“Cigarette-case. Silver. Tiffany’s. Given to him by somebody with the initial B. ‘To S from B.’ Three cigarettes left in it. Dunhills.” Snap. She closed it again, put it down.
“Wallet. Pin seal, Mark Cross. Two fives and a single. Two ticket stubs from tonight’s show at the Winter Garden. C-112, 114. Third row in the orchestra, that must be. Well, we know where he was tonight from eight-forty to eleven, at least.”
“Two-and-a-half hours out of thirty-five years,” he said morbidly.
“We don’t have to go back through his whole life. We only have to go forward about two, two-and-a-half hours, from curtain-time on. He wasn’t killed at the Winter Garden; he was still alive when he walked out of there. That’s already narrowed the evening down a lot, that’s taken a big chunk out of it.”
“Anything else in it?”
“Business cards. Stafford, whoever that is. Holmes, whoever that is. Ingoldsby, whoever that is. I guess that’s about— No, wait a minute, here’s something else, in this second little compartment here. A snapshot. A snapshot of a girl in riding togs, and himself, both on horseback.”
“Let me see it.”
He scanned it, nodded. “That’s the one I saw him leave the house with, early tonight. She’s also inside there, in the bedroom, in a silver frame. I saw her when I went in before. Signed Barbara.”
“Then she didn’t do it. If she had, she wouldn’t still be in there in his bedroom in a silver frame. Just the frame might, by itself, but not her any more. That’s ordinary common sense.”
“That’s all for that pocket. Now I’ll take the four in the trousers, two side, two rear. Left rear, nothing. Right rear, spare handkerchief, nothing else. Left side, nothing. Right side, his latchkey and a gob of change.”
She counted it over listlessly, as if realizing how immaterial it was. “Eighty-four cents,” she said, and planked it down.
“That finishes the pockets of his clothing. And we’re still no further than before.”
“Yes we are, Quinn. A good deal. Don’t say that. After all, we didn’t expect to find a piece of paper with ‘To whom it may concern: So-and-so killed me,’ written on it, did we? We’ve pulled a name out of thin air — Barbara — and we know what Barbara looks like, and that she was out with him in the early part of the evening tonight. We also know where it was they were together. That trims the blank down to just the couple of hours before and after midnight. I think that’s a whole lot for just one set of pockets to tell us.”
Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock—
She looked down at the floor. She reached out and pressed her hand down atop his for a moment, as if to steady, as if to encourage him. “I know,” she said almost inaudibly. “Don’t look at it, Quinn. Don’t look around at it. We can do it, Quinn. We can. We can make it. Keep saying that.”
She got to her feet.
“Shall I put this stuff back?” he asked.
“Leave it there for now. It doesn’t matter much.”
He got up after her.
“Let’s take the room next,” she said. “The room around him. We’ve tried him, now let’s tackle the room, see what we can do with that.” They separated, with the corpse for an axis. “You start over there. I’ll start over here.”
“What are we looking for?” he said dully, with his back to her.
I don’t know, she felt like wailing. Oh, God, I don’t know myself!
Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock—
She dropped her eyes, to miss seeing its dial, even as she passed right in front of it. Like an ostrich with its head in the sand, she told herself. It wasn’t easy to do, either; it was over there on her side of the room, staring her right in the face. The books on one shelf had been parted in two to receive it in the middle.
“Green Light,” she murmured aloud, as her feet slowly side-stepped along. “Oil for the Lamps of China, Personal History—” Then dropped her eyes.
Tick-tock! A moment gone, a moment out of their scanty store.
Then raised them again on the right-hand side of it. “North to the Orient, The Tragedy of X— He wasn’t much of a reader,” she commented.
“How do you know?” he asked curiously from his side of the room.
“It’s just a hunch of mine. When a person’s a heavy reader, all the books on his shelves would be pretty much alike, I mean pretty much of one type. This is just a smattering; one of this kind, one of that. He probably only read one maybe once in six months or so, when he had a wakeful night or something.”
She was the one who first came to it, and stopped.
Then after a thoughtful moment she called over to him, “Quinn.”
“Yes?”
“A man that’s a cigarette-smoker — and we found that case in his pocket — would he also go in for cigars, as a rule?”
“He’d be apt to, yes. Plenty of people smoke both. Why, did you find a cigar-butt over there?”
“Well, would he be apt to smoke two? Alone, by himself? There are two butts on this tray here—”
He came over to her and looked at it.
“I think he had somebody up here with him,” she said. “Some man. You can’t tell which of these two chairs the stand goes with, it’s out where it can be reached from both. One butt’s in one notch of the tray, and the other’s in another notch, around on the other side from it.”
He bent down and looked more closely. “He didn’t smoke both. Those are two different brands, and nobody does that. There was somebody up here with him, all right. Here’s another thing. They were having an argument of some kind, too. Or at least, one of them was worked up about something, even if the other one wasn’t. Look at the butt on this side. Smooth at the mouth-end; a little soggy, but still intact. Now look at the one over here. Chewed to ribbons at the mouth-end; fringe. One of those smokers was all steamed up over something. That tells it.” He looked up at her. “This is the best thing we’ve had so far. This is the best of the lot.”
“Which was the keyed-up one and which the calm, though? Graves or the other man? We don’t know.”
“No, but that doesn’t matter so much. It does show us that there was another man up here, and that’s what counts for us. The mere fact that there were two different brands of cigars shows that the interview wasn’t a friendly one. One of them refused the other man’s offer of a cigar — or else it wasn’t even made — and smoked his own. They smoked at the same time, but not together, if you see what I mean. There was a strain, a row or an argument of some kind, going on.”
“It’s good, but it’s not good enough,” she agreed. “It doesn’t tell us who the other man was.”
He moved around to the wall-side of one of the chairs; not that they were pressed close up against the wall, but to the side away from the middle of the room, which their own bulk had kept screened until now.
“Here’s the drink of one of them, put down on the floor close up against his chair.”
“Is there one for the other?” she asked quickly, jealously protective of his theory of ill-will.
He moved over to the inside of the second chair, looked down. “No.”
She drew a quick breath of relief. “Then that proves they weren’t on friendly terms. For a minute I was worried. It also shows us that this must have been Graves, sitting over here, where the empty glass was. He was the host. He helped himself to a drink, but didn’t invite the caller. Or else did, but the caller, because he was sore, refused.”