Iris walked up to him. “Miss Eulalia Crawford, please.”
His eyes blinked at her cautiously behind the bifocals. “What name, ma’am?”
“Lieutenant and Mrs. Duluth.”
His face relaxed. “Oh, yes, Mrs. Duluth, Miss Crawford’s expectin’ you.” He grinned, showing an occasional tooth. “Have to be careful with Miss Crawford. As much as my job’s worth to let anyone up unless she phones down special that she’s expectin’ ’em.”
There was a small, self-propelling elevator in the corner. Iris started toward it. The doorman shambled along, chattering. I followed.
“Yes, ma’am,” the doorman was saying. “Never can tell with a woman. Now Miss Crawford, she’s normally one for society. People streaming in and out every minute of the day. Then all of a sudden last night—no one’s to go up, not even a telegraph boy, she says.”
Iris reached the elevator. I joined her. It was only then that I came into the restricted visual sphere of the doorman. When he saw me, he exhibited the few teeth again.
“Want me to take you up, Lieutenant Duluth?”
“No. We’ll manage ourselves, thank you,” said Iris. She opened the door of the little elevator and stepped inside. I edged in next to her. “What floor is Miss Crawford on?”
“Why, the top floor, ma’am. Your husband will show you the way.” The doorman laughed a cackle of a laugh. “Didn’t take you long to come back, did it, Lieutenant? Don’t forget to take care of that cold of yours. Frisco’s mean on a cold if your blood isn’t thicked up for it. Yes, sir.”
I opened my mouth to speak, but at that moment Iris closed the elevator door and pressed the button for the top floor.
As the cramped elevator started upwards, I said: “What’s all this about my coming back? And how in Hades did he know I had a cold?”
Absorbed with more tantalizing problems, my wife gave this real and alarming one scant attention.
“Oh, he’s obviously blind as a bat. He probably mistook you for someone else.”
There was altogether too much of this mistaking people for other people.
The mobile coffin came to a jolting halt at the top floor. We stepped out into a small foyer. There was only one door. Apparently, Eulalia had the entire floor to herself. We moved to the door. A formal card, slipped into a metal slot on the panelling, announced: Miss Eulalia Crawford.
Iris pressed the buzzer. I could hear it ringing inside the apartment. We waited. Nothing happened. Iris pressed the white button again. Once again the buzzer whined inside. Once again there was no answer.
Iris’s face clouded. “Surely the doorman would have told us if she’d gone out.”
Impulsively her hand went to the door-knob. She turned it, and surprisingly the door opened inward on to a lighted hall.
“The door’s open and the lights are on. She must be in.”
I wanted to be done with the whole business. “Iris, we can’t go barging in …”
“We’re not barging,” said my wife primly. “We’ve been invited. Probably Eulalia’s visiting in one of the other apartments. That’s why she left the door open.” She stepped into the hall, calling: “Eulalia. Eulalia Crawford.”
Embarrassed and uneasy, I joined her. If my wife was determined upon housebreaking, the least I could do was to give her moral support.
A half-open door ahead led into a lighted inner room.
“Eulalia,” called Iris again. This time her voice tilted with anxiety. “Eulalia.”
No sound came from the apartment beyond. Gripping my hand, Iris pushed through the door into the inner room. We took one step across the soft carpet and then stopped dead.
At a first glance, that large, studio-like room seemed to be crowded with people—weird, silent people in fancy dress who were lounging over chairs and sofas in postures of abandon. For a moment I thought we had plunged into some Satanic orgy. Then, as I saw string trailing from floppy arms and grotesquely sprawled legs, I realized that we were merely looking at the “distinguished puppeteer’s” distinguished puppets.
And they were indeed distinguished. Large as life, all of them had an uncanny aura of vitality. For the most part, they were carnival or circus figures, a parade of gaudy clowns, a blond equestrienne in a stiff ballet skirt, a black and white ringmaster, a harlequin, and a giant of a trapeze artist in purple tights.
There seemed no rhyme or reason for their being tossed in such a haphazard fashion around that deserted room. Eulalia, I supposed, must be in the process of preparing them for her relief benefit next week.
“Eulalia,” called Iris again with an urgency that made the silence seem even more intense.
No answer came.
My wife turned to me. “She must be in the building somewhere. The man on the phone, the man with the lisp, he said she’d be expecting us.”
We looked at each other bleakly. The huge, staring puppets with their corpse stillness were getting on my nerves.
Irritably, I said: “It was a crazy idea to come, anyway. Let’s get out of here.”
“No, Peter. We must search everywhere and wait.”
There was another door at the far end of the room. In front of it stretched a massive George Washington desk on which an empty flower vase lay on its side across a pile of papers.
From behind the desk a silver-slippered foot protruded.
As we moved towards the inner door, that slippered foot hypnotised me. Somehow, with the rest of the body invisible behind the desk, it seemed more human than the other puppets.
We passed a gypsy in the lascivious embrace of a clown. But my gaze remained fixed on the silver slipper.
Iris was a little ahead of me. She reached the desk first. She glanced down at the floor behind it and, as she did so, her face became contorted into a white mask of terror.
“Peter! …”
I ran to her side. I stared down at what was behind the desk.
A female figure lay there on her back, with her arms flung puppetlike above her head. The skirt of her lemon-yellow dress was bizarrely askew and beneath it her slender legs tapered to the silver slippers.
I noticed these little things automatically as the blinding realization came that this woman was not a doll on strings. This woman was real.
Or rather, she had been real.
For she was dead—obviously.
The wooden handle of a knife stuck out of the yellow dress just above the left breast. There were two other crimson-stained gashes in the material where the knife had struck before.
Her face, staring up from blank, open eyes, was terrible to me—terrible because, even travestied as it was by death, it was dark, beautiful, and shudderingly familiar.
If Iris hadn’t been standing at my side, I would have sworn that it was she lying there stabbed in the breast—murdered.
“Eulalia.” My wife said the name in a stifled whimper. “Eulalia Crawford.”
But the nightmare did not end there. A trickle of water fell on Eulalia’s legs, drop by drop, from the overturned vase on the desk. And strewn across the corpse, as if plucked from the vase and thrown there by the idiot fingers of some Ophelia, were roses, dozens of dark-red roses.
Iris fumbled for my hand. Her eyes came up to meet mine, dilated with horror.
“Roses,” she breathed. “The red rose and the white rose. The roses mean—blood.”
CHAPTER V
That phrase, which until then had seemed senseless as a child’s jungle, was now terrifyingly, obscenely fraught with significance. I gazed down at the rose-scattered body of the unknown woman whose name had hounded us ever since our arrival in San Francisco. I suppose I felt pity for Iris’s dead cousin, but my chief emotion was indignation—howling, personal indignation against a fate which could do this to me. In those first seconds I wasn’t capable of detailed thinking. Everything seemed as simple as it was terrible.
Iris and I had found a body. We would have to do something about it. All hope for a quiet, domestic weekend had g
one for good.
My wife had been gazing down at the funeral canopy of red roses. Slowly she lifted her gaze and looked across the long, brilliant room with its flaunting company of puppets. Their painted, simpering faces stared back at her as if they were watching, passing silent judgment.
Iris’s face showed the shock of brutal reality crashing through her frivolous dreams of adventure. Here was adventure with no holds barred, and she wasn’t liking it any better than I was.
“Somehow I never thought … Peter, it is real. There was danger for Eulalia. Life or death.”
“Not life or death,” I said grimly. “Just death.”
The uncanny resemblance of the corpse to Iris was the worst part. I stepped back from the desk so that I didn’t have to see the face.
Iris went on huskily: “It can’t have been done long. That vase … He must have done it—the man with the lisp, the man who called me from the hotel lobby and then answered the phone here.”
“I guess so.” What did it matter who’d done it or why? It was done.
“He must already have murdered Eulalia when I talked to him from the phone booth.” Iris turned to me, her cheeks gaunt. “And he told us to come here. He told me Eulalia wanted to see us. And when we came, the door was open. He deliberately got us to come here. Why?”
Why? When she said that, my brain started functioning for the first time. Like a galloping horse, a thought thundered into my mind.
I said: “There’s something I never told you, baby. I guess it’s rather late to tell you now. The man who stole my uniform at the Turkish bath had a lisp. The clerk said so.”
“Peter!” she gasped. “Then that’s why the doorman …”
“Exactly. That’s why the doorman thought I’d already been here. The man with the lisp came here to murder Eulalia tonight in my uniform.”
Iris said passionately: “Why, why didn’t you tell me about the lisp before?”
Why hadn’t I? My motives had seemed perfectly adequate at the time. But now…
“I guess I was scared you’d tie everything up together and get excited about a mystery and—and spoil our evening.”
“Spoil the evening!” She gave a bleak laugh. “That’s funny.”
“There’s something else. We know now why the doorman asked about my cold. The pay clerk at the Turkish bath also said that the man who stole my uniform kept a handkerchief up to his face as if he had a cold.”
We stared at each other. The walls of that bright, puppet-strewn room seemed to be closing in on us.
Iris must have been feeling the same thing. She took a quick step towards me. She wanted to be near me.
As she passed the corner of the desk, her elbow brushed against a pile of papers. A printed circular on top halfslid off, revealing part of some paper with writing on it, which had been lying beneath.
I was far too jittery to have noticed that piece of paper, except for one thing. There is one word which the eye picks up almost automatically and that word is one’s own name.
Written on the paper, I saw Lieutenant Peter Duluth.
I drew the paper out of the pile. It was the first paragraphs of an unfinished letter on a piece of formal stationery with Eulalia’s address at the top. The writing was small and so mannered as to be legible only with difficulty. The ink was recent and the letter was dated Friday evening. It must have been written within the last few hours.
Iris, at my elbow, said: “It’s Eulalia’s writing. I remember it from the letter she wrote me.”
Puzzling with the words, I read:
Dear Lina,
I’ve been desperately wondering how to get in touch with you. I can’t come to see you. I don’t dare leave the apartment. Even the slightest sound at the door brings my heart to my mouth. But, thank heaven, I have an opportunity at last. The husband of a cousin of mine, a Lieutenant Peter Duluth, has just telephoned me. He’s in town and he and his wife are coming around to visit me. He can’t have anything to do with this terrible thing. I can trust him. I’m going to tell him everything and ask him to go to you immediately. I am expecting him at any minute …
There was more, but I couldn’t get beyond that point. Evasive and hysterical as the paragraph was, it was plain enough to make me realize just how hopelessly deep into a quagmire Iris and I had been lured.
I looked at my wife over the letter. The thing that had happened to us was so utterly unanticipated that I still needed time to take it in.
Iris was faltering stupidly: “Eulalia says you called her. You didn’t call her.”
“Of course I didn’t. He did.”
My wife gave a weak nod. “The man with the lisp.”
“He stole my uniform. He called Eulalia, pretending to be me, and asked to come around. Eulalia told the doorman to let up a Lieutenant Duluth. He came. He told the doorman he was Lieutenant Duluth. He came up. The uniform tricked Eulalia into letting him in. He killed her.”
“And then I telephoned from the hotel, Peter. I made it perfect for him. He told us to come over. He went downstairs. He told the doorman he was going to come back with his wife and he—he escaped. He kept a handkerchief to his face. The doorman’s almost blind.” She clutched my arm. “When he hears Eulalia’s dead, the doorman’s going to swear you were the only person who came here tonight. He’s going to swear you’re the only person in the world who could have murdered her.”
“Exactly. I’ve been framed.” I said it then, that cheap jargony phrase that until then had had no reality for me. “Baby, that’s what’s happened to us. I’ve been framed by a man I’ve never seen for the murder of a woman I never knew.”
Now that I’d faced the truth squarely, I felt a little steadier. Ever since we’d arrived in San Francisco we had been watched by invisible, scheming eyes. Everything that had happened had been part of a secret design building up to—this.
Iris was moaning: “It’s all my fault. It was all my crazy idea to come here and …”
“No, baby. None of that.” I went to her, steadying her. “We’ve got to keep calm and figure out just where we stand.”
I took out a packet of cigarettes, lit two, and gave one to Iris. She took a deep pull on it. It seemed to make her feel better.
I could hear the faint plop of water drops still falling from the upset vase on the desk. That tiny sound was more fraying to the nerves than a naval broadside.
When you find a corpse, you call the police. But, as Iris had pointed out, if I called the police in this case, they’d have to be idiot fringe to believe me against the statement of the doorman. I had witnesses, of course, to prove that my uniform had been stolen at the Turkish bath. Eventually I would be able to prove I was not a cousin-in-law murderer. But a great many unpleasant things could happen before that “eventually.”
The anger which had been banking up inside me burst out now and I was as mad as a bull. Until we arrived at Eulalia’s, my only idea for the week-end had been to be alone with Iris. Now I was a man with another single idea. I was going to get my own back on this murderer for playing on me one of the dirtiest tricks ever played. I was going to get my own back even if I had to start another earthquake in San Francisco.
Iris’s distracted voice came into my thoughts. “Peter, if we call the police, they’ll be sure you did it.”
“Exactly.”
“And what can we say for ourselves? That your uniform was stolen in a Turkish bath, that we were lured here by a man with a lisp, that a drunk with a black beard babbled about roses and elephants. It’ll sound like jabber-wocky.”
“Sure.”
She faltered: “In the end they’ll have to realize you’re innocent. But before that, the scandal, the publicity. Peter, your promotion—it’s shot to hell and it’s all my fault.”
Suddenly it came to me what we would have to do. I looked down at Eulalia’s unfinished letter, which I still held in my hand and which was packed with dynamite for me. Feeling almost casual, I folded it, still half unread, and slip
ped it into my pocket.
“Just in case the police do show up here tonight,” I explained. “We can’t risk their finding it—not yet.”
“But, Peter, you mean …?”
“I mean we aren’t going to call the police,” I said. “We’re going to walk out on Cousin Eulalia. We’re going to leave her here by herself—dead.”
Iris stared. “But we can’t just walk out and pretend it didn’t happen. The doorman knows your name. When you’re in the navy, you can’t possibly hide. The moment the police come, the whole city will be searching for Lieutenant Duluth.”
“When the police come, yes.” I took her arm. “Listen, baby, we can’t afford to be messed up with the police now. You see that. We’ll never get anywhere using up our week-end jabbering about beards and roses. If only we had some idea what was behind all this craziness, it’d be different. But we don’t. There’s one person, however, who does.”
Understanding dawned on her face. “The Beard?”
“Exactly. We don’t know his name. We don’t know where he lives. We don’t know anything about him. But he must know the truth about who killed Eulalia and why. Not only that. He’s the only one who can prove why we came here. If we let ourselves be held now, we may never be able to locate him again.”
“Hatch promised to watch him,” broke in Iris excitedly. “If we go back to the hotel, Hatch will be able to take us to him. We can shake him sober, make him tell us the truth. Then we can take him with us to the police.”
I nodded. “That’s it. We’ll go to the police all right, but we’re going with that goddam Beard safely tucked under our arm.”
Iris hesitated. “But what—what if they discover the body before we can get the Beard? We’ll be in a far worse position than we are now.”
“That’s a chance we have to take. And it’s a pretty good one. We know Eulalia’s been warned about this, probably by the Beard. She’s been barricading herself in up here. She’s given the doorman orders to let no one up unless she calls down to say she’s expecting them. That means, even if some friend does drop in to see her, he’ll never get past the doorman. It’s a hundred to one she won’t be discovered until tomorrow—and long before tomorrow we’ll be at police headquarters with the Beard.”
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