“Because Uncle Benedict told me if you ever wanted to get anywhere you had to notice details.”
“Who’s Uncle Benedict?”
“He’s the black sheep of my family, the one who made his living by—” Abruptly she became silent. She realized all too keenly that she couldn’t tell Don Kimberly about her Uncle Benedict. There were only a few people she could tell about him.
Kimberly signed both names to the register and said to the janitor, “Let’s go up to E. B. Halsey’s office, please, and make it snappy. Do you know whether that office has been cleaned?”
“Sure it has. We begin on that floor. That’s the brass-hat floor. They’re always out by five o’clock. Some of the other floors are later—”
“And you’re certain Halsey’s office has been cleaned up?”
“Sure. I did it myself.”
“You emptied the wastebasket?”
“Yes.”
“All right, we have to get that stuff. There was something in the wastebasket. Where is it now?”
The man grinned as he brought the elevator to a stop. “The stuff that was in that wastebasket is smoke by this time.”
“You incinerated it?”
“Sure.”
“I thought you sometimes saved it for a central pickup.”
“No more, we don’t. We burn it up. Everything in the wastebaskets is burned right here in the building. That’s E. B. Halsey’s orders. Don’t let anything go out.”
They hurried to E. B. Halsey’s office. As the janitor had told them, it had been cleaned. The square mahogany-colored wastebasket in Peggy Castle’s secretarial office was completely free of paper. There was a folded square of cardboard in the bottom, and Peggy pulled it out in the vain hope that some fragment of the letter might have worked down beneath it.
There was nothing.
“I guess that’s it,” Kimberly said.
“Wait a minute,” she told him. “I have a hunch. The way that janitor looked when he said the papers had been burned— Come on, let’s go.”
The janitor evidently had been expecting their ring because he brought the cage up quickly.
“All done?” he asked.
“Not quite,” Peggy said. “We want to go down to the basement. I want to see where you bum those papers.”
“It’s just an ordinary incinerator. Mr. Halsey said that he wanted all papers burned on the premises, and—”
“I’m checking,” Peggy said. “It’s something important. I think Mr. Halsey will want a report tomorrow.”
“Oh.”
The janitor stopped the cage at the basement and said, “Right over to the left.”
Peggy all but ran down the passageway to where several big clothesbaskets were stacked in front of an incinerator. Two of the clothesbaskets were almost full.
“What’s this?”
“Scraps that we haven’t burned yet.”
“I thought you told me everything had been burned.”
“Well, everything from your office.”
“How do you know what office these came from?”
The man fidgeted uncomfortably. “Well, I think that these two came from the lower floors.”
Peggy nodded to Kimberly, then upset the entire contents of the baskets on the floor, and started pawing through them, throwing to one side the envelopes, circular letters, newspapers, scratch paper — all the odds and ends that accumulate in a busy office.
“We don’t need to look through anything that isn’t torn,” she said to Kimberly. “I tore this letter up into fine pieces. And you don’t need to bother with anything that’s typewritten. This was written in ink in longhand.”
They tossed the larger pieces back into the clothesbaskets. When they had sifted the whole thing down to the smaller pieces, Peggy suddenly gave a triumphant exclamation. “This is part of it,” she said, holding up a triangular section of paper.
“Then here’s another part,” Kimberly said.
“And here’s another.” She pounced on another piece.
Kimberly found a fourth. “This piece has part of the postmark on it,” he said, fitting it together with the other pieces. “Gosh, you were right. It’s postmarked yesterday at five thirty. But I tell you no one knew—”
Peggy caught his eye, glanced significantly at the janitor, who was watching them with an expression of puzzled speculation.
Kimberly nodded, and thereafter devoted his energies entirely to the search.
At last they were finished with the final scrap of paper on the floor. By this time they had recovered four pieces of the envelope and six pieces of the letter.
“I guess that’s it,” Peggy said. “Let’s go up to the office and put these together.”
Back in the office, with the aid of transparent tape, they fitted the pieces into a hopelessly inadequate reconstruction of a letter that Peggy now realized was undoubtedly destined to be of the greatest interest to the police.
The writer of that letter, Peggy knew, had it in her power to make Don Kimberly the Number One Suspect in the Stella Lynn murder.
Would the writer come forward? She doubted it, but she thought it was likely that, since one anonymous letter had been written to her, another would be written, this time to the police.
And Peggy also realized that by falling in with Don Kimberly’s highly abridged account of the evening’s activities, she had nominated herself as the number-two if the police ever should learn exactly what had happened.
Peggy knew enough of E. B. Halsey’s temperament to know that her future at WEFI depended on not letting the police find out all that had happened — at least for the moment.
E. B. Halsey, at fifty-six, prided himself on his erect carriage, his keen eyes that needed spectacles only for reading, and his golf game.
There were whispered stories about extracurricular activities. At times when he was with cronies whom he had known for years and whom he knew he could trust, it was understood Old E. B. could really let loose. There were rumors of certain wolfish tendencies he was supposed to have exhibited on rare occasion.
These last tendencies were the most delectable from the standpoint of powder-room discussion at WEFI, and the hardest to verify. Old E. B. was too shrewd ever to get caught off base. He took no chances on a rebuff, and any amatory affairs he may have indulged in were so carefully masked, so skillfully camouflaged, that the office rumors, although persistent, remained only rumors.
It was nine-thirty when E. B. bustled into the office, jerked his head in a quick sparrowlike gesture, and said, “Good morning, Miss Castle,” and then popped into his private office.
Ten seconds later he pressed the button that summoned Miss Castle.
That was typical of the man. He had undoubtedly arrived an hour early so he could ask what had happened the night before, but it would have been completely out of character for him to have said, “Good morning, Miss Castle. Would you mind stepping into my office?” He would instead enter his office, carefully place his hat on the shelf in the coat closet, stand for a few seconds in front of the mirror smoothing his hair, straightening his tie, and then, only then, would he settle himself in the big swivel chair at the polished-walnut desk and press the mother-of-pearl button that sounded Peggy’s buzzer.
Peggy picked up her notebook, entered the office, and seated herself in a chair.
E. B. waved the notebook aside. “Never mind the notebook. I want to ask you a few questions.”
She glanced up at him as though she hadn’t been anticipating this interview for the past ten hours.