“Archer. Don’t bother announcing me. What’s her room number?”
“One hundred and two, Mr. Archer. I think she’s expecting you.”
It was opposite the elevator on the second floor. At the end of the corridor a pair of curtained French doors had a red-lit sign above them: FIRE ESCAPE. I knocked on the door of 102. The elevator creaked and thumped behind me like an old heart running down.
A wan voice called through the door: “Who is it, anyway?”
“Archer.”
“Come in.”
The door was locked, and I said so.
“All right, all right, I’m coming.” The door swung inward.
Una looked sick. The olive-drab patches under her eyes had darkened and spread. In red Japanese pajamas she looked less like a woman than a sexless imp who had grown old in hell.
She stood back to let me enter the room and closed the door softly behind me. It was the sitting-room of the bridal or gubernatorial suite, if honeymooners or politicians ever came there. The two tall windows that overlooked the street had drapes of dark-red plush. They were lit from outside by a red neon glow that competed with the light of a parchment-shaded floor lamp made of twisted black iron. The tall carved Spanish chairs looked unsat in and unsittable. The only trace of Una’s occupancy was a leopard coat hanging over the back of a chair.
“What’s the trouble?” I said to her back.
She seemed to be supporting herself on the doorknob. “No trouble. It’s this foul heat, and the waiting and the uncertainty.” She saw where that was leading her, into candor, and switched off the little-girl whine. “I have a migraine, God bless it. They hit me regularly.”
“Too bad.” I added, with deliberate tactlessness: “I have a headache myself.”
She turned on me with a hypochondriac’s fierce competitive smile. “Not migraine, I bet. If you haven’t had migraine you don’t know what it is. I wish I could have my head amputated. Wouldn’t that be stylish, though, a headless torso strutting around?” She was making an effort to master her self-pity and carry it off as a joke. “Men wouldn’t know the difference.”
Una was flattering herself again. Even in lounging pajamas, her torso was no more interesting or curvilinear than a brick. I backed into one of the unsittable chairs, and said: “You’re a great admirer of men.”
“They’re an admirable race. Well?” She stood above me, her changed tone indicating that there was no more time for comedy.
“I have a report to make. Why don’t you sit down?”
“If you say so.” The chair was too big for her, and her feet dangled clear of the floor. “Go ahead.”
“Before I do, there are a couple of matters that need straightening out.”
“What does that mean?” The pain behind her tongue gave it a vicious twang.
“You lied once to me this morning, about the theft of some jewelry. It’s possible that you lied twice.”
“Are you calling me a liar?”
“I’m asking you.”
“You’ve been talking to her.”
“Not exactly. Is that what I’d find out if I had? That you’re a liar?”
“Don’t put words into my mouth, I don’t like it. I gave you the reason I had for wanting Lucy followed.”
“The second time.”
“The second time, then.”
“You didn’t say very much.”
“Why should I? I’ve got a right to some privacy.”
“You had this morning. Not any more.”
“What is this?” she asked the room in perplexity. Her hands twisted, and their diamonds caught and reflected red light from the window. “I pay a man a hundred dollars to do a job for me, so he wants to know my grandfather’s middle name. It was Maria, curiously enough.”
“You’re very frank about things that don’t count. But you haven’t given me your own name yet. I don’t even know where you live.”
“If it was any of your business, I’d tell you. Who do you think you are?”
“Merely an ex-cop trying to hustle a living. I sell my services on the open market. It doesn’t mean I have to sell them to anybody.”
“That’s tall talk for a peeper. I can buy and sell you twenty times over–”
“Not me. You should have taken my advice and gone to the classifieds. There are bums you can hire for fifteen dollars a day to do anything short of murder. Murder comes higher.”
“What about murder? Who said anything about murder?” Her voice had dwindled suddenly to a bodiless whisper that buzzed and wavered like a mosquito’s flight.
“I did. I said it was expensive, in more ways than one.”
“But why bring it up, what’s the point? You haven’t been talking to anybody? One of these bums you mentioned?”
She was thinking of Maxfield Heiss. I said I hadn’t.
“Not Lucy?”
“No.”
“But you have been staying close to her?”
“As close as possible.”
“Where is she? Where did she go?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know! I paid you good money to tail her. That was the whole point.”
She slid off the chair and faced me with clenched fists. I was ready to catch them if she flung herself on me. Instead, she used them on herself, beating her bony flanks in staccato rhythm. “Has everybody gone crazy?” she yelped at the ceiling.
“Settle down. You sound as if you have. I wouldn’t put homicidal mania past you–”
“Homicidal mania!” Her voice rose to the narrow limit of its range, and broke. “What about homicidal mania? You have been talking to Lucy.”
“No. I overheard you talking to her, though, this afternoon. I didn’t like the sound of it. There’s violence in my business but I don’t like cold-blooded violence, or people who threaten other people with it.”
“Oh. That.” She looked relieved. “I slapped her face for her, not very hard. She had it coming.”
“Tell me more.”
“You can go to hell.”
“Later, perhaps. Before I kiss you good-bye, I want some information. Who you are, where you came from, why you were after Lucy. Also what you were doing at five o’clock this afternoon. We’ll start with that.”
“Five o’clock? I was right here, in this room. Is it important?” The question was neither rhetorical nor defiant like most of her other questions. She knew or sensed what was coming.
“Never mind that. Can you prove it?”
“If I have to. I made a telephone call around five.” Her hands were moving over and over each other, trying to warm themselves at the cold fire of the diamonds. “I wouldn’t want to use that unless I have to. You haven’t even told me what it is I need an alibi for.”
“Who were you calling?”
“You wouldn’t be interested. I said I can prove it if I have to. It was long distance. They keep a record.” She retreated to a leather hassock and crouched uneasily on its edge.
“I’m interested in everything about you, Una. A little while ago I made a statement to the police, and I couldn’t leave you out.”
“You went to the cops?” Her voice was incredulous, as if I had leagued myself with the forces of evil.
“They came to me. I found Lucy with her throat cut shortly after five o’clock.”
“Did you say throat cut?”
“I did. She was dead in her motel room. I had to explain what I was doing there. Naturally your name came up – the name you’re using.”