(He would have been proud of a girl I know named Kim Trelawney. For a while we were almost living together, and she got signed for the ingnue part in a road company version of The Estimable Sailor, and although she may have shed a tear or two, off she went. That had been three months ago, and she was still treading the boards in places like Memphis, and we didn’t bother writing to each other, and by the time she came back I had the feeling we wouldn’t have much to say to each other. It had been a long three months, let me tell you, and maybe that was a contributing factor to the way I reacted to Tulip, but I have to say I’d have probably gone just as bananas over her anyway, to be perfectly honest.)
I asked him about some of the people on our suspects list, and others who had been around Treasure Chest when Cherry was murdered. He had never heard of Haskell Henderson. He’d met Andrew Mallard while Mallard and Tulip were living together, and he said that in his book Mallard was a total feeb. His word, not mine. He’d been delighted when Tulip and Mallard split up.
He knew Leonard Danzig by sight and reputation and could not recall having seen him at the club. And he was surprised to know that Danzig had been keeping company with Cherry. “He’s no good,” he said. “He’s trouble.”
“What does he do for a living?”
“You hear lots of things,” he said.
“Would you happen to remember any of them?”
“A little of this, a little of that. He plays angles, he hangs with some heavies. I don’t know what he does but if it’s honest I’ll spread it on toast and eat it.” He hesitated for a moment. “If he had a beef with a chick, he wouldn’t get fancy with poison darts. I don’t even think he’d kill her. Maybe he’d beat her up. Or with a beautiful girl like Cherry he’d do something like throw acid on her or cut her so it would leave a scar. That’s more his style.”
I didn’t get a whole lot more than that. If Cherry was having trouble with Helen Tattersall, the downstairs neighbor, Barckover didn’t know about it. He had never met Glenn Flatt, Tulip’s ex-husband, and didn’t know anything about him. He was on nodding terms with Buddy Lippa, Leemy’s bouncer and gate-tender, and said only that Lippa was a former boxer, a good club fighter who did a decent job of keeping order in the joint. He got evasive when I asked about Leemy, and when I probed to find out who really owned the nightclub he made it obvious that he didn’t want to carry that particular ball any further. I asked if either Leemy or Lippa made a practice of making passes at the hired help. He assured me they were both happily married men, which didn’t strike me as an answer to the question I had asked, but I let it go.
He didn’t know the other waitress or the barmaid, and I didn’t ask him about his own secretary because I figured it would be more fun to ask her myself. I wound up the session with Barckover and went into the outer office and perched on the corner of her desk, notebook in hand. “I’m playing detective,” I said “Mind if I ask a couple of questions?”
She grinned. “You mean you’re going to grill me? I already told you everything I know.”
I told her we’d just go over a couple of things, and we did. I didn’t learn much. I found out that the other waitress was named Rita and that was all she knew about her. Jan the barmaid was a regular at Treasure Chest, but my green-eyed friend hadn’t had much contact with her except to order drinks and get change. She hadn’t seen anything suspicious, hadn’t recognized anybody except for Barckover and the people who worked at the club, and she knew nothing about Cherry’s private life.
“There’s something else,” I said. “How am I going to catch you at the Persian Room if I don’t know your name?”
She smiled. She didn’t show me as many teeth as Haskell Henderson, but they looked better on her. “It’s Maeve O’Connor,” she said. I made her spell her first name and she did. She also told me it was Irish, but I could have figured that part out by myself. Then she pointed out that she didn’t know my first name, so I supplied it, and then I told her I’d better take down her phone number.
“Is that what detectives always do?”
“Not always,” I said.
“You could reach me through the office.”
“But what if a case starts to break in the middle of the night and I need to check something with you? Mr. Haig would give me hell if I didn’t have your number.”
She gave it to me and I wrote it down. Then we looked at each other for a minute or two, and I could feel myself beginning to fall in love, which is something I probably do more readily than I should. I would have enjoyed perching on her desk for the rest of the afternoon, but Haig had given me a million things to do and there wasn’t all that much time to do them in. I said I guessed I’d better be going, and she said “Goodbye, Chip,” and I said, “I’ll see you, Maeve,” and that was that.
I called the advertising agency where Andrew Mallard worked and got a secretary who said that he was away from his desk. I asked when he would be likely to return to his desk and she said she didn’t know. I pressed a little, and it turned out that he hadn’t been at his desk all day, that he in fact had evidently taken the day off. I don’t know why she couldn’t come right out and tell me this straight out, but I guess when you work in advertising you get in the habit of doing things obliquely.
I tried Mallard at his home number and the line was busy. I looked at my watch and saw that it was almost three and remembered that I hadn’t had anything to eat all day except for a sip of dandelion coffee substitute. I realized that I had to be hungry. I don’t know if this would have occurred to me if I hadn’t happened to look at my watch, but once I did I was starving. I found a luncheonette down the block and had a hamburger and three glasses of milk and a cup of coffee. I decided not to look at my watch again because it might remind me how little sleep I had had and I wanted to be awake when I talked to Mallard. Except that I wasn’t destined to talk to Mallard. I called him after I’d finished my meal and the line was busy again, and I decided it wasn’t the usual sort of busy signal, and I called the operator and asked her to check the line for me. She went into a huddle and came back with the news that the phone was off the hook. (What she actually said was that the instrument’s receiver was disengaged, and it took me a second or two to translate it.) That had been my guess, and I decided Mallard had been up half the night with the police and the other half brooding, and now he was taking the day off and having himself a nap.
There’s a way the operator can make the phone ring even when it’s off the hook, and I considered telling her something about it being a matter of life and death, but they probably hear that line all the time and I didn’t think I was likely to get the right note of conviction into my voice. Then too, if Mallard was sleeping it off he probably wouldn’t welcome my making a bell ring in his apartment.
The next name on my list was Glenn Flatt, Tulip’s ex-husband and current friend. He worked at Barger and Wright Pharmaceuticals in Huntington, Long Island. I got the number from Information and placed the call. The switchboard at Barger and Wright put me through to a man who told me that Flatt was in some laboratory or other and couldn’t be disturbed. He asked me if I wanted to leave a number, so I left Haig’s.
I didn’t have a number for Leonard Danzig, and from what I’d heard about him I decided I wanted to take my time approaching him. Mrs. Haskell Henderson—I still didn’t know her first name—lived on the other side of the Hudson. I would eventually want to see her in person, and I’d have to do that during the day when there would be no chance of running into Mr. Wheat Germ himself.