“I’m guessing,” I admitted. “I haven’t finished it. But it must be there. If you and Mike and I go over it carefully, we should be able to spot some clue I think Elsie herself hadn’t even spotted. If she had, she certainly wouldn’t have let the guy in to murder her tonight.”
“It’s an interesting thought,” Ed muttered, “and it’s a logical reason for the other copy being missing. But you’ll have to turn it over to the cops, Brett. It’s evidence in a murder case. You can’t hold it back for Shayne to work on.”
“At least I can finish reading it before they come to me.”
“You can do that… and tell them you have. But you’ll have to give it to them.” He looked at his watch and muttered, “Damn it. You’ve got me so interested I’d like to spend a couple of hours with Elsie’s manuscript myself. But I’ve got to check down at the Precinct…” He paused thoughtfully, then leaned forward and picked up one of the typewritten sheets.
It was a good clean copy as I’ve said, neatly typed on lightweight paper. Not onion skin, but about 12-pound stuff.
He nodded happily and said, “I’ve got an idea, Brett. I believe it’ll work. There’s an outfit that calls itself The Overnight Duplication Service. Ever hear of them?”
I shook my head.
“They have some process for photographing manuscripts. Make a specialty of it. Five cents a page for as many duplicate pages as you want, and guarantee to turn out any ordinary job in a few hours. They boast they work around the clock, and the only thing is: the original has to be a solid black impression on fairly thin paper to duplicate well. This fits the bill. Let me call them and see. They’ve done a lot of work for me.”
He got up and hurried into the bedroom, searched for a number and started to call it, paused, returned the phone, and came back shaking his head. “That wouldn’t be so good. The police will check the switchboard for calls from this room just as routine. You’d have no earthly explanation for rushing out to get this duplicated unless you knew Elsie was dead and thought it might contain a clue for Shayne to work on.
“Here’s the address.” He wrote it down. It was a number on West 45th. “It’s in the ground floor of a small hotel,” he went on. “Some of them live there. The boss, I guess. If you still think the script is important after you finish reading it, take it down and have them knock off a copy. Leave the copy with them for me to pick up later. Bring this copy back and hand it over to the law when they come. And you’d better pray to God there is a motive in the script and we can find it.
“I’ve simply got to run. Don’t be surprised if I turn up with the cops in the morning. Don’t lie about anything except having seen and talked to me tonight. Good luck.” He shook hands hard and went out the door.
I sat down and picked up Elsie’s manuscript again. It meant a lot more to me now that I’d learned the carbon was missing from her apartment. It had to be important. It had to be the motive for her murder.
I began reading again with intense absorption.
8
When Aline Ferris next awoke, sunlight streamed in the window, but the fear of last night remained strong and agonizing-the almost unbearable fear of the unknown.
She closed her eyes against the bright sunlight and tried to make her conscious mind quiescent, to break through to the subconscious which knew what she had to know.
Her telephone call from the cocktail lounge was the jumping-off place. That had been done without her conscious knowledge. It was the one thing she now knew she had done while blanked out. She had the number in her mind, memorized from the night before. She repeated the five digits over and over again silently, like an incantation to break down the barrier between conscious and subconscious. If she tried not to think about the numbers, not to recall consciously a name connected with them! Then, perhaps, the name would come.
It was there, in the hidden recesses of her mind. The knowledge of everything was there. It had to be. If she could only bring it forth…
She couldn’t. It wouldn’t come. The effort was exhausting. After a time, she ceased trying and opened her eyes.
The clock on the table beside the bed said 9:30. She moistened her lips, lifted herself on one elbow and reached for the telephone extension beside the clock, and called her office number.
Margie’s cheerful voice answered. Aline kept her own voice dull and flat when she said, “Hello, Margie. This is Aline.”
“Hi.” Margie lowered her voice to an elaborately confidential tone as she added, “Miss Prescott just went through. She asked if you were in.”
“I’m not,” Aline told her. “I’m out. Tell her I’ve got an abscessed tooth. Tell her any damned thing, Margie. I simply can’t make it today.”
“Bad, huh?”
“Horrible,” Aline groaned. “Fix it for me?”
“Will do. And you’d better get right over to the dentist. I’ll explain to Miss Prescott. Bye now.”
Aline hung up and sank back against the pillows. Her nerves were edgy and she felt physically exhausted. But it was impossible to relax, so she dragged herself from the bed and tottered into the tiny kitchenette. She gulped a large glass of cold orange juice, then put on a kettle of water for coffee. After measuring the coffee into the drip pot, she went resolutely to the front door. There was no use postponing it any longer. Sooner or later, she would have to read the morning newspaper. She opened the door and picked it up.
Her hands trembled as she spread it out on the couch. There were no screaming headlines… nothing at all on the front page about the murdered man. She really hadn’t expected to find anything there. By the time she reached page three, the kettle whistled and she got up to pour the water in the pot.
Returning, she went through the paper to the last page without finding any reference to a dead man having been found in an uptown hotel room.
There was no reason to expect the story to break so soon, she told herself as she sipped her first cup of black coffee. In fact, it would be strange if the body were discovered before mid-morning when a hotel maid might logically let herself in. So it would likely be late afternoon before she could learn anything definite about him.
A cigarette with her second cup of coffee helped a lot. Her mind began to function again, and her thoughts turned back to Bart’s party… back to the real beginning. Whomever she had telephoned at midnight must have been someone who was on her mind at the moment. Someone she felt she could turn to at that time of night while she was locked out of her apartment.
There was no use denying to herself that men were her first interest when she was blacked out. There was too much evidence from too many sources. So, the person must have been a man to whom she was strongly attracted. Someone she wanted to be with. All right. There was Dirk. She remembered their little necking party before she passed out. It had been pleasant enough, and rather gay. The usual sort of thing when the gang got together. But what had happened to cause a fight between her and Ralph over Dirk’s attentions?
No, she decided, it couldn’t have been Dirk. Nor any of the others with whom she was familiar at Bart’s party. Because the telephone number was strange to her.
The man had to be someone she met after she blacked out. A man whose name she knew, but whose number she had had to look up and ask Joe to write down for her when she went to the bar.
She frowned and bit at her lower lip. Both Doris and Ralph had mentioned a strange man with whom she had been smooching. Ralph had described him vaguely. Mediocre… nondescript. That description might easily fit the dead man! And Ralph had given the man a name. What was it? An unusual sort of name. Thorn? No…
Torn! Vincent Torn! That was it!
Aline put out her cigarette and went for a third cup of coffee. Her heart pounded painfully as she considered a possibility. A distinct possibility, one she could check without too much trouble. She could telephone him, and if he answered, he al least wouldn’t be the dead man. That would eliminate one possibility.