All the sheets had been torn off down to the previous Monday. And that sheet was blank. I began to wonder why the Monday sheet would be on top rather than the sheet for the previous Saturday. Saturday was a working day. Assuming he tore off the Friday sheet before he left the office that last time, there was no reason for him to remove the Saturday sheet. I checked blank pages and found the pad included sheets for Sundays also. So two sheets had been removed.
I picked up the pad and tilted it so that any indentations of previous notations would show up. The Monday sheet was unmarked. I looked at the pencils in the drawer again. All had very soft lead.
I knew I had to operate on assumption, with the knowledge that if one assumption was illogical, all the rest in the chain would be meaningless. Assume that Kendall had made a notation on the pad for either Friday or Saturday. Perhaps it had been a memo of an appointment someone did not want him to keep. Then the removal of that incriminating or indicative sheet was in direct relation to his death. And the death, of course, was in a cause-and-effect relationship to the appointment.
This was dangerously vague, yet I could take that assumption another step. If Joe Gardland and Hildy Deveraux had given me the picture of a man facing a tremendous problem, was, then, the missing notation an indication that he had at last made up his mind? And, having made a decision, could he be permitted to live?
The tremendous and almost insoluble problem involved some facet of Niki.
Uncle Al sensed something odd about her, about her motivations.
I sensed the same oddness.
Niki knew why Ken’s life had become unbearable only when a conflict became too great. What conflict? Love for Niki versus — what? Versus, perhaps, an old-fashioned word? Honor, decency, dignity, self-respect?
Niki had walked into our lives out of a December rain, and over a candle-dark table she had shown me the shape of her mouth, the bright slant of blue eyes. Niki Webb from Cleveland, indignant, yet with a flavor of being amused at her own indignation, at her boldness in stopping me in the rain to protest. I’d bullied Hilderman into taking her on, even though, at that time, the office staff was being cut.
She had appeared and changed our lives — changed mine, and Ken’s was ended. I tried to think of the things she had told me about herself, about he past, during the months of our engagement. I reached for the phone and then pulled my hand back. It would be a ghoulish shock for an unsuspecting switchboard girl to have that particular light blink on her board, and hear my voice, so like Ken’s, asking for Hilderman.
I went to Hilderman’s office. He was out in the shop someplace. His girl was new, a young girl with chunky hips and a self-important manner. I asked for the Personnel card on a Miss N. Webb who had been hired four and a half years ago, and who had resigned several months later.
“That would be in the storage file.”
“Obviously.”
“I’m not supposed to give out cards without Mr. Hilderman’s okay. And only authorized people can look at them.”
She irritated me. She was full of petty authority. And I, could see that, as I had hoped, the name meant nothing to her and she did not know me.
Petty authority wilts under a show of force. “Young lady, I am Gevan Dean, and unless I have that card in my hand within two minutes, Mr. Hilderman is going to have a change in his staff as of now.”
Her mouth sagged and her high color faded. “I’m — I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Dean. I didn’t know — I mean, I—”
“I’m glad to see you take your job so seriously, miss.”
“Yes, I... I’ll get it right away. Webb did you say? W-e-b-b?”
She trotted off. She was back quickly, huffing the dust from the card. “Here you are, sir.” As she handed it over, I could sense a rebirth of reluctance. She was beginning to wonder if Hilderman would give her hell for disobeying his office rule. I could guess she would try to get the card back into the file without Hilderman ever realizing it had been gone.
I took the card to Ken’s office, sat at his desk and placed it squarely in front of me under the blue-white fluorescence. The small picture was not good. It gaunted her face and hardened her mouth. The information on the card confirmed the little she had told me of her past. Parents dead. No brothers or sisters. A business school. Job in a Cleveland office. Palmer Mutual Life Insurance Company, Inc. Position — Secretary to the Chief Adjustor. She had given that firm as a reference, and the information on the card indicated that the reference had checked her out as satisfactory.
I saw a smudge near the name of the company. I looked at it closely and saw that someone had penciled a small question mark there, and had partially erased it. There was a routing card stapled to the Personnel card. I looked at the routing card and saw that this Personnel card had been taken out of the storage file a year ago. I saw my brother’s initials scrawled beside the date.
I sat very still. It was the first clue I had found. Ken had examined this card. Perhaps he had made that question mark. It could only mean that Ken had become interested in her past. I could almost assume he had found some inconsistency in her history, and had taken the card out to check. If he had made the question mark, the inconsistency involved the office where she had worked.
I was no longer eager to try to spend the rest of the day as Ken had spent his last day of life. Through luck and logic I had found a loose piece. I intended to give it a good hard tug and see what happened. The girl in Personnel seemed pleased to get the card back so quickly. She was too anxious to get it back into the storage file to ask for my initials on the routing card. I hesitated in the hall, wondering if I should tell Perry I was leaving. There seemed little point in it. The rain had turned into a steady downpour. It got under the collar of the plastic raincoat and trickled down my back. I drove to the hotel. Traffic moved cautiously, dimmers on. I went to my suite and placed the Cleveland call, then took off my raincoat as I was waiting for it to come through. I had asked for anyone at Palmer Mutual Life in Cleveland.
The phone rang. “Ready with your call, sir. Go ahead.”
“Palmer Mutual,” a girl said.
“My name is Dean. I’m calling from Arland. I think I want to speak to your Chief Adjustor.”
“Are you reporting the death of a policyholder, sir?”
“No. How long has your Chief Adjustor held that job there?”
“Mr. Wilther has been Chief Adjustor for a long time, sir. Twelve years.”
“Could you connect me with him, please?”
“One moment, sir.”
I waited perhaps a full minute and then a man spoke with a heavy, friendly voice. “Hello again, Mr. Dean. What’s on your mind this time?”
“This time? Oh, I see. My brother must have phoned you.”
“I thought it was the same Mr. Dean phoning from Arland again.”
“When was that?”
“Maybe a year ago.”
“Would you mind telling me what he phoned you about?”
“I guess there’s no harm in that, Mr. Dean. He phoned about a girl who used to work here. Before she went with Dean Products. The name escapes me at the moment.”
“Miss Webb. Miss Niki Webb.”
“Yes, that’s the girl. He called up to ask me if I’d dig our copy of the letter of recommendation out of the files. He held the line and I had a girl get it out. It said she was satisfactory. Honest, energetic, and likable. We were sorry to see her go. She said it was some personal trouble. We never did learn the details.”
“Is that all my brother wanted to know?”
“That time, yes. But he called back the next day and asked a funny thing. He asked me to describe her. Getting the phone call had sort of refreshed my memory. I hadn’t seen the girl in over three years, you understand. So I described her. Tall, dark, very pretty, and so on. Gray eyes.”