“You know a murder case is apt to get messy.”
“Yes.”
“You don’t care about that?”
“Really, Mr. Fox—”
Fox got up, retrieved his coat and hat, and left by the other door as requested. As he waited in the corridor for the elevator, he muttered something unintelligible. In the alley called Wall Street, he sought the subway again, returned uptown to Grand Central, and emerged onto Park Avenue.
The atmosphere of the reception room of the administrative offices of the P. & B. Corporation was permeated with the spirit of the decade which developed the public relations counsel in his glory. The receptionist was really, though a shade remotely, receptive, with nothing in her manner to suggest that it was an infernal imposition to ask her to convey a message to Mr. Cliff: and the young man who showed Fox the way and opened the door for him was positively cheerful about it.
“Sit down,” said Leonard Cliff. “I’m busy as the devil, but I will be all day, so—” He looked, in fact, harried and a little puffy. “I’m glad you came. I want to thank you for that business yesterday — the way you removed that — uh — misunderstanding Miss Duncan had.”
“Don’t mention it.”
“Though I admit you made a monkey of me, calling me the way you did on my offering Collins a retainer—”
“You took it very well,” Fox declared. “It’s a good thing you don’t mind being made a monkey of, because I came to do it again, and since you’re busy and I am too, I won’t prolong it. You were wrong about that OJ55. It wasn’t OJ, it was GJ.”
Cliff withdrew immediately, and in fairly good order. A flicker of his eye and a movement of his jaw, neither very pronounced, was the extent of his nerves’ treachery. He sounded properly bewildered: “That must be a code I don’t know. What are you talking about?”
Fox smiled at him. “Let’s go at it another way. What newspaper did you work for?”
“None. I’ve never been on a paper.”
“Then where did you learn how to write without beginning sentences with ‘I’?”
“I wouldn’t say I did learn how to write. But I wrote copy for Corliss & Jones for three years before I landed here.”
“I knew you must have had practice.” Fox looked pleased with himself. “Regarding that anonymous letter Nat Collins got yesterday—”
“What letter?”
“One he got. Let me expound. You’re probably an excellent business executive, but you’d never make a good intriguer. When I asked you, there in Collins’s office, where you were Tuesday evening, your glance at Miss Duncan and your change of color gave you dead away. Obviously, during those two and a half hours you were doing something for, to, at, by, or with, Miss Duncan, the recollection of which you found embarrassing. That, however, told me nothing specific. But you went out to the anteroom where Philip Tingley was waiting, and you knew it was he because you had heard his arrival announced. While he was in with us, Collins got a phone call saying that the man who entered Tingley’s at 7:40 Tuesday evening was Philip Tingley. Since the anonymous informant had not known the identity of the man at the time he wrote the letter, he must have just discovered what Philip Tingley looked like. A little later I learned from Miss Larabee that you had been out for ten minutes at the time the phone call was received. So, as I say, I’m glad you don’t mind being made a monkey of. My odds are fifty to one that you wrote the letter and made the phone call.”
Cliff, composed, shook his head. “I hate to disappoint you, but it’s a bad bet. A letter — a phone call about a man who entered Tingley’s — it’s all news to me—”
“Come, Mr. Cliff. It’s a bad hand, throw it in.”
“I know it’s bad,” Cliff admitted, “since I refuse to say where I was Tuesday evening. But I’m playing it.”
“I implore you not to.” Fox sounded earnest. “Tell me about it. It’s more important than you know, and I guess I’ll have to tell you why. You think you’ve given us all the information you have that would help us, but you haven’t, because one detail of it is wrong. Your letter said that the registration number on the limousine was OJ55, but it couldn’t have been, because no such number has been issued. What I want to know is how close you were to the limousine and how plainly you could see the license plate, and whether you might not have mistaken a C or a G for an O.”
Cliff shook his head again. “I tell you, you’re talking Greek—”
“All right, here’s the point. There is a GJ55, and it belongs to Guthrie Judd.”
Cliff looked startled. He straightened up and folded his arms. “The hell it does,” he said quietly.
Fox nodded. “So you see.”
“Yes. I see.” Cliff screwed up his lips, staring reflectively at Fox’s necktie.
“With most kinds of people,” Fox continued, “a bold and bald statement of the fact would be enough. But in this case, I need to be sure of positive and immovable backing. If you can give it to me without an outrage on your optic nerve—”
“That part of it’s all right. It might easily have been a G instead of an O, and since there is no OJ55 it must have been. It was dark and rainy, and I saw it from a distance as it drove off, and the light on the plate wasn’t very good. I would be quite willing to state positively that it was G, at least for the purpose of pressure. But—” Cliff was silent, his eyes narrowed and his lips compressed, and finally shook his head. “But I can’t do it.” He shook his head again. “No, I simply can’t do it.”
“That’s too bad. I got the impression that you were ready to go through fire and water, and maybe even splash around in the mud a little, to help Miss Duncan.”
“I am. But it wouldn’t be worth — after all, the main thing is the fact, and you have that—”
“Not enough. Not in this case.” Fox leaned forward to appeal to him: “It might never be needed for anything but the pressure, and I’m working for Miss Duncan, and I want it and need it. Don’t be so damn scared of a P. & B. vice-president getting his name in the paper.”
“It’s not that.”
“What is it, then?”
“It’s—” Cliff chopped it off, sat in uncertainty, and at length took a breath of resolution. “It’s Miss Duncan. I was acting like a lovesick jackass.”
“Well,” Fox smiled, “evidently that’s what you are, so what’s wrong with that?”
Cliff’s innermost concerns were much too deeply involved for him to return the smile. “I was watching her,” he blurted. “I was following her.”
“You followed her to Tingley’s?”
“Yes. We had had an engagement for dinner and a show Tuesday evening, and she had canceled it. I thought maybe she had another — I couldn’t help wanting to know what she did that evening. When I left the office—”
“Just after Tingley phoned you. Twenty to six.”
“Yes. I went to Grove Street and watched the entrance to her apartment — that is, the building. I watched from across the street for nearly an hour, but when it started to rain I moved along to a doorway, and just as I did so she came out. She took a taxi at the corner and I managed to flag one soon enough to follow—”
“Wait a minute.” Fox was frowning. “The rain.”
“What’s the matter with it?”
“According to you, it started raining around seven o’clock. Up at my house in the country it started around five, but that’s sixty miles away, so that can’t be what’s wrong with it.” Fox was scowling in concentration. “It’s something else. There’s some reason why it should have been raining long before seven o’clock right here in Manhattan. Are you sure it started at seven?”