“He did,” the sergeant replied dryly. “He left town.”
Elizabeth whirled on him and grabbed his lapel.
“Sergeant Wiedenbeck, where would the other person be who tapped that phone?”
“Two or three places. In the next office — which isn’t likely, somewhere in the basement where all the wires come down, or in the tunnel under the street where they join the main cable.”
“Why are we standing here? I have a key to the next office.”
He snatched it out of her hand and strode rapidly to the next door opening into the corridor. The key turned and the door was shoved open. The office was empty; the wires for a telephone installation vanished into the baseboard. The sergeant pulled the door shut and made for the back stairway. Elizabeth Saari was right behind him.
The janitor maintained his own one-room “office” in the basement, adjoining a locked room which housed his supplies. The janitor was lying face down in the open doorway of his own room, his head bleeding.
Nine
A confidential investigator wearing a sore skull and nothing else opened his eyes sleepily and stared up at himself lying in the most effeminate, luxurious bed east of Hollywood.
He pulled his straining eyelids down, then cautiously and slowly re-opened them to discover he was still there, looking down upon himself — or up at himself. He was in an ornate four-poster, a rose-pink coverlet pulled up over his chest, his head resting on an undersized pillow covered with a dainty slip. The slip bore a monogram ‘BE’ in reverse.
Studying the monogram, he saw that it was placed almost under his ear and therefore he shouldn’t be seeing it unless he was sitting up.
He sat up.
The monogram, now no longer in reverse position, rested on the rim of the indentation in the pillow made by his head. He contemplated it for thoughtful seconds and then craned his neck back to stare at the blue-toned mirror which covered the entire ceiling of the bedroom.
Slightly incredulous, he threw back the rose-pink coverlet and put his feet over the side of the bed. They came to rest on a soft, fluffy throw rug about the size of a dollar bill. Looking down at it he wondered what the hell use it might be.
And where were his clothes?
A pair of sharply pressed tweeds he had never before seen hung over the back of a chair near the head of the bed. Beside the chair, on the floor, was a pair of new house slippers. There was nothing else to wear.
A door behind the chair and tweeds drew his attention. Striding to it, he pulled it open to find a spacious closet filled with dozens of dresses and skirted suits and fluffy, useless-seeming articles of feminine wear. With one hand he reached up and shoved all the burdened wire hangers first to one end of the rod and then the other. The filmier things fluttered in the breeze created by the movements, but there was nothing there he could wear.
Several pairs of shoes lined a rack near the floor, and the shelf overhead held a half-dozen hat boxes.
Horne backed out and slammed the closet door violently shut. He turned to inspect the bedroom. A pair of sharply pressed tweeds hung over the back of a chair near at hand, and on the floor were the house slippers. He let his roving glance slide over them and on to the dressing table.
A pipe caught his eye. His pipe, lying beside a matching ivory set of comb, brush and hand mirror. He strode over to them.
There was a new and unopened pound jar of pipe tobacco, the kind he used. Matches were missing but she had left a gold-plated lighter. He picked it up and inspected the monogram.
“Betty,” he mused just under his breath. “Betty—? Batty Betty. Judas Priest! where did she get such ideas? May as well ask what the younger generation is coming to — how old is she?” Mentally and in retrospect he ran his eyes over her figure, recalling the look about her eyes and the skin of her hands and wrists. “Five to ten years younger than I am, anyway. Edging close to thirty, maybe.”
Looking at his face in the mirror he noted his beard. Instinctively putting up a hand to rub it, he rediscovered the sore spot. “Batty Betty with the loaded wallop.” Now that he had time to think about it, that had been an exceedingly lousy trick. So lousy and low-down it begged for retribution.
Horne sat down on the rounded stool before the dressing table and began to search the drawers. The first one he opened was obviously set apart for him. It contained socks and handkerchiefs; he automatically looked at the size of the socks and saw they would fit. He put on a pair.
The other drawers held her things; all shapes and sizes and colors of things, but nothing he could wear. Idly he fingered over the boxes and bottles, reading the brands and sizes, noting the color of the nail polish and the matching lipstick, the wishful thought behind the name of the perfume, several pairs of sheer nylons, leg make-up, brands of facial lotions and cosmetics, the particular preferences of her more personal life. He opened the lid of one box and found the contents untouched.
Slamming the drawer shut, he arose and walked across the bedroom to the chair that stood near the bed. There was no use, he realized, in reading the label giving the waist and inseam measures of the trousers. They would fit.
They did, as well as if he had bought them himself.
Betty knew him like a book: she had said so, and there was little sense in disputing it. He stepped into the slippers and they fit. And he had been accepting money for years under the impression he was a detective! He couldn’t so much as guess the size of her shoe.
Throwing up his nostrils, he sniffed the air in the room. Her perfume, the subtle scent whose acquaintance he had first made when it came into his bedroom the night before. It seemed at first to come from the bed, and then again seemed to permeate the atmosphere of the entire room. He turned to examine the ornate instrument in which he had spent the remainder of the night.
The scent was everywhere; he found himself half-liking it. But the bed—!
Curiously, he bent over it to examine the other pillow. It was smooth and unmarred. Looking at his own, he found the indentation made by his head had vanished, leaving it the unruffled, unmarked twin of the other. From the sheets he could learn nothing: they were twisted in the manner all sheets became after he had slept in them.
Angry with himself, he punched a pillow. All right, so maybe she had, so what? He had been asleep ever since she clipped him.
The bedroom had three doors. One was the already explored closet and he dismissed it from his thoughts. The other two? That one, near the foot of the bed on the opposite side would be the bathroom. And the third would provide exit from the room if it were not locked. If and when it opened, it would open on the rest of the house.
But how about the windows? There were two.
The dog glared back at him when he put his bearded face to the nearest window.
The bedroom was on the ground floor, the window a few feet above a grassy lawn. The sun was somewhere on the other side of the house, throwing its bungalow-shadow out across the yard. The shadows showed a chimney at either end of the house. There was a latticework fence, quite high, around the house and encompassing a huge yard. Between the fence and the far blue horizon there was nothing but parched cornfields, empty pasture land and a distant clump of tall, green trees standing motionless in the blazing summer sun.
Between his window and the high fence stood the dog, legs stiffly apart, watching him with savage intentness. He thumbed his nose at the animal and tried to raise the window.
It wouldn’t budge. He repeated the experiment on the second window without success. The dog had moved his head.