The Clairvoyant Countess Read Free Page B

you. Did you find a letter in Miss Bartlett’s wallet?”
    He stared at her. “No.”
    “Then it had been removed. But find the letter that she carried folded in her wallet, a letter from someone she trusted and adored, and you will find her murderer.”
    “She showed you this letter?”
    Madame Karitska gestured impatiently. “Of course not, but I could feel its emanations: they were terrible, ugly, vindictive, warped.”
    Pruden sighed, crossed his legs and decided to try a different tack. “Perhaps you would describe for me everything the girl said?”
    “Of course,” said Madame Karitska cheerfully, “but it was very little—I disappointed her and she did not remain. I’ll try to think—” She put both hands to her temples and slowly recreated her few moments with the girl, describing the visit in detail.
    “This picture you claim comes to your mind,” said the lieutenant, curious in spite of himself.
    “I never explain it to skeptics,” she said firmly. “I will say only that it is a sixth sense, a gift for sensing what is invisible to others, for seeing what
is
and has been. In this case I was holding a ring which had belonged to the girl’s mother. She was undoubtedly wearing it when she died.”
    Pruden nodded. “Very interesting,” he said, and put down his cup of Turkish coffee.
    “You’ve not finished it,” said Madame Karitska with an amused smile.
    Pruden found himself smiling back at her, and then—suddenly uneasy at what she might guess of his thoughts, for there
was
something uncanny about her—hefrowned. “I’ve got to be going. I won’t say I swallow any more of this than I did of your coffee but it’s interesting. Something they never mentioned in Police College,” he added wryly.
    “A pity,” she said. “I understand the Russians are devoting whole college courses to psychic phenomena, but of course Americans continue to resist it.” She sighed and stood up to usher him to the door. “Oh by the way, Lieutenant Pruden,” she said as he reached the door.
    “Yes?”
    “Your father is in the hospital and not expected to live, is this not correct? I think you will find the doctors are quite wrong and that he will begin to mend by the weekend.”
    Pruden looked hard and long at her and then flung open the door and went out.
    Alison Bartlett’s body was claimed by her stepfather the next day, and Pruden met him at the morgue, where the man introduced himself as Carl Madison. He looked distraught, his eyes red-rimmed, his tie askew. He was guilt-stricken, he said; he had taken great pains not to interfere with Alison’s desire to be independent after her mother’s death and now this had happened; he should never have allowed her to come to the city. Pruden murmured the usual, asked a few questions about Alison’s life in Massachusetts, the body was signed over to Madison, and he left on his sad journey home.
    A week later the public murmurings over the Bartlett murder had grown into an uproar and Pruden and Swope had learned nothing more than they’d known twenty-four hours after the girl’s death. Every possiblelead had been followed to its source, every molester, loiterer, pimp, and known psychotic in their files checked out and still there was nothing. A big fat cipher. The county prosecutor was beginning to make angry statements. He was threatening his own investigation, and that, as Pruden’s superior grimly pointed out, threw a very bad light on the efficiency of the department.
    Pruden said, “I’d like to go to Massachusetts and poke around for a few days.”
    “She wasn’t murdered in Massachusetts,” pointed out the Chief. “She was murdered here in Trafton.”
    Pruden hesitated, a little embarrassed. “Look,” he said uneasily, “there’s always the chance we’ve gone about this wrong, isn’t there? I know McGill checked Massachusetts but it was only an inquiry to see if the girl had any rejected boy friends or had mentioned any men she met in