He said, “Me?”
She returned to the desk. “That was the office of Inspector Foy. Inspector Foy wants you right away over at Dr Kloppel’s. He’s on his way there now, he left in a hurry in a car, they said he could be there already.”
“Thank you,” he said. “That sounds hot, doesn’t it?”
“I wouldn’t know,” she answered.
There were four people sitting around Dr Kloppel’s table when he arrived, Kloppel, Foy, Bessy, and Beulah. In the centre of the table, ringed with mugs, sherry glasses, and a stein of beer, was the blue suit.
“You’re going to love me more than ever,” Beulah screamed. “Ruth Miller came from the Middle West!”
The only answer he could think of was, “Who says so all of a sudden?” He looked at Foy.
“The ladies,” Foy said, “have done the da—have had a fine piece of luck. They found that doc you advertised for. The good doc called me at once, and it’s all straight. Your story, ladies.” His smiling bow placed their forebears in the South of Ireland.
Beulah’s recital was almost too leisurely to be borne; it included every step of the previous search, Bessy’s non-co-operation, the weather at all times, the pangs of hunger, and the new friend who sold orange drink. “His name—I mean the doctor—is Eagan. John Thomas Eagan. And he reads the Herald Tribune, that’s why he didn’t know you were looking for him. And he didn’t see the suicide notice, either. When I mentioned Ruth Miller’s name, he remembered her at once. I don’t think he has many patients, it’s a poor-looking office. A girl cousin of his roomed at the same place as Ruth for a little while and that’s how she happened to come to him. Then the cousin moved back to Boston. That’s why the Inspector didn’t have any luck when he tried there. Run-down house in the West Sixties.”
“Middle West, Middle West,” Mark chanted through clenched teeth.
“Haven’t you ever heard of self-control?... She went to Dr Eagan last spring and he told her to come back in six months. She didn’t. He says he often thought about her because she was nice. Finally he phoned the rooming house, and she was gone. Must have just missed her. I think he liked her, too. He said he’d kept hoping she’d show up, because her eyes were really bad, and he was afraid she was staying away on account of money. When I told him she was murdered, I thought he’d drop.”
“How much did he know about her personally? How much did the cousin know? Where can we find the cousin, I want to talk to her. Where does the Middle West come in?”
“Am I a fool? I did as much as you can do and more. I saved you time. The cousin doesn’t know a thing. He wrote to her and asked. And he doesn’t know a thing himself, either, except that he has an idea. He fools around with accents.”
“What!”
“Accents. He collects them as a hobby. Coming from Boston, as he did, he had an accent himself, but he got rid of it because it made him mad when people looked at him and said, ‘Beans.’ It made him accent-conscious. That’s how he noticed Ruth’s. He said it was Middle West and probably Chicago.”
“Chicago,” Mark repeated. “Population one hundred. Advertise? Radio?” He turned to Foy.
Foy was staring at the blue suit. “Who wrote on that?” he asked.
“Who wrote on what?”
“That.” Foy pointed to the paper on the lapel. “What’s it mean?”
“How should I know? Cleaner’s ticket.”
“On Hope House paper?”
“Hope House!”
“Telephone pad. One on every floor, hanging beside the phone.” He saw Mark’s face and added hastily, and in time, “Ladies present!”
Mark smoothed the paper, held it to the light, read the pencilled scrawl a half dozen times. Then he left, hatless and coatless and without explanation. They heard the front door slam.
Bessy said, “Have we done something wrong or right?”
“Right.” Beulah’s voice was pitying. “If we were wrong, he’d be the first to tell us. Loud.”
He was back in less than five minutes. “It was in the coat pocket,” he said. “Crumpled up as if it had been put there in a hurry. The cleaner calls everything in a pocket personal property, so he saved it. Pinned it to the coat himself. Didn’t think it was worth mentioning, because he was sure Miller would know what it was.” There was a lift in his voice. “Can any of you bright people identify it?”
“Wiggle, wiggle,” Bessy began.
He interrupted with bitter triumph. “It’s a telephone number. Foy knew it was telephone-pad paper. He sat here and looked at it, but it didn’t say anything to him. I myself saw those pads hanging by the phones, and all they said to me was Roberta’s desk. But Tom the Cleaner and Dyer knew what it was right away. The knife Beulah uses for cutting miasmas wouldn’t make a dent in the peasant’s accent, but he looked me straight in the eye and said it was a telephone number in a beeg city like New York or Worcester, Mass. Because it had five leedle figures. I allowed him Worcester, Mass. because it is clearly close to his heart. If I had a shield I’d turn it in and shoot myself with my service gun… New York is beeg, Chicago is beeg, where do we start?”
“East, West, home’s best,” Bessy said.
“And nearest,” he agreed politely. “Bird in hand. But what does the wiggle stand for?”
Foy studied the slip of paper. “That could be something beginning with a W. That could be a W, an M, or an N. I can have the number called on every local exchange, but it may take a while.”
“Worth it if it takes the rest of the day. How long?”
“Half an hour, hour, I don’t know. Thing to do is get all the locations lined up. Then check each one. We can get anything, apartment houses, hotels, stores, theatres, railway stations, bus lines. Can get a car barn. And we can’t afford to pass up one.”
“Do it. You can start it rolling from here, can’t you? I want us both to stick in this neighbourhood. Get all the 2-8277 phones first, have them call you back on that. Meanwhile I’ll run over to Hope House and see if it clicks there. It may be one of their regulars. You know, drugstore, ice cream, cigarettes. I’ll be back before you’re ready for me.”
He left Foy murmuring instructions into the doctor’s phone and Bessy and Beulah loudly admiring the doctor’s bookcase. The doctor, poor fool, Mark noted, looked happy.
Kitty Brice was back at the switchboard and Jewel was nowhere in sight.
Kitty denied all knowledge of the number. Yes, she kept a list of local calls until they were paid for, which was at the end of each week. Long-distance calls were kept on a special record, in the desk. When the monthly bill came in from the telephone company, the girls were billed and the record was filed away. She checked three months’ bills while he looked over her shoulder. There was no 2-8277. When he asked if Ruth Miller had made many calls, she shook her head.
“Not when I was on duty,” she said. “Maybe late at night when Miss Plummer ran the board. You’d have to ask Miss Plummer.”
He nodded. Then, “You don’t look well, Miss Brice.”
“Who does?” she answered.
He was thinking of that when Miss Plummer finally admitted him to her room after asking him to wait until she got back in bed. Her face was ashen.
“What is it?” she whispered. “Why did you come back?”
Sympathy would break her down and make her useless. He knew that. He took an easy, matter-of-fact tone. “Miss Plummer, did Ruth Miller ever use the phone when you were on duty?”
She looked as if he had struck her. “How did you know?”
“I don’t know. I’m asking you. If I could be sure, it might help me.”
“Yes, she did. I forgot to tell you.” She corrected herself painfully. “No, I can’t truly say I forgot, it was more like being afraid to say anything. You see I lost the slip I wrote the number on. That didn’t worry me so much at first, because there wasn’t any question of a bill. The call wasn’t completed. But later, after she was dead, it worried me something terrible. I was afraid i
t might be important and I’d get in trouble with the Board for losing it. Or with the—the police.” She told him how the call had come through, how she had been surprised to hear Ruth Miller’s voice, because it was late, close to midnight.
“The Sunday night, it was,” she said. “The night of the tea, the night before she died. And she was breathing hard, like she’d been running, and she begged me to put it through quick. A person-to-person call, long distance, and she didn’t know the number, only the name. It was to a gentleman, a prominent gentleman she said. She said I wouldn’t have any trouble finding him because he was prominent.”
“Chicago?”
“Mr East!” She was hearing a sorcerer who could raise the dead and bring back lost voices. “How did you know? How did you know that? Nobody knew but the poor girl and myself. Unless there was another person on the line, unless there was another person listening in. That must be it. Mr East, I was so confused, I don’t often have a call like that, and to this day I can’t remember anything about it, no name, no number, nothing. If she hadn’t hung up, I’d have remembered, because I’d have had the record then. It would have been what you call completed, and I’d have had it down on paper and filed away. But she hung up just when I was ready to put her on; I think she was crying, or something like that. I could hear her breathing like she was standing beside me. I never had a chance to talk to her about it again, either. I wanted to talk to her about it… Wait a minute, Mr East! Law, Craw—”
“What is it, Miss Plummer?”
“The name. It seems to be speaking to me. Law—” Tears filled her eyes, too easily.
“Forget it now, Miss Plummer. Ignore it. That’s the way we make our minds behave. It’ll come back to you… Do you have many Chicago girls living in the house?”
“Do we have—” She reached for the glass of water, and he had to help her.
“Take it easy,” he said. “Don’t tell me if it upsets you. I can probably find what I want in the house records.”
“We don’t keep records like that.” She looked away when she spoke, across the over-furnished little room, out of the window and beyond. She sounded as if she were talking to someone miles away, or even thinking out loud. He knew she was preparing to meet the self-accusation that would come later, she was getting ready to answer her own reproachful finger. When the end came, she wanted to be able to say, “He must have guessed. I didn’t tell him anything. Maybe I mumbled something, I do that when I’m sick. Half the time I just lie there talking to myself. Why, I was so sick I hardly knew he was in the room. He must have guessed.” She sighed.
“No records like what?” he asked softly.
“Not of the places people come from. Or what they did before. That’s to help people start a new life.”
“I see. But do you happen, quite by accident, to know of anybody from Chicago, or near Chicago?”
She answered in her own way. “I think the Board might know if anybody does. When we opened the House, everybody was interviewed by one or more of the Board, to see if they were worthy. Then somebody, I don’t know who, said it wasn’t fair to do that. Un-American, they said. So it was stopped. Now they only ask you where you work and who should be notified in case of—sickness.”
“Good enough. On second thought, I may not need that information after all, but if I do, there’s always Mrs Marshall-Gill! Chatty old girl, Mrs M-G… You’re beginning to feel better already, aren’t you? You look better. Like to watch the snow, don’t you? So do I. Lazy-looking stuff. Drifting down as if it hadn’t any place to go and didn’t care. Nice and soft and lazy… That name you want to remember is Law, Craw, Law…”
“Crawford,” Miss Plummer said quietly. “Crawford or Lawford. You brought it back to me.”
“Don’t stop,” he said, and his voice was as quiet as hers. “Try.”
She shook her head. “I can’t, sir. I have tried, and that’s all. If I have to die for it, I can’t say more.”
He gave up. He had more than he’d hoped for. “You’ve been good,” he said, “and I thank you. I’ve got one more question but it doesn’t amount to much. I don’t suppose you know anything about a musical powder box in Miss Brady’s room?”
“No, sir… Mr East, I’d like to go back to sleep. I’m afraid I’ll have to work tonight. I’ve got to get some rest, I’ve got to. My sister says—”
“Maybe you won’t have to work,” he said easily. “I’ll see what I can do about it. You know, don’t you, that I can be reached at Dr Kloppel’s if you want anything?”
“Yes, sir.”
He heard her pad across the room after he closed the door. The key turned.
When he reached the doctor’s, Bessy and Beulah had left. “I sent the ladies home,” Foy said virtuously. “They were anxious to do all they could, but I told them this wasn’t woman’s work, not now. You’ve got something new, haven’t you?”
“What about the New York calls?”
“Too soon. Why?”
“Because it’s Chicago we want. At least I think so. Doctor, SON needs a little attention… Listen, I’ve got a name, or part of a name, or something that sounds like a name. Chicago resident.”
Foy exploded. “Name! Part of! Something that sounds like!”
“All right. I have some syllables, then, Lawford or Crawford, that may be the name of a man Ruth Miller called. My source of information isn’t too strong in the head, but I don’t want to throw this away because of that. Do you think Chicago could track down Lawfords and Crawfords with one hand and check the 2-8277 phones with the other? Lawford or Crawford is supposed to be a man of prominence.”
Foy was doubtful. “But we’ll be wrong if we drop New York entirely. From what you tell me about your source’s head—”
“Doctor,” Mark said, “how reliable is Miss Plummer?”
“Well, she tries.”
“That’s enough. We’ll try, too. Foy?”
The only sound for the next few minutes was Foy’s low voice apologising to Chicago. He was interrupted once, when an empty beer bottle rolled across the table and crashed to the tiled hearth as Dr Kloppel’s hospitality tangled with his curiosity. Mark pushed the old man gently into a chair.
Foy hung up. “They’ll do what they can, but they say it’s a paper chase. Can’t you dig up a little more?”
“One thing at a time, wash this up first. Did they know a big shot with a name like Lawford or Crawford?”
“They didn’t say so. Sometimes a man is so big that people don’t think of him.”
“Right. But he needn’t be big at that. A man of prominence in Ruth Miller’s world could be anything, a civil-service employee or a minor city official, a nice guy in a clean white shirt who finished high school and took courses at night to improve himself. Respected in his neighbourhood, which may have been hers, too. A giant among men, to a girl with her back to the wall. Apparently he was the one person she could turn to, the only one who could help her, who knew how she felt and could tell her what to do.” His voice rose. “What made her hang up?” He told them what Miss Plummer had said. “That call was a life line and she dropped it. Why? Because somebody came down the hall while she was at the phone? Somebody going to the bath or looking for conversation? Never. Ruth Miller wouldn’t throw away her only chance for an interruption like that. Not with help so close at hand that she had already jotted down the precious number that she must have overheard. She was stopped by the thing she was afraid of… I wonder where her roommate was? That phone’s directly outside the door.”
Dr Kloppel coughed eagerly. “What night would that have been?”
“Sunday night, the day of the tea.”
“That night April had an upset stomach, and I prescribed over the phone to Mrs Fister. Mrs Fister moved April down to her own room. That would leave Miss Miller alone in that end of the hall.”
“And that,” Mark said, “is why we haven’t heard about this business until now. Only Plummer and one other person knew about Rut
h’s call, and the other was the girl who couldn’t afford to tell us. She knew we’d try to trace the call, knew we might even succeed. If Ruth’s prominent friend could help Ruth, he could also point to Ruth’s murderer.”
Foy said, “That guy could be a former employer.”
“That’s what I’m crossing my fingers for. An employer, preferably in a department store or a shop. Maybe a floorwalker. Miss Libby thinks there’s a tie-up with a store or a shop. Miller claimed inexperience, but she knew too much about selling. Libby thinks—”
The phone rang. It was the first New York call, from Headquarters. Four exchanges had been cleared, and a squad was covering the locations.
They sat on; talking, silent, talking, watching the clock. New York reported at intervals, but there were no leads. Nothing looked hopeful enough to warrant Foy’s presence. Did the Inspector want a typed report sent up to him? Foy said no. He didn’t know how long he’d be where he was. He’d tell them if and when he moved on.
It was three-thirty when the first Chicago call came through. The crew that was checking the telephone numbers had five promising addresses. One was a packing house that employed hundreds of women, three were apartment houses, one was a private residence in an exclusive suburb.
“So what?” Mark said into Foy’s disengaged ear. “So what are we supposed to do, clap hands because they can count? Tell them to get inside those places. Packing house! That’s good for hours, and look at the time now. Tell them to put the packing house at the end of the list and go after the apartments and private house. And what are they doing about Lawford-Crawford?”
When Foy hung up, he said the Lawford-Crawford crew hadn’t been heard from. “That’s a slow and thankless job,” he reminded Mark. “You ought to know. A man’s name is his own business, and he can slam the door in your face if he wants to.”
Once more they sat in silence, watching the clock, poised for the next soft whir of the telephone. Dr Kloppel drew the curtains as the winter afternoon moved on to dusk.
It was a few minutes after four when Agnes came to the door, looking as near to bursting as a lean woman can. She said she had a note for Dr Kloppel from Miss Handy. Would the doctor read it right away, please, and give her an answer? Miss Handy said it was life and death.
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