“I wasn’t gawking, Kenny. There’s a man outside raising holy hell because we won’t let him in. He says—”
“What do I care what he says? I told you I won’t talk to the reporters yet, and you’re not to let any newspapermen—”
“But he’s not a newspaperman, Kenny. He says he lives here and has every right to come in.”
“Lives here?”
“Yeah. He says he’s Mr. Roger Dunne.”
Kilkenny looked down at the unconscious Mrs. Dunne. He thought he detected a faint flutter of the closed eyelids.
“What shall I do about this Mr. Dunne, Kenny? Should I let him in?” Bannigan asked.
“Certainly, let him in, if he lives here,” said Detective Kilkenny, still looking at Mrs. Dunne. “Let him all the way in, Bannigan. In fact, bring him right in here.”
X
BARNEY WEAVER HAD NOT TAKEN more than twenty steps before the second police car came howling around the corner of Broadway and Cathedral Parkway, barely made the turn—to the noisy relief of the news dealer at the subway entrance—and passed on. There were other sirens in the distance, too, a car coming up the Manhattanville hill, past the Seminaries, and another one baying on the scent as it streaked past Morningside Heights. The pack was assembling.
The crowd, too, was beginning to trickle off Broadway, on the trail of a spectacle. Barney felt self-conscious, walking against the stream. Twice he stopped to gawk in the direction of the people following the last police car. He didn’t want to look too much like a man who was running away. At the corner he ducked into a drugstore, began looking through the telephone directory.
The drugstore was empty of customers. Even the pharmacist had gone out to gawk. Only the soda dispenser remained, unhappily stacking dishes behind the fountain.
“What’s goin’ on out there?” he asked Barney.
“Nothing you can see from the street,” Barney said, not looking up from the phone book. Where the dickens was that Sell-Checking Lockers? Self-Advertising—Self-Burnishing—“Probably just a drunk breaking up the furniture.”
“Sure, that’s it, a drunk,” agreed the soda jerker, glad to deprecate the spectacle he had to miss. “We spend millions educatin’ scientists. The scientists use up their brains and their lives inventin’ things like the radio. And what fer? So a coupla dumb cops can blow their sirens and tie up traffic and try to break their damn necks and maybe scare the pants off a pedestrian who’s crossin’ the street to buy a nickel cigar. And why? Because some lush has had one too many and is breakin’ crockery.”
“That’s about it,” Barney agreed. Self-Cementing—Self-Certifying—here it was. Self-Checking Lockers, Inc.
“And who pays fer it?” the soda clerk went on. “Who pays fer the gas? We do. You and me pay fer it.”
“You’re right,” said Barney, edging into the phone booth. He closed the door, dropped his coin, dialed the number. He wondered if the locker office would still be open. Probably would, or they’d have some phone-answering service, to take emergency calls for stuck locks, and that sort of thing.
“Hello, Self-Checking Lockers? I’ve got a problem here. I checked some packages in one of your lockers last night, but I’m a stranger in town and I’ll be darned if I can remember where I checked them. I know it was a subway station, but once I get above ground, I can’t tell one from the other. Yes, I’ve got the key here. The number is three one three E… Times Square? Thank you very much.” Barney hung up and looked cautiously through the glass doors, wondering if he would have a better chance of getting past the soda clerk by stealth or by speed. One glance told him that neither would avail. The soda jerker was standing in the entrance to the store, staring disconsolately into the street.
“Two more police buggies just went by,” he told Barney, as the latter tried to pass. “That makes four or five, at least. And all fer a lush who can’t hold his licker. Makes a fella wonder.”
“Sure does,” said Barney, slipping out quickly.
He went down the subway stairs two at a time. There was a train standing in the station, but it pulled out before Barney could make change. It was a local anyhow, he noted as he went through the turnstile.
He paced the drafty cement platform nervously waiting for the next train. He had expected a feeling of safety as soon as he got into the impersonal bustle and crush of the subway, but somehow the comfortable feeling did not materialize. On the contrary, he felt increasingly uneasy. He was almost panicky by the time the billow of cold air pushed into the station ahead of the roar of the express, mischievously flicking skirts about silken knees, threatening hats, rustling abandoned newspapers on the benches. The express stopped. He got in.
Yes, he had made an awful mistake in swinging at Tony and running away. It would have been better to wait for the police, to pit his word against Tony’s. It would have been messy and unpleasant, and the key might turn out to be pretty incriminating for a while, but in the end truth would triumph. It always did, if you had the guts to face it and wait. Nothing in the world, though, could have prevented Barney from smacking Tony tonight. It was something he had wanted to do for so long that he simply could not have passed up this chance. And now he was in for it.
He tried to keep his mind off the might-have-been angle by studying the people who swayed in unison as they hung from the white enameled loops like dressed beeves. There were saucy secretaries in rabbit-skin coats, bound for the movies, probably. And large dark maids-by-the-day on their way home. They would get off at 96th Street and change. There was an eminently respectable gentleman in a stiff collar and derby hat and cane, reading the financial page, just to show that he did not really belong in the subway. The thin, undernourished girl next to him was obviously his companion. She wore a corsage of violets to accentuate her shabby gentility, and stood very straight as though to maintain her dignity in the un-genteel atmosphere of collarless laborers and shapeless laundry girls, or perhaps to insulate herself from the drunk in a turtleneck sweater hanging from the strap on the other side of her. Barney smiled to himself.
By 72nd Street, however, he was no longer smiling. He was beginning to worry again—about another angle. Suppose Tony Grove had nothing to do with the locker key? Suppose the key had not dropped out of Pierre Laurence’s pocket, but belonged to the murderer? Suppose the murderer, discovering his loss once he had escaped from Pen’s apartment, had taken up his vigil, safe in the anonymity of the subway crowds, to watch for the man who should try to use the key? Suppose the murderer was waiting to shoot the man who opened Locker 313E? Or should stalk him through the crowd, to stick a knife between his ribs and snatch the package from him? Even if Tony were involved, he had plenty of time to telephone his accomplice to hurry to Times Square and mount guard over Locker 313E. Or Tony might put the police on the trail as soon as they arrived, in which case Locker 313E would be surrounded by detectives.
The express stopped at Times Square. The floodgates opened, and Barney was caught in the human torrent that swept from the train. He let himself be carried along toward the 42nd Street end of the platform, climbed the stairs. The fragrance of doughnuts frying greeted his nostrils. The Times Square subway station always smelled of frying doughnuts and yet he had never seen the source of the aroma. It was one of the underground mysteries of the I.R.T., like the bewildering stairways, which invariably took you into strange basements or barber shops or glittering arcades or transplanted bits of Coney Island, and finally, when you reached the surface, to the corner of the Square exactly opposite the one you wanted.
Barney sauntered with the crowd past the newsstands, the bootblack, the flower stands. The crowd was much less in a hurry at this time of night than at the before-dinner rush. He could spot the numbers of the checking lockers without stopping. He passed three banks of lockers before he saw the orange number plaques with the three-hundred combinations. Then his pulses raced, and he began to perspire again. There was a man standing in front of the olive-green metal cabinet.
> He passed and looked back. The man was obviously looking for someone. He was a tall, bony, blue-jowled man, with a dark soft hat pulled down over his eyes. He was scanning faces as people streamed past him.
Barney walked to the far western end of the station; the end that most resembled a county fair with its milk bars and hot-dog stands. When he came back the blue-jowled man was still there, still waiting, still scanning faces. Barney passed again, kept moving until he reached the wooden catwalks of the Grand Central shuttle trains. He lingered awhile to look at the theatrical photographs in the underground show window, then doubled back.
The man was still there. He raised his head as Barney approached. There was a gleam of eager recognition in his eyes. He started toward Barney. Barney stopped in his tracks. His heart, too, stopped momentarily. The man brushed past—and Barney’s heart resumed beating. He turned to see the man embracing a large and gaudy blonde with considerable enthusiasm.
Barney was alarmed to find that he could not even laugh at himself. His fingers were shaking when he fitted the key into the lock of checking compartment 313E.
The metal door swung back. There was an airplane-type suitcase inside, a light-gray case with gay stripes and V. S. stenciled on the end. He drew it out, and the door clanged resoundingly shut.
Barney started off like a man hurrying for a train. He could run here without being conspicuous. He did not look behind him. If he was being followed, he couldn’t help it. So he decided he would rather not know about it.
He did not know at once what he was going to do with Vivian’s suitcase. It was not very heavy, and it gave off an occasional faint metallic clink. He would have to open it soon and analyze its contents in relation to the murder on Riverside Drive, but he couldn’t very well sit down in the middle of Times Square and open it. He couldn’t very well take it home, either. Not now. If the police were on their toes, they probably already had a man waiting for him there. He found himself drifting with a stream of people headed for the shuttle tracks—and that gave him an idea.
He took the shuttle train across town to Grand Central station. A uniformed policeman sat across from him and stared, but Barney paid little attention to him. He had a new worry, now. He was preoccupied with the faint metallic sounds that the suitcase gave off at irregular intervals as he held it propped between his knees. He wondered if the case might contain some sort of time bomb.
At the end of the brief journey he fairly ran through the maze of stairways and tunnels until he got into the brown-travertine bowels of Grand Central itself. Then he waved away a squad of converging redcaps, and made for the catacombs of white tile and porcelain where white-coated Negroes and gleaming chromium turnstiles levied Vespasian tribute on gentlemen with urgent functional needs. He placed a quarter in an appropriate slot, and found himself in sole possession of a dressing-room with shower. He put the suitcase on a chair, made sure the door was locked. At last he breathed more easily. He was now merely a commuter from Westchester, bent on freshening up and putting on a clean shirt before going to the theater. Unless, of course, that damned suitcase should suddenly explode.
Barney brought his ear close to the case. He could hear no ticking. The metallic sounds had ceased. Probably it was not a time bomb, then. Maybe the detonator was set to work when he lifted the lid. Well, there was no use in thinking about that now.
He thumbed the metal catches on the suitcase, and the spring hasps flew open with a snap. He lifted the lid a fraction of an inch. Nothing happened. He raised it a little more. Then he flung it all the way back.
His eyes bulged at what he saw. Then he snorted.
The mystery of the metallic sounds and the mystery of Anthony Grove’s missing license plates were solved simultaneously. The metal oblongs with the numbers that Barney recognized as Tony’s automobile registration, were lying on top of the fuzzy contents of the case. He lifted them out, placed them on the floor.
Then he devoted himself to what seemed to be a rug, or fur of some kind. He prodded it with his finger. Then he pulled out the undressed pelt of some species of fox.
Even to his untrained eye, the fur was strangely beautiful. It had the luxuriance of a silver fox, but was of a pale color that he had never seen before—a pearl-white, with an even sprinkling of long, darker hairs that cast a blue-gray veil over the animal. There was a dark streak along the back, a blaze of white across the neck and down the snout. The tip of the dark bushy tail appeared to have been dipped in mother-of-pearl. Barney examined the fur more closely. With his fingers he pried up the long, black ears that lay close to the flattened, unmounted head. Through the empty eye holes was a heavy tape, fastened with a circular lead seal. A fox head was stamped into the center of the lead disk and around the circumference was the inscription: Super-Platin. Norway.
There were five more similar pelts in Vivian Sanderson’s suitcase. Barney had no idea how much they were worth, but he suspected that they were valuable; there was a feel of richness about them that was eloquent. He was standing with a pelt in each hand, looking from one fur to the other, wondering if they were valuable enough to serve as motive for murder, when someone knocked on the door of the dressing-room.
XI
A COLD DRIZZLE was again blurring the night when Vivian went to work. Ordinarily the tang of raindrops gave her fresh, stimulating thoughts. Tonight, however, her thoughts were uninfluenced by the rain—except that she remembered that Miss Smith, the supervisor, wore a skunk cardigan which was apt to revert to type in wet weather.
Coming out of the subway, Vivian loitered a moment at the newsstand at the head of the stairs to steal a glance at the headlines. It was too soon, of course. The premature editions of the morning papers hadn’t come up yet—which was just as well, since Vivian was already physically ill every time the picture came back to her of walking in upon the corpse of Pierre Laurence. The reaction to the shock had come long after she had left Penelope’s apartment, just when she was feeling very proud of herself for having been so brave and calm about the whole thing. But Barney had said to go to work just as if nothing had happened.
She made a self-possessed entrance into Overlook Arms and even smiled brightly to the doorman. After all, he couldn’t guess what nightmares would wreck her sleep for weeks. She also managed a few jokes with her colleagues when she entered Apartment 8-K. When she sat down in front of the long switchboard, however, and adjusted the headset, the gone feeling came sweeping back over her with all its debilitating terror. There was nothing she could do to shut out the implications that lay behind the dark signal lamp with the little label over it: Mrs. Dunne—MO 2-9870. She could not keep her eyes from the lamp, and yet she felt she might very well scream if the light flared up—as though it would be a signal for events even more dire and dreadful.
“Hello. Doctor’s office—” She flipped back an index card with a green tab on it. “Doctor Banks has already gone to the hospital. I can give him your message as soon as he comes out of the operating-room.”
She was writing out the message for Dr. Banks when the lamp glowed under Pen’s number. With some trepidation, she plugged it out with the dummy jack. It did not light again. Someone had answered.
She wondered who had answered, and if Pen had come home. She wondered where Barney was, and whether he would be able to call her—
She finished writing the message for the doctor. As she was putting it into the index file, she noted there was a red tab on Penelope Dunne’s card. Then she remembered that Pen’s phone had rung while she and Barney were sitting on the bed, just after Barney had scared her out of the closet. She glanced at the slip to see who had phoned. She read: Mr. Artie Whisk called Mr. Roger Dunne at 5:45. Mr. Whisk called back at 5:50 to say that it was very important that Mr. Dunne get in touch with him as soon as possible.
She read the message a second time, to make sure her eyes had not deceived her on the “Mr.” Dunne. There it was—repeated. The afternoon operator could not have been mistaken twice, particul
arly as she used the Christian name. And yet—What was Roger Dunne doing back at Pen’s? It didn’t seem likely that there had been a reconciliation, as Pen had been so certain that the marriage was definitely washed up. Yet here was Roger Dunne getting phone messages at Pen’s number.
“Hello. United Coal. Yes, we will take your order. How many tons, please? Yes, sir. Tomorrow morning.” She recorded the coal order.
Yes, it was strange indeed. She wondered how long it was since Pen had seen her husband. Months, at least. And she had never heard of Artie Whisk.
Pen’s lamp glared at her. With a vicious jab she put it out. It glowed twice more. Vivian plugged in. “Monument two—nine eight seven oh,” she said.
“Please let me speak with Mr. Dunne,” said a man’s voice with a slight accent.
“Mr. Dunne is not here right now. Who is this calling, please?”
“Will you give him a message when he comes in?”
“Certainly, sir. Is this Mr. Whisk?”
“No, this ain’t Mr. Whisk. Listen, when Mr. Dunne comes in, just tell him he better call that Rux girl right away.”
“Is that Ruck’s, are you see kay apostrophe ess?”
“No, Rux, are you ex. Just tell him Rux girl. He knows it.”
“I am not sure that Mr. Dunne will be at this number tonight,” Vivian said. “He does not live here, you know. I can try to reach him for you, if you like.”
“Is this Monument two—nine eight seven oh?”
“Yes.”
“Then Mr. Dunne ought to be there tonight. There’s no use calling his other numbers. He ain’t there. You just give him the message.”
“I’ll certainly try, Mr.—” But the man had hung up. Vivian was recording the message when she saw the man come in. She did not know him, but watching him speak to Miss Smith, she felt instantly that he was a detective. Curious, too, because he was not built like the police detectives she had seen. He was rather slight, and meek-looking. Yet there was something about him that screamed police the moment he had come through the door. Perhaps it was his shoes—high-laced, black, square-toed; perhaps it was the angle at which the brim of his soft felt hat came down over his face; or perhaps the way he walked, with sure, firm-planted steps, and his arms motionless at his sides. They were walking over to the switchboard now.
See You at the Morgue Page 8