“Don’t tell me something else—?” he gasped incredulously.
“Well, look at it for yourself,” was her answer.
It was small; the exact size of a half-dime. It was brown. It was half-moon shaped; rounded on the outside, straight down the middle. It had two little holes in it, intact, and the remnants of two more indenting the straight edge. A corkscrew of brown thread still dangled from the two that were intact.
“Broken button,” he breathed almost reverently.
“Vest?”
“No, cuff. Those ones that you don’t use, on the outside of the sleeve. I mean that we don’t. Too small for anything else.”
“It must have been split for some time, maybe from the last dry-cleaning his coat got, and it finally dropped off tonight in the chair. Maybe he moved his hand too much, gesturing or with that cigar.”
“How’d it get under, though?”
“Fell down over the side, I think. And then maybe in getting up angrily, he gave the whole chair a shove over a little, and that put it below it, where it was already lying.”
“How do we know it isn’t Graves’? It may have been kicking around here on the floor for days.”
“Well, we’ll try matching it up right now, settle that point before we go any further. That’s one thing we can do, thanks be! It’s got to be from a brown or tan suit. I don’t have to be a man to know that blues or grays don’t have brown buttons. And he’s lying in a tux right now, it’s not from that.”
She went into the bedroom, flung open the clothes-closet, pulled on a light-cord. “Windows all right?”
“Yeah, I covered them up.” His eyes widened ingenuously, peering forward over her shoulder. “Will you look at that! How can a guy live long enough to wear all that many—”
They both thought the same thing, without saying it: well, he didn’t.
The browns and their offshoots were in a minority, as they are for some reason in almost any grouping of men’s clothes, whether large or small. “Here’s a mustard-color thing it could have gone on.” She took the hanger down, turned up the bottom of one sleeve, then the other, ran her fingernail rapidly down the line of vest-buttons. “All on.” She put it back. “Here’s a brown.” She took that down in turn, went over it.
“Don’t skip the back trouser-pocket,” he cautioned. “The one on the left usually buttons down — at least it does on mine.”
“Nope.” She put it back again. “That’s all. No, wait, here’s an extra jacket, hanging up there on a hook all the way back, must be old as the hills. That’s a brown, sort of.” She tried it, hung it up again. “Wrong type buttons; solid, with an eyelet in back, instead of pierced through. None gone, anyway.”
She tweaked the light-cord, closed the door. “So it’s not his. It’s from the man who came, and chewed the cigar, and was sore at him, and may — or may not be — left-handed.”
They went back inside again, swiftly striding. “We know two things more about him now, Quinn. D’you realize that? He’s got on a brown or tan suit, and there’s one button either gone or half-gone from one of the sleeves of his coat. My God, if we were professional detectives, d’you know what we could do with all that? With only half of all that?”
“But we’re not,” he said, tasting something imaginary — and not very pleasant — on his own lip with the tip of his tongue.
“We’re going to have to be, tonight.”
“This is the biggest city in the world.”
“That may make it all the easier for us, instead of making it harder. If it was a little place, if it was a village, like back home, they’d know the risk of discovery was so much greater they’d lie low, they’d take precautions, we’d never be able to— Here it’s so big they may feel safe, it may give them a sense of false security, they mayn’t bother even to hide or keep out of the way—” She stopped and eyed the expression on his face. “Well, that’s one way of looking at it, isn’t it? That’s one way.”
“Ah, it’s no use, Bricky,” he moaned. “What’s the use of kidding ourselves? It’s like one of these fairy-tales for kids, where a magic spell would have to be used to make it come true—”
“Don’t,” she said in a choked voice. “Don’t, please. Don’t make me do all the work for the two of us—” Her head went down.
“I’m yellow,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“No, you’re not yellow, or I wouldn’t be here in this room with you.”
Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock—
“I’m going to turn and look at it in a minute, and so are you,” she said. “And it may take real guts then, once we do. But before we do, let’s get the thing lined up. There are two people. Two shadows, but still and all they’re real. One of them, but not both, killed him. We’ve got to find the one that did, we’ve got to know, or that’ll make it you—”
He started to say something.
“No, let me finish, Quinn. I’m lining it up like this as much for myself as for you. In other words, we have to go out of here and track them down, find out where they went to, and go there after them, and break them down in some way, shake it out of them. That’s the job. That’s the job we’ve got facing us. And all the time we’ve got is, while it still stays dark in New York tonight. At daylight, at six, there’s the bus that leaves for home. The last bus, Quinn, remember that, the last bus. I don’t care what the schedule says, for us it’s the last bus there is, the last in the world.”
“I get you. They’ll keep running — but not for us. We’ve got to be out of here by daybreak.”
“Now, the job,” she nodded. “We can’t both take both of them.”
He got what she was driving at. He looked aghast. “I thought you said we should stick together in this? That was the whole reason you came over with me, instead of going down to the term—”
“There isn’t time now any more! We have to split it two ways, whether we like to or not. Look, here’s how it is. We have these two possibilities now, a man and a woman who both came here tonight at separate times. One of them’s innocent, one of them killed him. The thing is which? We haven’t time for hit or miss stuff; we can’t follow them up one at a time. We have to follow them both up at the same time. That gives us our only chance. We can only be wrong once, and if we’re both wrong together, we’re cooked, we’re finished. If we separate, and one goes after one, and the other goes after the other, that gives us our fifty-fifty chance. One of us is sure to be on a wild-goose chase, but the other one won’t be. That’s where our hope lies, right there. You take the man. I’ll take the woman.
“Now listen close, because we haven’t darned much to go by, and we have to make the most of what we’ve got. You have to look for a man in a brown or off-brown suit, with one button on his cuff broken, who maybe is left-handed or maybe is not. And that’s about all you’ve got. I have to look for a woman, who is left-handed for sure, and who uses a kind of heavy perfume. I don’t know what it is now, but I’ll know it when I get it again.”
“You haven’t even got as much as I have,” he protested. “You haven’t got anything.”
“I know, but I’m a girl, and that evens it up. I don’t need as much, our minds can do more with less.”
“But how can you do anything, even if you do track her down? An unarmed girl like you, with nothing but your bare hands? You don’t know what you’re likely to come up against!”