'Who's we, Dortmund?'
'Me and my partner, Ed Bagley. He's asleep in the bedroom.'
Worth rousted Bagley, then started checking out Dortmund's story on the phone while Devlin continued questioning them. Bagley sat on the couch, his eyes half lidded and puffy, mostly yawning.
'Who were you staking out?' Devlin asked.
'Man across in the big building. Name of Grimond. Peter Grimond.'
Devlin and Worth looked at each other with surprise. Worth said, 'Huh!' and flicked his ash, and Devlin asked, 'Why?'
'The usual,' Dortmund replied. 'Divorce evidence. We were hired by Mrs. Grimond for two weeks' surveillance. She was right about him; a big redhead's been visiting him most every afternoon. That is, until Saturday. Haven't seen her around lately.'
Bagley yawned and added, 'Haven't seen our client, either.'
'What?' Devlin asked.
'Lucky thing we got paid in advance,' Dortmund said. 'We've been reporting to her twice weekly at her beauty shop, but when Ed went over there Tuesday, she wasn't there. And she hadn't been, not since Saturday from what we can gather. We decided that if she didn't appear by our next meeting, we'd notify you.'
'Of course we saw her Sunday, when she was in the apartment,' Bagley said. 'She and Grimond had a fight about seven in the evening and she stalked off to the bedroom. Pulled the curtains and we haven't seen her after that. Of course, the way we're situated, if the bedroom door or curtains are closed, we can't see the entrance, so we can't tell when she left.'
'And Grimond?' Worth asked.
'Has been in the apartment ever since. He has a desk in the living room and he works there most of the day. Walks around a lot. On Monday, I think, he cleaned up the apartment, vacuuming and everything, but he hasn't gone out and nobody's visited him. Except for one old lady Tuesday night, and she only stayed for a minute.'
'I thought you couldn't see the entrance from here,' Devlin said.
'Well, the curtains and door have been open most of the time,' Bagley said. 'Moreover, we can see the building's entrance from here, and Grimond's car stall is right next to the lobby. We've been watching that place like hawks, and I can swear that he hasn't left centre court. He's been out of our sight maybe fifteen, twenty minutes at the most, except at night when he's been sleeping.'
Devlin thought for a moment and then said, 'There's one thing which puzzles me. You say that Grimond couldn't have left his apartment house at any time without you spotting him. Right?'
'I'll stake my rep on it,' Dortmund said.
'Then how did Mrs. Grimond leave?'
Neither Dortmund or Bagley could answer that one. Devlin left them with a warning to stay further back from the windows, and then Worth and he returned to centre court. They went directly to apartment 712.
Peter Grimond was irritated at the interruption.
'What is it?' he snapped when he opened the door. He glowered first at Worth and then at Devlin, then back at Worth. He was tall and lanky, with thinning grey hair and sagging jowls. He was dressed in a white shirt and suit pants, but the pants were baggy and wrinkled and the shirt was coffee stained and almost as grey as his hair.
Devlin identified himself and Worth.
Grimond seemed to flinch at the mention of police, blinking rapidly as an owl does. He allowed them in, however, shutting the door and following them into the living room. The main difference which Devlin could see between Grimond's and Mrs. Ibsen's living rooms was in the choice of carpet colour.
As Dortmund had noted, in one corner of the room was a paper strewn desk, a pipe turned over in an ashtray on the floor beside it.
'We're here about your wife, Mr. Grimond.'
'Lenore?' Grimond scowled. 'Has something happened to her 'That's what we'd like to know,' Devlin said. 'A number of people are concerned for her.'
'Oh.' Grimond slumped in a chair and leaned forward, clasping his hands in front of him, a picture of morose despondency. 'She left me, you see. After eighteen years, she left me. I thought when you mentioned her name she'd been in an accident, or something like that. I had no idea—'
'When did this happen?' Worth asked.
'We had a fight Sunday night. A spat over nothing, but it was the straw, she said. The final straw. Out she went, bang, like that.'
Devlin started walking around the apartment, not touching or opening anything, but not letting anything skip his attention. He saw that the apartment was getting a bachelor's patina; there was one shoe on the coffee table holding down a sock, dust on the credenza, magazines and cushions and books askew.
The sink was half full of dishes, and there was a large sack full of garbage in one corner. One bedroom had been turned into a combina¬tion office and storage room, though Devlin could understand why Grimond chose to work in the living room, where it was sunnier. The bedroom facing the yard was a mess. The bed was unmade and clothes were strewn on it and the floor. The dresser was littered with odds and ends, including a large brown alligator handbag with a black handle.
Devlin asked: 'What did your wife take with her?'
'Nothing,' Grimond replied. 'She left everything behind, saying she didn't want anything to remind her of me or her life here. She didn't take a suitcase or a toothbrush.'
'Strange,' Devlin said.
'Yes, it is, but that's what happened.'
'And she didn't say where she was going?' Worth asked.
'No, only that I would be hearing from her lawyer in a few days concerning the money.'
'Money?' Devlin said.
'Settlement would be a better word.'
'So you haven't seen or heard from your wife since Sunday,' Devlin said. 'You have no idea where she is, yet you didn't report her missing.'
'She's not missing,' Grimond protested.
'Then you know where she is?' Worth demanded.
'No, no. I mean she knows where she is. She just doesn't—'
'What was she wearing when she left?'
'A suit. A doubleknit, with a belt and buttons up the front. A light blue. And a frilly white blouse underneath.'
'Purse?' Devlin asked.
'Of course. Matching blue leather. Blue shoes, too.'
'Do you have a picture of her?' Worth asked.
'What is this, officers? I am in the middle of a terrible domestic crisis, true, but I can't understand why you would be concerned. It is a private affair, I assure you, and—'
'A picture, Mr. Grimond,' Worth repeated. 'Please.'
Grimond fumbled for his wallet, his fingers shaking badly. He had trouble removing a small snapshot from the milky plastic window.
'You act as though I did something to Lenore,' he mumbled, handing the picture to Devlin, who was closer.
'We'll return this,' Devlin said and studied the woman. It wasn't a good shot of her, accentuating Mrs Grimond's slide from youth. She was in a one piece bathing suit with some unknown hotel in the background.
It was a colour snap, and showed the paleness of her skin, except for two strips of sunburn up her thin legs. Her hair was piled on top of her head like some Egyptian queen, and she was squinting at the sun and showing large buck teeth.
'And did you?' Devlin prodded as he handed the photo to his partner.
'Did I what?'
'Do something to your wife?'
Grimond grew very red in the face, and he sucked in his breath sharply.
'We were happily married. Or so I thought, officer,' he said stiffly. 'I don't care for your insinuations. Please go.'
Devlin shrugged. He had done about as much as he could without a search warrant or more evidence of some crime. At the door he handed Grimond one of his business cards with his name and the precinct phone number printed on it.
'When you hear from your wife,' he said, 'call us.'
Grimond studied the card. 'Why should I?'
'It would save us a trip back here,' Devlin replied.
Grimond didn't respond. He shut the door firmly after them, firmly and loudly.
>
'Well?' Worth asked as once more they walked down the hall to the elevator. 'What did you find while you were looking around?'
'Nothing.' Devlin punched the elevator button. 'Not one damned thing. And I don't see how he could have hidden her, either. There's only one linen closet and the clothes closets in the bedroom, and the cabinets are out unless he cut her up. Besides, if she was still there after three days, our noses ought to have led us straight to her.'
'He could have frozen her,' suggested Worth, and then he shook his head. 'No, the refrigerator is too small. Perhaps the waste disposal in the sink?'
'Disposals have been tried. They won't take the bones and they burn up. Only large commercial jobs can handle such a load.'
'Those cartons in the bedroom. Maybe he shipped her out in one of those.'
'Doubtful,' Devlin said. 'We should have seen the stack of papers and records he had to have taken from the carton, and on top of that, Dortmund would have spotted the truckers when they came to pick it up. And,' Devlin added for good measure, 'there would have been the problem of decomposition.'
'Yeah,' Worth said. He paused, smoking reflectively, then he said, 'Maybe she's in the building somewhere.'
Devlin thought hard about that as he rode down to the lobby. As the doors to the elevator slid back he said, 'Let's find that super again.'
The superintendent was in the basement, painting a piece of wrought iron. His name was Saunders, and he was bald, squat, with an ugly mouth and cold, suspicious eyes. He wiped his hands on a rag, and Devlin wondered if there was something in Saunders' past which, unlike the tenants, he hadn't been able to leave behind.
He took the pass key Worth returned and put it on the ring of keys hanging from his belt, and when Devlin asked him about Mrs. Grimond, he replied that he didn't know nothing.
'Didn't see her on Sunday or any other day. Got enough to do around here without playing nursemaid.'
'Are there any vacancies here? Any empty rooms?' Devlin asked.
'Nope. We have a two year waiting list, in fact.'
'What about closets?'
'There's a tenant storage room and a building supply closet on each floor of the building. Oh, and another storage room in the basement.'
'We want to check them,' Devlin said.
'Go ahead. Be my guest. Just don't ask me to come along. I've got a job to keep. There's stairs to sweep and incinerators to clean, and—'
'Incinerators!'
'One in each building,' Saunders said. 'Got chutes which open on each floor, and the tenants throw their garbage down and it gets burned up. Wednesdays are my shovelling days.'
Devlin turned to Worth. 'Get Trimm on the phone and have him authorize a lab crew to be sent out here. I want those ashes sifted.
Then you search the storage and supply rooms, and I'll start talking to the guards.'
The security offices for The Acreage were on the second floor of the centre court. The only person there when Devlin arrived was a young secretary who looked as though she had just finished her schooling. She told Devlin that each of the four gates were manned by a guard and that there was one roving guard on duty at all times, and that there were three shifts a day. The fifteen men rotated positions and times according to a weekly schedule, which she supplied, along with a list of their names, addresses, and phone numbers. Devlin thanked her and left.
None of the five guards then on duty had seen Mrs. Grimond leave Sunday or since then, though they all knew her by sight. Part of their job was to recognize who were the tenants and who were visitors, and they all prided themselves in their ability. Devlin asked about any delivery trucks stopping at centre court, just to make sure that Worth's idea about the record keeping cartons wasn't true. Again, none of the guards had seen anything which couldn't be accounted for as normal.
Devlin returned to the security offices and used the phone there to contact the remaining ten, off duty, guards. He drew a complete blank.
At five o'clock, when Worth returned, Devlin and he had the lab crew around the incinerator in the centre court basement and pooled their information. Nobody had seen Mrs. Grimond leave centre court or The Acreage either on foot, in a private car, or in a taxi. Nor had there been any trucks stopping beyond the ones which were expected and explainable.
Worth was dirty and dusty and empty handed. The supply and the storage rooms had produced nothing and Worth was sure that he had checked every other conceivable hiding place in the five buildings. The lab crew had collected three tin cans, some silverware, the metal backs to a set of buttons, and a bent shoehorn, but no teeth, bones, or residue.
'How sure are you that there wasn't a body burned in there?' Devlin asked the head of the crew.
'As sure as I can be without analyzing every ash,' came the answer. 'I'd think that if one had been burned, the smell would have been terrible. It's not a very good incinerator. It burns slowly and incompletely and really doesn't get all that hot.'
Devlin thanked him and his men, told them they could go, and then Worth and he returned to the precinct house. Shortly afterwards Devlin went home thoroughly disgusted. He crabbed at his wife, snapped at his children, and tossed around the bed, bothered by the vanishing Mrs. Grimond.
Around midnight, his wife could stand no more. She switched on the bedside lamp and demanded an explanation for his behaviour.
Devlin told her, concluding with, 'And she's still in that building, Rose. I know it.'
'But isn't there the chance that the guards and those private detectives overlooked her, and she did leave Mr. Grimond as he said she did?'
'The chance is very slim. Both the guards and the detectives are trained, and if one missed her, I can't see the other missing her as well. Besides, no woman would walk out and leave everything she owned behind, including a thriving business.'
He slid down further under the covers and folded his hands over his chest. 'No sir, he did away with her for that redhead. I don't know what he did with her afterwards, but that's what happened.'
'I certainly hope you find out before I have to do away with you,' Rose Devlin said.
'I intend to,' he muttered. 'Now shut off the light so I can get some sleep.'
The next morning Devlin and Worth began anew. They talked to the two private detectives again. This time Dortmund was asleep, and Bagley merely reiterated what had been said the previous day. He added that Dortmund had seen them in Grimond's apartment, but that nothing strange had happened since. Grimond had worked the balance of the day, watched television, and gone to bed.
Bagley also said that they had been paid up until Friday, and Mrs. Grimond or no, they were going to finish their job and then leave.
There were five different guards on duty, though they all remembered Devlin's phone calls. Seeing the picture didn't change their memories any. That left five guards who hadn't seen the picture, and on an off chance, Devlin sent Worth in the squad car to personally interview the five, and then stop at the beauty shop and talk to the operators there.
Devlin located Saunders and again the superintendent was reticent and uncooperative.
'I tell you,' he said to Devlin, 'I ain't seen nothing. Leave me be.'
Devlin took the pass key again and went through the supply and storage room again. Worth was a good conscientious man, but there was always the chance . . .
Worth found Devlin just before one in the afternoon, on his hands and knees on the fourth floor of the east tower, looking at baggage tags. He was hot, grimy, and in a foul humour. Worth didn't help matters any.
'The guards are positive Mrs. Grimond didn't pass them, or that a truck picked up anything at centre court. The girls at the salon all say they haven't heard from her. Just to be on the safe side I checked the logs at the cab companies, and neither Yellow or Checker has picked up a woman of her description within ten miles of here.'
'Great,' Devlin said sourly. 'Just great.' He sat down on a steamer trunk and rubbed the bridge of his nose, his eyes shut. He was develo
ping a headache. 'She isn't in centre court. She isn't in any of the other buildings. She never left here, alive or dead, and the last person to see her was her husband, who hasn't moved from his apartment.'
'What now, Hal?'
'Help me finish this building. It's the last one. Then we'll have lunch, and afterwards—' He paused, then said, 'afterwards we're going to tear Grimond's apartment to shreds. It's the only spot left, and the last place she was seen.'
'And if there's no sign of her?'
'Don't say that,' Devlin replied grimly.
Grimond called his lawyer when Devlin served him the search warrant. The lawyer advised him that there was nothing he could do and to just sit tight and not say anything, even when queried. Grimond took his advice and sat at his desk and stared at Devlin and Worth as they went through his apartment.
One hour later they hadn't found anything. They compared notes in the hall so that Grimond couldn't hear them, then went back inside and started all over again. Two hours later they were still without anything.
'And don't come back,' Grimond said, his only words the whole time, and slammed the door.
Devlin stormed down the hall, seething with frustration and smarting from Grimond's smug expression, contempt evident in his eyes.
When he got back to the station house, he sat at his desk and brooded, cupping his face in his hands. His wife called, telling him he was overdue for dinner and that she had fixed his favourite casserole and it was drying out in the oven, and even that failed to cheer him. He continued to sit, and then he began to talk to himself.
Worth wisely kept on typing reports and didn't interrupt. He knew that Devlin only talked to himself when absolutely furious.
So Devlin spoke unhindered about how he knew damned well that Grimond had murdered his wife following the argument Sunday night, and that Grimond knew he knew it, but that until the method of disposal was discovered, Grimond was safe.
He went over every detail, starting with his visit to Mrs. Ibsen's, the surprised detectives, and the sullen superintendent. He reviewed the search of the buildings and the incinerators and Grimond's own apartment. He hit upon everything he could think of, right down to his sitting in his chair, missing his wife's casserole. He sat and stewed, turning and twisting the facts, and it was painful, like pulling teeth.
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