The Scarlet Letters

C...

Monday was a fine day for shadowing if you were an otter. The rains came and went all day, mischievously, sometimes a drizzle and at others a rattling shower that drove people off the streets. As usual in New York, at the first hint of moisture empty taxicabs became rarer than a traffic officer’s smile.

Ellery spent the whole morning and part of the afternoon shivering in his raincoat under a candy-store awning across the street from a shabby apartment house in Chelsea. Martha had found a play for the fall and she was going over it with the author, a young housewife who had written it between diaper-washings and sessions over the range.

It looked like a long wait.

It was.

Martha apparently had lunch there. For noon came, and one o’clock, and one-thirty, and there was still no sign of her.

At one-forty-five Ellery began to hunt for a cab. It took him twenty minutes to capture one, and even then he almost lost it when the driver learned that he was expected to wait indefinitely around the corner with his flag down. A five-dollar bill secured his loyalty.

Martha emerged at twenty-five minutes past two, unfurling an umbrella. She hurried in her plastic overshoes toward Eighth Avenue, looking around anxiously every few steps. Ellery, keeping his head down and his collar up, followed on the opposite side of the street, trying successfully to look like a miserable man.

At that, he had a close call. A cab appeared from nowhere, discharged a passenger, engulfed Martha, and was off before Ellery could reach the corner. He had to sprint to his waiting taxi. Fortunately, Martha’s cab was held up two blocks south by a red light. Ellery’s driver, sensing adventure, caught up at 15th Street.

“Where’s she headed, buddy?” he asked.

“Just follow her.”

“You her husband?” the driver said wisely. “I had a wife once. Take it from me, Mister, it don’t pay to knock yourself out. That’s the way I always figure. Give the other guy the headache. Why fight City Hall?”

“There they go, damn it!”

“Keep your pants on,” soothed the driver; and they were off again.

Martha’s cab turned left on 14th Street and began the long crawl east. Ellery nibbled his nails. Traffic was heavy and visibility poor. It was raining hard again. Where was she going?

At Union Square he half-expected the cab they were following to head north. But instead it turned south into Fourth Avenue.

The secondhand bookshops swam by.

Was she going down Lafayette Street? That way lay Police Headquarters.

It seemed improbable.

At Astor Place, behind Wanamaker’s, Martha’s cab turned into Cooper Square and cut across to Third Avenue. It settled into a sedate southward journey under the El.

Monday, 3 P.M., B... B for Brooklyn? Was she bound for the Williamsburg Bridge and the East River?

And suddenly it came to Ellery that, where Martha’s cab had turned into Third Avenue to head south, Third Avenue ceased to exist. Where Third Avenue met 4th Street, it became The Bowery.

B for Bowery it was.

But The Bowery ran all the way down to Chatham Square. She could hardly be peering out of her window hoping to spot Van Harrison on some unnamed street corner in the dingy gloom of the El. It had to be a specific place on The Bowery. A Bowery-Something... Bowery Mission!

It was not The Bowery Mission. It proved to be 267 Bowery, and it caught the philosopher driving Ellery’s cab as much by surprise as his passenger...

Near Houston Street Martha’s taxi, treacherously, made a full turn under the El. Martha jumped out, the door of a cab parked on the east side of the street popped open to receive her, and the last Ellery saw of her was a glimpse through the window of Van Harrison embracing her as their cab shot away from the curb, made a quick turn, and disappeared up a side street; By the time Ellery’s driver extricated himself from a tangle of northbound traffic and duplicated the maneuver, the enemy was out of sight.

“Why didn’t you tell me she was meeting him in front of Sammy’s Bowery Follies?” demanded the driver in an injured tone. “Then I’d been prepared.”

“Because Sammy’s Bowery Follies begins with an S,” snapped Ellery, “and if that’s cricket it ought to be baseball. Stop at a drugstore so I can use a phone, then take me up to West 87th Street.”

“With what’s on the meter already,” said the driver unhappily, “that’s going to use up a good hunk of the fin.” And there was no further communion between them.

Nikki managed to get away late Monday evening, and she burst into the Queen apartment with a “Well?” that faltered at sight of the Inspector.

“It’s all right, Nikki,” growled Ellery, “I’ve told Dad all about it. This looks like a long job. It was Sammy’s Bowery Follies, Bowery and Houston, with the ‘Sammy’ apparently canceled out. In short, I lost them. What time did Miss Prynne get home?”

“At the usual time. For dinner.” Nikki sank into a chair. “B... Bowery.”

“I think you two ought to have your heads examined,” exclaimed Inspector Queen. “Mixing up in an adultery case! Anyway it turns out, Nikki, you’re going to catch the dirty end of the stick. And don’t give me any taffy about friendship. In an adultery case there’s no friends, just subpoenas. I’ve already notified my son what I think of his judgment. And now, if you can bear it, I’m going to bed.”

“But why Bowery Follies?” asked Nikki, when the Inspector’s door had thundered. “What on earth were they doing there, Ellery?”

“Harrison’s an actor. The ham instinct. It’s romantic to meet on The Bowery and go scudding off in the rain. Gives that preliminary zing to the big scene. After all, there isn’t much variety in hotel rooms, or what usually goes on in them under these circumstances.” Ellery packed a pipe, viciously.

“Then you think they were going...”

“I assure you Martha didn’t jump into his taxi to discuss a casting problem. The last I saw, Harrison had a stranglehold on her collarbone. I leave it to you what their destination was.”

“The A — again?” asked Nikki in a small voice.

“Not the A—. I phoned Ernie at the desk. Harrison checked out Friday morning and he hasn’t been back since. It was an academic call. Does it really matter what hotels they use?” Nikki did not reply. “How did our heroine act when she got home?”

“Subdued.”

“Huh!”

“And... very nice to Dirk.”

“Of course.”

“Kept talking through dinner about the play she’s taken an option on. And about this Ella Greenspan, the young housewife who wrote it.”

“She also contrived to give the impression that she spent not only the morning but the entire afternoon with the precocious Mrs. Greenspan? Came directly home from Chelsea, and so on?”

“Well... yes.”

“And what’s on her agenda for tonight?”

“Martha’s reading Dirk the play.”

“Touching. By the way, how was Dirk?”

“Very interested. They went right into the study after dinner. That’s how I was able to get away. Dirk asked me to stay and listen in, but Martha seemed to want him to herself, so... Well, I said I’d some things to buy at the drugstore. I suppose Martha’s afraid of me these days.”

“I’m beginning,” remarked Ellery, “not to care a great deal for your Martha Lawrence, Nikki.”

Nikki nibbled her lip.

“But the situation does have its element of repulsive fascination. It’s sort of like living in a keyhole.” Then Ellery blew an apologetic cloud of smoke and laid his pipe down. Nikki was looking so miserable that he pulled her over to him. “I’m sorry. I guess I’m not used to this kind of case. Why are you getting up?”

“No reason. I want a cigaret.”

Ellery lit one for her. She returned to her own chair.

“You hate me.”

“I hate men!”

“Now, be reasonable, Nikki. It takes two to build a love nest. I hold no brief for Harrison, but Martha’s not exactly jail bait. She’s old enough to be held responsible for her acts.”

“All right,” cried Nikki. “Can’t we get back to the point? Do you want me to keep steaming open business envelopes?”

“I want you to come home. But if you won’t — yes.” Ellery picked up his pipe again. “By the way, today — we may say with some justification — we’ve progressed.”

“In which direction?” asked Nikki bitterly.

“Exactly. But that’s not what I mean. The pattern’s beginning to show.

“Harrison,” said Ellery, “has apparently worked out a melodramatic but effective enough scheme for having his pigeon and eating it, too. Different meeting places each time, and then away to the day’s nest. The only point of contact necessary under this layout is a time designation, place being expressed in code, and the whole luscious package enclosed in an innocuous business envelope. With Martha coming and going at all hours on legitimate business, and Dirk used to it — even though he breaks out in occasional rashes of jealousy-it’s not a bad set-up at all.

“Harrison’s really reduced the danger of discovery to a minimum.

“The code itself,” continued Ellery to the wall, since Nikki was looking there, too, “presents certain primitive points of interest. A comes first and turns out to represent the A—Hotel. B comes second and we find it indicates Bowery Follies. We may infer, then, that the next code letter will probably be C, and that C will stand for Carnegie Hall, or Coney Island, or somewhere in Central Park; that D will follow C and designate the Daily News building or Danny’s Hideaway; and so on. What Harrison will do when he exhausts the alphabet, assuming he can get away with it that long,” said Ellery gravely, “heaven only knows. Probably start working backwards from Z.”

“Games,” said Nikki. “Games!”

“But now the question: How did Martha know that A didn’t stand for the Astor, or the Art Students’ League, or the American Museum of Natural History? And B — why not Bellevue Hospital, or the Broadway Tabernacle, or Battery Park? The B was unqualified, except for time; so was the A. How did she know?

“The answer is that the initial-letter element of the code must be part of it only. The master key of the code must specify which A-place of all the A-places in New York the letter A in the code is to designate. Harrison has one copy of the decoding instrument, Martha the other. When she gets a message designating C, she’ll simply look up C in her copy, and she’s away.”

“That first envelope,” said Nikki, “retaining the shape of some booklet!”

“Nice work,” grinned Ellery. “Have you kept looking for it?”

“Well — yes.”

“Not, I gather, with the enthusiasm its importance warrants. You see how exacting detective work is, Nikki. You’ve got to find that booklet. It’s probably a guidebook of some sort to places of interest in New York City. With it we’ll know where they’ll meet before they meet. The advantages are self-evident.”

“Tonight,” said Nikki through her teeth, “you’re talking like Professor Queen, and I don’t appreciate it. I’ll find the damned thing! What’s that you’ve got there?”

“This?” Ellery looked up from a little black notebook he had taken from his breast pocket. “This is my case book.”

“Case book?”

“Times, dates, where they meet, where they go, what they do, to the best of my knowledge and belief... Who knows? It may come in handy.”

Nikki went off drooping.

While waiting for the next rendezvous, Ellery thought he might as well settle a point or two.

He spent all of Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday in an apparently aimless round of phone calls and visits to various Broadwayites of his acquaintance. He lunched at Sardi’s and the Algonquin, had dinner at Lindy’s and Toots Shor’s, dropped in at 21 and the Stork, ate a midnight snack at Reuben’s, and by Thursday evening he was far fuller of good food than of digestible information. He might have done better pumping the columnists, but he made broad detours whenever he spotted one. Expert of the painless exploratory technique as he was, he did not dare risk a consultation with the specialists. In fact, the newspapers these days gave him the horrors, and he scanned Winchell and Lyons and Sullivan and the rest with the fears of a man of much guiltier conscience.

The friendship of Martha Lawrence and Van Harrison was of very recent date. No one Ellery spoke to had ever seen them together, or even separately in the same place, until a few weeks before. On that occasion — Ellery’s informant was Maud Ashton, an old character woman with the acquaintanceship of Elsa Maxwell and the certified circulation of Life — they had both attended the all-night telethon emceed by a round robin of TV comedians in the interest of the recent blood-plasma drive. Martha had been there as one of the Broadway celebrities to supervise the studio blood donations, Harrison as a personality of the theater to entertain the television audience. He had given his famous imitation of John Barrymore, and it had netted so much blood for the drive that Harrison remained for the rest of the night, assisting Mrs. Lawrence.

“They made such a handsome pair,” Miss Ashton smiled. “I wonder if her husband was at his set.”

“Why, what do you mean?” asked Ellery.

“Not a blinking thing, Ellery, curse the luck. Of course, Van’s an old reprobate who’ll play Sextus seven nights a week, but everybody knows little Martha Lawrence is as faithful as Lucrece, and I can’t see Dirk Lawrence in the role of Tarquin, can you? Sextus... You know, considering the plot line, that’s awfully cute?”

If Maud Ashton was still thinking such noble thoughts, hope was not dead.

The second point advanced Ellery no further than the first. He visited 547 Fifth Avenue on Friday and discovered from the directory in the lobby that the Froehm Air-Conditioner Company occupied Suite 902–912, while Humber & Kahn, jewelers, had their showroom in 921. The occurrence of the ninth floor in the case of both envelopes suggested a certain line of investigation, and Ellery duly pursued it after six o’clock on Saturday afternoon, when most of the tenants of the building were gone. But he did not come empty-handed. First, on Saturday morning, he made one of his rare excursions to Brooklyn, to the home of an old man who owned a world-famous collection of theatrical photographs. Here, after representing himself as a feature writer for The New York Times Magazine, Ellery rented a set of studio portraits of stage stars who had played Hamlet in New York within living memory. Among them, as it happened, was a portrait of Van Harrison.

In The 45th Street Building Ellery prudently signed the after-hours check-in book in the elevator with the name “Barnaby Ross” and got off at the ninth floor. The sound of a vacuum cleaner led him to the propped-open door of a lighted office, and here he found a brawny-armed old woman in a tattered housedress with an apron over it.

“There’s nobody here,” she said, without looking up.

“Oh, yes, there is,” said Ellery sternly. “There’s you, and there’s me, and it won’t go any further if you come clean.”

“Come what?” the cleaning woman straightened. “Don’t you know you could go to jail for what you did, Mother?”

“I didn’t do nothing!” she said excitedly. “What did I do?”

“You tell me.” And Ellery thrust under her nose the portrait of Van Harrison.

The old woman paled. “He said nobody’d ever know...”

“There you are. You got them for him, didn’t you?”

She looked him in the eye. “You a cop?”

Ellery sneered. “Do I look like a cop?”

“You won’t tell the super?”

“I wouldn’t give that screw the time of day.”

“The man give me a big tip to keep my mouth shut...”

“I gather,” said Ellery, removing a bill from his billfold, “that to open it again will require something larger.”

“I’m a poor woman,” said the old lady, eying the bill in Ellery’s fingers, “and is that a twenty? The story is this: This good-looking gentleman comes up here one night after hours, like you, and he says to me he’ll make it worth my while if I’ll borry a few envelopes from some of the business offices on my floors, that’s the eighth, ninth, and tenth. I says I can’t do that, that’s dishonest, and he says sure you can, what’s dishonest about it, you heard of people who collect stamps and matchboxes and stuff, well I’m a collector of business envelopes, I go all over the city making deals like this with cleaning women who can use an extra few bucks rather than bother busy business people and maybe get thrown out on my ear. So one thing leads to another, and I get him a stack of different envelopes from different firms on the three floors, and he gives me the tenspot and goes away, and I ain’t laid eyes on him since. And that’s the whole truth, Mister, so help me, and I hope you won’t get me into no trouble with the super because I wasn’t doing no harm, just a few lousy envelopes for a fruitcake. So now can I have that twenty?”

“The Dead End Kid, that’s me,” sighed Ellery; and he gave the old cleaning woman the bill, raised his hat, and went away.

The third letter came the following Wednesday. It was camouflaged in the envelope of a firm of accountants on the tenth floor of The 45th Street Building, the address on the envelope and the message on the sheet of plain white paper inside had again been typed with a red ribbon, and the message was:

This triumph of reasoning consoled Ellery until the following night, when he trailed Martha downtown on almost the identical route of ten days before. But this time her cab penetrated deeper south into The Bowery, passed the Canal Street entrance to Manhattan Bridge, and turned into the narrow Asiatic world of Mott Street.

It drew up at Number 45, and Martha disappeared in the Chinese Rathskeller.

So C stood for Chinatown and/or Chinese Rathskeller, and there was no longer any reason to doubt the orthodox sequence or application of the alphabet in Harrison’s code.

It seemed like a meaty discovery until it was examined. On dissection it proved nutritious in appearance only. It advanced nothing.

Ellery felt sad as he went into the restaurant after an automatic interval and maneuvered himself to a table far enough away from Martha and Harrison to see without being seen. It all seemed so futile. What was he doing in Chinatown, spying on two people who were headed for the front pages of the tabloids? As he sourly consumed his lot-fon-kare-ngow-yuk — which had turned out to be beef, peppers, and tomatoes — he kept his eye on the lovers from a sense of duty only, conscious that he was not even aware of what he was being dutiful to.

And then he saw something that caused his gloomy ruminations to stop dead.

He had thought they were holding hands across the table. But when the waiter appeared with a trayful of steaming bowls, their hands parted company and Ellery saw that Harrison’s had hold of something Martha’s had slipped into it.

It was a small package, and the actor, after looking around, put it into his pocket.