So, she’d wasted her time, frozen half to death and ruined her slippers, and all for nothing.
No, not for nothing after all. Now she knew for sure the murderer was somewhere in this building.
Friday morning, Mrs. Kelly awoke with a snuffly head cold and a steadily increasing irritation. She was furious at Detective Ryan for making her do his work for him. She was enraged at the terrible creature upstairs, who’d started this whole thing in the first place. And she was exasperated with herself, for being such a complete failure.
She spent the day sipping tea liberally laced with lemon juice, and at four hobbled out to the incinerator to watch the upper half of the torso bump by. Then, snuffly and miserable, she went back to bed.
On Saturday, the cold was just as bad, and her irritation was worse. She sat and looked at her list of sixteen names, and searched desperately for a way to find out which one of them was a murderer.
Of course, she could simply call Detective Ryan and have him come over at four o’clock, to watch the piece of body fall down the incinerator shaft. She could do that, but she wouldn’t. When she called Detective Ryan, it would be because she had found the murderer.
Besides, he probably wouldn’t even come.
So she glared at the list of names. A silly thought occurred to her. She could look up the phone numbers of all these people, and say, “Excuse me, have you been dropping a body down the incinerator?”
Well, come to think of it, why not? It was a woman’s body, which probably meant it was somebody’s wife. With her husband the murderer. Most of the people in this building were middle-aged or better, couples whose children had grown up and gone their separate ways years ago. So far as she knew, there were no large families in the building at all.
It would have to be an apartment in which there were only two people. The murderer wouldn’t be able to hide the dead body from someone living in the same apartment.
So maybe the telephone would be useful after all. She could call each apartment. If a woman answered she would say she had a wrong number. If a man answered, she would ask for his wife. The apartment without a woman would be the logical suspect.
With a definite plan at last, she ignored her stuffed nose and sat down beside the telephone to look up the phone numbers of her sixteen suspects, and start her calls.
Two of the sixteen had no phone numbers listed. Well, if the other fourteen produced nothing certain, she would have to think of something else for those two. And she was suddenly convinced that she would be able to think of something when the time came, with no trouble at all. She was suddenly oozing with confidence.
She started phoning shortly after five. Eight of the fourteen answered, five times a woman’s voice and three times a man’s voice. Mrs. Kelly apologized to the women for calling a wrong number, and asked each man who answered, “Is the Missus at home, please?” Twice, the men answered, “Just a second,” and Mrs. Kelly had to apologize to the women who came on the line. The third time, the man said, “She’s out shopping right now. Could I take a message for her?”
“I’ll call back later,” said Mrs. Kelly quickly. “Do you know when she’ll be back?”
“Fifteen, twenty minutes, probably,” said the man.
She waited an hour before calling that number again, and she was so nervous she actually did dial a wrong number to begin with. Because this might be the end of the search. If the wife still wasn’t home—
She was. Mrs. Kelly, disappointed, made the eighth wrong-number apology, and crossed the eighth name off her list.
She tried the remaining six numbers later in the evening, and only once found someone at home. A woman. Mrs. Kelly crossed the ninth name off the list.
She tried the five remaining numbers shortly after ten that night, but none of them answered. Deciding to try again in the morning, she set the alarm for eight o’clock and went to bed, where she slept uneasily, dreaming of bodies falling from endless blackness.
The upper half of the torso had fallen on Friday.
Mrs. Kelly’s cold was worse again on Saturday. She forced herself to the telephone around noon, managed to lower the number of suspects from five to three, then gave up and went back to bed, rousing only to watch the left leg plummet by at four o’clock.
Only the head remained.
Sunday morning, the cold was gone. Not even a sniffle remained. Mrs. Kelly got up early, went to eight o’clock Mass, and hurried back home through the January cold and the slippery streets to have breakfast and make more phone calls.
There were three numbers left. One of them was answered, by a disgruntled man who said his wife was asleep, but the other two still didn’t respond. She tried again at eleven, and this time the disgruntled man turned her over to his wife. Two numbers left.
Her second call was answered by a man, and Mrs. Kelly said, “Hello. Is the Missus at home?”
“Who’s this?” snapped the man. His voice was suspicious and hoarse, and Mrs. Kelly felt the leaping of hope within her breast.
“This is Annie Tyrrell,” she said, giving the first name to come to her mind, which happened to have been her mother’s maiden name.
“The wife ain’t here,” said the man. There was a pause, and he added, “She’s gone out of town. Visiting her mother. Gone to Nebraska.”
“Oh, dear me,” said Mrs. Kelly, hoping she was doing a creditable job of acting. “How long ago did she leave?”
“Wednesday before last,” said the man. “Won’t be back for a month or two.”
“Could you give me her address in Nebraska?” Mrs. Kelly asked. “I could drop her a note,” she explained.
The man hesitated. “Don’t have it right handy,” he said, finally. Then, all at once, he said, “Who’d you say this was?”
For a frantic second, Mrs. Kelly couldn’t remember what name she had given, and then it came back to her. “Annie Tyrrell,” she said.
“I don’t think I know you,” said the man suspiciously. “Where you know my wife from?”
“Oh, we — uh — we met in the supermarket.”
“Is that right?” he sounded more suspicious than ever. “I tell you what,” he said. “You give me your number. I don’t have the wife’s address right handy, but I can look it up and call you back.”
“Well, uh—” Mrs. Kelly thought frantically. She didn’t know what to do. If she gave him her own number, he might be able to check it and find out who she really was. But if she gave him some other number, he might call back and find out there wasn’t any Annie Tyrrell, and then he’d know for sure that someone suspected him.
He broke into her thoughts, saying “Say, who is this, anyway? What’s my wife’s first name?”
“What?”
“I asked you what’s my wife’s first name,” he repeated.
“Well,” she said, forcing a little laugh that sounded patently false even to her, “whatever on earth for? Don’t you even know your own wife’s first name?”
“I do,” he said. “But do you?”
Suddenly terrified, Mrs. Kelly hung up without another word, and sat staring at the telephone. It had been him! The sound of his voice, the suspicious way he had acted. It had been him! She looked at his name on her list. Andrew Shaw, apartment 8B, two floors up, directly over her apartment.
Andrew Shaw. He was the killer, and now he knew that someone suspected him. It wouldn’t take him long to realize the call had come from someone in this building, someone who must have seen the evidence in the incinerator shaft.
He would be searching for her now, and she didn’t know how long it would take him to find her. He might be much more resourceful than she; it might not take him as long as a week to find and silence the person who was threatening him.