The friendship of Martha Lawrence and Van Harrison was of very recent date. No one Ellery spoke to had ever seen them together, or even separately in the same place, until a few weeks before. On that occasion — Ellery’s informant was Maud Ashton, an old character woman with the acquaintanceship of Elsa Maxwell and the certified circulation of Life — they had both attended the all-night telethon emceed by a round robin of TV comedians in the interest of the recent blood-plasma drive. Martha had been there as one of the Broadway celebrities to supervise the studio blood donations, Harrison as a personality of the theater to entertain the television audience. He had given his famous imitation of John Barrymore, and it had netted so much blood for the drive that Harrison remained for the rest of the night, assisting Mrs. Lawrence.
“They made such a handsome pair,” Miss Ashton smiled. “I wonder if her husband was at his set.”
“Why, what do you mean?” asked Ellery.
“Not a blinking thing, Ellery, curse the luck. Of course, Van’s an old reprobate who’ll play Sextus seven nights a week, but everybody knows little Martha Lawrence is as faithful as Lucrece, and I can’t see Dirk Lawrence in the role of Tarquin, can you? Sextus... You know, considering the plot line, that’s awfully cute?”
If Maud Ashton was still thinking such noble thoughts, hope was not dead.
The second point advanced Ellery no further than the first. He visited 547 Fifth Avenue on Friday and discovered from the directory in the lobby that the Froehm Air-Conditioner Company occupied Suite 902–912, while Humber & Kahn, jewelers, had their showroom in 921. The occurrence of the ninth floor in the case of both envelopes suggested a certain line of investigation, and Ellery duly pursued it after six o’clock on Saturday afternoon, when most of the tenants of the building were gone. But he did not come empty-handed. First, on Saturday morning, he made one of his rare excursions to Brooklyn, to the home of an old man who owned a world-famous collection of theatrical photographs. Here, after representing himself as a feature writer for The New York Times Magazine, Ellery rented a set of studio portraits of stage stars who had played Hamlet in New York within living memory. Among them, as it happened, was a portrait of Van Harrison.
In The 45th Street Building Ellery prudently signed the after-hours check-in book in the elevator with the name “Barnaby Ross” and got off at the ninth floor. The sound of a vacuum cleaner led him to the propped-open door of a lighted office, and here he found a brawny-armed old woman in a tattered housedress with an apron over it.
“There’s nobody here,” she said, without looking up.
“Oh, yes, there is,” said Ellery sternly. “There’s you, and there’s me, and it won’t go any further if you come clean.”
“Come what?” the cleaning woman straightened. “Don’t you know you could go to jail for what you did, Mother?”
“I didn’t do nothing!” she said excitedly. “What did I do?”
“You tell me.” And Ellery thrust under her nose the portrait of Van Harrison.
The old woman paled. “He said nobody’d ever know...”
“There you are. You got them for him, didn’t you?”
She looked him in the eye. “You a cop?”
Ellery sneered. “Do I look like a cop?”
“You won’t tell the super?”
“I wouldn’t give that screw the time of day.”
“The man give me a big tip to keep my mouth shut...”
“I gather,” said Ellery, removing a bill from his billfold, “that to open it again will require something larger.”
“I’m a poor woman,” said the old lady, eying the bill in Ellery’s fingers, “and is that a twenty? The story is this: This good-looking gentleman comes up here one night after hours, like you, and he says to me he’ll make it worth my while if I’ll borry a few envelopes from some of the business offices on my floors, that’s the eighth, ninth, and tenth. I says I can’t do that, that’s dishonest, and he says sure you can, what’s dishonest about it, you heard of people who collect stamps and matchboxes and stuff, well I’m a collector of business envelopes, I go all over the city making deals like this with cleaning women who can use an extra few bucks rather than bother busy business people and maybe get thrown out on my ear. So one thing leads to another, and I get him a stack of different envelopes from different firms on the three floors, and he gives me the tenspot and goes away, and I ain’t laid eyes on him since. And that’s the whole truth, Mister, so help me, and I hope you won’t get me into no trouble with the super because I wasn’t doing no harm, just a few lousy envelopes for a fruitcake. So now can I have that twenty?”
“The Dead End Kid, that’s me,” sighed Ellery; and he gave the old cleaning woman the bill, raised his hat, and went away.
The third letter came the following Wednesday. It was camouflaged in the envelope of a firm of accountants on the tenth floor of The 45th Street Building, the address on the envelope and the message on the sheet of plain white paper inside had again been typed with a red ribbon, and the message was:
This triumph of reasoning consoled Ellery until the following night, when he trailed Martha downtown on almost the identical route of ten days before. But this time her cab penetrated deeper south into The Bowery, passed the Canal Street entrance to Manhattan Bridge, and turned into the narrow Asiatic world of Mott Street.
It drew up at Number 45, and Martha disappeared in the Chinese Rathskeller.
So C stood for Chinatown and/or Chinese Rathskeller, and there was no longer any reason to doubt the orthodox sequence or application of the alphabet in Harrison’s code.
It seemed like a meaty discovery until it was examined. On dissection it proved nutritious in appearance only. It advanced nothing.
Ellery felt sad as he went into the restaurant after an automatic interval and maneuvered himself to a table far enough away from Martha and Harrison to see without being seen. It all seemed so futile. What was he doing in Chinatown, spying on two people who were headed for the front pages of the tabloids? As he sourly consumed his lot-fon-kare-ngow-yuk — which had turned out to be beef, peppers, and tomatoes — he kept his eye on the lovers from a sense of duty only, conscious that he was not even aware of what he was being dutiful to.
And then he saw something that caused his gloomy ruminations to stop dead.
He had thought they were holding hands across the table. But when the waiter appeared with a trayful of steaming bowls, their hands parted company and Ellery saw that Harrison’s had hold of something Martha’s had slipped into it.
It was a small package, and the actor, after looking around, put it into his pocket.
D...
“No, I don’t,’ said Ellery, steering Nikki around a mink coat holding a Scottie on a leash that was eying his leg thoughtfully. “It was done up in paper — in that lighting I couldn’t get the color — and it was about three by six, and a half-inch or so thick.”
“The booklet?” Nikki stopped to lean against the apartment house. It was a moonless night, and the river sounds were mournful. Everything floated tonight, people and sound and her thoughts.
“Wrong dimensions. What’s the matter, Nikki?”
“Oh... I feel anesthetized. Swimming around in the ether. I keep forgetting what day it is.”
“You’re drugged with tension. Nikki, you can’t keep on living like this. You’ll break down. Why not give it up as a nice try?”