She resumed the inventory. “Here’s his wallet. With a snapshot of himself and a girl in riding togs.”
He scanned it. “She’s in the bedroom, too, in a silver frame. Signed Barbara.”
“Then she didn’t do it. If she had, she wouldn’t still be in the bedroom in a silver frame. That’s common sense.”
“That cleans his pockets. And we’re still no further than before.”
“At least we got two names out of thin air. Holmes and Barbara.”
“What’s that?”
They both jumped violently. They were so keyed up, the sound confused them. It seemed to come from two places at once; faintly from the floor below, and a little clearer from somewhere near at hand, both synchronized.
Frank identified it first. “It’s a telephone fitted with one of these muted bells.” He went toward the bedroom entrance, looked in. “There’s an extension in here, ringing in time with the one below. Somebody that doesn’t know what’s happened is trying to get him. I’m... I’m going to take a chance and answer.” He started into the other room.
She flashed after him. Her hand found his wrist, tightened around it, ice-cold. “Don’t! We’re not supposed to be here. You’ll bring the police down on us!”
“And if I don’t answer, that’ll be an even quicker giveaway. He is supposed to be here, but he’s not supposed to be dead. I’ll have to pretend I’m he. Maybe I can get away with it.”
“But suppose it’s someone that knows his voice?”
“I’ll try to make mine sound sleepy, faint, as if I just woke up.” He poised his hand above it, ready. “Stand here by me. And keep your fingers crossed for all you’re worth!”
He lifted it as gingerly as if it were charged with high-voltage electricity. “Hello,” he said with somnolent indistinctness.
Her heart was pounding. He listened a minute. Then he hitched his head toward the dresser, for her benefit. She knew what he meant. This was Barbara now, the girl in the silver frame. And Barbara must know Gadsby pretty well, to ring up at such an hour and have her photo in his bedroom.
His face was white with strain, and she could see a pulse at the base of his throat flickering. He let the caller do most of the talking. He grunted and mouthed little blurred half-words at intervals, to show that he was still listening. “Mmm... yeah... um-hum.”
Once she heard him say, “I just wanted to tease you,” holding his face as far away from the mouthpiece as he could while yet hoping to remain audible. And at the end he said: “Guess I am kind of sleepy, at that. Call you first thing t’morrow.”
Then he hung up with a swift thrust of his hand and sort of wavered there, wiping the sweat out of his eyes.
“Whew! That was horrible!” He grimaced. “Making love to a dead man’s girl, with him lying stark dead in the very next room!” He drew the back of his hand across his mouth remorsefully. “They were engaged,” he said. “She was his fiancee. At least, she’ll have one last good night’s sleep before her heart breaks...”
“Did you manage to find out anything?”
“About that?” He motioned toward the next room. “How could I? She doesn’t know herself yet. She left him at about half-past two or so. She was out with him all evening, and they had a quarrel just before she left him. The call was to try to patch it up with him. She couldn’t sleep, she said, until they’d made up again.”
“Could you gather what the quarrel was about?”
“Yes. She thought she was rehashing the whole thing with him, the way people do, and in that way I got the drift of it. He took her to the Winter Garden, and then afterwards to the Club la Conga. While they were in there, she thought she caught one of the hostesses, a tall redhead, trying to signal to him behind her back. She paid no attention at first.
“Then a few minutes later she was sure she detected the waiter palming a note in his hand. She accused him of flirting, and he insisted he didn’t know the redhead, had never seen her before in his life. He also denied that he’d just received a note from her. And that started their quarrel. He seemed ill at ease, in a hurry to leave, after that. He saw her to her door, and they parted on the outs.”
“If we could only see what was in that note. If we only knew what he did with it!”
“Tore it up into little pieces, I suppose.”
“No, that would be admitting he had gotten one, and he didn’t want her to know it.”
“We’ve turned out all his pockets and it’s not in any of them.”
She tapped the curve of her lower lip thoughtfully. “Frank, you’re a man. Just suppose you were sitting at a table with a girl you were engaged to, and got a note from a stranger you didn’t want her to see. What would you be likely to do with it? Answer quick now, without taking too long to think it out.”
“Reach down under the tablecloth and shove it in my shoe, most likely.”
She turned and went out into the other room without a word. By the time he had followed, she was crouched down by the still form in there, her back toward him, wrenching at one of its extremities. Something thudded. Then she wrenched a second time. She didn’t say anything. She straightened and turned toward him, smoothing a crumpled little slip of paper. She handed it to him when she’d finished reading it. It said:
Mr. Gadsby, I understand? You don’t know me, but your younger brother Tommy does — considerably so. I would like to speak to you in private, at your home, after you have taken the young lady home. You better find time to see me or it’ll be just too bad.
It was unsigned, of course.
He creased his face disappointedly. “Not much in that. The mere fact that he received the note and tucked it in his shoe doesn’t prove she actually did show up here.”
“She was here, you can count on that,” Carol let him know with a confident nod of her head.
“How do you know?”
“Anyone that would compose such a defiant note and have it smuggled into the hand of a prominent, well-to-do man whom she didn’t even know, under the very nose of the girl he was engaged to marry, wouldn’t let herself be stopped from calling around to see him once she’d made up her mind to do it!”
“That still doesn’t prove she shot him. I think it was Holmes; he had a defalcation of twelve thousand five hundred dollars to cover up.”
“Well, we’ve got to know, or that’ll make it you — and neither one of them! We have about sixty-five minutes left. You take Holmes, and I’ll take her. It’s a toss-up between them.”
“But you don’t even know her name, or where to find her!”
“We know where she works now, and we know she’s a tall redhead. They can’t all be tall redheads down at the La Conga Club.”
“The place’ll be closing by now.”
“The people that can be really helpful will still be around — waiters, scrub-women, washroom attendant. I’ll trace her from there if I have to go over the hairbrushes in the dressing-room one by one for stray red hairs!”
“I thought you said we should stick together in this?”
She was already out at the head of the darkened stairs. “There isn’t time now any more! Here’s how it is. We have these two possibilities now, a man and a woman who both came here tonight — at separate times. One of them’s innocent, one of them killed him. The thing is which? We haven’t time for the trial-and-error system; we can’t fo’low them up one at a time.