I stood for a moment with my fingers touching the picture. Then I went over to the magazines stacked on the window ledge and paged hurriedly through the top one. It didn’t take long to find what I was looking for—a ragged edge where a page had been torn out.
Sure enough, that bathing suit pose had been ripped from a current issue. Selected at random, to hide a blank space left where another picture had been peeled from the wall?
Whoever had struck me down earlier that morning had been in my office not only to get that bit of stone, but also for the much stranger purpose of removing a picture from my wall.
Carefully I lifted an edge of the newly glued page. It had been fastened roughly, the glue smeared on the back in splotches so that it wasn’t fixed tightly. It tore a little as I pulled it off. The picture underneath had been torn too as it was removed, but there the glue was old and easily pulled loose. Only one corner of the former picture remained—not enough to give a hint as to the identity of the picture.
Of course I knew I’d remember it. I’d arranged those walls myself, with Keith’s help. And I’d looked at them six days a week for months on end. I could almost recite by heart the order of my little art gallery. In just a moment now the image of that missing picture would flash before my mind’s eye. I could almost grasp it—almost—
But each time it eluded me provokingly and I was sitting there with my palms pressed over my eyes, struggling vainly to remember, when Keith came in.
“What’s the matter, Miss Wynn?” he asked in a startled voice.
“It’s nothing,” I said. “But I want you to do something for me. Do you see that space on the wall there? I want you to remember what the picture was that was pasted there.”
Keith looked at the space for a moment and shook his head in bewilderment.
“Never mind.” I was weary. “I can’t remember either. But keep it in mind. It will come back to us sooner or later. Someone came into this office, tore down one picture and pasted up another. Your guess as to why is as good as mine.”
He looked about the office with quickly shifting eyes. It made me nervous just to watch him.
“Forget it,” I said. “You’d better get to work and go through the store to check any torn or soiled signs that need replacing.”
Anything, I felt, to get him out of sight. He left with an air of being more than willing to go. The phone rang and I picked up the receiver.
“Hello,” said a very faint voice, “this is Chris.”
I tried to sound cheerful. “Oh, good morning, Chris. How is everything?”
There was a moment’s silence, as if that were not a matter she cared to go into. Then she went on hurriedly.
“Listen, Linell. I’m in the store using a house phone. But I don’t want to go roaming around and have people ask me questions, so I can’t come up to see you. But I’ve got to see you. Alone. I need your help, Linell. I need your help, Linell. I need it terribly. Will you meet me for lunch?”
“Of course,” I assured her. “Wherever you say.”
“At a quarter to twelve then. Do you know that little Polka Dot place over on Washington? Father’s taken me there to lunch several times and it’s fairly quiet. If we get there before noon perhaps we can get a booth and be able to talk in privacy.”
“I’ll be there,” I agreed. “Take care of yourself, Chris.”
She rang off and I thought about this new complication. So Chris was in the store. And Sondo was behaving very queerly about Chris. Which meant—what, if anything?
But I wasn’t going to sit there any longer struggling with problems that were too much for me. I took out a fresh sheet of paper and this time I went straight to work and got the thing done.
Red is the Color of the Year
Red for Daring
Red for Courage
Be Dramatic in Red!
That settled that. Now it could go over to the sign department to be lettered. But if it was going to take me two days to write four very ordinary lines, where would my job be in a week’s time?
Someone said, “May I come in?” Susan Gardner was standing in the doorway. I laid down my pencil in surrender. There was no use even trying to work.
“Hello,” I said. “Of course you may come in.”
Owen Gardner’s wife sat down hesitatingly in the chair opposite my desk. She was wearing a frock that was a masterpiece of style and quality but, as usual, on her it was a little dowdy. She had the sort of figure which encouraged a dress to ride up in the wrong places, and fostered a relief map of wrinkles. She made habitual little gestures of smoothing out and pulling down, but the result was negligible. Then she gathered her forces for a plunge into frankness.
“This has all been so awful,” she began in a hurried, breathless voice. “Monty murdered and Chris a widow in two weeks. There were reporters out to our place this morning, and more detectives. But I want to talk to you about Chris.”
“I’m very fond of Chris,” I assured her. “I’d like to help if I can.”
Susan nodded. “I know. You’ve been so kind to her all along. Though sometimes I think she’s had too much kindness. I’ve tried so hard to make it up to both Owen and Chris by being all the things Owen’s first wife was not. But sometimes I feel that I’ve failed completely.”
Her voice fluttered off into silence and she looked around at the bright pictures on my walls.
Owen admires beautiful things. He admires beautiful women like those models up there in your pictures. She was like that, you know. Glamorous. His first wife, I mean. He’s never talked about her much, but I can guess. And sometimes I wonder—when a man has a taste for women like that, does he ever really get over it?”
It was disturbing to realize that back of Susan’s manner, back of her self-effacement, existed so wistful an envy of all that she was not.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said, in an effort to be reassuring. “It seems to me that once a man has been fooled badly, he’d be more apt to turn to a woman who was entirely different from the first one.”
“Do you really believe that?” Susan said, with touching eagerness. Then she went on apologetically. “But I didn’t come here to talk about myself. I believe Chris is worried about something more than Monty’s death. She’s in a state of fright that borders on hysteria. And she won’t talk about it to me at all. But I know she’s having lunch with you and I thought she might tell you what she won’t tell those who are close to her. If we could just find out what’s wrong, perhaps we could help her.”
“Well, I’ll try,” I said, feeling more inadequate by the moment.
Her kind, plump little face took on a surprisingly grim expression. “Michael Montgomery was a very wicked man. I’m glad he’s dead. I hope they never catch the person who did it.” Then she added, “So there!” like a reckless child.
But her indignation died out almost at once and she stood up, her own amiable self again. At the door she paused.
“There’s one thing, Miss Wynn. I know I can trust you. Mr. Hering was right. Chris never came to the waiting room to meet me. I made it up about meeting her on the stairs. I found her wandering around down on the main floor in a dazed sort of state, but what she was doing there I don’t know.”
That was rather startling information. But before I could comment, she went still further.
“Did you find the stone from that ring in your smock?” she asked. “And did it mean anything?”
I couldn’t suppress a start. “How did you know about that?”
“Why—why Chris mentioned it to Owen and me when she came home last night. Wasn’t she supposed to tell?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Not now. The stone was gone when I got to the office.”
I watched her for any reaction, but she so often looked disturbed that it was difficult to gauge her state of mind. She fluttered out of the office shortly after.
So Chris had talked. Which brought both Owen and Susan into the thing, and left me no closer to a solution, or even an opinion. Knowing Owen and Susan, I couldn’t imagine either of them in the murderous role that had been played in this very office. But as far as that went, I couldn’t imagine anyone I knew killing Monty.
Later on I’d get Bill Thorne and we’d go over the whole thing together. When he heard what a close call I’d had that morning, perhaps he’d change his tune. And when he knew that Chris had never really gone to the waiting room to meet Susan, he might not be so gallant about listing her as a non-suspect. As for the suspects, there were a couple of others we hadn’t included on our list last night.
Susan Gardner, for one, with her unexpected bitterness against Monty and her strongly protective mother love for a girl who wasn’t her own daughter. And Helena, who had something on her mind about that scratch. And the model, Carla Drake, though her connection was obscure.
The next three-quarters of an hour ran along on a more normal schedule. I had no further time for making wild deductions for the phone rang repeatedly, people rushed in and out of the office, buyers issued orders no one had any intention of obeying and had to be quieted and placated. It was a relief to throw myself into the whirlpool of my ordinary life.
On top of everything else, the newspaper reporters suddenly discovered the eighth floor and were in our hair, until Mr. Cunningham furiously pulled strings and got them called off.
Once, when the telephone rang, it was Hering, to tell me he’d talked to McPhail and that the detective wanted to come over that afternoon to question me and to get an idea of the set-up of my office.
The hour for my appointment with Chris seemed to arrive in no time at all. I left the store with a sense of release from unbearable surroundings and hurried to the Polka Dot.
Chris was already there, holding a place for me in one of the small booths. There were dark circles under her eyes and her lips had a tendency to quiver.
“Oh, Linell!” she cried. “I was so afraid you wouldn’t come!”
I slipped into the seat opposite her. “Of course I’d come. Have you ordered yet?”
She shook her head. “I don’t want any food. I just came here to have a chance to talk. Everywhere else there are always people around you.”
I couldn’t urge food upon her. I felt so little like eating myself. We ordered soup and I settled back against the wall of the booth.
“Now then—what’s troubling you?”
“It’s Sondo. Linell, she frightens me. She’s an awful person. I’ve always known she had no use for me, but now she hates me. She hates me because I married Monty and she wants to hurt me.”
“But there’s no way in which she can hurt you,” I said, “other than using her sharp tongue when she gets a chance. And you have to accept that with Sondo.”
“But why should she want to hurt me?”
I reached out and patted Chris’s hand. She had large hands, long-fingered and broad across the back, but somehow useless, helpless. Not tough, sinewy little paws like Sondo’s.
“It’s not hard to see,” I told her. “You’re young and very pretty, and you married Monty. Probably if I’d married him, she’d have wanted to hurt me too. I’ve never realized it before, but I think Monty has been something of an idol to her and his death has hit her pretty hard.”
Quick tears came in Chris’s eyes and she was silent, remembering. The waitress brought our orders and I waited till she’d gone before I spoke.
“Was that all you had to tell me?” I asked at length.
“No, there’s something else,” she said, blinking back the tears. “The thing I’ve really been wanting to say. Monty had some reason for marrying me, Linell. Something that hadn’t anything to do with me personally. He even threw it up to me while we were away. He said the only thing I meant to him was protection, that I was a weapon in his hands. A weapon to keep him safe.”
“What did he mean by that?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know at all. Perhaps I couldn’t keep him safe after all from whatever it was he feared. So if we could just find out what it was, then we’d know why he died and who killed him.”
“Have you any ideas as to how to go about it?” I asked.
She nodded. “Yes. That’s where you come in. I want you to help me. I want to go up to his apartment and go through his things.”
“The police have already done that,” I said.
“I know a place to look they might have missed. A place he told me about. He said if anything ever—happened, to look there.”
“Then why don’t you tell McPhail and have him help you?”
Chris’s lips began to quiver and I thought she might break into tears again. But she made an effort and quickly recovered.
“No, Linell! I just want you to go with me. What I find might be something I wouldn’t want the police to see.”
“Well,” I said, “I don’t know why you shouldn’t go in and out of the apartment as you please, even though there’s probably a guard stationed outside for the time being.”
Chris looked dismayed. “A guard? Oh, dear! I never thought of that. I don’t want them to know. Anyway I’ve lost the key to the apartment,”
I glanced at her sharply. “Lost the key?”
“Well, I can’t find it. And Monty gave me one, you know, when we came back to town—though I spent just one night there and haven’t been back since.”
Somehow I didn’t like the idea of that lost key. Particularly if there was evidence hidden in the apartment which might incriminate someone. That made another puzzler.
Suddenly, as I watched her, Chris’s face seemed to crumple into confusion, doubt, fear.
“What is it?” I demanded. “What’s the matter?”
In frozen silence, she was looking toward the front of the restaurant.
I reached out, clasped her shoulder and shook it. Chris jerked away, shrank far back in the booth.
“We’ve got to get out,” she whispered. “Quickly.”
“But why?” I asked. “Stop acting like a baby, Chris.”
The jibe had no effect. She was up, pulling at my arm. We paid our checks and went hurriedly out of the restaurant. But not so hurriedly that I missed the two in the front booth.
Owen Gardner was leaning forward, his interest wholly absorbed in the woman who sat opposite him. In passing the booth, I had a glimpse of powder blue, of the fall of silvery hair beneath a smart little hat. The woman was Carla Drake.