“At the usual time. For dinner.” Nikki sank into a chair. “B... Bowery.”
“I think you two ought to have your heads examined,” exclaimed Inspector Queen. “Mixing up in an adultery case! Anyway it turns out, Nikki, you’re going to catch the dirty end of the stick. And don’t give me any taffy about friendship. In an adultery case there’s no friends, just subpoenas. I’ve already notified my son what I think of his judgment. And now, if you can bear it, I’m going to bed.”
“But why Bowery Follies?” asked Nikki, when the Inspector’s door had thundered. “What on earth were they doing there, Ellery?”
“Harrison’s an actor. The ham instinct. It’s romantic to meet on The Bowery and go scudding off in the rain. Gives that preliminary zing to the big scene. After all, there isn’t much variety in hotel rooms, or what usually goes on in them under these circumstances.” Ellery packed a pipe, viciously.
“Then you think they were going...”
“I assure you Martha didn’t jump into his taxi to discuss a casting problem. The last I saw, Harrison had a stranglehold on her collarbone. I leave it to you what their destination was.”
“The A — again?” asked Nikki in a small voice.
“Not the A—. I phoned Ernie at the desk. Harrison checked out Friday morning and he hasn’t been back since. It was an academic call. Does it really matter what hotels they use?” Nikki did not reply. “How did our heroine act when she got home?”
“Subdued.”
“Huh!”
“And... very nice to Dirk.”
“Of course.”
“Kept talking through dinner about the play she’s taken an option on. And about this Ella Greenspan, the young housewife who wrote it.”
“She also contrived to give the impression that she spent not only the morning but the entire afternoon with the precocious Mrs. Greenspan? Came directly home from Chelsea, and so on?”
“Well... yes.”
“And what’s on her agenda for tonight?”
“Martha’s reading Dirk the play.”
“Touching. By the way, how was Dirk?”
“Very interested. They went right into the study after dinner. That’s how I was able to get away. Dirk asked me to stay and listen in, but Martha seemed to want him to herself, so... Well, I said I’d some things to buy at the drugstore. I suppose Martha’s afraid of me these days.”
“I’m beginning,” remarked Ellery, “not to care a great deal for your Martha Lawrence, Nikki.”
Nikki nibbled her lip.
“But the situation does have its element of repulsive fascination. It’s sort of like living in a keyhole.” Then Ellery blew an apologetic cloud of smoke and laid his pipe down. Nikki was looking so miserable that he pulled her over to him. “I’m sorry. I guess I’m not used to this kind of case. Why are you getting up?”
“No reason. I want a cigaret.”
Ellery lit one for her. She returned to her own chair.
“You hate me.”
“I hate men!”
“Now, be reasonable, Nikki. It takes two to build a love nest. I hold no brief for Harrison, but Martha’s not exactly jail bait. She’s old enough to be held responsible for her acts.”
“All right,” cried Nikki. “Can’t we get back to the point? Do you want me to keep steaming open business envelopes?”
“I want you to come home. But if you won’t — yes.” Ellery picked up his pipe again. “By the way, today — we may say with some justification — we’ve progressed.”
“In which direction?” asked Nikki bitterly.
“Exactly. But that’s not what I mean. The pattern’s beginning to show.
“Harrison,” said Ellery, “has apparently worked out a melodramatic but effective enough scheme for having his pigeon and eating it, too. Different meeting places each time, and then away to the day’s nest. The only point of contact necessary under this layout is a time designation, place being expressed in code, and the whole luscious package enclosed in an innocuous business envelope. With Martha coming and going at all hours on legitimate business, and Dirk used to it — even though he breaks out in occasional rashes of jealousy-it’s not a bad set-up at all.
“Harrison’s really reduced the danger of discovery to a minimum.
“The code itself,” continued Ellery to the wall, since Nikki was looking there, too, “presents certain primitive points of interest. A comes first and turns out to represent the A—Hotel. B comes second and we find it indicates Bowery Follies. We may infer, then, that the next code letter will probably be C, and that C will stand for Carnegie Hall, or Coney Island, or somewhere in Central Park; that D will follow C and designate the Daily News building or Danny’s Hideaway; and so on. What Harrison will do when he exhausts the alphabet, assuming he can get away with it that long,” said Ellery gravely, “heaven only knows. Probably start working backwards from Z.”
“Games,” said Nikki. “Games!”
“But now the question: How did Martha know that A didn’t stand for the Astor, or the Art Students’ League, or the American Museum of Natural History? And B — why not Bellevue Hospital, or the Broadway Tabernacle, or Battery Park? The B was unqualified, except for time; so was the A. How did she know?
“The answer is that the initial-letter element of the code must be part of it only. The master key of the code must specify which A-place of all the A-places in New York the letter A in the code is to designate. Harrison has one copy of the decoding instrument, Martha the other. When she gets a message designating C, she’ll simply look up C in her copy, and she’s away.”
“That first envelope,” said Nikki, “retaining the shape of some booklet!”
“Nice work,” grinned Ellery. “Have you kept looking for it?”
“Well — yes.”
“Not, I gather, with the enthusiasm its importance warrants. You see how exacting detective work is, Nikki. You’ve got to find that booklet. It’s probably a guidebook of some sort to places of interest in New York City. With it we’ll know where they’ll meet before they meet. The advantages are self-evident.”
“Tonight,” said Nikki through her teeth, “you’re talking like Professor Queen, and I don’t appreciate it. I’ll find the damned thing! What’s that you’ve got there?”
“This?” Ellery looked up from a little black notebook he had taken from his breast pocket. “This is my case book.”
“Case book?”
“Times, dates, where they meet, where they go, what they do, to the best of my knowledge and belief... Who knows? It may come in handy.”
Nikki went off drooping.
While waiting for the next rendezvous, Ellery thought he might as well settle a point or two.
He spent all of Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday in an apparently aimless round of phone calls and visits to various Broadwayites of his acquaintance. He lunched at Sardi’s and the Algonquin, had dinner at Lindy’s and Toots Shor’s, dropped in at 21 and the Stork, ate a midnight snack at Reuben’s, and by Thursday evening he was far fuller of good food than of digestible information. He might have done better pumping the columnists, but he made broad detours whenever he spotted one. Expert of the painless exploratory technique as he was, he did not dare risk a consultation with the specialists. In fact, the newspapers these days gave him the horrors, and he scanned Winchell and Lyons and Sullivan and the rest with the fears of a man of much guiltier conscience.