An emaciated room clerk, with jaundice-tinted skin, and plastered hair, spoke English. I registered under the name of Harold Rocks. The name made no difference, especially as I paid for my room a week in advance. The room was what I had expected, but I didn’t care.
Before going to bed, I took out the post card and clipping which I had found in Rosemary Martin’s possession, stuffed my pocketbook with the five hundred dollars inside the pillow case, and left my knife on the floor beside the bed. Then I went to sleep. About two in the morning, however, I awakened.
During my sleep, one answer had arrived. I had found the key to the name Rosemary Martin was using at the Acton-Plaza ... Nell C. O’Hanstrom. It was the kind of name no one could possibly have, or if having, use. And yet there was a certain lucidness, a vaguely defined sense about it which made an off-balance logic. Subconsciously I had worked it out, or at least very nearly so, and all that remained to do was to write it on my pad. I put it down:
Colonel Horstman
Nell C. O’Hanstrom
If I accepted the premise that the apostrophe in O’Hanstrom represented a second letter “o,” then the name “Nell C. O’Hanstrom” was a simple anagram for the name “Colonel Horstman.”
This was enlightening, although I still did not know who Colonel Horstman was. Was it possible, I asked myself, that Rosemary Martin had been Colonel Horstman? This was ridiculous; not by the most absurd stretching of my imagination could I believe it. The name did not belong to her. This I knew instinctively, not even if Rosemary Martin had been a colonel in any of the women’s services during the war. And even this most slender of possibilities was completely eliminated by the fact that she had been too young to even consider serving at that time.
I sat in the night, smoking cigarette after cigarette. It is in the predawn hours that facts sometimes become stripped and naked under scrutiny and examination. It is possible for them to become distorted too—blown up to a new importance, inflated with despair and emotion. The connotation of the name Horstman to me was not an unpleasant one; I felt that at some time I had known him well; that he had been my friend. I was anxious to find him again, to see him, to secure his help. I decided that Rosemary Martin had used his name, in an anagram, because she had obviously expected me to recognize it; it was a name filled with meaning and good intent for me, and I was expected to know it.
After reaching this decision, I returned to bed. My nightmare began with my sleep. The same long dark room, the same spot of light at the end. Outside the radius of light, there was movement and preparation in the darkness ... a quickening of the black shadows, but no materialization. When I awakened, my knife was in my hand, my body was covered with sweat, and daylight was pouring through the dirty window of my bedroom.
I had breakfast at a bar and grill in the neighborhood. As I drank the muddy coffee, I examined the post card again with its cheap, gaudy, lithographed scene of the New York City skyline. While I sat on a stool, carefully looking over the colored card, the full light of the day reflected from the imitation marble top of the counter and struck the post card, and I observed something which I had not noticed before. Near the top of one of the buildings, a tiny hole had been punched with a pin or needle. It might well have remained invisible except for the roving ray of light. There was no question that the hole was there, and had been punched there deliberately.
The reason for its presence seemed clear. It indicated the building where I was supposed to meet Rosemary on some Tuesday, in the past, at ten o’clock in the morning. Unfortunately, however, I failed to recognize the building. At one time both Rosemary Martin and I must have known the address well, and an indication had been sufficient for her to determine my intention. But now to me it was only a small colored area on the card, rearing slightly over other similarly colored areas. There were neither towers nor ornamentation such as the Empire State or Chrysler buildings to set it apart. From the card, it appeared to be located north and slightly to the west of the Empire State structure, although the relative distance was impossible to determine accurately. Taking the card, I went down to the public library, but the maps of the city offered me no help as I didn’t know the name of the building or its location.
I rode the subway back downtown and got off at Fourteenth Street. There was no particular reason for doing this except that I had become tired of riding. I was anxious to escape its confines and the rushing roar of its dark journey, and decided to walk the rest of the distance to my room. On Twelfth Street, between University Place and Fifth Avenue, I passed an ancient, six-story building, the front of which was a patina of smoke, dirt, and soot. Outside the doorway was a sign “Expert metal worker wanted—6th Fir.”
The building was occupied by various manufacturing companies, one on each floor. A decrepit elevator wobbled in its shaft, from side to side, cautiously inching its way to the top where I left it. The sixth floor was occupied by the Warner Stained Glass Company, a cavernous area the overall size of the building—dark and blanketed with a layer of gritty dust. At the front by the windows several six-foot-high partitions had been installed to separate three desks. The rest of the floor was littered with heavy wooden tables, and tremendous shelves to store glass.
A man who identified himself as the shop foreman approached me and asked what I wanted. I wrote that I wanted a job. He told me his name was Haines and he inquired concerning my experience—especially in stained glass work. I told him that I had no experience in that particular field, but that I had been a silversmith, and might qualify as a metal worker. He regarded my pad which I had been using to answer his questions, and he asked me if I was a veteran. I told him yes. This impressed him favorably as he was a veteran too, and evidently he decided that I had been wounded. This was true enough, but not in the sense he thought, and I didn’t disillusion him. Haines motioned me to follow him toward the rear of the shop. On the way, he said, “We keep only four regular employees: an artist who does the life-size cartoons of the designs, two glass workers ... call ’em cutters ... and a metal worker. I do a little bit of everything.”
He stopped by a large bench which held a number of strips of U-shaped lead. The foreman selected an irregular piece of blue-colored glass and handed it to me. “Let’s see you completely solder around the four sides with lead,” he told me. On the bench was an iron which was hot enough to use. I had no difficulty in doing the job—which was relatively coarse work compared to my experience soldering jewelry for Bianca Hill. Haines inspected it, and said, “It looks pretty good. There’s a little knack in shouldering the glass more solidly in the lead, but you can pick that up pretty quick.
I indicated that I could. When he asked me for more personal information, I told him my name was Rocks and I lived at the Castillo Hotel. Evidently he had never hear of the Castillo, which was all right with me too. We shook hands and agreed that I would start work the next day. The job satisfied me for several reasons; although I had the five hundred dollars which I had taken from Rosemary Martin, I had no way of knowing how long the money would have to last. I might need it for emergency reasons, and the job at Warner’s would permit me to keep it in reserve. Also, if I should be traced by the police, the fact that I was working would be in my favor; I would have visible means of support. It paid a good salary, far more than Bianca Hill could pay and was an excellent excuse for me to have left her house.
The evening papers indicated the importance of an efficient publicity department. At least for the Acton-Plaza. Rosemary Martin’s body had been found at the hotel; she had been correctly identified although she had registered under an assumed name. She had not been working recently according to her agency, and it was believed that she was despondent. The police thought she had committed suicide. That was all. Brief, short, proper; no suppression of news; the freedom of the press upheld, and the advertising department of the Acton-Plaza not embarrassed.
I did not know and could only speculate how much information the police were going to dig up or
how much they already knew. However, I was quite sure that I knew the reason Rosemary Martin had been murdered. After I thought the situation through, this was the way the facts appeared to me: Amar, or the group with which he was working, had located the safe deposit box. He had received the information in the letter forwarded to me through the New Amsterdam Safe Box News the night that Merkle was killed. Knowing the location of the box, he had to secure the key. It was inevitable that I had been searched thoroughly the night I had been taken for a ride, so Amar was sure that did not have it. He reasoned, then, that the key was in the possession of Rosemary Martin, and now that he was in position to use it, he went to get it. It took him a while locate her at the Acton-Plaza, and when he did it was too late. I had the key. Furthermore, I thought, Rosemary Martin had been calculatingly murdered. While Merkle’s death might have been accidental, her death had been deliberate. Even if Amar had been convinced that she no longer he the key, he had a reason to believe that I couldn’t use if it Rosemary Martin was dead. So, she was dead.
Amar could be expected to call on me in the near future. In the meantime, I attempted to merge into the colorless background of the Castillo by spending my days at the Warner Glass Company and staying close to my room in the evenings. My job interested me, and I was content to work—marking time until I could gather more facts and turn them into actions. Haines had explained that the methods used in creating stained glass windows vary in only the slightest details from the way they were made in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. The tools are better; that is about the only difference.
In the shop there was an order for an extremely large and elaborate glass window to be made for a new library on Long Island. This window would require a long time to complete. In the beginning an artist conceives the design for a window and executes it in a colored miniature. From this miniature the glass artist draws cartoons to life size, and the cartoon in turn is rendered on pieces of heavy brown paper; this paper is, in truth, a pattern which is cut into exact shapes to fit the design of the window. Glass is cut by means of this paper pattern, assembled, and soldered with strips of solid lead.
I had constructed the outer, arched frame of metal for the window, and no one would examine it or be working with it again until the final assembly of all the pieces. Consequently, I soldered the safety deposit key, which Rosemary Martin had given me, into one end of the frame. It was safe there; no one would find it; and should it be necessary, I could remove it at any time.
Several nights later, I called Bianca on the phone. It was difficult to make myself understood without the use of my pad. I repeated several times, “See you?”
“You wish to see me?” she asked finally.
“Yes.”
“Why don’t you come over here?”
“No.”
After a slight pause, she said, “I don’t think the house is being watched by the police.”
“No.”
“Shall I meet you then?”
“Yes.”
“Where? Oh, let me think.” She finally named a small restaurant a few blocks from her house and I agreed to meet her there.
I was waiting in the back of the cafe, in a small booth, when she appeared. She appeared tired, and looked worried, although she smiled when she saw me. “How are you?” she asked. I told her that I was fine.
“The police came to see me,” she said. “They got my address from Rosemary’s old modeling agency. They asked me nearly a million questions.”
“Me?” I asked.
“Yes, about you, too. I told them that you had worked for me for a while, then became tired of the job and left I didn’t know where you had gone.”
“Thanks,” I said.
Bianca sat listlessly, a cigarette in her hand. Occasionally she smoothed the wrinkles in the tablecloth, a nervous gesture leveling the little mountains and valleys. Finally she said, “The police asked me if I had ever met a man named Howard Wainwright. When I told them that I hadn’t they asked me next if Rosemary had ever mentioned his name. She never had.”
I looked at her inquiringly. “Wain-wright?” I attempted to ask.
“Yes,” she replied. “Wainwright. It seems that he was some kind of wealthy broker, or he did something like that, down near Wall Street. Rosemary was supposed to be seeing a great deal of him.”
In the back of my mind the name repeated again and again ... Wainwright, Wainwright, Wainwright.
She continued, “Well, the police went to see Wainwright and discovered that his office was closed. He’d disappeared; no one knew where he was or where he is now.”
I knew this information about Wainwright was important. I wanted to know more. As yet, I was unable to place his name, but I recognized it. It was unfortunate that I was unable to go back to see Delton, but I did not care to push my luck too far. Delton, I hoped, would keep quiet regarding his activity in locating Rosemary Martin at the Acton-Plaza. He did not know my name, naturally, but I could be easily identified because of my voice. I didn’t believe that Delton would volunteer information to the police, and there was a reasonable possibility that, unless they should come across his trail, he might know nothing of the murder having occurred. The papers had carried it inconspicuously enough to have escaped his notice.
Wainwright, I decided, would have to be investigated through other channels.
Bianca opened her purse and peered into a tiny mirror.
Without glancing up, she asked, “How do ... do you have enough money to live on?”
I assured her that I had enough.
She snapped shut her purse and arose to her feet. Although I followed her to the front of the cafe, I permitted her to leave by herself, as a precaution in case she was followed by the police. “Call me again, Vic,” she said. “Call me anytime.”
I told her yes, that I would call her.
After Bianca Hill had gone, I smoked another cigarette. I continued to turn the matter over in my mind: I had my throat cut; Rosemary Martin was murdered; a broker named Wainwright had disappeared. This was not coincidence— there had to be a connection. In my head I heard the word “Jahsh,” the Arabic word for donkey. It was my own sense telling me that I was an ass. Of course there was a connection ... Pacific, Martin, Wainwright! Merkle had been insignificant and unimportant, a pawn caught out of position. But Wainwright ... and suddenly I remembered the name ... had been important. I had better find out more about him!
22
JENSEN looked at his wrist watch. It was nearly twelve noon. He yawned. “Christ, I’m sleepy!” he said.
“We should hear from Gorman pretty soon,” Burrows replied.
“You know,” said Jensen, “it was a funny thing how the war did a lot of good for a bunch of those young hoods. After they came back, they’d had it. Today they’re nice peaceful citizens.”
“Maybe. But you can’t say that about Pacific. Anybody who ends up getting his throat slit can hardly be called a nice peaceful citizen.”
“Yeah, but maybe it wasn’t his fault. Although I doubt it. A guy can be killed in a stick-up or a mugging ... accidental-like, and it isn’t his fault.”
“But this wasn’t a stick-up or mugging,” Burrows objected.
“I know it.” Jensen was becoming irritable through fatigue. “What I was going to say was that Pacific might’ve started out as a young punk. The war ... the discipline … sort of straightened him out—at least for a while. Ten, fifteen years. Then he got back into the old routine again.”
“He had a good Army record,” Burrows said.
“Sure. Six hundred and fourth Tanks ... a damned good outfit. A rugged one, too. Pacific bucked all the way up to sergeant in a good company.”
“I see he originally asked for service in the Rangers.” Jensen laughed. “Remember those days?” he asked. “You were a good mechanic, say, and you asked for service in a truck depot ... someplace, or something, you knew something about. And what did you get?”
“A job taking s
horthand in Alaska,” replied Burrows. “But what I’m beginning to believe was this guy Pacific was a tough character right from the beginning. The Rangers ... the Scouts ... were just about the toughest. Like the English Commandos.”
“Judo, hand-to-hand combat, sure. But a lot of young guys thought they’d like it. Anyway, what Pacific got wasn’t a creampuff. The tanks in Africa were plain misery.” Jensen removed a number of papers clipped together, unfolded them, and glanced at the detailed report. “It says that he got his in a little place called Al-Slaoui. His tank got trapped and was blasted out direct by artillery. The rest of his crew was killed. He got it bad in the back, and was reported dead. There was a short retreat but twenty-four hours later there was a general advance and Pacific showed up at the field hospital after the line had been straightened out again. He was hospitalized in England, and then given a medical discharge and returned to the United States.”
“He was lucky,” said Burrows.
“Sure he was lucky,” agreed Jensen. “A lot of those guys never came back. But then his luck ran out. After all this time he finally got it.” Jensen for a moment became a philosopher, “And so, it just proves—everybody gets it in the end anyway. You can’t live forever.”
“No, but I’d like to try,” said Burrows.
23
I ASKED Haines, “Okay?” and handed him a note in which I had requested permission to take an extra hour on my lunchtime. “Sure,” Haines agreed. I walked over to the subway at Union Square and caught a train to Forty-second Street. The other side of Broadway I located the address of Panoramic Photography, Inc.
Within the office there was the indefinable smell of drying negatives, developing fluids, and chemicals which always seem to be associated with photographers ... even a street photographer. A morose man, with a lantern jaw, sat patiently while I wrote out my request. “Do you have any pictures of the New York skyline?” he repeated my question aloud as he read it. “Hell,” he said, “does the ocean have salt?” His name was Donlan, and his company specialized in aerial photography for maps and survey work, including oil pipe lines, canals, and other commercial projects.
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