“No,” he whispered deprecatingly.
“Stephen, can’t you talk louder? You’re whispering, almost as though you were afraid of waking someone. And if you’re awake yourself, who else is there in the house to be afraid of waking?”
The dead, thought Bricky, with an inward grimace.
He clapped his hand to it. “She’s beginning to tumble. What am I going to do?”
She sensed that he was about to hang up in sheer desperation, as the quickest way out. “Don’t. Don’t do that, whatever you do. Then you will give yourself away.”
He went back to it again. “Stephen, I don’t like the way you’re acting. Just what is going on up there? This is Stephen, isn’t it?”
He muffled it again. “She’s catching on. I’m sunk.”
“Wait a minute, don’t lose your head. I’ll get you out of it. Turn it my way a little.”
Suddenly she spoke out, full voice, in a maudlin, drunken singsong aimed straight for the telephone-mouth.
“Sugar, come awn. I’m getting tired waiting. I want another drink. How much longer you gonna stand there talking?”
There was a flash of shock at the other end, that was almost like a molecular explosion; without sound or substance to it, yet he could almost feel the concussion of it whirling through the wire toward him, it was so intense. And then the voice withdrew. Not in physical distance but through strata of pain. Withdrew to a remoteness that could never be bridged again.
When it sounded again, there was no indignation. There was nothing. Not even acute coldness, which is an inverse form of heat after all. There was only classic, neutral politeness.
The voice said just two things more. “Oh, I’m sorry, Stephen.” And breathed once or twice in agony between. “Forgive me, I didn’t know.”
There was a click, and silence.
“That was a lady,” Bricky apotheosized her ruefully when he’d hung up in turn. “A lady through and through.”
He drew the back of his hand across his mouth remorsefully. “Gee, that was cruel. I wish we hadn’t had to do that. She was engaged to him after all — whoever she is.” Then he looked at her curiously. “How were you so certain that would do the trick?”
“I’m a girl myself, after all,” she said wistfully. “We all work on the same strings.”
They thought about her for a moment longer, both turning to look at her, over there in her silver frame. “She won’t sleep tonight,” he murmured. “We’ve given her a busted heart.”
“She had to have one, one way or the other. The funny part of it is, though, she’ll suffer more this way than she would if she’d found out he was dead. Don’t ask me why.”
They left her, then, and returned to their own concerns.
“Well, we know a little more than we did before,” he said. “We’ve filled in another little chunk of missing time. They went to the show at the Winter Garden, Hellzapoppin, first, and then they went to this place where they had the trouble. The Piro — what’d she say it was?”
“The Perroquet.” She had the night-life of this city that she hated at the tips of her fingers at all times. “I know where that is, on Fifty-fourth Street.”
“But that still don’t bring it up to the point where he came back here and it happened. There’s still a chunk out, between the time he left her at her door and—”
She was thinking about it.
“There’s something right there. And something big. The biggest thing we’ve had so far all night. He must have gotten a note, there must have been one.” She went over closer to the picture. “This doesn’t look like the face of a girl who would make up a thing like that, out of her own jealous mind. Take a look at her. She’s too pretty and too sure of herself to think up things to worry about. If she says she saw it, she saw it, you can bet on that. There was a note. The thing is, what became of it? If we only knew what he did with it.”
“Tore it up into a million little pieces, I guess.”
“No, because if he did that while he was still with her, that would have been admitting he had gotten one after all, and he didn’t want her to know it. And then once he’d left her, there was no longer any reason to tear it up, she wasn’t around to claim it any more. He could leave it whole, the way it was. And most likely he did. What I’d like to know is, where did he have it hidden while he was still sitting with her in the club? He had it on him somewhere.”
“We’ve turned out all his pockets and it’s not in any of them—”
She tapped the curve of her underlip thoughtfully. “Let’s go at it this way. Quinn, you’re a man. I imagine you’d all act pretty much the same in a given situation. You’re in a night-club entertaining the girl you’re engaged to, and you’ve just been handed a note by a stranger, a note you didn’t want her to see. What would you be likely to do with it, where would you be likely to put it? Answer quick now, without taking too long to think it out. If you start thinking about it, that’ll make it artificial.”
“I’d roll it up in a little pill and pitch it.”
“No. You’re on a conga-line when it’s first slipped to you, there isn’t any chance for you to do that. If you take your hand off your partner’s waist you’re likely to go out of step and disorganize the line.”
“Well, I could drop it straight down the floor under me, without hardly moving my hand at all; just let it fall.”
“No again. That way it would be carried backward along the floor, under the line, and all your fiancée would have to do when she came up to that point would be to reach down for it herself. The main thing is, she didn’t see him do either of those things, and she was watching him from two positions away down the line — which is close enough to be accurate. He got it and then it disappeared, not another sign of it, either being thrown or being pocketed.”
“Then he must have kept it folded flat on the inside of his hand.”
“Exactly. Now here’s what I’m trying to get at by testing you. The line breaks up and he takes her back to their table. That’s when he stuffed it away some place, as soon as he had the table between them to cover him. Now try again. You’re sitting at the table with her, and she’s already starting to throw the incident up to you, so you can’t just be passive about it and let it ride. You’re covered up to here—” She drew a line across him just above the belt. “It’s in your hand yet, from the conga-line, and you’ve got to get it out of your hand fast. You can’t use your upper pockets, nor your wallet, nor your cigarette-case, because she’ll see all that, that’s above the water-line.”
“I’d throw it away under the table—”
“Never. One reading isn’t enough, especially on a conga-chain while you’re kicking out with both feet. You want to look at it again, to study it or decide what to do as soon as you’re alone and you safely can. He became uneasy from then on, she said to you just now. Showing that the note gave him a problem, he had to make a decision. That kind of a thing’s never thrown away after one quick glimpse. It was unfinished business. He kept it. But where?”
“Maybe he slipped it under the table-cloth, on his side.”
For a minute she stopped, startled. Then she said finally, “No-o. No, I don’t think he did that. That would still mean leaving it behind, when they got up to go. It would also mean some stranger would eventually get hold of it. He’d be less likely to do that than even to just throw it away. And I don’t think he could do that without her noticing the rippling of the cloth his hand would make. Remember, he’s trying to quiet down a girl who’s mad and has a right to be, a girl sitting squarely opposite to him, and they have six eyes and about a dozen extra senses.”