Free Conspiracy of Silence by S. T. Joshi Page A

reporter for the Herald Tribune, and she’d helped me on a case. We’d become friends, colleagues, pals. In fact, we’d become bedmates. Once I’d made her give up sticking a huge wad of chewing gum in her mouth, everything was fine. Well, not quite everything. We enjoyed each other’s company—and on top of that, I was no monk, and she was no nun. So what about marriage? Well, here’s the thing: Since Marge had to hobnob with the upper crust, she couldn’t exactly tag along with a shamus whose suits were all bought for $11.95 at one of the discount stores on 14th Street; and she didn’t exactly fit into my world of cheating spouses and bail bondsmen either. So we were an “item,” but that’s about all: whether we’d ever shack up and tie the knot was a big question that neither of us was anxious to answer anytime soon.
    But this isn’t about me. What I’d found was that Marge was an incredible source of information on people who were generally out of my league. She knew everyone worth knowing and kept files on everyone whether they were worth knowing or not. She and her colleague, Gene Merriwether, had done me lots of good turns over the years.
    So when I sauntered up to their office on West 40th Street, it was not entirely a surprise. They were always glad to see me, and they liked feeling useful. Maybe, too, they liked vicariously slumming in my world.
    I got right down to business. When I told them I was poking around in the James Allen Crawford case, they were mildly interested. They of course had heard of the business, but it was almost ancient history to them; and, not knowing the details of the case, they wondered what there was to investigate. But they knew the Crawfords well enough, even if the social and financial aristocracy of New Jersey doesn’t cast much of a shadow on New York’s Four Hundred.
    But what I wanted to know was not anything about the Crawfords; it was about Daniel and Norma Bisland, Florence Crawford’s brother and sister-in-law.
    They remained the wild cards in this case. What, really, were they doing at Thornleigh in March of 1924? By what coincidence were they on the scene when the death of Frank Crawford had taken place? Maybe there was nothing suspicious, maybe there was. But it was an angle I had to follow up.
    The Bislands were only a little less of an enigma to Marge and Gene than the Crawfords. I’d recalled Lizbeth saying that they lived upstate, but for New Yorkers upstate begins north of Westchester county, and the farther you get from Manhattan the less interesting you become; and by the time you get up to Ithaca, you might as well be in Indiana.
    But Marge dutifully looked in her files for anything about the Bislands. There wasn’t much, but what there was proved pretty compelling. They owned plenty of land up in the Finger Lakes area and had extensive interests in wine making and some dairy farming. But what piqued my curiosity particularly were two tiny bits of information:
    In late 1923 the Bislands had declared bankruptcy.
    In the summer of 1924 they threw a lavish party at their home to commemorate their return to prosperity.
    It became clear that a trip upstate was on my agenda.
    Once again, the trip out of Manhattan proved a study in contrasts. The moment you left the city and entered Westchester, a new world dawned. The county was still largely rural, with scattered homes buried in the woods, and towns like Yonkers and Bronxville trying to maintain their suburban innocence while they served as bedroom communities to New York. The Hudson River, as you passed through Dobbs Ferry and Tarrytown, widened out to the dimensions of a small lake, and I couldn’t criticize our Chief Executive for wanting to spend as much time at his estate at Hyde Park as he could. It was only one of the many noble edifices you come upon as you head up to Newburgh and Poughkeepsie.
    Heading west and skirting the lower