“A bit. You trying to make a mystery out of this?”
The detective shrugged. “Looks like pretty much of a mystery already.”
And McLove had to admit that it did.
He spent an hour with the police, both upstairs and down in the street. When they finally left just before noon, he went looking for Margaret Mason. She was back at her desk, surprisingly, looking as if nothing in the world had happened.
“How about lunch?” he said. “Maybe a martini would calm your nerves.”
“I’m all right now, thanks. The offer sounds good, but you’ve got a date.” She passed him an inter-office memo. It was signed by William T. Knox, and it requested McLove’s presence in his office at noon.
“I suppose I have to tell them what I know.”
“Which is?”
“Nothing. Absolutely nothing. All I know is a dozen different things that couldn’t have happened to Calm. I’ll try to get out of there as soon as I can. Will you wait for me? Till one, anyway?” he asked.
“Sure. Good luck.”
He returned her smile, then went down the long hallway to Knox’s office. It wasn’t surprising to find Hamilton and Greene already there, and he settled down in the remaining chair feeling himself the center of attention.
“Well?” Knox asked. “Where is he?”
“Gentlemen, I haven’t the faintest idea.”
“He’s dead, of course.” Jason Greene spoke up.
“Probably,” McLove agreed. “But where’s the body?”
Hamilton rubbed his fingers together in a nervous gesture. “That’s what we have to find out. My phone has been ringing for an hour. The brokers are going wild, to say nothing of Pittsburgh!”
McLove nodded. “I gather the merger stands or falls on Billy Calm.”
“Right! If he’s dead, it’s dead.”
Jason Greene spoke again. “Billy Calm was a great man, and I’d be the last person in the world to try to sink the merger for which he worked so hard. But he’s dead, all right. And there’s just one place the body could have gone.”
“Where’s that?” Knox asked.
“It landed on a passing truck or something like that, of course.”
Hamilton’s eyes widened. “Sure!” he remarked sarcastically.
But McLove reluctantly shook his head. “That was the first thought the police had. We checked it out and it couldn’t have happened. This building is set back from the street; it has to be, on account of this sheer glass wall. I doubt if a falling body could hit the street, and even if it did, the traffic lane on this side is torn up for repairs. And there’s been a policeman on duty there all morning. The body didn’t land on the sidewalk or the street, and no truck or car passed anywhere near enough.”
W. T. Knox blinked and ran a hand through his thinning, but still wavy, hair. “If he didn’t go down, where did he go? Up?”
“Maybe he never jumped,” Hamilton suggested. “Maybe Margaret made the whole thing up.”
McLove wondered at his words, wondered if Margaret had been objecting to some of his jokes again. “You forget that I was out there with her. I saw her face when that window smashed. The best actress in the world couldn’t have faked that expression. Besides, I saw him go in — or at least I saw the door closing after him. It couldn’t close by itself.”
“And the room was empty when you two entered it a moment later,” Knox said. “Therefore Billy must have gone through the window. We have to face the fact. He couldn’t have been hiding under the table.”
“If he didn’t go down,” Sam Hamilton said, “he went up! By a rope to the roof or another window.”
But once more McLove shook his head. “You’re forgetting that none of the windows can be opened. And it’s a long way up to the roof. The people checked it, though. They found nothing but an unmarked sea of melting snow and slush. Not a footprint, just a few pigeon tracks.”
Jason Greene frowned across the desk. “But he didn’t go down, up, or sideways, and he didn’t stay in the room.”
McLove wondered if he should tell them his idea, or wait until later. He decided now was as good a time as any. “Suppose he did jump, and something caught him on the way down. Suppose he’s hanging there now, hidden by the fog.”
“A flagpole? Something like that?”
“But there aren’t any,” Knox protested. “There’s nothing but a smooth glass wall.”
“There’s one thing,” McLove reminded them, looking at their expectant faces. “The thing they use to wash the windows.”
Jason Greene walked to the window. “We can find out easily enough. The sun has just about burned the fog away.”
They couldn’t see from that side of the building, so they rode down in the elevator to the street. As quickly as it had come, the fog seemed to have vanished, leaving a clear and sparkling sky with a brilliant sun seeking out the last remnants of the previous day’s snow. The four of them stood in the street, in the midst of digging equipment abandoned for the lunch hour, and stared up at the great glass side of the Jupiter Steel Building.
There was nothing to see. No body dangling in space, no window-washing scaffold. Nothing.
“Maybe he took it back up to the roof,” Knox suggested.
“No footprints, remember?” McLove tried to cover his disappointment. “It was a long shot, anyway. The police checked the tenants for several floors beneath the broken window, and none of them saw anything. If Calm had landed on a scaffold, someone would have noticed it.”
For a while longer they continued staring up at the building, each of them drawn to the tiny speck on the twenty-first floor where cardboard temporarily covered the shattered glass. “Why,” Jason Greene asked suddenly, “didn’t the cop down here see falling glass when it hit? Was the window broken from the outside?”
McLove smiled. “No, the glass all went out, and down. It was the drilling again; the sound covered the glass hitting. And that section of the sidewalk was blocked off. The policeman didn’t hear it hit, but we were able to find pieces of it. You can see where they were swept up.”
W.T. Knox sighed deeply. “I don’t know. I guess I’ll go to lunch. Maybe we can all think better on a full stomach.”
They separated a few moments after that, and McLove went back up to 21 for Margaret Mason. He found her in Billy Calm’s office with Shirley Taggert. They were on their knees, running their hands over the oak-paneled wall.
“What’s all this?” he asked.
“Just playing detective,” Margaret said. “It was Shirley’s idea. She mentioned about how Mr. Calm always wanted the office door left exactly as it was, and with the directors’ room right next door, even though both rooms were really too small. She thought of a secret panel of some sort.”
“Margaret!” Shirley got reluctantly to her feet. “You make it sound like something out of a dime novel. Really, though, it was a possibility. It would explain how he left the room without jumping from the window.”
“Don’t keep me in suspense,” McLove said. “Did you find anything?”
“Nothing. And we’ve been over both sides of the wall.”
“They don’t build them like they used to in merrie old England. Let’s forget it and have lunch.”
Shirley Taggert smoothed the wrinkles from her skirt. “You two go ahead. You don’t want me along.”
She was gone before they could protest, and McLove wasn’t about to protest too loudly anyway. He didn’t mind Shirley as a coworker but, like everyone else, he was acutely conscious of her position in the office scheme of things. Even now, with Billy Calm vanished into the blue, she was still a dangerous force not to be included at social hours.
He went downstairs with Margaret and they found an empty booth at the basement restaurant across the street. It was a place they often went after work for a drink, though lately he’d seen less of her outside of office hours. Thinking back to the first time he’d become aware of Margaret, he only had fuzzy memories of the tricks Sam Hamilton used to play. He loved to walk up behind the secretaries and tickle them — or occasionally even unzip their dresses — and he had quickly discovered that Margaret Mason was a likely candidate for his attentions. She always rewarded his efforts with a lively scream, without ever really getting upset.