She looked up from the typescript she was pencilling, and caught me regarding the hat. “Pay no attention to the flying saucer.” She showed her small even teeth in a practiced smile. “I have to interview a ladybird this morning. As a matter of fact, I thought you might be she.”
“I’m usually compared to insects like the cockroach.”
“I mean when you knocked. Don’t you know what a ladybird is? A ladybird is a bird who thinks she’s a lady. The hat helps me to dominate, you know? This particular ladybird has slain wild elephants with a wild elephant gun, so she’ll take some dominating. Now tell me you’re her husband.” She smiled expertly again. If her nose had been a trifle less sharp, her eyes a few degrees warmer, she would have been a very pretty woman. I couldn’t imagine her writing the inscription in the Sonnets from the Portuguese.
I said: “My name is Archer. You are Miss Hammond?”
“You surprise and distress me, Mr. Archer. My fair pan was on the cover of Radio Mirror last month.” I wondered if she worked this hard selling herself all day every day.
“What can I do for you?” she said. “I only have a minute.”
“I’m looking for a woman named Galley Lawrence. Mrs. Joseph Tarantine. Do you know her?”
A shadow crossed her face. Her hardening blue gaze reminded me that I hadn’t shaved or changed my shirt for over twenty-four hours. “I think I’ve heard the name. Are you a detective?”
I admitted that I was.
“You should shave more often; it puts people off. What has this Mrs. Tarantine been up to?”
“I’m trying to find out. What did she used to be up to?”
“I really don’t know Mrs. Tarantine. She lives in the same apartment building as a friend of mine. I’ve seen her once or twice, I think, that’s all.”
“Under what conditions?”
“Normal conditions. She dropped into my friend’s apartment for a cocktail one afternoon when I was there. I didn’t like her, if that’s what you mean. Her appeal is to the opposite sex. Frank sexuality is her forte. If I wanted to be catty I’d call it blatant.” Her forte was the cutting word.
“Do you know her husband?”
“He was there, too. I didn’t like him either. He was sleek and crawling with charm, like a tomcat, you know? They made a well-suited couple. Keith – my friend implied that Tarantine was some sort of gangster, if that’s the sort of thing you’re looking for.” She took a cigarette from a silver box on the desk and broke it clean in half between her carmine-tipped fingers. “What are you looking for, anyway?”
I didn’t know myself. “Just information. Is this friend of yours Keith Dalling?”
“Yes. Have you talked to Keith – Mr. Dalling?” She managed to get the second cigarette between her lips.
I leaned across the desk and held my lighter to it. “I’d like to. He doesn’t answer his phone.”
She puffed hungrily on the cigarette. “What did she do? I’ve always considered her capable of anything. I named her Ignoble Savage.”
“Her husband seems to have committed a theft.”
“From whom?”
“I daren’t say.”
“And you want to question Keith?”
“Yes.”
“He isn’t involved in it, is he?” Now she was really worried. And that was just as well, if she loved Dalling or ever had.
“He may be. If he’s mixed up with Mrs. Tarantine.”
“Oh no.” She’d come close to the edge of candor but I had pushed her too fast. She drew away from it, her personality almost visibly receding. “They’re just the merest acquaintances, apartment-house neighbors.”
“You said they were friends.”
“I certainly did not, because they aren’t.” The clicking machine was back in place, everything under control. “I’m afraid we’ve run out of time, Mr. Archer. Good morning and good luck.” She crushed out her cigarette in a silver ashtray, and the last smoke puffed from her nostrils like a tiny exhaust.
“Something I almost forgot,” I said. “There’s a radio producer, a friend of Dalling’s, who does a crime show based on police work. He wouldn’t work for this station?”
“You are checking up on Mr. Dalling, then. Is he in some kind of trouble?” Her voice was tense, though she had regained her composure.
“I hope not.”
“Of course you wouldn’t tell me if he was. You probably mean Joshua Severn. Mr. Dalling used to work for him. He doesn’t work for the studio, he owns his own show, but he has an office down the hall. Sometime’s he’s even in it.”
“Thank you, Miss Hammond.”
“Don’t mention it, Mr. Archer.”
There was a telephone booth in the first-floor lobby of the building next door. The man behind the news counter wore the frosted glasses of the blind. I called police headquarters from the booth, and told the sergeant on duty that I was worried about a friend of mine. His name was Keith Dulling and he lived in the Casa Loma, Apartment 8. He didn’t answer when I phoned or when I knocked on the door – “And what is your name, sir?” he cut in sharply.
I deliberately misunderstood the question: “Keith Dalling. He lives at the Casa Loma.”
“Just one minute, sir.” His voice was soothing.
There was a buzzing silence on the line, terminated by a double click. It probably meant that the body had been found and they were tracing my call.
I hung up. I went back to the studio building and up in the elevator again to the third floor. I found the name Joshua Severn on a door at the rear of the building. It was standing slightly ajar; a continuous low murmur came from the other side. I knocked and was told to come in.
It was a working room, containing two desks piled with papers, a pair of metal filing-cabinets, a blackboard on one wall. At the moment the blackboard showed the odds on a half-dozen Derby candidates quoted from the winter book. A heavy middle-aged man switched off the dictating machine on the table beside him and straightened up in his chair.
“Mr. Severn?”
“That’s what it says on the door.” He said it cheerfully. He had a broad cheerful face surmounted by a brush of erect gray hair, like iron filings tempted by a magnet.
“My name is Archer.”
“Wait a minute. Not Lew Archer?” He stood up and offered me a stubby hand. “I’m glad to meet you, Archer. Have a seat.”
I said that I was glad to meet him, too, and sat in the chair he pushed up beside his desk. I added I hadn’t been aware that my name was a byword in the upper echelons of the radio industry.
He grinned. Most of his features, nose and ears and chin, were a little larger than life-size and slightly squashed-looking, as if they’d outgrown their mold. “It’s a darn funny thing, Archer. It happens to me all the time. The extrasensory boys, the parapyschologists, have got me half convinced. I start thinking about somebody I haven’t seen or heard of for maybe two years. Within twenty-four hours after I get the flash, I meet the guy on the street or he marches into my office, just like you.” He glanced at the yachtsman’s chronometer on his wrist. “It took you thirty-six.”
“I’m always a little slow. I take it you were thinking about me around nine thirty Sunday night. Why?”
“A fellow I know called in from Palm Springs. He wanted the name of a good private detective, one who works alone. I gave him yours. I have a beach house in Santa Teresa, and Miranda Sampson was singing your praises last year. Okay?”