I said: “You see what this does to us, don’t you? Our story was incredible enough already. Now we’ve got to sell the police on two murderers we’ve never seen who both wore my uniform and then calmly hung it up in our closet again when they were through with it.” I groaned. “Can you see them believing that?”
“No,” said Iris.
I was too tired to be able to whip up a great deal of emotion. Things were so bad, they might as well be this much worse. I put the bloodstained uniform back in the closet. I yawned. Iris was climbing into bed. I followed her.
The last thing I saw before I turned out the lights were the cupids’ behinds. They didn’t look provocative any more. The last thing I heard before I collapsed into exhausted sleep were the Beard’s resonant snores issuing from the bathroom.
So much for our man-and-wife reunion.
I was awakened eventually by a tap on the door. I sat up in bed. It was daylight. Iris stirred, opened her eyes and then sat up too. The tap came again and with it Hatch’s voice calling softly: “Lieutenant Duluth.”
I looked at my watch. It said eight o’clock. Suddenly I remembered everything. So did Iris. She reached out of bed for her bathrobe and wrapped it around her shoulders. I got out of bed, padded to the. door, and let Hatch in.
“Morning, Lieutenant.”
Hatch wore the same blue-check suit, the same purple and white shirt. He looked as if he hadn’t had much sleep.
“Bill’s waiting downstairs,” he said. He gave a funereal grin. “At least we’re O.K. so far. I looked at the papers. No news broken on the murders yet.”
While Iris, looking miserable, huddled in the robe, I told Hatch about the return of the uniform and showed it to him. He whistled and pushed the hat back on his head.
“Geez,” he said. And then, as if trying to comfort us: “Don’t let it get you down, Lieutenant. At least we’ve got the Beard there in the bathroom. With him telling the whole story, you ain’t got nothing to worry about with the police.”
I only hoped he was right.
Iris had risen from the bed and was pushing her feet into white feathery mules.
Hatch said: “The old goat should have slept it off by now. Let’s wake him up.”
The three of us went to the bathroom. I opened the door. We all stepped inside. We all stared down at the tub.
There it was—a perfectly good tub. But it was just a tub.
No one was in it.
I had been so slugged around by fate that I should have been able to take that. But I couldn’t take it Neither could Iris.
We both exploded in a simultaneous moaning cry: “The Beard’s gone.”
Hatch was speechless. He glanced around the empty bathroom and then turned into the bedroom and began searching hopelessly under the bed and in the closet.
“They had a key,” he said at last. “They must have come in when you were asleep and kidnapped him.”
“I turned the safety catch on the door,” I said. “No one could have come in from outside.” Then I remembered. When I had let Hatch in a few moments before, the door had opened without my having to unlock the safety catch. I said: “He must have left under his own steam. He came to, didn’t like the looks of our bathroom, and walked out.”
Hatch turned on me. I had never seen him angry before. He was really mad now. “You mean you didn’t have the sense to lock him in?”
I faltered: “We—we didn’t think. He’d passed out. I never dreamed he’d sober up for hours.”
“And when he’d passed out, you didn’t search him to get his address or anything?”
Even more feebly I said: “We didn’t think.”
“So you didn’t think,” snarled Hatch. “So where are you now? You’re much worse off than if you’d called the cops when you first found Eulalia. You’re framed for Eulalia’s murder. You’re framed for Lina’s murder. You’re in so deep even your ears don’t stick out. And you did all that just on a gamble to get this Beard. You got him. You let him go.” He gave a despairing shrug. “Now, going to the cops’d be like shaving your own head and slitting your own pants. My first murder,” he groaned. “And I have to pick clients like you.”
There was no point in trying to justify ourselves. He was right.
I said: “O.K. There’s only one thing to dp. We’ve got to catch up with the Beard again.”
“Yes, yes,” said Iris. “He can’t have gone long. Maybe if we ask people in the lobby, they’ll have seen him. Come on, Peter. Quick. We’ve got to get dressed.”
She started to pull off her bathrobe. Hatch put a hand on her arm.
“Hey, hold it, lady.” He stared from her to me, his face very grim. “We got to get the Beard back, yeah. That’s so obvious you don’t have to say it. But any minute now they’re going to find one of the two corpses. Any minute now they’re going to be screaming all over the city for you two. You can’t go running around in broad daylight looking for the Beard. We got to get him, sure. But Bill and me’s the ones who’re going to do it.”
“But…” I said.
“But nothing. You two can’t stay here either. You’re registered as Lieutenant and Mrs. Duluth. The management will call the police the moment the news breaks. You’re just about as safe here as if you were already in the city jail. Tell you what you got to do.” He pulled a key out of his pocket. “Me and Dagget’s got an apartment over on Fillmore.” He gave me the address and tossed me the key. “You two get dressed, check out of here right away, and get over to the apartment. Stick there. Don’t go out on the street. Don’t do nothing. Stay there till we come for you.”
“But…” I began, but Iris broke in again.
“Yes, he’s right, Peter.”
Hatch grunted. “Better make it snappy too. If we get a lead on the Beard, we’ll keep you posted. But none of this fancy business you go in for, Lieutenant. Stick right there in the apartment, and for pity’s sake don’t try to be smart. You’ve done enough damage already.”
I grinned weakly.
Hatch made for the door. “Me and Bill’s got to get on the job right away.” His opinion of me had dropped so low that he added to Iris: “Lady, you got some sense. You understand, don’t you? Don’t let the Lieutenant screw things up again.”
Iris said: “We’ll go to your apartment, Hatch, and we’ll stay there.”
“O.K.”
Hatch hurried out of the room, slamming the door behind him.
In chastened silence, Iris and I dressed and packed our bags. I put on my new uniform and packed the murderous one. I put the civilian clothes in the bag, too. At least they were something to show the police. In a few moments we left forever the room that the anomalous Mrs. Rose had been so kind as to bequeath us and which had brought us nothing but catastrophe.
It is quite a sensation to know that the police are going to be on your heels at any moment and yet not to know when that moment is going to come. To me, our fellow passengers on the elevator were all potential plainclothes-men. Even the most casual glance that followed us across the lobby brought uneasy suspense. I expected anything from the cashier when I checked out. All I got was a mechanical smile and a mechanical: “I hope you enjoyed your stay, Lieutenant.”
I gulped and joined Iris. There were no signs of Hatch or Bill in the lobby. They must already be out on their desperate Beard hunt. Finding an unknown black beard in San Francisoo was going to be no simple matter. I tried not to think what would happen if they failed.
Fugitives or no, Iris and I had to eat. We chose a crowded cafeteria where we snatched an unobtrusive breakfast of eggs and coffee. All around us, on stools and in booths, people were reading newspapers. I had never been so aware of other people’s newspapers before. In spite of Hatch’s assurance that they contained no news, as yet, of the murders, I expected each gulp of coffee to be my last as a free man.
Nothing happened in the cafeteria, though. And nothing happened on our walk to the unprepossessing Fill-more Street. Unmolested, we reache
d the drab little two-room apartment in the drab little house where Hatch and Bill led their modest and presumably bachelor existence.
I locked the door on the inside. I followed Iris into the living room, which was as lugubrious as Hatch’s face. There were a telephone on a rickety table, a brown studio couch, a rocking chair, and a spattering of True Confession magazines. Iris dropped down on the studio couch. I got the rocking chair. She sat. I rocked. We waited.
The most difficult thing to do in a crisis is to do nothing, and there was nothing for Iris and me to do. There was nothing even to talk about. The situation was so simple. Either Hatch and Bill would locate the Beard or they wouldn’t. It was a waste, of time and mental anguish to speculate about the mystery that lay behind our dilemma. Even now, after as hysterically active a night as anyone had ever put in, we knew less than nothing about this murderous faction which had chosen me as their scapegoat.
The red rose … the white rose … the crocus … the elephant … the bird … the cat. That was all we knew. Short of chanting the refrain to each other, there was nothing for us to say.
Once, after she had plowed her way through two old copies of True Confessions, my wife said tentatively: “Peter, if they don’t find the Beard, we might still be able to locate Zelide or Edwina.”
A grunt from me was more than enough to snuff out her flicker of optimism. She lapsed back into the True Confessions.
It was about eleven o’clock when Hatch called. His voice sounded sardonically surprised that we had been smart enough to reach the apartment without mishap. His news, however, was hardly encouraging. They had managed to trace someone who answered to the Beard’s description from the hotel to the ferry building. At the ferry building, they had found someone who had seen this same individual boarding a ferry for Oakland. Hatch wasn’t at all sanguine about their being on the right track, but they were planning to take the next ferry to Oakland. After exhorting me to stay under cover and not to get impatient, he rang off.
In a solitary bookshelf hanging on the wall I found an old atlas. The atlas told me that the population of San Francisco was 634,536, while the population of Oakland was a mere 302,163.
I squeezed what comfort I could from the statistics.
By one o’clock, Iris had collapsed into an apathetic torpor. Having rocked myself dizzy, I was pacing up and down the room, smoking an endless chain of cigarettes.
At last I said: “Honey, there must be a new edition of the paper out by now. Hatch or no Hatch, I’m going out to get one.”
My wife sat up on the couch. “No, darling. You’ll be the one with all the publicity. It’s much more sensible for me to go.”
She refused to argue and walked out, returning shortly with a Chronicle.
“Well?” I said.
“I haven’t looked at it, darling. Somehow, it seemed too guilty. Here.”
She spread the paper out on the studio couch. We both sat down and stared at the front page. All sorts of things of disastrous importance to the human race were going on, but we skipped them. There was nothing about any murders. With a relaxing of tension, we turned to the second page and so right on through the funnies. Dick Tracy was in an awful jam.
It was nice to be reminded that other people had their troubles, too.
I got up from the couch and began pacing again. Iris sat there, listlessly, brooding over the paper. She took a cigarette out of her purse and lit it.
“Edwina,” she murmured, half to herself. “Edwina, the elephant. The elephant!” She repeated the word excitedly. She swung back to the paper and started leafing through it “Peter, I think I’ve got it.”
“Got what?”
I crossed to her side.
“I noticed the ad when we were going through it just now. I never realized.” She had found a certain page in the newspaper. She pointed down triumphantly.
“Look. It was Edwina the elephant that gave me the idea.”
I looked. Staring up from a large advertisement were the likenesses of three prancing elephants.
“See, Peter? Eulalia’s letter to Lina—we read it wrong. Eulalia’s writing was so shaky. We thought she said: ‘The crocus is opening.’ She didn’t. What she must have said was: ‘The circus is opening.’”
Above the elephants, in bold, black letters, were the words:
MADDEN’S CIRCUS IS IN TOWN GALA OPENING TODAY THE LAWRENCE STADIUM
“The red rose and the white rose are out and the circus is opening,” quoted Iris. “I’m sure that’s it, Peter. I’m sure the clue to everything must be in the circus.”
I was getting excited myself. “Eulalia had all those circus puppets. Maybe there is a tie-up. Maybe Edwina is one of the elephants in the circus. How a circus elephant fits in I can’t imagine, bu…”
“Look, Peter.” Iris’s finger had come to rest on a column at one side of the advertisement which listed the principal attractions of the show. Heading the column was: Edwina, the oldest elephant in captivity.
And that wasn’t all. My eyes travelled down the column and fixed on another attraction near the end of the list. For once we were getting a break.
There, under Merlino the Magician, was the announce ment: Madame Zelide, World-famous aerialist, with her amazing Bird Ballet.
“Zelide—the bird,” I said.
Iris looked up from the paper, her eyes shining. “It doesn’t matter now whether Hatch and Bill get the Beard or not. Zelide will be able to tell us the truth.”
“If she’s still alive,” I said shortly. I hated to douse her enthusiasm. But, since Zelide seemed to be on the same murder schedule as Eulalia and Lina, the world-famous aerialist’s hopes of being alive seemed on the slim side.
“She must be alive.” Iris got up from the couch and ran to the telephone. She fiddled around with the phone book and then gave the mouthpiece a number.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“Calling the Lawrence Stadium, of course.”
She got her number and talked to it. It was the wrong number for contacting performers. She was given another. She dialled it After innumerable conversations that got her nowhere, I heard her say: “Yes, yes. She’s not there? Well, do you know where she’s staying? … She … What? … see … Oh.”
She dropped the receiver on to its stand. She turned to me, her face drawn.
“Well?” I said.
“Zelide isn’t there. They’re expecting her for the opening this afternoon. But she isn’t there yet.”
“Did they know where she’s staying?”
Iris nodded. “Madame Zelide left her address with the management. She’s staying at the St. Anton.”
“The St. Anton.”
“And that’s not all. Zelide’s just her professional name. She’s staying at the St. Anton under her real name. And her real name is …
“What?”
“Zelide’s real name is Mrs. Zelide Rose.”
CHAPTER XI
“Mrs. Rose!” I repeated. “Then Mrs. Rose isn’t a menace, after all. She’s another victim.”
“Peter, it all ties up now. Mrs. Rose was a friend of Lina’s. We know that because Lina had her photograph. And then Mrs. Rose told me I reminded her of someone she used to know. She must have meant Eulalia. All the three women are linked together. Eulalia—Lina—Zelide.”
“That explains what the man with a lisp was doing in the St. Anton lobby when we arrived. He was hanging around Zelide.”
“But she checked out to marry Mr. Annapoppaulos and the man with the lisp got sidetracked to me, thinking I was Eulalia. They’d have a time trying to murder a bride on her wedding night. With any luck, Zelide is still alive and, if she is, she’s bound to show up for the gala opening of the circus.” Iris looked radiant. I never thought I would see her look that way again. “All we have to do is to get to the Lawrence Stadium before the performance starts. Zelide will be able to clear us just as well as the Beard.”
“When does the show start?”
“Two-thirty. It’s one-thirty now. We’ll have to hurry.” Hatch had repeatedly warned us against leaving the apartment and trying to be clever. But this, I felt, was no time to worry about his forebodings. It wasn’t just a question of getting Zelide to clear us. If the Beard’s drunken word could be relied upon, Mrs. Rose Annapoppaulos was in as great danger as Eulalia and Lina had been. I had liked Zelide with her gusty laugh and her Greek bridegroom. She wasn’t going to end up with a knife in her breast—not if I could help it.
“Let’s go,” I said.
Iris picked up her silver-fox wrap. “Perhaps we’ll even find the Beard at the Stadium. Don’t they have bearded men in circuses?”
“Bearded ladies,” I said. “Maybe that’s the payoff. Maybe the Beard’s a lady.”
Iris snuggled her shoulders into the wrap. “The Beard is not a lady, Peter. You can take my word for that.”
I said: “We’d better leave a note for Hatch telling him where we are in case they get back from Oakland.”
I found a piece of paper and a pencil by the telephone. I wrote that Zelide was at the circus and that we had gone to find her.
“Ready,” I said.
Iris looked at me. “Hadn’t you better change into the civilian suit?”
“Darn the civilian suit. I’m tired of masquerading. If we find Zelide, O.K. If we don’t, then I want to go down with all flags flying.”
“Hatch’d be cross.” Iris grinned and then kissed me. “But you’re right. I’d much rather have you arrested in the uniform. You’d look so much nicer in the line-up.”
She slipped her hand through my arm. We went to the door.
“I’m so happy,” she said. “Everything’s going to be all right. I feel it in my bones.”
I hoped Iris’s bones were better prophets than mine.
The Lawrence Stadium was somewhere along Market Street. Iris and I walked down Fillmore. The sun was shining crisply. Even the somber houses and the indeterminate passers-by were transformed by it. I could feel the festive pulse of San Francisco in the sunshine, in the air, but we were no part of it. It was all like somebody else’s birthday.
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