“No, I never even give him a look. I couldn’t say who was with her. He stay in the shadow down below.”
“You see, there’s as big a link as ever missing, only it’s the other way around now. Most of the others remembered him, but not her. You remember her, but not him. It’s still no good, wouldn’t prove anything. Just that a woman stood up in a theater one night. Any woman. She might have been alone. She might have been with someone else entirely. It doesn’t mean a thing. I’ve got to get the two linked up together by one witness.” He clapped his hands to his knees frustratedly, rose to leave. “Looks like it ends there, where it began. Well, thank you for your time.”
“I keep trying for you, anyway,” she promised, giving him her hand. “I don’t know what I can do, but I keep at it.”
He didn’t either. He shook hands briefly, passed through the outer room in a mist of depression. He felt the let-down, the sudden reversal, all the more keenly because he had come closer to getting on to something tangible just now than he had at any other time so far; it had been almost within his grasp, only to be snatched away at the last moment. Now he was right back where he’d been before.
The operator had turned and was looking at him expectantly, so he knew he’d come all the way down without feeling it, and was supposed to get out of the car. Somebody propelled a door for him and he was outside in the street. He stood there for a moment without moving away from the entrance, simply because he couldn’t decide which direction to take next. One offered as little as the other, so they checkmated each other. And his ability to make even such a minor decision as that was wallowing helplessly in a trough just then.
A taxi came along and he hailed it. It had someone in it, he had to wait for another. That kept him there a minute longer. And sometimes a minute can make an awful lot of difference. He hadn’t left any tracer with Mendoza, she wouldn’t have known where to contact him.
He was already seated in the second taxi and it was just about to take off, when the revolving door of the hotel blurred like a propellor in motion and a bellboy came darting out to him. “Are you the gentleman that just left Miss Mendoza’s suite? She called down a minute ago after you’d gone by. She’d like you to come back again, if you don’t mind.”
He went inside again and up fast. The same fur snowball launched itself at him, in fond recollection. He didn’t even mind that this time. The pajamas were gone and she was in the middle of trying something or other on. She looked like a half-finished lampshade standing in the middle of the floor, but he had no eye for any of that.
She was only mildly disconcerted, if at all. “I hope you’re a married man? Pouf, if you’re not, you will be some day, so it’s all the same.” He couldn’t quite grasp the fine point of propriety involved, but let it go at that. She picked up a length of material and draped it negligently across one shoulder, where it would do the least good, as a protection. Then she dismissed some shadowy third person kneeling at her feet with a mouthful of pins.
“A minute after you left I got something,” she told him as soon as they were alone. “I was still kind of”—she twisted her hand this way and that, as tough she were trying a doorknob—“you know—sore.”
William, occurred to him unspoken at this point.
“So I let it out, like I always do when I’m sore, by breaking a couple of little things.” She motioned with perfect unconcern to numerous crïal fragments littering the floor, with a disembodied atomizer bulb lying in their midst.
“Then the fonniest thing happen. It bring back another time I am sore, about that woman we were talking about. Because I throw things now, I remember how I throw things that other time.” She hitched her shoulders. “Is peculiar, no? It remember to me what I do with the hat. I think maybe it help you to know.”
He waited, shifting one foot out toward her in leashed intensity.
She shook an explanatory finger at him. “So that night, when that woman do like that to me, I go back to my dressing room and, immh—” She inhaled deeply. “I nidd to be tied opp. I take everything on the table and I go like this!” She made a clean horizontal sweep with one arm. “You onderstand how I feel, no? You don’t blem me?”
“I don’t blame you at all.”
She trip-hammered the flat of her hand between the circumflex accents formed by the brassiere she had on. “You think anyone is going to do that to me in front of a houseful of people? You think I, Mendoza, let them get away with that?”
He didn’t, now that he’d had a sample or two of her com-bustive temperament.
“They have to huld me back by both arms, the stage manager and my maid, to keep me from rushing out the stage door in my wrapper just like I am, to see if I can find her in front of the theater, for to pull her to pieces betwinn my two hands!”
He’d half hoped, for a minute, that that was what it was going to develop had happened, that she’d tangled with the cipher at the theater entrance. But he knew it hadn’t, or Henderson would have mentioned it to him, and she herself would have recalled it sooner than this.
“I would have showed her a thing or two, you bet!” She still looked capable of doing it even at this late day. Lombard even drew back a precautionary step or two, the way she was crouched facing him. fingers working convulsively in lobster-claw formation. Bibi was clasping and unclasping his own tiny digits in apprehensive supplication.
She straightened, threw her arms outward in breast-stroke position. “The next day I’m still sore. With me it lasts. So I go to the modiste, the designer, that make opp the hat for me, and I blow off stimm there instead. I throw it in her face in front of hull room full of customers. I say, ‘So you make me an original for my production number, ha? The only one of its kind, ha? Nobody else is going to have one like it, ha?’ And I wipe it all over her face, and when I leave she is still spitting out pieces of the material, she can’t talk.”
She shoveled her hands at him inquiringly. “So that’s good for you, is no? That helps you, no? This cheat of a designer, she must know who is the person she sell the copy to. You go to her and you find out who this woman is you look for.”
“Swell! Great! At last!” he yelled, so enthusiastically that Bibi dove head-first under the chaise and pulled his tail in after him. “What’s her name? Give me her name!”
“Wait, I dig it opp for you.” She tapped the side of lhead apologetically. “I work in so many different shows, I have so many different costumers, I can’t keep track.” She called the maid in, instructed her, “Look among my bills for a hat, from last year’s show, see you can find one.”
“But we don’t keep them that long, do we, Señorita?”
“You don’t have to go all the way back to when it start from, stupid,” said the star, as unselfconsciously as ever. “Look it opp among last month’s, it probably still kipp coming in.”
The maid came back after a moderately lengthy—and to Lombard, excruciating—wait. “Yes, I found it, it did come in this month again. It says, ‘One hat, a hundred dollars,’ and the letterhead reads ‘Kettisha.’ “
“Good! That’s it!” She passed it to Lombard. “You got it?” He copied the address, returned it to her. Her hands went into hysterics, and a blizzard of tiny pieces of paper snowed all over the floor. Then she ground her foot down into the middle of them. “I like the nerve! Still sending me bills a year later! She’s got no shem, that woman!”
She looked up to find him already crossing the adjoining room on his way out. He was an opportunist; after all, her contribution had been made, she was of no further value to him. On to the next link.
She hastened to the boudoir doorway to deliver a parting benediction on his enterprise. One motivated by spite, however, and not altruism. She would have followed him all the way to the outside door, only the uncompleted hoopskirt she wore got stuck in the opening, wouldn’t let her pass through. “I hope you catch opp with her!” she shrilled after him vengefuUy, “I hope she find herself in plenty of trouble!”
A woman will forgive you anything—but wearing the same hat as she does, at the same time.
He felt like a fish out of water when he walked into the place, but he didn’t let it deter him. He would have stalked into far more unlikely places than this to attain his goal. It was one of those establishments on a side street, housed in a former private residence converted to commercial purposes, whose expensiveness and exclusiveness always seem to be in inverse ratio to their lack of conspicuousness. The entire ground floor was given over to the display room, or whatever the trade name for it was. Having stated his business, he took shelter in a secluded corner of this, the most secluded corner he was able to find.
He’d walked in right in the middle of a showing. Or maybe they had one every day at this hour, for all he knew. It didn’t help to put him at his ease. He was the only man there, or at least the only one of service age. There was what appeared to be a dessicated septuagenarian present among the sprinkling of clients seated here and there. The charming young thing with him, his granddaughter no doubt, must have brought him in with her to help her select a wardrobe. “The mind,” thought Lombard, regarding him with a bilious eye, “can certainly work wonders.” But with that one exception, it was all distaff. Even a girl doorman and girl pages.
The mannequins would come forward slowly, one by one, from the rear, and make a complete circuit of the forepart of the room, turning this way and that with little graceful swirls. For some reason, it may simply have been the corner he had chosen, he kept getting swirls and even full halts, from every single one of them. He felt Hke saying, “I’m not here to buy anything,” but didn’t have the nerve. It made him acutely uncomfortable, the more so since he had to keep staring into their faces and there were lots of other places he would have preferred staring.
The young woman he’d spoken to came back and rescued him at last. “Madame Kettisha will see you in her private office, upstairs on the second floor,” she whispered. A girl page showed him the way, knocked for him, then departed below again.
There was a buxom, middle-aged, redheaded Irishwoman sitting facing him from behind a large desk when he went in. She not only had nothing of the chic couturier about her, she even leaned slightly to the horsy, dowdy side. She probably had once been Kitty Shaw in some backstreet tenement and she deserved plenty of credit, he told himself, sizing her up. She probably was a wizard at making money; only an unqualified success could have afforded to flaunt such personal slovenliness as she was exhibiting. I^is first impression was altogether favorable and his relief was almost abject.
She was shuffling through a sheaf of crayon colored fashion sketches at lightning speed, discarding some to her right, okaying others to her left. Or vice versa. “Well, mike, what can I do for you?” she grunted brusquely without looking up.
He was all out of tact by now. It was still the same day as the Mendoza interviews, and he hadn’t had time to recuperate from them yet. It was getting late, anyway; nearly five in the afternoon.
“I came straight down here from one of your former customers. The South American actress Mendoza.”
She did look up at that. “Better use a whiskbroom,” she suggested dourly.
“You did a hat for her, for last year’s show, remember? One hundred bucks, and I want to know who got the chaser on it.”
She put the sketches out of harm’s way first, before she cut loose. The accepts into a drawer, the discards into a wastebasket. She had a temper, evidently, that could be turned off and on at will, and with a time limit set to it. At that, he liked it better than Mendoza’s brand. It was more forthright. Her hand came down on the desk top with a bang like a hand grenade. “Don’t you gimme any of that!” she roared. “I’ve had enough trouble out of that hat! I said then there was no copy made, and I still say now there was no copy made. When I produce an original, it stays original! If there was a copy made, it wasn’t run up in this establishment or with my knowledge, and I’m not responsible! I may soak ‘em, but I don’t doublecross them!”
“There was a copy made,” he insisted. “It showed up in a theater, face to face with hers across the footUghts!”
She leaned down heavily over the desk, both elbows in air. “What does she want me to do, sue her for slander?” she shouted. “I will if she keeps this up! She’s a liar, and you can go back and tell her I said so!”
Instead he tO(^ his hat and pitched it onto a chair over in the corner, to show her he intended staying until he had what he’d come here to get. He even unbuttoned his coat, to give himself plenty of free arm action. “She has nothing to do with it, so let’s just forget her. I’m here for purposes of my own. There was a copy, because a friend of mine was with the very woman who had it on in the theater. So don’t tell me there wasn’t. I want to know who she is, I want her name from your list of customers.”
“It isn’t on it. It couldn’t be, because there was no such transaction entered into by us. What’re you going to do, keep this up all day?”
He hitched his chin out into second, brought his own hand down in an answering blow to hers that made the whole desk structure jar. “For the love of God, there’s a man counting his life by hours! What the hell do I care about your business ethics at such a time. You’re not going to sit there and head me off, not if I’ve got to lock this door and stay in here with you all night! Don’t you understand me? There’s a man going to be executed in nine days’ time! The wearer of that hat is the only one can save him. You’ve got to give me her name. It’s not the hat, it’s the woman I want!”
Her voice suddenly dropped to a reasonable level. She’d evidently turned her temper off. He’d caught her interest. “Who is he?” she asked curiously.
“Scott Henderson, for killing his wife.”
She wagged her head in recognition. “I remember reading about that at the time.”
He struck the desk again, less shatteringly than before. “The man’s innocent. It’s simply got to be stopped. Mendoza bought a certain specially designed hat here, that couldn’t have been reproduced elsewhere. Somebody popped up in the theater with an exact copy of that same hat. He was with this somebody, he was with her all that evening, but he never found out her name or anything about her. Now I’ve got to find that person, at all costs. She can prove that he wasn’t home when it happened. Is that clear enough for you? If it isn’t I can’t make it any clearer!”
She gave him the impression of being a person with few, if any, moments of indecision. She was having one of them now, but it was of brief duration. She asked one more question, to safeguard herself. “You’re sure this isn’t some legal trick on that hellcat’s part? The only reason I haven’t filed suit against her, for non-payment and also for assault that day she came down here, was so that she wouldn’t file cross-suit against me. The publicity would be harmful to my establishment’s good name.”
“I’m not a lawver,” he assured her. “I’m an engineer from
South America. 1 can show you who I am, if you’re in any doubt.” He took things out of his pocket for identification purposes, presented them to her.
“Then I can talk confidentially to you,” she decided.
“Absolutely. My only interest in the matter is Henderson. Tm sweating myself skinny to get him out of it. Your wrangle with her doesn’t mean anything to me, from either party’s side. It’s just that it happens to lie across my own path of investigation.”
She nodded. She glanced at the door to make sure it was discreetly closed. “Very well, then. Here’s something that I wouldn’t admit to Mendoza for the world, that I can’t afford to, understand? There must have been a leak around here some place. The copying did originate here. But not officially; on the sly, by some member of the organization. Now I’m telling you this, but I don’t want it to go any further. I’d have to deny it, of course, if it was ever brought out publicly. My designer, the girl that does the sketches, is in the clear; I know it wasn’t she who sold us out. She’s been with me ever since I first
opened my own place, she’s bought into it. It wouldn’t pay her, for a measly fifty, seventy-five, or whatever it was, to peddle around her own ideas like that. She’d be competing against herself. The two of us, she and I, investigated on the q.t. after Mendoza was down here raising an uproar that day, and we found that particular sketch gone from her album, missing, when we went to look. Somebody had deliberately swiped it, to use over again. We figured it for the seamstress, the girl who did the actual needlework on that number in the shop. She denied it naturally, and we had no evidence to prove it. She must have run the thing up at home on her own time. I suppose we caught her before she’d had time to slip the borrowed sketch back into the album again. Well, to be on the safe side, to make sure we didn’t get into hot water like that again, we shipped her.” She thumbed over her shoulder.
“So you see, Lombard—that your name, again?—as far as the sales records here in the office go. there never was any
second buyer for that particular hat. That’s dead on the level. I couldn’t help you there if I wanted to. All I can suggest is, if you want that woman, your best bet is to tackle that former sewing apprentice of ours. As I say, I can’t guarantee that she actually does know anything about it. All I know is we ourselves felt strongly enough convinced that she did, at the time, to dismiss her. If you want to take the chance, it’s up to you.”
Again it had jumped a lap ahead of him, just when he thought he was safely up to it at last. “I have to, I haven’t any choice,” he said dismally.
“Maybe I can give you a hand with it,” she said helpfully. She snapped on her desk speaker. “Miss Lewis, look up the name of that girl we discharged right after we had all that trouble with Mendoza. Address too.”
He leaned his head sideward, elbow to desk, while they were waiting. She must have seen something in his attitude. “You think quite a lot of him, I guess,” she said, almost gently. It was a seldom used inflection with her; she had to clear her throat to get it to transmit in the right key.
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