The Red Carnelian

by Phyllis A. Whitney

  He said, “Don’t act like that! Pull yourself together. What’s happened?”

  I waved one hand wildly toward the display department. I could only gasp incoherently. Hering took me by the wrist and he and the elevator man started off on a run, with me trailing helplessly along. I didn’t want to go back, but I was being dragged back. I couldn’t even be allowed the privilege of hysteria.

  The phonograph was still on in Sondo’s workroom, the needle clicking round and round at the end of the record. But there was no one there, no one at all. Hering turned off the machine and turned sternly to me.

  “Not here!” I told him frantically. “In the mannequin room!”

  I had to go with them and show them which cabinet, but they didn’t make me look. I shrank back against the door and covered my face with my hands. I couldn’t shut out the things they were saying.

  “It’s the Norgaard woman, all right,”—that was Hering.

  “Lookut what’s around her neck!”—the elevator man.

  I wouldn’t look and I didn’t know till later about the thin, braided suede belt that had cut off Sondo’s life. A belt of bright scarlet—the color we were featuring for the year. The missing belt.

  The next hour or so will always remain a little hazy in my mind. I’ve a memory of Hering trying to be in a dozen places at once. Trying to search all the enormous eighth floor, calling McPhail, giving orders that no one be allowed to leave the store.

  We were all gathered in the department eventually—a more terrible repetition of the ordeal we’d gone through only a few days before. Tony and the boys from the windows, the models from the style show, Miss Babcock, Owen Gardner, and Carla Drake in her gold and white gown, looking like Juliet. Carla, protesting that she must be allowed to change her dress. Objecting and complaining till she was allowed to go and make the change, there were a few others too. Scrubwomen, anyone who had been in the store.

  But out of us all there was simply nothing to be gleaned. Apparently everyone had been doing what he was supposed to do. I was the only one who admitted I’d been on the eighth floor.

  After the police routine had been run through and the body examined, we found that Sondo had been dead since early morning. There was a bruise at her temple where she had been struck a blow, only enough to stun her, to make her helpless so that those cruel hands could draw the suede cord tightly about her throat. It was thought that the same hammer with which Dolores had been smashed had struck the blow.

  This was more dreadful than Monty’s death. That had been impersonal in the sense that it had little to do with us. Someone had hated him and killed him. But Sondo was dead, not because she was so bitterly hated, but because she had possessed knowledge that was dangerous. And that left each one of us wondering if he too knew more than it was safe to know. In a queer sort of way I suppose I’d liked Sondo. She was erratic and tempestuous and fiery, but she’d had a touch of genius and dauntless courage.

  I told McPhail what I knew or surmised about the affair of the phonograph and the ring, and his men turned the place upside down searching for any trace of the stone, but if it was in the department, they didn’t find it. Nor did they find anything enlightening when they later searched Sondo’s apartment

  Bill had told me to keep still about everything until he saw me, so aside from what I knew about the phonograph, I said nothing. My mind was sick with speculation. If Sondo’s suspicions had been correct, if she’d been following the right thread, then it was Chris she had prepared to trap. Every bit of evidence she’d uncovered had pointed to Chris. And she’d spoken as if she held back one final ace—the ring. Had that ring belonged to Chris? She’d been in the store that morning. Had she gone first to window display to try to recover her property? Had she—?

  I could see the two of them with terrible clearness in my mind’s eye. Chris, so big and strapping, and little wiry Sondo. A Chris capable of action when she was aroused—and not a limp crybaby.

  I couldn’t believe it.

  Later I found myself in Hering’s company at the lunch counter on the seventh floor, without quite knowing how I’d got there. Every night free coffee was served to the scrubwomen and anyone else who worked late. The free coffee business was flourishing that night.

  I sat on a high stool beside Hering, while he handed me cream and sugar, and all but stirred my coffee for me. I’d gone so far along a road of horror since that moment in the mannequin room, that I couldn’t feel much more about anything for the time being.

  I do remember rousing myself once to inquire the time. It was after ten—which meant that I’d already missed my call from Bill. I hoped he wouldn’t be too worried and that he’d come back to town tomorrow, but I couldn’t even get very excited about that.

  “What’s the matter with your fingers?” Hering asked me, and I looked at my hand, not knowing what he meant.

  Then I realized that I’d been rubbing my fingertips against my skirt, rubbing them again and again—and I knew why. It was as if I was trying to rub from them the silky feel of Sondo’s dark hair.

  “Why can’t we do something?” I cried. “Why doesn’t somebody do something?”

  Others at the lunch counter glanced at me, then hastily away. For the first time I looked about to see who was there.

  Carla Drake had changed to her blue suit and was wearing her usual beautiful, sad expression. I noticed with distaste that Owen Gardner had taken the stool beside her, but he was wasting no interest on her just then. He looked grayer than ever and the strong black coffee he drank seemed to be doing him little good.

  Once Carla turned and said something to him in an undertone, but he only shook his head indifferently.

  When I’d downed two cups of coffee, Hering pulled me off the stool and led me away from the counter. There was an exhibit of porch furniture not far from the lunch counters and he pushed me into a glider and sat down beside me. I was so numb and dazed that I had to be pushed and led.

  “I found out about that fur coat business,” he told me. “I had some time off this afternoon and I went over to the library and looked up some eastern papers around that date.”

  “Did you find anything that ties in?” I asked. I formed the words automatically because I couldn’t really care. I didn’t want to wake up and try to think. Every time I began to use my mind, I started through that experience in the mannequin room again. All I wanted now was to be numb.

  “If it ties in,” Hering said, “I don’t know how. I took it to McPhail, but he was so bent on catching Sondo that he wasn’t interested. I guess I don’t look so smart from where he sits. Anyway, it seems Montgomery had a quite a finger in the style shows at that store in the east. They put ’em on like regular stage shows and he designed settings and arranged everything. Well, he had a dance team he was helping, and they went around appearing at all these shows between the dress displays. I guess he gave ’em a lot of good publicity.”

  I was barely listening. I’d begun to think of Bill again. Where had he gone? How long would it take him to get back to town?

  “Well,” Hering went on, “they had a fur coat show and some of the coats disappeared. I guess it even looked a little bad for Monty for a while. But they finally pinned it on these dancers he’d helped. They arrested the man, but the woman got away. ‘Luis and Lotta’ they called themselves.”

  I came out of my apathy with a name ringing in my ears. “What did you say?”

  Hering regarded me in despair, “Ain’t you even been listening? I said they billed themselves as ‘Luis and Lotta.’ ”

  “Did the papers give their last name?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Some sort of Spanish name. I got a picture of it in my head. Wait a minute.”

  “It wouldn’t be Montez, would it?”

  He fitted the name painstakingly to his mental photograph. “Yeah, sure. That’s it. How’d you know?”

>   “I’ve probably heard it some place,” I said.

  Hering changed the subject. “Look, Miss Wynn, who do you think was up here playing that phonograph tonight?”

  Everything came back with brutal clarity. I forgot about Lotta Montez.

  “I don’t think anybody ever played it, except Sondo and Carla Drake. And this time it wasn’t Sondo. Carla was in the store all right, but why on earth she’d go sneaking upstairs to play that record, I don’t know. And if it was Carla, why didn’t she come out when I started screaming?”

  “It could have been somebody who wanted you to think it was the Drake woman,” Hering said.

  “But why? It doesn’t make any sense. And who would know I was there and take all the trouble to go up and scare me? Whoever it was had to walk up. The elevator man said he didn’t take anyone but me to the eighth floor around that time.”

  Hering’s melancholy deepened. “There’s a lot that doesn’t make sense till you get hold of a key. What did Sondo take the dress off that dummy for? And who smashed its head in?”

  We were on the old treadmill of speculation again. Tomorrow Bill would be back in town. Tomorrow I’d get to tell him everything I knew. And with whatever it was he had found out, perhaps something would make sense and we could go to McPhail with some concrete evidence that wouldn’t hurt the wrong person.

  One of McPhail’s men came toward me “Hey! I been looking all over for you. You’re wanted upstairs, Miss Wynn.”

  Hering took me up and I went into Monty’s office, where McPhail was waiting for me. The department was bright now, with lights burning everywhere, and noisy enough to shut out the rain beating against the window panes. I knew the minute I sat down in the chair opposite McPhail, that something new had come up.

  I found out almost at once. Although the fingerprints on the hammer had been badly smudged, they’d made out one clear thumb mark. It belonged to Bill Thorne.

  19

  I forgot all other horror in this shock. I knew it was all right. It had to be. But it looked bad for Bill.

  I told McPhail about the phone call I’d had from him late that afternoon and the detective pounced on the information eagerly.

  “Where’d he call from? Where is he now?”

  “I don’t know,” I said helplessly. “He didn’t tell me.”

  McPhail didn’t believe a word and I became a little frantic trying to convince him.

  Across the room Hering was playing with the pine spray again, while he listened. He gave the plunger a little push and the office began to smell of Christmas trees. McPhail sneezed and barked at him.

  “Get the damn’ thing outta here!”

  Hering took it away sheepishly and came back.

  I explained to McPhail that Bill was on the track of something and that he’d thought it safer if I didn’t know too much about it. I said he’d told me about seeing Sondo and that he’d sounded concerned when I’d told him Dolores had been smashed with a hammer.

  “Sure,” McPhail said, “he probably remembered his prints were on that hammer.”

  “He didn’t say anything about the hammer,” I told him. “He just sounded shocked and said he’d come back to town right away. There wasn’t a train until midnight and he was going to call me again at ten o’clock. Only of course I wasn’t home.”

  At the back of my mind I was thinking that all he’d need to know to settle us nicely was the part Bill and I had played in the discovery of Monty’s body. Why on earth had Bill had to touch that hammer when he’d been in Sondo’s workroom that morning?

  The palms of my hands had broken into a cold sweat and I pulled a handkerchief from my pocket to dry them. Of all the times in the world to pull out a handkerchief, I had to pick the worst moment.

  Something which had been caught in the folds flew across the room with a little clatter. Hering leaned down and picked it up. But he didn’t hand it back to me. He studied it for a moment thoughtfully and then put it down on the desk in front of McPhail without a word.

  His action was so odd that I leaned over to see what it was. McPhail picked the object up in his fingers and turned it about. It was a large carnelian stone, deep red and highly polished, set in an oval of antique gold, evidently broken loose from the prongs of a ring. About a third of the stone had cracked off and the mounting was visible underneath.

  McPhail spoke curtly over his shoulder and someone brought an envelope and laid it before him. He took out the ring that had been found clutched in Monty’s hand and fitted the stone to it. The match was perfect. He looked at me, his eyes cold and deadly.

  “Well?” he said.

  I felt as if a net were being pulled in around me and I was suddenly too weary to fight the entangling mesh.

  I don’t know where it came from,” I said. “I’ve never seen it before.”

  Someone was trying to incriminate me. That smock stuffed in my desk. And now the stone to the ring in my pocket. Who could hate me like that?

  Hering’s eyes were on me. “You try hard to think, Miss Wynn. You must have got that somewhere. Can’t you remember anything about it?”

  I put my fingers over my eyes and thought of everything I could remember handling that night in my work in the window. I went again through all the steps I’d taken on my way upstairs to the mannequin room, thought through the whole experience. And suddenly I had it.

  No one had put that stone in my pocket. I’d put it there myself. I looked up at McPhail triumphantly.

  “I remember now! When I was in the mannequin room. Right after—right after I found her. My foot kicked something on the floor and then I stepped on it. I picked it up and put it in my pocket so I couldn’t kick it again. I didn’t look at it or think about it, but it must have been the stone.”

  McPhail regarded me with open disbelief in those cold eyes. “Pretty smooth with your stories, aren’t you? First you find a piece in the window and then you lose it. Now you got the other piece. Come clean now—where did you get it? Why was it in your pocket? What were you going to do with it?”

  He took me over the whole thing again and again, until I felt so weary that I wanted to give up. It was almost like the horrid fascination of looking down a well. I knew it was the end of me if I jumped, but I was tempted to go plunging down—to cry that of course I’d murdered Sondo, that the ring was mine, anything to get away from those coldly cruel eyes watching me. Somehow I clung to a shred of sanity because I knew I had to help Bill.

  Hering finally broke the tension. He picked up the stone again.

  “You know,” he said, “I’ve seen this somewhere before.”

  McPhail turned. “Where?”

  “I don’t know exactly.” Hering looked uncomfortable. “It’s just that I got a picture of it in my head. And when I get a picture like that I know—”

  “You and your pictures!” McPhail snapped. “If you’ve seen it before you’d better remember where.”

  Hering closed his eyes and went into one of his trances.

  “It was on a hand,” he produced at last.

  “Well now,” McPhail said heavily, “ain’t that just too sweet! On a hand he says. You wouldn’t by any chance know whose hand, I suppose?”

  “Nope,” Hering shook his head. “That ain’t in the picture. But it was a woman’s hand. With red nails.”

  McPhail turned his back in disgust and started over again on me. The little interlude had restored my balance to some extent, and I could go over the ground again without giving way.

  Hering was still playing with the parts of the ring and suddenly he exclaimed and stepped forward to show something to McPhail. There was a tiny hinge in the gold oval that held the stone and when he pressed above the hinge with his nail the stone tilted up to show a hollow beneath. It was a space in which a lock of hair, or a picture, or some such sentimental treasure might have been kept.
There was nothing in it now.

  McPhail glared at me. “I suppose you don’t know what was kept in that ring?”

  “Of course I don’t,” I said. “I’ve told you I’ve never seen the thing before.”

  He finally let me go, but only, I think, because he thought I might lead them to Bill. From that moment on I was followed every time I left the store.

  There wasn’t anyone to take me home this time and I have no clear memory of going out and catching a bus. I suppose I must have, because I turned up eventually at my own door.

  Helena was sitting up in bed, reading a magazine and she looked up anxiously as I came in.

  “Linell! I’ve been so worried. You’ve never come home this late from the store.”

  I went over and sat limply down on her bed. “Sondo’s dead. Murdered, just like Monty. I found her. I—I went up to the mannequin room for a figure. And when I put my hand into a cabinet I touched her hair and—”

  Helena’s magazine slid off on the floor with a ruffling of pages. She recovered herself as I talked, but there was a gray look about her mouth. “I knew it,” she cried. “That party. I knew something awful would come of it. A thing like that gets out of hand.”

  I told her about that earlier attack upon me in the office and it was pleasant to have her soothe and cluck over me. But still I watched her a little uneasily. I hadn’t seen her alone since the night before when she’d refused to tell me about Lotta Montez, and it seemed to me that Helena was looming up more and more as a mystery woman.

  “I know about Lotta Montez,” I said, when we’d exhausted the subject of Sondo’s murder.

  “About her?” The words were scarcely more than a whisper.

  “Yes. That she was mixed up in that fur coat theft in the east. She and her dancing partner.”

  I watched her warily. Her expression was guarded and I couldn’t tell how my news had hit her.

  Lotta Montez. A stage name certainly. But who was the real woman behind the name? Why had Helena burned that note?