“Don’t be silly,” I said.
She looked at me with a flush of anger starting to stain her face.
“Therefore,” I said, “I won’t be there. I’ll be away from home. I’m just leaving on a trip. You’ll sit there for a few hours and monitor the telephone calls. If anybody asks for Evelyn Ellis you’ll pretend to misunderstand them. If you can get by acting the part of Evelyn Ellis you’ll do it. If you can’t, you’ll be very friendly over the telephone and state that Miss Ellis probably won’t be in for some time, but that you’ll try to get a message to her. You’ll definitely try to find out who’s talking but do it in a nice way so it doesn’t arouse suspicions. Be friendly and visit with them. If they’re men, your voice will be particularly seductive.”
“But why in the world should we rent an apartment?” she asked. “Good heavens, Donald, you know what will happen if Bertha finds out and—”
“In this business,” I said, “you can’t wait for the breaks. You have to make your own breaks and you have to keep moving. Come on.”
We entered the Breeze-Mount and rang the bell of the apartment marked MANAGER — MARLENE CHARLOTTE.
The woman who came out in answer to our ring was in the forties. She was a fairly big woman who had started to sag. There was an expressionless placidity about her face which made it seem she felt everything that could possibly happen had already happened.
“Yes?” she asked, looking us over appraisingly.
“I heard that you were expecting a vacancy next month,” I said.
“We have three vacancies right now,” she said.
“May we look at them?”
“Certainly,” she said, and again sized us up, this time more carefully.
Elsie said demurely, “We both work. We’ll be here nights and weekends but not during the day.”
“No children?” the manager asked.
Elsie shook her head, then let the corners of her mouth twist a bit as though she were about ready to cry. “Not any more,” she said. “No children.”
“Well, come with me,” Mrs. Charlotte said, taking some keys from the board. “I have some apartments I think you’ll like.”
The first one she showed was neat as a pin and had no telephone. The next one was a larger apartment, with no phone.
Elsie glanced at me surreptitiously and I shook my head.
“Don’t you... don’t you have anything else?” she asked.
“I have one that’s just been vacated,” Mrs. Charlotte said. “It hasn’t been cleaned up. It’s just the way the person left it. She moved out sometime during the night and left me a note.”
“May we look at it?” Elsie said, somewhat dubiously.
Mrs. Charlotte led us to the apartment I wanted.
There was a private telephone and the place was in a mess. The tenant who had moved out had made no attempt to disguise the haste of her departure. A wastebasket was crammed to overflowing with the various debris that a person would keep for a while in bureau drawers only to discard when packing up to leave. There were crumpled papers, a pair of old shoes, stockings with runs, and a broken coathanger. More crumpled papers were on the floor of the closet.
Mrs. Charlotte gave an exclamation of annoyance. “The maid was supposed to get in here and clean some of this stuff out,” she said.
I looked over at Elsie and raised my eyebrows.
“Well, honey,” I asked, “what do you think? Of course it’s hard to judge a place in this condition but I have an idea it’s just what we want.”
Elsie said dubiously, “Yes, I suppose so, but, Donald, you must remember we have to move into a place right away.”
“Yes,” I said lugubriously, “we do, for a fact. I’ll tell you, honey, this place is exactly what we’ve been looking for. It’s only the fact that it isn’t clean that—”
Mrs. Charlotte said, “What do you mean when you say you have to move in right away?”
I said, “We’ve been staying with friends and every time we tried to move they wanted us to remain on with them. They have a small child that they won’t trust with a baby-sitter and because we were there they had quite a bit of freedom for the first time in months. Then the man’s parents showed up this morning. They’d written they were coming but the letter miscarried. We’re going to have to get out right away.”
I suddenly whipped a billfold out of my pocket and said, “I’ll tell you what. We’ll pay the rent now in advance but we’ll take off five dollars because of the condition of the apartment. The maid can dump the stuff tomorrow but if you can get some clean linen, we’ll move in. Unfortunately I’ve got to go to San Francisco but Elsie can stay right here. I’ll finish bringing our stuff in. Then we can phone our friends that we’ve found a place. They were terribly concerned. They wanted to have their folks go to a hotel tonight but I told them we’d be sure to find a place.”
Mrs. Charlotte hesitated, said, “How long will you be here? Do you want a year’s lease?”
I said, “I’d prefer not to take a year’s lease unless we have to, because there is a possibility I’ll be transferred.”
“What sort of work are you in, Mr. Lam?”
“High-security work,” I said. “Of course, if you want references I can get you some of the best. However, as long as I’m here you’ll have the cash in advance right on the dot.”
Her face broke into a sagging smile. “Well, of course I don’t like to have you folks move into an apartment looking like this, but... if Mrs. Lam doesn’t mind...”
“It’s quite all right,” Elsie said, looking around. “Frankly, however, I won’t try to do much cleaning up until after the maid gets in tomorrow.”
“That’s fine,” Mrs. Charlotte said. “I’ll have some linen up here right away.”
She said to me, “Come downstairs and I’ll give you a receipt for the rent.”
The phone started to ring.
I frowned and said, “I suppose that’s never been disconnected.”
“No, it’s still in the name of the other occupant, Evelyn Ellis,” she said.
“Oh, well, we’ll get that straightened out,” I said, taking her by the arm and shooting Elsie a significant glance.
I led the manager out of the door and down to the elevator.
Elsie moved over toward the telephone.
Down in the office Mrs. Charlotte gave me a receipt and I told her, “I’ll run up and tell the wife I’m going out to pick up our stuff.”
I hurried back up to the apartment.
“Find out who it was, Elsie?” I asked.
She said, “Apparently you’ve been getting around, Donald.”
“How come?”
“This,” she said “was a gentleman who inquired for Evelyn Ellis. I told him that she wasn’t here but that I expected to be in touch with her and I could give her a message if necessary. He said to have her call Mr. Calhoun, the public relations man. I told him that I didn’t think she’d be free to call, that she was going to call me but that that was all the telephoning she’d have a chance to do. He wanted to know who I was and I told him I was her roommate, so he finally let down his hair and told me to tell her that a Mr. Lam had been asking questions, that he had become suspicious of Mr. Lam and on a hunch had looked Lam up in the telephone book. There was only one Donald Lam he’d been able to find and he was a member of the firm of Cool & Lam, private investigators. So, Mr. Calhoun asked me if I’d be sure to get in touch with Evelyn and tell her a private eye was on her trail.
“I told him I’d try and reach Evelyn right away and asked him if he had any idea what you were after and he said he didn’t, that you were posing as a writer but that you certainly were on the track of something. He said you tried to make a circuitous approach, but he’d had you figured out right from the start.”