Nikki gulped. “I’ll try to be careful.”
“Yes,” said Ellery without mercy. “Louis! Where’s our tetrazzini?”
Nikki called the Queen apartment late Saturday afternoon to say that she was free for the evening, if anybody was interested. Inspector Queen, who took the message, had to have it translated.
“It means she’s got something,” said Ellery with excitement. “Give me that phone! Nikki, well?”
“Well, what?” said Nikki’s voice. “Do we have a date, or don’t we?”
“Can’t talk?”
“No.”
“The apartment. Any time you can make it.”
“What’s going on here?” demanded his father when Ellery hung up. “What are you two up to?”
“Nothing good,” said Ellery.
“Anything in my line?”
“Heaven forbid.”
“You’ll get around to me yet,” said the Inspector cheerfully. “You always do.”
Nikki showed up a few minutes past nine, looking more dead than alive.
“Excuse us?” said Ellery politely, and he shut the study door on the Inspector, who was watching Sid Caesar in the living room. “I’ve got your drink ready, Nik. Kick off your shoes, lie down, and give out.”
Nikki sank back on the couch, wiggling her toes, set the highball glass untouched on the floor, and addressed the ceiling. “I am now,” she announced, “the female Jimmy Valentine of my darning and knitting circle. I don’t suppose you want the technical details?”
“Correct,” said Ellery. “Results are all that interest me. And they were?”
“You have no heart.”
“This is a heartless racket, child. Well?”
“The letter came in this morning’s mail,” said Nikki dreamily. “There were three business-type envelopes, but I didn’t have to steam open all three. I spotted the right one at a glance.”
“You did?” Ellery was astonished. “Froehm again?”
“No. This was an ordinary long white envelope with the return address of a business firm named Humber & Kahn, Jewelers. But the address was The 45th Street Building, 547 Fifth — same as the air-conditioner outfit, please note. And... get this...”
“Oh, come on!”
“Martha’s name and address were typewritten in red again.”
Ellery stared. “Funny.”
“Stupid, I calls it. That red typing is a dead giveaway all by itself, if Dirk should happen to notice it a few times. Luckily, he almost never gets to the mail first.”
“Go on,” muttered Ellery. “What did this message say?”
“It said — in the same red-ribbon typing, by the way — ‘Monday comma 3 P.M. comma B.’”
“B?”
“B.”
C...
Monday was a fine day for shadowing if you were an otter. The rains came and went all day, mischievously, sometimes a drizzle and at others a rattling shower that drove people off the streets. As usual in New York, at the first hint of moisture empty taxicabs became rarer than a traffic officer’s smile.
Ellery spent the whole morning and part of the afternoon shivering in his raincoat under a candy-store awning across the street from a shabby apartment house in Chelsea. Martha had found a play for the fall and she was going over it with the author, a young housewife who had written it between diaper-washings and sessions over the range.
It looked like a long wait.
It was.
Martha apparently had lunch there. For noon came, and one o’clock, and one-thirty, and there was still no sign of her.
At one-forty-five Ellery began to hunt for a cab. It took him twenty minutes to capture one, and even then he almost lost it when the driver learned that he was expected to wait indefinitely around the corner with his flag down. A five-dollar bill secured his loyalty.
Martha emerged at twenty-five minutes past two, unfurling an umbrella. She hurried in her plastic overshoes toward Eighth Avenue, looking around anxiously every few steps. Ellery, keeping his head down and his collar up, followed on the opposite side of the street, trying successfully to look like a miserable man.
At that, he had a close call. A cab appeared from nowhere, discharged a passenger, engulfed Martha, and was off before Ellery could reach the corner. He had to sprint to his waiting taxi. Fortunately, Martha’s cab was held up two blocks south by a red light. Ellery’s driver, sensing adventure, caught up at 15th Street.
“Where’s she headed, buddy?” he asked.
“Just follow her.”
“You her husband?” the driver said wisely. “I had a wife once. Take it from me, Mister, it don’t pay to knock yourself out. That’s the way I always figure. Give the other guy the headache. Why fight City Hall?”
“There they go, damn it!”
“Keep your pants on,” soothed the driver; and they were off again.
Martha’s cab turned left on 14th Street and began the long crawl east. Ellery nibbled his nails. Traffic was heavy and visibility poor. It was raining hard again. Where was she going?
At Union Square he half-expected the cab they were following to head north. But instead it turned south into Fourth Avenue.
The secondhand bookshops swam by.
Was she going down Lafayette Street? That way lay Police Headquarters.
It seemed improbable.
At Astor Place, behind Wanamaker’s, Martha’s cab turned into Cooper Square and cut across to Third Avenue. It settled into a sedate southward journey under the El.
Monday, 3 P.M., B... B for Brooklyn? Was she bound for the Williamsburg Bridge and the East River?
And suddenly it came to Ellery that, where Martha’s cab had turned into Third Avenue to head south, Third Avenue ceased to exist. Where Third Avenue met 4th Street, it became The Bowery.
B for Bowery it was.
But The Bowery ran all the way down to Chatham Square. She could hardly be peering out of her window hoping to spot Van Harrison on some unnamed street corner in the dingy gloom of the El. It had to be a specific place on The Bowery. A Bowery-Something... Bowery Mission!
It was not The Bowery Mission. It proved to be 267 Bowery, and it caught the philosopher driving Ellery’s cab as much by surprise as his passenger...
Near Houston Street Martha’s taxi, treacherously, made a full turn under the El. Martha jumped out, the door of a cab parked on the east side of the street popped open to receive her, and the last Ellery saw of her was a glimpse through the window of Van Harrison embracing her as their cab shot away from the curb, made a quick turn, and disappeared up a side street; By the time Ellery’s driver extricated himself from a tangle of northbound traffic and duplicated the maneuver, the enemy was out of sight.
“Why didn’t you tell me she was meeting him in front of Sammy’s Bowery Follies?” demanded the driver in an injured tone. “Then I’d been prepared.”
“Because Sammy’s Bowery Follies begins with an S,” snapped Ellery, “and if that’s cricket it ought to be baseball. Stop at a drugstore so I can use a phone, then take me up to West 87th Street.”
“With what’s on the meter already,” said the driver unhappily, “that’s going to use up a good hunk of the fin.” And there was no further communion between them.
Nikki managed to get away late Monday evening, and she burst into the Queen apartment with a “Well?” that faltered at sight of the Inspector.
“It’s all right, Nikki,” growled Ellery, “I’ve told Dad all about it. This looks like a long job. It was Sammy’s Bowery Follies, Bowery and Houston, with the ‘Sammy’ apparently canceled out. In short, I lost them. What time did Miss Prynne get home?”