I forgot all other horror in this shock. I knew it was all right. It had to be. But it looked bad for Bill.
I told McPhail about the phone call I’d had from him late that afternoon and the detective pounced on the information eagerly.
“Where’d he call from? Where is he now?”
“I don’t know,” I said helplessly. “He didn’t tell me.”
McPhail didn’t believe a word and I became a little frantic trying to convince him.
Across the room Hering was playing with the pine spray again, while he listened. He gave the plunger a little push and the office began to smell of Christmas trees. McPhail sneezed and barked at him.
“Get the damn’ thing outta here!”
Hering took it away sheepishly and came back.
I explained to McPhail that Bill was on the track of something and that he’d thought it safer if I didn’t know too much about it. I said he’d told me about seeing Sondo and that he’d sounded concerned when I’d told him Dolores had been smashed with a hammer.
“Sure,” McPhail said, “he probably remembered his prints were on that hammer.”
“He didn’t say anything about the hammer,” I told him. “He just sounded shocked and said he’d come back to town right away. There wasn’t a train until midnight and he was going to call me again at ten o’clock. Only of course I wasn’t home.”
At the back of my mind I was thinking that all he’d need to know to settle us nicely was the part Bill and I had played in the discovery of Monty’s body. Why on earth had Bill had to touch that hammer when he’d been in Sondo’s workroom that morning?
The palms of my hands had broken into a cold sweat and I pulled a handkerchief from my pocket to dry them. Of all the times in the world to pull out a handkerchief, I had to pick the worst moment.
Something which had been caught in the folds flew across the room with a little clatter. Hering leaned down and picked it up. But he didn’t hand it back to me. He studied it for a moment thoughtfully and then put it down on the desk in front of McPhail without a word.
His action was so odd that I leaned over to see what it was. McPhail picked the object up in his fingers and turned it about. It was a large carnelian stone, deep red and highly polished, set in an oval of antique gold, evidently broken loose from the prongs of a ring. About a third of the stone had cracked off and the mounting was visible underneath.
McPhail spoke curtly over his shoulder and someone brought an envelope and laid it before him. He took out the ring that had been found clutched in Monty’s hand and fitted the stone to it. The match was perfect. He looked at me, his eyes cold and deadly.
“Well?” he said.
I felt as if a net were being pulled in around me and I was suddenly too weary to fight the entangling mesh.
I don’t know where it came from,” I said. “I’ve never seen it before.”
Someone was trying to incriminate me. That smock stuffed in my desk. And now the stone to the ring in my pocket. Who could hate me like that?
Hering’s eyes were on me. “You try hard to think, Miss Wynn. You must have got that somewhere. Can’t you remember anything about it?”
I put my fingers over my eyes and thought of everything I could remember handling that night in my work in the window. I went again through all the steps I’d taken on my way upstairs to the mannequin room, thought through the whole experience. And suddenly I had it.
No one had put that stone in my pocket. I’d put it there myself. I looked up at McPhail triumphantly.
“I remember now! When I was in the mannequin room. Right after—right after I found her. My foot kicked something on the floor and then I stepped on it. I picked it up and put it in my pocket so I couldn’t kick it again. I didn’t look at it or think about it, but it must have been the stone.”
McPhail regarded me with open disbelief in those cold eyes. “Pretty smooth with your stories, aren’t you? First you find a piece in the window and then you lose it. Now you got the other piece. Come clean now—where did you get it? Why was it in your pocket? What were you going to do with it?”
He took me over the whole thing again and again, until I felt so weary that I wanted to give up. It was almost like the horrid fascination of looking down a well. I knew it was the end of me if I jumped, but I was tempted to go plunging down—to cry that of course I’d murdered Sondo, that the ring was mine, anything to get away from those coldly cruel eyes watching me. Somehow I clung to a shred of sanity because I knew I had to help Bill.
Hering finally broke the tension. He picked up the stone again.
“You know,” he said, “I’ve seen this somewhere before.”
McPhail turned. “Where?”
“I don’t know exactly.” Hering looked uncomfortable. “It’s just that I got a picture of it in my head. And when I get a picture like that I know—”
“You and your pictures!” McPhail snapped. “If you’ve seen it before you’d better remember where.”
Hering closed his eyes and went into one of his trances.
“It was on a hand,” he produced at last.
“Well now,” McPhail said heavily, “ain’t that just too sweet! On a hand he says. You wouldn’t by any chance know whose hand, I suppose?”
“Nope,” Hering shook his head. “That ain’t in the picture. But it was a woman’s hand. With red nails.”
McPhail turned his back in disgust and started over again on me. The little interlude had restored my balance to some extent, and I could go over the ground again without giving way.
Hering was still playing with the parts of the ring and suddenly he exclaimed and stepped forward to show something to McPhail. There was a tiny hinge in the gold oval that held the stone and when he pressed above the hinge with his nail the stone tilted up to show a hollow beneath. It was a space in which a lock of hair, or a picture, or some such sentimental treasure might have been kept. There was nothing in it now.
McPhail glared at me. “I suppose you don’t know what was kept in that ring?”
“Of course I don’t,” I said. “I’ve told you I’ve never seen the thing before.”
He finally let me go, but only, I think, because he thought I might lead them to Bill. From that moment on I was followed every time I left the store.
There wasn’t anyone to take me home this time and I have no clear memory of going out and catching a bus. I suppose I must have, because I turned up eventually at my own door.
Helena was sitting up in bed, reading a magazine and she looked up anxiously as I came in.
“Linell! I’ve been so worried. You’ve never come home this late from the store.”
I went over and sat limply down on her bed. “Sondo’s dead. Murdered, just like Monty. I found her. I—I went up to the mannequin room for a figure. And when I put my hand into a cabinet I touched her hair and—”
Helena’s magazine slid off on the floor with a ruffling of pages. She recovered herself as I talked, but there was a gray look about her mouth. “I knew it,” she cried. “That party. I knew something awful would come of it. A thing like that gets out of hand.”
I told her about that earlier attack upon me in the office and it was pleasant to have her soothe and cluck over me. But still I watched her a little uneasily. I hadn’t seen her alone since the night before when she’d refused to tell me about Lotta Montez, and it seemed to me that Helena was looming up more and more as a mystery woman.
“I know about Lotta Montez,” I said, when we’d exhausted the subject of Sondo’s murder.
“About her?” The words were scarcely more than a whisper.
“Yes. That she was mixed up in that fur coat theft in the east. She and her dancing partner.”
I watched her warily. Her expression was guarded and I couldn’t tell how my news had hit her.
Lotta Montez. A stage name certainly. But who was the real woman behind the name? Why had Helena burned that note?
She leaned forward and put her hands on my shoulders, turned me so that I faced her.
“You’re young. Linell,” she said. “Only a few years older than Chris. Too young, perhaps, to have learned tolerance.”
“Tolerance!” I cried. “How can you talk about tolerance when two people have been murdered?”
“Listen to me,” she pleaded. “I’m not talking about murder. I’m talking about someone who is innocent and mustn’t be brought into this.”
I had to believe in her sincerity. I might not understand her motives, but I couldn’t doubt that she was honest in what she was saying.
“There’s nothing I can do anyway,” I told her. “Hering looked up the fur theft and he put the whole thing in McPhail’s hands. But right now McPhail is busy suspecting Bill Thorne.”
“Bill!” Helena’s tone was incredulous. Then she remembered. “He phoned you tonight. I told him you were working late and that everything was all right. He said he’d be seeing you and hung up.”
That was a help. Not that I blamed Helena, since she hadn’t known what was happening at the store. But if Bill took her at her word, he might not even come home tomorrow. And he had to come home. Quickly. In order to defend himself.
I gave Helena a further account of the evening while I was getting ready for bed, and the strangeness between us began to wear off. After all, Helena had as much right to shield someone if she chose, as Bill had to shield me, or I him. Probably none of us was obscuring the real issue. I couldn’t help wondering who it was Helena was shielding. And why?
It took me a long time to get to sleep and then I had a queer dream. I was back in my office at Cunningham’s and that missing picture was again in place on the wall. I knew it was there. But it was in place only so long as I had my back to it. The moment I started turning around, the spot on the wall was empty again. I kept trying and trying to sneak up on that picture and catch it in place—but always it just managed to elude me.
I woke up limp with fatigue, but came alive the moment I got out of bed. This was to be a day of action. If Bill wasn’t to be arrested the moment he set foot back in town, somebody had to do something. And I knew one thing I was going to do—about that missing picture from the wall of my office.
I think I was a little shocked when I walked over from Michigan and found Cunningham’s State Street windows alive with color and light. The curtains had been opened and the red windows were on display.
There were my signs, lettered in red on creamy paper. “Red is the Color of the Year!” with a crimson exclamation point. And Sondo’s backgrounds bright and spectacular—when Sondo herself lay so tragically dead.
I had forgotten all about the windows from the time I’d found Sondo. But others had been more responsible than I. Sometime, between all the police procedure, Tony had managed to get his windows done. They were every bit as striking and effective as we’d hoped and I felt sick at heart to think Sondo couldn’t see them. For all her scrapping with Tony, she’d loved her work and had taken a real pride in the things she did for the windows.
The store was in a state of confusion. The news of the second murder was out and I think every employee in Cunningham’s had the jitters. The women, particularly, went to the locker rooms and upper floors in groups of two or three and during the day there were several resignations. Policemen were posted at every entrance and reporters lurked in every corner. Not even Mr. Cunningham could stem the tide now.
The day had a remorseless tempo. One thing led to another so swiftly that I seemed to be out of breath most of the time.
Keith started things off. He was already in the office when I arrived, and I knew by his face that he’d heard.
“I told you it would be like that,” he said. “Something’s loose now and it can’t be stopped unless it’s caught and bound. I told you it wasn’t safe to know too much. Remember? So I’m going to be rid of what I know.”
“What do you know, Keith?” I asked evenly.
His eyes were dark and haunted in his yellowish face. “It’s all right to tell you now,” he said, “because then I’m going over to tell McPhail. Remember Tuesday afternoon—before Mr. Montgomery was murdered—when you gave me those signs to take down to lingerie?”
I nodded.
“Well, I didn’t leave the store right away afterward. I was going down to the basement to look at some shirts they had on sale. I took the basement stairs down from the main floor. The stairs at the front of the store. You know where they come in?”
I knew perfectly well. That stairway, with its head close to window five, cut down just below the front windows.
He saw my quickening of interest. “Just as I was starting down the stairs I heard somebody talking in the window. Somebody talking loud and angry. I’m pretty sure it was Mr. Montgomery, and I heard part of what he said.”
I leaned forward. This was the thing Chris wouldn’t tell.
“What did you hear?”
“He was swearing some. And then he said, ‘You get out of here and get out fast. I’m sick of the whole tribe of Gardners and you’re the worst of the lot.’ ”
My eyes were on Keith, but I didn’t really see him. Certain little pieces of a puzzle were beginning to fall into place. But my mind shrank from accepting the pattern they presented. Monty might have addressed those words to Chris, though that seemed unlikely, if her story of hiding in the window during Monty’s tirade was true. The other person to whom he might have been speaking was Owen Gardner.
Had Owen gone down earlier to see Monty? And then gone down again to discover the body? It was not only possible, but suddenly very likely. If it had been Owen in the window, then many things were explained. Chris’s hysteria, her lack of hatred for the murderer.
That would be why she’d kept her presence in the window secret; why she refused to tell what she had heard. It explained Owen’s behavior too. Torn between the necessity to save himself, the love for his daughter, and the need to keep her from being involved. Might it not even explain Sondo’s death?
Owen, watching Sondo as she tortured Chris and threatened to involve her. It all dovetailed perfectly. The only trouble was that I had pieces left over. I had Lotta Montez, and Helena shielding someone, and a carnelian ring, and a mannequin with a smashed head.
Perhaps those things were really extra. Perhaps they fitted no more than that stone in my pocket, or Bill’s thumb print on the hammer.
Keith was watching the expressions that crossed my face.
“I’ve been afraid,” he said. “But I’m not afraid any more. If I wait, maybe I’ll be the next one after Sondo. So I’d better go talk to McPhail.”
“Yes,” I said, “you’d better go talk to McPhail.”
He went off and I phoned Universal Arts to see if there’d been any word of Bill. But nobody had heard from him since the day before.
I took care of a few urgent matters on my desk and then put on my hat and coat. One last look at the vacant spot on my wall told me nothing, but I knew now what I might be able to do about it.
The public library was only a short walk and I went straight up to the periodical room and explained to the attendant what I wanted. I sat down at a table with an armful of magazines and started going through them methodically.
These were the magazines from which Keith and I had cut pictures to paste on the walls of my office. We’d chosen old ones to cut up, of course, so if I went back a few months before the time we’d papered the office, I ought to find a copy of the picture that had been torn from my wall.
I knew I was on familiar ground. Many of the pictures I had pasted on the office walls looked up at me from those pages. But though I went through the magazines carefully, with my hopes high at first, and then gradually dying, I found no picture which struck a responsive chord in my memory.
Just as I was about to give up, I was rewarded—not by finding the picture, but by discovering one I’d never seen before.
It was a beautiful photograph done in full color—rich golds and reds and black. A man with a young, narrow, Spanish face smiling down at the woman in his arms. A woman in a dance frock of gold and red, and high-heeled gold sandals. Her head was tipped back to look up into his eyes and her glossy black hair swung to her shoulders.
My eyes dropped to the caption below the picture—“The dance team of Luis and Lotta, which has been making such a stir at style shows lately”—and then back to the profile of the woman.
I knew her in spite of the dark hair. Lotta. Shortened from Carlotta? Eventually Carla? There was no doubt about it. Lotta Montez was Carla Drake.
I sat back, wondering where the path led to now. Carla Drake, was Lotta Montez, and whose dancing partner had been sent to jail in connection with a fur theft at a store where Michael Montgomery had worked. Had she loved that much younger man in the photograph? Was he the “lost” husband Mrs. Babcock had mentioned? And what had become of him in the end? Hering had said that he’d been arrested. He’d said nothing of trial or conviction. But he’d said something else too—that the woman had got away.
I carried the magazines to the desk and headed for Cunningham’s as fast as I could go. I left the elevator at the fourth floor.
Miss Babcock greeted me with a frantic wave of her hands. “The police are questioning Mr. Gardner again. And the style show’s scheduled to go on at two this afternoon. What am I to do?”
So Keith had had his interview with McPhail.
“I want to see Miss Drake,” I said. “Right away.”
Miss Babcock went on for five minutes about Owen, the style show and the inconvenience of murders in general.
Then she said, “Oh, Miss Drake won’t be down till later. She’s not modeling this morning.”
I was just as glad. There was something I wanted to see before I faced Carla.
“Do you mind if I have a look at that white dress she’s wearing in the show?” I asked Miss Babcock.
The buyer motioned absently toward the racks where the style show dresses hung. I found Carla’s lovely Juliet frock without any difficulty and lifted the soft material in my hands.
I could remember the tears in Carla’s eyes when I’d told her how beautiful she looked. I could remember the graceful way she’d lifted the skirt. And the way she’d shied away from the slightest mention of dancing.
I ran the edge of the hem through my hands. There was a gray tracing of grime along the edge of the skirt. Grime never picked up from the soft, well-cleaned carpets of the dress section. I went back to speak to Babcock.
“Do you happen to remember where Miss Drake was during the rehearsal last evening?” I asked.
“Why—she was here, of course. Where else would she be?”
“But there were so many models. Are you sure? Would there have been any time when she could have slipped away for fifteen or twenty minutes?”
Miss Babcock considered. “Well, if it comes to that, I don’t suppose there was one of us who was in plain sight all the time. Not even Mr. Gardner. Wait!” Something like a glitter came into her eyes and she put an excited hand on my arm. “There was a time. We had to wait for her once. In fact we ran some of the other girls through ahead. But she showed up right afterwards. She said she’d got bored and was looking around the department. It was strictly against rules for her to be out of the dressing rooms and I was very annoyed. You—you don’t think Miss Drake has anything to do with—with all this?”
She looked disgustingly eager and I had no intention of satisfying her curiosity.
I said, “Oh, no. Certainly not,” and left before she could stop me.
Now I was pretty sure about the mysterious hand that had played the phonograph last night. And where did it get me? If Sondo had been murdered around that time—but she hadn’t. She’d been dead since early morning.
I went upstairs to my office and found Bill tilted back in my chair.