Penelope Page 4

  Pleased with herself, she took a cab home, and in the cab she removed the black wig, the beauty mark, and the wad of cotton in her nose. The cab driver, as might be expected, never noticed the difference. He didn’t like women, and so he never really looked at them; and aware of the profession’s distaste for her sex, Penelope undertipped him. If she had tipped properly, he would have remembered her.

  Martha, cook and housekeeper, always took a severe and privileged attitude with Penelope. This was not because she had been with Penelope (and before that with Penelope’s parents) for a total of twenty-two years, but because she was an inveterate television watcher, and followed the fortunes of various serialized television domestics. She saw herself as a confused blend of half a dozen unlikely household servants, and from day to day Penelope never knew what to expect in variations regarding Martha—the loyal family retainer one day, the indignant and independent New England housekeeper on another day, the acid-tongued Westerner on still another day, the mother replacement, the scolding teacher, the humble and obedient domestic, etc. She was addressing the third of the manila envelopes when a shrewish, I-told-you-so Martha stalked in.

  “Now, Penelope,” Martha snapped, “you are not even dressed and you’re to meet Mr. Hastings at seven-thirty, and that’s all the way downtown.”

  “I’ll be there,” Penelope replied calmly. In front of her, on her desk, were nine neat packages, folded in white tissue paper and sealed with Scotch tape. She had already labeled and inserted into the proper envelope Josie Stoneham’s diamond bracelet, Alice Carter’s sapphire brooch, and Jane Parkinson’s solitaire diamond pendant. (It was positively enormous, and she could only guess at its value. The newspapers rated it as something over one hundred thousand dollars, but Buzz Carter, the onetime wolf of Wall Street, was known to be chintzy far beyond the call of duty, and Penelope doubted that he would have put out half that sum for Jane.) Now she was addressing an envelope to Florence Crichton. Florence was a stout, acid-tongued little woman who never failed to bring up the fact that she had once spent twenty-two minutes with Barry Goldwater. She had a theory that America was actually and in fact governed by a secret cabal of the Mafia and the Communist Party; and having reasoned the plan out in all of its many ramifications together with her husband, she managed to obtain the interview with Senator Goldwater. She was interestingly silent on what Mr. Goldwater’s reaction had been; but her husband, admiring of her patriotism and perspicacity, had rewarded her with an outsize diamond pin, which Penelope had managed to steal—with great delight.

  It was the only time in her life that she had managed to steal jewels directly from a hot, breathing body—as she would think of it. She had on that occasion driven Mrs. Crichton into a corner, and enduring her sour breath had held her fascinated by a wild improvisation about the American Indians being wholly in the service of the Soviet Union, the reservations being arms caches, and the day chosen when the palefaces would die by the millions, renewing the soil of America with a veritable river of blood. While Florence Crichton listened open-mouthed to this, Penelope carefully unfastened her diamond pin and dropped it into her own evening purse. Not until hours later did Mrs. Crichton become aware of its disappearance.

  It was the one piece of jewelry Penelope hated to part with, and it took a positive effort of will to put the pin into the envelope. It saddened Penelope, and this distraught feeling was reflected in her face. Martha saw it and immediately slid into her substitute mother character and asked Penelope:

  “Is something wrong, my dear?”

  “Silly of me,” Penelope answered. “I feel that I am parting with things of importance. But they aren’t of any real importance—are they, Martha?”

  “What?” Martha asked. She was used to Penelope’s inner conversations, and she climbed aboard at any convenient point.

  “Wealth, diamonds, money—”

  “Your friend Sidney Blackmore—” (he was a television comic whom Penelope had met at a cocktail party and whom she had invited to dinner, to her husband’s mild displeasure, and who had become a sort of hero of Martha’s) “says that he has been rich and he has been poor, and rich is better.”

  “Well, he’s a comic,” Penelope observed, licking the envelope and sealing it.

  “I don’t think that is very comical at all. It is also almost seven o’clock,” Martha warned her.

  Penelope finished addressing the envelopes, changed her dress, did her face quickly, flung on the best of two mink coats, and raced out of the door. As Dr. Mannix always said, she blocked all too easily, and only now did it occur to her how angry her husband would be if she were late.

  Downstairs, she thrust the pile of envelopes containing seven hundred thousand dollars worth of jewels—give or take a hundred thousand—into the doorman’s hands.

  “Tom, do be an angel and mail these for me.”

  Since Tom considered Penelope to be as much of an angel as one finds on this earth, he was delighted to mail the stuff for her.

  Penelope’s husband, James R. Hastings, did not consider her stupid, but that was only because stupidity as a word or a concept had no place in his thoughts. He thought of people as incompetent, inferior, or incapable when he was upset with them or their work. Stupidity, however, was a dangerous word; there were too many men in his world who might have deserved the label. In Penelope’s case, he would have used the word flighty; he endured Penelope. He considered himself a patient and much put upon husband. Yet deep in back of his mind, he had the feeling that he was married to a woman who, if not downright stupid, was at least incapable; and in reaction to this, Penelope had once informed Dr. Mannix that she probably was quite stupid.

  “With your IQ, that would be odd.”

  “I mean in James’s terms,” Penelope said with resignation. “He doesn’t think much of IQ intelligence.”

  “Has he ever said this to you?”

  “You know, not in so many words—only like, well, ‘Really, Penelope!’ Or he will look at me. He has a patient look. I mean, I always say the wrong thing, and then that look of his tells me that I have said the wrong thing. He’s so patient. I know he could have married one of those tall, strong, competent women. And then when I have put my foot in my mouth, he will say to someone, ‘Well, you know Penelope.’ I’m a sort of an albatross. You know—‘instead of the cross, an albatross about his neck was hung,’ or something like that; and I do feel sorry for him.”

  Now “poor James Hastings” was sitting in Whitman’s Restaurant on Nassau Street, and Penelope was already twenty minutes late. With Hastings, as his dinner guests, were John Comaday, the police commissioner of New York City, a gray, thick-necked, unhappy man of fifty-five or so; and Larry Cohen, who was first assistant to the district attorney of Manhattan, and had the reputation of being the brightest young man on his staff. Comaday had put down two whiskey sours, and was now eating bread in a steady and grim determination to kill his hunger. Cohen nursed his drink.

  Hastings apologized again. “Well, that’s Penelope.” And Comaday wondered why the man had ever been such a fool as to ask his wife to meet him down here. “I think we ought to order,” Hastings said; and at that moment Penelope entered.

  Her husband managed his temper, but his look spoke volumes; and as he introduced Penelope to the two men, she attempted to chatter away the tension. As each word came out, she knew it was wrong. She could anticipate the evening. At the end, they would go home, and James would be murderously silent.

  “I will have a drink,” Penelope said in response to Cohen’s suggestion, thinking, “What a very nice young man!”

  James looked at her, and his expression said, “Haven’t you made us wait long enough? And you know how you get with a drink.”

  “A very dry martini,” Penelope added.

  “Penelope—”

  “James doesn’t think martinis agree with me,” she giggled. James bit his lower lip. “Oh, I am sorry,” Penelope said. “If you don’t want me to have it, James—�
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  “You are over twenty-one,” James said.

  Penelope, sitting between Comaday and her husband, realized suddenly that Comaday’s knee was touching hers. Food was on the table, and with it the black beer for which Whitman’s was famous, and the men were eating and relaxed and satisfied, and Commissioner John Comaday’s knee was touching hers. She glanced at Mr. Comaday His mood had changed. A vast plate of roast beef and hash-browned potatoes, washed down by two mugs of dark beer, had changed him from a somber, gloomy policeman to a man of the world among men of the world. His knee pressed a trifle—oh, just the smallest trifle—harder against Penelope’s.

  They had been discussing the bank robbery. Hastings was most disturbed by the ease with which the robbery had been perpetrated. It gave the bank a bad reputation. Too easy. Too easy.

  “No easier than we’ll pick her up, Mr. Hastings.”

  “You mean you know who the thief is already?” Penelope asked.

  “We have a pretty good notion, Mrs. Hastings. That doesn’t mean we have her name and address. But we have what we call an MO file, modus operandi, or method of working—” Again, the pressure of his knee increased ever so slightly. When John Comaday desired to, he could be a warm and charming man. “… and we have this in a cross-file. All criminals are repeaters, and very few of them have any intelligence to speak of. We begin with women bank robbers—narrow it to an age group—cross-search on rubber masks, wigs, bright-yellow clothes—”

  “I have a bright-yellow suit,” Penelope interrupted.

  “I’m sure a million women have. But they are not bank robbers,” Comaday continued warmly, understandingly, while Penelope’s husband frowned with annoyance. “We simply continue to cross-check until we have narrowed down our suspects to—well, how many would you say, Larry?”

  “Two or three if we’re lucky,” Cohen nodded.

  “That’s one approach, my dear lady,” Comaday said expansively. “Another is the film. Don’t forget, we have a motion-picture record of the thief—which we intend to have a look at directly after dinner.”

  “A motion-picture record!” Penelope cried. “How absolutely thrilling. You know, one reads about splitting the atom, and going to the moon, and all these wonderful scientific discoveries—I mean like antibiotics—”

  “Penelope,” her husband said, “we are not talking about antibiotics.”

  “Of course, I know that, James.”

  “I think,” Comaday said gallantly, “that Mrs. Hastings is simply grouping our scientific methods with others.”

  “Exactly.” Penelope nodded, a slight, nervous giggle in her voice.

  “Perhaps not the same magnitude of science, but we are on the ball.”

  “And you have motion pictures of the thief?”

  “We have indeed.”

  The police commissioner, being a consistent man, was continuing to apply pressure. Penelope glanced down. There, beside her, was Mr. Comaday’s side pants pocket, and projecting slightly from it, his billfold. Penelope could not resist. Afterward, she told Dr. Mannix that it must have been the very dry martini, for whatever her feelings about stealing were, one did not go about pinching police commissioners’ wallets. She simply could not resist, and in one motion and moment, she did the following: she increased the pressure of the knees slightly; she squeezed Comaday’s arm with her left hand, just a simple squeeze of, good will; and with her right hand, she reached across her lap and deftly slipped the billfold out of Mr. Comaday’s pocket, opened her purse, and dropped it in. And all the while, she was saying:

  “But suppose this were the first time? Now, please don’t feel that I am casting any reflection on the quality or theory of your work, Mr. Comaday—but couldn’t this be a new thief? A sort of amateur?”

  “Penny,” Mr. Hastings said, “would you please leave crime to the commissioner?”

  Comaday smiled benignly and assured Penelope, kindly enough, that the work of an amateur was just that, while the work of a professional was something else entirely. Larry Cohen, on the other hand, studied Penelope shrewdly; and without ever looking directly at him, Penelope caught his glance and wondered what she could have said or done to make him appraise her so thoughtfully. She had no desire for anyone to be overthoughtful about her tonight, and she said coyly to the commissioner:

  “You must remember, Mr. Comaday, that I see very little of this hard, terrifying underworld of yours.”

  “Which is our purpose,” replied Comaday. “The decent citizen should never even be aware of an underworld, if police work is done properly.”

  “If it’s done properly,” Hastings said. He might have a silly little ass for a wife, but he was still Hastings of the City Federal Bank, and he counted for something in this town. “If it is done properly, Commissioner,” he repeated, “but how properly is it done when some heroin-saturated slut can walk into my bank and rob it without so much as a by your leave?”

  During this, Comaday reached for his napkin and allowed his knuckles to brush Penelope’s thigh. She parted contact with his knee, informing him in proper under-the-table talk that tonight it was only so far and no further.

  “Well, sir,” said Larry Cohen, “if the police could prevent all crime, then we would indeed have Utopia, wouldn’t we?”

  “I think it is wonderful police work to find out that she was a dope addict,” Penelope said sweetly. “I am so interested in addiction. I think it’s one of the great problems of our time. Don’t you, Commissioner?”

  “I do indeed,” the commissioner admitted graciously. “And now I suggest a quick brandy, and over to Centre Street.”

  Naturally, James R. Hastings took care of the check; but when they came to the coatroom, John Comaday insisted that this must be on him. He waited until he and the two other men were wrapped in their overcoats, and then he examined his loose change. He had fifty-five cents, but with Penelope watching him so admiringly, he could hardly tip less than a dollar for the three of them.

  He reached into his pants’ side pocket for his billfold—he had never taken to carrying bills loose or in a money clip, considering this in the way of a gesture of contempt for hard-earned money—and Penelope smiled encouragingly at him as his hand emerged empty. He smiled back, but a bit vacuously—going through his other pants’ pockets.

  “Anything wrong, Commissioner?” Larry Cohen asked.

  “Can’t understand—”

  “Let me—” Hastings began.

  “No, no—not at all. I just don’t seem to have my wallet,” Comaday said bewilderedly.

  “Poor thing,” said Penelope. “I always feel that a man is so helpless when he loses his wallet. I mean—it’s like—like losing himself—”

  “For heaven’s sake, Penelope,” her husband cried, “can’t you see that Mr Comaday’s disturbed! This is no time—”

  “No, please, please,” Comaday said, trying to get a grip on himself. “I probably left it in my office. I remember taking it out to find my telephone credit card. I probably left it on my desk. You paid for the cab over here, didn’t you, Larry?”

  “I did at that,” Cohen nodded. “And I intend to pay for the coats,” he said, laying a dollar on the counter.

  “Oh, I hope you find your wallet, Commissioner,” Lena, the hatcheck girl, said. “I think it’s outrageous that a man like yourself—” She was interrupted at this point by Mr. Alvin Whitman, the proprietor, who practically got down on his knees in apology. “That this should happen in my restaurant!” he moaned.

  “Not at all,” Larry Cohen said. “There is absolutely no indication that it happened here at your restaurant.”

  “I am insured,” declared Mr. Whitman. “Every penny will be reimbursed. I will—”

  “You will do nothing at all about this,” the commissioner declared with some asperity. “I don’t want it spoken about or mentioned!”

  “Actually,” Larry Cohen explained, “we don’t know that the commissioner’s wallet has been stolen at all, Mr. Whitman
, and it would be quite improper to take any steps based on such an assumption. The fact is that he probably mislaid it in his office. I am sure it will turn up.”

  He glanced at Penelope as he said this last, and she nodded and walked over to Commissioner Comaday and took his arm. “Of course it will turn up,” she declared. “And now I am dying to see those films. Imagine—photographing a thief in the very act!”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The small viewing room at Police Headquarters was already filled almost to capacity when Commissioner Comaday and his party arrived. Detective Lieutenant Leonard Rothschild of the Nineteenth Squad was there, with all four of his sergeants, Captain Harold Bixbee, the uptown district commander, two other East Side lieutenants, Richard Shepson, the bank manager, two of the bank guards, Sergeant Andrew Peebles (who was said to have a more photographic and retentive memory than any IBM machine), the three downtown specialists in bank robbery, and the assistant commissioner as well. And with this some dozen gentlemen and ladies of the press. It spoke well, if not of James R. Hastings’ importance, then at least of the importance of the City Federal Bank and its thirty branches.

  Most of the seats in the viewing room were already occupied. The back row, upholstered in contrast to the hard finish of the other rows, was reserved for high officials and their guests, and was still unoccupied.

  Recovering but slowly from the shock of his missing billfold, Commissioner Comaday managed to keep his place by Penelope’s side, and he said to her, “You will sit with me, dear lady—that is, if you have no objections?”

  “It will be thrilling,” Penelope answered.

  Larry Cohen, meanwhile, had sent a policeman into the commissioner’s office to look for the wallet. Not that he had any real hope of finding it, but he was intrigued by the case of the missing wallet. Comaday nodded somberly when he was informed that it was not there.