“Well, that’s what it was. He thought you were the whimsy type. He thought that’s the way to make a pass at a whimsy girl. And apparently he’s right.”
With extreme hauteur, Iris said: “I won’t even demean myself to discuss it any longer.”
For some moments we rumbaed in icy silence. Gradually the gleam returned to her eyes.
“The white rose and the red rose,” she murmured. And then sharply: “Roses. Mrs. Rose!”
“What about Mrs. Rose?”
‘The woman who gave us her room. Mrs. Rose. She was wearing red.”
“So what?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I’m just wondering.”
The music pounded untiringly. Iris, apparently, went on wondering.
At length she said: “He said my picture was in the Chronicle.”
“Yes.”
“Maybe that’s the key. My picture might be in the paper. The studio’s started releasing publicity stills.” She glanced at me cozeningly. “Peter.”
“Yes?”
“Peter, darling, even if we don’t go back and talk to the Beard, can’t we at least go out and buy a Chronicle—just to see?”
Dismally I saw the evening I had planned vanishing into thin air. I made a futile attempt to grab at its skirts.
“Iris, baby…”
“Darling, don’t be so tweed-coat-and-pipeish. Come on.”
“O.K.”
Triumphantly, Iris slipped her hand through mine and drew me off the dance floor.
With a hatred for all beards smoldering in me, I accompanied my wife down thickly carpeted corridors to the vestibule. The lighted chandeliers and the drawn red plush curtains had done something to mellow the raucous atmosphere of the afternoon, but the place was still as crowded and active as ever. Indifferent to a barrage of masculine glances as outspoken as whistles, Iris led the way through the potted palms to the magazine stand which lurked in a corner.
A frayed blonde was scuttling around behind the counter, dispensing magazines and cigarettes. Iris grabbed a copy of the San Francisco Chronicle, leaving me to deposit a resentful nickel.
My wife had started to turn the pages of the newspaper when a hand tapped my shoulder.
“How’s tricks, Lieutenant?”
I turned to see Hatch Williams standing behind me. He was wearing the same check suit and, to make Iris’s imaginary portrait of him complete, a fat, unlit cigar drooped from his lips. In this festive setting he looked even more melancholy than he had at the Turkish bath.
“I just called your room and got no answer, Lieutenant. Figured you’d be down in the dining room eating. Then I saw you.”
Iris had stopped looking at the paper and was watching Hatch. He was staring back at her with an expression which, for him, indicated rapturous appreciation.
I said: “Iris, this is Hatch Williams, the guy who was so kind about my uniform. Hatch, this is my wife.”
Iris held out her hand. “Ive been dying to meet you.”
Hatch’s rough fingers folded over hers. “If I’d known what to expect, lady, I’d have reciprocated.” He threw me one of his sardonic glances. “No wonder you were so hot to get back to the hotel.”
I said: “Any news on the uniform?”
“Not so fast, Lieutenant. I’m no lightning valet service. I’ve narrowed things down to a couple of names in the register and I’m going to follow ’em up. I’ve got my partner, Bill Dagget, interested too. He’s got a kid brother in the navy. But Dagget’s the guy for detail, always was. He won’t touch it until you give us something what you might call distinctive about your uniform—something that can prove positive identification.”
I told him the tailor’s name in the jacket. I also told him about the triangular tear in the left leg of the pants. He took it all down methodically in a little book.
“That’s for Dagget. Must have the facts down on paper. Me, I don’t bother with notes. Keep it in my head.”
Iris gushed: “You’re being awfully sweet about my husband’s uniform.”
He shrugged. “Ain’t nothing, lady. The case we’ve been working on came to what you might call a dead end at the Turkish bath. We had a free evening. Neither Bill nor me’s one that likes lazing around.” He looked wise. “Besides, to tell the truth, in our racket, you never know. Something that looks like nothing—if you follow it up, maybe you get on to something big.” He grinned at me. “Maybe you’re puttin’ us on to something big, Lieutenant, without knowing it.”
I hoped I wasn’t.
Iris seemed to be struggling with some inner decision. I didn’t get what was on her mind until she blurted: “Hatch, if—if you dp have a free evening, maybe you would help us. I don’t mean the uniform. I mean something else—something that really might be something big.”
I felt a flood of embarrassment for her gall. “Iris,” I said sternly, “Hatch is a professional. You can’t expect him to bother with your girlish …”
Hatch held up a hand to check me in a gesture of gloomy authority. “What’s on your mind, lady?”
“It’s just some crazy thing that happened a couple of minutes back,” I said. “Some old drunk who said a lot of crazy things.”
“I don’t think they’re crazy,” said Iris. “Hatch, listen. What do you think?”
My wife gave him an accurate if enthusiastic account of the Beard episode. At second hand it sounded even more lunatic than when it had actually happened. Hatch watched her face while he listened, his eyes slowly widening. When she was through, he knocked back his hat, scratched his head, and chewed the unlit cigar.
“Lady,” he said very slowly, “are you kidding me?”
“No, no, of course I’m not. That’s what he said, isn’t it, Peter?”
I nodded. “But he was tight.”
‘Tight.” Hatch laughed then. His laugh was about as cheerful as the interior of the Capulet tomb. He nudged me in the ribs, winking a wiseacre wink. “An old drunk gives her some double talk and right away she’s in the middle of a Nazi plot. That’s women. They’re all the same. Every time.”
He rocked back and forth on his heels, guffawing. I could have embraced him for not encouraging her. But Iris, still clutching the Chronicle, was obviously pained by his skepticism.
“All right, all right. Laugh at me. I don’t care. I’m going to find that picture.”
Peevishly, she started to leaf through the paper. Hatch and I watched. She stopped at a page. She gave a gasp.
“Peter.”
I was at her side instantly, looking at the paper over her shoulder. She had come to the social page. At the head of a short column of newsprint was a photograph of a very beautiful woman—a woman whom anyone except a husband might easily have taken for Iris. Dark, with the same amazing, slightly slanted eyes and the finely etched bone structure.
In fact, for a second, I thought myself that it was a picture of Iris until I read underneath it the two words: Eulalia Crawford.
“Eulalia Crawford.” Iris looked at me triumphantly.
“That’s the explanation. The Beard mistook me for Eulalia.”
Hatch queried, “Eulalia—what?”
“She’s my cousin,” explained Iris. “She lives here in San Francisco. She’s fairly well known. Only this afternoon someone mistook me for her.”
While she told him about the telephone incident, I read the newspaper paragraph under the photograph. It was nothing much. It just announced that Miss Eulalia Crawford, “the distinguished puppeteer,” had consented to give some sort of show for some sort of relief benefit.
Iris was winding up: “You see, Hatch? The man with the beard wasn’t just making passes at me. He thought I was Eulalia. He knows there’s danger for her and he’d warned her to stay home. When he saw me, he thought she’d come out in spite of his warning.”
Hatch stroked his lean jaw. “Sounds pretty screwed up to me.”
“Of course it’s screwed up,” I said.
Iris flared: “Oh, I’m bo
red with both of you. Here’s the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to me and you stand around like a couple of dreary old owls. Don’t you see there’s terrible danger for Eulalia?”
“Danger from what?” I said.
Iris’s lips tightened. “From the red rose and the white rose…”
“…and page eighty-four and the elephant,” I cut in derisively.
“Go on.” My wife’s cheeks were flushed. “Go on, both of you. That’s right. Laugh. Don’t lift a little finger with my poor cousin Eulalia in danger of being killed or—or worse.”
“Killed?” echoed Hatch. “Not so fast, lady. Not so …”
“Oh, shut up.” Iris turned on me. “As for you …”
People had started to stare. Iris knew that I squirm from any kind of public scene and took shameless advantage of it.
With a sigh of resignation, I gave in. “O.K., baby, if you’re set on making a mystery of it, we’ll go back and make the old wolf explain himself. He’s probably under the table by now.”
My capitulation had mollified her. But she shook her head. “Possibly,” she announced, “that drunkenness was just an act, something he put on. But it’s no use going back to him. He only spoke to me because he thought I was Eulalia. Once he knew I wasn’t Eulalia, he’d shut up like a clam.”
“Very well. Then what are you going to do?”
“The only right and proper thing. I’m going to telephone to Cousin Eulalia.”
I liked that Cousin Eulalia business. She hadn’t even seen the woman since she’d dropped pollywogs in her drawers during her charming Jamaica Plains childhood.
Since her outburst, Hatch was watching my wife with a certain amount of awe, as if she were a beautiful beast of prey to be admired but also to be handled cautiously.
“Excuse me, lady. You say this Eulalia’s in danger and you say this guy with the beard has warned her. O.K. Why do you want to warn her all over again? What are you going to say?”
Iris withered that extremely sensible remark with a glance. “I,” she said haughtily, “am going to tell her about the white rose and the red rose and page eighty-four and the elephant and life or death.”
She swept away from us towards a lighted sign saying TELEPHONES. Hatch and I looked at each other and shrugged in mutual masculine understanding. Then we started through the vestibule after her.
She wasn’t gone long. When she came out of the booth, her whole body, the very way she walked, exuded determination.
“Well,” I said, “did you get Cousin Eulalia?”
“No.” Iris fingered the gardenia at her throat. “A man answered the phone. He said she’d just stepped out but would be back any minute. He knew my name. He said Eulalia had just been talking about us. He said she was very eager to see us—that she wanted us to go over right away.” She paused. “I said all right. I said we’d come.”
“Go to Eulalia’s?” I snarled. “We break our necks trying to get a hotel room to be alone and away from your revolting Cousin Eulalia. And now you want to drag me …”
Iris didn’t smile. “We’ve got to go. I don’t know what it’s all about any more than you or Hatch do—but something’s wrong.”
“Why?” I asked.
“The man, Peter. The man who answered the telephone. His voice was soft and funny and he had a lisp.” She stared me straight in the face.
“He’s the same man who called me from the hotel lobby this afternoon.”
CHAPTER IV
Both Hatch and I were watching my wife. For the first time, I was getting a little worried. Not for Eulalia. I didn’t give a hoot what happened to Eulalia and her elephant and her roses. I was thinking about the one detail of the Turkish bath episode which I had kept from my wife, the fact that the man who had stolen my uniform had also lisped. I considered telling her now, but I decided against it. Her deductive fires had more than enough fuel already.
Hatch had received Iris’s dramatic news phlegmatically, which was reassuring. Legs apart, thumbs under the lapels of his blue check jacket, he surveyed my wife with paternal indulgence.
“I’m not saying there isn’t trouble,” he said. “Maybe there is. But figure this straight. You’re worried because the guy who’s with your cousin now’s the same guy who mistook you for her here in the lobby. Right?”
“Of course.” Iris was clearly impatient with his Socratic method.
“Now don’t you think you’re just a bit screwed up? This guy said he was a friend of hers. What more natural than he should be visiting her? What more natural than he’d tell her about mistaking you for her? What more natural than she’d want to see her own cousin?”
Even Iris quailed before the solid common sense of that remark.
“I suppose,” she faltered, “when you put it like that … but, well, it’s not just the man with the lisp. It’s everything. The roses, the elephant…”
She wasn’t going to let her Dick Tracy dream fizzle out without a struggle. She turned to me, her eyes pleading.
“Peter, please come to Eulalia’s. She lives right here on Nob Hill—on California Street. It isn’t far. Oh, I know you hate the whole idea. I know I’m just the sort of a wife a serviceman on leave shouldn’t have. But—darling, I swear we’ll just drop in, make sure she’s all right, and then leave. It isn’t ten yet. It’s early.”
Partly because refusing her would have been like stealing a little girl’s doll, partly because a bug of uneasiness still stirred in the back of my mind, I said: “O.K., baby.”
“Thank you, darling.”
“But no lingering around. No girlhood reminiscing.”
“No, no, of course not.” Iris turned radiantly to Hatch. “And, Hatch, I’m sorry I was rude just now. Won’t you come, too?”
Hatch looked uncomfortable. “Don’t you think it would look kind of funny calling on your cousin after all these years with a private dick in tow?” His face cleared: “Tell you what I will do, though. If this Eulalia’s part of a Nazi plot”—he lowered an eyelid at me—“then you won’t want to lose sight of this guy with a beard, will you? I’ll stick around here until you come back and keep an eye on him.”
“Wonderful.”
“You’ll have to point him out, though.”
“Oh, you can’t miss him. He’s the only beard in the whole dining room. A black curly beard. A grey suit. A red carnation in his buttonhole. You’re so very, very sweet.”
Hatch smirked almost coyly. “Think nothing of it. It’s a pleasure to help out some people.”
Impulsively Iris leaned forward and kissed his gloomy ear. “Come on, Peter. I’d better get my wrap from the room.”
As we headed for the elevator, Hatch strolled away towards the dining room. He was waiting for us a few minutes later when we came down again into the lobby, the unlit cigar limp in his mouth.
“The old guy’s still there,” he announced. “He’s picked up a redhead. He’s dancing—if you call it dancing.” He grinned. “His line don’t pay dividends with a brunette, so he settles for a redhead. Guess she’s getting the roses now.”
Iris drew the silver-fox cape around her shoulders. “You still think I’m a fool, don’t you?”
“In my set-up, lady, I don’t think no one’s a fool until they’ve proved it. Maybe, when you come back, you’ll have the laugh on me.”
He moved away, headed towards his post. I noticed that, sensibly, he was approaching the dining room by way of the bar.
Since it was impossible to get a taxi, Iris and I decided to walk up Stockton and take the cable car over on California. The warm night air seemed to quiver with a promise of excitement. San Francisco was still being San Francisco and the passers-by still seemed to be following their own individual adventures. We passed through a long dark tunnel and, as we emerged at the other end, we were in another city where unreadable hieroglyphics took the place of names on the stores and the faces around us had lost their Anglo-Saxon features and were slant-eyed and Oriental.
Iris, watching the Chinese men and women moving past, made a little crooning sound. Already, I could tell, she was in a world more exotic than this real Chinatown. A world peopled with roses and beards and elephants and… life or death.
We waited on the precipitous corner of California Street. Soon the cable car bucketed down the hill and ground to a last-minute, breathless stop. We boarded it. Iris chose places in the open section under the shadow of the giant brake lever. We sat there on the absurd benches which faced out towards the sidewalk.
That cross-town ride, lurching up hills and zooming down hills, added the final touch of insanity to our mission. Iris, clinging to an iron pole like a pole on a merry-go-round, kept her own counsel: Once, as we wheezed up to the great bulk of the Mark Hopkins Hotel, she murmured caressingly: “The white rose and the red rose mean blood.”
Cutting into her sanguinary thoughts, I said: “Since I’m stuck with Eulalia, I might as well know something about her. What else is there besides the pollywogs and the puppets?”
Iris started and said: “What, dear?”
I repeated the question.
“Oh, really nothing. She’s my mother’s sister’s only daughter. She’s about five years older than I am, and when I was just a tot her mother quarrelled with my mother—and there was no trafficking with each other after that.”
“What’s all this about her being disreputable and having lovers?”
“I don’t know the details. She got into some scandal with an Italian or something and came West. It’s very vague. It all came through a poisonous spinster cousin of Mother’s. It’s probably exaggerated just because Eulalia’s artistic and beautiful and …”
The great brake lever behind us ground down for the eleventh or twelfth time. Iris got up suddenly.
“This is where we get off.”
We were out of Chinatown, in a residential district of apartment houses. The streets were dark and almost deserted. As the cable car rattled away, Iris started to inspect numbers. We walked a short distance and then with a “This is it,” she turned in under an awning of a smallish, Georgian apartment house.
I followed her into a dressed-up, modernistic foyer. An old doorman in plum livery with shaggy white hair and thick bifocals was sitting in an upholstered chair, peering at a newspaper. He jumped to his feet as we entered.
Puzzle for Puppets Page 4
