“I hope not.”
“Well, there you are.”
Blackshear wasn’t exactly sure where he was. But he knew where he was going.
The means to charm were apparently more profitable than its ends: Miss Hudson could afford glass bricks and mahogany paneling; Terola’s place was a long, narrow stucco building between a one-way alley euphemistically named Jacaranda Lane, and a rickety three-story frame-house converted into apartments. Black stenciling on the frosted glass window read:
Blackshear went in. In spite of the rows of filing cabinets and the samples of Terola’s work which lined the walls, the office still looked like what it had been originally, somebody’s front parlor. Near one end of the room was a dirty red brick fireplace which had a desolate and futile appearance, as if it had become, from long disuse, a mere hole in the wall which a careless workman had forgotten to plaster over. To the right of the fireplace was a curtained alcove. The curtains were not drawn and Blackshear could see part of the interior: a brown leather chair, the seat wrinkled with age, a daybed partly covered with an old-fashioned afghan, and above it, the stenciled front window. The alcove reminded Blackshear of his childhood in the Middle West — all the best people had had a “sun porch”, which was indescribably hot in the summer and equally cold in the winter and no good for anything at all except social prestige.
Terola’s sun porch seemed to be not a mark of prestige but a sign of necessity. The daybed was obviously used for sleeping; a dirty sheet dribbled out from under the afghan and the pillow was stained with hair-oil.
There was no one in sight, but from behind the closed door at the other end of the room came sounds of activity, the scraping of equipment being moved across a wooden floor, the rise and fall of voices. Blackshear couldn’t distinguish the words but the tones were plain enough. Somebody was giving orders and somebody else wasn’t taking them.
He was on the point of knocking on the closed door when he noticed the printed sign propped against the typewriter of Terola’s desk: FOR ATTENTION, PLEASE RING.
He rang, and waited, and then rang again, and finally the door opened and a young girl came out, wearing a printed silk bathrobe. She wore no make-up and her face glistened with grease and moisture. Water dripped from the ends of her short black hair and slid down her neck, and the damp silk of the bathrobe clung to her skin.
She seemed unconcerned. “You want something?”
“I’d like to speak to Mr. Terola.”
“He’s busy right now. Sit down.”
“Thank you.”
“I’m supposed to be drowning but Jack can’t get the water right. It’s supposed to be Lake Michigan, see.”
Blackshear nodded politely to indicate that he saw.
“Jack’s a sucker for drowning scenes,” the girl added. “Me, I like to stay dry. The way I look at it is, I could just as easy been stabbed. All this fuss trying to make like Lake Michigan. Don’t you want to sit down?”
“I’m perfectly comfortable.”
“Well, all right. You here on business?”
“In a way. My name is Paul Blackshear.”
“Pleased to meet you. I’m Nola Rath. Well, I better get back now. You want a magazine to read?”
“No, thanks.”
“You may have quite a wait. If Jack gets this shot right he’ll be out here in a jiffy, but if he don’t, he won’t.”
“I’ll wait.”
“I could just as easy been stabbed,” the girl said. “Well, I’ll tell Jack you’re here.”
She left behind a trail of water drops and the smell of wet hair.
Nola Rath. Blackshear repeated the name to himself, wondering how old the girl was. Perhaps twenty-five, only a few years younger than Helen Clarvoe, yet a whole generation seemed to separate the two. Miss Clarvoe’s age had very little to do with chronology. She was a middle-aged woman because she had had nothing to keep her young. She was the chosen victim, not only of Evelyn Merrick, but of life itself.
The thought depressed Blackshear. He wished he could forget her but she nagged at his mind like a broken promise.
He looked at his watch. Three-ten. A wind had come up. The curtains of Terola’s alcove were blowing in and out and the cobwebs in the fireplace were stirring, and somewhere in the chimney there was a fidgeting of mice.
“You wanted to see me?”
Blackshear turned, surprised that he had not heard the opening of the door or the sound of footsteps.
“Mr. Terola?”
“That’s right.”
“My name’s Blackshear.”
They shook hands. Terola was in his early forties, a very thin, tall man with a habitual stoop as if he were trying to scale himself down to size. He had black, bushy brows that quivered with impatience when he talked, as if they were silently denying the words that came out of the soft feminine mouth. Two thin parallel strands of iron-gray hair crossed the top of his bald pate like railway ties.
“Just a minute.” Terola walked over to the alcove and drew the curtains irritably. “Things are in a mess around here. My secretary’s home with the mumps. Mumps, yet, at her age. I thought they were for kids. Well, what can I do for you, Blackshear?”
“I understand you employ, or have employed, a young woman called Evelyn Merrick.”
“How come you understand that?”
“Someone told me.”
“Such as who?”
“Miss Merrick used your name as a reference when she went to apply for training as a model. She claimed she had done some work for you.”
“What kind of work?”
“Whatever kind you had to offer,” Blackshear said, attempting to conceal his impatience. “You do quite a bit of — shall we call it art work?”
“We shall and it is.”
“Have it your way. Do you remember Miss Merrick?”
“Maybe I do, maybe I don’t. I’m not answering a lot of questions unless there’s a good reason. You got a good reason, Mr. Blacksheep?”
“Blackshear.”
“It’s not that I don’t want to co-operate, only I kind of like to find out first who I’m co-operating with in what and for why. What’s your business, mister?”
“I’m an investment counselor.”
“So?”
“Let’s say that there’s an estate to settle and Evelyn Merrick may get a piece of it.”
Terola spoke tightly, barely moving his mouth, as if he was afraid there might be lip-readers around peering in through the curtains of the alcove or the chinks in the chimney: “The kind of piece that babe gets won’t come out of any estate, mister.”
“She came here, then?”
“She came. Gave me a hard-luck story about a dying mother, so I let her have a couple of hours’ work. I’m a sucker for dying mothers, just so’s they don’t change their minds and stay alive, like mine did.”
“Did the Merrick girl give you any trouble?”
“I don’t take trouble from chicks like that. I bounce them out on their ear.”
“Did you bounce her?”
“She got nosy. I had to.”
“When was this?”