She gasped and scrambled awkwardly to her feet and turned on the kitchen light. She ran to him and turned him over. It was Howard. His underlip sagged. On top of his head, right in the middle, just forward of the crown, was an angry lump the size of a plum.
She remembered the young doctor on the third floor, the thin one who worked in a private clinic and made occasional broad passes at her. Began with an H. That was it. Halstead. She looked in the book, hands trembling. He answered on the first ring.
“This is Jane Bayliss, Doctor. Upstairs. I’ve seen you in—”
“Ho! The Rita Hayworth type. I memorized your apartment number off the mailbox in case you ever came down with—”
“Please, could you come up right away? Someone is hurt.”
“Right away,” he said in an entirely different voice.
He came in and gave her a casual glance and got down on his knees beside Howard. He took the pulse first, then thumbed up Howard’s eyelid and shone a light into the pupil. He gingerly fingered the skull around the area of the angry lump, then appeared to feel the temperature of Howard’s hands.
He sat back on his heels and looked up at Jane. “A lusty thump on the noggin. And don’t try to tell me he tripped. Were you being unsocial?”
“I found him here. I just got home.”
“From the look of that lump, and the amount of discoloration, I’d say he’s had a nice long sleep.” He got to his feet and headed for the phone. “An ambulance for this boy.”
“Is it bad?”
“He’ll have a thorough headache. I don’t suspect a fracture. Concussion and shock. A little bed rest is indicated.”
Howard moaned and opened his eyes and stared dully at the ceiling. Jane knelt beside him and took his hand in hers. “Darling! How do you feel?”
He turned his head slowly and looked at her. “What are you doing here?”
“I live here!”
“What am I doing here then?”
“What’s the last thing you remember?” the doctor asked.
“I was supposed to pick you up and take you to dinner, honey. I thought we might go to the Taffeta Room later and—”
“That was Saturday!” she cried. “This is Monday.” She looked up at the doctor. “What’s wrong with him?”
The doctor grinned. “Don’t scare the patient. A bump like that often results in temporary amnesia. It will probably go away in a few days. Hey, don’t get up.”
“I got to,” Howard said earnestly and doggedly. “I’m going to be sick.”
They helped him up and the doctor led him away to the bathroom. When they came out Howard looked a luminous blue. He sat in the big chair and shut his eyes.
“I think I can walk him down to my car,” the doctor said. “Come on, pal. Let’s see if we can make it. What’s his name, Miss Bayliss?”
“Howard Saddler.”
“Okay, you notify the police and whoever else Howard here would want you to tell. Come on, now. Upsy-daisy. And I wouldn’t touch anything, Miss Bayliss. Somebody gave this place a good going over.”
She walked them to the elevator. As soon as it started down she raced back to the apartment, shut the door and put the night chain on it. Then she saw the apartment more clearly. The bureau drawers, the cosmetics, the medicine cabinet was bad enough. The final straw was in the kitchen, where flour, sugar, coffee, rice and less identifiable substances had all been dumped out on the counter top and had spilled over onto the floor. She wanted to cry.
She phoned and asked for Detective Sergeant Sam Dolan.
“This is Jane Bayliss. Could you... could you come over?”
“What’s wrong?”
“Somebody hit Howard on the head and turned my apartment upside down.”
“Don’t touch anything. Be right there.”
Dolan arrived in eight minutes, accompanied by a uniformed officer, two lab men and the Journal reporter named Locatta.
Dolan listened patiently while she told what had happened. The lab men took her fingerprints. They began to go over the apartment. After the first five minutes one of them came over to Dolan and said, “Waste of time. Doorknobs, catches either smeared or clean. The joker wore gloves. Two strangers off the outside knob is as good as we’ll do, but odds it wasn’t him or them. Knock off?”
“Jerry, take these boys back. Loco here will give me a lift if I ask him nice.” He turned to Jane. “You have anything valuable here?”
“No.”
“Who is the other girl? Tell me everything you know about her.”
Jane gave him a complete report on Betty Alford. Halfway through he began to look bored. Before she had finished he was roaming around again, whistling tunelessly. He stopped and scratched his red head. “These things have a smell. If you can find where they left off, then the odds are they found what they wanted. This guy didn’t leave off. He kept looking.”
“There’s nothing here to find, that’s why.”
“Fill her in on developments, Red,” Locatta said in his thin, boyish voice. “Maybe she can make things fit by remembering something.”
“A couple of other things have happened. We don’t know if they’re related or unrelated. Somebody broke into the Taffeta Room last night. It was a professional job of breaking and entering, but it stopped being professional right there. They wore gloves. They stood at the bar and had a drink of the best scotch in the house and went out the way they got in. The only thing they didn’t do was leave a tip.”
“That sounds crazy.”
“Like drunk college kids doing it on a dare,” Locatta said.
“Item number two. This will be on local news tonight and in the paper in the morning. The Los Angeles Police tried to find out who Fredmans was running around with. They got a line on a girl friend. They shook down her place and didn’t find anything that meant anything except a ring. That ring disappeared along with a bunch of unmounted stones in Savannah about eight months ago. A salesman for a diamond wholesale house was slugged. He had his locked case chained to his wrist. They cut the chain with what was believed to be a heavy pair of snips. It was well planned.
“The girl was scared, and she talked. She told them Fredmans was in on the robbery. She didn’t know who else was. He gave her the ring. It was a common type of setting and a pretty fair half-carat stone. Apparently Fredmans never noticed the initials inside the band. The girl did, but she didn’t realize those initials could be dangerous, and so she didn’t throw it away. She said she hadn’t seen Fredmans for two weeks. But she said some men she didn’t know had been asking her about him. She said they acted sore. She couldn’t give an adequate description.”
Jane looked at Dolan and then at Locatta. She shook her head. “I don’t know why you should think all that should mean anything to me. It just confuses me.”
Locatta held up a snapshot Betty Alford had taken of Jane at the beach the previous summer. She had on the bathing suit that always made her obscurely uncomfortable when she wore it. “Do I have your permission to use this delectable thing in our miserable newspaper?”
“You do not! Where did you get it?”
“There’s a lot of them in that drawer, and some on the floor under the table.”
“Give it here!”
Locatta handed it over reluctantly and shrugged.
“Who hit Howard, Mr. Dolan?” Jane asked.
“Some burglar, I guess.”
Chapter Three
Locatta and Dolan left. Jane replaced the chain on the door. She was hungry. She managed some sandwiches in the ruin of the kitchen. Then she changed to old clothes and started in on the apartment. She saved the kitchen until last. She got to that by eleven-thirty. At quarter of one she straightened up by painful degrees, digging herself in the back with her fist. She looked at the gleaming little room.