I made for the Martine Street flat. That was instinctive: the place I’d last seen her, calling me back. Either the car didn’t start right up after me or I shook it off in my erratic zigzag course through the streets. Anyway I got there still unhindered.
I ganged up on the janitor’s bell, my windpipe making noises like a stuffed drainpipe. I choked, “Steffie!” a couple of times to the mute well-remembered vestibule around me. I was more demented than sane by now. Gilman was slowly driving me into the condition he’d already picked for me ahead of time.
The janitor came up with a sweater over his nightshirt. He said, “You again? What is it — didn’t you find her yet? What happened to the other fellow that was with you?”
“He sent me back to take another look,” I said craftily. “You don’t have to come up, just gimme the passkey.”
He fell for it, but killed a couple of valuable minutes going down to get it again. But I figured I was safe for the night; that it was my own place, across town, Gilman would make a beeline for.
I let myself in and fit it up and started looking blindly all around — for what I didn’t know, where a professional detective had been over this ground once already and gotten nothing. The story-book ending, I kept looking for the story-book ending, some magic clue that would pop up and give her back to me. I went around on my hands and knees, casing the cracks between the floorboards; I tested the walls for secret panels (in a $50-a-month flat!); I dug out plaster with my bare nails where there was a hole, thinking I’d find a bullet, but it was only a mouse-hole.
I’d been in there about ten minutes when I heard a subtle noise coming up the hall-stairs outside. I straightened to my feet, darted through the door, ran down the hall to the stairs. Gilman was coming up, like thunder ’cross the China Bay, with a cop and the janitor at his heels. It was the fool janitor’s carpet-slippers, which had no heel-grip, that were making more noise than the other two’s shoes put together. Gilman had tape on the back of his skull and a gun in his hand. “He’s up there now,” the janitor was whispering. “I let him in about ten minutes ago; he said you sent him.”
I sped up the stairs for the roof, the only way that was open to me now. That gave me away to them, and Gilman spurted forward with a roar. “Come down here you, I’ll break every bone in your body! You won’t live to get to Headquarters!” The roof-stairs ended in a skylight-door that I just pushed through, although it should have been latched on the inside. There was about a yard-high partition-wall dividing the roof from the next one over. I tried to clear it too fast, miscalculated, and went down in a mess, tearing a hole in my trouser-knee and skinning my own knee beneath. That leg wouldn’t work right for a minute or two after that, numb, and before I could get upright again on it and stumble away, they were out on me. A big splatter of white shot ahead of me on the gravelled roof from one of their torches, and Gilman gave what can only be described as an Iroquois war-whoop and launched himself through space in a flying tackle. He landed crushingly across my back, flattening me a second time.
And then suddenly the rain of blows that I’d expected was held in check, and he just lay inert on top of me, doing nothing. We both saw it at the same time, lying on the roof there a few yards ahead of us, momentarily played up by the cop’s switching torch, then lost again. I could recognize it because I’d seen it before. The package that she’d brought over here tonight.
“Hold that light steady!” Gilman bellowed, and got off of me. We both got over to it at the same time, enmity forgotten. He picked it up, tore open the brown paper around it, and a sheaf of old newspapers slowly flattened themselves out. With squares and oblongs scissored out of them here and there. She hadn’t been sent over with clippings, but with the valueless remnants of papers after the clippings had already been taken out. It was a dummy package, a decoy, used to send her to her — disappearance.
The rest of it went double-quick — or seemed to. It had built up slow; it unraveled fast.
“Someone did bring a package here tonight, kid,” was the way he put it. “And if I give you that much, I’ll give you the whole thing on credit alone, no matter what the odds still outstanding against it are. Blonde, really named Stephanie Riska, works for Hessen, lives at 120 Farragut, never chews gum, and all the rest of it. Come on. My theory in a pinch would be she was jumped from behind outside the door of that vacant flat before she had a chance to cry out, spirited up over this roof, down through the next house and into a waiting car-while you hugged the vestibule below. Calhoun, call in and have someone get out there fast to Hessen’s house, Myrtle Drive, and keep it spotted until we can get out there. I want to take another crack at that office first.”
On the way over I gasped, “D’you think they—?”
“Naw, not yet,” he reassured me. “Or they would have done it right in the empty flat and let you take the rap.” Whether he meant it or not I couldn’t tell, so it didn’t relieve me much.
The second knot came out in the office. I went over the little table she’d used, while he turned the filing-cabinets inside-out. Again our two discoveries came almost simultaneously. “Look!” I breathed. It was stuck in a crack in the floor, hidden by the shadow of the table. A gilt hairpin she must have dropped one time at her work. Such as no brunette like the one Hessen had showed us at his house would have ever used in her life. “Blonde, all right,” he grunted, and tipped me to his own find. “I muffed this before, in my hurry: about every third name in this card-index of ‘clients’ has a foreign mailing-address. Neutral countries, like Switzerland and Holland. Why should they be interested in social items appearing in papers over here? The mere fact that they’re not living here shows the items couldn’t possibly refer to them personally. If you ask me, the guy’s an espionage-agent of some kind, and these ‘clippings’ are some kind of a code. With a scattering of on-the-level ones interspersed, to cover up. But that’s a job for the FBI. I’m only interested in this girl of yours. My lieutenant can notify their local office about the rest of it, if he sees fit.
“The second leg of my theory,” he went on, as we beat it out of there fast, “is she found out something, and they figured she was too dangerous to them. Did she say anything to you like that?”
“Not a word. But she had told him she was quitting end of next week to get married.”
“Well, then she didn’t find out anything, but he thought she did, so it amounted to the same thing. He could not afford to let her quit. And did he cover up beautifully, erase her existence! They only slipped up on that package. Maybe some tenant came up on the roof to take down her wash, before they could come back and pick it up, so they had to leave it there, rather than risk being identified later. Come on, we’ll stop off at that rooming-house on the way, I want that landlady picked up. She’s obviously one of them, since he recommended the girl there as a lodger in the beginning. Changed the whole room around, even to sticking a wad of tutti-frutti gum on the washstand.”
“Let’s go,” I cried.
A second knot came out at the rooming-house, but it was simply a duplicate of the one at her office: confirmation of the color of her hair. “A girl shampoos her hair once in a while,” he said to me, and stuck a matchstick down the drain of the washbasin. He spread something on a piece of paper, showed it to me: two unmistakably blond hairs. “Now why didn’t I think of that the first time?” He turned the steel-plated landlady over to a cop to be sent in, and we were on our way again — this time out to the Myrtle Drive house, fast.