18

The red windows were going in.

Tony and his helpers were all at work. Sondo’s backgrounds had been hung and the checkered floors were down. Tony was busy dressing the mannequin that was to take Dolores’ place, though not in the dress originally intended for the window, because the belt was still missing.

It was my job to add finishing touches, to contribute any brilliant ideas I might have, and to keep in close touch with the window work in order to write better sign copy. Keith was anxious to learn something about the window decorating end and he was there too, mostly getting in the way.

Right at the moment I was wandering dreamily around the cosmetic counters selecting a few odds and ends I wanted for a window.

I don’t think I was quite all there. Monty’s death and Chris’s grief and all the queer undercurrent things that I couldn’t understand, had gone away from me for a little while. There was one spot in me that woke up every now and then and clamored, “What about Sondo?” But mostly I was moving around in a haze of happiness that was personally mine and that horror couldn’t touch. I’d never felt like this about Monty. There’d always been a sure knowledge that I’d be hurt if I loved him too well. But I didn’t think Bill was going to hurt me. Not for all his teasing. It was wonderful to have somebody who’d worry about me the way I’d worry about him. It was wonderful to have Bill.

So I moved around in my foolish, happy daze and I suppose it’s just as well I had my little moment, because it wasn’t going to come again for a while.

I picked out a small red tower of a box that held cologne, then a red and gold compact and a lipstick with a bright red container. After that I went over to costume jewelry and found a long strand of big red beads. I showed my selection to the watchman—the usual routine—and went back to Tony’s window.

I hadn’t been in a window since the day I’d found Monty, but I didn’t think about that. I was feeling too happy about Bill for any queasiness. It didn’t even matter that Tony looked like a thundercloud and snapped at everybody who spoke to him. I paid no attention, but carried my things to the right front corner of the window and knelt down to arrange them as a little eye-catching accent in red.

The heavy depression of the day had finally lifted. Rain pounded against the big plate glass window behind me. If I’d stopped to think, conditions were very much the same as they’d been on Tuesday. But my own golden haze kept me from thinking.

Under the circumstances, I don’t know how it happened that what Tony was doing registered with me at all. I opened the box of cologne, tried various arrangements of compact, lipstick and coiled red beads. When I achieved a combination that satisfied me, I sat back on my heels to get the effect.

“How does it look, Tony?” I asked.

Tony’s soul was still rankling under the indignities to which he’d been submitted, and he only glowered at me and went on trying to crush a hat that simply didn’t belong there onto the head of a mannequin.

I said, “Heavens, Tony, stop it!”

The elaborate net and horsehair wigs they put on mannequins these days are stunning to look at, but they often drive the window decorators crazy because they lack the softness and pliability of more natural wigs.

“This hat’s got to be used,” Tony said grimly and made another attempt to arrange it on the stiff wig of the mannequin.

I came out of my haze enough to feel sorry for him. This series of red windows was Tony’s own brain child. The whole idea was really a knockout and if it was done as Tony had planned, we all knew it would make a stir on the street. But Tony had had too much handed him and now that the opportunity to put the series across was actually in his hands, he was going to pieces with resentment over past wrongs, instead of trying to meet and fulfill his present chance.

I went over and took the hat out of his hands to have a try at it myself. But the hat and the mannequin were simply not to be mated.

“Look, Tony,” I said, “this won’t do at all. But what about that blond figure upstairs? You know—the one with her hair parted in the middle. I think you could use the hat on that one.”

Tony said something intelligent and encouraging like “umph,” and I knew he wouldn’t do anything about it on his own. There was still a lot of work to be done in the windows and all his boys were occupied. Keith wouldn’t know where to look if he went. I was the third hand that could be spared.

“I’ll go get her,” I offered. “Her coloring’s good and she’ll be much better all around.”

“Dolores was the one,” Tony said, but he didn’t object to my going.

And I never thought about not going. I’d only have to carry a half figure downstairs and the figures we use now are very light. I never gave a thought to Bill’s warning that I must be careful. It seems amazing that I could go blithely off on that errand, without a care in the world and all disaster forgotten. Just because the word “honey” had gone to my giddy head and I thought I carried a talisman against the powers of darkness.

The elevator man took me up and said he’d wait for me unless he got a signal. As we went past the fourth floor I caught a glimpse of bright lights from the dress section where the style show was being rehearsed.

I got out on eight and started toward window display. The passenger elevators were at the very opposite end of the floor and it was quite a hike. I didn’t mind. It’s a wonder I didn’t skip as I went and maybe whistle a little tune. Never have I been so disgustingly carefree in my life—or with so little reason.

I went past my office, with my heels clattering gayly on the wooden floor. I hurried across the little drawbridge effect leading into the department, without a thought for the gloomy depths of the freight elevator on one hand, or the old, open stairway on the other.

I didn’t pause. I went straight on into the department. Only one or two lights were burning and I didn’t bother to turn on any more. I knew my way around the mannequin room, and I knew exactly where the half figures for the State Street windows were kept. There is something of a caste system among the mannequins. The older, cheaper figures are relegated to side windows, while State Street gets our prima donnas.

I went directly to the right cabinet and pulled open the door. Cabinets ranged as high as the partition in the mannequin room, but this was a low one, at floor level. Only a dim light came over the partition, but I knew what I was doing, and there was enough light to make out the figures in the cabinet.

I lifted out the first one, a luscious redhead, and set her to one side. Then I reached in for my blond. And knew immediately that something was wrong.

The next figure was wearing clothes, and the mannequins were never put away dressed. I put my hand on her hair and then froze where I stood. My throat was choked with horror. For one long, dreadful moment I couldn’t even take my hand away.

Instead of the stiff net of a mannequin’s wig, I’d touched hair that was soft and silky. Flyaway human hair that coiled about my fingers like something alive.

But not alive.

I stumbled backwards and closed the door quickly upon the thing that sat propped against the wall of the cabinet. I didn’t want to look. I didn’t need to look. I knew.

My surroundings began to crowd in upon me, awareness quickened within me and all my senses tensed to listening. The old trembling weakness ran through me and my knees refused to obey. But I could listen and watch.

I was aware of the lonely sound of rain whispering against the windows, and of all the dim, vast, echoing emptiness of the floor; the area of a huge city block. Far away the clang of an elevator gate told me the operator had not waited. I was the only living being on all that floor and within arm’s length, separated from me by only the thin wood of the cabinet door, lay something terrible and gruesome and dead.

Now, in my awareness, other shadowy figures about the room took on threatening guise and the whole place was horror-filled. But the culmination of all terror was still to come. Into that listening and waiting, came a sound that closed my throat and turned my flesh to ice. The eerie, ghostly sound of music, of a phonograph playing.

The needle had been set down in the middle of the record and the voice of the singer took up the words.

“Let the love that was once afire remain an ember;

Let it sleep like the dead desire I only remember,

When they begin the Beguine.”

Sondo’s favorite tune!

And then I heard the other sound. A queer slipping noise across the floor of Sondo’s workroom and I knew there was something more terrifying than being alone on that floor.

I was trapped in the mannequin room. There was only one path of escape and that lay past Sondo’s workroom, where that dreadful music played and something slipped and slid across the floor.

I took a step toward the door and some small object on the floor slid away from the touch of my foot with a tiny clatter. I stepped again and felt it small and hard beneath my shoe. Scarcely knowing what I did, I bent and picked the thing up, lest it clatter again, and slipped it into the pocket of my suit. And as I did so, I had the queer feeling that I was repeating a motion I had made long ago in the remote past, before I had ever reached a hand into a cabinet and touched silky hair that was no longer alive.

The weird singing went on and on and I knew I had to escape before it stopped. I stole in stark terror into the corridor. The door to Sondo’s room stood open, but from where I crouched I could see nothing in the dim light. I could only hear—the music, and that light, strange sound.

Was Sondo dead? Had it been Sondo in the cabinet? Or was it Sondo here in this room playing the music she loved? Was it perhaps—both?

I screamed then. I couldn’t stop myself. There was no reason in me, but only a crazy tearing of sound from my throat.

“Sondo!” I cried. “Sondo! Sondo!”—as if by crying her name aloud I could make her be alive, and not a dead thing propped in a cabinet, not a ghostly dancer to that awful music.

But the music went on playing, though the other sound stopped abruptly. And nothing came out of that room. Nothing flew at my throat. No hands, living or dead, reached out for me, and I fled past the open door and ran wildly across the dark reaches of the floor toward the elevator.

There I stood shaking the gate crazily, screaming for help, until the elevator came rapidly upward, the operator round-eyed with amazement and a passenger in the car.

It was Sylvester Hering and never have I been so glad to see anyone in my life. I flung myself upon him, chattering hysterically and he simply put one big hand over my mouth and smothered me into silence.

He said, “Don’t act like that! Pull yourself together. What’s happened?”

I waved one hand wildly toward the display department. I could only gasp incoherently. Hering took me by the wrist and he and the elevator man started off on a run, with me trailing helplessly along. I didn’t want to go back, but I was being dragged back. I couldn’t even be allowed the privilege of hysteria.

The phonograph was still on in Sondo’s workroom, the needle clicking round and round at the end of the record. But there was no one there, no one at all. Hering turned off the machine and turned sternly to me.

“Not here!” I told him frantically. “In the mannequin room!”

I had to go with them and show them which cabinet, but they didn’t make me look. I shrank back against the door and covered my face with my hands. I couldn’t shut out the things they were saying.

“It’s the Norgaard woman, all right,”—that was Hering.

“Lookut what’s around her neck!”—the elevator man.

I wouldn’t look and I didn’t know till later about the thin, braided suede belt that had cut off Sondo’s life. A belt of bright scarlet—the color we were featuring for the year. The missing belt.

The next hour or so will always remain a little hazy in my mind. I’ve a memory of Hering trying to be in a dozen places at once. Trying to search all the enormous eighth floor, calling McPhail, giving orders that no one be allowed to leave the store.

We were all gathered in the department eventually—a more terrible repetition of the ordeal we’d gone through only a few days before. Tony and the boys from the windows, the models from the style show, Miss Babcock, Owen Gardner, and Carla Drake in her gold and white gown, looking like Juliet. Carla, protesting that she must be allowed to change her dress. Objecting and complaining till she was allowed to go and make the change, there were a few others too. Scrubwomen, anyone who had been in the store.

But out of us all there was simply nothing to be gleaned. Apparently everyone had been doing what he was supposed to do. I was the only one who admitted I’d been on the eighth floor.

After the police routine had been run through and the body examined, we found that Sondo had been dead since early morning. There was a bruise at her temple where she had been struck a blow, only enough to stun her, to make her helpless so that those cruel hands could draw the suede cord tightly about her throat. It was thought that the same hammer with which Dolores had been smashed had struck the blow.

This was more dreadful than Monty’s death. That had been impersonal in the sense that it had little to do with us. Someone had hated him and killed him. But Sondo was dead, not because she was so bitterly hated, but because she had possessed knowledge that was dangerous. And that left each one of us wondering if he too knew more than it was safe to know. In a queer sort of way I suppose I’d liked Sondo. She was erratic and tempestuous and fiery, but she’d had a touch of genius and dauntless courage.

I told McPhail what I knew or surmised about the affair of the phonograph and the ring, and his men turned the place upside down searching for any trace of the stone, but if it was in the department, they didn’t find it. Nor did they find anything enlightening when they later searched Sondo’s apartment

Bill had told me to keep still about everything until he saw me, so aside from what I knew about the phonograph, I said nothing. My mind was sick with speculation. If Sondo’s suspicions had been correct, if she’d been following the right thread, then it was Chris she had prepared to trap. Every bit of evidence she’d uncovered had pointed to Chris. And she’d spoken as if she held back one final ace—the ring. Had that ring belonged to Chris? She’d been in the store that morning. Had she gone first to window display to try to recover her property? Had she—?

I could see the two of them with terrible clearness in my mind’s eye. Chris, so big and strapping, and little wiry Sondo. A Chris capable of action when she was aroused—and not a limp crybaby.

I couldn’t believe it.

Later I found myself in Hering’s company at the lunch counter on the seventh floor, without quite knowing how I’d got there. Every night free coffee was served to the scrubwomen and anyone else who worked late. The free coffee business was flourishing that night.

I sat on a high stool beside Hering, while he handed me cream and sugar, and all but stirred my coffee for me. I’d gone so far along a road of horror since that moment in the mannequin room, that I couldn’t feel much more about anything for the time being.

I do remember rousing myself once to inquire the time. It was after ten—which meant that I’d already missed my call from Bill. I hoped he wouldn’t be too worried and that he’d come back to town tomorrow, but I couldn’t even get very excited about that.

“What’s the matter with your fingers?” Hering asked me, and I looked at my hand, not knowing what he meant.

Then I realized that I’d been rubbing my fingertips against my skirt, rubbing them again and again—and I knew why. It was as if I was trying to rub from them the silky feel of Sondo’s dark hair.

“Why can’t we do something?” I cried. “Why doesn’t somebody do something?”

Others at the lunch counter glanced at me, then hastily away. For the first time I looked about to see who was there.

Carla Drake had changed to her blue suit and was wearing her usual beautiful, sad expression. I noticed with distaste that Owen Gardner had taken the stool beside her, but he was wasting no interest on her just then. He looked grayer than ever and the strong black coffee he drank seemed to be doing him little good.

Once Carla turned and said something to him in an undertone, but he only shook his head indifferently.

When I’d downed two cups of coffee, Hering pulled me off the stool and led me away from the counter. There was an exhibit of porch furniture not far from the lunch counters and he pushed me into a glider and sat down beside me. I was so numb and dazed that I had to be pushed and led.

“I found out about that fur coat business,” he told me. “I had some time off this afternoon and I went over to the library and looked up some eastern papers around that date.”

“Did you find anything that ties in?” I asked. I formed the words automatically because I couldn’t really care. I didn’t want to wake up and try to think. Every time I began to use my mind, I started through that experience in the mannequin room again. All I wanted now was to be numb.

“If it ties in,” Hering said, “I don’t know how. I took it to McPhail, but he was so bent on catching Sondo that he wasn’t interested. I guess I don’t look so smart from where he sits. Anyway, it seems Montgomery had a quite a finger in the style shows at that store in the east. They put ’em on like regular stage shows and he designed settings and arranged everything. Well, he had a dance team he was helping, and they went around appearing at all these shows between the dress displays. I guess he gave ’em a lot of good publicity.”

I was barely listening. I’d begun to think of Bill again. Where had he gone? How long would it take him to get back to town?

“Well,” Hering went on, “they had a fur coat show and some of the coats disappeared. I guess it even looked a little bad for Monty for a while. But they finally pinned it on these dancers he’d helped. They arrested the man, but the woman got away. ‘Luis and Lotta’ they called themselves.”

I came out of my apathy with a name ringing in my ears. “What did you say?”

Hering regarded me in despair, “Ain’t you even been listening? I said they billed themselves as ‘Luis and Lotta.’ ”

“Did the papers give their last name?” I asked.

“Yeah. Some sort of Spanish name. I got a picture of it in my head. Wait a minute.”

“It wouldn’t be Montez, would it?”

He fitted the name painstakingly to his mental photograph. “Yeah, sure. That’s it. How’d you know?”

“I’ve probably heard it some place,” I said.

Hering changed the subject. “Look, Miss Wynn, who do you think was up here playing that phonograph tonight?”

Everything came back with brutal clarity. I forgot about Lotta Montez.

“I don’t think anybody ever played it, except Sondo and Carla Drake. And this time it wasn’t Sondo. Carla was in the store all right, but why on earth she’d go sneaking upstairs to play that record, I don’t know. And if it was Carla, why didn’t she come out when I started screaming?”

“It could have been somebody who wanted you to think it was the Drake woman,” Hering said.

“But why? It doesn’t make any sense. And who would know I was there and take all the trouble to go up and scare me? Whoever it was had to walk up. The elevator man said he didn’t take anyone but me to the eighth floor around that time.”

Hering’s melancholy deepened. “There’s a lot that doesn’t make sense till you get hold of a key. What did Sondo take the dress off that dummy for? And who smashed its head in?”

We were on the old treadmill of speculation again. Tomorrow Bill would be back in town. Tomorrow I’d get to tell him everything I knew. And with whatever it was he had found out, perhaps something would make sense and we could go to McPhail with some concrete evidence that wouldn’t hurt the wrong person.

One of McPhail’s men came toward me “Hey! I been looking all over for you. You’re wanted upstairs, Miss Wynn.”

Hering took me up and I went into Monty’s office, where McPhail was waiting for me. The department was bright now, with lights burning everywhere, and noisy enough to shut out the rain beating against the window panes. I knew the minute I sat down in the chair opposite McPhail, that something new had come up.

I found out almost at once. Although the fingerprints on the hammer had been badly smudged, they’d made out one clear thumb mark. It belonged to Bill Thorne.