When I got back to the office Hering was waiting for me. I threw a hurried look at the stack of magazines on my window ledge as I went in, but they were evenly piled and hadn’t been disturbed. Even though I wasn’t going to do anything about the picture and Sondo’s letter right away, I didn’t want to lose them.
Keith went out to lunch and Hering sat down on the corner of the desk.
“What goes on?” I asked.
“Looks bad for Gardner,” Hering told me. “But McPhail hasn’t arrested anybody yet. He’s moved down to Gardner’s office on fourth so the style show can go ahead. Gardner needs to be on the spot and Cunningham’s pulled strings to get him a break. But I think there’ll be an arrest before night.”
I believe Hering was feeling a bit lonely. My office was about the only spot in the store where he was listened to with respect. I gathered that the city detectives considered him on a lowly plane and felt his job was catching shoplifters, not dabbling in murders. In the end it was Hering who knew more about the case than any of the others.
Considering the gloomy mood which had held me so strongly in its grip the day Monty was murdered, I’m sure I don’t know why I didn’t feel something of the same thing that afternoon. My nerves were in a much more jittery state. I felt tense and jumpy and suspicious of everyone, and I did sense a mounting tempo. But I had no premonition that the climax was to come with such startling suddenness. In fact, I felt hopeless of a solution ever being reached.
“Where’s Bill?” I asked Hering.
He was regarding my walls with his usual interest. “Oh, around. Universal’s getting along without him these days. He said to tell you he’d be up to see you before he went home.”
“Kind of him,” I murmured and tried to turn my attention to the avalanche of work on my desk.
But Hering didn’t take the hint. “Say, what’d you pull a picture off your wall for?” he inquired.
I looked up in surprise. “Don’t tell me you didn’t hear about that? I was a good little girl and told McPhail all about it. Whoever knocked me out with that book end must have pulled a picture off. Something else was pasted up in its place, but I took it down.”
And then inspiration struck me so suddenly I almost choked.
“Mr. Hering,” I said shakily, “you’ve looked at those pictures dozens of times. I suppose it would be too much to hope that you—might have taken one of your mental photographs of that wall?”
“Well now, I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe I did.”
“Then tell me what the picture was that’s missing,” I demanded.
He closed his eyes obligingly and remained that way for a few minutes, while I held my breath. Then he opened them and regarded me in triumph.
“Sure,” he said. “I got a picture of it. Just as clear as anything.”
I bounced up and down in excitement. “Tell me! Tell me what it was!”
He was really enjoying himself. No one had ever taken his mental photography seriously before and he had to lengthen his big moment. He nearly drove me crazy with suspense.
He turned around with his back to the wall. “You check now and see if I’m right.”
I could have shaken him. He proceeded to describe every picture in that row on the wall, from the door to the vacant space. When he came to that he paused maddeningly.
“Did I have ’em in order?”
“Every one,” I told him. “But if you don’t go on there’ll be a murder right in this office.”
He grinned at me and closed his eyes again. Closed his eyes and said one word.
“Seashells.”
And I had the picture at once. But he went on in detail. “A woman’s hands playing with seashells against something dark. Hands with bright red nails.”
“You’re wonderful!” I cried. “It was an ad for nail polish.”
I remembered perfectly now. I hadn’t found it when I’d looked at the library because I wasn’t looking at ads. I’d forgotten we’d used any.
Hering positively beamed with pride. Now that I knew what the picture had been, I was hopelessly disappointed.
“It still doesn’t mean anything,” I pointed out. “It’s just senseless. Why would anybody come in and pull a nail polish ad off my wall?”
He was holding back his trump and he leaned toward me with dramatic intensity.
“Because the woman whose hands posed for that picture was wearing a ring. A ring with a big, dark red stone in it.”
“You mean?”
“Right,” he said. “I knew I’d seen that ring before!”
I could remember it myself now.
“Then—then all we have to do—” I began, but he broke in on me.
“Miss Wynn, do you remember the name of the company that put out the ad?”
“It was the Nail Luster people, I think,” I said. “Are you going to tell McPhail?”
He was halfway out the door, but he turned back and grinned at me. “And get laughed out of town? No thanks, Miss Wynn. I’m going to get busy and find out who posed for that ad. I’ll be back when I know.”
I settled down in my chair, limp with the aftermath of excitement. Hands. Graceful hands wearing a carnelian ring. I tried to remember the hands of all the women I knew, but I hadn’t Hering’s kind of memory.
The afternoon was endless. Keith came back and we both buckled down to a pretense of work. I could send him on errands around the store and run down to talk to various buyers myself. But I couldn’t write copy to save my life.
Storm clouds were rolling in from the lake and it began to get dark in mid-afternoon. I felt restless with waiting. Would this evidence of the hands mean anything when we had it? I wanted to talk to Bill, but he didn’t come around.
At three o’clock I went down to have a look at the style show. Owen had attracted a good crowd of our more exclusive customers for the first day and I got there in time to see Carla Drake (I couldn’t think of her as Lotta Montez) go drifting effortlessly across the long platform. She was tremendously effective, but if the burst of applause she received meant anything to her, she gave no sign.
The door to Owen’s office was closed and I had no wish to investigate. When I glimpsed Miss Babcock weaving toward me through the crowd, I left hastily, pretending not to see her.
The rest of that afternoon was all deadly routine until, around a quarter to five, Tony Salvador put his head in my office.
“Well, I’ve done it!” he announced.
I hadn’t the faintest idea what he was talking about.
“Say, don’t you work here any more?” he demanded. The windows! Everybody’s nuts about ’em. Mr. Cunningham’s secretary came down to congratulate me in person. Looks like I get the job.”
“I’m glad, Tony,” I told him. “You deserve it. But, Tony—no more phonographs. Please.”
He looked a little sheepish. “Maybe you’re right at that.” Then the broad smile left his face. “You know something, Linell?”
“What?” I asked.
“I miss her like the dickens,” he said. “Sondo, I mean. Place doesn’t seem right without having her around to scrap with. And those are her windows as much as they are mine. I don’t think I’ll do so well without her.”
“Of course you will,” I assured him. “But I’m glad you said that. She’d have liked to get credit.”
Tony grinned half-heartedly. “She liked credit all right, and she deserved it. Say—Carla’s over in display now, packing up some of Sondo’s records. We thought they might as well go to her. And she said she wished you’d come over for a minute. She wants to talk to you about something and you won’t be interrupted over there. She wants you to bring a picture along. Says you’ll know what she means. Well, the department’s knocking off early tonight and I’ve got some shopping to do. So long.”
What on earth did Carla want with that picture, I wondered. Keith shook his head at me.
“Don’t you go, Miss Wynn. You stay away from display. Everything happens there.”
Keith was forever playing Cassandra and it irritated me. “Don’t be silly! It’s daytime and I scarcely think Carla will murder me.”
“You don’t know,” Keith warned. “You don’t know for sure about anybody. And maybe it’s daytime, but it’s already dark.”
It had been murky outside all day. Another storm was blowing up and the last traces of feeble daylight were dying out. But I wasn’t afraid of Carla and I was curious as to what she might know of that snapshot of Chris.
I slipped the picture from its hiding place among the magazines and put it in my purse. Then I said, “Cheer up,” and went off to window display, leaving Keith’s mutterings behind me.
Tony had evidently closed the department for the night, because the lights were off, except for a single bulb in Sondo’s workroom. What with the gloom outside, the place was dim and full of shadows. In spite of my brave words to Keith, I shrugged aside a twinge of uneasiness as I walked into the workroom.
Carla knelt on the floor, sorting a pile of records. She looked up at me soberly as I came in.
“Did you bring the picture?” she asked.
I tapped my purse. “Yes. What about it?”
“I want it,” Carla said. “Give it to me please . . . it will be better for everyone if you give it to me.”
There was something so strained in her manner that I was startled. It would be just as well, I thought, to keep Sondo’s work table between Carla and me. If she made a single move, I could be out the door and away before she could reach me.
“Why do you want the picture?” I asked. “Why should a picture of Chris mean anything to you?”
For some strange reason the faintest flicker of relief came into her eyes. Then she turned back to the records, reading the titles, placing one on one pile, one on another.
“The picture doesn’t mean anything to me,” she said. “It’s just that—that it might get Chris into a lot of trouble. And why should you want to do that?”
“I don’t want to get anyone into trouble she doesn’t deserve,” I told her. “But I’m not giving up that picture till I know what it’s all about.”
Carla laid the records aside and stood up. She pushed back a plume of hair from her eyes with a careless gesture—that silvery hair she had dyed black when she’d been part of the dance team of Luis and Lotta.
“It’s for your own good,” she said. “Sondo died because of that picture. If you keep it, something may happen to you.”
I didn’t like her tone, or the way she was looking at me and I inched backward toward the door.
“I’m not going to keep it,” I told her. “I’m going to give it to McPhail.”
“Don’t be a fool,” she said. “You mustn’t do that.”
I was almost at the door now. Another step and I’d make a bolt for it. My bravado was completely gone. This was a Carla I’d never seen before and I had no intention of letting her get near me.
And then to my relief, I heard footsteps coming down the corridor and into the department. But it was a relief shortlived.
Carla looked around, listening. “There she comes now. I had an idea you wouldn’t want to give up the picture, so I asked her to come up and try to persuade you. You’d really better listen to us, Linell.”
I felt trapped. Carla was there before me, and someone else was cutting off my retreat from the rear. I swung about quickly and my panic died. It was only Susan Gardner.
“You talk to her, Mrs. Gardner,” Carla said and dropped to her knees to tie up a stack of records.
Susan came over to me, her hands aflutter with distress. “Miss Drake says you have a picture of Chris that may get her into difficulty. Won’t you please let me have it?”
Carla gathered up her records and went past me to the door. “I’ve done what I could, Mrs. Gardner,” she said. “It’s up to you now. It’s no use fighting destiny anyway.”
“Listen,” I said to Susan, when Carla had gone out, “I don’t know what this is all about, or why a snapshot of Chris should mean much one way or another, but I’m not giving that picture to anyone but McPhail. I’ve held off because I didn’t want to get anyone into unnecessary complications. But if this snapshot is as important as you and Carla seem to think, then I want to get it out of my possession right away and put it where it will help to clear everything up.”
Susan stood there for a moment longer and she must have realized that my mind was made up. She looked distressed and unhappy, even a little puzzled, but she offered no further argument. Without another word, she turned and followed Carla.
So that was that, and there had been nothing to fear after all. I opened my bag to have another look at the picture that was causing all this controversy, but I could make no more of it than before. Who was the man? What part did he play in this? Was it, perhaps, his identity that held the answer to the riddle?
Another moment and I’d have returned the picture to my purse and left the department. I had no premonition whatsoever of what was about to happen. I heard no footfall, no sound of a hand creeping toward the light switch at the door behind me.
The light simply went out with a click and I stood there in darkness, filled with the knowledge that someone was in the doorway, cutting off escape. I fumbled at the catch of my purse and put the picture away.
“Susan?” I said. “Carla? Who is it?”
But there was no answer. The darkness was horrible and blank. I backed away, fumbling for a path of escape. If I could reach the wall, perhaps I could work my way around to the door. Escape I must. For I knew that Death stood in the doorway. The same death Monty had met, and Sondo. This time I might not be so lucky as I had been that day in my office.
Against the grayer darkness of the doorway I could just make out the blurred shadow that stood there. No outline, nothing to give height or form. Just a darker patch against more darkness.
Then a hoarse whisper came to me and I knew there was desperation here.
“The picture! Give me the picture!”
The voice was coarsened, unidentifiable. It might have been the voice of a man or a woman. Whatever it was, it sent terror streaming through the marrow of my bones. I wanted to scream, but I knew no scream could help me. One sound and I’d be done for, before anyone could hear and come to my help.
I moved again. Holding my breath, trying to control the trembling of my body. Back a step. Another step, and then a creak sounded that was like the crash of doom about my ears. I knew I was trapped.
I’d backed straight into Sondo’s long work table and the sound had given my position away.
Hands reached for me in the darkness, brushed my face. I ducked beneath them, but I was cornered, caught. The hands were hunting for me. Cold hands with a deadly strength in the fingers.
I groped across the table behind me, searching for anything—anything at all that might serve as a weapon. My hand closed over a smooth tube of metal. I picked it up, not knowing what it was.
There was a hot breath on my face and hands touched my shoulders, moved upwards. I raised the thing in my hands, meaning to strike out with it. And then I recognized what it was. The pine spray Tony had used last Christmas to fill the store with the odor of Christmas trees.
I pulled back the plunger, thrust it forward, shooting the spray at short range straight into the face, the eyes of the shadowy figure before me.
There was a gasp of pain. I didn’t wait for any more. I stumbled for the door, ran blindly out of the department, down the corridor. No purpose or direction. Wanting only to put distance between me and the horror that had reached for me in the dark.
The elevators were too far away and there’d be no safety in my office. I plunged down the stairway three steps at a time, falling twice, clinging to the rail, picking myself up to plunge downward again.
It was my abrupt collision with an indignant customer coming up the stairs that brought me to my senses. No pursuit sounded from above, and by running away I was giving the murderer every chance to cover her own escape.
The doors downstairs, I thought frantically. The exits must be stopped, the store searched. I left the protesting woman I’d nearly knocked over and rushed for an elevator, made the startled operator take me straight down to main. Then I tore down the middle aisle and ran straight into Keith, Bill and McPhail.
Keith gave a little scream as he saw me. “There she is! I told her not to go over to display!”
Bill put out his hands to stop my flight, caught my shoulders and swung me around. I clung to him for a moment, half hysterical with relief. Then I pushed him away and faced McPhail.
I couldn’t have made very much sense, but he got enough of the idea to call one of his men from his post near a door and give sharp orders that every exit be watched.
“The pine spray!” I gasped. “I used it to get away. Shot it all over the person who came at me . . . over her shoulders and face and hair. She’ll smell of it. If she tries to leave the store you can stop her.”
“You keep saying ‘she’,” Bill said. “Have you any idea who it was?”
I hadn’t. I was only using the ‘she’ because of Carla and Susan. I couldn’t be absolutely positive it was one of them. It might just as easily have been a man.
“You take Miss Wynn upstairs to her office and keep her there,” McPhail told Bill. “I’m going to round up everybody who’s had any connection with this affair and we’re going to have a showdown right now.”
I didn’t want to go back to the eighth floor again, but with Bill on one side, and Keith on the other, muttering I-told-you-so’s, I was marched to an elevator and taken upstairs. Thank goodness, at least, that my two rescuers had no odor of pine needles about them.
Keith told me that shortly after I’d left the office, he had gone to get someone to stop me. He would never have been in time, but I was grateful just the same.
Sylvester Hering sat on my desk waiting for me. It was just closing time—I heard the jangle of the bell as we walked in.
“I’m on the trail!” Hering announced. “I got the Nail Luster people looking up the name of the gal who posed for that hand picture. They’re gonna call me the minute they find out who she was. I told the operator I’d wait here.” Then he paused and took in my distraught condition. “Say—what goes on?”
I could make a little more sense by that time and I blurted out the whole story. About the picture and Carla and Susan—everything. Hering had a look at the snapshot and shook his head in bewilderment. Then he passed it over to Bill, who sat down to study it.
“How is Owen getting along?” I asked, just to keep talking and stop my teeth from their nervous chattering.
Hering shrugged. “He still claims he wasn’t the Gardner Montgomery was talking to in the window. They haven’t been able to shake him from that. I guess McPhail is going to take him and Chris over to headquarters for a real going over.”
Bill was still studying the picture, but didn’t seem to come to any conclusions.
He said, without taking his eyes from it, “You know, I turned up something funny about Gardner on that trip I took.”
“What?” I demanded.
Bill tilted the picture sideways and examined it from a fresh angle. “I told you about Monty working in a store down in a small Missouri city. And running off to Mexico with a woman who worked there. Well, Owen Gardner worked in that same store at the same time.”
“Then—then Owen and Monty knew each other long ago, before they ever worked together here?” I asked.
“That’s right,” Bill said, as calmly as if he weren’t throwing a bombshell into our midst. “You know something? I don’t think the girl in this picture is Chris.”
“Oh, don’t be sil—” I began, but he looked so positive that I stopped and went to look over his shoulder. Then I said, “I think you’re crazy. Of course it’s Chris!”
He shook his head. “It can’t be. Because of the man.”
Even Hering craned his neck. “You mean you know who the man is?”
“I think so,” Bill said. “And if I’m right, then this picture was taken years ago. So it couldn’t be Chris.”
The phone rang with startling shrillness and I could have tossed it impatiently out the window. But Hering picked up the receiver and it was his call. We all tensed to anxious listening.
“Yeah?” Hering said slowly. “You got her name? That’s swell. Sure, I’ll write it down. Give.”
Oddly enough, he didn’t write. He stood there with his mouth open. Then he said, “Hey, come again! What was that name?” The name must have been repeated, for he listened blankly. “That’s what I thought you said,” he muttered and put the phone back on my desk.
When he looked around at us, it was with the stunned air of a man on whom a great light was beginning to break.
“I think Gardner’s telling the truth,” he said. “He wasn’t in the window. It was a woman who killed Montgomery. The woman that ring belonged to. The same one who wrote that note signed ‘E’ and posed for the polish ad. And who killed Sondo because she wanted to get that picture back.”
“But who is it?” I cried. “Tell us!”
Hering leaned over and tapped the picture Bill held. “The jane we’re looking for is the one in that picture.”
“You mean—you mean Chris?” I demanded.
“No,” he said. “I don’t mean Chris. Bill’s right. That ain’t no picture of Chris. It’s a picture of the murderer. Her name’s Eileen Gardner.”