Owls Don't Blink

Chapter Sixteen

There was a bend in the corridor about twenty feet from Edna’s door. I kept my hand on Roberta’s wrist, guiding her down the corridor and around this bend.

“But what—” she said. “Why—”

“Hush,” I whispered. “Wait.”

There were steps on the stairs.

“If it’s one man,” I whispered, “we wait here. If it’s two men, we beat it.”

There were two men. They came walking down the corridor, the heavy tread of beefy men. We could hear knuckles on Edna’s door.

I peeked around the corner and saw two broad backs. I had a glimpse of Edna’s white face; then the two men pushed their way into the room. I waited until the door closed, turned to Roberta, and beckoned.

She followed me down the hall.

At the head of the stairs she asked, “Why would we have waited if there had only been one?”

“They hunt in couples. If one had gone up, it would have meant the other was sitting in the car, waiting. With both of them in Edna’s room, it should mean the coast is clear. At any rate, let’s hope.”

We went down the stairs. I pushed open the door and held it for Roberta. A police car was parked in front of the apartment. No one was in it.

“Let’s go,” I said.

We walked down the street.

“Not too fast.”

“I feel as though something were chasing me. I want to run.”

“Don’t do it. Look up at me and laugh. Slow down. Here, let’s stop and look in this window.”

We paused, looked casually in a store window, then started walking again. Slowly I guided her around the corner.

“Know anyone else here?” I asked.

“No.”

I said, “Okay, we go into a restaurant and eat. Had dinner?”

“No. We were just going out for dinner when you rang the bell. Edna was just out of the tub.”

We strolled along the street. Once or twice she tried to ask me questions. I told her to wait. We found a good-looking restaurant with booths, went in, and selected a quiet booth off in the comer away from the door. The waiter brought a menu, and I ordered two daiquiri cocktails.

The waiter withdrew.

I said, “Keep your voice down low. Tell me How much you know about Edna’s little scheme.”

“Nothing,” she said. “It happened just the way you doped it out, only I didn’t know she was expecting any papers to be served on her.”

“Why was Nostrander so anxious to see you?”

She said, “He fell for me. It was very annoying as far as I was concerned.”

I said, “You don’t mean that you moved out of the apartment, changed your whole style simply because some man whom you didn’t like was making passes at you.”

“Well — well, not exactly.”

“Why, then?”

“I’d rather let it go just the way it is.”

I shook my head. “You can’t.”

She said, “Well, to tell you the truth, in part I got tired of the life I was living. I wasn’t working. I was getting all of my expenses paid simply to stay there and take the name of Edna Cutler. I wasn’t getting up until along about eleven or twelve o’clock in the morning. I’d go to breakfast, take a little walk, pick up some magazines, come back, read and doze during the afternoon, go out about seven o’clock for a bite to eat, come back, take a bath, put on my glad rags, take a lot of care with my make-up, and groom myself up to the minute. Then I’d either have a date, or else I’d drift across to one of the bars, and — well, you know how it is in New Orleans. It isn’t like any other city on earth. A girl sits in the bar, and men pick her up. They don’t think anything of it, and neither does the girl. In any other city, you’d wonder what sort she was, but — well. New Orleans is New Orleans.”

The waiter brought our daiquiris. We touched glasses, took the first sip.

The waiter stood by the table, exerting a silent pressure for our orders.

“Could you bring some oysters on the half shell with a lot of cocktail sauce, some horseradish and lemon?” I asked. “Then bring us some of those cold, peppered shrimp, some onion soup, a steak about three inches thick, done medium rare, some French-fried onions, shoestring potatoes, cut some French bread, put on lots of butter, sprinkle on just a trace of garlic, put it in the oven, let it get good and hot so the butter melts all through the bread, put some sparkling Burgundy on the ice, and after that bring us a dish of ice cream, a huge pot of coffee, and the check.”

The waiter never batted an eyelash. “I could do that very nicely, sir.”

“How about you?” I asked Roberta.

“I could go for that in a big way.”

I nodded to the waiter, waited until the green curtains had dropped back into place, and said suddenly to Roberta, “Where were you at two-thirty a.m. Thursday?”

She said, “If I told you what happened that night, you wouldn’t believe it.”

“Bad as that?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me then.”

She said, “I’d kept away from Nostrander. He didn’t know I was in New Orleans; then he found me. You were there when he found me. You heard what he said. It was the first time I’d seen him for two years. I didn’t want to have a scene in front of you. The last time I had seen him, he had been absolutely crazy about me. In fact, he had a jealousy complex. That was one of the things which made him so distasteful to me. Whenever I’d try to go out with anyone else, he’d go absolutely crazy-I mean that literally. He was a very brilliant man, but completely unstable. Heaven help the woman whoever married him! He wouldn’t have let even the milkman come to the house.”

“Is that why you took him out in the corridor the night I was at your apartment?”

“Yes I knew he had a gun, and I was afraid he was going to do something desperate. When he saw you there he almost pulled his gun. I took him out m the corridor. He was insanely jealous of you. I told him I’d never seen you before, that you were a business visitor. He wouldn’t believe me. He thought, finding you in my apartment, that you were the privileged boy friend. He pulled his gun, said he’d shoot me and kill himself if I didn’t go out with him, and went through all for dramatics. So I told him that the reason I hadn’t seen him, and the reason I hadn’t gone with him was because of that very trait in his character, that if he’d put that gun back in his pocket and quit all that crazy jealousy, I’d go out to dinner with him, and we’d have a few drinks.”

“He wanted to know all about me?” I asked.

“Oh, of course.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I told him the truth. I told him you were a detective who was trying to find out something about a man by the name of Smith in order to close up an estate.”

“Did he ask you who Smith was?”

“Oh, certainly. You mention any man’s name, and he’d pounce on it like a hawk swooping on a baby chick. He’d want to know all about him, who he was, where he came from, how long you’d known him, and all that. I told him Smith was a friend of Edna’s.”

“And he did all that out in the corridor?”

“No, not out in the corridor. I told him that I didn’t have time to stand there and argue with him. I was going to have to get rid of you if I was going to dinner with him. So he agreed to wait.”

“That’s the point I’m interested in,” I said. “Where did he wait?”

“He said he’d wait outside somewhere, and come back after you’d gone.”

“Did he?”

“What?”

“Come back after I’d left?”

“Yes. Within less than a minute.”

She saw the expression on my face. “What’s the matter? What are you scowling about?”

“I was trying to think back,” I said. “As I remember it, there’s only one string of apartments in that building. It’s over a storeroom, and the corridor runs the length of the building, with apartments on both sides, isn’t that right?”

“Yes.”

“There are no bends or crooks in the corridor where a man might hide?”

“No.”

“I didn’t see him there when I went out.”

“He might have gone over to the far end and flattened himself in the shadows where he could watch you, without your knowing he was there. That’s the way he would do things. He was secretive and liked to spy on people. Good heavens, when I was living there in the Quarter, you’d have thought I was an enemy alien, and he was the whole F.B.I. He snooped around, watched my apartment window with binoculars. When I’d go out with anyone, he’d be hanging around somewhere to find out what time I got in. I didn’t even dare to take a boy friend upstairs to have a drink—”

The waiter appeared with a tray, put dishes on the table. We started eating.

“Want to hear the rest of it?” she asked, after a few moments.

“After dinner,” I said. “Let’s concentrate on eating now. I’m hungry.”-

We ate our way through dinner. I could see that her nerves were relaxing. The wine and the food generated a mood of expansive friendship.

“Know something, Donald?”

“What?”

“I feel that I can trust you. I’m going to tell you the whole truth.”

“Why not?”

She pushed away her plate, accepted one of my cigarettes, and leaned forward for a light. She reached up with her hands and held my hand and the match m both of hers. Her hands were soft and warm, the skin smooth. “Paul and I went out to dinner. He was going to kill you,” she said.

“He got drunk and crazy jealous again. He began asking me a lot of questions about you. He wouldn’t believe you were a detective. Finally I got sore, and told him that he hadn’t changed a bit m the last two years, that I’d tried to let him down easy once by simply moving out, but this time I was giving it to him the hard way; that I didn’t want to see him again ever and I didn’t want to have anything to do with him; that it he ever tried to force himself on me, I’d call the officers.”

“What did he do then?”

“He did something that frightened me, and at the same time it made me laugh.”

“What?”

“He grabbed my purse.”

“Why? So you wouldn’t have any money?”

“That’s what I thought at the time, but I realized later what it was.”

“You mean he wanted your key?”

“Yes.”

“Where were you when he took your purse?”

“In Jack O’Leary’s Bar down in the Quarter. That was always his regular hangout.”

“And just what did he do?”

She said, “I was telling him that I was tired of the way he did things, that I couldn’t stand that insane jealousy, and that I wasn’t ever going to see him again.

“The bar was crowded. I didn’t know what he’d do, but I did feel that if he tried to pull a gun or make any threats, there were enough people around to grab him before he could do anything. Even if there weren’t, I was just tired of living in perpetual terror of that man. Until he fell in love with me, he was simply wonderful.”

“You met him through Edna?”

“Yes.”

“How did he feel toward Edna?”

“I think he was — well, perhaps, playing around. I think he picked her up there in Jack O’Leary’s Bar, and they were going together for a while; then Edna told him her troubles, and he worked out this scheme by which she could fleece her husband. That must have been it. I can look back now and put two and two together.”

“But Edna never told you that?”

“No. She never confided in me the real reason she wanted me to take the apartment in her name. Just gave me some excuses as she did you when you first asked her. She didn’t let me know where she was. Paul Nostrander was the only one who knew that, but he claimed he didn’t. Every month Paul would give me enough money to cover all my living expenses, the apartment, clothes, meals, beauty treatments, and all the rest.”

“Did you give him the papers when you were served?”

“No. I tried to, but he wouldn’t take them. He said he had no authority. He told me Edna had simply arranged with him to give me money from a fund she’d left with him. He claimed he didn’t actually know where she was, and had no means of reaching her. He said she’d given him fifteen hundred dollars to apply on my expenses, that the money had nearly all been spent.”

“All right, you told Nostrander where to get off, and he took your purse. Then what?”

“Without a word, he walked out.”

“Pay the check?”

“They don’t have any checks there at Jack O’Leary’s. You pay for the drinks as you get them.”

“So he walked out and left you sitting there?”

“Yes.”

“What did you do?”

“I sat around there for a while, and a couple of soldiers who were on the loose started making eyes at me, and I thought, after all, why not? The boys were going to be shipped somewhere pretty soon. They were entitled to as much of a good time as I could show them, so I smiled back at them. They came over, and we had quite an evening. They were awfully nice boys, but they knew nothing whatever about New Orleans. It was their first night in town. They came from Milwaukee. I took them around and showed them some of the sights, told them stories about the Quarter, drank with them until they were just about able to navigate, and left them.”

“What did you do?”

“I walked home, every single, blessed step of the way.”

“You didn’t take a cab?”

“No. I didn’t have my purse; I didn’t have a cent.”

“And how did you intend to get in if you didn’t have a key?”

“I had a key.”

“I thought you said he took your key.”

“Took one of them, but there’s another key in the bottom of my mailbox. I always leave it there, just in case of an emergency. You see, there’s a spring lock on the door, and sometimes when I run down to the corner to get things from the grocery store, I’ll forget to take my key along, so I always leave an extra one there in the mailbox.”

“What time did you leave the soldiers?”

“Oh, about two o’clock, I guess. Somewhere around there.”

“And you walked home?”

“Yes.”

“What time did you get there?”

“At exactly twenty minutes past two.”

I said, “Why are you so positive in your time? Did you hear a shot?”

“No.”

“What did you hear?”

“I didn’t hear. I saw.”

“What?”

“My friend, Archibald C. Smith.”

I did a little thinking over that one, and said, “Wait a minute. You couldn’t have seen him. He was in New York that night.”

She smiled. “I saw him plainly.”

“What did he say to you? What did you talk about?”

“I didn’t talk with him. I saw him, but he didn’t see me.”

“Where?”

“Down in front of my apartment.”

“When?”

“Just as I’m telling you, at twenty minutes past two.”

“Go ahead,” I said. “What happened?”

She said, “I was very close to the apartment when he came past in a taxicab. He got out of the cab and ran up the three steps to the street door and rang the bell of my apartment.”

“Are you certain it was your apartment?”

“Well, reasonably certain. I could see the position of his finger. I couldn’t see the exact button he was touching, but it was — yes, it must have been my bell he was ringing.”

“And what happened after he found you weren’t home?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why? Didn’t he turn back and see you coming along the sidewalk just a step or two behind him?”

“No.”

“What did he do?”

“He went in.”

“You mean he entered the apartment house?”

“Yes.”

“How did he get in?”

“Somebody in my apartment pushed the buzzer for him.”

“And what did you do?”

“Up to that time I’d thought Paul Nostrander had taken my purse so that I wouldn’t have any money, and so he could go through it and-well, see if there was anything in there, a diary, or perhaps a letter from you, or something of that sort.”

I nodded, keeping my eyes on her. “And after you heard the buzzer sound?”

“Then I knew why he’d really taken it. He d gone up to my apartment, let himself in with my key, and was waiting up there.”

“A delicate approach,” I said.

“It wasn’t entirely that,” she said. “Of course that was part of it. The other part was that he d been accusing me all evening of being intimate with someone You see, the way I’d disappeared had made him feel that way. He’d advertised for me in the paper. A personal ad that had run for almost two years.”

“I know. I saw it.”

“Well, naturally, he thought I’d gone away with some man. I knew it was only a question of time until I’d run into him on the street somewhere, but I felt that the longer it was put off the more chance he’d have to fall in love with someone else and forget me. But he has that peculiar complex some men have — he only wants someone he can’t get. You know how some men are?”

I nodded.

“There he was,” she went on bitterly, “in my apartment, with his gun, and probably about two-thirds drunk, sitting there on the bed, waiting for me, and determined that he was going to find out whether anyone was sufficiently intimate with me to come to my apartment. He’d insisted that I’d promised you that if you’d go out without making any trouble, you could come back later, and — well, you know.”

“And so,” I said, “Archibald C. Smith pressed the doorbell at twenty minutes past two — and walked right into the middle of that situation.”

“Yes — he must have gone on up.”

“And you think Archibald Smith thought you would be in your apartment at that hour of the night, and would answer the bell?”

“Well, he certainly must have thought I’d be there, and the bell would get me up. It was reasonable to suppose that I’d at least pick up the telephone and ask who was there.”

“Did you hear any shot?” I asked.

“No.”

“Would you if one had been fired?”

“I don’t think so, not the way it was muffled by the pillow.”

“What did you do?”

“I crossed the street. I tried to look up to the window of my apartment. I couldn’t see anything. The shade was drawn.”

“Then what?”

“I started walking back toward town.”

“At what time?”

“It must have been just before two-thirty. When I had reached the corner, Marilyn Winton drove by. She was in a car with two other people — a man and a woman.”

“You know her?”

“Oh, I know who she is, and we speak when we meet in the hall. Her apartment is almost directly across from mine.”

“Then what did you do?”

“Went to one of the little hotels in the Quarter which isn’t too particular. I used an assumed name, because I thought Paul might try calling all the hotels.”

“And then what?”

“Shortly before nine I walked all the way down to the apartment. I wanted to get my purse, some of my toilet articles, grab a taxi, and go to work. There were a bunch of cars around the place, and a man who was standing at the curb told me a murder had been committed, said some lawyer had been found dead in a woman’s apartment, and the woman was missing. The police were looking for her.”

“And what did you do then?”

“Like a ninny, instead of making a clean breast of the situation and explaining it while it could have been explained, I got in a panic and dashed back to the hotel. I sent Edna a wire telling her to send money quickly, waiving identification and making the draft payable to that assumed name I’d registered under.”

“You wired?”

“Yes.”

“Didn’t you try telephoning collect?”

“Yes.”

“Got her?”

“No. She didn’t answer.”

“She answered the wire?”

“That afternoon. I got the hotel to cash it and took a late train to Shreveport.”

The waiter came and cleared away the dishes, brought the ice cream and coffee.

“Can you trust Edna?” I asked.

“I used to think I could. Now I’m not so certain. She acted strangely.”

I said, “It helps Edna’s case a lot having Nostrander out of the way.”

“Yes. I can see that — now.”

“It might make a motive for murder.”

“You mean that she might have killed him?”

“The police might think so.”

“But she was in Shreveport.”

“Not when you telephoned.”

“Well — no, perhaps not.”

“It was late the next afternoon before she sent you the money?”

“Yes.”

We finished our ice cream, sat smoking cigarettes and sipping coffee. Neither of us said much. We were both thinking.

“What do I do next?” she asked.

“Got any money?”

“Some left from what Edna sent me. Tell me, Donald, what should I do? Should I go back to the police and tell my story?”

“Not yet, and not now.”

“Why?”

“It’s too late now. You’ve missed the boat.”

“Couldn’t I explain the—”

“Not now, you couldn’t.”

“Why?”

I said, “You didn’t murder him, did you?”

She looked as though I’d thrown something at her.

I said, “All right, someone did. That someone wouldn’t like anything better than to have the police blame things on you.”

“Well, can’t I do myself more good by being there to block that very thing?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Why?”

“If you’re out of circulation for a while the real murderer will then try to make you the goat by planting evidence, making false statements, and things of that sort. Then you’ll have the chance to find out who this is. Reel out lots of rope and see if we can’t hang somebody.”

“Not me, I hope.”

I met her eyes, raised my coffee cup.

“I hope.”

I paid the check, inquired if there was a telephone booth in the restaurant, found there was, closeted myself in it, and called the airport at New Orleans.

“This is Detective Lam at Shreveport talking,” I said, and then so they wouldn’t start asking questions as to whether I was on the force at Shreveport or a private detective, I started talking fast. “On Wednesday noon you had a passenger for New York. That passenger turned right around at New York and came back to New Orleans. The name was Emory G. Hale.”

The voice at the other end of the line said, “Wait a minute and I’ll consult the records.”

I waited for a minute or so during which I could hear papers rustling; then the voice said, “That’s right. Emory G. Hale. New York and back.”

“You wouldn’t know what he looked like? I wouldn’t be able to get a description?”

“No. I don’t remember him. Just a minute.”

I heard him say, “Anyone remember selling a ticket to a man named Hale for New York on Wednesday? Shreveport police calling... No, I’m sorry we don’t have anyone who remembers him.”

“When you book a passenger, don’t you take his weight?”

“Yes.”

I said, “What did Hale weigh?”

“Just a minute. I have that right here. He weighed — let’s see — yes, here we are. He weighed a hundred and forty-six.”

I thanked him and hung up.

Emory G. Hale would have tipped the beam at something over two hundred pounds.

I came out of the telephone booth.

“What is it?” Roberta asked. “Bad news?”

“Want to go to California?” I asked.

“Yes.”

I said, “I think we can hire a car to take us to Fort Worth and a plane from Fort Worth will get us into Los Angeles tomorrow morning.”

“Why California?”

“Because this state is very, very hot so far as you’re concerned.”

“Won’t we attract attention?”

“Yes. The more the better.”

“What do you mean?”

I said, “People speculate about a couple whom they don’t know. The thing to do is make them know us. We get acquainted with everybody from the driver of the rented automobile to the passengers on the plane. We’re husband and wife. We left Los Angeles to come east on our honeymoon. We’ve just got a wire that your mother had a spell with her heart, and we’re rushing back to be with her. It’s an interrupted honeymoon. People will sympathize with us, remember us in that capacity. If the police teletype starts clicking out a description of you as being wanted for murder, no one will ever connect that description with the poor little bride who is so worried about her mother.”

“When do we start?” she asked.

I said, “As soon as I telephone for an automobile,” and went back into the telephone booth.