He was trying, but he wasn’t shining much. “Gee, I dunno— I’ve about run out of places. I’d sit on it, maybe, while I was still in the chair, but then as soon as I got up I’d be worse off than before.”
“Never mind, Quinn.” She shook her head dispiritedly. “You’ll make some woman an honest husband. You’re certainly no good for intrigue.”
“Well, I never had a note handed to me in a night-club by somebody, right while I was with somebody else,” he mumbled apologetically.
“I’m willing to take your word for that,” she assented drily.
They went inside again. She stood, looked down at it. All night long, it seemed to her, that was all they’d been doing, standing by it, looking down at it.
“Try that little watch-pocket or whatever you call it, just under the belt in front. Did we turn that one out before? I can’t remember.”
He crouched, hooked his thumb to it, drew it out again.
“Empty.”
“What are they for, anyway?” she asked dully. Then before he could answer, “Never mind. This is no time to be learning the ins and outs of the men’s tailoring business.”
He stayed down like that, at the crouch, dribbling his fingers undecidedly against his own kneecap.
“Quinn, could I ask you to— Would you mind turning him a minute?” she said hesitantly.
“The other way? Do you think we ought to disturb—?”
“We’ve done so much already, emptying the pockets and all, that I don’t see that it matters.”
He turned the form over, face down, as gently as he could. A slight, involuntary twinge of distaste struck through them both, quickly quelled.
“What’d you want that for?” he asked, ridging his forehead at her.
“I don’t know myself,” she said lamely.
He stood up again. They looked at one another uncertainly; at a loss, not knowing what to do next.
“It’s not on him, that’s a cinch. He may have put it somewhere around the place here, after he got back. The desk — we haven’t looked that over yet.”
“That’s going to be an all-night job,” she said, going over to it. “Look at the way it’s crammed with stuff. I tell you what; you go inside and take a look through the bureau-drawers, I’ll give this a quick going-over.”
Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock— In the silence of their preoccupation with their separate tasks it sounded twice as loud.
“Quinn!” she called suddenly.
He came in on the fly.
“You mean it was in there? You came across it that quick?”
She was standing, however, with her back to the desk.
“No. Quinn, he was very well-dressed. I just happened to turn and something caught my eye. He has a hole in the heel of one sock, it’s showing just above the shoe. That doesn’t go with the way he’s turned out. The left one, Quinn.” He was already over by it.
The shoe dropped off with a light thud. The “hole” had vanished with it.
“The note,” he said.
He was already smoothing and starting to read the crumpled little slip of paper by the time she got over to him. They read it together the rest of the way.
It was hastily scrawled in pencil, on some impromptu edge that didn’t take pressure very evenly; the sort of a note written where there were no writing facilities readily available.
“Mr. Graves, I understand? I would like to speak to you in private, at your home, after you have taken the young lady home. And I don’t mean some other time, I mean right tonight. You don’t know me, but I feel like a member of the family already. I wouldn’t want to be disappointed and not find you there.”
Unsigned.
She was hectically elated. “She did, see? She did! She did come up here. She was the woman of the matches — we were right about it. I forget which one of us it was—”
He was less positive, for some reason. “But 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.”
“How do we know?”
“Listen, anyone that would go this far would go the rest of the way, don’t kid yourself. This was no shrinking violet. A girl or woman that would scribble out such a defiant note, and strong-arm her way onto a conga-line, and smuggle it into the hand of a prominent well-to-do man like Stephen Graves, without even knowing him, mind you, and under the very nose of the girl he was engaged to marry, wouldn’t let anything stop her from coming around here and calling on him, once she’d made up her mind to it! Get this: ‘And I don’t mean some other time, I mean right tonight.’ That dame was here, you can bet your bottom dollar!”
Then she added, “And if the character-reading approach doesn’t cinch it for you, give it the blindfold-test. That ought to do it.”
“What do you mean?”
“She goes with the kind of perfume that the match-folder gave off, and that I guessed at in the air of the room here when we came in the first time. The kind of a dame who would write a note like this is also the kind of a dame whose handbag would reek like that. She was here,” she said again.
“It still doesn’t follow from that, that she shot him. She might have been here all right, and left, and then this cigar-mangling guy came in after she was already gone.”
“I don’t know anything about him. I do know there’s plenty of shooting-material right here in this note, even before she got to the point of personal contact with him.”
“There is kind of a threat in it,” he admitted.
“A threat? The whole thing is threat, from the first word to the last. ‘Mr. Graves, I understand?’ ‘I wouldn’t want to be disappointed and not find you.’ What else would you call that?”
He was reading it over again. “It’s some kind of a shake, don’t you think?”
“Sure it’s a shake. A threat almost always spells a money-squeeze, and particularly when it’s from a woman to a man.”
“ ‘I feel like a member of the family already.’ What does she mean by that? He was engaged to this Barbara. It makes it look like it’s someone he got tangled up with before then, and when she heard about him becoming engaged— All except for one thing—”
“Yeah, I thought of that too, when I first read it. All except for that one thing, as you say.”
“ ‘You don’t know me.’ So how can a guy get tangled up with someone, and still not know her? Unless maybe she’s fronting for some other dame, making the approach. She’s the, how would you call it — middleman? Maybe a sister, or someone like that.”
She lopped that off short. “Nuh, never. That’s one thing, if you knew more about women— You’ll never find a woman using another woman for go-between, in a squeeze-play stemming from heart-interest stuff. Don’t ask me why, but that’s the hard-and-fast of it. A man might, in business or some kind of crookedness. But never a woman, in anything of this kind. She either does the dirty work herself, or it doesn’t get done.”
“Then he wasn’t tangled with her. And yet she had something on him.”
“And he knew she had something on him, or at least had a hunch she did. The way he acted after getting the note shows that. He met the writer of it part of the way, on her own ground. Look, see what I mean? Barbara was jealous of another kind of a note, which she thought this was. Of a friendly, a too-friendly note, from somebody that he knew, that he was flirting with behind her back. All he had to do to calm her down was show her this, show her what kind of a note it really was. But he’d rather keep it to himself, even at the cost of letting her work herself up and of parting from her on bad terms. Why shouldn’t he want to show it to her? Or better still, why didn’t he get up from the table then and there, go over and accost the woman before she left the place. ‘What d’you mean by this? Who are you? What’re you driving at?’ Force the thing out into the open.” She shook her head. “He had more than a slight suspicion that there was something behind it that needed to be handled with kid gloves, and you can’t tell me different. That she had at least part of a leg to stand on, if not the whole two; that there was fire somewhere behind the smoke. He played it her way, soft-pedalled it. And why should he have to? People don’t do that. Would you—?” Then she quickly cancelled that out. “Oh, never mind you; you’re no good at that stuff, anyway. I forgot that, from before.”