“No.”
“Would you mind telling me exactly what he said—”
The question was cut off by the entrance of a woman about half Miss Yates’s age in a working smock. She trotted up with the flurry of impending disaster on her face and in her gait. Fox knew her as Carrie Murphy, one of the five persons to whom he had telephoned at midnight, but without taking any notice of his presence she blurted at Miss Yates:
“Mr. Fry says the mix in vat three is too stiff and he’s going to add oil!”
Miss Yates leaped from her chair and tore from the room, with Carrie Murphy at her heels.
Chapter 6
After rising to examine the two-pound weight which was there in its place in the row on the little shelf above the scale, and finding that it differed slightly in detail from one he had inspected on the floor of Tingley’s office, Fox left the sauce room to stroll through the factory toward the front of the building. He saw no special evidence of grief on any faces of the girls and women working at the tables and benches and the various machines, but having himself met Arthur Tingley in the flesh, that did not seem to him shocking or even unexpected. Their curious glances at him as he passed along did, however, display an agreeably horrified suspense and perturbation, as well as an anticipatory gleam for the social supremacy they would have that evening among friends who worked for firms whose names were not in the papers at all, let alone in banner headlines on the front page.
There was a slight commotion at the far side of the huge room, where Miss Yates, backed up by Carrie Murphy, was confronting a defiant but obviously defeated Sol Fry. Fox sent a chuckle in that direction and went on.
A corridor led him past the open door of the long narrow room where the employees kept their wraps, and other doors as well. The last one on the right was closed. Fox turned the knob and pushed and breezed in. A broad-shouldered husky came at him, demanded angrily:
“Hey, what the hell?”
“My name’s Tecumseh Fox.”
“I don’t care if it’s Franklin D. La Guardia! On out!”
“I should think, shut up in here like this, you’d welcome an intruder once in a while to break the monotony.”
Another man seated in Arthur Tingley’s chair, with his feet resting on a newspaper on Arthur Tingley’s desk, let out a growl, “Okay, go buy us a doormat with welcome on it. Run along.”
“I just thought I’d save some steps by going through here to the front offices.”
“Yeah. Do you want help?”
“No, thanks.” Fox backed up for space. “The truth is, I’m drawn irresistibly to a room that has been searched by a murderer, as a bee is drawn to a flower. What if he didn’t find what he wanted? I’d give a gross of Spiced Anchovies Number 34 to be in here alone for an hour. I see you’ve straightened up a little.” The National Grocer had been returned to the shelf, and Tingley’s coat was back on the hanger.
“He does want help,” said the man at the desk. “Help him.”
The husky made a forward movement. Fox backed out with sufficient alacrity, pulling the door with him.
He tried another door across the corridor and found himself in a medium-sized room with every inch of wall space occupied by rickety old wooden filing cabinets and bookkeeping books on shelves. A young woman with freckles and amazingly fine legs was filing papers, and a man who could have been the brother of the one with rheumy eyes at the window in the anteroom was nodding at a desk. Fox said pleasantly, “I’m a detective,” and passed on through. He had to invade four other rooms, opening and closing five more doors, before he found the person he sought. She regarded him with a startled and hostile expression from her seat at a typewriter desk, where apparently she had been doing nothing whatever, and there was a redness around her eyes and her snub nose which caused Fox to wonder if there was some grief around after all.
“Good morning.” He smiled at her, and added sympathetically, “You’ve been crying.”
Berdine Pilt, who for sixteen years had nursed a silent resentment at being called “my clerk” instead of “my secretary,” sniffed, picked up her handkerchief, and blew her nose with a total lack of inhibition or restraint.
“I’m busy,” she declared with finality.
“In circumstances like these it’s a relief to have something to do,” said Fox, pulling up a chair.
He stayed with her half an hour, and got next to nothing for it, though he displayed the note Amy Duncan had armed him with. Miss Pilt professed admiration for Amy because during her brief stay at Tingley’s she had shown independence and spunk, and affection for her because of her generous action in the case of the fellow employee who had got into trouble, but Miss Pilt was nevertheless indomitably discreet. She took the position that since her room was separated from that of her employer by two partitions and a corridor, and since she was not an eavesdropper, she knew absolutely nothing of Tingley’s confidential affairs, either business or personal. Nor could she be drawn into any speculation regarding the truth of the situation with respect to Phil, the adopted son; or an animosity in any quarter toward Amy Duncan which might have prompted the imprinting of her fingers on the handle of the knife; or whether the murder was in any way connected with the affair of the quinine. She did, however, furnish four items for the record:
1. She had left the premises, as usual, a few minutes after five o’clock, taken the subway to her home in the Bronx, and spent the evening there.
2. The redness came from weeping. She regretted and deplored the tragic death of Arthur Tingley, but the weeping was due to the fact that Mr. Fry and Miss Yates didn’t like her and she didn’t like them, and she would probably soon be out of a job at her age.
3. The only callers Tingley had seen on Tuesday, aside from the usual run of salesmen and such, had been a Mr. Brown, a tall well-dressed man around sixty whom Miss Pilt had never seen before and who had arrived a little after ten in the morning and had stayed nearly an hour; and Mr. Fox who had arrived at eleven. The tall well-dressed man was of course the one whom Fox had seen crossing the anteroom on his way out.
4. Shortly after Tingley returned from lunch, he had told Miss Pilt to tell the sales department that he wanted to see Phil when he came in with his day’s orders and reports; and she had seen Phil enter his father’s office a minute or so after five o’clock, as she was leaving. That, she admitted, had been unusual, but by no means unique.
Fox, after using her telephone to make a call to the East End Hospital, and hearing something, judging from his expression, which surprised and annoyed him, left Miss Pilt there with her empty machine at her empty desk. On his way out he tried his luck with the old man at the window in front, but soon discovered that if there was any pay ore in that vein it would take blasting to get down to it.
He drove east to Fifth Avenue and then uptown, maneuvered the car into a space on 41st Street that would barely hold it, went to a Bar & Grill that he knew and disposed of three ham sandwiches with lettuce and three cups of coffee. For his leisurely afterluncheon cigarette, he stood on the sidewalk and watched people go by. Then he walked around the corner to the entrance of a modest office building only sixty feet higher than the Great Pyramid, took an elevator to the thirtieth floor, entered a door which bore the inscription, NAT COLLINS, ATTORNEY-AT-LAW, and bade a sharp-featured alert-eyed woman good afternoon, calling her Miss Larabee. She said he was expected, and he went through two doors to a spacious corner chamber with two large windows on each of two sides. An appraisal of it would have depended on the focus of attention. If you limited your gaze to the five Van Goghs, all good and one famous, on the walls, you would have thought you were in a small private gallery; if to the rugs and furnishings, you would have said a blatantly luxurious office; if to the large healthy-looking man seated at the enormous carved desk, you still would not have suspected that you were in the sanctum of one of the three ablest criminal lawyers in New York.