“No.”
“What about his voice? Could it have been anyone we’ve met with or through the Lawrences?”
“It’s possible. I thought it sounded familiar, although I couldn’t place it.”
“What sort of voice was it?”
“Very deep and masculine. A beautiful voice. One of those voices women call sexy.”
“Then you shouldn’t have had any trouble identifying the body that went with it!”
“Oh, stop being so male, Ellery. The point is, I think Mr. Dirk Lawrence has pushed little Mar into a romance. I’m all for it, mind you, but not while Dirk parks that cannon in the apartment. What do I do now?”
“Did you try talking to Martha again?”
“She didn’t give me the chance. She showered, dressed, and was out of there before my hands stopped shaking... I’ve been wondering why Martha’s acted so strange lately! It was bad enough when Dirk had no grounds. I can imagine what she’s going through now.”
“So he’s going to write,” Ellery was mumbling.
“That’s what he said. What do I do, snitch the letter?” Nikki sounded bitter.
“You can’t do that. But watch for it, Nikki. If possible, find out who the man is. And, of course, do your level best to keep it from Dirk.”
Each morning Charlotte, the maid, stopped in the apartment-house lobby to pick up the Lawrence mail from the switchboard and mailbox cubby. On the morning after the mysterious phone call, Nikki beat Charlotte to the cubby by half an hour.
Nikki went through the pile of mail in the elevator. There were five envelopes addressed to “Mrs. Dirk Lawrence” and to “Martha Lawrence.” One was a flossy handwritten number from a Park Avenue post-deb friend of Martha’s family, but this, Nikki knew, contained nothing more lethal than an invitation to a society wedding. The other four envelopes were typewritten and bore business address imprints in their upper left-hand corners; one was from Bergdorf Goodman.
Nikki riffled through Dirk’s mail automatically. One, postmarked Osceola, Iowa, and forwarded by his publisher, was unmistakably a fan letter; there was a bill from Abercrombie & Fitch Company, and a large grand envelope from the Limited Editions Club.
But that was all.
Nikki dropped the letters in the catchall salver on the foyer table, where Charlotte usually left them, and hurried to the study, grateful that the post office still limited itself to a single delivery per day. She felt mean and dirty.
She was to feel dirtier.
Dirk, always a late riser, was still in bed when Nikki finished transcribing his Tuesday’s library notes and found herself with nothing to do. Wondering if Martha was awake, she wandered out of the study. Charlotte was in the foyer, vacuuming.
“Mrs. Lawrence? She just got up.” Charlotte poked the nozzle of the vacuum cleaner in the direction of the kitchen.
The pile of mail on the foyer table had dwindled.
Nikki went through the swinging kitchen door with a thump. Martha cried out, whirling.
“Nikki!” She tried to laugh. “You startled me.”
She had been standing by the dinette table, holding a letter. Unopened envelopes lay on the table.
“I... I thought it was Dirk.”
Color came back to her cheeks.
“My goodness, does he affect you that way?” said Nikki cheerily. But she was not feeling at all cheery. Martha had been alone, reading her mail. Why should she have jumped so at an interruption? They were just business letters. Or were they? “I think,” said Nikki rather faintly, “I’ll have a cup of coffee.”
As she went to the electric range she saw Martha stuff the envelopes from the table and the letter she had been reading into the pocket of her robe. Martha’s movements were hasty and blundering.
“I’d better snag the bathroom before Dirk monopolizes it,” Martha said with a shrill laugh. “Once he gets in there...” The rest was lost in the roar of Charlotte’s vacuum cleaner as Martha fled.
And there was the letter, on the floor under the dinette table, where it had fallen from Martha’s pocket.
Nikki drew a deep breath and pounced.
It was not a business letterhead. There was nothing on the sheet of white paper but a single line of typing. The line had been typed in red.
There was nothing to indicate what the typewritten words meant or who had typed them.
The back of the sheet was blank.
At the sound of Martha’s voice from the foyer Nikki dropped the letter under the dinette table and ran to the cupboard. She was taking down a cup and saucer when the door banged open.
Martha was terrified again. She looked frantically about.
“Nikki, did you happen to see a letter? I must have dropped it—”
“Letter?” said Nikki as casually as she could manage. “Why, no, Mar.” She went to the range and picked up the coffeepot.
“Here it is!” The relief in Martha’s voice was almost too much to bear. Nikki did not trust herself to turn around. “It fell under the table. It’s a — it’s a bill I don’t want Dirk to know about. You know how he acts when I buy something expensive out of my own money...”
Nikki murmured something female.
Martha hurried out again.
Nikki telephoned Ellery from the public phone booth in the lobby.
“Now, Nikki,” said Ellery, “what’s the point of crying?”
“If you could only have seen her, Ellery. Frightened, lying... It’s not like Martha at all. And me, spying on her — lying right back...”
“You’re doing this to help Martha, not hurt her. Tell me what happened.”
Nikki told him.
“You didn’t see the envelope?”
“I must have, when I looked over the mail in the elevator this morning. But I have no way of telling which one the letter was in.”
“Too bad. The envelope might have—”
“Wait,” said Nikki. “I do know.”
“Yes?” said Ellery eagerly.
“The message on the sheet of paper — the enclosure — was typed on the red part of a black-and-red ribbon. I remember now that on one of the envelopes I handled this morning Martha’s name and address were typed in red, too.”
“Red typing on the envelope?” Ellery sounded baffled. “You don’t happen to recall the name of the business firm imprinted on the upper left corner?”
“I think it was an air-conditioning company, but I don’t remember the name.”
“Air-conditioning company... Not a bad dodge. Any envelope like that would naturally be taken to contain an advertising mailing piece. So if Dirk happened to get to the mail first—”
“Ellery, I’ve got to get back upstairs. Dirk may be up.”
“You say, Nikki, this took place in the kitchen?”
“Yes.”
“I seem to recall a wastepaper basket near the dinette alcove. Is the basket still there?”
“Yes.”
“She may have dropped the envelope into it. She’d have no reason to be careful about the envelope. Did you look in the basket?”
“I didn’t look for the envelope at all!”
“Naturally,” soothed Ellery. “But it won’t hurt to look, Nikki. I’d very much like to examine that envelope.”
“All right,” said Nikki, and she used the phone for punctuation.
She brought him the envelope at noon.
“We needed some more carbon paper, so I told Dirk I’d have lunch out today. I’ll have to cab right back, Ellery, or they may suspect something. It was in the wastepaper basket.”
“Lucky!”
The manila envelope was of the clasp type, about five inches by eight. A strip of heavy adhesive paper had been used for sealing above the clasp. On the face, typed in red, were the words “Mrs. Dirk Lawrence” and the Beekman Place address. The inscription in the upper left corner was THE FROEHM AIR-CONDITIONER COMPANY; the address was The 45th Street Building, 547 Fifth Avenue, New York. The entire left side of the envelope was decorated with a cartoonical drawing of a heat-prostrated family, over the legend: Why Live in a Turkish Bath This Summer?