“I can’t tell just yet.”
We waited by the car tracks. He was nervous, kept glancing at his watch.
A streetcar came along. We swung aboard, and I knew Hale had reached a decision on something by the time we took our seats. He kept looking for an opportunity to break it to me, but I didn’t give him any conversational opening for anything. I simply sat looking out the window.
We craned our necks as we went by the Gulfpride Apartments. Quite a few cars were still in front of the place. A little group of men was standing on the sidewalk, heads close together, talking.
That gave Hale the opportunity he wanted. He sucked in a deep breath, said, “Lam, I’m going back to New York. I’m going to leave you in charge here.”
I said, “You’d better get a room, hole up, and get some sleep. You can’t keep commuting back and forth to New York all the time.”
“I’m afraid I wouldn’t rest much.”
I said, “That apartment Bertha Cool just vacated is wide open. You can move in there and go to sleep. It won’t be like a hotel. There won’t be anyone to disturb you. You can simply lock your door and pass out.”
I could see that the idea appealed to him.
“What’s more,” I said, “you’ll find that apartment interesting for another reason. Roberta Fenn lived there for several months. She was then going under the name of Edna Cutler.”
That brought him bolt upright. His eyes, red-rimmed, slightly bloodshot from lack of sleep, were wide with startled interest. “Is that how you found her?”
“I got some clues there, yes.”
He seemed a bit worried. “It’s uncanny how you find things out. Lam. You’re a regular owl.”
I laughed at that.
“Perhaps you know a lot more about Miss Fenn than you’ve told me?”
“You wanted me to find her, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I found her. We try to give results, and don’t bother our clients reporting methods, or talking about clues.”
He settled back once more in the car seat. “You’re a very unusual young man. I don’t see how you found out so much in so short a time.”
I said, “We get off here and walk the rest of the way. It’ll take five minutes.”
Hale was very much interested in the furniture, and the old-fashioned, high-ceilinged rooms. He walked out onto the porch, looked around at the plants, looked up and down the street, came back, tried the bedspring with the palm of his hand, and said, “Very, very nice. I think I’ll be able to rest here. And so Roberta Fenn lived here — very, very interesting.”
I told him he’d better try to get some sleep, left him there, went out, and hunted up a telephone booth where I’d be assured of privacy.
It took me half an hour dealing over the phone with a detective agency in Little Rock to find out that 935 Turpitz Building, the address given in Edna Cutler’s letter to Roberta Fenn, had been a mailing address only. It was a big office where a girl rented out desk space to small businessmen, did stenographic work, and forwarded mail.
She would forward mail to Edna Cutler, but the actual address of her client was confidential — very much of a secret.
I told the Little Rock man the agency would send him a check, and then hunted up a commercial typing agency. I asked the girl in charge, “Could you make a stencil for me and run off a thousand letters on a mimeograph machine?”
“Why, certainly.”
“Got a stenographer I can dictate a sales letter to?”
The girl smiled at me, picked up her pencil. “The managing department now becomes the clerical unit. You can start whenever you’re ready.”
I said, “I’m ready. Here we go.”
I started dictating:
Dear Madam:
A close personal friend of yours says that you have pretty legs. You want them to look pretty, and ice want them to look pretty.
You can’t get the sheer hosiery which you could formerly buy — not if you try to buy in the United States.
It is quite possible, however, that exclusive arrangements could be made to supply you with sheer silk hosiery for the duration of the war. At the time of Pearl Harbor a Japanese ship put into a Mexican port and we were able to obtain its cargo of silk stockings originally destined for the United States. This hosiery would be shipped to you duty prepaid from Mexico City. All you’ll have to do will be to open the package, put on the stockings, and wear them for thirty days. If, at the end of those thirty days, you are entirely satisfied, make a remittance at the same price you were paying for hosiery a year ago. If any of the hose should develop runs or show signs of defective workmanship or of material, you need only to return such defective hose for a complete credit.
Simply place your name and address, the size, style, and color of sheer silk stocking you prefer to wear on the enclosed blank, put it in the enclosed, stamped, addressed envelope, drop it in the mail. You are not obligated in any way.
The girl looked up. “That all?”
“That’s all,” I said, “except that it will be signed Silk-wear Importation Company, and I’ll have to work out a color chart and order blank to enclose.”
“How many of these do you want?”
“A thousand. After you have the stencil made, I’d like to see one or two samples before we go ahead with the full thousand letters.”
She looked up at me, studying me. “All right. Now, what’s the racket?”
I just stared at her, saying nothing.
“Look — there was an embargo on silk a long time before Pearl Harbor, and when did stockings ever come from Japan?”
I grinned. “If the people who get these letters are as smart as you are, I’m out of luck. I’m a private detective. This is a stall. I’m trying to smoke someone out from behind a blind address.”
She looked me up and down. I could see the puzzled surprise in her eyes change to respect. She said, “Okay, you almost took me to the cleaners. So you’re a detective?”
“Yes, and don’t tell me I don’t look like one. I’m getting tired of hearing that.”
“It’s a business asset,” she announced. “You should be proud of it. All right, what’s the real dope on these? How many of them do you really want?”
“Just two. Don’t make too good a job of it. Smear them up a little as though out of a thousand copies these people were getting the last two. You can address the envelopes. The first is Edna Cutler, 935 Turpitz Building, Little Rock, Arkansas, and the other is Bertha Louise Cool, Drexel Building, Los Angeles.”
She laughed, swung the typewriter from the side compartment of her desk, and announced, “It’s a good gag. Come back in half an hour, and I’ll have ‘em ready.”
She fed the stencil sheet into her typewriter and started playing a tune on the keyboard.
I told her I’d be back, went out, bought an early afternoon paper, and sat down at the lunch counter to read the account of the murder.
As yet, the newspapers didn’t have all the details, but they had enough to hit the high spots. Paul G. Nostrander, a popular young attorney, had been found dead in the apartment of Roberta Fenn. Roberta Fenn was missing. Employed in a secretarial position in a downtown bank, she had failed to show up for work. An examination of her apartment convinced police that if she had fled, she had taken no clothes with her, not even her facial creams, toothbrush, or even her purse. The purse was lying unopened on the dresser in the bedroom. Not only did it contain her money, but her keys as well. Police reasoned, therefore, that she was entirely without funds, without means of re-entering her own apartment. They expected either to find her body sometime within the next twenty-four hours, or that she would voluntarily surrender to the police. Police inclined to two theories. One was that the murderer had killed the young attorney, then forced Roberta Fenn to accompany him at the point of a gun. The other was that the murder had taken place during Miss Fenn’s absence from her apartment, that she returned to find the body in much the same position as police had found it, and, in a panic, had resorted to flight. There was, of course, the third possibility, which was that Roberta Fenn had been the one who pulled the trigger on the gun.