Who Has Wilma Lathrop? (10 page)

There were flaws in the theory, a lot of them, but it was worth investigating.

Lathrop realized the blowzy blonde was talking to him. He looked sideways at her. “I beg your pardon?”

“I said, how about it?”

“How about what?”

“You haven’t been listening to a word I’ve been saying.”

“I’m afraid I haven’t.”

He paid his check and left the restaurant. He might have something, or nothing. At least it was better than beating his head against a wall.

Huddled in the doorway of the restaurant against the cold wind sweeping a Utter of old newspapers and other debris up the neon-lighted street, Lathrop considered going directly to the police. He was tempted. But the police might laugh at him. Worse, they might detain him. Harris had warned him he might be picked up any minute and before he was arrested and charged with a crime he hadn’t committed, he wanted to retain a lawyer to define and represent his rights. He wanted to talk to Vladimir.

It wasn’t a nice feeling, this not knowing if he was a wanted man. Lathrop glanced furtively up, then down the street. If the police were looking for him it wouldn’t be safe for him to take a cab to Ramsey’s house. If the cab dispatchers had been alerted, as soon as the driver made his trip call the dispatcher would call the police and a squad car would be waiting in front of the lawyer’s house.

Lathrop tried to remember where his car was. So much had happened it was difficult for him to list events in their chronological order. But, to the best of his recollection, he hadn’t driven anywhere since he had returned from the Stanislawow house to find a yellow Buick usurping his usual parking space. Since then he had ridden in police cars or taxis. His car should be parked a quarter of a block from the house.

He walked east through the cold to Sheridan Road, took the first bus that came along and transferred at Diversey Avenue. No one paid any attention to him. It took him an hour to reach the square. The windows of his flat were dark but there were lights on both the first and the third floors and a thin plume of smoke was curling from the chimney. At least the police had allowed the new janitor to build a fire.

His car was where he had left it. He got in and attempted to start it. The car had stood in the cold so long that it started reluctantly but once the motor turned over it gave him no further trouble.

Lathrop thought a moment before moving the lever to Drive. If he remembered correctly, the Fair Oaks section of Oak Park adjoined the Chicago City limits on the south side of North Avenue, west of Austin Boulevard. He started off.

He drove carefully, making certain to stop at all traffic lights and through streets. Twice he thought he was being followed but both times the car behind him turned down a dark side street.

North Avenue was cleared of snow but the pavement was slick with ice. As he passed Austin Boulevard he was tempted to drive to the Mercer Street address and have a showdown with Vladimir. However, he wanted to talk to the lawyer first. He wanted to be certain someone knew of the theory he’d conceived. Besides, if what he was assuming was correct, Vladimir wasn’t going anywhere. He was stuck with the character he’d assumed, that of the loving but oh-so-innocent brother.

1521 Fair Oaks Avenue proved to be an attractive field stone and timber house in a neighbourhood of equally high-priced homes. The upper floor was dark but there was a light behind the drawn drapes of the mullioned windows of the living-room. Here, except for the precisely shovelled walks, a few sled tracks and a path gouged by the rolled snowball of a half-finished snow man, the recent fall of snow was unbroken.

Lathrop parked behind another parked car at the kerb, under an ancient oak tree whose leafless limbs reached across the street to mesh with the limbs of the trees growing out of the far parkway. The moon was as cold as the night and the light filtering through the bare branches cast odd patterns on the snow.

Lathrop got out of his car and stood a moment looking at Ramsey’s house. It was a hell of a time of night to call on an attorney. He closed his door and took two quick steps through the snow and stopped as the door of the car behind which he was parked opened and a familiar voice said, “We thought you might be headed for here. After you passed Austin we were sure, so we came on ahead and waited. Where you been since the cops let you go, Lathrop? Our butts are sore waiting for you to show at the three-flat. Then when you did show, there were too many cars around for us to do anything about it.”

The larger of the two men who had attacked him two nights before stepped out of the parked car and walked towards Lathrop slowly.

Lathrop had thrust his hands into his pockets against the cold. He took his hands out of his pockets and made fists of them. “What’s the idea?” he asked. “Who are you?”

The big man came still closer. “That doesn’t matter to you.”

It was so cold under the tree that Lathrop’s words were accompanied by little puffs of condensation. “That,” he said, “is a masterpiece of understatement. I spent eight hours yesterday trying to identify you from pictures in the rogues’ gallery. Where’s Wilma? Where’s my wife?”

There was a faint crunch of snow behind him and Lathrop turned to face the second of the two men. “I thought schoolteachers had to be bright,” the man said. “You must not read the newspapers. Where’s Wilma? Well, I’ll tell you. When you found out she had been a naughty girl before she met you, you blew your top and killed her and put her body in the firebox of your heating plant.”

“You know that’s not so.”

“Sure we know. But do the police?”

It was difficult trying to watch both men. Lathrop backed a step, until he could feel the bole of the oak tree behind him. “What is this? Another merry-go-round?”

The larger of the two men said, “You could call it that. Or maybe we were friends of Wilma’s.”

“Your pal has just admitted that she is still alive.”

“That’s right. As pretty and tight as ever. O.K. Let’s just say we take pride in our work and we don’t like to have a chump wiggle out of a trap. You’re supposed to be in a cell. And moving around like this, you might complicate things.”

“Where is Wilma?”

“In a safe place. And still as stuck-up as ever. But then she always was a snooty little broad. Even with Raoul. And she made him marry her.” The man seemed to relish the prospect. “But when we get through she’ll be as willing as her feeble-minded sister.”

Lathrop was no longer cold. “You keep your hands off Wilma,” he warned the man.

The larger of the two men laughed.

“You bastard,” Lathrop cursed him. He struck out instinctively and had the satisfaction of feeling bone and gristle flatten under his fist.

The blow forced the man back. He stood with his head thrust forward so he wouldn’t bleed on his overcoat. “You son-of-a-bitch. You’ve broken my nose.” He held a handkerchief to his nose and reached into his overcoat pocket with his other hand. “Sap him, Pete. But don’t mark him any more than you have to.”

The man on the other side of Lathrop swung a blackjack and the leaded leather thudded against the tree as Lathrop dodged the blow. “You’ll have to do better than that,” he said.

The man braced his feet. “I intend to. I’m going to beat your brains in.”

“Like you did to Nielsen?”

Lathrop dodged a second blow and got in a hard left and right to the body before the man could back away. He followed them with a punch to the jaw that sent the man sprawling in the snow. But he had momentarily forgotten the man whose nose he’d broken.

The thud of the blackjack knocked his hat from his head and left him entirely conscious but unable to move, paralysed by pain. It was an odd sensation. He saw the man lift his arm again. He heard the blow land on his head, but didn’t feel it. His body stiffened galvanically. His palms scraped the rough bark of the tree against which he was standing as he attempted to hold himself erect. He stood a moment longer looking at the lighted mullioned windows with glazed eyes. Then the tree in back of him tilted at an absurd angle and he slid down the trunk to the ground and lay on the snow without moving.

LATHROP HAD
never been more comfortable. He lay relaxed, his breathing slightly laboured, admiring Shirley Stanislawow.

“It’s like I’ve always said,” the buxom barmaid confided. Her voice was a throaty whisper. “Some dames are nuts. They don’t know when they’ve got it made. If your wife doesn’t come back or you don’t find her and you are still in the market and you like your girl a little on the heavy side, it may be we can work out something.”

Lathrop was embarrassed. Shirley shouldn’t be in a public place. He tried to tell her and couldn’t. His tongue was too thick.

Shirley sucked in her breath as she continued. “I’ve never been married to a high-school teacher. The chances are I never will be. But from where I’m standing, it looks like it would be a hell of a lot better than standing back of a Noble Street bar pouring drinks for a bunch of drunken Polacks.”

Lathrop was even more embarrassed. If Shirley didn’t stop he was going. There was, he decided, a small generator back of the bar, undoubtedly the motor that cooled the beer box and the coils. Its rhythmic beat pulsed in his ear. Then Shirley was gone and he was with Wilma on the night they had been married, Wilma shy and a little frightened, her lips pressed to his as she promised:

“I’ll try to make you a good wife.”

His sense of immediate urgency gone, Lathrop took her in his arms and kissed her. Her lips were soft and sweet and moist as warm wet velvet. The kiss lasted a long time. The pressure of Wilma’s lips became painfully unbearable. Lathrop couldn’t get his breath. No matter how he moved his head, Wilma’s wet lips clung to his. He struggled to free himself and his groping fingers encountered the chrome handle of a car door. The handle depressed under his weight and Wilma, too, was gone as the door opened and Lathrop, his body a dead weight, slipped from behind the wheel and fell heavily to the ground.

The impact of the fall shocked him into semi-consciousness. He lay on the snow sucking great gasps of air into his lungs, still struggling weakly, trying to escape the smothering proximity of the turned-up velvet collar of his coat. Then full consciousness returned and he rolled on his back and stared up at the star-filled sky.

Wherever he was, he was no longer in front of Attorney Ramsey’s residence. He was lying in the open, his view of the sky unobstructed by branches, but with distant towering trees silhouetted against the dark skyline.

His breathing still laboured, Lathrop sat up and cradled his head in his hands. The rhythmic beat that had bothered him still pulsed in his ears, then the metallic click of a tappet permeated the rhythm and Lathrop realized where the sound was coming from. He was listening to the idling motor of his car.

He held his head in his hands a long time, then he got unsteadily to his feet and walked to the rear of his car. A length of garden hose was taped to the exhaust pipe, running from the pipe through a partially open rear wing window to disappear over the back of the front seat.

His strength returned gradually. The numbed feeling left his fingers. His tongue shrank to fit his mouth. When he could, he unwound the tape that held the hose to the exhaust pipe, then shut off the motor of his car and opened all four doors. His state of mental shock continued. It had been close, very close. He was supposed to have died. He didn’t know what had saved him, perhaps the memory of Wilma’s kiss groping through the fog of his slowly ebbing life. At least he knew one thing now. When a man died of carbon monoxide poisoning, he died happily.

An impelling need for haste replaced Lathrop’s state of shock. He was on the far side of his car, opposite the wheel. He took two quick steps, meaning to walk around the car, and fell flat on his face in the snow. It was an effort for him to get back to his feet. He still wasn’t out of the woods. He would have to make haste slowly. Not that, except for Wilma’s sake, there was need of haste. He was supposed to be dead. He was supposed to be sitting in the front seat of his car dreaming pleasant dreams; just another statistic, to be found with his face beet red and a silly smile on his lips by the first passer-by in the morning.

Lathrop laid his palms flat on the cold metal of a fender and rested his weight on his arms. The police could believe him, or not. The police could do as they pleased. He knew what he intended to do as soon as he recovered his strength. And this time he’d use a gun if he had to.

As his head began to clear, his thinking grew more concise. Wilma had used him as a hide-out, true. But she’d had some good reason for that. More, there had been some good reason why she had held on to the jewels taken in the Sutton Place stick-up. He’d know why when he talked to her.

The first scene with the blackjack twins, the envelope filled with money, the message he’d been instructed to give to her had been so much razzle-dazzle to set the stage for what was to follow. He still didn’t know how they had got Wilma out of the flat. But if she had left of her own free will they had been waiting for her and the only reason she had left was because she loved him, because she didn’t want him to become involved in her past. They had threatened to hurt
him
.

Lathrop stood savouring the thought. Their last night together hadn’t been a he. Wilma had meant every word, each caress. She hadn’t been pretending. The pretence had been before that, while she had been trying to act her conception of a schoolteacher’s wife.

Lathrop realized his glasses were steamed. He wiped them with his handkerchief and studied the star-lighted landscape. He was in the Cook County Forest Preserve, at Dam Number Two, a spot at which he and Wilma had swum several times. The boys had been very clever. To date, they hadn’t missed a trick. Both sorrow and remorse sought familiar spots. It was dubious if Wilma had told them the details of their courtship and marriage. That left Vladimir. The blond youth was in this up to his duck-tail haircut.

The little things added up and there you were. Still, Vladimir’s act had been convincing. He had managed to fool the police.

Lathrop closed the doors of his car but to be on the safe side he rolled down all the windows. From what he remembered of carbon monoxide from his college chemistry, the gas was colourless, tasteless, and odourless. It caused headache, weakness, nausea, fainting, paralysis of the nervous sytem — and death.

It was too cold and too late for petters. As far as he could tell he was alone in this particular section of the Forest Preserve. His car stood on a little used side road. If he hadn’t subconsciously depressed the handle of the car and fallen to the ground when he had, by now he would be a body, a man dead by his own hand. His assumed suicide would have been accepted as proof that he had killed Wilma and the case would have been transferred to the closed file.

Lathrop found his cigarettes and lit one. If he had died, the reporter who had written the story for the morning paper would have had a field day in clichés. Remorseful husband … it stands to reason … dead by his own hand … grey dawn of morning … alert passer-by. If the coroner had noticed any swellings or contusions left by the blackjacking in front of Attorney Ramsey’s house, they would have been attributed to the first beating he’d taken. He could visualize the headline —

The faculty members at Palmer High would have felt sorry for and a little ashamed of him for having so besmirched their mutual profession. Mrs. Metz would have clucked her tongue and said she knew it all the time. Mr. Metz and Dr. Klein would have worried for fear the new owner of the building would raise their rents. Mrs. Nielsen, in her own grief, would have read the headline with grim satisfaction. The new janitor would have wondered who was going to pay him. Of his closer acquaintances, only Jenny and Eddie Mandell would have understood. Young as they were, they knew what love could do.

Despite the bitter cold, small drops of perspiration beaded on Lathrop’s face. The very simplicity of the plot had guaranteed its success.

Lieutenant Jezierna and Sergeant Meyers and Detectives Harris and Jethro and Madigan were intelligent men. They would have mental reservations. They would have followed the inquest closely. They might even have made an independent investigation. But in the end all they would have been able to do would have been to shake their heads and add his and Wilma’s death to their mental file of queer cases.

It had been clever, devilishly clever. No further search would have been made for Wilma, and the blackjack twins would have been free to do what they would with her.

Lathrop’s sense of urgency returned, this time in a different form. He was wasting valuable time. Wilma loved and needed him. And he thought he knew where she was.

He got in his car and started the motor. The lonely side road was tyre-deep with snow and pocked from the fall and winter storms. He was forced to drive at a crawl until he reached the cleared highway. Then he depressed the accelerator to the floor boards.

There was little traffic on the highway until he reached the junction of River Road and North Avenue. Then the streams of market-bound produce trucks forced him to slacken the speed. Once he almost sideswiped a huge semi-trailer loaded with potatoes. Another time, trying to leapfrog a convoy of trucks, he barely missed a head-on collision with a car coming the other way. Both times he drove on, deaf to the blast of horns and vehement but inaudible profanity behind him.

Still closer in, the cars of early rising workers swelled the stream of traffic and forced him to both slow down and stay in line. He drove east as far as Austin Boulevard, then stopped his car at the kerb in front of an all-night lunchroom a few doors from the corner.

As Lathrop parked his car, a newspaper truck piled high with morning papers paused on the corner he’d just passed and the bundle hustler in the back of the truck bounced two twine-tied bundles of newspapers on the walk before the truck sped on.

Lathrop walked back to the corner and found a lone quarter in change in his pocket. He laid it on the newsstand and extracted a paper from one of the tied bundles.

His name was splattered in bold type all over the front page. He walked back to the lighted window of the lunchroom to read it. The headline read:

There was even a picture of him, taken ten years before. He was in uniform with two gold pips on his shoulders and a silly grin on his face. It had been taken on the day he had graduated from the nightmare of the officer’s candidate school at Fort Benning, Georgia. It had been some months after the picture before someone had discovered he had a degree in engineering and had got him transferred from the infantry to the combat engineers.

Lathrop read the newspaper story carefully. It was mainly a rehash of the story he had read the day before. With one important exception. The State Attorney’s office had decided it had enough evidence to hold him on suspicion of murder while it asked the Grand Jury for a true bill. The police laboratory had failed to establish the fragments of bones as human but a second sifting of the ashes had disclosed a melted partial plate that checked with Wilma’s dental chart. The police were still vitally interested in questioning the two men who, allegedly, had attacked him in the Juvenile Court parking lot, but they were much more interested in taking him into custody. All police cars in the city had been alerted to pick him up on sight.

Lathrop looked through the windows of the lunchroom. There was a public phone on the wall. He folded the paper carefully and tugged open the heavy front door. Speaking from behind the glass cigar counter, a swart-faced man of obvious Greek ancestry greeted him cordially. “Good morning, sir. What will it be for you. Some waffles and fresh country sausage? Or maybe some nice ham and eggs?”

Lathrop had never been less hungry. He extracted a five-dollar bill from his pocket and laid it on the glass case. “No, thank you. But I’d like to use your phone if I may. And might I have some change?”

After the cold of the night and the physical effects of the carbon monoxide fumes that had almost taken his life, the co-mingled smells in the overheated lunchroom made Lathrop feel slightly giddy. He gripped the edge of the cigar case as he fought down a wave of nausea.

The Greek picked the bill from the glass. “You don’t feel so good, huh?”

“No. I don’t.”

“You got troubles, huh?”

Lathrop swallowed the lump in his throat. “Yes. It so happens I have.”

The proprietor of the lunchroom rang up “No Sale” on his cash register. “Ha.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“
You
got troubles. Ten dollars a night it costs me just for light and heat so I can stay open all night. I have to hire another short-order cook and another waitress, at time and a half for night work. And how much money do I take in? What kind of trade do I get? Drunks who buy a cup of coffee it costs me more to make than I can charge. More drunks who make water all over the wash-room. An old lady who asks, ‘Has the last bus come?’ ” The Greek laid four dollar bills, three quarters, two dimes and a nickel on the rubber mat. “Now you want change for à five-dollar bill.” He put his elbows on the case and leaned his weight on them. “Tell me again, Mister. You got troubles, huh?”

“No. Maybe not,” Lathrop told him.