The man gave a technical description of breed, species, place of origin, and so on.
When he had finished Brokay said: “Can you tell me that in less technical terms? I want to know exactly what the monkey looked like.”
The man gave him a description which tallied exactly with that of the monkey which was at the moment clinging to Brokay’s shoulder.
“Thank you,” Brokay said, when he had noted the points of the description.
“You said you were with the police?” asked the man in the pet store.
“I didn’t say so,” Brokay answered, “but you can draw your own conclusions.”
He slid the receiver back into place and turned to Rhoda Koline.
“Miss Koline,” he said, “I think we’re on the trail. You’ve got to do something and do it right away.”
“What is it?”
“Find out if Thelma Grebe has a leopard-skin coat.”
“Oh yes,” she said, “I know that she has. She wore it one night when she was out with me. In fact, she had it on the night she came to call on me there at the Ordway residence.”
Brokay stood staring at the dead body on the bed. “There’s one funny thing about these murders,” he said.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“There’s a single stabbing wound, made with a long, narrow-bladed weapon. It’s too long and thin to be an ordinary type of knife. Moreover, the murderer has always had to work fast. He’s had to thrust and then run. I am wondering if he is absolutely certain that his victim is dead when he leaves the room.”
“What difference would it make?” Rhoda Koline asked.
“I’m going to show you,” he said. “This is going to be a little gruesome, but it’s got to be done.”
He walked to the bed, picked up the body of the dead burglar, dragged it half from the bed, so that it lay partially on the bed and partially on the floor. Then he took a pencil from his pocket, a piece of paper, and wrote in a rude scrawl—
“Thelma is mixed up in it. She notified…”
At this point Brokay let the pencil trail across the paper. He placed the paper directly beneath the left hand of the corpse, pushed the pencil into the fingers of the right hand, and then arranged the arms so that it looked as though the burglar had tried to scrawl some message just as he was dying.
“But,” she said, “I don’t see what you’re getting at.”
Brokay nodded toward Sam West. “That man,” he said, “was killed because he knew too much.”
“What did he know?” she asked, with a frown.
“It wasn’t what he knew, so much as what they thought he knew,” Brokay said. “Now I’m in exactly the position that he occupied, only I really know what they could only surmise that Sam West knew.”
“In other words,” she said, her face suddenly changing color, “you mean that—”
Brokay consulted his wristwatch. “I mean,” he said, “that it is going to take three murders to make the chain complete. There was the murder of Gladys Ordway. We don’t know yet what the motive was. There was the murder of Sam West. He was murdered because he knew too much about the Ordway murder. The next murder will be when I am stabbed in the back with some long, thin weapon.”
“But when?” she asked. “Will they attempt—”
“Almost immediately,” he said. “I think we can count on the attempt within the next hour.” He turned and smiled at her, but his smile was grim and without mirth.
“What time is it now?” she inquired.
The smile remained fixed upon his lips. “Time for murder,” he said in an undertone as the knob on the door turned quietly. The latch clicked back. The lock held the door in place.
“Unlock the door,” said Brokay.
Rhoda Koline turned the key in the lock. The door opened and Thelma Grebe crossed the threshold. “There’s a message,” she said, “for Frank Compton. Someone wants him at once, and—”
She broke off with a quick scream as she stood, apparently rigid with terror and startled surprise, staring at the figure which lay half off the bed, with the tell-tale red pool which had seeped through the covers telling its own grim story.
“Good God!” she said, “it’s Sam! What’s happened?”
“I’m sure I couldn’t tell you,” Brokay said. “I was talking with this young lady in the social hall. I came in to see Sam. I found him like this.”
“There was a man who came to see him,” she said quickly. “A man by the name of Compton, a fence. Where is he?”
Brokay shrugged his shoulders.
“Then,” said Thelma Grebe, “he’s the one that did it. He’s the one that’s responsible. We’ve got to find him.”
“Probably,” Brokay said, “that means Compton was at least the last one to see him alive. The police will want him as a material witness.”
“The police?” exclaimed Thelma Grebe. “Who said anything about the police?”
“Don’t you notify the police?” asked Brokay.
“Certainly not,” she snapped. “This is a place where we can’t have the police prowling around. We’ll have to handle the matter in such a way that the place will never be mixed up in it. But that isn’t going to prevent Sam West’s friends from getting vengeance.”
She turned and stared at Rhoda Koline. “When did you get in here?” she asked.
“You heard what the gentleman said, Thelma,” Rhoda Koline remarked.
Brokay entered the conversation once more. “We had just this minute entered the door,” he said. “We saw the body and turned the key in the lock of the door. We didn’t want to be disturbed until we could find out what it was all about. Then you twisted the knob on the door. I decided that it might be better to let you in, because I didn’t know who you were, and I was afraid you might make a racket if you found the door locked and got no response.”
Rhoda Koline, playing her part as though she had been carefully schooled in it by several rehearsals, moved toward the body, then recoiled.
“Look!” she said, “there’s something in his hand! Something that he was writing on — a paper or something.”
Thelma Grebe moved swiftly forward.
“I’ll take it,” she said.
“Just a moment,” Brokay said, and moved quickly, so that he was standing shoulder to shoulder with her as they bent over the figure and stared at the paper.
Brokay read, then looked accusingly at Thelma Grebe.
“Are you the Thelma that he referred to?” he asked. “That’s your name, I believe.”
“Certainly not,” she said. “It’s some other Thelma. What’s more, that doesn’t look like Sam West’s writing. I don’t believe Sam West could possibly have written anything after he received that stab wound in the back. That must have been instantaneous. This is some kind of a frame-up.”
Brokay shrugged his shoulders. “At any rate,” he said, “the paper is evidence.”
“No it isn’t!” she said and swooped for it.
Brokay bent swiftly, caught her wrist with his hand, pulled her back and picked up the paper. He folded it and slipped it in his pocket. “Oh yes,” he said, smiling frostily, “it’s evidence’.”
She stepped back, stared at him with blazing eyes. “You can’t get away with that sort of stuff,” she said. “Who the hell do you think you are?”
Brokay shrugged his shoulders again. “I am,” he said, “a friend of Sam West — that is, I was a friend of his.”
“You’re a great friend!” she blazed. “You were left here alone in the room with him, and he was murdered. That may be what you call friendship.”
“I was down at the end of the hail,” he said, “in the social room — Room Ten.”
“You’re a liar!” she said. “You weren’t there at all.”
“Oh yes I was, and this young lady was with me.”