"Got a call for you," he said. "Telephone."
That was strange. I hadn't told anybody that I was going to the Lassiter exhibit. I walked to the entrance. The phone was on the desk where the white-haired old man checked invited guests in and out. Molo was holding the phone. I took it and waited for him to move away. When he didn't, I said politely, "Thanks."
"Huh?" he said. "Oh, sure, sure." He moved away.
The old man with the list was sitting next to the phone but I didn't think I had to worry about him. "Hello," I said into the phone. "This is Peter Meadows."
"Hello, Pete," a voice said cheerily. "This is Nancy."
"I couldn't imagine who was calling," I said. "You got sensible and went home, did you?"
"Guess again," she said.
At that moment my glance happened to pass over the list of guests in front of the old man. There was a red check after the name of everybody who had arrived, and a black one if they had already left. There was Meadows with a red check. There was Miss Nancy Vernon with a red check. She hadn't been checked out.
I said in a nervous whisper, "What are you doing, calling me? You're still here, according to the list."
"That's right, Pete. I'm here. The line I'm on is an extension of your phone. I asked the operator to give the line a test ring. I knew the man at the entrance would pick it up and think somebody outside was calling. It's so nice you're right at the list. Check me out, please."
Blood started prickling through my skin. "The hell I will," I whispered. "I'm not going to leave you hiding in some closet."
"Please don't argue. There might be another extension. Someone might pick it up and listen in. I'll meet you at my house later."
She was right about the danger of someone picking up another extension. Lassiter might wonder who was calling me. And I could see the ex-wrestler, Molo, heading down the hall as if looking for him. I had to talk her out of this fast. Sweat stung my face, and I fumbled for a handkerchief. I found one in my right-hand coat pocket and pulled it out.
"Pete!" Nancy said, with a touch of fear in her voice. "Pete, are you still there?"
At the moment I couldn't answer. What I had pulled from my coat pocket was not a handkerchief. It was a piece of blue-green silk. It was so light it almost floated out of my hand. It was strong enough to hang a man, though. While I had been pushing through the crowd looking for Nancy, someone had slipped it into my pocket, next to the photo of the fake Rembrandt.
"Pete!" Nancy gasped. "You've got to answer me!"
"Sorry," I said in a cracked voice. "Something took my attention away."
"The reason you've got to check me out," she said, "is that I sneaked upstairs and I can't get down again. Now do you understand?"
15.
I understood, all right. I understood what Nancy said and what the hunk of blue-green silk meant. Nancy was trapped upstairs. The hunk of silk told me what would happen if she was caught there. I hadn't fooled Lassiter as much as I thought. The piece of silk, slipped into my pocket by someone in the crowd, warned me he was suspicious and wouldn't hold still for a double-cross. One moment, everything was under control. The next, I was elected baby sitter to a time bomb.
"How did you get upstairs?" I said. "Why can't you get down?"
"There's a little elevator next to the stairway. I went up in it. But I can't pick a safe time to come down that way."
I glanced down the hall. At the end was a grand staircase, blocked off by a bronze gate that looked ornamental but had a strictly practical lock. The door of the little elevator was near the gate. "Did anybody see you use the elevator?"
"I'm sure no one did, Pete. The guard at the door had stepped outside for a moment. The nice old man at the table wasn't looking my way. And no one else was in the hall right then. I really pushed the elevator button just for fun. But it's one of those automatic things, and when the door opened on an empty car, I couldn't resist stepping in. If I come down the same way, the chances are somebody will see me."
"Come on anyway. They can't do anything to you with this crowd around."
"I can get down the back stairs and out through the kitchen," she said. "I've already checked that way, and it's clear. But the door into the kitchen from your part of the house is locked, so I can't get back into the exhibit rooms. That's why you have to check me out. I'll sneak out the back door and go home and you can meet me there."
"How soon will you promise to leave?"
"In a half-hour or so."
"You get out of the place this moment or—"
"There's no use arguing, Pete. I found something very interesting up here. I'll tell you later. Check me out, please. Good-
by."
"Wait a minute," I said hoarsely. "Wait—" There was a click on the other end of the line. She had hung up.
While whispering to her I had kept an eye on the old man at the table beside me. He hadn't paid any attention to our talk. I pretended to go on talking into the phone. I put away the piece of blue-green silk, got out a handkerchief, two coins and the photo. I dropped the coins and photo as if they spilled from my pocket when I pulled out the handkerchief. The coins hit the table beside the old man, and bounced to the floor. The photo landed on the table. The old man looked up.
"Sorry," I said to him, waving the phone helplessly in one hand and the handkerchief in the other. "They fell out of my pocket."
"I'll get them," he said.
He bent to pick up the coins. I reached down, grabbed his pencil and made a black check on the list beside Nancy's name. Then I dropped the pencil and grabbed the photo just as he came up with the coins.
"Thanks so much," I said. "Clumsy of me."
"No trouble at all," he said pleasantly, handing me the coins.
"What were you saying, Nancy?" I said into the phone. "I dropped a couple of things and couldn't hear."
The old man relaxed again in his chair. I made a few more remarks and was about to hang up when I saw Lassiter coming
down the hall with Molo. I put more spirit into my fake conversation.
Lassiter stopped beside me and tapped my arm and said, "Would you like to take the call in my office, where it's more private?"
I smiled at him. "No thanks," I said. "Just finishing." Into the phone I said, "What did you say? . . . Oh, that was Mr. Lassiter . . . What? . . . Yes, I certainly will tell him. Nice of you to call. Good-by." I hung up and told Lassiter, "That was Miss Vernon. She had a slight headache and went home. Wanted me to thank you for having invited her."
He couldn't help glancing at the list. Then he frowned and said to the old man, "I like to know when my guests leave. You didn't tell me Miss Vernon had gone."
The old man looked at the list, too. He gave a helpless shrug and said, "But Mr. Lassiter, there are so many people it's hard to keep track of them. Maybe when Miss Vernon left, someone else was coming in, and it slipped my mind."
"All right, all right," Lassiter said irritably.
I put a silly look on my face, and said to Lassiter, "I got out of the doghouse."
"How fortunate," he said in a bored tone, and walked away.
They have a big statue of William Penn on top of City Hall tower. I could have had more fun, the next hour or so, if I had been hanging from his hat brim by my fingernails. I wasn't going to leave the place until I had to, just in case anything went wrong upstairs. I wandered around staring at paintings that never came into focus. I talked with Sheldon and a few other people, and for all I knew they could have been reciting the telephone book to me. But I could have told Lassiter that he passed the bronze gate at the foot of the staircase fourteen times, and that he glanced up the stairs four times and checked the lock once. I could have told Joe Molo that he scratched his head about once a minute, and that his shoulder holster was apparently strapped one notch too tight.
It was midnight when I left. I would have stayed longer, but eveiyone else was leaving and Lassiter was beginning to glance
curiously at me. In theory
, Nancy had slipped out the back way and gone home long ago. But I had no way of being sure of that.
When I got outside I headed for her house. Rittenhouse Square was deserted and my footsteps came back to me in flat little echoes. By the time I reached her street I was almost running. I poked the doorbell, and waited. There was cotton stuffed in my chest and it kept me from pulling in enough air. William opened the door.
"She's home, isn't she?" I said. "Isn't she?"
His face looked old and tired. "Come in, Mr. Meadows," he said. "She isn't home. And I think she's in trouble."
"Do you know anything or is that a guess?"
"She telephoned here three times, Mr. Meadows. She expected to find you waiting here for her. She's going to call back again. I don't know what's wrong, but her voice sounded shaky."
"I'd better talk to her parents," I said. "They ought to know about the jam she's in. Are they still up?"
"I'm sorry, Mr. Meadows, they're away on a trip. I've been hoping you would keep track of her."
"Sure. It's no harder than tailing a bolt of lightning."
I sat down in the hall near the phone and waited. Beside me a grandfather's clock ticked solemnly. The face plate said it had been made by William Ericke, Clockmakers Company of London, 1730. It had been minding its own business for a long time, which is the way to survive to a ripe old age. The hall light drew sleek reflections from the cabriole legs and claw-and-ball feet of Chippendale furniture. Everything in the house said that here was a staid Philadelphia family that simply couldn't produce a rebel like Nancy. And yet, back a half-dozen generations, there were Vernons playing hide-and-go-seek with Indians and galloping off with the Philadelphia Troop of Light Horse to help with a revolution. Probably those traits had to flare up now and then.
The phone rang. It jarred me like a fire bell going off. William picked it up and said a few words and then handed it to me.
"Hello, Pete," Nancy said. "I'm still all right."
"Oh, fine. I'm glad one of us is. Where are you?"
"Well, I'm upstairs in Mr. Lassiter's house."
"Good. I was afraid you might have done something silly, like getting out and going to the police."
"Please don't be angry with me," she said meekly. "I really am a little scared."
"Can't you get out?"
"I don't seem to be able to. You know that kitchen door I was going to use? When I tried it, the door wouldn't open. Whoever locked it must have taken the key. And the door from the kitchen into the exhibit rooms is still locked. That gate across the main stairway is still locked. The elevator is parked across from the open door of Mr. Lassiter's room on the second floor. I'm afraid to use it to go downstairs because you can hear it plainly now that the house is quiet. The upper story windows have horribly strong screens, and I can't open them to try to climb down. So here I am still on the second floor."
I said harshly, "Lassiter will start charging you rent."
"Please don't make a joke of it."
"I'm not making jokes. I'm covering up the fact that I don't know what to do."
"Haven't you any ideas?"
"I can always call the cops."
"Probably," she wailed, "I'll be arrested as a burglar or something."
"I'd feel pretty safe with you in jail."
"That's silly. You know Mr. Lassiter wouldn't make any charges. But if I get caught, he'll know exactly what we've been up to. That may not be fun. Can't you think of anything else?"
"No. I've been out of my mind for the last two hours, so I don't know what thoughts I've been having. Where are you in the house?"
"Second room from the front, on the second floor. It's a spare bedroom and I'm in a closet with the phone. Mr. Lassiter has a couple of rooms at the rear of the second floor."
"All right. Hide where you are for the next hour. Don't come out no matter what happens. I'll try to sneak into the place
and get you. If I can't do it in an hour I'm calling the cops."
"But if I can't get out, how can you possibly get in?"
"I don't know. Just sit tight for an hour, see?"
"Yes, Pete. Thank you, Pete. I think you're wonderful."
"Now I know you're crazy," I said, and hung up.
I asked William for paper and an envelope, and scrawled a note and sealed it and handed it to him. "If we're not back by 4:00 a.m.," I said, "call the police and read this to them."
"Mr. Meadows," he said, "there's one more bit of trouble that Miss Nancy is in. You probably ought to be told about it. But she ordered me not to tell you."
"Did she tell you about it over the phone tonight?"
"No sir. It happened before she went out."
"Then save it," I said. "There isn't room in my head to park another headache."
I left the Vernon house and hurried back toward Lassiter's. It was around one o'clock now. Earlier in the evening the Rit-tenhouse Square section had been lively. Cars had winked by steadily on Walnut Street and the big apartment hotels had lifted honeycombs of light into the dark sky. The section was blacking out now. On Lassiter's side of the square, away from the apartment hotels, only a few yellow windows were pasted against the night.
Lassiter's sawed-off castle loomed up ahead of me. It was only four stories high but it couldn't have looked harder to handle if it had been the Tower of London. The setup was all wrong. What they needed here was a guy with nerves of steel and muscles of iron. If mine had ever been like that, they certainly were badly rusted.
I checked the outside of the place. The heavy double doors at the entrance were locked, and steel shutters covered the front windows. One side of the house extended along a side street. Its shutters were closed. In the back, there were more shutters and another locked door. The other side of the house was separated by a narrow twisting alley from the neighboring place, and that side was locked up like a bank vault, too. I stood outside Lassiter's office, which was on the alley side, and
wondered how you got into the joint if you didn't have a key or a search warrant or dynamite. I might as well tiy to open an oyster with a toothpick.
I hunted through my pockets to see if anything in them would give me an idea. The blue-green silk gave me an idea I didn't like. The photo of the fake Rembrandt didn't give me any. It-Wait a moment. Lassiter had shown me how the steel shutters outside his office worked. He hadn't closed the window itself when he did it, so the window might still be open. And he had mentioned an electric eye system that protected the windows. I tried to remember how those alarm systems worked. You have a beam of black light going from one side of a door or window to a photo-electric cell on the other side. If anything breaks the beam of light, the alarm goes off. I studied the steel shutters just above me and saw that they didn't clamp together perfectly. There was a tiny space between them. It would be possible to hold one end of the four-by-five-inch photo and stick the rest of it through that crack. It would reach about four inches inside the shutters. If the electric eye was within four inches of the shutters, and if I moved the photo up and down the crack, I could break the circuit and set off the alarm.
The question was, what then? Would Lassiter call the police the way an ordinary citizen would? It wasn't likely. First he might want to know who was trying to break in, and whether it was someone he would rather handle without any help from the law. Nick Accardi might be a good example. Or a guy named Meadows.
Probably the alarm system had a control panel that showed where the circuit had been broken. So Lassiter would hurry to his office. When he found nobody inside yet, he or his tame thug might run out to the alley to try to catch the guy at work. That would leave the front or back door open for a few moments. And during those moments that slick operator Meadows would breeze into the house.
More likely I would drop the photo inside the shutters, and nothing would happen.
However, nobody was offering me a better idea, so I went to work. I went to the back door and borrowed the garbage can. There were four empty milk bot
tles, and I arranged them so that anyone coming out of the back door would kick one over. I carried the garbage can into the alley and placed it under the office shutters and climbed up on it. That let me reach the full length of the shutters. I gripped the photo firmly and pushed the free end through the crack and slid it all the way up and down.
I don't know what I had expected. Maybe a pinball game climax with flashing lights and buzzers. Nothing happened. Not a sound came from the house. But there was no use fiddling around. Electric eyes don't close for naps. Either I had set off the alarm or I couldn't set it off. I jumped off the garbage pail. The alley had a couple of angles where it bent around a side bay window, so anyone coming from the front would have to go down the alley to check on the office shutters. That would give me a few extra seconds to get into the house. I sneaked around to the front and hid in an angle formed by the stone entrance stairway and the wall. If anybody came out the back door, I ought to hear the crash of a milk bottle.
I waited. Across the square, a late trolley car banged over a switch and mashed a couple of my nerves. A cat came along and looked at me as if I were a new and poor variety of mouse. A church bell marked the half-hour by letting a teardrop of sound plunk into the silence.
A shadow drifted past me. It moved so quietly that at first I thought it might be the shadow of a tree, thrown on the house by the headlights of a moving auto. Except for one thing. Tree shadows don't carry revolvers. The shadow was Joe Molo. He floated past and turned into the alley. I jumped up. Above me, a hunk of blackness the size of a coffin showed between the big front doors. I went up the steps. Either Lassiter was guarding the doorway into his office or he was guarding this one. The way to find out was to take a deep breath and step into the blackness. I did. Nothing happened. Halfway down the inside hall I was still alive, so Lassiter must be at his office door. The
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