Chicago’s loop was aroar with the noon hour rush, and elevated trains rumbled above our heads as we turned down Wabash Avenue. The lights changed at the shrill of a policeman’s whistle. I slipped my arm through Chris’s and marched her along briskly.
“Do you think they saw us?” she asked, without turning to look at me.
“I doubt it,” I assured her. “But why didn’t you want to be seen? What’s up?”
Her voice was so low that I had difficulty catching the words above the din of traffic. “I’ve been afraid he was meeting her, Linell. But I haven’t been sure till now. Oh, how can he? How can he hurt poor Susan like that?”
I tightened my grip on her arms. “Don’t leap to conclusions. The world hasn’t come to an end just because your father is taking one of the store models to lunch. It’s been done before without any dynasties collapsing. Don’t be an infant!”
Somehow I couldn’t pack a great deal of reassurance into my words. I remembered only too clearly that moment, yesterday, when I’d gone to Gardner’s office and there’d been something almost guilty about the way he’d ushered me in and dismissed Carla. However, Gardner’s peccadillos, unpleasant as they might be for his wife and daughter, had nothing to do with the more immediate matter of Monty’s death. Chris had enough concern without this added distress.
“You mustn’t worry,” I told her, managing to put some conviction into my voice. “I’m sure it can all be explained quite harmlessly and that you’ll feel foolish and ashamed of your suspicions. After all, Carla’s no young girl. She must be close to forty, if not more.”
But I doubt if Chris listened to a word I was saying. We said good-bye at the foot of the elevated steps and I stood looking after her for a moment, before cutting over to State Street to get back to Cunningham’s.
I knew what I was going to do before I turned my attention to anything else.
Keith looked up as I walked into the office. “Tony wants to see you right away. He says never mind the crime wave—his windows have to go in and you’re to hurry over.”
I picked up the phone, called a number.
“I’ll go see him in a minute,” I told Keith and then spoke into the phone. “Hello, Mr. Thorne? . . . Oh, Bill, I’m glad to talk to you! Bill, when can I see you?”
His voice was cheerful. “How about tonight? I have to finish up some work here, but it won’t take too long. Suppose you come out to the shop when you’re through work and we’ll have dinner together.”
“Wonderful!” I cried, feeling that several tons of worry had slipped from my shoulders. “I’ll be out around six.”
“Anything wrong?” Bill asked.
My fingers felt the lump behind my ear. His voice had such a sympathetic ring, I had to make a real effort to keep from blurting out what had happened to me.
“No—well, I suppose there is in a way,” I told him. “A lot of ways. But I can’t tell you now. See you later.”
I felt considerably better when I hung up. Bill was that kind of person. He had a level head on his shoulders and he’d help me to see everything clearly. Until then, I’d simply stop puzzling and worrying.
That’s what I thought.
Keith was watching me. He spoke as soon as I hung up the receiver.
“Tony said I was to take that phonograph out to Universal Arts this afternoon. But if you’re going out there—”
He looked unhappy and I knew how badly he must want to get away from Cunningham’s.
“You can take it out,” I told him. “It will be heavy, I expect, and I don’t want to juggle it on a crowded street car.”
He cheered up right away and I went off to the display department.
I could hear Sondo and Tony wrangling long before I reached Sondo’s workroom. The girl was up on her ladder, working on a background for Tony’s red windows.
She had painted two or three figures coming down a corridor of big red and white checks. The checked floor of the painted corridor would continue into the window itself and mannequins would be set upon it.
The two of them were behaving as if nothing had happened to disturb their show-window world, and their manner jarred me. I couldn’t immediately look beneath the casual surface of their flippancy for the tension that must have existed.
“How do you like it?” Tony asked, “We’ll be putting the red series in Friday, so you’d better count on working late that night.”
“Maybe they’ll go in,” Sondo snapped. “I’ve still got the navy blue background to do and the decorations for the window signs. And now you’re howling for screens.”
Tony ignored her. “You get the set-up, Linell? The golf window, then the red series in the middle. And next week we’re putting gray in the corner window. Babcock says they’ll be showing a lot of gray this spring and she wants all gray dresses in the display. That’s why I want to put in some folding screens for background. Something to liven up the color scheme.”
I suppressed a desire to call them back to the reality of horror. Too much that was dreadful hung over our heads. If we snatched at a familiar routine, perhaps we could for a little while avoid the quicksands. I made an effort to join the discussion.
“I saw a hat down in millinery a couple of days ago that was a honey,” I told Tony. “Flame color. If it hasn’t been sold it would give you your color keynote.”
That was the way the decorators worked. One striking note of color gave them their key and they built around it, repeating it in background and accessories.
Sondo came down from the ladder. Fresh smears of red brightened the already stained smock, and her black hair escaped in careless tendrils from beneath the yellow kerchief. She pulled a wallpaper book from a shelf and began to ruffle through its pages.
“Here you are, Tony!” she cried, shoving the book toward him. “There’s flame for you in those flower clusters. If they match the hat, we can use wallpaper to cover the screens. And I can copy the flower motif on the window signs in flame, too.”
“Good girl!” Tony said, and they beamed at each other amiably.
Then Sondo climbed back up the ladder and returned to work, and Tony sent one of his helpers to millinery to pick up the hat.
“That’s a start,” he said. “Now if you’ll get going on the window signs, Linell.”
I closed my eyes and attempted half-heartedly to play the game the others were playing. It wasn’t as easy for me as for them. There was nothing hanging over Sondo’s head, or Tony’s. No one had made an attack on their lives. Even though I didn’t want what had happened to me publicized, still I felt a twinge of resentment that these two could be so casual and matter-of-fact in their ignorance of how close I’d come to death.
“Shimmering gray for spring,” I chanted. “The gray gleam of April rain, accented by all the hues in your garden.”
Sondo Bronx cheered lustily. “Talk about tripe! I’m glad I only have to paint signs, not write ’em.”
“Don’t pay any attention to her,” Tony assured me. “She’s a frustrated sign writer herself. Anyway, these new windows are going to be something. Better than anything Michael Montgomery ever put in.” The name carried a spell with it that hushed our forced cheerfulness.
“You’re glad Monty’s gone, aren’t you?” Sondo said bitterly.
Tony glared up at her. “What do you expect me to say? I never wasted any love on him while he was alive, why should I pretend to now that he’s dead? I’m running this department and I can’t be sorry because Monty’s not around to interfere.”
“What if they put in another display manager over your head?” Sondo asked. “Will you get rid of him too?”
“Oh, stop it!” I broke in. “We’re all in this together and it doesn’t do any of us much good to go flinging ridiculous accusations around.”
“How can you be so sure it’s a ridiculous accusation?” Sondo demanded. “There’s just one thing I’d like to know, Tony. Why did you get that peculiar look on your face and shut up so fast when McPhail told you Monty was killed with a golf club?”
“You know what you can do,” Tony said. “And if I get the job of running this department permanently, don’t think you’re going to stay in it.”
Sondo tossed her kerchiefed head. “I’ll be here longer than you, Mister Salvador. Lay you odds on that.”
I stopped listening to their squabble because I was thinking of that golf club and my own fingerprints upon it, prints the police now held in duplicate in their records. I had to tell McPhail about finding the club. I had to tell him before he discovered those prints.
I started out of the room and Tony stopped quarreling with Sondo to call after me.
“Hey, Linell! Will you go down and talk to Babcock? You know how to handle her. She’s just had another brain child. A perfectly stinko idea about having mannequins lined up in the window holding block letters in their hands spelling out GRAY FOR SPRING. Discourage it, will you?”
“I’ll try,” I said wearily and went off toward the elevators.
I didn’t care much about Babcock’s ideas, or the continual war that raged between some of the buyers and window display. I felt as if I walked a narrow ledge with an abyss on either side. On one hand waited the police. It was true that I, more than anyone else, had the motive for Monty’s murder. And too much circumstantial evidence, still unknown to McPhail, had piled up against me. I might have some nasty times ahead unless I moved carefully.
But on the other hand lay a more terrifying danger. The very real attack on my life, and the unpleasant possibility Hering had suggested—that the murderer might watch for an opportunity to “finish off the job.”
It was no wonder that I went down to see Miss Babcock in a most indifferent frame of mind.
When I reached fourth I found that the buyer for better dresses was taking life the hard way, as usual. It wasn’t easy to turn an idea which she considered divinely inspired into something slightly less antique, but I’d had plenty of practice and set about it almost automatically.
I began by planting the flame colored hat and the screens in her consciousness, and then gradually circling until she came out dramatically with them as her own idea. That would annoy Tony considerably, but would give us our way and at least keep peace.
As I was about to leave, Miss Babcock put a sympathetic hand on my arm.
“I want you to know, my dear, how sorry we all are about what happened. So unfortunate. So bad for the store. Have they, have they found out yet who—”
“No,” I said curtly. “Nobody knows.”
Miss Babcock looked disappointed and reluctant to allow me to escape.
“How would you like to see one of the numbers we’re going to present in the style show?” she asked. “The model who is to wear it is back there trying it on. Miss Drake is so stunning, don’t you think? So unusual?”
I’d been anything but vitally interested until I heard Carla’s name. The woman had crossed my path so often lately that I was beginning to have a fatalistic feeling about her.
Miss Babcock led me to one of the dressing rooms. A fitter knelt on the floor, while Carla turned slowly before the triple mirrors.
Beautiful gowns and beautiful models were nothing particularly new in my life, but I caught my breath in tribute.
The dinner gown Carla wore was as modern as tomorrow, but it’s ancestry went back to the classicism of old Greece. It was white and straight in line, flowing, full, yet clinging to the lovely curves of her body with revealing simplicity. It was banded at the neck and wrists in gold and a golden girdle circled her waist.
If you discounted the silvery hair, falling in beauty to her shoulders, if you missed the tragic wisdom of her eyes, she might have been as young as Juliet.
“It’s beautiful,” I said. “You’re beautiful, Carla.”
Her eyes flooded unexpectedly with tears. “Thank you, Miss Wynn. But it is the dress.” She lifted the white folds in her slender hands and turned before the mirror.
I had never seen a motion so graceful, so lovely. Then something like dismay came into her eyes and she stilled the swirling of the skirt. I had a queer feeling that she felt she had made some disclosure. The fitter picked up the hem again and I followed Miss Babcock back to the department.
“Where did you find her?” I asked.
The buyer shrugged. “She came from New York. I understand she lost her husband some time ago. She’s a good model, but the other girls don’t seem to care for her much. There’s something peculiar about her.”
I left the department thoughtfully. So Carla Drake had “lost” her husband, whatever that meant. And on the day Michael Montgomery died, he had stood talking to her in an eighth floor corridor, so intent that his hands had rested on her shoulders. At the time I had thought that the gesture was one of affection. But now I wondered.
When I reached the middle aisle, I saw that my signal was on in the light box between the elevators. I stepped to a house phone and learned that I was wanted at once in my office.
Though such a summons was familiar enough, I couldn’t suppress the sense of alarm that swept through me. I went upstairs at once and found McPhail waiting for me. Keith, working at his desk, did not look up, but even his ears looked frightened. My uneasiness increased as I sat down opposite the detective.
His greeting was curt and he went at once to the point. He wanted to know exactly what had happened that morning and I gave him the story in full, conscious all the while of Keith listening.
McPhail prodded me with sharp questions about the identity of my assailant and about that bit of stone from the ring. But I could tell him nothing that would help. I had done no more than glance at the fragment before I put it in my pocket, and I’d had no glimpse at all of whoever it was I’d surprised in my office.
I told him about the queer business of the picture which had been torn from my wall and the substitute pasted up in its place, but that made as little sense to him as it did to me, if he believed the story at all.
“Now then,” he said, with a cold, unwavering look, “suppose you come clean about what happened in that window yesterday.”
So it had come. Somehow he knew about my finding Monty and running away. I longed for Bill’s sane presence more than I’d longed for anything in my life. But there was no Bill. I had to get through this on my own.
Before I could form an answer, McPhail shifted the papers on my desk and I saw what lay beneath them, the upper half of a broken golf stick. There were powdery traces on its varnished surface and I knew I’d waited too long.
Even so, my relief was tremendous. The fingerprints on that stick looked bad for me, but they weren’t as bad as the other. My cheeks cooled and my tenseness relaxed.
“Oh, that!” I said. “I’d meant to tell you about it. I forgot it entirely until last night. It was there in the window when I went to take care of last minute details. I wondered at the time how it came to be broken, but I didn’t think about it especially, any more than I thought about the stone. I just picked it up and put it in the golf bag to get it out of the way. I meant to ask somebody about it later. And then I forgot.”
“Very convenient,” McPhail sneered. “A man gets murdered with a golf club and you forget that you had the other half of that club in your hands. Until we find your prints on it and you have to remember.”
“But I did forget!” I protested. “Everything was so shocking and horrible. It went right out of my mind at the time you were questioning us. But I’d have got around to telling you today if you’d given me time.”
“You’ve had time enough,” McPhail said. “And here’s something else. The only prints on that book end that was used to knock you down are yours and your office boys.”
Keith’s head sank a little lower between his shoulders and I had a sudden unpleasant vision of him hiding behind the door and leaping out at me. I dismissed it at once as ridiculous.
“That’s silly!” I told McPhail. “Keith and I have both handled those book ends many times. You’ll find our prints on the other one too. All it means is that the person who attacked me must have worn gloves.”
“Maybe,” said McPhail, his mouth grim and straight, his eyes cold with suspicion.
“Oh, come now!” I cried. “Do you think I picked up that book end and knocked myself out with it? Ask Mr. Hering. He knows how groggy I was. And there’s no getting away from this lump on my head.”
McPhail would have loved to get away from it. I’m sure that lump and the fact that Hering had vouched for the attack on me, were the only things which kept him from taking me to headquarters as a suspect then and there.
As it was, I went through a bad twenty minutes or so, while he shot the same questions at me, over and over. But somehow I kept my story straight and suppressed that moment when I’d gone back to the switch box.
McPhail left at last and I phoned Helena to let her know that I was having dinner with Bill Thorne and wouldn’t be home till later. I told Keith he might as well go pick up the phonograph and take it out to Universal Arts. Certainly, neither of us was good for any work after McPhail’s visit, and the despairing look Keith gave me was the last straw.
“What’s the matter with you?” I demanded. “You haven’t anything to worry about. McPhail’s not taking your prints on that book end seriously. There’s no possible tie-up you could have with this affair. So stop going around with that I-am-a-leper expression on your face!”
“It’s that attack on you, Miss Wynn. That’s awful. It’s—”
“Well, don’t go broadcasting it,” I said. “I don’t want the whole store in here oh-ing and ah-ing.”
He shook his head mournfully. “The trouble is you can’t tell where all this is going to end. There’s something pretty awful loose in this store and it’s out of control now. It’s killed once and it’ll kill again. And how can any of us stop it, or get out of its way, when we can’t even see what it is?”
“The trouble with you,” I said, “is that you read too many detective stories. It’s not an “it,” but a human being. Somebody who had something against Monty. Eventually the police will catch up with the murderer and we’ll know the whole story. But it won’t be anything supernatural.”
Keith shook his head. “I don’t just read detective stories, Miss Wynn. I’ve read a lot about the psychology and pathology of crime too, and we’re not dealing with anything normal now. There’s nothing more awful than this kind of insanity. Where the person goes right on wearing his ordinary face and ordinary actions and you can’t tell the difference. But inside he’s gone stark raving mad and he’s not going to do things that are normal and sensible. He’s going to do treacherous, crazy things to fool you and blind you. So he can strike again.”
I’d known the boy ever since I’d come to Cunningham’s and I’d always thought him more or less inarticulate and futile. Yet behind his quiet exterior was all this teeming unpleasantness.
He saw he had startled me and tried to smile. It was a tight, thin smile that was a little frightening.
“Miss Wynn, I’m sorry. I wouldn’t scare you for anything. Gosh, I like you better than anybody I know. It’s just that—that—well, you better be careful. Don’t you trust anybody. Not anybody at all.”
With those cheering words, he left in search of the phonograph.
I went over to the single small window and threw it open. I was chilled to the bone, but I wanted fresh air. Eight stories below trucks rolled in and out of the alley, midget figures of men moved and gestured and spoke with midget voices. All about crowded the walls of stores and buildings, alive with lighted windows like unlidded eyes that watched until the light was quenched.
The wind from the lake was raw, smoke-laden, grime-laden, its first clean freshness gone the moment it struck these hills of steel and concrete.
I shut the window and turned back to the office. The blank space on the wall behind my desk challenged and tantalized me. What had a page from a magazine casually pasted up with a hundred other pages to do with the murder of Michael Montgomery?
If I could remember that picture would I perhaps have the answer?