The Girl with the Frightened Eyes

by Lawrence Lariar

  “Why were you rubbing?”

  “Hair,” he said. “Too bad there’s no comb around. I’d give ten bucks to find some black hairs on a comb.”

  We returned to the living room and Hank leaned in the doorway, still studying the arrangement of the furniture. I sat in the easy chair rubbing my eyes and wishing that Paula Smith would come home.

  Hank came over to me and stood, arms akimbo, staring at the chair. He moved back a few steps and I saw his eyes searching the rug. He said, “That chair, Jeff. I still think it looks out of place there. Nobody would ever dream of putting an easy chair in that spot—away from any reading light.”

  “Maybe Paula didn’t read.”

  He bent over and examined the rug in the other corner of the room. He felt the rug and then called me over. “Look here—this is where that chair stood originally. Here are the leg marks in the rug—see them?”

  I saw them but was unimpressed. “People often move furniture around. What are you getting at?”

  He didn’t know. He walked back to the chair and stood there scowling at it. Then, suddenly, he lifted it and moved it away. I shared his shock of surprise. There was a large oval stain under that chair, a twelve inch oval of dull crimson. Hank eyed it balefully and bent down to touch it. His finger came up stained with crimson. “Don’t tell me this is more of your Crimson Lake, Jeff.”

  I felt the blot of red and examined my finger. I said, “It looks like blood, but I won’t swear to it.”

  “You haven’t been around,” said Hank. “You’ve never touched it before. Or have you?”

  “I’ve seen it—plenty of it. But you don’t go around touching blood on a battlefield.”

  “I’ve touched it before. It’s blood.”

  We stood there for a moment, fascinated by the crimson stain. The sight of it did things to my inner man. The faint smell of paint added to my nausea and the walls of the small room were suddenly too close to me and full of claustrophobic menace. I opened the window and a tired breeze blew in from the river and fluttered the drapes. In the silence a tug moaned from far away.

  Then we heard the footsteps in the hall.

  They were bold steps, sharp and clear and feminine, moving quickly toward us.

  Hank muttered, “Here it comes, and don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  We faced the door and waited and a woman came into view. She was surprised to see us. Her mouth opened in amazement and she closed it and put a hand to her bosom and took a small step backward. She was a middle-aged lady, short and dumpy and overpainted. She had a sharp face, a face that was once beautiful but long ago had lost its glamour. Her hair was an incongruous color and her make-up matched it perfectly. There was an overabundance of rouge and the over-powdering made it burn high on her cheeks. Her eyes were bright blue, heavily mascaraed, heavily lidded. She opened them wide, blinked them and opened them wider still. You had the feeling that she was acting a part, measuring her audience and dramatizing.

  She said, “What the hell is this, Grand Central Station?”

  CHAPTER 6

  Hank said, “Mrs. Franklin?”

  She took a step into the room and threw her bag on the oak table. She turned to face him and when she moved she moved with a bounce. She put her hands on her hips and frowned at him. “Yes, I’m Mrs. Franklin. Who are you two and what do you want?”

  “It’s all an accident, Mrs. Franklin. We’re here by mistake,” Hank said. “Must have gotten into the wrong apartment.”

  “Wrong apartment, he says. So you got into the wrong apartment and figured you liked it here and would stick around all night?”

  “We were just leaving,” said Hank. “We haven’t been here long.”

  I studied Mrs. Franklin whilst I had the chance: she wasn’t looking at me. I was standing close to the spot of blood near the window but I didn’t hide it from her sight. If she had wanted to see it she had only to look beyond my feet. But she didn’t turn her head my way.

  “When did you get here?” Mrs. Franklin asked.

  I said, “About a half hour ago.”

  She jerked her head my way and stared suspiciously. “A half hour, he says. You telling me it took you a half hour to make up your mind this was the wrong apartment?”

  “Not exactly. You see, we couldn’t tell whether this was the right place because we’ve never been here before. If somebody had been in, it would have been different. As it is, we thought we were in the right apartment.”

  She frowned, confused. “Start the record again, soldier, and play it slower.”

  I said, “We were looking for a girl named Paula Smith.”

  “What made you think she lived here?”

  “She’s supposed to live here.”

  Her suspicions were filling her face. “You telling me you walked in here without looking at the name on the door?”

  “That’s about the size of it.”

  She threw her head back and gave a shrill laugh. She let it run its course, then: “You expect me to swallow that? If you didn’t have that uniform on I’d maybe walk over and call the cops. That kind of malarkey would tickle them. What gives you the idea anybody named Smith lives here?”

  Hank saved me. His poise had returned, out of nowhere, and he stepped forward casually and offered her a cigarette. He said, “My friend Keye is a little tetched in the head. You know how it is, Mrs. Franklin—he got a letter from a girl named Smith while he was overseas. Romance, and all that stuff. She told him she lived in this apartment. But I can see now what happened. The last letter he got from her was dated maybe three months ago. The girl probably moved. You been in this apartment long?”

  Mrs. Franklin handled her cigarette delicately, and tipped the ashes with her little finger. When she looked back at me she had softened. She walked over to a chair and sat down, smiling faintly. “Three months ago, he says. It’s possible…I moved into this place about two months ago.”

  “That’s the answer,” said Hank. “The Smith girl must have lived here before you.”

  “Maybe she did at that.” She dropped out of character for a moment and began to play a new role. She was the sympathetic friend, the kind woman. “I heard of stories like this where a soldier can’t find his girlfriend. Lots of times the girls do it on purpose because of getting married to somebody else or something like that.” She reached into her bag and withdrew a small black book. “You give me your name and address and I’ll get in touch with you tomorrow if I hear anything about her. Maybe the neighbors on the floor would know her.”

  I gave her my name and address. I said, “It’s pretty important that I find her. I’ll appreciate anything you can do.”

  “Sure, sure,” she clucked. “I’ll do my best. But what you ought to do is maybe forget about that girl. Any girl who does such a thing to a nice boy like you isn’t worth finding, maybe.”

  “This girl is worth finding.”

  She laughed softly, “Love is a kick in the pants.”

  Hank said, “You’ll find him in a bed at Bellevue if he doesn’t locate that doll soon.”

  “I know how he feels,” said Mrs. Franklin. “I wish I knew a Smith with a Paula handle.” She shook her head gently. “Once I read an article about the Smiths in New York City alone. We got fourteen thousands of them in this town. Doesn’t that do things to your head when you figure the odds?”

  I said, “I like long odds. Odds perk up a man’s imagination. I could have sworn that Paula Smith called me from this apartment tonight.”

  She dropped the sympathetic role as quickly as she had put it on. “She called you from here? You’re nuts!”

  “Are you sure? Were you here all night?”

  She stood up, angrily. “That, my friend, is none of your business!” She flounced over to the doorway and showed us the hall. “Now that you’re getting so damned nosey you can beat i
t the hell out of here. Fast!”

  We walked out quickly. Hank paused in the outside hall and said, “No hard feelings?”

  She slammed the door in his face and we heard the slip-lock fall into place.

  Downstairs, Hank held me in the marble entrance hall. He said, “Something tells me we shouldn’t leave here yet. Homer Bull would do something clever at this point.”

  I said, “Maybe Homer Bull would tell us to go home to bed.”

  We moved into the street and walked into the shadows on the other side. Hank stared up at a lone light on the sixth floor. A figure appeared at the window, remained there for a moment and then disappeared.

  Hank whispered, “Mrs. Franklin.”

  I yawned and started away, but he grabbed my elbow and pointed up to the window. “Watch,” he said.

  I watched. The bulky silhouette that was Mrs. Franklin appeared again, leaned out of the window and scanned the street. She couldn’t see us. We were hidden behind the stone porch of an old brownstone. We saw her figure move back into the room and her silhouette crossed the window on the way to the hallway.

  I said, “Now what?”

  “Watch,” said Hank again.

  After a long minute there were signs of activity up in 6-C. But this time the action was hurried and the shadows of movement flickered against the window shade confusingly. A figure moved to the window and stood there. But this time it wasn’t Mrs. Franklin. I caught the bulky outline of a man’s shoulders and head and the pattern of a felt hat.

  Hank said, “See?” He edged me back into the shadows and gave me a cigarette. “We sit here and wait.”

  “For what?”

  “We don’t know. We just squat here and wait. I have an instinct about situations like this. If Bull were here he’d tell you that people who go in must come out.”

  “Tomorrow morning?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. Whoever the man is up in Mrs. Franklin’s nest, he can’t be her husband. Her husband would have walked in with her.”

  “And what do we do if he walks out?”

  “We give chase, but he mustn’t know we’re after him. I’ll show you the technique. Bull himself taught it to me—but I perfected it.”

  We didn’t wait long. I felt Hank squeeze my arm and looked across the street. Mrs. Franklin stood on the narrow stone porch, making a great show of nonchalance as she surveyed the street. She flounced down the steps and started spryly toward the east.

  We gave her a lead, then strolled casually across the street, entered Hank’s car and began the slow crawl to Eighth Avenue. On Eighth Avenue, Mrs. Franklin hailed a cab and started uptown. We gave the cab a small lead and then shot away after it. We roared uptown, hit Broadway and followed Broadway to Central Park West. At Central Park West and Sixty-Seventh Street Mrs. Franklin left her cab and stood on the corner, deliberating. When the traffic light changed she walked uptown. We parked the car and followed.

  We hugged the shadows close to the buildings, allowing her a full block lead. At Seventy-Third Street she slowed her pace and occasionally looked back into the shadows behind her.

  I said, “She’s spotted us.”

  “Maybe—we’ll know in a minute.”

  We knew in less than a minute. Mrs. Franklin suddenly turned to the left and disappeared down Seventy-Fourth Street.

  We ran up to the corner, rounded the corner and were halfway down the block before Hank pulled up short. A yellow cab was starting away in the distance.

  Hank let out a giant sigh of anger and breathed obscenities.

  We walked down the darkened street. At the corner he paused and eyed me glumly. “We’ve done exactly the opposite from what we should have done. We have been outsmarted.”

  “By Mrs. Franklin?”

  “By none other. She has led us a merry goose chase.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said, because I didn’t. “Mrs. Franklin is clever, suddenly?”

  “I’m not sure,” he said. “But I have an idea that she deliberately waltzed out of that apartment to have us tail her. She must have known that we might wait for her. It could be that our Mr. Franklin instructed her. If we hightailed it after his spouse we cleared the street for him. He sent her out as a lure. It was the best insurance for his getaway.”

  “Keen deduction,” I laughed. “Then why did we follow her?”

  He shrugged dismally. “I’m an honest moron, Jeff —I admit my mistakes.”

  An early morning wind sang up the street and there was a bite in it. The city was fast asleep but the main arteries were still alive with taxis and lights.

  We went to a nearby dogcart for some coffee.

  Hank spread his elbows on the counter and wrinkled his forehead in deep thought. I busied myself with some personal mental gymnastics involving the mysterious apartment, Paula Smith and the elusive Mrs. Franklin.

  I said, “It occurs to me now that maybe I acted the role of a quiet moron up in Mrs. Franklin’s apartment.”

  “What did you do wrong?”

  “Nothing. That was the trouble. I stood there chewing my cud instead of aiming a few questions at her. I should have upped to her with that scrap of paper. I should have asked her whether she had written that note about Woodstock. I should have asked her to show me a sample of her handwriting. Now that it’s too late, it all becomes very clear to me.”

  “She would have thrown us out a little sooner if you had opened your big mouth,” said Hank. “You think a dame like that would have asked you to analyze her handwriting? I doubt it.”

  “It would have been worth the try. A smart guy could have tricked her into writing a few lines.”

  Hank laughed wryly. “Forget it, Jeff. Nine chances out of ten the dame didn’t write that note. So what?”

  “I’d like to be sure. It would help.” I pulled out the Woodstock note and compared it again with Paula’s signature.

  Hank said, “Forget Mrs. Franklin. Your girl friend Paula Smith wrote this business about Woodstock. I know a little bit about handwriting. Studied some of it with Bull. Your dame wrote the Woodstock note. Stet.”

  I drank my coffee, half satisfied again.

  Hank munched a doughnut sleepily. “That guy up there with her—I can’t figure him at all. I’m wondering whether we made a thorough search of that dump before she walked in. Did we miss out on any closets?”

  “There were only two of them—in the bedroom, and both of us gave them a going over.”

  “Nuts,” said Hank. “There must have been other closets in the dive. Trouble was that we walked down that hall in the dark. We considered ourselves inside the apartment after we passed through that catacomb of a hall. That was why we missed out on the hall closet. Our fat friend was probably squatting in it as we passed down the hall toward the light.”

  “Fine,” I said. “And why was he hiding in the closet?”

  “He probably wasn’t. If he was waiting for the floozy dame, he would have been sitting in an easy chair in the living room when we walked in. He couldn’t have been waiting for her in the hall closet. That’s what annoys me, Jeff. There’s no reason for thinking of him in that closet.”

  “Maybe he’s a mental case. Maybe he lives in that closet. Maybe he likes to startle his little woman.”

  “Or he might have come up later,” said Hank, brushing off my humor. “He might have come up with her in the elevator and then stayed outside in the hall until she detoured us out of there.”

  “Fine. Now, all of a sudden, he knew that we were up there. You figure he can look through walls?”

  “Don’t be funny. How did we discover that he was up there, mon capitaine? Remember? We caught a squint at him from down in the street. Maybe he and the dame looked up at the apartment window the way we did and saw us against the light up in that living room. Maybe they figured she could get us out quickly by her
self.”

  “A fat coward,” I said. “If her boyfriend saw us up there from the street, why didn’t he walk in with her?”

  “Ah! A good question. But the answer’s simple—the fat guy just didn’t want to be seen with the doll. You understand? An illicit relationship, as they say in the divorce courts.” Hank’s eyes opened wide with another idea. “Or maybe he just didn’t want to be seen by us. That, my friend, is the probable answer. Take it or leave it.”

  “I’ll leave it. Why didn’t fat boy want to be seen?”

  Hank shrugged. “I’m no mastermind. I’m just a thick-headed cartoonist trying to think like a bigshot detective. The whole business of Mrs. Franklin doesn’t make any sense to me. A couple of the new angles leave me cold. The fat guy in the apartment. The apartment itself. The blood on the floor. The rearranged furniture. Do you think it might have been the doll we just met who called Lecotte?”

  “Definitely not. The woman who spoke to me had a young voice.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Mrs. Franklin’s voice was old—it was pitched higher and had no undertones. It had a flat quality that couldn’t have changed on the telephone. It couldn’t have been Mrs. Franklin who called Lecotte.”

  “So now we have a young voice full of undertones.” He leaned on his elbow and appraised me with a thin smile. “You’re positively sold on the idea that Paula Smith made that phone call.”

  “I’m sold on the idea that it could have been Paula. I’m also sold on the idea that she might have used the name of Benjamin Franklin if she wanted to disappear. Names like Benjamin Franklin aren’t just coincidences, Hank.”

  He got off his stool. “I want to sleep on all this. Once I dreamed that I was a brilliant sleuth and when I woke up I handed Homer Bull a small idea. It could happen again.”

  I said, “How about the police? Shouldn’t we return to The Frog?”