Upstairs, in the apartment, the man-hunter found Lieutenant Geogan and one of his plain-clothes squad, Davis.
“Anything new since the phone call, Geogan?” he asked.
“No, sir.”
“Uh huh.”
Frayne, nodding, glanced about. The hallway was a wide one, with the entrance door about in the center. A kitchen and dining room were toward the rear, with a bath next, almost opposite the door. Then came two bedrooms, with the living room up in front of them, facing the street.
“Where is she?” asked Frayne.
Geogan pointed to the first bedroom.
Frayne went in. A pathetic death chamber, seeing that Baa-Baa had previously had some exceedingly nice boudoirs in other and more genteel parts of the city. There was too much gilt in this one. Too many laces; too many beribboned pillows; too many startling colors.
She lay on the bed, in scant negligee, with a big red bruise on her left jaw and a big dark red patch on her left side with a kitchen knife sticking in the center of it.
“Denham been here yet?”
Denham was the finger-print expert.
“No, sir. We waited for you,” said Geogan. “You’ve asked us to always—”
“Thanks,” said Frayne, and added: “Get Denham, Don.”
Don was at the telephone before Frayne could speak again.
“Maid and Lamont up ahead?”
“Yes, sir. In the living room.”
The manhunter walked up forward, to a room quite as garish as the one in which Baa-Baa had met her death.
Vince Lamont and the colored maid, with an officer in charge, were there. The tout was sitting in a rocker by the window, comfortably stretched out, smoking a cigarette. He didn’t rise, but raised inquiring eyebrows. The maid — a “high yaller” type — was walking the floor and moaning.
“Come out of it,” snapped Frayne.
“Y-yessuh,” she said, and changed her moaning to a sob.
“What’s your name?”
“B-Bethenia, still. Bethenia Gibbons.”
“All right, Bethenia. The sooner you get hold of yourself the sooner you can go — back home, or behind bars, one of the two. Let’s get to work and get your story.”
“Bellin’ bars, suh. Oh, Lawdy, suh, you ain’t meanin’ that for me, is you?”
Frayne didn’t look at her as he spoke. He looked at Vince Lamont, as if silently asking his opinion.
Lamont shrugged. It was an expressive shrug. It said that the maid had, after all, been found in the apartment with her dead mistress.
Frayne nodded, as if in understanding, and then spoke with gentle patience.
“Come now, tell me what happened, Bethenia.”
Bethenia Gibbons did try to pull herself together. She somewhat succeeded. Her lower lip quivered and she shook her head.
“I done tol’ it so many times to them other police gen’lemen, sub.”
“Just try once more,” said Frayne.
“Well, suh, I opened the door with my key at nine o’clock. I always tiptoes to Miss Baa-Baa’s bedroom to see if she’s awake or not, to see if she wants her breakfast or what order has she got. I ain’t only come in the door this mornin’, though, when she asks out in a sleepy an’ yawny kin’ o’ voice — you know, suh — if it’s me. I says yes, an’ then she says go ahead an’ clean up the front room an’ not wake her till about eleven o’clock.”
Frayne frowned. He had seen, when he had looked at the dead body of Baa-Baa Jackson, that rigor mortis had already set in. How could this have occurred had Baa-Baa not been killed until after nine o’clock?
Was the maid lying?
“Did you kill her?” Frayne suddenly snapped. “What was your motive?”
“I didn’ kill her,” the girl said sullenly. “I usta keep a-tellin’ her she would be killed, though, if she didn’ start leadin’ a more clean an’ decent life.”
“Mmmm,” said Frayne. “So you used to tell your mistress that you didn’t approve of her mode of living, eh? How did she take that?”
Bethenia flushed, hung her head, stubbornly remained silent.
“Speak up — speak up,” snapped Frayne.
The girl did.
“She... well, she give me notice to leave the end o’ the week, if you wanta know. I... it’s the fu’st place I ever been fired from, too. I’m a respectable workin’ girl, I am, an’ I’s worked for real quality folk down in—”
“And you killed her because she fired you, eh?”
“I—”
But Frayne had raised a hand. Frayne could always get instant action by merely raising a hand. He got it now. The girl sullenly hung her head.
“Well,” he asked, “what happened when you say she told you this morning to clean up the front room?”
Bethenia Gibbons looked frightened, panicky, for a moment.
“I went right to the front room — right to this here room — and begun a-tidyin’ an’ a-sweepin’ an’ all. I wasn’t here so long, suh — maybe ten minutes, maybe fifteen — an’ then I went to fix the dinin’ room an’ kitchen an’ put a pot o’ coffee on the stove for myself, like I does. I... I dunno. The coffee wasn’t b’iled, quite, when the bell rings, an’ it’s Mistuh Lamont.”
Bethenia hesitated again. She looked at Vince Lamont, a trifle pleadingly. But he shrugged again, and a faint smile came to the lips under his thin, black mustache.
Frayne didn’t nod at him this time. Frayne winked.
“I tol’ Mistuh Lamont that Miss Baa-Baa wanted to sleep till eleven, but he says that’s all right, she wouldn’ min’ him a-wakenin’ her. An’... an’— Well, suh, that’s all they is. He went to wake her an’ he foun’ her dead! So help me God I’m tellin’ you the truth!”
Frayne began pacing up and down the room, then, his eyes narrowing, a slight furrow on his forehead.
The bell rang presently, and some one entered.
“That Denham, Don?” called Frayne.
“Yes, chief,” replied Haggerty, coming to the door.
Frayne sat down suddenly, as if he were a trifle nervous. He took out a pencil and began tapping the arm of his chair, as nervous people frequently do.
But it wasn’t that Frayne was nervous.
The manhunter was tapping out a message to his assistant, in a private code that he and Don had invented.
The message said that Haggerty was to send for Grady, the coroner, and that the latter was to get there without delay.
Frayne rose, stretched, again began to walk leisurely up and down the length of the room. Finally, with a frown, he paused before Vince Lamont.
“What do you think about the whole mess, Lamont?” he abruptly asked, his voice and face frankly puzzled.
IV
The tout smiled. It was a cynical smile, tinged with a touch of candid relief.
“There’s one thing I’m thinking of right now, inspector,” he said, “and that is that here’s one thing they can’t hang on me!”
Frayne regarded him gravely. The thin mouth with the thin black mustache; the dark brown eyes that Baa-Baa had probably liked; the coal black hair showing a contrasting white line where it was parted with meticulous care straight down the middle.
Although his clothes verged slightly on the Broadway cut, Frayne nevertheless noticed that Lamont could be called a well-turned-out man. Frayne was qualified to judge clothes, too. He himself was the best garbed police official that New York or any other city had ever had. He wondered, idly, why it was that on this hot August day Lamont wore silk gloves in the house.
“It doesn’t seem so,” agreed Frayne thoughtfully. “No, it doesn’t.”
“Don’t think I’m such a hard-boiled guy for speaking of that right off the bat, inspector,” Lamont said, suddenly losing his cynicism and looking troubled. “I guess if I didn’t have this cold turkey alibi it could be made to look damn bad for me. I—” he shrugged. “I don’t know what to think, inspector, since you ask me!”