Nobody answered.
I tried six picks on the lock before getting one that worked, stepped inside and felt for the light, the .45 tight in my fist. I flipped it on, moved sideways and covered the room. The place was a maze of equipment, smelling of hypo and water-colored backdrops, but it was empty. I tried each of the rooms to make sure. Theodore Gates wasn't there. Two closets were still full of his clothes, his dresser drawers well filled and orderly, but there was no telling whether or not he had taken anything with him.
In the studio itself was a desk cluttered with photographic supply catalogues and opened mail, another of those rotary files centered on it. I thumbed through this one too, but there was no Greta Service in it either. Along one side was a row of metal filing cabinets and I pulled out the one under "S." A folder of proofs on Greta Service was there, all right, duplicates of the ones in the Proctor Building. I was about to shut the drawer when I noticed that the contents had been alphabetically arranged from the P's to the T's. Out of curiosity I thumbed the first few back.
Then I saw the name Helen Poston.
Only four proofs were in the folder, but they were enough. Teddy Gates had posed her so that every inch of her lush form was visible through the sheer Grecian gown, the same one Greta had modeled in. She wasn't a Proctor Girl, but neither was Greta. It was too bad. They made the Proctor Girls look pretty sickly. I put the proofs back and tried the "D" file and came up with three on Maxine Delaney. The redhead wore a sarong, but the effect was the same. All woman, but no Proctor Girl. There was too much breast and thigh, too much inborn seductiveness rather than the lean emaciated look the fashion magazines demanded.
I closed the drawers and checked the rotary file again. Neither Helen Poston nor Maxine Delaney had an index card there. That I could expect. They were both dead. Taking their photos out of the files would come with a general cleanup. But Greta Service's had been there and wasn't any longer.
Any prints I might have left, I wiped off, then went downstairs, back to Broadway where I picked up a cab and headed for the Blue Ribbon.
Velda had almost given me up and was on her last cup of coffee. Angie was trying to keep her company at a table in the back, but they had run out of conversation just as I arrived. She had sparks in her eyes and if there had been something to throw I would have caught it, but she took one look at my face where the guys at the Sandelor had worked me over and the anger subsided into an expression of concern and she grabbed for my hand.
Angie brought me coffee and a sandwich and while I finished it I gave her the details. The little fine points I would liked to have elaborated on wouldn't come out. They were still ideas that wouldn't congeal into a solid and until they did they just lay there dormant, oozing through my mind, waiting to be recognized.
Velda had had a phone pickup service put on the office line and the only ones who had called were Hy and Pat. Pat had two possibles on persons who had been convicted on sex charges, later paroled and were presumed to be in the area. Both were parole violators and an intensive search was on for both. The men who jumped me were in custody, accusing the desk clerk of having hired them to lay me out. I was supposed to go in and press charges. There was a tracer out for Lorenzo Jones, but a guy like that could disappear anywhere in New York. Virginia Howell came up with the names and addresses of his other women, but he wasn't at any of those places.
Hy wanted to see me as soon as possible. Al Casey had come up with something he wanted corroborated and I was to meet him at ten at his office.
When Velda had given me the information she said, "What does it look like?"
"It smells. When it gets this damn complicated there's something else going on."
"I found the car Greta Service used. It was a rental job and she had it out twice. Both times it was registered to her and the mileage figures were nearly identical. The first time it was 118 miles, the second, 122." She reached in her pocketbook and brought out a map of the New York, Jersey and Long Island area.
"Figuring it as a round trip each way," she said, "I laid out a general sixty-mile radius from the city. Here it is." She shoved the map to me and sketched the circled area with her forefinger.
"That's a hell of a lot of square miles," I told her.
"We're only interested in the perimeter."
"If she went directly to her target, yeah."
"Well have to assume some things. Anyway, she had Helen Poston with her and women don't usually get too devious when they're driving."
I traced the line of her circle, picking out the cities the line touched. Peculiarly, there weren't many that it intersected at all. According to the diagram, the extent of Greta's trip would have led her to some pretty remote spots.
There was one that it did come close to, though. It was on Long Island and the name was Bradbury. I took out my pen and drew a circle around the town. "We'll start here."
She looked across the table at me and nodded. "Thee origin of that letter Greta had."
"When Harry mentioned it she cut him off. It may mean something."
"I know the section, Mike. When I was a kid it was a very exclusive place for the wealthy. It's come down a lot since the general population move to the suburbs, but there are still a lot of big people out that way."
"Who would Greta know there?" I asked her.
"A beautiful woman might know anybody. At least it's a lead. Supposing I check into a hotel out that way and see what I can do. I'll call you when I'm located."
"You watch it. You're a beautiful doll too."
"It's about time you noticed." She gave me a big grin. "And when I think of those lovely adjoining rooms going to waste."
"I'm hurting too, kitten."
She looked at her left hand and the ring I had given her. "I can come closer to getting married than any girl in the world. Why did I have to pick you?"
"Because we're made for each other," I told her. "Now get moving."
I could tell when Pat was burning. He stared at me with those cold eyes of his as if I were a suspect and let me go through my story for the third time around before he said, "Just tell me why you didn't hold Greta Service."
"For what reason?"
"You could have called me."
"Sure, and if there was something backing up this mess and she's involved she would have clammed right up."
"That doesn't cut it with me, Mike."
"No? I'd like to see what a lawyer would do to you if you tried it. I played it my way and that's the way it is. Any word on Lorenzo Jones or Gates yet?"
"Not a damn thing. Jones is holed up somewhere and the best we got on Gates was a statement from the elevator operator in the Proctor Building that he left sometime after ten. He carried no luggage and seemed to be in a hurry. The cleaning woman who took care of his place said everything was still there as far as she knew, but she had the idea he kept a woman somewhere and a change of clothes at her apartment. We're still looking. Incidentally, the other desk clerk at the Sandelor Hotel handed us a blank. He knew the Howell dame but couldn't identify Greta. He's generally half in the bag and can't see too well anyway. We leaned on him a little but couldn't cut it at all."
"And Dulcie McInnes?"
"She was on live TV from Washington this afternoon M.C.ing a fashion show for some big women's organization. She's a house guest of a woman who's the wife of one of our biggest lobbyists and couldn't give us a lead to Gates at all. She suggested that he might have gone off on an independent assignment. Our men didn't think so because the equipment he would have carried is still at his studio."