The Case of the Calendar Girl

Chapter Five

Thirty minutes later Mason returned to Beatrice Cornell’s apartment. He was armed with a twin-lens camera, a Strobolite, a leather carrying case and a dozen rolls of film, both color and black and white.

Dawn Manning was there ahead of him.

Beatrice Cornell performed the introductions.

Dawn Manning’s slate-gray eyes appraised the evident newness of Mason’s photographic equipment.

“You’re an amateur, Mr. Mason?”

He nodded.

“Rather a new amateur, I would say.”

Again Mason nodded.

“What is it you want, Mr. Mason?”

“I want some shots,” Mason said, “of a model. I’d like to try some... well, some... well, some—”

“Pin-ups?”

Mason nodded.

She pulled the tight-fitting sweater even more closely to the contours of her body. “I have nice breasts,” she said, “and my legs are good. You understand about my rates?”

“He understands.” Beatrice Cornell said.

Dawn met Mason’s eyes frankly. “If you’re looking for a woman,” she said, “go get someone else. If you’re looking for photographs, that’s different. We don’t have trouble with the professionals or the experienced photographers who are accustomed to hiring models. We do have lots of trouble with amateurs, and I don’t want trouble.”

“Mr. Mason is all right,” Beatrice Cornell interposed quickly. “I told you that, Dawn.”

“I know you told me that, but... well, I just don’t want to have any misunderstanding, that’s all.”

Mason said, “I am willing to pay your rates and I assure you, you won’t have to fight me off.”

“All right,” Dawn Manning said crisply, after a moment’s hesitation, “but it’ll be a few days before you’re able to take shots showing my legs.”

“You were in an automobile accident?” Mason asked.

She nodded, said, “I got out lucky at that.”

Mason took a cigarette case from his pocket. “Is it all right if I smoke?” he asked.

“Certainly,” Beatrice Cornell said.

Dawn Manning took one of Mason’s cigarettes.

Mason held a match. Dawn Manning inhaled deeply, held the smoke in her lungs for a moment, then exhaled.

She settled back in the chair, started to cross her legs, then suddenly winced.

“How bad is it?” Mason asked.

“Frankly,” she said, “I didn’t look at myself in the mirror this morning. I was sleeping late. When Beatrice called, I jumped up, piled into some clothes and came on over.”

“Without breakfast?”

She laughed. “I have to watch my weight. Breakfast and I are strangers. Let’s take a look and see how things are coming.”

She got up from the chair, and, as freely and naturally as though she had been making an impersonal appraisal of a piece of statuary, raised her skirts almost waist-high and examined her left hip. “That’s where it’s the most tender.”

Beatrice Cornell said, “Gosh, Dawn, that would take a lot of retouching. It’s bad now and by tomorrow it’ll be worse.”

Dawn Manning kept twisting around trying to look at herself, said, “I feel like a puppy chasing its tail. Let me take a look in that full-length mirror, Beatrice.”

She crossed over to stand in front of a door which contained a panel mirror, and shook her head dolefully as she surveyed herself. “It’s worse than it was last night when I went to bed. I’m afraid I’m not going to be available for a few days, Mr. Mason. Will this wait, or do you want another model? I’m sorry. Under the circumstances, I’ll only charge you taxi fare.”

Mason said, “I think we could arrange things with the proper lighting... Could we go to your apartment? I’d like to have a couple of hours of your time.”

Dawn Manning’s face flushed. “You certainly can not,” she said, “and I’m going to be frank with you, Mr. Mason. I don’t work with amateurs without a chaperon. If you’re married, bring your wife along. If you aren’t married, I’ll arrange a chaperon. It’s going to cost you three dollars an hour extra.”

“All right,” Mason told her. “We’re chaperoned here. Let’s talk here.”

“About what? About photographs?”

Mason shook his head. “I may as well confess. I was interested in the bruises.”

“In the bruises?”

“I wanted to see the nature and extent of your bruises.”

“Say, what is this, anyway? What kind of a goof are you?”

“I’m a lawyer.”

“Oh-oh,” Beatrice Cornell interposed.

“All right, so you’re a lawyer,” Dawn Manning said indignantly. “You’ve got me out of bed and up here under false pretenses. You—”

“Not under false pretenses, exactly,” Mason interrupted. “I told you I was willing to pay for your time. Miss Cornell has the money.”

Dawn Manning’s face softened somewhat. “What is it you want, Mr. Mason? Let’s put the cards on the table and see how our hands stack up.”

Mason said, “I was interested in your bruises because I am interested in the automobile accident which took place last night.”

“Are you intending to sue somebody?”

“Not necessarily. I would like to have you tell me about it. And, since we’re taking up Miss Cornell’s time without payment, I suggest that we go someplace where we can talk and let her get ahead with her work, or that I make arrangements to compensate her for her time.”

“And you don’t want pictures?” Dawn Manning asked.

“Yes, I want pictures.”

“It’s all right if you want to talk here,” Beatrice Cornell said. “I get a commission on this job, you know, and I—”

“You’ll do better than that,” Mason told her. “You’ll get twenty dollars an hour for your time, as well as the commission.”

Mason arose, opened his billfold once more, took out forty dollars and said, “I’ll probably use up two hours of your time, first and last, and here’s another twenty for Miss Manning.”

“Well now, look, that’s not necessary, Mr. Mason. I—”

“You have a living to make, the same as anyone else,” Mason told her.

“What do you want from me?” Dawn Manning asked.

“First I’d like to know all about the automobile accident,” Mason said.

“Well, there wasn’t much to it. I went to a studio party last night. A photographer friend of mine was showing some of his pictures and he invited a group of us in for cocktails followed by a buffet dinner. Ordinarily I wouldn’t have gone, but he had some pictures of which he was quite proud. I’d been the model and I hadn’t seen the proofs. I was interested and he was terrifically proud of his work.

“Quite frequently, at a time like that, a model picks up new business and new contacts, and it’s nice to be out with your own kind. Most people who learn you’re a photographic model and are willing to pose in Bikini bathing suits or without them, under proper circumstances, get the idea you’re cheap and that everything you have is for sale.

“However, when you’re out with a crowd that knows the ropes and understands each other, you can have a good time and... well, it’s a nice, free-and-easy professional atmosphere. Everyone respects the work the other one is doing. We like good photography and we like good photographers. They need models to stay in business, and we need photographers to keep us going.”

“All right,” Mason said, “you went to this party.”

“And,” she said, “because I wanted to go home early, I went alone. I didn’t have an escort and took a taxi. I had some drinks, I had a buffet dinner, I saw the pictures, and they were darned good pictures. He’d used a green filter, which is about as kind to the human skin as anything you can get for black-and-white photography, and the pictures came out nice. As I said, I wanted to get home early, so I broke away before things got to a point where the drinks began to take effect. I was looking for a taxicab when this woman pulled up to the curb in a nice Cadillac and said, ‘You were up at the studio party. I saw you there. It’s a rainy night. You’ll have a hard time getting a cab. Want a ride?’

“I didn’t place her, but she could have been there. There must have been fifty people in the place altogether at cocktail time. I think only ten or twelve were invited to stay for dinner.”

“So you got in with this woman?”

“I got in with this woman and she started driving toward town.”

“Did you get her name?”

“I didn’t. I’m coming to that. She chatted with me as though we were old friends. She knew my name, where I lived and all that.

“She told me it was a rainy night, that I’d have trouble getting a cab, and that was the reason she’d asked me to ride with her. She said that she had to make one brief stop on the road home.”

“This cocktail party was here in town?”

Dawn Manning shook her head. “Out in Mesa Vista,” she said. “This whole story is a little weird, Mr. Mason. To understand it you’ll have to know a little about my background. I’ll have to tell you some of my personal history.”

“Go ahead,” Mason told her, his eyes narrowing slightly, “you’re doing fine.”

“I’ve been married,” she went on, “Dawn Manning is my maiden name. I took it after we split up. My ex-husband is Frank Ferney. He’s associated with Meridith Borden. He’s a chiseler. When we split up, I couldn’t go to Reno to get a divorce. Frank agreed to go. He wrote me he’d filed papers, and I made an appearance so as to save problems of serving summons. I thought everything had been taken care of.

“I don’t know how much you know about Meridith Borden. He makes his living out of selling political influence. I did some posing for him. I met a local politician, the politician fell for me, and Borden wanted to use me just as he’d use some party girl to get this politician to the point where — well, where Borden could get something on him.

“I hate these man-and-wife feuds where people are intimate for years and then suddenly start hating each other. My ex-husband wasn’t what I thought he was, but I had tried to keep friendly with him.

“This Borden deal was too much. I told them both off. I told the amorous politician he’d better do his playing around home, and I walked out on the lot of them.

“Well, last night we drove along the road, and this woman said she wanted to turn in to see a friend very briefly. Then she mentioned casually that someone had told her that my husband and I had planned a divorce but that he had not gone through with it. About that time she started to swing into Meridith Borden’s driveway. I sensed a trap and grabbed at the wheel to keep her from turning in. We met another car coming out of the driveway. I guess I shouldn’t have grabbed at the wheel, but I wasn’t going to let them trap me. Anyway, we went into a skid.”

“Go on,” Mason said, “what happened?”

“We went completely around. I know the other car hit us because I felt the bump, or perhaps I should say we hit the other car. Then I have a recollection of crashing through a hedge and the next I knew I was lying on the damp grass on my left hip with my skirts clean up around my neck as though I had skidded or been dragged some little distance. I was lying in a cold drizzle and I was wet and chilled.

“I moved around a bit, trying to find where I was and thinking what had happened, and finally recollection came back to me all at once. I tested myself to see if I had any broken bones. Apparently, all that I had was a bruised and skinned fanny. I was lying up against the stone wall that surrounds Borden’s place. The car I had been riding in was on its side. I looked around for the other woman. She was nowhere around. I was cold, wet and shaken up. I found my way to the driveway, walked through the gates to the highway. After a while a motorist stopped. I hitchhiked to town.”

“Do you know this motorist?”

“No, I don’t. I didn’t get his name and I didn’t want his name. He had an idea he could furnish me board and lodging for the night and was rather insistent. I didn’t tell him anything about myself or my background. I let him think I was walking home from a ride during which I’d had an argument with my boy friend.

“As Beatrice can tell you, in this business we get so we can handle ourselves with most men, turn them down and still leave them feeling good. But this particular specimen was a little hard to handle. However, I put up with things until I got to where I could get a bus. Then I slapped his face good, got out, and removed the dollar bill I always keep fastened to the top of my stocking. I took a bus to the corner nearest my apartment and then had to ring the manager to get a duplicate key. I’d lost my purse and everything in it — cigarettes, lipstick, keys, driving license, the works.”

“Did you look for your purse?”

“I felt around in the car and on the ground. I couldn’t find it. Evidently this woman took it with her.”

“What time was this?” Mason asked. “Can you fix the time?”

“I can fix the time of the accident very accurately.”

“What time was it?”

“Three minutes past nine.”

“How do you know?”

“My watch stopped when I hit the ground, or when I hit the side of the car or something. In any event, the watch stopped and hasn’t been running since.”

“Do you know what time it was when you left the grounds?”

“I can approximate that.”

“What time?”

“I would say about twenty-five minutes before ten. I arrived home at perhaps fifteen minutes past ten, I think. Why? Does it make any great difference?”

“It may make quite a difference,” Mason said.

“Would you mind telling me why, Mr. Mason?”

“Unfortunately, I’m a one-way street as far as information is concerned at the moment. I can receive but I can’t give. There’s one other thing I want. I want the best possible description you can give of the woman who picked you up and gave you a ride in that car.”

“Mr. Mason, you’re putting me through quite a catechism here.”

“I’m paying for your time,” Mason reminded her.

“So you are,” she said, laughing. “Well, this woman was somewhere in the late twenties, or say, on a guess, around thirty. She was about my height... oh, say around five-feet-five, and she weighed... well, from 116 to 120, somewhere in there. She had reddish hair, the dark, mahogany type of red that—”

“Comes out of a bottle?” Mason asked.

“Comes in a hair rinse of some sort. I have an idea she might have been a natural brunette.”

“What can you remember about her eyes?”

“I remember her eyes quite well because she had a peculiar habit of looking at me, and when she did, it gave me rather an uneasy feeling. Her eyes were dark and... it’s hard to describe, but there’s a sort of a reddish, dark eye that doesn’t seem to have any pupil at all. I suppose if you looked carefully enough you could find a pupil, but the color of the eyes is dark and sort of reddish, and you just don’t see any pupil.”

“You remember that?”

She nodded.

“Anything else?”

“She wore rings on both hands, I remember that. Diamonds. Fairly good-sized stones, too.”

“How was she dressed?”

“Well, as I remember it, she didn’t have any hat on and her coat was a beige color, rather good-looking. She had a light wool dress in a soft green that went well with her coloring.”

“You hadn’t seen this woman before?”

“You mean to know her?”

“Yes.”

“No. I’m quite certain I haven’t.”

Mason glanced at Beatrice Cornell.

Beatrice Cornell slowly shook her head. “There’s something vaguely familiar about the description, Mr. Mason, but I don’t place it — at least at the moment.”

“All right,” Mason said. “I guess that covers the situation at the moment. I’d like some pictures.”

“Bruises and all?” Dawn Manning asked, laughing.

“Bruises and all — particularly the bruises.”

“Okay. We’ll throw in the all,” Dawn Manning said. “Beatrice can show you how to work that Strobolite.

“Pull the shades, Beatrice, and we’ll get to work.”