There was a flat-topped desk taking up one side, his I guess, with a phone on it and a wire paper-basket and nothing else. And a smaller-size “desk,” this time a real table and not a desk at all, with nothing on it at all. The rest was just filing cabinets. Oh yeah, and a coat-rack. He must have been getting it for a song.
“What a telephone-booth,” remarked the dick.
He looked in the filing-cabinets; they were just alphabetized names, with a scattering of newspaper-clippings distributed among them. Some of the names they didn’t have any clippings for, and some of the letters they didn’t even have any clients for — and I don’t mean only X.
“There’s about a hundred bucks’ worth of clippings in the whole kitty,” Gilman said, “at your own estimate of what the charge was.” He didn’t follow up with what he meant by that, and I was too worried about her to pay any attention to his off-side remarks. The only thing that meant anything to me was, there was nothing around the place to show him that she had ever worked here or even been here in her life. Nothing personalized, I mean. The single drawer of the little table just had a pair of shears for clipping and a pot of paste for mounting, and a stack of little salmon-colored paper mounts.
The night-watchman couldn’t corroborate me, because the place was always locked up by the time he came on-shift. And the elevator-runners that worked the building in the daytime wouldn’t have been able to either, I knew, even if they’d been on hand, because this hole-in-the-wall was on a branch-off of the main entrance-corridor, she didn’t have to pass the cars on her way in from or out to the street, so they’d probably never seen her the whole time she’d worked here.
The last thing he did, after he’d gotten Hessen’s name and address, which was readily available in the place itself, was to open a penknife and cut a notch from the under-side of the small table. At least, it looked like he was doing that from what I could see, and he kept his back to me and didn’t offer any explanation. He thumbed me at the door and said, “Now we’ll go out there and hear what he has to say.” His tone held more of an eventual threat in it toward me than toward her employer though, I couldn’t help noticing.
It was a bungalow-type place on the outskirts, and without being exactly a mansion, it wasn’t low-cost housing. You walked up flat stones to get to the door, and it had dwarf Japanese fir-trees dotted all around it.
“Know him?” he said while we were waiting.
“By sight,” I swallowed. I had a feeling of that quicksand I’d been bogging into ever since she’d left me in the lobby at Martine Street, being up to my eyes now and getting ready to close over the top of my head. This dick mayn’t have taken sides yet, but that was the most you could say; he certainly wasn’t on my side.
A guy with a thin fuzz on his head, who looked like he belonged to some unhealthy nationality nobody ever heard of before, opened the door, stepped in to announce us, came back and showed us in, all in fast time.
A typewriter was clicking away busily somewhere near at hand, and I thought it was him first, her boss, but it wasn’t. He was smoking a porcelain-bowled pipe and reading a book under a lamp. Instead of closing the book, he just put his finger down on the last word he’d read to keep his place, so he could go right ahead as soon as this was over with. He was tall and lean, with good features, and dark hair cut so short it just about came out of his scalp and then stopped.
Gilman said; “Did you ever see this young fellow before?”
He eyed me. He had a crease under one eye; it wasn’t a scar so much as an indentation from digging in some kind of a rimless glass. “No-o,” he said with a slow benevolence. A ghost of a smile pulled at his mouth. “What’s he done?”
“Know anyone named Muller, at 415 Martine Street?” There hadn’t been any Muller in the filing-cabinets at the office.
“No-o, I don’t know anyone by that name there or anywhere else. I think we have a Miller, a Mrs. Elsie Miller on our list, who all the time divorces and marries. Will that do?” He sighed tolerantly. “She owes us twenty-nine dollars.”
“Then you didn’t send a package over to Muller, Apartment 4F, 415 Martine Street, at 6:15 this evening?”
“No,” he said again, as evenly as the other two times. I started forward spasmodically. Gilman braked me with a cut of his hand. “I’m sure I didn’t. But wait, it is easy enough to confirm that.” He raised his voice slightly, without being boorish about it. And right there in front of me, right there in the room with me, he called — “Stephanie. Stephanie Riska, would you mind coming in here a moment?”
The clicking of the typewriter broke off short and a chair scraped in the next room. “Steffie,” I said huskily, and swallowed past agony, and the sun came up around me and it wasn’t night any more, and the bad dream was over.
“My assistant happens to be right here at the house tonight; I had some dictation to give her and she is transcribing it. We usually mail out clippings however, only when there is an urgent request do I send them around by personal messen—”
“Yes sir?” a velvety contralto said from the doorway.
I missed some of the rest of it. The lights took a half-turn to the right, streaking tracks across the ceiling after them like comet-tails, before they came to a stop and stood still again. Gilman reached over and pulled me up short by the coatsleeve, as though I’d been flopping around loose in my shoes or something.
She was saying, “No, I don’t believe I do,” in answer to something he had asked her, and looking straight over at me. She was a brunette of an exotic foreign type, and she came up as high as me, and the sun had gone out again and it was night all over again.
“That isn’t Steffie!” I bayed. “He’s calling somebody else by her name!”
The pupils of Hessen’s eyes never even deflected toward me. He arched his brows at Gilman. “That is the only young lady I have working for me.”
Gilman was holding me back with sort of a half-nelson. Or half a half-nelson. The brunette appeared slightly agitated by my outburst, no more. She hovered there uncertainly in the doorway, as though not knowing whether to come in or go out.
“How long have you been working for Mr. Hessen?” Gilman asked her.
“Since October of last year. About eight months now.”
“And your name is Stephanie Riska?”
She smiled rebukingly, as if at the gratuitousness of such a question. “Yes, of course.” She decided to come a little further forward into the room. But she evidently felt she needed some moral support to do so. She’d brought a small black handbag with her, tucked under her arm, when she left the typewriter. She opened it, so that the flap stood up toward Gilman and me, and plumbed in it for something. The two big gold-metal initials were so easy to read, even upside-down; they were thick, bold Roman capitals, S. R. The bag looked worn, as though she’d had it a long time. I could sense, rather than see, Gilman’s mind’s eye turned accusingly toward me: “What about it now?” though his physical ones were fastened on the bag.
She got what she was looking for out of it, and she got more than she was looking for. She brought up a common ordinary stick of chewing-gum in tin-foil, but she also accidentally brought up an envelope with it, which slipped through her fingers to the floor. She was very adroitly awkward, to coin a phrase.
Gilman didn’t exactly dive for it, but he managed to get his fingers on it a half-inch ahead of hers. “Mind?” he said. I read the address on it with glazed eyes, over his shoulder. It had been postmarked and sent through the mail. “Miss Stephanie Riska, 120 Farragut Street.” He stripped the contents out of it and read the single sheet of note-paper. Then he gravely handed it back. Again I could feel his mind’s eye on me.