The next morning I overslept and Helena was considerate enough not to wake me. She was gone when I got out of bed, but she’d left a newspaper on the dresser for me to see. The murder of Michael Montgomery had hit Chicago’s front pages.
It had hit Cunningham’s, too. Hit it hard. The minute I walked in the store that Wednesday morning, I sensed the nervous excitement. I was aware of it as the chatter hushed when I stepped into the elevator. The few good mornings which greeted me were packed with unspoken questions. I responded when necessary and tried to ignore the eyes I was sure were boring into my back.
How many of these people, I wondered, were connecting me with Monty’s murder? How many were saying to each other, “Well, he threw her over, didn’t he? A woman scorned, you know!” And if they were wondering about me now, how would it be if they ever learned what I was hiding?
But the thing uppermost in my mind at the moment was that bit of something I’d picked up in the window and which might be part of the stone missing from the ring Monty had held clutched in his hand. I meant to get it from the pocket of my smock at once and I walked quickly as I left the elevator.
The door of my office stood open, as always. There was nothing of value there and I never bothered to lock it at night. Keith hadn’t come in yet and I walked straight to my chair.
The smock was gone.
My first thought was that I must have hung it somewhere else. The hook behind the door perhaps. Another instant and I would have turned, but in that instant some faint sound reached me and I knew I was not alone in the room. Knew, with horror running like ice water through my veins, that something waited for me behind the door.
And then, before I could recover the power of movement, there came a rush from behind me. Something caught me a heavy awkward blow behind the ear and I pitched forward across my desk, stunned and groggy.
I wasn’t out cold. The blow, though struck with desperate intent, had glanced off the thick padding of my hair. I could hear the thud of footsteps down the corridor, yet I couldn’t summon the will to move or scream. I seemed to be swimming through space without being able to make the effort to return to a more solid world.
Then heavy hands were pulling me up from the desk, shaking me. I started frantically to struggle, thinking that my assailant had come back. But the hands held me firmly and squeezed me back to consciousness. As the red mist cleared from before my eyes, I realized that the hands belonged to Sylvester Hering and that he was muttering over me in concern.
I stood on my feet for an instant and then collapsed in a chair.
Hering bent over me anxiously. “You all right now, Miss Wynn? What happened? You faint?”
“No,” I told him “No!” The throbbing lump behind my ear didn’t help to clarify my thoughts.
“Somebody hit me,” I said. “Somebody hit me and ran away!”
Hering took one look at the lump and then rushed off down the corridor in the direction I’d indicated. I felt that search would be useless. Whoever it was would have had time to make the stairway by now and lose himself in the store. I looked about my small office, trying to force my mind to function.
It was the sight of my flowered smock on the floor behind the door that whipped me back to full consciousness. I leaned over dizzily and picked it up, searched the pockets with trembling fingers.
The stone from the ring was gone.
Hering came back, shaking his head. “Couldn’t find nobody. Don’t you know who it was?”
“No,” I said. “But I think I know what he wanted.”
I told him about the stone I’d dropped into the pocket of my smock, and he picked up the phone on my desk to try to get in touch with McPhail. But the detective was off on some hunt of his own. Hering reported what had happened and left word for McPhail to call the store.
When he hung up, I pointed to the floor. “Look. That must have been what hit me.”
There was a shelf halfway up the wall and on it had stood a pair of small onyx book ends from Mexico. One of them lay on its side on the floor. Hering picked it up carefully, using a handkerchief.
“Looks like it all right. Let’s see that bump.” He examined my bruises. “That’ll hurt for a while. But you got off easy. Skin’s not even broken. Your hair’s thick and a book end ain’t the handiest slugger in the world. How you feel now?”
“My head hurts,” I said. “But I’ll be all right.”
“Then maybe it’s a good thing it happened,” he told me solemnly.
“What do you mean?”
He shrugged heavy shoulders. “Look, Miss Wynn, I’m your friend.”
“Of course,” I said. “Thank you.”
“That’s why I want to tip you off. You watch your step. There’s a lot of people in this store who’ve been plenty mad at Montgomery at one time or another. But you got the motive. A better one than anybody else. McPhail could make things pretty hot if he got anything on you. Maybe this attack kind of lets you out. So maybe it’s a good thing.”
I pressed my fingers against throbbing temples.
“Look, Miss Wynn,” Hering went on, “if you think you can stay on the job today, it might be better to keep still about this. Not go blabbing it around right away. Watch how people act. See if anybody looks surprised to see you okay, or gives himself away.”
I nodded. I was willing to keep still about the affair. The news would bring half the floor around me in sympathy and I felt I wanted most of all to be let alone.
“Well,” Hering said, folding his handkerchief tenderly about the book end, “guess I’ll take this over to the fingerprint boys. Oh—that’s what I was coming to tell you. That you’re supposed to go get fingerprinted.”
“Fingerprinted?” Sickness flashed through me as I remembered that golf club.
“Yeah. Over in window display. Mr. Cunningham’s got a few pals among the higherups and he put up an awful yowl about pulling a flock of people off their jobs and taking ’em over to headquarters to get fingerprinted. What with the publicity and all. So to keep him quiet they’re doing it over here.”
“When’s the inquest to be?” I asked.
“They were going to hold it today,” Hering explained, “but McPhail asked for a continuance, so the Coroner’s set it for Monday. This is a screwy case. Too many witnesses. McPhail wants to get ’em all rounded up before the inquest. Well, I gotta run along. You think you’ll be okay now?”
I gave him a stiff smile. “I think so. Whoever it was got what he wanted. I don’t think he’ll come back.”
“Mm,” said Hering. “Unless he thinks you might have seen him. Then he might want to finish off the job.”
And with that cheerful thought, he left.
Nothing seemed real or solid any more. I wasn’t even very frightened as yet. Too many things that simply couldn’t happen had happened, and my mind hadn’t gotten used to accepting them.
Someone had killed Monty. Someone had hidden in my office and struck me down. And a fragment of stone was gone from my smock. There—there lay the clue. Who had known where I’d put the stone?
There were just three people. Helena, Bill, Chris.
Helena had left before I had this morning. She would have had plenty of time to slip upstairs to my office before I arrived to get the stone from my smock. But Helena was my friend.
As for Bill and Chris—I’d come down after the store opened. Anyone at all could have walked in among the customers and come upstairs unchecked ahead of me. But it couldn’t be Bill. It couldn’t be! I wasn’t going to think again those ridiculous thoughts that had tormented me the night before.
Yet it couldn’t have been Chris either. She was big enough and strong enough. But she had seemed to worry about what she had done, so anxious to make her peace with me.
Bill and Chris were my friends, too. Still—even a friend who was desperate, trapped, might strike out against discovery. Against any person who meant discovery.
Or had one of these three told others? In that, there was a thread of hope. I’d check on it later when I could see each one alone.
The whole thing was so baffling. What had that ring meant in Monty’s hand? And if it had been part of the stone from the ring I had found, why should such a fragment be of importance to the murderer?
The questions were endless, impossible to answer. And on every hand there were threats to me, dangers I might be unaware of even now. I wished Keith would arrive so I needn’t be alone. In a few moments I’d have to go over to be fingerprinted, but first I wanted to collect myself a bit. Perhaps work might help.
I searched my desk and found the copy I’d been working on the day before, with its bold words: “Red is the Color of the Year.” But that was no way to settle my mind. “Red for blood,” Keith had said. But now I could go him one better. In my mind red would forever stand for “murder.” I thrust the paper out of sight just as Keith came in.
The boy looked ghastly. His naturally muddy complexion had yellowed and his hands were shaking so that he could hardly hang up his hat.
“What’s the matter with you?” I demanded.
“I—I didn’t know till this morning,” he stammered. “About Mr. Montgomery, I mean. It’s awful.”
“You’d better straighten up,” I said. “We’re both supposed to go over to the display department and get fingerprinted.”
“Fingerprinted!” The word came out shrilly. “But I didn’t have anything to do with this. Oh, Miss Wynn, I’ve got to stay out of it!”
He looked so green that I turned mercifully away. It wouldn’t do to take the boy over to the police in such a state of jitters.
“I’m going ahead,” I said over my shoulder. “As soon as you can, follow me.”
I went out without looking at him again. I was still a little wobbly, I discovered, but I felt lucky to be alive at all.
Bill had been doubly right last night when he’d said we’d better all put our wits to work and try to clear this thing up. Not only to save some innocent from arrest. To save our own lives. I thought of that last remark of Hering’s about the murderer coming back to finish the job, and shivered as I stepped into the empty corridor.
The fingerprint expert had grumblingly set up his materials in Monty’s office. He didn’t care for the irregularity of the procedure and was letting everyone know just how he felt. I could hear him the moment I stepped into the department. Another detective plodded systematically through Monty’s papers and files, pausing now and then to ask questions of Tony Salvador.
I tried to notice if anyone watched me warily, or seemed surprised to find me walking about in good health. But I saw nothing suspicious.
Sondo came out of the office, wearing her usual green smock and a yellow kerchief tied about her tangle of black hair. She waved inky fingers at me and motioned with her thumb.
“A lot of work we can get done with that crowd of flatfeet trampling all over the scenery! I tried to explain that a department store is like the theater. Come hell, high water, or murder, the show goes on. But it didn’t register.”
Her words were flippant and callous, but there were smudges beneath her big dark eyes and the hollows under her cheek bones were more marked than ever. Sondo hadn’t been sleeping well either.
But as I stepped to the door of Monty’s office, I forgot her.
This room was Monty’s own and very familiar to me. In the months he had worked here, he had stamped it with the imprint of his vital personality. Last night in Tony’s office it had not been like this. Then death had been too horrifyingly new to be accepted. I could make no real connection in my mind with that crumpled body down in the window and the Monty I knew.
But now it was real. There were reminders of him everywhere. Things he had touched and left his mark upon. Rough drawings he had sketched for window plans. Pictures he had chosen for the walls. It seemed as though at any moment his vibrant voice might echo through the department, his footstep sound upon its floor. A voice that would never echo again, a step that would never fall.
That knowledge made him really dead. And the thought that the same murderous hand which had struck him down had been raised against me, made reality all the more keen.
I became aware that Sondo was still at my elbow, her dark penetrating gaze upon me.
“Stop in to see me when you’re through here,” she whispered. “I think we could do a little note comparing.” And, with that enigmatic remark she went off toward her workroom.
Two of the girls from the perfume counters came past me out of the office, whispering together, and as I stepped through the door, I saw that Helena Farnham was just pressing her fingers to a card. Behind her, Owen Gardner awaited his turn, looking completely outraged at the thought of this indignity.
Helena quirked a sympathetic eyebrow at me as she went out and whispered, “I’ll wait for you.”
Tony nodded as I approached and then switched his gaze speculatively to Owen.
“Say!” He spoke abruptly. “How about getting Carla Drake up here to be printed?”
Gardner looked up from wiping his fingers. “What for? She hasn’t any possible connection with the case.”
“Who’s Carla Drake?” a detective demanded.
“She models dresses down on my floor,” Gardner said. “I doubt if she’s spoken to Montgomery more than twice in the three months she’s been in the store.”
Tony shrugged. “Maybe so. But she’s always sneaking in and out of the display department and she’s been pretty darned thick with Sondo Norgaard.”
The detective nodded. “Call the fourth floor and get her up here.”
Gardner glared at Tony and strode out of the office.
The fingerprinting didn’t take long, but I was barely conscious of what was going on. Tony’s words had recalled to my mind that moment so long ago—yesterday morning!—when I’d come upon Monty and Carla in the corridor. If what Owen said was true and Monty scarcely knew Carla, then that was a strangely intimate scene I’d happened to witness.
Helena was waiting for me when I left the office and we walked over to Sondo’s workroom together. The phonograph was playing as usual, but this time it was Cole Porter, instead of Ravel. Begin the Beguine. The effect, however, was just as melancholy.
I shivered as we went in. “Gracious, Sondo, don’t you have any cheerful records?”
“I’m not in a cheerful mood,” Sondo said. “I’m remembering that Monty’s dead, if no one else is.”
I glanced at her in surprise. It wasn’t like Sondo to display sentiment of any variety.
The girl was up on a stepladder, a paintbrush in her hand, and tacked on the wall before her was a huge sheet of heavy, seamless paper. Sondo was at work on a background for one of the red windows Tony had been planning.
“Red is the color of the year!” Sondo announced derisively, and smeared a streak of scarlet casein paint across the paper.
The workroom was as wildly untidy as Sondo herself. Rolls of paper and bolts of cloth spilled over a table. There were tacks scattered on the floor and a hammer balanced precariously on the edge of a shelf. A half-finished sketch smeared by a penful of India ink was tacked to a drawing board.
This room was wholly Sondo’s. Monty might have left his more orderly imprint on the rest of the department, but here Sondo had gone her own untidy way. The work she produced was first-rate, her salary small, so it had been wise to let her alone.
Not that many people ever dared give orders to Sondo. She was a domineering little person with a will like a hurricane. What she chose to do she did, and left destruction in her wake if she was opposed. Even Owen Gardner was a little afraid of her, and I could remember more than once when Sondo had flown furiously to Monty’s defense and vanquished the merchandise manager himself.
“You said you wanted to see me,” I reminded Sondo. “Has anything new come up?”
“Nothing new,” she said. “Our friend Hering was over here this morning telling me all about his photographic memory. I’ll bet he was right about Chris never coming up to the waiting room at all. He was taking one of his mental pictures of that perfume counter during the questioning last night and he could rattle off the names of every perfume bottle on display. In order, too. So I think there’s something fishy about Chris.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Look,” Sondo said, “I’m no fool. I was around Monty enough to know something about him. He wasn’t in love with Chris. What possible appeal could she have had for him? A big, husky kid with that empty kind of prettiness that means no brains.”
“You’re a little hard on her,” I protested.
Sondo sat down on the top of the ladder and waved her paintbrush at me. “How can you be so generous when she sneaked in behind your back and took him away from you? How can you stand the sight of her when—”
“If that’s all you wanted to talk about, I’ll be getting back to work,” I told her quietly.
Helena was glancing at the sketch on Sondo’s drawing board, and she laid it down and turned around. But she didn’t say anything.
Sondo went right on. “It’s not all I wanted to talk about. I think it’s up to somebody to find out the truth about that marriage. Those dumb coppers never will. There was something worrying Monty before he got married and if we could find out what it was we might have a key to the whole thing. And once we get that key in our hands—”
I looked up at her, startled. There was something so utterly vindictive about the expression on her ugly little face that I was dismayed. A surprising thought began to form in my mind, but before I could get used to it and accept it, Helena took the play away from me.
“So you’re another one who was in love with Montgomery,” she said calmly to Sondo. It was no question, but a quiet statement of fact.
Sondo didn’t take it quietly. “Don’t be idiotic!” she snapped, and went furiously back to her painting.
I felt a little upset. It had been no secret to me that Monty exerted a tremendous attraction for women, and that he was not above the dubious enjoyment of exerting it consciously, even where he had no interest in the woman. And Sondo, for all her lack of feminine appeal, was a woman. But if Monty had done this—and he must have known he was doing it—
I turned toward the door and saw Carla Drake standing there. There was no telling how long she had been there, or whether she had heard anything of our conversation. She wore a beautifully-cut suit of powder blue that emphasized the rather lush curves of her figure and set off her fair skin and silver hair to advantage. But she didn’t look quite real, quite flesh-and-blood.
She came into the room like a sleep-walker, apparently seeing none of us, and went straight to the phonograph. There was a packing box beside the machine and she sat down, clasping graceful hands about her blue-skirted knees. Her head tilted back so that her silver hair hung below her shoulders and her eyes were rapt and dreamy.
Sondo looked down at her and said sharply, “Cut it out, Carla!”
But if the model heard, she gave no sign, listening with all her being to the baritone’s voice.
“To live it again is past all endeavor,
Except when the tune clutches my heart . . .”
Sondo dropped her paintbrush and came down from the ladder. In three catlike steps she crossed the room, lifted the needle from the record. Carla started, blinked, came out of her trance.
Her eyes looked old, somehow, in her youthful face. That was something I’d never noticed before. If ever a woman had a tragic past, it was Carla. The evidence was there in her eyes.
But now they flooded with tears and she spoke sadly to Sondo. “You don’t understand. It’s that piece. It has wonderful memories for me. You said I might come up here and listen to it any time.”
“The trouble is you get drunk on it,” Sondo said curtly. “You’ve got to be able to take music or leave it, the way I can. But you get tight on it the way Tony gets tight on liquor.”
“Who gets tight?” It was Tony himself. He came in carrying a portable phonograph of the same make as Sondo’s and set it on a table. “Let me have one of your records, Sondo. Not that damn Bolero! This is the contraption Bill Thorne made for the window, but there’s something wrong with it.”
Carla got up from the packing case and Tony glanced her way.
“What are you doing here?” he asked. “You’re supposed to be over in Monty’s office getting fingerprinted.”
The model glided smoothly toward the door. “I know. I just happened to hear the music and—” she broke off, turned back to Tony. “Do—do they know anything more? About him, I mean?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Tony said. “The police aren’t exactly showering information around. If they have any to shower.”
“I just wondered,” Carla said gently. “There’s nothing anyone can do anyway. It’s all written there ahead and what must come will come.”
Across the room Helena was studying her palm again and Carla looked at her.
“How is your hand today, Miss Farnham?” she asked.
Helena opened and closed it a couple of times. “A little sore. But it will be all right.”
“I was so sorry about scratching you,” Carla said. “It was very clumsy of me.”
“The fault was just as much mine,” Helena told her.
I think I was the only person in the room who paid much attention to the little byplay. But I was curious because I’d caught again in Helena’s eyes that odd look I’d seen the night before, as if she were remembering something. And it seemed to me that the two women were regarding each other with a certain wariness of expression.
Then Carla slipped noiselessly out the door and Tony glanced after her.
“I’ll take Dolores any day,” he said. “That jane gives me the creeps. All that stuff about what-must-come-will-come. She’s nuts. What do you let her come up here for?”
“I like people who are slightly nuts,” Sondo told him. “And she can come up here any time she likes. Nobody’s promoted you to the position of display manager yet.”
Tony picked out a record haphazardly and slipped it into place in the machine he’d brought. “Maybe not. But they will after those windows I’m putting in the end of the week. They’ll make State Street sit up and take notice.”
Helena glanced at her watch and murmured that it was time she got to work. Sondo and Tony were paying no attention, so I put a hand on her arm as she went by me.
“Helena,” I said softly, “did you tell anyone about that piece from the ring that I put in my smock pocket?”
She looked a little startled. “No—I don’t believe I did. Why?”
“Never mind,” I whispered. “Tell you later.”
When she’d gone, I turned back to Tony and Sondo. Tony’s interest was entirely on the machine and Sondo was watching him with open curiosity. The record whirled and the music started, but it came out with an odd, tinny vibration. Tony listened for a moment and then lifted the needle.
“See what I mean? It was all right when I played it yesterday. So what’s got into it now? I suppose some of Bill’s gadgets have come loose.”
“You’d better let Bill tinker with it then,” Sondo said. I’ve seen what’s happened before this when you go taking things apart.”
Tony ignored her. “Linell, that office boy of yours lives west, doesn’t he? How about letting him off early tonight so he can drop this at Universal Arts? I’m still going to put that golf window across.”
“I don’t mind,” I told him. “Keith’s just sitting around waiting for me to get to work anyway. Which reminds me that that’s what I’d better do.”
But I didn’t hurry back. I ran into one of the girls from advertising and she wanted to hear the latest, so I stopped to talk a few moments. By the time I reached the office it was empty. Evidently Keith had gathered up courage to face the fingerprinting.
Until this moment I hadn’t been really frightened, but a reluctance to step through the door swept over me. Suddenly, I was afraid.
I looked around quickly to make sure no crouching figure hid behind the door. The room was quite empty, but I was uneasy, disturbed. It was as if some mark had been left upon it, as if it had in some way been changed. I’d been too dazed before to notice details, but now I was sure that something was wrong.
I sat down at my desk, with sweat breaking out on my forehead and on the palms of my hands. Something was different, out of line.
I couldn’t find it at once and I began to check carefully in my mind. On the wide window ledge, conveniently ready to my hands, were stacks of current and back issues of all those magazines that are bibles of the fashion trade. My desk was heaped with clippings of ads from Cunningham’s and rival stores—all the usual litter. But an ordered litter, because it made sense to me.
What, then, was different?
The glue pot on my desk was uncovered. Leaving sticky things around like that wasn’t a vice of mine, and Keith was essentially neat. Whoever had used the glue brush had been hurried and untidy about it, for there were smears on the desk and down the side of the pot.
I sat back in my chair and began a systematic study of the walls. It was there the trouble lay, I felt sure. There was something different, something changed. And then I saw it.
On the wall just behind my desk, fitted neatly in among the other pictures, was a portrait that had not been there before. It was a black-and-white, a coyly posed beauty winner in a lastex bathing suit. A very Hollywoodish sort of picture and not one I would ever have chosen to grace my collection.
I got up and walked over to the wall, slid my hand over the paper. The glue wasn’t dry. This page had been pasted on my wall that very hour.