“You read about the dead woman found in Stockford?”
“I read something about it. I don’t know anything really.” She leaned forward a little. “You don’t mean it was Joan, do you?”
“That’s what we’re trying to find out. These suitcases and a green trunk were found in the house. Do you recognize the suitcases?”
Ruth Cary was uncertain. “Joan had a couple of suitcases like those, but I can’t remember whether hers had initials. Her trunk was kept in the cellar. She only brought it up when she moved. I don’t see how she could be the girl you found. SKe left town. She got married and moved out West.”
“You don’t want to identify the suitcases?”
She shook her head. “I can’t be sure they’re hers.”
Fellows lifted the smaller to the cushion beside him and got up to open it. “Maybe you can identify some of her things. Would you care to take a look?”
The girl came over reluctantly, and Fellows lifted the lid. The belongings inside were not neatly folded. They hadn’t been when the locksmith had opened the luggage, and the police, when they inventoried the items, were careless in replacing them. Fellows took out some underthings on the top which were store bought and meant nothing. Then came a blouse, a dress, and a sweater. Ruth Cary said tensely, “Those are hers.” Then she drew out an item herself. She said, “That’s my blouse,” and burst into tears.
Fellows helped her back to her chair and she said she was sorry and blew her nose. He repacked the suitcases and met Wilks’s eye. Death was a sorry fact at all times, but at last a break had come. At last they knew who was dead. He put the suitcase back on the floor and said solicitously to the girl, “Can I get you a glass of water or something?”
If the blouse made her weep, Fellows’s remark brought about an opposite effect. She laughed through her tears and got herself under control. “Why,” she asked, “does a man always say something like that—as though water was a miracle cure?” She wiped her eyes and said, “I’ll be all right now. It’s just—it’s such a shock. She lived with us and now she’s been murdered.”
“Maybe you can help us find out who did it.”
She put her handkerchief away. “I want to.”
“You said she got married, or she told you she got married. We’d like to know who the man was.”
Ruth leaned on her knees and shook her head. “I can’t tell you.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
“Can’t. I don’t have the faintest idea.”
“We think he may have been the man who took her trunk to the station in a pick-up truck. That ring any bells?”
She smiled a little at that. “That was Bob Herald. He’s Helen’s beau—my other roommate. He has a chicken farm and that was his truck.”
“We’ll want to talk to him.”
Ruth said, “He’ll be here. Helen’s having dinner with him, but when I said you’d called, she said they’d come right back.”
Fellows nodded. Then he asked the girl to tell him everything she could about the dead girl. Joan, Ruth related, worked as a secretary for the Fizz-Rite Cola Company. Originally she was in their main office in Bridgeport, but when a branch bottling plant was opened between Townsend and Stamford, she was transferred. This had happened two years before in the fall. Through one of the new girls who’d been hired, she learned of the apartment Ruth and Helen had and that they would not be averse to having an additional roommate to help defray the rent. The two girls, who worked together in the greeting card company, met and talked to Joan and took her on, Joan moving in at the beginning of the previous February. Since Ruth and Helen worked together and had grown up together, and since they were five or six years younger than Joan, they weren’t too close to her. “We date a lot, for instance,” Ruth said, “and Joan never had any dates at all. At least not at first. But we got along very well. She sort of played mother to us. She wasn’t a wallflower, you understand. She was very attractive and I think she had lots of dates in her time, but she was thirty at least and, you know, that’s practically death.
“I think her problem was she really wanted to get married. I don’t mean she talked about it, but you can tell. Helen and I sometimes tried to get her a date at our place, but we never had any luck. There weren’t many people to ask. Most of the men we know are younger than thirty, and the older men are already married. She didn’t ask us to, but she was interested in our dates and we knew she wished she had some too.
“And then one day, it was last April or May sometime, she went out herself. She said she was going to the movies, but Helen and I suspected she had a beau. At least she had a kind of glow when she came home like she’d had a date instead of going to the show alone, if you know what I mean. After that, she started going out now and then. It wasn’t every night or even every other night, but maybe every week or two, she’d be going to another show. We got after her for keeping it such a secret. She always was that way, never saying much about herself, but we finally got her to break down and admit she had a boy friend. She wouldn’t tell us his name,
