He walked diffidently to the studio doorway; unframed pictures stood on the ground facing the wall, studies and watercolour sketches were pinned up everywhere, there was a lopsided dummy in a corner, and an easel with an unfinished picture on it was placed to get the north light. The picture was a watercolour of an apple and grapes.
A little woman in a green smock sat working at a long table to the right of the door. She saw Gamadge, and rose. Gamadge said: “So glad to find you in town, Miss Bransome; but I don’t suppose you share my satisfaction. Was it nice up in Vermont?”
She was a thin little woman with dark eyes and dark untidy hair. The eyes surveyed him from behind pince-nez. She said: “My sketching class only runs through July.”
“So I thought when I decided to look you up.”
Miss Bransome slowly took him in. She asked very doubtfully: “Would you be the owner? I told the agent, I told him distinctly, that I would give up the front room before I’d pay any more rent.”
A New Englander. Gamadge said: “Don’t blame you. I’m not the owner, Miss Bransome.”
“I didn’t suppose so.” Her eyes seemed to inquire: “Could you be an art patron at this time of the year? Or the parent of a new pupil?” But she left it to Gamadge to explain:
“I just wanted a little information.” Finding it even more difficult to go on than he had expected, he crossed over to the easel: “That’s a nice study.”
Miss Bransome smiled faintly, glancing at the disintegrated remains of the study, which now lay on a plate—apple peelings and grape skins. She said: “I ate it for lunch. Hope I’ll get more like it tomorrow.”
Gamadge said: “Now if the portrait painters could only eat the sitters!”
“I guess they’d like to, sometimes.”
The thing wasn’t getting easier, it was getting harder. Gamadge turned to face her. “I’m not an official of any sort, Miss Bransome; just doing some confidential work, more or less at my own discretion. Would you tell me where Alice Dunbar used to go when she was supposed to be here painting?”
Miss Bransome backed up against the work-table and gripped the edge of it with both hands. Her eyes were fastened on his, her face had turned ash-colour.
He said: “You might not have to come into it.”
“How did you—” Her voice broke.
“Just to make you feel better about it, I’ll tell you—if you’ll sit down.”
She sank into the hard chair, nicely painted and decorated, that she had been sitting in before. “I’ve been sick about it,” she said in a whisper.
“I can imagine.” Gamadge pulled another of the painted chairs up to face her, sat down, and got out his cigarettes. “You smoke, Miss Bransome?”
She shook her head, still gazing at him.
“May I?”
She put her arm out blindly, and got her fingers on a green pottery bowl. Gamadge rose to take it from her, put it on a stool beside him, and lighted a cigarette.
“Nobody asked me,” whispered Miss Bransome.
“They only asked whether you’d heard from her after she disappeared?”
She nodded. “I know I should have—but how could I tell whether it would help, and the Dunbars—and I’d be in the papers and they might not have believed I didn’t know anything.”
“But you did, didn’t you?”
“She told me it was this nice young couple, artists; her mother and father wouldn’t have cared for them, they’d have asked a lot of questions about who they were and where they came from and silly stuff like that. They were just nice young people from the West, with no money. Alice wanted friends of her own.” Miss Bransome was speaking fast, almost angrily. “And she hasn’t been near them since last spring.”
“When did she start going?”
“Last fall, October. She didn’t go every week, only about once a month. I don’t believe they have a thing to do with it, not a thing!”
Gamadge dropped ash in the pottery bowl. Leaning forward to do so, not looking at her, he asked: “How did she happen to meet them? Did she say?”
“Of course she said! Naturally I asked her, when she first wanted me to—wanted me to—” Miss Bransome couldn’t find the word. She paused, and at last ended faintly: “Help her.”
“What did she tell you?” Gamadge sat back again.
“It was really an accident, and they were so nice about it. Some friends were driving her home from a theatre party—”
“I thought she was always carted around in the family car.”
“Yes, but these were people who had a car, and they often brought her home. But this time she found they had an appointment way downtown, and they’d be late, so she insisted on taking a cab part of the way. And there was this nice store right on the avenue, with soda and fruit. She was thirsty. She went in and had the soda, and then she found she had no money! She hardly ever needed it, you know. And these nice young people were there, sitting beside her at the counter, and she was so terribly mortified, and they lent her the change.”
“It’s a friendly town,” commented Gamadge, “especially to people like Alice Dunbar.”
“Yes, but she was mortified. Of course she wanted to pay them back and thank them, and they’d given her their address and asked her to come. Where was the harm? She was a grown woman. I’ve been going around by myself since I was a child. I’ve been teaching since I was eighteen.” Miss Bransome snatched a checked handkerchief out of her pocket, covered her face with it, and began to cry.
Gamadge said: “Don’t cry, Miss Bransome. You’re upset because you didn’t believe a word of that story.”
She sobbed, and Gamadge caught disconnected phrases: “No life of her own…wasn’t appreciated…grown woman…”
“I know; you were sorry for her.”
She looked up. “I knew her when she was at school, I used to come to the house to give her lessons when she’d been sick. All she had was her painting.” Miss Bransome glanced at a cupboard behind the work-table. “Beautiful work, people don’t realize how much work and study goes into illumination and lettering. You don’t know—” She sobbed again. “All I’ve been through since she left! She might have told me.”
“And you haven’t a clue to these people? To where she went when she—er—wasn’t here?”
Miss Bransome said slowly: “If they were nice, and they didn’t have anything to do with it and don’t know where she is, I’d hate to drag them into it. Young people like that—it might hurt them. I mean not coming forward and saying anything. Like me.”
“Wouldn’t hurt them at all. They weren’t in your position, Miss Bransome.”
Tears again filled her eyes. “You couldn’t say I was in a position of responsibility. I did take the money for the lessons, because I was giving her the time, even if she wasn’t here. And it was her money, she paid me out of her own allowance. And she wasn’t the flighty type. But I did feel—one day I followed her.”
“Sensible.”
“I did feel a responsibility, I just couldn’t help feeling one. I mean she never did give me their name or their address.”
“That told you something.”
“I couldn’t believe—”
“Would you have blamed her? If her family was so very fastidious?” Gamadge smiled at her.
Miss Bransome said: “You don’t know them. When her engagement was broken they weren’t kind at all. They have no feelings!” She spoke with considerable violence. “When I went there to give her a lesson, I had my lunch on a tray!”
Gamadge looked grave and shook his head.
“It’s not far from here,” said Miss Bransome. “She could walk it in a few minutes. And there is a couple on the top floor. I asked in the basement.”
“Superintendent?”
“No, she doesn’t come in the afternoon. There’s a store in the basement.”
“You’d give me this address?”
Searching his face anxiously, she asked: “Did you say you don’t have to t
ell?”
“Not if it isn’t necessary.”
“But how did you know? If you know, you must have heard about me somewhere.”
“I might have guessed.”
“Guessed?”
“Well, you seemed to be her only chance, Miss Bransome. I mean you were the only person she seems to have been alone with at regular intervals, over a long period of time. The lessons were two hours long; you can go places in two hours.”
She said in a low voice, looking down at her hands, “If it hadn’t been a nice kind of little apartment house, and there hadn’t been a couple there, I’d have spoken to her.”
“Of course.”
“If I’d said anything, after she left, the Dunbars—I’d rather have died.”
“Difficult. One gets into these things, and it isn’t so easy to explain.”
“And she hadn’t been going there for so long.”
“That’s your out, of course.”
She got up, went out of the room, and came back after a minute or two with a scrap of paper. Rising, he took it from her. As he looked down at her, at the small pale face so full of pride and self-respect and anxiety, he could not help smiling at the thought of those lunches on a tray. She had got even with the Dunbars.
He expressed something of this when he said: “They’re having a bad time, you know—the Dunbar family. Their worst enemy couldn’t wish them a rougher time.”
She was not to be softened. “I wish you knew them! And I wish I’d been there to see their faces when they found out they weren’t getting that Woodworth money.”
It was Gamadge’s turn to back up against the table. The idea was not entirely a surprising one to him, it had occurred to him before; but her definite confirmation of it was something of a shock. He asked after a moment: “Did they expect it?”
“Of course they did. For Alice. They thought it was coming to her after the aunt died. I’m sorry she didn’t get it. She was to have it because Abigail had Richfield Tanner’s.”
“You mean it was settled? In a will?”
“They thought so! I always say, wait till the party dies. When I saw that will in the papers, I actually laughed. That old lady was leaving it to that hospital all the time! Of course they have plenty; Alice would always have been comfortable. Oh, what has become of her?”
“Alice Dunbar told you in so many words that she was getting the Woodworth fortune?”
Miss Bransome was irritated by his slowness of comprehension. “Fifty times!”
“Well.”
She followed him out to the landing. “I just can’t tell you how thankful I’ll be if you’ll keep my name out of this. I might not get another pupil as long as I lived.”
Gamadge said rather drily that he understood that.
“Some of them are young, you know; just children. It was different with Alice Dunbar, but parents mightn’t understand.”
“Try not to worry, Miss Bransome. I’ll do my best and I’ll call you.”
“Oh, will you? Oh, thank you so much. There’s one thing,” she said, crumpling the smock in a pathetic hand, “she never mentioned me.”
“To the nice young couple?”
“Whoever they were.”
“I can see that she’d be mortified at having to confess what shifts she was put to to see a friend.”
“And she wouldn’t give me away.”
Gamadge rattled the gate of the elevator. He said: “This thing, such as it is—do you have it at night?”
“Indeed I don’t; it goes off at six in winter, five in summer. Twelve on Saturdays.”
“Lots of stairs for a tenant.”
“Well, I’m the only one that sleeps in the place, and I’m so tired at night I stay home.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Nice Couple
GAMADGE WALKED DOWN the avenue, and then a good way east. When he turned in to the block he wanted, he saw why Miss Bransome had not described it; it was not nice at all. It was dreary and gritty, very grey under the now overcast sky. Small wholesale supply stores—plumbers, upholsterers, surgical appliances—occupied the basements and first floor fronts; this would not be a shopping centre for Dunbars or their friends. Alice Dunbar might safely visit here, especially in the afternoons, when superintendents were away and the business people back at their work.
The house he wanted was nice enough, however; a stucco-fronted walk-up with a stationers’ supply store in the basement, a printing plant above it, a firm of architects above that. The third-storey windows were shuttered, the top apartment had neat curtains of watermelon pink. The nice couple was in residence.
Gamadge mounted steps of pierced ironwork to the clean vestibule. A typed card beside the top bell said Steadman; under it a fading pencil scrawl had been crossed out, but he deciphered the name—Fuller. He pushed the Steadmans’ bell, opened the door when the lock clicked, and climbed the stairs.
A girl stood waiting for him on the last landing, in front of an open doorway. She was a very pretty girl, with clear features and candid blue eyes; her bronze hair curled on her neck, and she wore a print dress of expensive quality and cut. She smiled, the smile of one who has always had the goodwill of her fellow mortals.
Gamadge asked: “Fuller?”
“Oh, I’m sorry, you pushed the wrong bell. And I’m afraid Mr. Fuller has gone.”
“I’m awfully sorry I disturbed you. I had an idea there was a vacancy here, and there doesn’t seem to be a superintendent on the premises.”
“Mrs. Flynn is only here from twelve to two, and it isn’t quite twelve yet. Would you”—the candid eyes had candidly taken Gamadge in—“care to wait?”
“That’s much too kind.”
A large, fair young man was working at a drawing board in the room behind her. He now looked around, rose, and came to the door. He was wearing a shirt that had certainly been part of his flying outfit; collar open, sleeves rolled high. He said: “Come on in, it’s a hellish climb.”
“Mighty nice of you, if I won’t be in the way.”
“You think I want an excuse to knock off work?”
They all laughed, and Gamadge followed Mrs. Steadman into a pleasant room with chintz cushions on the wicker furniture, a very fine old French rug on the floorboards, and a framed oil of flowers over the mantel. It had no doubt been the servants’ room once, when the house had been a private residence; but its little open fireplace and grey-marble chimney piece would put the rent up nowadays.
Hot up here under the roof, although there was a free current of air through open doors to the back windows; and young Steadman, looming huge under the rather low-pitched ceiling, must feel the heat; but he looked satisfied with life.
“Sit down,” he said. His wife had already settled herself on a couch, and Gamadge sat near her. Steadman resumed his place in front of his drawing board, turning his chair to face them. Gamadge looked with polite interest at the blueprint.
“I work for an architect,” said Steadman, “downtown. I don’t do anything at home as a rule, but this is part of my vacation. I came home from the beach to put in some licks on a competition I went in for.”
Mrs. Steadman said: “I hope you will move in, if Mr. Fuller’s really gone for good. I’m alone in the house so much. Jim doesn’t like it, but I don’t mind.”
“Fuller was a rock, was he?” Gamadge had refused young Steadman’s offer of a cigarette, and was lighting one of his own.
Steadman laughed. “We never laid eyes on him.”
“That’s New York for you.”
“We only moved in ourselves in June,” said Mrs. Steadman. “The families thought we were crazy, but we go up to stay with them—Jim’s or mine—every weekend, and it’s rather fun in the city. And we had to take the flat then, or probably never.”
Gamadge, looking around him, said they were lucky. Nice place.
“Fuller’s is bigger and of course cooler,” said Steadman. “And a damn sight more money. It was Scale’s, you know.”
<
br /> “Scale’s?”
“He’s the owner; old boy owns the house. I thought sure you’d have a personal pull with him; they say he never rents to anybody he doesn’t personally know about.”
“He knows my family,” said Mrs. Steadman.
“I haven’t a prayer,” said Gamadge. “I just dropped in. Somebody said there might be a flat.”
“Hope you get it,” said Steadman, looking him over.
“Thanks. I’m sorry Mr. Scale is so particular.”
“You know us.” Mrs. Steadman laughed.
“By Jove I do!”
“Ought to be easy enough to dig up a reference,” said Steadman. “Reason the old geezer is so fussy, the flat’s full of his furniture and stuff. They used to live here—his family—from way back; then they lost money, and they all died but Scale, so he kept the third floor and rented the rest.”
“The superintendent was an old servant in the family,” said Mrs. Steadman. “She does all the renting for him. There isn’t much work here for her, with all the business firms downstairs. They take care of their own places, and there’s an oil furnace. She’s such a nice woman.”
“I see it’s feudal,” said Gamadge. “So Mr. Fuller was only a sort of sublet?”
“That’s so,” said Steadman. He looked at his wife. “Probably moving out so Scale can move back.”
Mrs. Steadman shook her head. “No, Jimmie, Mr. Scale isn’t coming back until Thanksgiving. He never does.”
“I wouldn’t want a place for three months,” said Gamadge.
“Lots of people do,” urged Steadman.
“Sometimes Mr. Scale goes right down to Asheville from Canada,” said Mrs. Steadman hopefully. “He did last fall, and Mr. Fuller came.”
Gamadge asked: “Where did you take your vacation? I’m debating places; haven’t had mine yet.”
“The first part with my folks,” said Steadman, “in the Adirondacks. That was the last two weeks in July. They let me take a third week with her folks in Maine, but as I said I cut it short after all and came back Monday on account of the competition.”
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