I wasn’t having any. It was like asking you to leave your right arm behind you, chopped off at the shoulder. “You go up and stick there by that empty flat. I’m going out and get a cop.” It sounds firm enough on paper, it came out plenty shaky and sick. I bounded down the stairs. In the vestibule I stopped short, punched that same 4F bell. His voice sounded hollowly through the interviewer after a minute-“Yuss?”
“It’s me. The bell works all right up there, does it?”
“Sure.”
“Okay, stay there. I’ll be right back.” I didn’t know what good that had done. I went on out, bareheaded.
The one I brought back with me wasn’t anything to rave about on the score of native intelligence. It was no time to be choosy. All he kept saying all the way back to the house was “All right, take it easy.” He was on the janitor’s plane, and immediately I had two of them against me instead of one.
“You saw her go in, did ye?”
I controlled myself with an effort. “Yes.”
“But you don’t know for sure which floor she got off at?”
“She rang 4F, so I know she got off at the fourth—”
“Wait a minute, you didn’t see her, did ye?”
“No, I didn’t see her.”
“That’s all I wanted to know. You can’t say for sure she went into this flat, and the man here says it’s been locked up for months.”
He rang every bell in every flat of the building and questioned the occupants. No one had seen such a girl. The pot-cheese lady with the little boy remembered having seen me, that was the closest he got to anything. And one other flat, on the fifth, reported a ring at their bell with no follow-up.
I quickly explained I’d done that, to gain admittance to the building.
Three out of the twenty-four occupancies in the building were out; IB, 3C and 3F. He didn’t pass them by either. Had the janitor passkey their doors and examined the premises. Not a trace of her anywhere.
That about ended his contribution. According to his lights he’d done a thorough job, I suppose. “All right,” he said, “I’ll phone it in for you, that’s the most I can do.”
God knows how he expressed it over the wire. A single plain-clothasman was dropped off at the door a few minutes later, came in to where the three of us were grouped waiting in the inner lobby. He looked me over like he was measuring me for a new suit of clothes. He didn’t say anything.
“Hello, Gilman,” the cop said. “This young fellow says he brought a girl here, and she disappeared in there.” Putting the burden of the proof on me, I noticed. “I ain’t been able to find anyone that saw her with him,” he added helpfully.
“Let’s see the place,” the dick said.
We all went up there again. He looked around. Better than I had, maybe, but just as unproductively. He paid particular attention to the windows. Every one of the six, two regular-size apiece for the two main rooms, one small one each for the bath and kitchenette, was latched on the inside. There was a thick veneer of dust all around the frames and in the finger-grips. You couldn’t have grabbed them any place to hoist them without it showing. And it didn’t. He studied the keyhole.
He finally turned to me and gave me the axe. “There’s nothing to show that she — or anyone else — ever came in here, bud.”
“She rang the bell of this flat, and someone released the doorcatch for her from up here.” I was about as steady as jello in a high wind about it. I was even beginning to think I could see a ghost in the corner.
“We’re going to check on that right now,” he said crisply. “There’s already one false ring accounted for, attributable to you. What we want is to find out if there was a second one registered, anywhere in the building.”
We made the rounds again, all twenty-four flats. Again the fifth-floor flat reported my spiked ring — and that was all. No one else had experienced any, for the past twenty-four hours or more. And the fifth-floor party had only gotten the one, not two.
That should have been a point in my favor: she hadn’t rung any of the other flats and been admitted from them, therefore she must have rung 4F and been admitted from there — as I claimed. Instead he seemed to twist it around to my discredit: she hadn’t rung any of the other flats and been admitted from them, and since there could have been no one in 4F to hear her ring and admit her from there, she hadn’t rung any bell at all, she hadn’t been admitted at all, she hadn’t been with me at all. I was a wack. Which gave me a good push in the direction of being one, in itself.
I was in bad shape by now. I started to speak staccato. “Say listen, don’t do this to me, will you? You all make it sound like she didn’t come here with me at all.”
He gave me more of the axe. “That’s what it does sound like to us.”
I turned northeast, east, east-by-south, like a compass on a binge. Then I turned back to him again. “Look.” I took the show-tickets out of my pocket, held them toward him with a shaky wrist. “I was going to take her to a show tonight—”
He waved them aside. “We’re going to build this thing from the ground up first and see what we’ve got. You say her name is Stephanie Riska.” I didn’t like that “you say.”
“Address?”
“120 Farragut.”
“What’d she look like?”
I should have known better than to start in on that. It brought her before me too plainly. I got as far as “She comes up to here next to me—” Then I stopped again.
The cop and janitor looked at me curiously, like they’d never seen a guy cry before. I tried to turn my head the other way, but they’d already seen the leak.
The dick seemed to be jotting down notes, but he squeezed out a grudging “Don’t let it get you,” between his eye-tooth and second molar while he went ahead doing it.
I said: “I’m not scared because she’s gone. I’m scared because she’s gone in such a fairy-tale way. I can’t get a grip on it. Like when they sprinkle a pinch of magic powder and make them disappear in thin air. It’s got me all loose in the joints, and my guts are rattling against my backbone, and I believe in ghosts all over again.”
My spiritual symptoms didn’t cut any ice with him. He went right ahead with the business at hand. “And you met her at 6:15 outside the Bailey-Goodwin Building, you say, with a package to be delivered here. Who’d she work for?”
“A press-clipping service called the Green Star; it’s a one-man organization, operated by a guy named Hessen. He just rented one dinky little rear room, on the ground floor of the Bailey-Goodwin Building.”
“What’s that?”
“I don’t know myself. She tried to explain it to me once. They keep a list of clients’ names, and then they sift through the papers, follow them up. Any time one of the names appears, in connection with any social activity or any kind of mention at all, they clip the item out, and when they’ve got enough of them to make a little batch, they send them to the client, ready for mounting in a scrap-book. The price for the service is about five bucks a hundred, or something like that.”
“How is there any coin in that?” he wanted to know.
“I don’t know myself, but she was getting twenty-two a week.”
“All right. Now let’s do a little checking.” He took me back with him to where she worked, first of all. The building was dead, of course, except one or two offices, doing night-work on the upper floors. He got the night-watchman, showed his credentials, and had him open up the little one-room office and let us in.
I’d never been in the place myself until now. I’d always waited for her outside at the street-entrance at closing time. I don’t think it was even intended for an office in the first place; it was more like a chunk of left-over storage-space. It didn’t even have a window at all, just an elongated vent up near the ceiling, with a blank shaft-wall about two feet away from it.