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I put my napkin down and bid a reluctant adieu to the remnants of my veal bird. I wanted to follow up on what Lucille had just told me. Five minutes later I was headed uptown.
At Third and Main the traffic light turned red ahead of me. To keep my impatience in check, I watched holiday shoppers. FDR’s New Deal was working. Their arms held a few more bundles than those of shoppers a few years ago.
Gil Tremain had a daughter. I tried to block the thought that no matter how many gifts she got in her stocking, she was likely to have a lousy Christmas unless I found her father. Apart from when someone went missing voluntarily, the sooner you found them, the higher the odds they’d still be alive. Tremain had been missing going on four days now. The question was, had he vanished because he wanted to?
The light changed.
I moved on.
I wasn’t in a holiday mood.
By the time I pulled onto the parking strip outside C&S Signals, I’d planned my order of attack. Mrs. Hawes eyed me without enthusiasm as I entered.
“Have you found him?”
“No. Is Mr. Collingswood in?”
“Where else would he be with everything topsy-turvy here? The office boy went out and got him a sandwich. He’s eating it at his desk, poor man.”
“I need to see him.”
“And he needs ten minutes’ peace and quiet. Have a seat.”
She pointed at four chairs paired on either side of a low table. My impulse was to breeze past her, but she’d been party to the conversation I was interested in. She would probably respond to honey better than horseradish, so I sat. As demurely as when one of the nuns at Holy T. sent me to the principal’s office.
The frequency of those visits had given me considerable experience.
Keeping my knees together, I folded my hands in my lap and smiled at Mrs. Hawes. She ignored it. It hadn’t worked with the nuns either.
My plan had been to ask Collingswood why he’d neglected to tell me Tremain had been sighted Monday morning. Since Collingswood had hired me, why wouldn’t he give me every scrap of information he had? My forced acquaintanceship with the chair in the reception area gave me time to reflect he might not know.
Women in offices talked about things they didn’t pass on to the bosses. One got a glimpse of a letter about someone being promoted, or fired, or the target of legal proceedings. That girl passed the information to others. Word spread.
Some might call it gossip. A more accurate term was survival. Women were the disposables, the last to be told officially when jobs or salaries might be cut. They depended on each other for that, and for hearing when one of the men who called the shots was better avoided because he was in a nasty mood.
“Say, I heard somebody caught a glimpse of Mr. Tremain Monday morning,” I said innocently. “Did you hear anything about that?”
Mrs. Hawes looked at me over the letter opener poised in her hand.
“Yes.”
The opener ripped into the envelope. I gritted my teeth.
“Did you have some sort of grudge against Mr. Tremain that you didn’t mention it yesterday when I was asking everyone questions?”
“Of course not! He’s a lovely young man.”
“Well, then? Why didn’t you tell me?”
Another envelope succumbed to the letter opener.
“I’m not one to gossip,” she said primly. “I told Mr. Collingswood and left it to him to make what he might of it. It wasn’t for me to say how reliable it was. Or how important.”
Extricating her latest conquest, she clipped it to its envelope and added them to the pile of opened mail at her elbow. So Collingswood had known, which led me back to the question why he hadn’t mentioned it.
“Mr. Collingswood has had a lot on his mind,” I said. “The more you can fill in some details on this, the less I’ll need to pester him. When you implied Daisy’s story might not be reliable, why was that?”
From the way her mouth pursed, I thought she wasn’t going to answer.
“I didn’t say it wasn’t reliable; I just don’t know that it was. She was on a bus. She can’t have had more than a glimpse. And she comes in after everyone else has gone. Mr. Tremain did work late sometimes, but still.”
“Still?” At least I’d confirmed it was Daisy who’d claimed to see him. She’d told Mrs. Hawes she was on a bus, the sort of insignificant detail which carried the ring of truth.
“Mr. Tremain would have been in his office. Probably with the door closed. They can’t have done more than pass each other and nod a few times. How could Daisy be sure it was him? And at that distance?”
“Mrs. Hawes, you make excellent sense.” I was more than willing to stroke her feathers now that I had what I needed. “I think I’ll pop in to see Mr. Collingswood now.”
Before she could put down the letter opener, I breezed past her.
***
Collingswood was at his desk poring over pages decorated here and there by equations when I rapped on his door. A partly wrapped half-eaten sandwich lay in his wastebasket. He gave a faint frown as I came in.
“Is Mrs. Hawes not at her desk?”
“I’m afraid I didn’t give her a chance to tell you I was here. I just need to check something. I won’t stay long.”
“Yes, of course. Any time.”
Standing works when you need to show who’s boss, but sitting’s better when you want to put them off guard. I sat down.
“I just had a nice lunch with your daughter. She mentioned a woman who works here had seen Tremain down on Fifth Street Monday morning.”
“Well, yes. Mrs. Hawes told me Daisy had said that, but I didn’t give it much credence.”
“Why not?”
His gaze fell to a paperclip on his desk and he pushed it around.
“I hate to say it, but the old dear drinks.”
“Why do you keep her on, then?”
“Oh... well... she’s a good-hearted soul, and there’s nothing wrong with her work. Reliable as can be. Leaves everything ship shape.”
“Does she come in tipsy?”
“Oh, no. That is... as far as I know.”
Something wasn’t adding up.
“How do you know, then? About the drinking?”
Collingswood’s expression had begun to grow unhappy.
“Someone must have told me. Wilma? Frank?” He shook his head. “I’m sorry. I can’t remember. So much has been going on. By the time I talked to you about helping us, it had slipped—. Frank. I think it was Frank who told me. He’d come by one night to pick up some papers and saw her drinking out of a bottle.”
I took my leave and went across the hall to his partner’s office. Frank Scott was on the phone. Beckoning me in, he brought the conversation to a quick close.
“Anything to report?” he asked hopefully.
“No, something to ask.” This time I stood, leaning a shoulder casually against the wall and crossing one leg over the other. “How do you know that Daisy drinks?”
Scott had been watching my legs. He looked startled.
“Daisy? Oh. You must have heard that rumor she started about seeing Gil somewhere Monday morning.”
“Why do you say it’s a rumor?”
He spread a hand indulgently.
“The source, the time of day. The woman works nights. Why would she be out and about first thing in the morning? As to your first question, I’ve come in nights a couple of times and caught her taking a swig from a bottle.”
A long time ago my work had taught me one thing about boozers: Sometimes they saw things that weren’t there. But sometimes they saw things that were.