“That,” Peggy said, “would account for the jeweled butterfly.”
“You mean that was to be my assurance I was dealing with the right people?”
“That was the start of it, but I think it has an added significance now.”
“What?”
“You are thinking Stella ran into danger because she was going to tell you something about the Garrison jewels. Now, let’s suppose you are right, and she was killed by the jewel thieves. They'd never have left that jeweled butterfly on her stocking. All those rubies, emeralds, and diamonds! It must be worth a small fortune.”
He thought that over.
“And,” Peggy went on, “if she’d been killed by an intruder or a burglar he’d naturally have taken the butterfly. So it adds up to the fact that her death must have been unrelated to that Garrison job and must have been caused by someone who was so anxious to have her out of the way the opportunity to steal the butterfly meant nothing.”
He looked at her with sudden respect. “Say, you’re a logical little cuss.”
She said, “That’s not what women want. When men praise their brains it’s almost a slam. A woman would far rather be known as a glamor puss than as a thinker. Let’s check on our story a little further. Stella telephoned you this morning, and it was you who suggested the Royal Pheasant?”
“That’s right. Surely you don’t doubt my statement.”
“I don’t doubt your statement. I doubt your conclusions.”
“What do you mean?”
“If you told me that two and three added up to ten,” she said, “I wouldn’t be doubting your statement, I’d be doubting your conclusions. You might actually have ten as an answer, and know that the figures you had in mind consisted of two and three, but the total of those figures wouldn’t be ten.”
“Apparently you want to point out that there’s a factor I’ve missed somewhere, that there’s an extra five I don’t know about.”
“Exactly,” she said.
“And what makes you think there’s this extra five? What have I missed?”
“The anonymous letter I received in the afternoon mail had been postmarked at five thirty p.m. yesterday. If you are the one who suggested the Royal Pheasant, how did someone know yesterday that you and Stella were to have a date there tonight?”
“All right, let’s go,” he told her. “There’s a possibility the janitor hasn’t cleaned up in your office. We’re going to have to find that letter, put the tom pieces together, and reconstruct the postmark on that envelope. There’s also the possibility that your totals are all wrong and the postmark was a clever forgery. How come you noticed it?”
“Because Uncle Benedict told me if you ever wanted to get anywhere you had to notice details.”
“Who’s Uncle Benedict?”
“He’s the black sheep of my family, the one who made his living by—” Abruptly she became silent. She realized all too keenly that she couldn’t tell Don Kimberly about her Uncle Benedict. There were only a few people she could tell about him.
Kimberly signed both names to the register and said to the janitor, “Let’s go up to E. B. Halsey’s office, please, and make it snappy. Do you know whether that office has been cleaned?”
“Sure it has. We begin on that floor. That’s the brass-hat floor. They’re always out by five o’clock. Some of the other floors are later—”
“And you’re certain Halsey’s office has been cleaned up?”
“Sure. I did it myself.”
“You emptied the wastebasket?”
“Yes.”
“All right, we have to get that stuff. There was something in the wastebasket. Where is it now?”
The man grinned as he brought the elevator to a stop. “The stuff that was in that wastebasket is smoke by this time.”
“You incinerated it?”
“Sure.”
“I thought you sometimes saved it for a central pickup.”
“No more, we don’t. We burn it up. Everything in the wastebaskets is burned right here in the building. That’s E. B. Halsey’s orders. Don’t let anything go out.”
They hurried to E. B. Halsey’s office. As the janitor had told them, it had been cleaned. The square mahogany-colored wastebasket in Peggy Castle’s secretarial office was completely free of paper. There was a folded square of cardboard in the bottom, and Peggy pulled it out in the vain hope that some fragment of the letter might have worked down beneath it.
There was nothing.
“I guess that’s it,” Kimberly said.
“Wait a minute,” she told him. “I have a hunch. The way that janitor looked when he said the papers had been burned — come on.”
The janitor evidently had been expecting their ring because he brought the cage up quickly.
“All done?” he asked.
“Not quite,” Peggy said. “We want to go down to the basement. I want to see where you bum those papers.”
“It’s just an ordinary incinerator. Mr. Halsey said that he wanted all papers burned on the premises, and—”
“I’m checking,” Peggy said. “It’s something important. I think Mr. Halsey will want a report tomorrow.”
“Oh.”
The janitor stopped the cage at the basement and said, “Right over to the left.”
Peggy all but ran down the passageway to where several big clothesbaskets were stacked in front of an incinerator. Two of the clothesbaskets were almost full.
“What’s this?”
“Scraps that we haven’t burned yet.”
“I thought you told me everything had been burned.”
“Well, everything from your office.”
“How do you know what office these came from?”
The man fidgeted uncomfortably. “Well, I think that these two came from the lower floors.”
Peggy nodded to Kimberly, then upset the entire contents of the baskets on the floor, and started pawing through them, throwing to one side the envelopes, circular letters, newspapers, scratch paper — all the odds and ends that accumulate in a busy office.
“We don’t need to look through anything that isn’t torn,” she said to Kimberly. “I tore this letter up into fine pieces. And you don’t need to bother with anything that’s typewritten. This was written in ink in longhand.”
They tossed the larger pieces back into the clothesbaskets. When they had sifted the whole thing down to the smaller pieces, Peggy suddenly gave a triumphant exclamation. “This is part of it,” she said, holding up a triangular section of paper.
“Then here’s another part,” Kimberly said.
“And here’s another.” She pounced on another piece.
Kimberly found a fourth. “This piece has part of the postmark on it,” he said, fitting it together with the other pieces. “Gosh, you were right. It’s postmarked yesterday at five thirty. But I tell you no one knew—”
Peggy caught his eye, glanced significantly at the janitor, who was watching them with an expression of puzzled speculation.
Kimberly nodded, and thereafter devoted his energies entirely to the search.
At last they were finished with the final scrap of paper on the floor. By this time they had recovered four pieces of the envelope and six pieces of the letter.
“I guess that’s it,” Peggy said. “Let’s go up to the office and put these together.”
Back in the office, with the aid of transparent tape, they fitted the pieces into a hopelessly inadequate reconstruction of a letter that Peggy now realized was undoubtedly destined to be of the greatest interest to the police.
The writer of that letter, Peggy knew, had it in her power to make Don Kimberly the Number One Suspect in the Stella Lynn murder.