“In case it’s any of your business,” Gabby said angrily, “she’s in the bedroom changing her clothes.”
I started for the bedroom door.
Gabby said, “Don’t.”
“Why not?”
“She’s a decent kid.”
I said, “She may be a decent kid, but she’s an enemy agent,” and flung the door open.
Gabby came out of the chair and toward me fast, but something he saw in my face made him turn toward the bedroom.
It was empty.
“You see?”
Gabby walked across the room to the bedroom window and looked out to the iron platform of the fire escape.
After a minute I said, “Look, Gabby, we’re going to get her back. She can’t get away with it. I think Lorraine can help us.”
Gabby turned. “Where is Lorraine?”
“Down by the elevator. I left her there while I came up to see that the coast was clear.”
Gabby said, “Go get her. We can’t wait.”
Lorraine wasn’t there.
I walked over to the door and looked out on the street. She wasn’t there. I came back and climbed the stairs. No sign of her on the stairs.
I went back to the apartment.
Gabby looked up. “Where is she?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Suppose you and I quit making damned fools of ourselves. There was a dead man in that bedroom. I don’t know what the big idea was with the police claiming it was a plant. You call the law in on a murder case and right away they start telling you it’s all a pipe dream.”
“I know,” Gabby said.
“All right; it was a body. You can’t pick up a body and carry it downstairs under your arm. You can’t change the mattress and the sheet and the blankets and the spread and the pillows on a bed in the middle of the night. The way I see it, there’s only one answer.”
“The adjoining apartment?”
I nodded.
Gabby said, “How’s your leg?”
“Okay.”
Gabby said, “Remember, I’ve got my automatic, so in case the party gets rough let’s not break any legs over it.”
“We won’t,” I said.
Gabby said, “If you’d come down to earth and be reasonable — I could tell you what happened — just so you won’t crack the wrong girl over the head.”
“I won’t crack the wrong girl.”
“Look, Jay, when Muriel came to her apartment this evening she found a man’s suit hanging in the closet. It looked as though the suit had just come back from the cleaners. She noticed a bulge in one pocket which turned out to be the seventy-five hundred.”
“So little Muriel figures finders keepers.”
“Muriel happens to be a gal who can look out for herself. The whole thing struck her as fishy, so she decided to sit tight until she discovered what was going on — or at least part of it. It seems there was quite a splash in the papers when her divorce came up and she’s allergic to publicity. She had sense enough to realize that either by design or accident she had become involved in something, and she couldn’t be sure her husband didn’t have a hand in it. Unless it became absolutely necessary she didn’t want the cops in on it.”
“I still don’t see why she carried all that around with her.”
“She wanted to get it to a place of safekeeping, but a guy started to tail her when she left the apartment. She was almost sure she had lost him, but just as she was stepping out of the taxi she thought she saw him again. Apparently without Lorraine seeing her, she slipped her purse back on the seat and then got out. As soon as she was certain she had lost the tail she telephoned the cab company to see if the driver had found her purse.”
“How come she didn’t tell any of this to Lorraine?”
“I didn’t ask her, but my guess is that she thought it would be best all around if she didn’t.”
“And the switch list with the message?”
“Don’t be so damn sarcastic. A railroad friend of hers gave her that, earlier in the afternoon, and arranged for a pass. In case you want to know all about her private life, her husband made a property settlement prior to the divorce. Then he ran out on her and quit paying. This man tipped her off that a chap was working on the night shift at the hump who owed her husband a wad of dough, and told her that she could go down there tonight and he’d take her to this man. She wanted to get the rest of the money her husband had promised her on the property settlement and then forgot to pay.”
“Who was this friend,” I asked, “and will he corroborate her statement?”
Gabby said stiffly, “I haven’t had a chance to get her entire story.”
I started for the window and got out onto the steel platform of the fire escape. The window which opened on the farther edge of the platform was closed. I slid my knife blade under it and found it wasn’t locked.
“Step to one side as soon as you raise it,” Gabby whispered.
I got the window up, and was too mad to care about anything. I slipped under Gabby’s arm and went in headfirst. Gabby was behind me with the gun, and he could take care of anything that happened.
Nothing happened.
We were in an apartment very similar to the one we’d just left, only arranged in reverse order. The window opened into the bedroom. I could see the bed. It was clean and white, and apparently hadn’t been slept in. For all I could see, there was no one in the apartment, and then somehow I had an uneasy feeling that the place was occupied. You could feel the presence of human beings.
We moved on a few steps from the window.
“The light switch will be over by the door,” I whispered.
“Think we dare to risk the lights?” Gabby asked.
“Gosh, yes. This place gives me the willies.”
“Stick ’em up!”
The beam of a flashlight sprang out of nothing and hit my eyes with such a bright glare that it hurt. I saw Gabby’s wrist snap around so that his gun was pointed toward the flashlight. Then Inspector Fanston’s voice yelled, “Hold it, soldier! This is the law.”
Gabby said, “Put out that damn flashlight. What are you doing here?”
“What are you doing here?” the Inspector asked.
“There’s no one here?” Gabby asked.
Fanston said, “Switch on the lights, Smitty.”
The light switch clicked the room into illumination.
“Where’s the girl?” I asked.
“What girl?” the Inspector asked.
“The one who came through the window a few minutes before we did.”
“No one came through that window.”
“For how long?”
“Ever since we came over here with you. I doped it out that if you saw a body it must have been moved. It looked as though it must have moved out the window to the fire escape, then across to here. I made a stall to get you boys out of the way, then Smitty and I went to work.”
“And you’ve been waiting here all that time,” I demanded, “simply on a hunch that the body might have been—”
“Take it easy,” the Inspector interrupted. “Show him what we found, Smitty.”
The cop opened the closet door.
I looked inside and saw a bundle of bedclothes wadded up into a ball. There were red splotches on the bedclothes — blood that wasn’t old enough even yet to get that rusty-brown tint. It looked red and fresh.
“I’ll be damned,” Gabby said.
“That’s the only way they could have come in,” Fanston said. “It’s perfectly logical. What’s more, there are bloodstains on the iron ribs of the fire-escape platform.”
“And why,” I asked, “are you guarding the bloody bedclothes and letting the other apartment take care of itself?”
Fanston looked at Smitty, and the look was a question.
“Why not?” Smitty said.
Fanston decided to tell us. “Because when we looked through that other apartment, we found something. I’ll show you.”