Deadline at Dawn

Chapter 5

In the coffin-like confinement of the vestibule the misappropriated key shook a little as he fitted it unlawfully into the door for the third time that night. Her heart shook in time with it. But that was bravery, that slight shaking of his hand, and no one needed to tell her that. He was going in, not out; toward it, not away. And the man who says he’s never been afraid is a liar. So she admired the shaking of his hand; that was honest, that was brave.

He got it straight at last and a latch-mechanism recoiled and freed the door. They went in. His off-shoulder hitched a little, she could feel the gesture transferred to her, and the latch-mechanism bedded softly back into its groove again. The door was closed now at their backs. A blurred grayish oval remained, that was the street-light, dun and smoky as it was, struggling to come in after them all the way and giving up after it reached that far. It receded, grew smaller, to the size of an ox-eye, as step by step they felt their way forward.

The hall — they were in some kind of a hall, she surmised — had the stuffy air of a place closed up all day. She tried to visualize the house by her unaided sense of smell. She was no expert in scents, but over and above its stuffiness the place had an expensive leather-and-woodwork aura to it. Not distinct, that was just the sensory impression. No mouldiness of decay or disrepair, no cookery taints, no sachet of feminine occupancy. Impersonal, austere maybe, but not cheap.

“He’s in the back, on the floor above,” he whispered. “I don’t want to light any lights down here. They might be seen from outside.”

Again a transfer of motion told her his hand had gone into his pocket for something. “No, don’t use matches either,” she cautioned. “You lead the way, I’ll be able to follow. I’ll keep my hand on your sleeve. Wait, let me put this down here somewhere first.”

She groped her way to the wall, set her valise down close against the baseboard of it, where she could find it again readily. Then she moved back to him, took up her position of telepathic accompaniment, hand to his coat-sleeve. They toiled forward in a sort of swimming darkness that was almost liquid, it was so dense.

“Step,” he whispered presently.

She felt him go up. She raised her foot, pawed blindly with it, found the foremost step with her toe. The rest of them followed in automatic succession, were no trouble at all. The staircase creaked once or twice under their combined weights in the stealthy silence. She wondered if anyone else were in the house, anyone still alive. For all they knew, someone might be. Many a nocturnal murder isn’t discovered until the following day.

“Turn,” he whispered.

His arm swung away from her, to the left. She kept contact, wheeled her body obediently after it. The stairs had flattened out into a landing. They made a brief half-pirouette together, like a couple executing a ghostly cotillion in the dark.

She felt his arm go up again, after the brief level space. She found the new flight, reversed in direction to the old. Finally they too had leveled off, there weren’t any more. They were on the second floor now.

“Turn,” he breathed.

His arm crowded in against her, around toward the right this time. She corrected her own direction accordingly. They were moving along an upstairs hall now.

The leather-and-woodwork aroma became a little more personal. The ghost of a cigar lingered in it somewhere or other, too evanescent to be trapped. Something sweeter was in it too, that was not even a ghost, that was a memory, it was so far-away, so long gone by. A single grain of powder, perhaps, in — who knew how many cubic feet of sterile air? Or the exhalation of a single drop of perfume that had passed this way — a year ago, a night ago? She thought of perfumery, remembered it from other places, other times; she did not actually detect it now.

She felt herself go over a wooden door-sill, only slightly raised, not high enough to impede.

The air changed subtly. There was someone in it besides themselves, yet there was no one in it. They say you can’t smell death, at least not recent death. Yet there was a stillness in it, a presence in it that was more than just emptiness.

She was glad they weren’t going forward any more. His arm had stopped. She stopped alongside it. He reached behind them and did something with his other arm, and she felt a slight current of air as a door swept by. She heard it close gutturally just in back of them.

“Get your eyes ready, here go the lights,” he warned.

She shuttered them protectively. Electricity flashed on with unbearable brilliance after the long pilgrimage in the dark. The dead man was the most conspicuous thing in the room; it seemed to form a halo about him.

The room itself was an amalgam, a blend, a sort of all-purpose room. There were books in it to a moderate amount, two or three short rows of them on shelves built into the wall, so that it was a library to a limited degree. There was a Sheraton desk in it, so that it could be termed a study, also to a degree. There were a number of comfortable, leather-covered club-type chairs disposed about it, a liquor cabinet, ashtrays, so that it was perhaps more than anything else a masculine variety of sitting-room. An upstairs living-room, pertaining more to one person than to the house in general. What had been once, in an earlier society, known as a den.

It was not masculine to a sophomoric extent, its character was not blatant. It was first and foremost a room, the rest was insight on the part of the beholder.

The walls were lime-green, but so pale that in the electric light they appeared white. It was only when actual white was placed in juxtaposition with them, as if say a square of paper were held up against them, that their faint tint became perceptible. The woodwork was walnut. The carpet and chairbacks were a dark, earthy brown. The lampshades, of which there were two, were parchment.

It was oblong, lengthwise to the direction from which they had entered. The two short side-walls were blankly unbroken. The one at their backs held, of course, the doorway by which they had entered. The one facing them held two doorways, one leading into a bedroom, the other, at a spaced distance from it, into a bath. Quinn left her side to go into the former. She could see his indistinct figure, in the gloom in there, drawing heavy, sheltering drapes together over the windows, to keep the light from showing through to the rear of the house. This room they were in had no outside openings, no windows, whatever.

He didn’t bother with the bath, so it evidently had none either.

She was aware of him, of his movements, but only dimly, as of something beyond her immediate ken, something on the perimeter of her mind.

She’d never seen anyone dead before. That thought kept turning over and over in the turmoil of her mind, like some sort of a powerful cylinder. She stood there staring down, but it wasn’t with a feverish, unhealthy interest, it was with a stricken, thoughtful awe. So this is that thing we’re all so afraid of, ran the current of her thoughts. This is that thing that has to happen to all of us, to myself, to Quinn, so young, so agile in there, to everyone else, some day. So this is where all my dancing leads to, and all my scraping of pennies; all my snarling and clawing at my annoyers, all my hanging onto my ideals of person. All those rolls I take out of the slots at the Automat day after day, I’m only fooling myself, they can’t keep this away— So this is it. So this.

She thought she’d seen everything, known everything, but this was one thing she’d missed. One night a girl, right out on the middle of the floor at the mill, right in the middle of Begin the Beguine, she suddenly crumpled, went down like a shot. They said, afterwards, she’d taken something, but nobody knew for sure. All Bricky knew was she’d come in the long way, upright, and moving all over; she went out flat, and not moving, just twitching a little. They all rushed over to the windows in a mass and peered down, no matter what the manager said, how he berated them. They saw her down on the sidewalk, being shovelled into the ambulance, looking awfully small, awfully flat, on the white stretcher. She didn’t come around next night. She never came around again.

But even that, that was just before it happened. This was after.

She’d never seen anyone dead before.

She looked at his face, tried to reconstruct it, tried to fill it in. It was like reading a page on which the writing has already grown faded, blurred, distorted. It was like an ink-written page on which it has rained. Everything was still there yet, but everything had moved a little out of focus. The lines that had been facial characteristics were seams now. The mouth that had been either strong or weak, bitter or good-humored, was a gap now, a place where the face was open. The eyes that had been either kindly or cruel, wise or foolish, they were just glossy, lifeless insets now, like isinglass stuck into yellowish-gray dough.

His hair was well cared-for and full of life and light yet, for it dies last, or rather it doesn’t die when the body does, it grows on afterward. Even the death-shock and the fall had hardly disturbed a blade of it. Just one or two had fallen out of the furrows that his brush had trained them into through the years.

He had fine dark brows, like tippets of sealskin. Not grotesquely thick, but well-emphasized. And they were perfectly straight now, even; death had taken away perplexity and the need for bending them this way or that.

With all this, she couldn’t make out much what he’d been like. He looked as though he’d been about thirty-five or so. But the ages of men are trickier to calculate than those of women; he might have been thirty or he might have been forty. He must have been facially good-looking until an hour ago, or whenever it had happened — the putty mask that was left behind told her that — but then that’s the least important attribute a human being can have. Angels and devils are good-looking, both.

He’d liked life, in its pleasanter recreational aspects. Even in death he was still immaculately attired in evening clothes, the starched bosom of his shirt scarcely rumpled at all, the gala flower in his buttonhole still in place.

The underparts of his shoes were faintly glossy with floor-wax, so he’d danced in them not long ago, and their rims weren’t nicked or marked in any way, so he’d been a competent dancer, avoiding others and seeing that they avoided him on a crowded floor. What good did it do to know that now? He wouldn’t dance any more.

Quinn had come back to her again. She was aware of him standing beside her, without looking, and she was glad to have him there. Their shoulders touched lightly, and it felt good.

“Shouldn’t we close his—? They seem to be watching you when you’re not looking at them, and then when you look, they’re not.”

“No, don’t touch them,” he whispered. “I don’t know how to, anyway, do you?”

“I guess you just squeeze the lids together.”

But neither of them did it.

“Can you tell what it — was?” she asked with bated breath. “What it was done with?” She crouched slowly downward toward the floor, as if drawn by an irresistible compulsion. He remained erect an instant longer, then he crouched with her.

“It must be on him somewhere.”

He saw her hand arch timidly above the button holding the two sides of the jacket together across the form’s middle. Her fingers spread as if trying to undo it without coming into too close a contact with anything but that.

“Wait, let me do it,” he said quickly. He scissored his own fingers deftly, and the two sides of the jacket sprang open.

“There it is.” She drew in her breath.

A small reddish-black sworl was revealed, marring one armband of the white piqué vest. It was a good deal below the armpit, however, almost dead center above the heart.

“It must have been a gun,” he said. “Yeah, bullet. It’s round and frazzled. A knife would make a slit.”

He undid the buttons of the vest and parted that. Underneath it repeated itself, but it was far more spreading in its secondary results. The shirt had absorbed it like a blotter, all down the side, and a little bit over to the front in a random offshoot or two. He tried to keep her from seeing too much of it by holding the vest wings upward like a screen. Then he folded them back over it again.

“Must have been an awfully small one,” he said. “I’m no expert, but it’s a pretty tight little hole.”

“Maybe they’re all that way.”

“Maybe.” Then he admitted, “I never saw one before, so I can’t tell.”

She said: “Then one thing we can be sure of, there was no one staying in the house but him right now, or they would have heard it go off.”

He was scanning the room. “They took it away with them; there’s no sign of one lying around.”

“What’d you say their name was again — the people that live in this house?”

“Graves.”

“Is this the head of the family, the father?”

“There is no father; he’s dead about ten or fifteen years. There’s the mother, she’s a well-known society woman, I think. Then there’s two sons, and a daughter. This is the older son. There’s another one, still a student, away at college somewhere. The daughter’s one of these, what they call, debutantes; you know, they write her up in the papers a lot.”

“If we could figure out why, if we could get at the motive—”

“In a couple of hours. When it takes the police weeks sometimes. And they know all about these things.”

“Let’s start with the easy ones first. He didn’t do it himself, because then the gun would still have to be lying around the room somewhere, and it isn’t.”

“I guess that’s safe enough,” he said hesitantly. But he didn’t sound any too sure.

“Robbery or burglary is about the commonest reason. Was anything taken out of the safe, that had been in it the first time, when you went back to it just now, the second time?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I came in without using any lights, you know. I stumbled over him and went down on my hands and knees.”

She sucked in her breath sympathetically.

“It was like a third rail poking into your heart. So, after I’d lit a match and seen what it was, I just staggered over to the safe — I mean around behind it — tossed the money back into it, and got out fast without stopping to look.”

She struck her uptilted kneecap, poised a foot above the floor. “Then let’s look now. Do you think you’ll be able to remember, if there’s anything gone that was there the first time?”

“No,” he said frankly. “I was pretty steamed up even the first time, don’t forget. But I’ll try, and see if I can.”

They left their crouched positions and turned their backs on the body for the present. They went into the bathroom, Quinn in the lead because he knew where the light-switch was.

It exploded into a dazzling flash of white tiling at his touch. The mirrored surface of a wall cabinet at the other end gave them a disconcerting impression of other people stepping in from there at the same time that they were stepping in from here. Who were those frightened kids, looking so young, so hopeless, so helpless?

She didn’t waste time on that, though.

The most conspicuous thing was the square opening he had hacked into the plaster, to their right as they stepped in and just behind where the safe was in the outside room. It seemed incredible that walls, inner walls in a house, had once been made so thick.

He’d had the shower-curtain arranged the first time to conceal it; artificially draped and panoplied so that it fell over that way. He’d told her all about that. But in returning just now in his fright and haste, he’d cast it aside once more and then left it that way. It was pushed back, “dented” in, you might say, and within this sagging loop was where the wall-fracture lay exposed.

He’d done a neat job, but she took no pride in that, and she knew he didn’t either. She could tell by his face. It was almost as though he’d used a ruler to outline it, it was so straight. No more than a thin pencil-line of the white plaster-fill was exposed around the gums of the aperture. The tinted surface of the wall was scarcely cracked around this, it was so little disturbed. A flake or two threatened to peel off, that was all. He must have scuffed the fill he’d taken out, away from sight under the tub with the edge of his foot. She didn’t ask him, but there was none in sight on the floor, and the tub was one of these old-fashioned kind, raised above floor-level and supported by claw-feet, she saw.

At the back of the opening, plaster-whitened wood peered faintly. He reached in and caught at it around the edges with his fingers, in some way that he already knew of from having done it before, and presently he’d brought it out and set it down. It was the rear section of the lining, of the wooden casing or chamber within which the safe bedded.

Then slowly after this he drew out the steel cash-box rearwards, until he held it slanted across both his arms. That was all the safe consisted of: an ordinary steel cash-box, without even a lock to it, inserted into a wood-lined cavity built into the wall. It was true that on the opposite side, fronting the other room, it had a steel lid or plaque to cover the entire thing, that worked on a combination. But from the rear it had been like cutting through butter to get at it.

“Not much, is it?” she remarked.

“I suppose it was built years ago, when crime wasn’t as expert as it is now. When they didn’t expect it to come right into their homes with them—”

Then he stopped, and his face colored up a little. He was ashamed of it now, she could see, of what he’d done. He was crime himself, at least he had been as far as this particular safe was concerned. He was ashamed at the recollection of his own former act, his instincts were against it. That was all to the good; that was the way the boy next door should feel about having done a thing like that.

He hooked forward a three-legged enamelled bath-stool with the curve of his foot and they rested the heavy box on that and opened it up to examine its contents.

The money was right there on top, the money that he’d just restored. They cast that aside, went burrowing through the shoals of papers. Yellow, incredibly old, most of them older than he and she were themselves.

“Here’s a will — d’you think that could have anything to do with it?”

“I hope not — if it does that’s not the kind of thing we could work out in time.”

He went ahead dredging, while she stopped to read snatches here and there. “It’s the will of the father. He was made executor—” She flicked her head toward the outside room. “Isn’t that his name, Stephen?” Then dipping into it a little further, “I don’t think this had anything to do with it. Everything’s left to the wife, Harriet; the children don’t get it until her death. And she’s not the one who’s been murdered, the son has.” She repleated it, flung it aside.

“That’s not the motive we’re working on now, anyway. It’s robbery.”

“You said there was some jewelry in it. Where is it, I don’t see it?” For a moment her hopes were raised.

“That’s in a second compartment, behind this first one. The lid bends back in sections, I’ll show you. It’s not very valuable, anyway. I mean, it is valuable, in a way, but it’s not diamonds or anything like that.”

He laid bare the second compartment. They took up a number of old-fashioned plush boxes, of various shapes, all faded alike now to a dingy gray-tan. A rope of pearls. A necklace of topazes. An old-fashioned brooch of amethysts.

“These pearls must be worth a couple thousand.”

“Everything’s still there that was there the first time,” he told her. “I saw all these things. Nothing’s been taken out, since I—”

Again he stopped, and though he didn’t flush this time, he dropped his eyes for a minute.

She wasn’t pleased; their hopes, in this, were gauged to work in reverse. “Then it wasn’t robbery,” she said soberly. “It’s going to be something harder than that for us to—”

They started putting everything hastily back again. The money went in last of all. He gave it a look of hatred, this time. She knew. She didn’t blame him.

They closed the box up, and he hoisted it and shovelled it back inside the wall-rent. He didn’t bother trying to cover it over with the shower-curtain any more. She knew what he was thinking about that too. With a dead man inside lying in full view, what good was it trying to cover up this lesser trace of another, different guilt in here? No use trying to keep them separate any more. One would simply swamp the other as soon as it was found out.

“Well, that’s out,” he said discouragedly.

They went inside again. He killed the lights behind them, in the place where they’d been.

They stopped and gave one another a helpless look. What was there to do now?

“There are other motives, just as simple,” she said. “Only more personal, maybe, that’s all. Hate, and love— The next thing we’ll have to do is—”

He knew what she meant. He walked resolutely over beside the body, dropped down by it once more.

“You haven’t yet — have you?” she asked.

“No I just lit a match, after I fell over him, and crawled back and touched him on the forehead to see, but that was all.”

She conquered her repulsion, came over beside him, dropped down in turn. As close as he was, every bit. “Well, then we’ll have to empty them out now,” she said. “I’ll help you.”

“You don’t have to reach in. I’ll take the things out. You can look them over as I hand them to you.”

They smiled at one another bleakly, to pretend they didn’t dislike what they were going to have to do.

“I’ll start up here,” he said. “That’s the highest-up pocket on anyone’s suit.”

The breast-pocket. There was nothing in it but a fine linen handkerchief, pleated up into a sort of fan-shape, so that a little of the top edge would show above the pocket-mouth.

She opened it, then said: “Look, the bullet went through this. The way it was folded, it just made one little hole, down near the bottom. Then when you open it up, it makes three separate ones, a sort of design. Like when you cut papers, and make them into lace-patterns.” They didn’t smile about it; it was too gruesome a parody.

“That’s all for in there. Now the one on the left side, on the outside. He’s on it a little, the coat’s caught under him.” He had to raise the figure a little, pull the coat out, give it more slack.

Then when he had—

“It’s empty, there’s nothing in it, not a scrap.” He pulled the black satin lining out after him, left it reversed to show her.

“Now the right-hand one.”

He pulled that inside-out too. “Nothing, either.” They made two little black balloons, half-deflated, at the figure’s hips. Like a pair of midget water-wings. He left them that way for the time being.

“Now the inside jacket one.”

This time his forearm had to coast along the dead chest to get in. His face didn’t show anything. There was a layer of stiff-shirting between, anyway.

“Take out everything,” she breathed, “no matter what it is.”

She made a sort of audible inventory for him as they went along, passing things from pocket, to his hand, to hers, to floor beside her.

They resembled, grotesquely, two overgrown kids playing with their pails in a sandpile, or making mud-pies or something. The way they were huddled over, knees cocked up. He didn’t say anything, but she could tell by his face he was thinking they didn’t have a chance — not in the little time there was left to them.

Behind them on the book shelf there was a clock. They both kept from turning to look at it by sheer will-power alone. But they could hear it. It kept chopping up the silence fine. It kept going tick-tock, tick-tock, so mockingly, so remorselessly, so fast. Never stopping, never letting up, going, going, going—

“Cigarette-case. Silver. Tiffany’s. Given to him by somebody with the initial B. ‘To S from B.’ Three cigarettes left in it. Dunhills.” Snap. She closed it again, put it down.

“Wallet. Pin seal, Mark Cross. Two fives and a single. Two ticket stubs from tonight’s show at the Winter Garden. C-112, 114. Third row in the orchestra, that must be. Well, we know where he was tonight from eight-forty to eleven, at least.”

“Two-and-a-half hours out of thirty-five years,” he said morbidly.

“We don’t have to go back through his whole life. We only have to go forward about two, two-and-a-half hours, from curtain-time on. He wasn’t killed at the Winter Garden; he was still alive when he walked out of there. That’s already narrowed the evening down a lot, that’s taken a big chunk out of it.”

“Anything else in it?”

“Business cards. Stafford, whoever that is. Holmes, whoever that is. Ingoldsby, whoever that is. I guess that’s about— No, wait a minute, here’s something else, in this second little compartment here. A snapshot. A snapshot of a girl in riding togs, and himself, both on horseback.”

“Let me see it.”

He scanned it, nodded. “That’s the one I saw him leave the house with, early tonight. She’s also inside there, in the bedroom, in a silver frame. I saw her when I went in before. Signed Barbara.”

“Then she didn’t do it. If she had, she wouldn’t still be in there in his bedroom in a silver frame. Just the frame might, by itself, but not her any more. That’s ordinary common sense.”

“That’s all for that pocket. Now I’ll take the four in the trousers, two side, two rear. Left rear, nothing. Right rear, spare handkerchief, nothing else. Left side, nothing. Right side, his latchkey and a gob of change.”

She counted it over listlessly, as if realizing how immaterial it was. “Eighty-four cents,” she said, and planked it down.

“That finishes the pockets of his clothing. And we’re still no further than before.”

“Yes we are, Quinn. A good deal. Don’t say that. After all, we didn’t expect to find a piece of paper with ‘To whom it may concern: So-and-so killed me,’ written on it, did we? We’ve pulled a name out of thin air — Barbara — and we know what Barbara looks like, and that she was out with him in the early part of the evening tonight. We also know where it was they were together. That trims the blank down to just the couple of hours before and after midnight. I think that’s a whole lot for just one set of pockets to tell us.”

Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock—

She looked down at the floor. She reached out and pressed her hand down atop his for a moment, as if to steady, as if to encourage him. “I know,” she said almost inaudibly. “Don’t look at it, Quinn. Don’t look around at it. We can do it, Quinn. We can. We can make it. Keep saying that.”

She got to her feet.

“Shall I put this stuff back?” he asked.

“Leave it there for now. It doesn’t matter much.”

He got up after her.

“Let’s take the room next,” she said. “The room around him. We’ve tried him, now let’s tackle the room, see what we can do with that.” They separated, with the corpse for an axis. “You start over there. I’ll start over here.”

“What are we looking for?” he said dully, with his back to her.

I don’t know, she felt like wailing. Oh, God, I don’t know myself!

Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock—

She dropped her eyes, to miss seeing its dial, even as she passed right in front of it. Like an ostrich with its head in the sand, she told herself. It wasn’t easy to do, either; it was over there on her side of the room, staring her right in the face. The books on one shelf had been parted in two to receive it in the middle.

“Green Light,” she murmured aloud, as her feet slowly side-stepped along. “Oil for the Lamps of China, Personal History—” Then dropped her eyes.

Tick-tock! A moment gone, a moment out of their scanty store.

Then raised them again on the right-hand side of it. “North to the Orient, The Tragedy of X— He wasn’t much of a reader,” she commented.

“How do you know?” he asked curiously from his side of the room.

“It’s just a hunch of mine. When a person’s a heavy reader, all the books on his shelves would be pretty much alike, I mean pretty much of one type. This is just a smattering; one of this kind, one of that. He probably only read one maybe once in six months or so, when he had a wakeful night or something.”

She was the one who first came to it, and stopped.

Then after a thoughtful moment she called over to him, “Quinn.”

“Yes?”

“A man that’s a cigarette-smoker — and we found that case in his pocket — would he also go in for cigars, as a rule?”

“He’d be apt to, yes. Plenty of people smoke both. Why, did you find a cigar-butt over there?”

“Well, would he be apt to smoke two? Alone, by himself? There are two butts on this tray here—”

He came over to her and looked at it.

“I think he had somebody up here with him,” she said. “Some man. You can’t tell which of these two chairs the stand goes with, it’s out where it can be reached from both. One butt’s in one notch of the tray, and the other’s in another notch, around on the other side from it.”

He bent down and looked more closely. “He didn’t smoke both. Those are two different brands, and nobody does that. There was somebody up here with him, all right. Here’s another thing. They were having an argument of some kind, too. Or at least, one of them was worked up about something, even if the other one wasn’t. Look at the butt on this side. Smooth at the mouth-end; a little soggy, but still intact. Now look at the one over here. Chewed to ribbons at the mouth-end; fringe. One of those smokers was all steamed up over something. That tells it.” He looked up at her. “This is the best thing we’ve had so far. This is the best of the lot.”

“Which was the keyed-up one and which the calm, though? Graves or the other man? We don’t know.”

“No, but that doesn’t matter so much. It does show us that there was another man up here, and that’s what counts for us. The mere fact that there were two different brands of cigars shows that the interview wasn’t a friendly one. One of them refused the other man’s offer of a cigar — or else it wasn’t even made — and smoked his own. They smoked at the same time, but not together, if you see what I mean. There was a strain, a row or an argument of some kind, going on.”

“It’s good, but it’s not good enough,” she agreed. “It doesn’t tell us who the other man was.”

He moved around to the wall-side of one of the chairs; not that they were pressed close up against the wall, but to the side away from the middle of the room, which their own bulk had kept screened until now.

“Here’s the drink of one of them, put down on the floor close up against his chair.”

“Is there one for the other?” she asked quickly, jealously protective of his theory of ill-will.

He moved over to the inside of the second chair, looked down. “No.”

She drew a quick breath of relief. “Then that proves they weren’t on friendly terms. For a minute I was worried. It also shows us that this must have been Graves, sitting over here, where the empty glass was. He was the host. He helped himself to a drink, but didn’t invite the caller. Or else did, but the caller, because he was sore, refused.”

“Yeah. That’s not a hundred proof, but it’s reasonable enough. It could be the other way around, but most likely it wasn’t. A host feeling unfriendly toward you wouldn’t ask you to have a drink, and then show his unfriendliness by not joining you. He wouldn’t offer in the first place. So let’s call it Graves, over on this side, and let it go at that.”

“It’s not where he was sitting,” she muttered frustratedly, “it’s who he was sitting with.”

“Wait a minute, here’s something—” His hand drove perpendicularly downward into the seam between chair-arm and seat, of the second chair, the one they had decided the visitor had occupied. Both their faces dropped a little when he’d brought it up.

“Match-folder,” she said, crestfallen.

“I thought it might be something else, for a minute,” he admitted. “I saw it peeping up out of there. Graves had his own on him; I took them out when we were over there. These must be the other guy’s. Slipped down in there, I guess, in his excitement.”

He flipped open the little folder, fitted it closed again, made to cast it back where he’d found it. Then he quickly brought it back toward him again, opened it a second time. He frowned at it.

“Whew! He sure must have been excited. Look how many he used up, just on that one cigar. Can’t you see him lighting one after the other, through the whole conversation, and maybe even forgetting to use half of them, or the cigar going out every other minute by his forgetting to draw on it, he was talking so fast?”

“The folder could have been half used-up before he began on it,” she tried to suggest. “It didn’t have to start out brand-new, even with the cigar.”

But he’d already gone on past that point, evidently. He made no rejoinder. He was still staring, for far more than the object was worth in the ordinary course of events.

“Come here a minute,” he said, without taking his eyes off it. “What does this tell you? I want to see if you get what I do.”

“Chew Doublemint Gum?”

“Not the cover. The match part itself, inside.”

Her head was down close, beside his. They were holding it like some sort of a precious talisman. “Wait a minute, there’s usually twenty matches come to one of those things. Two rows of ten each, front and back. There’s — get your thumb out of the way — five left, two in front, three in back. That means he used up fifteen separate lights just on that one cigar, is that what you mean?”

“No, you still don’t get what I mean. All right, look. The five left are the end ones in both rows, over to the right.”

“Oh, sure—” she said belatedly. “I saw that from the start.”

“Now, wait. Here. Here’s a folder from my own pocket.” He passed it over to her. “Tear one off and strike it and blow it out. Don’t stop to think what you’re doing. Just strike a match, like you would at any other time. You’re lighting the ring under the coffee-pot. Go ahead, don’t stop now.”

She struck one, blew it out, then quirked her head at him with a sort of charming uncertainty.

“Look at it now. See where that came off of? The right-hand side. Every man, woman, and child that uses one of these things starts at the outside, on the right, and works their way along the line, match by match, over to the left. His folder was worked in reverse. Now do you get what I mean? The guy sitting in this chair facing Graves tonight was a left-handed guy.”

Her mouth opened into a soundless oval of sudden perception, and stayed that way.

“I don’t know who he was, what he looked like, if he killed him or not. But I do know these things about him: he was all steamed up or rattled about something, whittled away fifteen matches to one cigar and mangled it to ribbons between his teeth; he was on bad terms with Graves; and he was left-handed.”

She’d reached out for it, the folder, and he’d relinquished it absently to her; this was several moments before. He caught a strange look in her face now.

“I’m sorry, Quinn,” she said with an odd air of compassion.

“What do you mean?”

“The whole thing just fell all to pieces.”

This time he did the strange-looking. “Why? How?”

“It was a woman.”

She took his hand first, and held it. Then planked the folder down into it with her other. “Smell this,” she said laconically. “Just hold it about even with your upper lip, that’s all.”

He wanted to argue before he’d do it. “A woman chopped that cigar into spinach?” He gestured violently behind him. “A woman sat in that chair?”

“I don’t know anything about the cigar or the chair. All I’m asking you to do is hold that steady up by your lip for a minute.”

“Sulphur and stuff, like matches always—”

“Give that a minute to clear away. That’s the stronger of the two, it tops the other. Now.”

His face gave in with a disheartened grimace. “Perfume,” he said wryly. “Faint perfume.”

“It came out of somebody’s handbag. It’s been carried around all day in a handbag. A handbag that stinks of perfume. Just being in it skunked the cardboard. Just the opening of the bag, once or maybe twice, while she was in here, gave the air a shot of it. I noticed it out in the hall, in the dark, when we were coming in. There’s been a woman here in this room tonight.”

He didn’t want to give in. He had to, but he didn’t want to. “What about the cigar? Who smoked the two cigars, one strong, one weak? One calmly, one all riled up? You mean he did, at one and the same time?”

“Maybe there was a man here before she was here. Or maybe he was here after her. Maybe they were both here at the same time.”

“Nah, they couldn’t,” he said arbitrarily. “The cigar-butt shows the man was in this chair, facing him. The matches show a woman was. They couldn’t have both been in it at one and the same time.”

“If his nerves were all frazzled, and he’d used up all his own matches, he might have had to borrow hers from her. He was in the chair here talking away to Graves, and she was across the room somewhere, listening to them.”

He killed it with a pitch of his head. “That don’t hold together. Graves was smoking away right opposite him, much nearer than wherever it is she was supposed to be. There’s no third chair handy. He would have borrowed from him instead.”

“But if they were bawling each other out, or burned up?”

“A match doesn’t count as a favor. It’s not like the drink or the smoke. He would have almost reached without asking. Anyway, for him to borrow, there’d have to be a discarded folder around without any left in it, the one ahead of the one he borrowed. And there isn’t.” He bounced one bent knuckle off the top of the chairback. “They weren’t here together.”

“All right, they weren’t here together. But that don’t help much. Which came first? Because whichever is the one that came last is the one that did the killing.”

“We’re gaining ground backwards by the minute,” he said gloomily.

Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock—

They both looked down at the floor, over the other way, away from it.

They were standing there close by those two chairs. The whole thing had taken place by those two chairs.

Maybe it was because they were looking down avertedly like that, trying to avoid the sound of the clock. It must have been a difficult thing to see. The carpet itself was brown. Suddenly she followed her own look down. Went all the way down, half-prone, on the point of one knee and the palm of one hand. Her hand thrust a little ways under the chair, the second chair, of the folder and mangled cigar-butt, came out again. She straightened up, holding her palm upturned now, poking at something in it with one finger.

“Don’t tell me something else—?” he gasped incredulously.

“Well, look at it for yourself,” was her answer.

It was small; the exact size of a half-dime. It was brown. It was half-moon shaped; rounded on the outside, straight down the middle. It had two little holes in it, intact, and the remnants of two more indenting the straight edge. A corkscrew of brown thread still dangled from the two that were intact.

“Broken button,” he breathed almost reverently.

“Vest?”

“No, cuff. Those ones that you don’t use, on the outside of the sleeve. I mean that we don’t. Too small for anything else.”

“It must have been split for some time, maybe from the last dry-cleaning his coat got, and it finally dropped off tonight in the chair. Maybe he moved his hand too much, gesturing or with that cigar.”

“How’d it get under, though?”

“Fell down over the side, I think. And then maybe in getting up angrily, he gave the whole chair a shove over a little, and that put it below it, where it was already lying.”

“How do we know it isn’t Graves’? It may have been kicking around here on the floor for days.”

“Well, we’ll try matching it up right now, settle that point before we go any further. That’s one thing we can do, thanks be! It’s got to be from a brown or tan suit. I don’t have to be a man to know that blues or grays don’t have brown buttons. And he’s lying in a tux right now, it’s not from that.”

She went into the bedroom, flung open the clothes-closet, pulled on a light-cord. “Windows all right?”

“Yeah, I covered them up.” His eyes widened ingenuously, peering forward over her shoulder. “Will you look at that! How can a guy live long enough to wear all that many—”

They both thought the same thing, without saying it: well, he didn’t.

The browns and their offshoots were in a minority, as they are for some reason in almost any grouping of men’s clothes, whether large or small. “Here’s a mustard-color thing it could have gone on.” She took the hanger down, turned up the bottom of one sleeve, then the other, ran her fingernail rapidly down the line of vest-buttons. “All on.” She put it back. “Here’s a brown.” She took that down in turn, went over it.

“Don’t skip the back trouser-pocket,” he cautioned. “The one on the left usually buttons down — at least it does on mine.”

“Nope.” She put it back again. “That’s all. No, wait, here’s an extra jacket, hanging up there on a hook all the way back, must be old as the hills. That’s a brown, sort of.” She tried it, hung it up again. “Wrong type buttons; solid, with an eyelet in back, instead of pierced through. None gone, anyway.”

She tweaked the light-cord, closed the door. “So it’s not his. It’s from the man who came, and chewed the cigar, and was sore at him, and may — or may not be — left-handed.”

They went back inside again, swiftly striding. “We know two things more about him now, Quinn. D’you realize that? He’s got on a brown or tan suit, and there’s one button either gone or half-gone from one of the sleeves of his coat. My God, if we were professional detectives, d’you know what we could do with all that? With only half of all that?”

“But we’re not,” he said, tasting something imaginary — and not very pleasant — on his own lip with the tip of his tongue.

“We’re going to have to be, tonight.”

“This is the biggest city in the world.”

“That may make it all the easier for us, instead of making it harder. If it was a little place, if it was a village, like back home, they’d know the risk of discovery was so much greater they’d lie low, they’d take precautions, we’d never be able to— Here it’s so big they may feel safe, it may give them a sense of false security, they mayn’t bother even to hide or keep out of the way—” She stopped and eyed the expression on his face. “Well, that’s one way of looking at it, isn’t it? That’s one way.”

“Ah, it’s no use, Bricky,” he moaned. “What’s the use of kidding ourselves? It’s like one of these fairy-tales for kids, where a magic spell would have to be used to make it come true—”

“Don’t,” she said in a choked voice. “Don’t, please. Don’t make me do all the work for the two of us—” Her head went down.

“I’m yellow,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“No, you’re not yellow, or I wouldn’t be here in this room with you.”

Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock—

“I’m going to turn and look at it in a minute, and so are you,” she said. “And it may take real guts then, once we do. But before we do, let’s get the thing lined up. There are two people. Two shadows, but still and all they’re real. One of them, but not both, killed him. We’ve got to find the one that did, we’ve got to know, or that’ll make it you—”

He started to say something.

“No, let me finish, Quinn. I’m lining it up like this as much for myself as for you. In other words, we have to go out of here and track them down, find out where they went to, and go there after them, and break them down in some way, shake it out of them. That’s the job. That’s the job we’ve got facing us. And all the time we’ve got is, while it still stays dark in New York tonight. At daylight, at six, there’s the bus that leaves for home. The last bus, Quinn, remember that, the last bus. I don’t care what the schedule says, for us it’s the last bus there is, the last in the world.”

“I get you. They’ll keep running — but not for us. We’ve got to be out of here by daybreak.”

“Now, the job,” she nodded. “We can’t both take both of them.”

He got what she was driving at. He looked aghast. “I thought you said we should stick together in this? That was the whole reason you came over with me, instead of going down to the term—”

“There isn’t time now any more! We have to split it two ways, whether we like to or not. Look, here’s how it is. We have these two possibilities now, a man and a woman who both came here tonight at separate times. One of them’s innocent, one of them killed him. The thing is which? We haven’t time for hit or miss stuff; we can’t follow them up one at a time. We have to follow them both up at the same time. That gives us our only chance. We can only be wrong once, and if we’re both wrong together, we’re cooked, we’re finished. If we separate, and one goes after one, and the other goes after the other, that gives us our fifty-fifty chance. One of us is sure to be on a wild-goose chase, but the other one won’t be. That’s where our hope lies, right there. You take the man. I’ll take the woman.

“Now listen close, because we haven’t darned much to go by, and we have to make the most of what we’ve got. You have to look for a man in a brown or off-brown suit, with one button on his cuff broken, who maybe is left-handed or maybe is not. And that’s about all you’ve got. I have to look for a woman, who is left-handed for sure, and who uses a kind of heavy perfume. I don’t know what it is now, but I’ll know it when I get it again.”

“You haven’t even got as much as I have,” he protested. “You haven’t got anything.”

“I know, but I’m a girl, and that evens it up. I don’t need as much, our minds can do more with less.”

“But how can you do anything, even if you do track her down? An unarmed girl like you, with nothing but your bare hands? You don’t know what you’re likely to come up against!”

“We haven’t time enough left to be afraid. We only have time enough to wade in and go through with it, right or wrong. Now here’s how we’ll work it. We’ll meet back here — yes here in this house where he’s lying — no later than a quarter to six, with them or without them, empty-handed or successful. We’ll have to, if we want to make that bus at six.” She moved over toward the body, stooped for something, came back again. “I’ll use this latchkey, that was in his pocket, to get in with. You keep the first one.”

She took a deep breath. “Now turn, and let’s look—”

Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock—

“Oh, God,” she grimaced whimperingly. “Three hours—!”

“Bricky!” he said hoarsely, his courage recoiling for a minute.

But she was already out at the head of the darkened stairs.

He went out after her.

She was already halfway down them.

“Bricky—”

Her voice came up softly. “Put out the lights.”

He went back and put out the lights.

He went down after her.

She was already at the street-door. She had it open, waiting for him. She was standing there by it.

“Bricky—”

“What was it you wanted to say?”

“Just—” He stopped a second. “How game you are, how spunky you are — that’s all. We’ll make it. If there’s a star that looks out for a little fellow and a little girl, and there must be one somewhere — we’ll make it.”

He moved on a step or two from her, to go out. Then he stopped and came back again.

“What is it?”

“Bricky, I don’t suppose — would you want to kiss me, just for luck, like?”

Their lips touched fleetingly for a moment, in a sketch of a kiss. “Just for luck, like,” she murmured.

As they parted there in the darkness, just inside the front door, to slip out into the street one at a time, the last thing she said to him, in a pleading whisper, was: “Quinn, if you should get back first, before I do — wait for me, ah, wait for me, don’t leave me behind. I want to go home tonight, I want to go home.”