The Girl with the Frightened Eyes

by Lawrence Lariar

  “How would I know? All I really saw was her head, in here. Outside I saw much less. I caught a glimpse of her figure at about two hundred feet. She had a fine back, but it might have belonged to Lana Turner or Lauren Bacall for all I know. Still, she turned when I shouted her name.”

  Hank said, “That proves nothing at all. Lots of dames in New York would have turned at a whistle.”

  I looked at my watch. It was one o’clock. People were beginning to filter out of the place now, although the line of regulars at the bar still held their ground. I signaled Ike as he crossed toward the kitchen and he came over.

  I said, “It’s one o’clock. When does Lecotte arrive?”

  “I don’t wait for him,” smiled Ike. “I don’t watch for him to come in. Maybe he came in already, who knows?”

  “How about dragging him out?” Hank asked.

  Ike’s shoulder went up in a gesture of horror. “Me? You want me to lose my job, palsy? The cheap help never bothers the boss. When Lecotte calls me, I come. He whistles and I trot. But walk into his office without the whistle? You want my wife and kids to starve?”

  “You mean that he’s a stinker?”

  “Stinker, shminker—he’s got his job and I got mine. We understand each other.”

  “Where’s his office?” I asked.

  Ike pulled me gently away from the bar and pointed my nose to a door at the right of the bar, at the far end. “The last door on your left, down the hall.”

  We entered the narrow, dark corridor. Far down at the end a small blue hall fixture shone with a dull light. A pine paneled door on the left stood slightly ajar.

  I knocked. There was no answer. I knocked again. A sudden draft of air swung the door inward a bit farther and an unoiled hinge sang in the quiet.

  I pushed open the pine door and we walked into the office.

  It was a small room, ribbed with the same pine on the horizontal and waxed to a high finish. In the corner, a big desk of the Empire period. A formal lamp threw a circle of light on the desk top. Many thin black frames decorated the walls. Each of these pictures was a Daumier lithograph, neatly framed and hung with a decorator’s eye.

  I said, “I guess the great man hasn’t yet arrived. Shall we wait?”

  Hank was bending over the desk and when he straightened he was serious. He held a pipe in his hand. “If Monsoor Lecotte is a pipe smoker, he was here not too long ago.” He winked at me. “This pipe bowl is still hot. Maybe it would be smart if we got out of here. Night club owners don’t like strange gents browsing in their inner sanctums.”

  We stepped back into the hall, leaving the pine door ajar as we found it. My eyes were accustomed to the gloom now. In the blue light I saw that the door to the alley was open a bit. I saw, too, what was holding it open. It was a shoe—a man’s shoe.

  Hank saw it at almost the same moment. He pushed open the door and it swung outward, into the alley. The alley was dark, but the blue light threw a meager beam beyond the threshold.

  The gleam hit a spot far enough to reveal the figure of a man who lay in the alley on his face, arms outstretched; fists clenched. The glow was just strong enough to highlight the pearl-handled knife stuck up right between the man’s shoulder blades.

  I heard Hank suck in his breath as I bent over the figure.

  I said, “Is this Lecotte?”

  “Leave him alone,” said Hank. “He looks like a dead pigeon from where I stand.”

  I admired his coolness and his poise. The sight of a civilian corpse was a shock to me. I had seen death before, death in wholesale lots, on battlefields, in trenches, in hospitals. After a while such death became part of an infantryman’s daily routine. You looked at it, yet you didn’t see it, really. It was an impersonal thing, this death that visited soldiers. You felt sick and sorry for a while after viewing your first casualty, but after that only the death of a buddy could upset you.

  But that was war. This was New York, and Pierre Lecotte. I stood there, staring down at him, my throat dry; my head whirling with a confusion of ideas.

  It was then that the phone rang in Lecotte’s office. Hank pulled me back into the hall, back toward the bar, but I held him at Lecotte’s. I said “That call might be important.”

  “Are you nuts?” Hank was annoyed. “Let’s get the hell and gone out of here.”

  “Wait here for just a minute, Hank.” I ran into Lecotte’s office and lifted the phone.

  “Pierre?” It was a woman’s voice, low and sweet and full of alarm.

  “Hello, yes?”

  There was a silence and her voice rose sharply. “Pierre? Is that you?”

  “Paula?” I said, only because I wanted to believe that it was Paula. “Paula Smith?”

  I thought I heard her gasp before she hung up. I felt my head break into sweat and turned to Hank desperately.

  He said, “Who was it, detective?”

  I shook my head. “Don’t be funny. You’re the detective. How do I trace this call? I want to find out where that dame called from. What do we do?”

  “We get the hell out of here. Fast.” He got off the desk and ran out of the room. I followed him down the hall, past Lecotte’s body, into the alley and out to the street. He was running fast, surprisingly fast for a man of his weight.

  I said, “Is this what you call tracing a call?”

  Hank leaped into his car. “Exactly. We’ve got to report the call to the operator from another phone. It’s the only way to trace on a dial phone.” The car shot into gear. “It’ll take time—maybe fifteen minutes.”

  We squealed to a stop before a drug store. In the booth Hank sweated and groaned. The minutes crawled. I heard him say, “Get after it fast, girlie—this is the police. You heard me—the police!” The minutes crawled. Finally, Hank said, “Say that again, operator, but slow and easy this time.”

  He hung up. I said, “Where did the call come from?”

  “Apartment house. Number 2543 West Fifty-Fourth Street. The telephone is listed under the name of an old man. Very old man, by name of Benjamin Franklin, she says.”

  I said, “Bingo! That’s my number.”

  “You know the number?”

  I pushed him into his car. “The number is meaningless, but the name intrigues me.”

  In the car, Hank stalled over the ignition key. “I’m getting too old for this kind of gay sport, Jeff. This thing is beginning to smell bad—it stinks. We’re up to our ears in it now, both of us.”

  “Turn the key and step on it,” I said. “Or do you want me to take a cab?” I was feeling a lot better since Ben Franklin had entered the mix-up.

  He started the car and moved it into traffic slowly. “Where will it get us? The cops will go down to the club any minute and Ike will sooner or later be put on the pan and roasted until his ears are red. He’ll remember seeing you and me going into Lecotte’s office.”

  “He saw us walk into the hall, that’s all.”

  “Did he see us come back? Will he remember your pretty pan passing the bar on the way out? Of course not.” He held his head with one hand and rocked it. “What a sucker I was to leave my peaceful little studio orgy and go searching for a phantom dame named Smith. Where are we going now?”

  “To visit Mr. Benjamin Franklin.”

  “Is he still around flying kites?”

  “He’s an old friend of mine.”

  “You know George Washington and all that bunch, too, I’ll bet.”

  I slapped him on the knee and told him all about it. “Benjamin Franklin was the name of Paula’s uncle, Hank. But Paula’s Uncle Ben is dead. It stands to reason that if Paula wanted to go into hiding she’d be likely to use an odd name out of her past—no?”

  Hank sighed. “Peachy. But suppose the dame who called Lecotte happens to be a genuine Mrs. B. Franklin who just happens to know Lecotte?” />
  “It could be,” I said. “But it would have to be a damned strange coincidence, wouldn’t it?”

  “Franklin is a common name. Some of my best friends are Franklins.”

  “You haven’t met a Benjamin Franklin since third grade American History and you know it. There aren’t many with that handle.”

  The car slid around the corner and crept into West Fifty-Fourth Street. As it turned I saw a woman enter a parked cab far down the block. She carried a big package. Something in her fleeting silhouette held me. I knew her figure. I reached over and tapped Hank on the shoulder to slow him.

  The approaching cab was rolling into gear as it passed us. In the sudden light of a street lamp I made out the sharp profile of a face I knew well.

  I said, “That woman—the dame in the cab. It was Mrs. Preston!”

  Hank tried for a glimpse of her, but it was too late. He said, “Are you sure?”

  “I’d know her profile anywhere.”

  “Wasn’t she at the bar back in The Frog?”

  “I didn’t notice her after the incident with Semple. She might have left and come over here.”

  “Impossible. You would have seen her on your way back.”

  “Not if she had left before I did. She might have gone out and waited for Paula Smith, then followed from down the block where I saw Paula take the cab.”

  “Paula your ear,” said Hank.

  The car slowed and stopped before an ancient apartment house, loaded with rococo stone carving and the accumulated dirt of unwashed masonry. A tall iron fence protected six or seven inches of lawn from the sidewalk.

  A tired old man dressed in baggy pajamas answered the bell. He shuffled through the marble hall and unlocked the door and yawned in my face. He looked at me over his spectacles and stepped back from the door and said nothing. I knew the type—he was a combination janitor and night doorman, a man who only opened a door and asked questions.

  I said, “Franklin’s apartment?”

  “Upstairs. Number 6-C. Elevator to your left.”

  The elevator was ripe with the smell of unwashed linoleum and the stench of stale liquor. It was an old house, a house that had lived a grand life in its youth but had gone to seed in its old age. On the sixth floor the smell of paint blended with other and more subtle odors.

  Our heels made noise on the marble corridor. We walked halfway to the stairs and paused at the apartment. The door to 6-C stood ajar. I rang the bell and stared into the blackness beyond.

  Nobody answered the bell. I turned to Hank with a small question in my eyes and he answered it for me. He kicked open the door and stood back, bowing me in. “You’re not going to stop here, are you, Commando Keye? We must investigate this Benjamin Franklin. We must enter Mr. Franklin’s apartment and be thrown out on our tails.”

  We entered. It was a nightmare stroll, our first few steps down the hall. In the first step forward it occurred to me that perhaps Hank was right and if he was right we might be arrested at any moment for housebreaking. We could also be shot, at simple range, by an infuriated Mr. Benjamin Franklin. Or perhaps Mr. Franklin would be the type of citizen who hits out with blunt instruments and asks questions later. We had no business trespassing on Mr. Franklin’s property. And yet I crept forward slowly until I came up against a wall and Hank MacAndrews came up against me, sighed, muttered a brief and appropriate epithet and prodded me to the right. He had caught the spirit of my idiocy and was signaling his approval.

  To the right, at the end of the corridor, there was a halo of light from a small lamp. We walked toward this glow bravely for the light robbed us of all sinister motive. If anybody sat or slept beyond that light, there could be excuses. We had simply wandered into the wrong apartment.

  But there was nobody beyond the light. The apartment was empty. We walked into a small living room, over decorated with cheap plush furniture. A heavy oak table, fat-legged and unpolished, crowded the far wall. A huge lamp, ornately tasseled in the Chinese style, sat on the table. It was lit. A number of women’s magazines were scattered beneath it. An ancient glass ash tray squatted near the lamp. An odor of paint hung in the room.

  I whispered, “The lady was a painter. We’re halfway home.”

  Hank scowled at me. “You’ve got wheels in your head. Where do you see paints or brushes?”

  I pointed to my nose. “The nose is quicker than the eye. I’d know art paint anywhere. If I were three years younger I could name the brand she used.”

  “If you were three years younger, I’d be home in bed.” Hank stood in the doorway, thoughtfully. He came in and walked around the room once, studying the furniture, fingering the drapes. He paused in the doorway again and pointed to the lamp. “This place has been jerked around.”

  “What do you mean?

  “Homer Bull would say that this room is set in an ‘un-casual composition.’ Look for yourself.”

  I looked and saw nothing ‘un-casual’ in the layout. “Tell me more.”

  He went to the oak table. “This table, for instance. There’s something about it that’s wrong. I’ve never seen a place of this kind laid out this way “

  “You can’t expect a decorator’s dream in a dump like this.”

  “I don’t,” he said. “But look at the lamp layout. The lamp on this table is lit, yet the two standing lamps are disconnected. Wouldn’t an easy chair lamp be plugged into a wall socket, usually?”

  “Why? Maybe nobody ever read in this chair.”

  “Could be,” said Hank. “If that’s the case, nobody ever read in any chair in this room. The only lamp connected is the one on the table. Both floor lamps are out of their sockets. They’d have to be—it’s a hell of a stretch from the chair you’re sitting in to the nearest wall socket.”

  “So what?” I asked.

  Hank shrugged. “Just an observation. I was taught to observe when I worked with Bull. You never know when you need these little things.”

  I followed him into the bedroom. It was a square room, equipped with the bare rudiments of living. On the far wall, a window. In one corner, a small chest, three drawers deep. Above this chest, an oblong mirror framed in aged gilt fancywork with a long jagged crack down the length of it.

  Hank stood at the far wall staring up at a small picture. It was a reproduction of “The Woman in the Red Caraco” by Henri Matisse. The color was good and I recognized the source. The picture had been taken from a book—the Hyperion Press collection of French Painting in the Twentieth Century. Matisse’s pictures have a rough, rapidly painted look, and their carefully thought out design is only appreciated by art students and art lovers.

  Hank held his nose. “Modern junk. Maybe you’re right. Whoever lived in this dump must have had an eye for the long-hair in art.”

  “Then you agree that we may be in Paula Smith’s apartment?”

  “I agree to nothing of the sort. Benjamin Franklin may have been in the art game, remember?”

  Hank walked to the squat table on the left of the dresser. It was an old-fashioned piece, a small night table of the type used in bedrooms. He opened the top drawer and stared into it. It was empty. I took it away from him and studied it. I smelled it. Somebody, not too long ago, had kept paints in this drawer. I rubbed my finger along the inner edge and when I held it up there was a smear of crimson on it.

  “Blood?” Hank asked, his eyes wide.

  “Crimson Lake,” I told him and held my finger under his nose. “An everyday color for anyone who paints in oils.”

  “You’re a stubborn fiend, Jeff.”

  “You’re the stubborn one. Everything in this place points to the fact that the tenant is a painter. All we’ve got to do is walk back into the living room and wait for Paula Smith to show.”

  Hank frowned at the bed and picked up the pillow. The bed was unmade and in a great upheaval. The pillow was a
large, striped affair, uncovered. He tossed the pillow idly, catching it with one hand. He put it down and pointed to some smears on the pillow and the bedsheet. They were small crimson stains. “More Crimson Lake? Or are these bloodstains?”

  I examined the stains and called them Crimson Lake. He patted the pillow and returned it to the bed. We left the bed and went over to the chest of drawers.

  Hank opened the top drawer and fingered the contents. There were assorted woman’s garments, many scraps of paper and the smell of a strong perfume. I picked up some of the papers and went through them. They were pages from some sort of notebook, perhaps a small ruled school book. On one of these sheets, written in a sure, straight hand, was the name Alice Yukon, Country Road, Woodstock, New York…next Saturday.

  I showed it to Hank. He shrugged it off with a yawn. “So what? Somebody has to meet Alice Yukon in Woodstock, New York on a certain Saturday.”

  I dug into my pocket and produced the packet of letters from Paula. I flipped open an envelope and turned anxiously to Paula’s signature—for all her letters to Kip were typed.

  Hank said, “You’re driving yourself nuts, Jeff. You expect to match up the handwriting?”

  I shoved Paula’s signature under his nose triumphantly. “Take a gander at this handwriting, Mr. S. S. Van Dine. Aren’t you chagrined? You’ll note that Paula wrote her name in the same type of heavy, librarian scrawl. Observe that the note we just discovered shows the same type of writing. Observe also the wide ‘a’—the wide ‘u’ and the general direction of the writing. Apologize?”

  Hank massaged his brow. “A veritable ferret. I must allow as how you’ve maybe got something, General.”

  “I’m hotter than an 88 at point blank range, chum. More than anything else, I’m sure we’re on the right track now.”

  We entered the bathroom and continued our search for everything and nothing at all. Hank fussed around the medicine chest, rubbed his fingers along the shelves, examined his fingertips and said, “Maybe you’re right about an artist living here. You can slice the dust with a knife.”