“Didn’t Dirk make any comment?”
“Only that if Leon Fields had something on Harrison, he wouldn’t be in Harrison’s shoes for all the empty seats on Broadway.”
“How right he is. Well, you’d better keep your eye peeled for the next business envelope. Martha may beat you to it.”
This was a prophecy. On Monday morning Nikki hurried out of her room at the usual time, bound for the lobby and the mail, to find that Martha had already been downstairs for it and was shuffling the envelopes rapidly.
“Aren’t you the early one this morning?” Nikki said brightly. She tried desperately to keep up with the envelopes, on the lookout for the telltale red typing.
Martha smiled and dropped the letters on the foyer table. “The usual nothing,” she said indifferently. “I’ll look at them later. The coffee’s making, Nikki...”
On Tuesday morning she did the same thing.
“I don’t know what we’ll do if she keeps this up,” Nikki said over the phone Tuesday evening. “If she gets to it first, I’ll never see it.”
“Illustrating the futility of this whole damn thing,” growled Ellery. “What’s the point, Nikki? So I follow them through the alphabet and back again — and then what? I’ve been trying to do some work of my own, and this day- and nightmare is making it impossible.”
“I’m sorry,” said Nikki frigidly. “Of course you mustn’t let your work suffer. Why don’t you hire a secretary?”
“I’ve got a secretary!”
“No, I mean it, Ellery. Forget the whole thing. It is an imposition—”
“Imposition my foot. It’s a stupidity. I’d be far better off following Dirk. Less wear and tear, and surer results. That is, if the object is to keep him from knocking their heads together. Is that the object? I don’t know up from down any more.”
“I want this affair stopped,” Nikki whispered. “As well as kept from Dirk. Harrison’s not right for Martha, Ellery. He’s no good. I’ve — I’ve asked around. Some way has to be found to bring her to her senses, and it has to be done before Dirk finds out. Maybe you’ll see an opportunity to break it up — somehow, some night, when they meet. Don’t you see, Ellery?”
“I see,” sighed Ellery; and in the end he agreed to trail Martha blindly on whichever days Nikki was unable to get to the mail first.
Happily for Ellery, Martha as well as Van Harrison had been thoroughly frightened by the Fields affair. Not only did Harrison refrain from sending a message for two weeks afterward, but Martha clung to hearth and husband as if they were the most desirable things in life. What those two weeks meant to her, Ellery could only imagine from Nikki’s eye-witness reports. She was evidently afraid to leave the premises, since Harrison might rashly phone, as he had done before the first letter came; at the same time she must have had to fight night and day the temptation to slip out and phone him. The result was a suspension in time; and it made of Martha a pitiful ghost, drifting about the apartment with an eager-to-please smile which she put on and took off like her bedroom slippers. Dirk seemed puzzled; he kept asking her if anything was the matter. She would murmur something about having to wait while Ella Greenspan rewrote her second act, and steal away to her bedroom at the first opportunity, as if it were too dangerous to remain under Dirk’s eye another moment.
What Harrison was waiting for was evidently the disappearance of l’affaire Alley from the newspapers. When four days passed without reference to it, the fifth letter suddenly came.
They were lucky. Martha had got the mail first, as usual, but Nikki caught a glimpse of a buff-colored business envelope with the address typed in red as Martha went into the bathroom and locked the door.
“Just try to let me know when she’s getting ready to leave the apartment,” Ellery said when Nikki phoned him at noon that day. “The appointment is probably for tomorrow. But don’t take any chances.”
The next morning Martha left the apartment at ten o’clock to drop in on Ella Greenspan, she said, and see how her author was coming along with the script. Nikki phoned Ellery as Martha was putting her hat on. They had a short conversation about a mislaid non-existent book of Nikki’s. The moment she hung up, Ellery left.
But he was too late. When he stepped out onto the observation terrace on the 102nd floor of the Empire State Building, there was no sign of either Harrison or Martha. He waited a few minutes in the lounge, and then he sought an attendant. He was careful to describe only Harrison.
“Yes, sir, the gentleman was here about fifteen minutes ago. I remember because he was joined by a lady and instead of going out to look at the view they took the elevator right down again.”
So Ellery went back home, shrugging all the way.
Nikki’s subsequent report was curious. Dirk had been reminiscently fretful from the moment the door shut on Martha. He had taken to pacing and muttering to himself while he eyed the telephone. Finally, at eleven o’clock, he had seized the Manhattan telephone book, looked up a number, and dialed.
“Mrs. Greenspan? This is Dirk Lawrence. Is my wife there?”
And Martha had been there! Dirk’s mood lightened by magic. They had an idiotic conversation and he hung up in high spirits to resume dictating.
“Cute,” remarked Ellery. “She knew he’d be suspicious when she left the house alone for the first time in a couple of weeks. She and Harrison must have had all of five precious minutes together. I wonder what they found to talk about.”
“I don’t care,” said Nikki happily. “We’ve passed E.”
“You sound like the editor of a dictionary project,” snapped Ellery. “Let me know when you get to F.”
They got to F five days later. This time Nikki had no difficulty intercepting the letter. Martha, she said, had stopped getting up early.
“Fort Try on Park — The Cloisters — at one P.M. tomorrow.”
Ellery’s car was laid up with carburetor trouble, and he decided on the 8th Avenue subway as the least painful way of reaching Manhattan’s far north. He got off at the 190th Street-Overlook Terrace station.
It lacked a few minutes of one o’clock; The Cloisters did not open to the public until one. Ellery approached the towered building cautiously. He was just in time to see Martha step from a taxi into a red Cadillac convertible and the convertible shoot away.
“I keep forgetting,” Ellery told Nikki that night, “that they’re not really interested in sightseeing. Harrison’s guidebook refers to points of contact only. I’m sorry, Nikki. Shadowing doesn’t seem to be my forte.”
“I don’t suppose it matters.” Nikki was very nervous tonight; she kept lighting cigarets and putting them down. “I saw something this evening that I don’t think I ever want to see again.”
“What’s happened now?”
“She was away all afternoon. Dirk was very upset. He dictated hardly a line. I didn’t hear what alibi she prepared for herself, but whatever it was it didn’t satisfy him. He kept making calls to various places where she might be, and of course he didn’t get her or turn up anyone who’d seen her. When she came home... I think,” Nikki said, “I need a drink.”
Ellery gave her straight Scotch. She took the glass, but then she put it down. “No, that’s what he did. It doesn’t solve a thing... He jumped on Martha before she could peel her gloves off. Where had she been, what man had she been with this time — he had the goods on her — she hadn’t been where she’d said she was going — now he knew he’d been right all along... You can imagine.