Fortunately I didn’t have to get to work early Friday. Tony’s red windows were going in that night, and even with Tony in jail, the work had to go ahead. Lately Monty had had me stay to help him with the big State Street windows. On these occasions I came down late in the morning and worked late at night along with the rest of the department. That was my plan for the day, so it didn’t matter if I overslept.
I awoke with a jolt and sat up in bed, feeling that it was going to be the worst possible sort of day. It wasn’t raining, but clouds hung low, and the air was heavily oppressive. Not a breath of wind stirred at my window, but dampness cut through to the bone.
More than the weather disturbed me, however. My first waking thought was that something was about to happen. Something terrible that had to be stopped. It took me a minute or two to pull myself out of my deep sleep and figure out who I was and what I was concerned about.
Then I thought of Sondo. Had she and Carla come through the night all right? I had to know at once. I got up quickly.
Helena’s bed was empty and her breakfast dishes stacked in the sink. She’d left without waking me, since she had to get to work on time as usual.
I looked up Sondo’s number and called it. I waited for a dozen rings, but there wasn’t any answer. That might, or might not be ominous. Sondo’s hours depended on the work she had to do, and if she had to go down early and stay late, she often took some time off in the afternoon. On the other hand—but I didn’t want to think about that.
I ate a sketchy breakfast and hurried for the bus, knowing there’d be no peace-of-mind for me, until I reached the store.
I’d told Keith he might help me in the windows, so he was working on the late shift, too, and hadn’t come in when I reached the office.
I called window display, but the operator could get no answer. Which still didn’t mean anything serious. I tried the fourth floor and got Carla easily.
“Where’s Sondo?” I asked.
“Sondo?” She sounded surprised at the urgency in my voice. “Why, we left her place together this morning. Isn’t she upstairs?”
Relief swept through me. “It’s all right then,” I assured Carla. “She’s probably running around the store. Nothing—happened last night?”
“Of course not,” Carla said in surprise. “Whatever would?”
Now that I could breathe again, I couldn’t resist a dig. “Bill says you’re a wonderful rhumba dancer, Carla.”
She gave a queer little gasp. “Why, how silly! I’ve never danced the rhumba in my life.” There was a blank pause and then she said, “Oh, there’s someone calling me. Sorry,” and rang off,
I put down the telephone. What on earth was the matter with her? Had Bill just been teasing me? But even then, there was nothing in the word “rhumba” to startle anyone. She’d acted as if I’d accused her of something awful.
I got up and moved about the office restlessly. So many things puzzled me. Chris hiding in the window at the very time when Monty was murdered. That was a terrible thought in itself. Helena stealing into Monty’s apartment, burning that note. Later refusing to explain. And always Carla somewhere in the picture.
I felt as if I ought to do something. But I didn’t know what. The vacant spot on my wall, where that picture had been, caught my eye tantalizingly and I made a face at it.
“Oh, you!” I said. “If I could just remember what you were!”
Keith chose that moment to walk in and was evidently not too reassured to find me talking to myself. He gave me a sidelong glance and slunk toward his desk.
“Well!” I said. “Good morning. How are you? I like people to speak to me when they come to work!”
He said, “You’re feeling it again, too aren’t you?”
I looked at him blankly.
“I mean it was like this the other day. Our nerves all tied up and waiting for something. And then Mr. Montgomery—”
“Oh, stop it,” I told him. “Of course our nerves are wound up. That affair at Sondo’s last night was enough to upset us all.”
“It isn’t just that,” he said darkly. “Miss Wynn—maybe I talked too much last night.”
“I can’t remember your talking at all.”
“But I did,” he said. “And I shouldn’t have. If you happen to remember, please don’t mention it to anyone. Will you, Miss Wynn?”
“Of course not,” I told him. I wasn’t trying to remember what he’d said. My thoughts were concerned with Sondo and I was uneasy because no one answered the phone in the display department. Sondo had come to work early. So where was she? I ought to talk to McPhail and tell him everything I knew, but somehow I hesitated. There was that queer threat Helena had made and which I had an idea she might carry out. But most of all I didn’t want to tie Chris up in a chain of circumstantial evidence.
Keith looked up suddenly. “It couldn’t be, of course, but—that sounds like Tony Salvador.”
It was Tony, all right, and he was furiously angry. As he approached my office I could hear Sylvester Hering attempting to calm him.
“Now take it easy, Tony?” Hering was saying. “She only told the police what was her duty to tell them. You can’t blame—”
“I know what she did!” Tony broke in. “She built up a whole pack of lies just to get me arrested. Wait till I get my hands on her!”
They were coming down my corridor and I ran to the door.
“Hello, Tony. We all knew they’d have to let you go, but we’ve been worried just the same. Thank goodness you’re back to work on the windows tonight.”
He gave me a black look and went right on raging. “Nobody can stop me from what I’m going to do to Sondo Norgaard. Not if they have to take me right back to jail for it.”
Hering said, “Take it easy, take it easy,” and trailed after Tony.
“I’ll be right back,” I told Keith and followed Tony and Hering toward the display department.
I wanted to see Sondo and assure myself that she was all right.
The department was deserted. None of the window decorators had come down yet and there was no Sondo anywhere. We gathered for a council of war in her workroom. The green plant still wore its Easter bonnet and on a table was one of Sondo’s latest creations. A lamb made of rolled tubes of white paper. A fetching little creature with downcast, fringed paper eyelids. A screen to be used in the gray window was pulled out beside Sondo’s work table, and I looked around it out of idle curiosity. What I saw made me gasp and reach weakly for Hering.
A woman’s body, clad only in a pink satin underslip, lay twisted awkwardly face down behind the screen.
“She’s here!” I cried. “Here on the floor!”
Hering pushed me aside and Tony crowded after him. They stood for an instant looking down in shocked silence. Then Hering turned back to me with a melancholy smile.
“It’s okay, Miss Wynn. It ain’t what you thought.”
It wasn’t Sondo. When I looked again I saw that the too-awkward position of the legs and arms wasn’t due to death, but to the inanimate. Tony’s Dolores lay there on the floor.
I started to laugh a little hysterically, but Tony knelt beside the mannequin’s figure and gave me a look that stopped me at once.
“If Sondo did this,” he said, “there’s just one more score to square with her.”
I believe that in some strange way Dolores was a real person to Tony. He turned her over quite gently and I gave a cry of dismay. The whole side of the mannequin’s head had been broken in. Not by a fall, but deliberately.
We knew it had been deliberately because as Tony turned her we saw the hammer under her body. Tony reached for it, but Hering put a quick foot on his wrist.
“Don’t touch it,” he said, “Fingerprints.”
That was when I began to get the sinister aspect of the thing. The viciousness. It must have taken wild rage, or else a cold impulse toward destruction to have smashed the mannequin. And who would vent rage upon a thing of plaster and papier maché?
Yet there was no other sign of vandalism in the room. Nothing else had been touched. Hering found the mannequin’s dress on a chair. A bright red dress she would have worn when they put her in the window that night.
The hammer was a small one Sondo kept on hand for tacks and the light carpentry work she sometimes attempted. I’d seen it often on her shelves. But there was no Sondo in the department, though Hering and I went through every room of it.
Tony stayed beside Dolores and I believe he was actually grieving. When we came back, he looked up at us.
“There’s no use searching for her,” he said. “This is just something else she’s done to get even with me. But she’d have sense enough to get out of my sight after she did it. You needn’t expect her here today.”
Hering looked around the room. “It don’t seem like the Norgaard girl would do a thing like this.”
“A lot you know!” Tony told him. “It’s exactly the sort of thing she would do if the impulse struck her. Sondo’s a devil.”
“Just the same,” Hering mused, “it don’t seem like anybody who wanted to work for the store would go smashing one of those mannequins. They cost a lot of money, don’t they?”
“Dolores came to a hundred and fifty dollars,” Tony said.
“And there’s another thing.” Hering went over and picked up the red dress. “Of course I don’t know much about the way you run things up here, but I’ve got a sort of picture in my head. I mean about these dresses you use in the windows. You don’t just go throwing them around on chairs, do you?”
“Of course not,” Tony said. “We get them fresh from the press room and then—”
“And then they go right on the dummy, don’t they?”
“Mannequin.” Tony corrected automatically.
“But you carry ’em around on hangers, don’t you? And if you had to let a dress out of your hands, you’d hook the hanger over something. You wouldn’t just go throwing the dress over the back of the chair.”
Tony and I both looked at him. He had something there. Not a hanger in sight in the room.
“Of course I wouldn’t know,” Hering said, “but it looks like maybe that dum—mannequin was already dressed and somebody took the dress off her. Took it off in such a hurry that they didn’t bother to look for a hanger to hang it up properly, just tossed it over a chair.”
We found out very shortly that he was right about the mannequin having been dressed. The rest of the department started to straggle in and one of the boys admitted that he’d dressed Dolores before he went home the previous day. The mannequins had to be carried downstairs in sections, and were usually dressed in the windows, but in this case Sondo had wanted to try out some effects and had asked that Dolores be dressed and left in her workroom.
This careful deduction got us nowhere. Tony finally dragged himself away from the “body” and Hering went to phone McPhail about the latest developments. It wasn’t until much later in the day that Miss Babcock got into the affair and began to throw tantrums because the red belt that belonged with the dress was missing.
Meanwhile, I went back to my office to find Chris waiting for me. By the sudden silence that fell when I walked in and the guilty expressions on the faces of both Chris and Keith, I could surmise that I’d interrupted a little heart-to-heart talk.
“Oh, Linell!” Chris burst out when she had recovered from her momentary embarrassment. “I came to ask you not to say anything to the police about what came out at Sondo’s party. You don’t have to, do you? After all, it hasn’t anything to do with Monty’s death. I mean, since I don’t really know anything—” A flush crept up her throat and into her cheeks and she stopped helplessly.
“Now listen to me,” I said. “I’m beginning to feel practically like an encyclopedia of what the police department doesn’t know. About every fifteen minutes someone new comes up and asks me please not to say anything to the police about such-and-such because, of course, it hasn’t anything to do with the murder.”
Tears began to well up in Chris’s eyes. “Oh, Linell, how can you be so unkind? Of course father and Susan won’t say anything. And I’ve already stopped by to speak to Helena and Carla and they won’t tell either. Keith just promised me he wouldn’t so there’s only Sondo, Bill Thorne and you left. If you’d promise, then I could just go over to see Sondo and—”
“If you can find her,” I said. “Just at the moment she’s disappeared.”
The flush drained out of Chris’s cheeks.
“Oh, no!” she whispered. “Oh, no—it couldn’t be!”
“Couldn’t be what?” I snapped.
She looked around toward Keith, but he was watching me in wide-eyed horror and didn’t see her.
“I didn’t say she’d been murdered,” I told them. “I only said she’d disappeared. Probably not even that. She came to the store this morning, so she may be around somewhere.”
Chris was not reassured. She jumped up. “I’m going over to window display. I’ve got to find out! I’ve got to know!”
“Maybe you’d better stay away,” Keith warned her. “After what Sondo did to you last night, they might go tying you in. Or they might tie—”
Chris whirled on him. “Don’t you say it! Don’t you dare say it!”
The glimmer of a most unpleasant suspicion began to stir in my mind. What was it Keith had been so uneasy about having said last night? It had been after Chris had gone. He’d accounted for her strange behavior in the window by suggesting that there might be someone else she’d loved as well as Monty.
For the first time that idea began to take hold in my mind. I’d thought from the beginning that she had never shown a natural hatred toward the murderer, even though he’d taken the life of the man she’d loved. And she’d been so frightened and hysterical from the beginning. There were two people Chris had loved besides Monty; two who loved her devotedly. Owen and Susan Gardner.
I leaned my elbows on the desk and put my face in my hands. My confusion of mind was so great that I couldn’t seem to think in a straight line for two minutes consecutively. Sooner or later I’d have to go to McPhail with everything I knew. Everything. Which meant my own part in finding Monty’s body, the part Bill had played, Helena’s visit to Monty’s apartment, the letters we’d found there, Sondo’s suspicions of a possible explanation concerning the ring—anything and everything. But before I did that I wanted to have one last thorough talk with Bill.
“Chris,” I said more gently than I’d spoken before, “I think you’d better go home and stay there. Don’t talk to anyone else in the store. Probably Sondo is all right and will show up at any minute. But—but if she isn’t all right—we’ll all have to tell the truth. There’s nothing else for it. Go home, Chris and rest. And I’ll call you the moment I know anything.”
She said, “All right, Linell,” in a voice that was hardly more than a whisper and went out of the office as if she were walking in her sleep.
The moment she was gone, I sent Keith off on an errand and then phoned window display. One of Tony’s helpers answered. No. Sondo hadn’t shown up as yet. Hering was still there. Sure, he’d tell him I wanted to see him.
I sat back and waited. There were a number of things I couldn’t tell Hering yet, but there was one thing I could. Until I made up my mind to confess the part I’d played, I simply couldn’t go giving any of my friends away, but there was one person concerned who was no friend of mine.
“I want you to find out something for me,” I said when Hering came in. “It’s just possible there was another person near the window at the time Mr. Montgomery was murdered. I mean someone who hasn’t figured very strongly yet.”
He looked all ears and interest and I went on.
“Last week Carla Drake bought a pin down at the costume jewelry section. It didn’t suit her and she went down Tuesday to exchange it. Helena Farnham waited on her on both occasions, but for some reason neither Miss Farnham nor Miss Drake can recall exactly what time of the day that exchange was made. Do you have access to the salesbooks?”
“I’ll find out, Miss Wynn,” Hering said.
“Of course there may not be anything to it,” I told him. “I’m just curious, that’s all. But there’s one other thing. Yesterday a clipping came into my hands and it may have some significance. I wonder if you could look up the case referred to?”
“Well,” he said, “I guess so. That Miss Drake sure is some baby, ain’t she?”
“Et tu, Brute?” I said and smiled at his blank look. “I mean it would certainly be a shame if she turned out to be a murderess, wouldn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Hering said. “Tough to get a conviction. What’s that clipping you were talking about?”
“I have it in my handbag,” I said, and then wondered if I did. I’d read it over again on the way to work that morning, but what with the queer things that went on these days I couldn’t be sure how long I’d keep anything.
I opened a drawer in my desk. I must have done it absently, because it wasn’t the drawer in which I kept my bag and gloves. And then I sat quite motionless.
Hering must have noted the peculiar expression on my face because he came around the desk and looked at the contents of the drawer.
“Pull it out,” he said. “Go ahead, pull it out.”
I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to because suddenly and unreasonably I was afraid. I knew what was in that drawer and so did Hering. When I still hesitated, he reached in and pulled out the wrinkled green folds and shook them into shape.
The thing was Sondo’s paint-smeared smock and out of it dropped the knotted yellow kerchief she so often wore about her head.
Hering regarded me darkly. “Where’d you get this?”
“I don’t know,” I said in bewilderment. “I mean I didn’t get it anywhere. Sondo must have put them there herself. But I can’t imagine what for.”
Hering looked increasingly mournful. “Maybe she did and maybe she didn’t. You sure you don’t know anything about this, Miss Wynn?”
I began to feel a little indignant. “I’ve told you I don’t. What do you think—that I’ve murdered Sondo and—and—”
He shook his head at me reproachfully. “Don’t get excited now. I didn’t say nothing of the kind.”
“But you thought it!” I cried. “I saw it there in your face. But why you should mind, I’m sure I don’t know. I’d be a lot easier to get a conviction on than Carla Drake.”
Hering said, “Aw, Miss Wynn!” and I began to feel a bit foolish. I hadn’t meant to pull a Chris on him, but it just seemed as if so many things were piling up and that smock stuffed in the drawer of my desk was the last straw.
“It’s all right,” I said. “I’m sorry. I’m sure there’s some simple explanation and as soon as Sondo shows up we’ll hear about it.”
“I’ll have to take this over to show McPhail,” he told me. “And now that clipping.”
I found it and gave it to him. “It’s about a fur coat theft at a style show run by the store where Monty used to work before he came here. Maybe there’s a connection.”
“I’ll check on it,” he assured me. “And don’t you worry about this smock business.”
Keith came back shortly after Hering had left and I told him what had happened. He looked sicker than ever and dropped limply into his chair.
“That means she’s dead,” he said in a hollow voice. “That’s what it means!”
“It doesn’t mean anything of the kind,” I told him, but he shook his head at me.
“If she’s dead I’m going to tell,” he whispered. “I have to tell. I can’t let it go on.”
I was tempted to get up and shake Keith, the way Bill and I took turns at shaking Chris.
“Just what have you got on your mind?” I asked.
He only shook his head and I knew from experience that when Keith developed a mood there wasn’t much chance of doing anything with him. He denied all knowledge of the smock and I believed him.
It wasn’t until after lunch that we found out Bill had disappeared too, and that in all probability he’d been the last to talk to Sondo.