5:46 a. m.—Mrs. Endicott Cannot Be Found
Lieutenant Valcour stepped across the corridor and rapped on the door
of Mrs. Endicott’s room. There was no response. He rapped again, and
still there was no response. He turned the knob and the door swung
inward.
The room was empty.
He closed the door and called to Cassidy, who was at the other end of
the corridor.
“Sir?” said Cassidy, when he had joined him.
“You’ve been out here all the while, haven’t you, Cassidy?”
“Except when I went upstairs to get the housekeeper, sir.”
“That’s right, you did. Come inside here for a minute with me. There
are some questions I want to ask you.”
They went into Endicott’s room.
“Sure, it’s good to see the daylight again, Lieutenant. Will we be
cleared up here soon?”
“I have a feeling that we’ll be finished pretty soon now. Tell me,
Cassidy, was it you or Hansen fired first at Hollander?”
“Lieutenant, Hansen and I have been disputing that very point. We all
but came to blows over it, we did.”
“Why so?”
“Because I claim it was him who fired the first shot, and he still has
the audacity to say it was me who not only shot first, but shot two
times before he so much as pulled the trigger.”
“That,” said Lieutenant Valcour, “is exactly what I wanted to know.
You were both right and both wrong.”
“Now, how can that be, Lieutenant?”
“Neither of you fired the first shot, because it was fired by the
murderer over there at the window. You heard it, and thought Hansen
had fired. Hansen heard it, and then heard your following shot, and
thought that you had fired twice.”
“That must have been it at that, Lieutenant.”
“It was. The second thing I wanted to ask you about is Mrs. Endicott.
She isn’t in her room. Have you seen her about the corridor, or
anywhere else?”
“No, sir.”
“Then go and look her up. Ask the men downstairs if they’ve seen her,
and if they haven’t, look through the rooms on this floor and up
above. When you do come across her, ask her if she will please come in
here and see me.”
“Yes, Lieutenant.”
Cassidy went out and closed the door.
Lieutenant Valcour was beginning to feel very, very tired. He yawned
elaborately, stared out of the window for a minute or two, and then
sat down again at the desk. There was something that he had intended
to do there when he had been interrupted by the arrival of Madame
Velasquez.
What was it?
It wasn’t connected with that wretched premonition of danger which was
nagging at him with increasing insistence. But it was something just
as intangible . . .
Elusive as a shadow . . .
Yes, that was it—the thing that he had forgotten: he had intended to
trace to its source that faint scent which was so curiously
reminiscent of some place—some thing. It had come, he remembered, from
the aperture from which he had taken the drawer. He shoved a hand
inside and felt around. Wedged far in the back was a crumpled letter
written on heavy notepaper. He pulled it out, and the scent became
more penetrating.
It came back to him quite clearly now. It was the same perfume that
had drenched the note left by Marge for Madame Velasquez up at the
apartment. He took the letter from its envelope, smoothed it, and then
turned to the signature. Yes, it was signed “Marge.”
A knock on the hall door interrupted him, and he placed the letter on
the desk. Hansen came in.
“Yes, Hansen?”
“I have searched all the yards you told me to, sir.”
“Well?”
“There wasn’t any gun, Lieutenant, that I could see.”
“Did you look through all the shrubbery? There are some evergreens
down there that I noticed.”
“Yes, sir, I looked through and beneath every one of them.”
“All right, Hansen.” Lieutenant Valcour studied the young man facing
him for a curious moment. “You were at sea for a while, weren’t you?”
“Yes, sir. I was with the navy during the war, and after that on
merchant ships for a year or two.”
“Would it be possible for a sailor to climb up onto the balcony
outside this window from the garden?”
“I couldn’t say offhand, Lieutenant. I didn’t notice much about the
balcony when I was down there.”
“Then go down again and see what you think. Let me know whether it
would be an easy job, difficult, or impossible.”
“Yes, sir.”
Hansen went out, and Lieutenant Valcour had barely returned his
attention to the letter from Marge Myles when there was another
rapping on the door. This time it was Cassidy who came in. Lieutenant
Valcour dropped the letter back upon the desk and turned to him.
“Did you find Mrs. Endicott all right, Cassidy?”
“No, sir, I didn’t.”
Lieutenant Valcour felt strangely disturbed. He had half expected
Cassidy to answer in just that way; the denial was nothing more than a
fulfilment of the curious premonitions he had been experiencing of
some subtle danger.
“Did you look in all the rooms?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Question anybody?”
“Everybody, Lieutenant. There’s no one has seen hide nor hair of her.”
“How about the men at the doors?”
“Each one was at his post, sir. She didn’t go out.”
“Then in that case,” said Lieutenant Valcour, “she must still be in.”
The thought was both a bromide and a consolation. Nowadays, Lieutenant
Valcour assured himself, people didn’t vanish into thin air; it just
wasn’t being done. While concentrating in his mind as to the possible
whereabouts of the unfindable Mrs. Endicott, his hands were
mechanically placing the piles of letters he had assorted back into
the empty drawer. He had shoved the letter from Marge Myles carefully
to one side. Any reading of it would have to come later, after he had
hit upon some logical explanation for this sudden move on the part of
Mrs. Endicott.
“He must have been some stepper, Lieutenant,” Cassidy said, eyeing
with interest one disappearing pack of pink envelopes.
“Quite a stepper, Cassidy.” . . . Where _could_ she hide? And why
should she? . . .
“Each one of them piles from some dame?”
“That’s right, Cassidy—each one from some dame.” . . . She wanted to
get out of the house, one could be pretty sure of that, and go to the
hospital to see Hollander. But how could she have got past the men at
the doors? She couldn’t. . . .
“It certainly does beat hell what some guys can get away with,
Lieutenant.”
“But it never does beat hell, Cassidy.” . . . And Hansen had been out
around the backyards, even supposing she had attempted anything so
unbelievable as to scale fences. That was absurd. . . .
“It ain’t all a matter of looks, exactly—no, nor money, either.”
Cassidy’s glance toward the bed was but half complimentary. “I’ve run
with lads that was one step this side of being human monkeys, but
could they pick them? I’ll say. They had sex appeal. How about it,
Lieutenant?”
“Undoubtedly, Cassidy.” . . . As for the roof, it was peaked and
offered no passage to the roofs of the adjoining houses. One couldn’t
picture her, in any case, scrambling over roofs any more than one
could believe that she would scramble over fences. . . .
“And the worst of it is with these bimbos that have it, they ain’t
ever satisfied.”
“No one is ever satisfied, Cassidy.” . . . There might be a way to the
roof at that, from the attic . . . attic . . .
“Not ever with anything, Lieutenant?”
“Not really ever with anything.” . . . Attic . . . and that curious
look that one had had to interpret as exaltation. It couldn’t be
possible, but still—— “Stay right here, Cassidy!”
Cassidy gave a nervous jump. The words were sparks from flint striking
steel. Lieutenant Valcour’s sudden spurt of speed as he rushed toward
the door was surprising.
A possible solution to Mrs. Endicott’s absence had just come to him
with rather horrible clearness.