Wanger’s record on Ken Bliss:
Met death in fall from seventeenth-floor terrace, 4:30 A.M., May 20. Last seen with woman, about twenty-six, fair skin, yellow hair, blue eyes, five feet five inches. Identity unknown. Wanted for questioning.
Motive: uncertain if crime was committed, but, if so, probably passional or jealousy. No record of former relationship.
Witnesses: none.
Evidence: Black evening scarf, purchased Bonwit Teller’s, May 19.
Case Unsolved.
Part Two
Mitchell
He starts as one who, hearing a deer’s tread,
Beholds a panther stealing forth instead.
I
The Woman
Miriam — last name long forgotten within the confines of the Helena Hotel — was a short pugnacious person the color of old leather. She had three things she clung to tenaciously; her British citizenship — which had been passively acquired through the accident of birth on the island of Jamaica; a pair of gold-coin earrings; and her “system” of doing rooms. No one had ever made the slightest attempt to interfere with the first two, and the few abortive efforts at tampering with the latter had met with resounding failure.
Numerical progression of the rooms had nothing to do with it. Nor had their location along the dim, creaky, varileveled corridors. In fact, it was a sort of mystic algebra known only to the innermost workings of her mind. No one could disturb it — not with impunity, anyway. Not without bringing on a long malevolent tirade, down endless reaches of labyrinthine corridor, that went on — or seemed to — for hours afterward, long after the original cause of it had slunk away, frustrated.
“The fo’teen come after the seventeen. It got to wait tell I finish the seventeen. I ain’t never yet do fo’teen first.”
Nor did this precedence have anything to do with gratuities, which were in any case an almost nonexistent factor at the Helena. Habit, perhaps, would be the closest guess to what after all was a purely emotional state of mind on Miriam’s part.
The wheel of the “system” having finally, at the appointed hour and fraction thereof of the day, swung around to “the nineteen,” Miriam advanced down a particularly moldering length of corridor far toward the back, tin bucket in one hand, long pole in the other, at the working end of which could still be detected stray wisps of fibrous fuzz.
She halted before “the nineteen,” reversed her key and sounded it twice against the woodwork. This was a mere formality, since she would have been as highly outraged at finding “the nineteen” in as at having her “system” interfered with. “The nineteen” had never been in at this hour yet. “The nineteen” had no right to be in at this hour.
Nor was the formality of the key tap due to scrupulous observance of hotel regulations, either. It was reflex action. She could no longer enter a door without doing it. Inevitably, on returning home to her own furnished room at the end of the day, she gave that same triphammer tap on the panel before inserting her own private key into the lock.
She threw open the door challengingly and advanced into a small and singularly unprepossessing room. The pattern of the carpet had been ground into oblivion. A sort of gray green fungus was all that now covered the floorboards. A whitewashed-brick wall blocked the eye a few feet outside the window. Through this a shaft of sunlight struggled downward at an angle that was enough to break its back. The room would have been better off without it, if only to preserve an illusion of cleanliness, for it was fuming like a Seidlitz powder with masses of dust particles.
On the wall above the bed was ranged an array of girls’ photographs of varying sizes, all mounted, framed and glassed over. Miriam did not even deign to raise her eyes to these. Most of them had been up for years. The one “nineteen” was going with now would never get up there, she opined, because she couldn’t afford to have a picture taken and he couldn’t afford to have it mounted, framed and glassed over. And there wasn’t any more room left on that side, anyway. He was too old now to begin a new side. And if he wasn’t, he ought to be. Which disposed of that matter.
The bed made, with frenziedly swirling effects on the dust motes in the sunbeam, Miriam narrowed the room door considerably but without closing it altogether. There was nothing furtive about the way she did this; there was rather an injured defiance. She even put this into words, aloud, it was felt so keenly. “Hidin’ it all the time. Always hidin’ it. Who he think going to take it anyway? Who he think want it?”
She gave her mouth a preparatory drying — or perhaps it was a whetting — along the back of her hand. She opened the closet door, stooped, disrupted a cairn of soiled shirts on the floor in one corner of it, brought up a bottle of gin like someone lifting a rabbit out of a hole.
She displayed no satisfaction at the sight of it, only moral indignation. “Who he think come in here, anyway, but me? He know ain’t nobody come in here but me! Suspicionin’ people that way!”
She tilted the bottle, lowered it again. Then she came out with it, advanced to the washbasin, turned on the cold-water tap. With a dexterity that bespoke long practice she switched the open bottle mouth under it and out again, just enough to restore the contents to their former level, no more. This was not so difficult as it appeared. There were mistrustful pencil gauge marks plainly visible on two of the four corners of the frosted glass to guide her. She corrected a slight discrepancy she had been guilty of in favor of the bottle, by means of her mouth. She was heaving with a sense almost of persecution by now. “Ole miser! Stingy ole thing!” she glowered with Antillean passion and a slight accompanying tinkle from the gold-coin earrings. “One thing I don’t like is people mistrustin’ me!”
She returned the bottle to its bourn, closed the closet, restored the room door to its former width and entered upon the second stage of her duties, which consisted in thrusting the staff with the errant fuzz at random places along the base of the walls, like someone spearing salmon from a rock in midstream.
It was while she was engaged in this slightly puzzling maneuver that she became aware of being observed. She turned her head and there was a lady standing out there in the hallway, looking through the open doorway. Miriam knew at a single glance that she did not live in the hotel, and she rose accordingly in Miriam’s esteem. Her low regard for and truculence toward those who did was matched only by her high regard for and willingness to be affable to those who didn’t. A blanket order, both ways.
“Yes, ma’am?” she said with cordial interest. “You lookin’ for Mist’ Mitchell?”
The lady was so friendly and so soft-spoken. “No,” she smiled. “I just happened to drop in to see a friend of mine, and she’s not in. I was on my way back to the elevator, and I’m afraid I became a little confused—”
Miriam rested on her mop handle like a Venetian gondolier at ease and hoped the lady wouldn’t go right away.
She didn’t. She advanced an unnoticeable step nearer the threshold but still remained well outside the confines of the room proper. She gave the impression of an overpowering interest in Miriam and her conversation.
Miriam visibly preened herself standing there in the sulfurous sun shaft, wriggled almost ecstatically around the mop pole.
“You know,” the lady confided with an enchanting woman-to-woman intimacy of manner, “I always think you can tell so much about a person just by looking at the room they live in.”