
to death.”

I shivered. “What?”

His voice gained strength. “The sheriff was here a while ago. He didn't know she no longer worked for us.” His voice hardened. “That the hotel canned her.” But then the droopiness returned, his eyes moist. “He said someone driving by saw her curled into a ball by a bank of snow, coatless. Christ Almighty. She had no overcoat on. Like it was summer. He said they think she was drinking at the place down from her room, somehow wandered out, took the wrong turn, and wandered away from the town. No one saw her.”

“Without her coat?” I asked.

“I know, I know.”

“My Lord,” I said, slipping into a chair.

He looked into my face. “How can that happen? Someone must have seen her, no? People don't wander without a coat in freezing weather. Someone must have driven by. The sheriff said she was probably drunk. She—he said people knew her at this tavern nearby.”

I looked at Aleck. “Another death.”

“She froze to death, Edna.”

“Like Annabel. Dead.”

Aleck spoke in a clipped voice, close to my ear. “It's not a murder, Edna. Get that notion out of your head. She was a frightened woman, afraid of her room, probably spending the night in a bar. She wandered away.”

I drew my lips into a thin line. “I can't believe that, Aleck. It's just not—possible. Too much has happened in that one room. Annabel's murder, the burglary, the letters, and now this.”

Aleck spoke through clenched teeth. “Stop this now.”

Horace, watching us, stood and frowned. Slowly, he shuffled through the kitchen door, and I heard a pot clang onto the floor. I stood. “This day is over,” I told him. “And not well.”

As I turned to leave, the kitchen door swung open. I expected to see Horace returning but instead Martha stood there, her arms folded over her chest.

“Martha,” I began, “I heard the horrible news from your husband.”

Fury laced her face. “Poor Horace. Now he'll have to find a new dalliance to annoy me with.”

“Really, Martha. A woman has died a horrible death.”

She laughed an unfunny laugh. “And there will always be a new one. It's the nature of the beast.”

“Surely…”

She turned to go back into the kitchen, but she looked back at us, a grotesque smirk on her face. “Two down. Imagine that. Maybe it was something he said to them. Or
did
to them. Or didn't do.” A thin high cackle. The door slammed behind her.

Chapter Sixteen

Peggy Crispen. Dead.

Frozen to death. A body lying against a snowbank in the frigid night. Impossible. When I closed my eyes in bed, I saw her scared face as she stood, bundled and shivering, in the doorway of a building near her own boardinghouse. Frightened out of her wits, that woman, afraid of the space she'd rented during her sad sojourn in Flemington. Not only had she discovered the strangled body of her roommate, a numbing horror, but then found her room ransacked, again violated, and finally, cruelly, she lost her job. Dead. Peggy Crispen. A woman who found herself embroiled in a drama she had no part in creating. And now dead. Drunk, wandering away from town. Impossible.

Early morning, unable to stay in bed, I walked to the boardinghouse and knocked on the first-floor apartment door of the landlord. A shuffle of feet from inside, the snarl of a dog, and an old man stood in the doorway. “Yeah?” He was adjusting paint-stained dungarees, bunched at the work boots, tucking in a yellowed undershirt that bore one or two cigarette burns near the collar. Again, the cigarette-smoker's rasp, “Yeah?” He peered at me through myopic eyes. “You ain't the plumber.”

“I certainly am not.”

“He's late.”

“I'm on time.”

That tickled him, a twist of his lips as he grinned and threw back his head. I saw a broken tooth and a blackened one, both of which gave him an oddly jack o' lantern look, though the long, wrinkled face, pockmarked and splotchy, belied that festive look.

“I'm Edna Ferber, a writer.”

“All booked up. Doubles, triples. I got folks sleeping in the hallway, ma'am.”

“No, no, I'm not looking for a room.” Then I added, unnecessarily, “I have one at the Union Hotel.” His eyebrows shot up at that. A coveted habitation, that hotel. “I have some questions about Annabel Biggs and Peggy Crispen.”

He stepped back, silently nodded me in. “I got some coffee on. I suppose you'll take a cup.” He motioned me to a dumpy chair, currently occupied by a fat orange-matted mongrel who did not plan on sharing the space. But a flick of a wrist from the old man and the beast toppled to the floor, yawned, eyed me through rheumy eyes, and slunk into a corner.

“I'm Pervis Trumbull,” the old man said, extending his hand. “I figured someone gotta talk to me about them sorry girls.”

“Why?”

“Nobody murders nobody in Flemington, leastwise in my long memory—and I been here seventy-seven years now. Papa fought for the Union against the South. Wounded, he was. And now that hillbilly strangles poor Annabel and people just nod like she died of the flu or something. Not fair, let me tell you.”

“Well, I feel the same say, Mr. Trumbull. All the sensation of the Hauptmann trial lets folks ignore—”

He cut in. “Making a lot of us folks rich, but I can't wait till everyone goes away.”

“Too many people here?”

“Craziness, all of it.”

“I agree.”

Again, he broke in as he snapped a Lucky Strike from a pack and lit it with a long wooden match. “That trial shoulda been in Trenton. Not here. Lord, they put two airplane landings not one hundred yards back of this house. Buzz over my head when I'm sleeping. We got this young mayor, John Schenk, who thinks it's good for business. And it is. But I'm not complaining.”

I smiled. “Sounds as if you are.”

The same deferential chuckle. “My wife, now dead these twenty years, used to say if I didn't complain about things I got nothing to talk about.”

“Mr. Trumbull, could you talk to me about Peggy Crispen?”

That startled him. He got up, stumbled to the kitchen with the cigarette drooping from his lips, and poured two cups of coffee. He placed one in front of me and nodded at a small pitcher of milk. I helped myself. Hot, savory, thick. Perfect.

“Annabel Biggs is the story, no?”

“But Peggy's death bothers me.”

He scratched his head. “I ain't following you, ma'am.”

“Two women in the same room, both now dead?”

He bit the inside of his lip, managed to sip coffee while dragging on a cigarette. “But Annabel was killed.” He pronounced the word
kilt
.

“Yes, but Peggy was afraid to return to her room here. The break-in afterwards.”

He waited a heartbeat. “Yeah, I know. I seen that. I talked to her. Sad, sad girl, didn't know what to do, what way to turn.”

I watched him over the rim of the cup. “Yes, the police have arrested Cody Lee Thomas for murder. They consider that case over and done, but to me there is so much mystery with Peggy's death—frozen to death in a bank of snow deep in the night? A horrible death, and strange.”

He shivered. “Sort of shook me when they brung me that news, ma'am.”

“So, yes, Annabel's murder intrigues, but Peggy's bothers.”

“I see what you mean.” He sat back. “She was a sweet one, that Peggy.”

“And not Annabel?”

Another drag on his cigarette. “I don't like to speak ill of the dead, always been warned against it, but”—a feckless grin—“I seem to be doing it all my life, especially since at my age, going on seventy-eight this coming May, I got lots of dead folks around me, and some deserve being spoken of poorly.”

“However…” I prodded.

“Annabel was a just little too loud for me. Not that she made a ruckus in her room. I don't mean that. I wouldn't have tolerated it. This is a quiet house.” He grinned. “A little overcrowded these days, but so be it. I mean, she liked to swagger around the hallways, collaring strangers, boasting of this and that. In your business, yammering about the trial and the coins in her pocket from waitressing over to the Union Hotel. But she's the type what got under your skin, speaks too close to your face, eyes burrowing into you, tell me, tell me, tell me. And you ain't got nothing to tell her, frankly.”

I smiled. “I guess you didn't care for her.”

“Not a question of liking anybody. I didn't trust her. Struck me as someone up to scheming. You know, the shifting eye corners, that cloudy look? Late with her rent so I had to pound on her door. You know what I mean? She told me she was out of here the day they threw the book at Bruno Hauptmann.”

I nodded. “She had her sights on something beyond Flemington.”

“One way to put it. But a pretty gal, that's for sure. In a hard diamond kind of way, you know—all sharp edges and razor cuts. That bright red lipstick girls wear nowadays—called them hussies in my day. I had no idea why she took up with that tarpaper boy, Cody Lee Thomas, him following her around like a puppy dog, the two of them yelling at each other in the street like barnyard animals. Him from the Sourlands—frontier where Negroes and Indians married folks running away from the law. Annabel tells me how she told him to get lost, don't let him near the house, and he took it real bad. Then he kills her. Sooner or later somebody was gonna kill a girl like that.”

“Did you see him that night?”

“Nope. Over to my daughter's in East Amwell. Spent the night listening to
Amos 'n' Andy
on her new Zenith. Come back to find Peggy and the cops running up and down the hallways like chickens with their heads cut off.”

“You liked Peggy?”

“What's not to like about her? Always polite to me. Laughing girl. She talked to me. Young folks look through old folks, you know that. But she was kind of lost, you know.”

“What do you mean?”

He struggled with his words. “Well”—he stretched out the word—“she was always looking up. Or around. I seen her on the sidewalk and someone walks by and she looks at them, like waiting for someone to be her friend. A lonely look on her face. Sort of broke my heart. A plump girl, that Peggy, so fellows didn't smile at her.”

“I think the manager of the café was fond of her.”

He scoffed. “Yeah, I seen that Casanova slipping around here. Stopping in at her room. When I caught him, he tells me he got to tell her about something about work. Lying to me. I don't allow no fooling around in my house—I'm a Presbyterian elder myself—but I know it goes on. That man played on her loneliness. One time I saw them whispering on the front stoop, and he bustled away. You know what she said to me? ‘That man only knows how to lie.' Smart girl, but weak. She let him into her life. Him a married man.”

“She was afraid to stay in her room after the murder.”

He nodded. “Yeah, but I told her it was over and done. The scum in jail for good. But then somebody broke in. That never happened in my house before. And that set her off, dizzy and fretting. She was gonna move out, but where you gonna move in Flemington these days? You can't. She had to stay put for now.”

“Did you see her the night she died?”

“Early on. Yeah. I'm walking home and I seen her going into the Smiler's Tavern on the corner. Lots of locals meet there. The owner is a no-account Methodist. I don't drink, and a young girl ain't got no business in a tavern. A single woman. Well, any woman. Do you drink, Miss Ferber?”

“A cocktail now and then.”

He squinted his eyes. “Comes from living in a big city, I bet.”

“You bet. A big city is one of the reasons I drink.”

“Real funny. Anyway I go to bed around nine, but I checked the furnace first. I seen her walking up the stairs. She calls to me, a little tipsy, I think. But what do I know? I say good night and she tells me she's plum tuckered out. She was out looking for a job that day, chance of being a waitress at Smiler's Tavern. I wait till I hear her close her door, latch it shut. I could hear the snap of the lock. After the robbery, I put another lock on, made her feel safe. I go to bed.”

“So she most likely didn't wander drunk from that bar into the countryside,” I said, mainly to myself. “She came home.”

“Not 'less she went back out again. And I doubt that.”

“But there was a reason she left the room later that night.”

“Maybe she had to meet someone.”

“Or maybe someone got her to leave.”

A quizzical look on his face. “That seems unlikely, Miss Ferber.”

“I don't think she left alone.”

“But why?”

“That's what I intend to find out.”

***

Back at the Union Hotel I heard my name called out. Cora Lee Thomas was sitting on one of the wing chairs by the reception area, her chair turned away from the front window. A tiny woman, she looked lost in the oversized chair, but she'd also tucked herself in, as though hiding from the reporters drifting down from their rooms, her head pressed against the back of the chair.

I walked over. “Mrs. Thomas.”

She glanced around the lobby, already filling with people. “I've never been here before. So fancy a place. I didn't know if I could sit here.”

I smiled. “You're perfectly welcome here.” I slipped into the wing chair next to her, turned it so I faced her. “Has anything happened?”

Her eyes got moist as she fumbled for a handkerchief, dabbed at them. “I'm sorry.”

I held her hand. “What happened?”

A helpless shrug. “They held that lineup I told you about, Cody Lee standing with these other guys. He says he was the only stocky guy, and so the drummer identified him.” She stared into my eyes. “But that's impossible. So…so then they told him to confess, and he wouldn't. I don't know what that meant, but they said someone has come forward who says he
saw
Cody Lee and Annabel together in the doorway, arguing. But that had to be a different night. I mean, they argued at the café earlier that night, but he left. She kept working her shift and then went home.”

“Where someone strangled her in the room.”

Cora Lee shuddered and echoed my words. “In the room.” A heartbeat. “He didn't follow her home because he was with me.”

“You know I believe you, Mrs. Thomas.”

She nodded, a wistful smile making her ragged face come alive. “That's why I'm here, I guess. You're the only person who believes me.” She surveyed the lobby. “I wanted to thank you because I got a phone call from this lawyer from Manhattan who said he's a friend of yours. He's sending a friend who practices criminal law down here in Hunterdon County, an old school chum of his, a good lawyer, Yale Law, he said, his name is Amos Blunt, he tells me.” Now a wider smile. “Thank you.”

“No matter.”

She looked away, sheepish. “He told me you said you'd cover the…you know.”

“I told you not to worry about that.”

She interlocked her fingers and drew them up to her chin. She sucked in her breath. “People ain't that kind to other folks anymore, Miss Ferber. With the Depression and all, it's…like cutthroat out there.”

“I believe you when you say that Cody Lee is innocent.”

Emphatic, her hand tapping the arm of the chair. “Yes, he is.”

“But there's something else you want to tell me. I can tell.”

Bashful, she glanced away, then tilted her head toward her lap. She wouldn't look at me. “Cody Lee got himself a temper like his father, sad to say. And he's restless in that cell, banging into the bars. So I guess he had a little shoving match with the jailer.”

“Oh Lord, that's not good.”

“I
told
him that. ‘What's the matter with you?' I yelled at him. ‘You ain't looking good that way. They'll think you're a violent man, no respect for authority. For laws.'” Her voice fell to a whisper. “When he hit the jailer, he heard that Bruno Hauptmann yell something at him in German. Like he heard the whole thing.”

“What did he say?”

She rolled her head back and forth. “My Cody Lee don't speak German, but the jailer, he told this Bruno to shut the hell up.”

“Did he?”

“He did. But the jailer made fun of him, saying to Cody Lee, ‘Even that baby killer is a better prisoner than you.'”