“They slugged me,” she shouted, her dark eyes blazing, her black hair tossing like the mane of a wild horse, “Right behind the ear. If I can for one minute only get my hands on them I will teach them good.” She bucked up and down the living room, the housecoat billowing around her knees, waving her arms in windmill swings. I asked her to calm down and tell me about it.
“It was before eight o’clock, what a time to housebreak. I was leaving for work — I am a designer, but now I am not good for the work today, they make me so ma-ad. I pass by Robert’s room and I hear the noise. It seems I am always hearing the noises in there. The lock on the door is broken and I push it open. This man is looking through the drawers and closets, such a mess. I go to him and say ‘what are you doing?’ Bang. I am slugged on the back of the head. I am like a light, out. What a headache I have.”
“Did the men take anything?”
“I do not know. The police came and they said they could not know if anything was stolen unless the owner will tell them.” Eve made fists of her small hands, glowered angrily like a teased kitten. “Sit down,” she huffed at me. “You are grinning like the big ape.”
“I think you’re most beautiful when you’re angry,” I said, sitting at the end of a long tufted sofa.
“Ah?” Eve smiled pleasantly, the storm had passed. “Let us look at his room. The door is not fixed yet.”
I followed her into the hall. The door of Donaldson’s apartment had been clumsily jimmied. Inside drawers from the bureau and writing desk had been carelessly upended. The picture of Doris O’Rourke was gone from the bedroom and the frame which held it lay broken on the floor. That was all they needed.
We returned to Eve’s apartment. I resumed my seat and asked, “Can you describe the man you saw in there?”
“It was very quick,” she said. “He was ugly, short and wide and ugly. He wore a gray hat and suit. He wore the pink sport shirt. Pink.” Eve’s eyes widened in amazement. “He had a mean ugly face, I can not think of any more.”
“That’s fine.”
“Now I will fix a drink. I have had already at least one.” She turned and left the room through a swinging door, the housecoat swishing sibilantly. She returned with two aperitif glasses of rum, handed me one and sat beside me. She asked, “Is the drink nice?”
I sipped the rum and said it was fine.
Eve put her glass down on the coffee table in front of us and leaned back against me. My arm received orders from somewhere and looped around her. She settled into the hollow of my shoulder, said softly, “I have been through the most harrowing experience. You must comfort me.”
“Poor, defenseless creature,” I remarked. She laughed, pulling my hand down over her shoulder. She was as fragile as a curled cobra. Warm and soft against me she sent sparkling messages in bedroom cipher. My receiving set was picking them up loud and clear, but hell, Donaldson was in the bite.
“You are thinking of Robert,” she said, rubbing my knuckles with her finger tips. “What is it about, this missing business and the breaking in to his room?”
“You were right about his not having a wife, but he is being hunted by someone,” I explained. “I’m trying to help him.”
“So.” She turned and sent a shock into me with those deep, dark eyes. “So, you are going to leave?”
I put my other arm around her then and we kissed, a long, moist kiss. I didn’t want to go and I didn’t want to stay. Her hand stole inside my coat to my back, then she pushed me away.
“Now you must go,” Eve said firmly. “We will see each other again.”
I got back to the office before noon. Max Wendell had phoned and everything was okay in Moraga hills. Jack reported on Mrs. Donaldson.
“The lady registered yesterday morning at quarter past eight, giving an Oakland address,” Jack said, referring to a piece of Westshire stationery. “According to the phone company the address is a parking lot. She went out, presumably to consult you, in the afternoon and returned at about three o’clock. She ate her meals in the hotel and remained in her room the rest of the time.”
“They kept pretty good tabs on her.”
“Swanson’s the house man over there. He has an eye for a pretty broad. Between him and the desk clerk, Mrs. Donaldson was well guarded.” Jack consulted his pencil scratchings. “A skinny, well dressed man with a pock marked face called on her a couple hours ago. She checked out and drove off with him in a cream colored Lincoln. The bellman says the guy looked like somebody he’s seen around with Frankie Mortola.” Jack handed the notepaper to Hilda and added, “Sounds like Benny Lufts.”
“Another name on the roster.” I told them about the theft of the photograph from Donaldson’s apartment. “I want you to drive to Sacramento this afternoon, Jack, and case Pennant Shirt Shops. Their main office is there, you might find a tie-in with Mayflower. On the way up stop at the Artcraft Studios in Gravenstein. If someone was around there this morning trying to identify Doris O’Rourke’s photograph, call the sheriff’s office immediately; report a burglary at number one Rosebud lane and give them the leads from Artcraft and Donaldson’s apartment.”
“I’ll have to fly,” Jack growled. He plowed out of the office like an old quarter horse.
Hilda smiled after him. “When he rains, he pours.”
“I’m going to stake out our friend Ralph Booker,” I told Hilda. “Meanwhile, close up the office, go out and get all the dope on Mayflower Shirts, Bassey’s, and a bar on Broadway called the Green Slipper. Try the Herald, State Board, City Hall, everywhere.”
Hilda said, “I’ll have to fly too, if I’m going to cat lunch.”
My watch read ten minutes to twelve. Leaving, I said, “If you get hold of anything phone before you come back. I may be here.”
Seven
I parked up the street from the Mayflower building and sat, smoking cigarettes and watching the entrance to the upstairs offices, until half past one. There was no sign, going or coming, of Ralph Booker. Maybe he didn’t eat lunch.
I went upstairs, past the reproachful girl at the desk, through the maze of frosted glass to Booker’s office. The girl in the anteroom stopped typing and raised pencilled eyebrows at me. When I walked by her, into the manager’s inner sanctum, she rose hurriedly and followed.
The pasty faced man was drooping in the chair behind his desk, his elbows on the arms, chin reposing on the interlocked fingers of his clay colored hands. He opened the small clouded orbs under his bushy brows and stared at my feet, then rearranged himself so he was sitting upright.
To the girl Booker said, “Why don’t you go out for a cup of coffee, Miss Arnold? Have my calls put through the front desk.” When the door closed behind her he said, “Well, Mr. Sweeney, won’t you be seated?”
I took the chair nearest his desk, lit a cigarette and dropped the match into his polished seashell. His gray agates focused on the match like it was the aftermath of an atomic explosion.
“Where’s Mrs. Donaldson, Booker?”
“Has she disappeared too?” He ran a hand over his bald head, breaking the reflection of sun from the curtained window behind him.
“As far as I’m concerned she has, but I think you know where to find her,” I said. “You showed no surprise yesterday when I mentioned that Donaldson’s former wife had employed me to locate him; but you knew he had never been married. Even if he hadn’t mentioned his marriage to you himself, which is improbable, you’d have known about it from the records of his withholding taxes.”
The pasty faced man grabbed the arms of his chair and pushed himself up. He crossed to the side door in the mahogany wall and opened it by the canteloupe knob. Leaving it ajar, he walked impassively back to the chair and slumped into it.