Crimson Clue

by George Harmon Coxe

‘It’s safer’, Bacon said. ‘This is murder, Miss Wayne. You may be the next victim.’

  ‘But if I promise to stay in my room.’

  ‘And make no outside telephone calls?’

  ‘But I’ll have to call up about the audition.’

  ‘Murdock can do the calling. You just tell him who to call and he’ll get it postponed for you.’

  Murdock was watching her and it came to him now that, in spite of the way she looked at you with those wide-open green eyes which seemed to be incapable of anything except the truth, she had not always told the truth. At least not all of it. Somehow, in some way, unconscious or not, she must have held something back. Either this or she had given the killer the impression that she knew more than she did.

  ‘The lieutenant’s right’, he said. ‘You’d better pack. I’ll take care of the dishes.’

  Bacon straightened his coat and reached for his neat grey hat. ‘Let us know what room she’s got’, he said to Murdock. ‘And what name she registers under … We’ll be checking with you, Miss Wayne. And thanks for the coffee.’

  There was no trouble getting a room at the Copley and Audrey Wayne was assigned Room 519, registering as Miss Ann Wright. Murdock went up to the room with her and inspected it. He said it looked all right and that if she wanted anything she could call downstairs and have it sent up.

  ‘But how long will I have to stay here?’

  He shrugged and said he did not know. He said one thing was certain: the killer was scared. He had made some mistakes already; he would probably make more. He smiled at her and told her if she was a good girl he would come over and have dinner here in the room with her.

  When he got back to the Studio, he telephoned Sydney French and told him that Audrey would have to postpone the audition.

  ‘Why?’ said French.

  ‘Somebody took a shot at her last night.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The police think she knows more than she’s told and they’re taking no chances. They’re hiding her out some place.’

  French said it was a hell of a note. He said he had everything set up for her. Murdock let him ramble on until French got his annoyance off his chest and agreed to try to arrange another audition later on; then he hung up and got to work.

  It was the middle of the afternoon before he had a chance to do anything more on the pictures he had taken at the reception. As soon as he started making prints his mind began to work, and he thought of the two films that had been stolen.

  The result set up a chain reaction that had as its base the original resentment which, partially buried, had started the afternoon of the reception. There was no doubt in his mind that the two missing negatives had been delivered to the Cannings and were, in all probability, destroyed. Certainly they would not have given Damin a cheque unless they had the evidence which would prevent Murdock from proving his story that Garvin had been in that upstairs closet.

  Damin had not done the developing; that much seemed obvious. Which left Lew Klime. Klime had done the work, and turned the negatives over to Damin, and Damin had collected.

  Considering these possibilities, Murdock glanced down at the wet print he had in his hand. Like that the idea came to him and he was annoyed with himself for not thinking of it before. A print could be copied. Suppose Klime had made prints of those two negatives? Such prints, or negatives made from them, made a perfect vehicle for blackmail at some later date, and Klime’s unsavoury reputation on the police force indicated that he might well consider the possibility.

  The thought blossomed rapidly in Murdock’s brain, even though he cautioned himself that it might well be nothing but wishful thinking. At best it was certainly a long chance, an even longer chance that he could do anything about it even if he happened to be right in his assumption.

  But it was a chance, and since he had nothing else in the way of a lead he decided to explore the possibility for what it was worth. He had been able to enter Damin’s apartment without much trouble; maybe he could do the same at Klime’s.

  Drying his hands, he went back to his desk and consulted the telephone directory, making a note of the number and address, and then telling the operator what he wanted. The conversation that followed was brief.

  A man’s voice said: ‘Hello.’

  Murdock let it go at that. He hung up gently and with some disappointment. He leaned back in his chair, his angular face thoughtful and his dark eyes remote. He sat there quite a while, not even glancing up when one of his men came in. Then, gradually, the set line of his lips softened and a gleam of anticipation began to work inside him as his thoughts moved on.

  Suddenly he sat up and reached again for the directory. He looked under the K’s and found Klime again, a grin beginning to shape the corners of his mouth. The Klime he wanted was Mrs. Hilda Klime, who had a somewhat more fashionable address than her husband.

  He wrote it down and glanced at his watch, remembering now the rumours he had heard of the Klime separation, remembering something else that happened nearly five years ago when Hilda—her name wasn’t Klime then and he could not remember what it was—had worked as a cigarette-and-hat-check girl at a local night club.

  A reporter named Hoskins had been quite smitten with Hilda at the time. He sought her favour by attempting to promote her in a beauty contest or two, believing that Hilda’s looks and full-blown figure would stand up well in competition. He had talked Murdock into taking a couple of photographs of Hilda in her bathing suit. The trouble was that in most beauty contests the winner was required to show a certain amount of talent as well as looks, and Hilda was singularly lacking in such endowments.

  Now Murdock wondered if Hilda would remember him; then, not so sure that it mattered, he reached for his hat and coat.

  Hilda Klime occupied a third-floor apartment in a fairly modern four-story building in the Kenmore district. When she opened the door in response to Murdock’s ring he noticed first that she was a little fuller-blown than he remembered, but the added pounds had been properly distributed and the general effect was worth a second glance to anyone who liked his women tall and generously endowed.

  The light was not too good here in the hall and what there was came from behind her so he could not tell too much about her face. He thought she surveyed him with some scepticism in the first moment, blocking effectively the partly opened door, so he took off his hat, smiled, made his voice cordial.

  ‘Hello, Hilda’, he said. ‘Remember me? From the Courier?’

  She hesitated, giving him a final glance of sharp appraisal; then she started to smile and stepped back.

  ‘Murdock’, she said. ‘Kent Murdock. You took some pictures of me when I was working at Club Zero.’ She laughed. ‘Sure’, she said. ‘Come in, come in.’

  She was wearing a grey hostess-gown and she gave the sash a tug when she had closed the door. She was nearly as tall as he was and she was growing another chin, but her complexion was still good, the skin smooth and unblemished and having a natural, milkmaid look seldom seen in smaller, thinner women. Her eyes were brown and so was her hair—at the roots; the rest of it was auburn and, for Murdock’s taste, worn too short.

  ‘You know,’ she said, ‘I still have those pictures … Sit down, take off your coat … And every time I look at them I tell myself I’ve got to start dieting.’ She watched him slip off his topcoat, and put it on the arm of the divan, her head tipped, glance speculative. ‘Would you say it was too early for a drink?’

  Murdock made an act out of looking at his watch and frowning over the proposition. When he looked at her she laughed.

  ‘Bourbon?’ she asked.

  ‘That’ll be fine.’

  ‘On the rocks, huh?’

  She started for the kitchen and he asked if he could help and she said no. ‘On this kind of a drink,’ she said, ‘nobody needs help. Sit down, will you? Park. Make yourself comfortable.’

  Murdock grinned and sat down. She banged through the swinging door beyond the d
inette and presently he heard her hammering at the ice tray. When she came back she was carrying an ice bucket, two Old Fashioned glasses, and a bottle of bonded whisky. She sat down next to him, put the tray on a coffee table, put two cubes of ice in each glass and filled them with whisky.

  ‘Now,’ she said, holding up her glass, ‘you can tell me what you want.’

  The pointed digression caught Murdock off balance. He was still fumbling for a reasonable answer when she took him off the hook.

  ‘You want to talk about Lew, right?… Don’t con me’, she said. ‘In the last five years I see you maybe once. Now the police get a sudden interest in Lew and so do you. That’s it, isn’t it?’

  She took a big swallow of her drink and waited, a half-smile working in her eyes, her wide red mouth twisting. Nothing in her voice or manner suggested that she was annoyed, or resented his evasiveness; she seemed instead to be enjoying herself.

  ‘What did they want?’ Murdock said, not surprised that the police had been there but wondering how much, if anything, they had told her.

  ‘They didn’t say. They wanted to know what I knew about Saul and Lew splitting up, if I knew what the trouble was. They said they’d heard I was the cause of it all, and what was this about getting a divorce and was I going to marry Saul if I got one.’

  Murdock grinned in spite of himself because it amused him that Hilda should consider the matter with such great good humour.

  ‘What did you tell them?’

  ‘I told them my testimony was no good because most of it was hearsay. I said I understood the boys were having a little trouble. I said Lew and I had been separated for nearly a year because we didn’t get along, and that as long as I kept getting my monthly payments I had no kick.’ She finished her drink and said: ‘What’s Lew done this time?’

  ‘I don’t know that he’s done anything.’

  She filled her glass after adding a fresh cube, and gave him a scathing glance. ‘Don’t give me that. Get with me. You come up here for information but you don’t know a thing.’

  ‘All I know is that there’s a chance he might be mixed up in murder.’

  Her gaze was instantly sober. She considered the implications of what Murdock had said.

  ‘With Saul?’

  ‘Possibly.’ Murdock watched her take another sip from her glass. ‘Nobody knows too much about it right now.… Are you going to marry Saul?’

  ‘I’m thinking about it. I like him. I’m having dinner with him tonight.’ She reached over and took Murdock’s wrist, turning it so she could see what time it was. ‘Which means,’ she said, ‘that you’ve got time for just about one more quick one. Then I’ve got to have my beauty bath.’

  She gave her attention to her drink and said: ‘In a way Saul’s something like Lew. They’re both pretty hard inside, but Saul’s a gentleman when he’s with a woman. He knows how to treat them. He’s good looking and he knows how to dress. Lew always was a roughneck. I knew it when I married him but I thought I could polish off some of the edges.’

  Murdock took a shot in the dark. ‘Is he still interested in photography?’

  ‘I guess so.’

  ‘Still doing his own developing and printing?’

  ‘He was when he lived here. He built himself a darkroom in the kitchen and it got so the coffee always tasted like chemical. You could hardly boil an egg without tripping over some of his things. That and music’, she said, a little thickly now as the hundred-proof whisky started to work on her.

  ‘What?’

  ‘His hobbies’, she said. ‘Photography and records. You see that wall?’ She pointed to the opposite end of the room and the mirror that hung there. ‘I had to have the whole wall fixed when he left. It was full of built-in shelves. I’ll bet he had two thousand records there. He thought more of them than he did of me.’

  Murdock remembered how intently Klime had been listening to Sydney French’s band, and the comments he had made.

  ‘What kind of records?’

  ‘How do I know? All kinds, I guess. He’d sit by the hour and play the damn things. I couldn’t even read, not that I ever wanted to much, and one night I got so mad after listening to that machine for two hours I picked up an album and heaved it at the wall; broke about four records.’

  She laughed at the thought and put down her empty glass. ‘You should have heard him scream. Collector’s items, he said. Worth a lot of money. So I told him what to do with the records and his darkroom. A couple of weeks later he did. Not just because of that; that was only the topper. We hadn’t anything left anyway and I’d been seeing Saul now and then——’

  She let the sentence dangle and examined the bottom of her glass. ‘At least with Saul,’ she said, ‘I won’t have to listen to records every night in the week.’

  ‘Saul doesn’t go for records, hunh?’

  ‘Saul,’ she said, chuckling to herself, ‘has a tin ear. You play “Star Dust” for Saul and it’s eight to one he couldn’t tell you for sure if he’d ever heard the melody before, let alone name the tune.’

  She paused again, frowning now as some new thought came to her, then straightening on the divan and putting her shoulders back. She reached for Murdock’s glass but he said he had to be running. She slanted her eyes at him.

  ‘Who got killed?’ she asked abruptly.

  He stared at her, a little slow in following her.

  ‘You said Lew might be mixed up in murder.’

  ‘Oh. A fellow by the name of Neil Garvin. You wouldn’t know him. He’d only been in town a day or so. A piano player.’

  ‘Lew wouldn’t kill him’, she said with some conviction. ‘Lew loved piano players.’

  Murdock stood up and reached for his coat. She walked to the door with him, and he thanked her for the drink, and she said she was glad he had come because it gave her an excuse to start a little early.

  ‘I still don’t know just why you came,’ she said, standing close and watching him with frank approval, ‘but come again any time. There’s always a bottle around somewhere.’

  Murdock asked himself the same question going down in the elevator. He was still not sure why he had come but he understood that other than substantiating his hunch that Lew Klime was interested in photography and developing, he had accomplished nothing at all, unless three ounces of excellent whisky could be put down in that category.

  Chapter 16

  WHEN Kent Murdock called Audrey Wayne on the house telephone at the Copley he looked like a man who was going courting. He had a box of candy under one arm, a magazine and the afternoon papers in his free hand; he even felt a little that way when he asked if he could come up.

  ‘I wish you would’, Audrey said shortly. ‘I haven’t seen anyone but the waiter since you left this morning.’

  She smiled when he came into her room and she was properly appreciative of his presents, but her pleasure could not long sustain itself. She did not sit down, but paced nervously back and forth across the room; when he spoke to her, her replies seemed listless and indifferent.

  ‘Sure you’re bored’, he said. ‘Anyone would be. Also’—he gave her his best smile and kept his tone hearty—‘you’ve been a good girl. What you need is a drink. How would a bourbon Old Fashioned go?’

  ‘Almost anything would help.’

  ‘Fruit in it?’

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘Lemon peel?’

  ‘Please. And very little sugar.’

  Murdock stepped to the telephone and gave the order, asking to have the waiter bring up a menu. ‘That is,’ he said when he hung up, ‘unless you have other plans.’

  That got a slow and almost reluctant smile out of her. ‘I’m sorry’, she said. ‘I didn’t mean to be nasty.’

  He got her to sit down and gave her a cigarette. When the cocktails came he read some of the menu to her. She said she wasn’t very hungry but he said maybe with the drink inside her she would change her mind. In the end she decided on a thin soup, lobster Newbur
g, and a salad. Murdock said he’d go along with her. He said they’d have coffee later and maybe a dessert, and when the waiter came to set up the table he was to bring two more Old Fashioneds.

  The dinner and drinks did much to improve Audrey’s mood. She said Lieutenant Bacon had telephoned twice, apparently just to make sure she was staying in her room, and what had he, Murdock, been doing all day.

  ‘Working, mostly’, he said.

  ‘You haven’t heard anything new? I mean about Neil Garvin?’

  ‘No. I haven’t seen Bacon.’

  ‘But this’—she waved her hand to indicate the room—‘could go on for days. I can’t just sit here and——’

  ‘You may not have to so don’t start worrying about tomorrow.’

  She was wearing the skirt and cashmere sweater he had seen before, and now she folded her arms and sat on one foot, pouting silently while the waiter cleared things away. In the subdued lighting her two-toned hair looked soft and lovely and Murdock found himself wondering whether that light streak was natural or had been put there with a brush. He considered asking, decided not to when he considered the planes and angles of her face, the shadows beneath her cheekbones and generous mouth. Natural or not she looked very desirable right then and it was with some reluctance that he stood up shortly after nine and said he had to go.

  She did not protest. She rose with him and said she was grateful to him for coming. ‘I don’t know what I’d have done if you hadn’t.’

  She held his coat for him and when he turned back to get his hat she kissed him on the mouth and then stepped quickly back.

  ‘That’s for the presents and the dinner’, she said. ‘You’ll call me in the morning, won’t you?’

  He said he would and when he walked along the hall on the way to the elevator he could taste, faintly, the flavour of her lipstick, and somehow there was a fine warm glow inside him that had nothing to do with the drinks or the dinner. It was sort of an over-all feeling, and with it came a new and optimistic mood. Something that had no basis in fact told him he was due for a break. He was more than ever convinced of this when, from a downstairs telephone booth, he called Lew Klime’s home number and got no answer.