The Red Carnelian

by Phyllis A. Whitney

  I stared without interest at the words I’d written on the paper.

  Red is the Color of the Year

  Red for Daring

  Red for Courage

  Red for—

  “Red for what?” I asked Keith.

  He looked up from his typewriter.

  “Blood, maybe,” he said somberly.

  “Oh, go home,” I told him. “It’s only a half hour or so till closing time and I’m getting awfully fed up with people.”

  I knew I’d hurt his feelings.

  “I’ll feel better tomorrow,” I called after him as he left, but he went out the door without replying.

  That was the trouble with department stores. You could never get away from people. From different temperaments and dispositions and sensitivities. Including your own. Usually I liked it. I liked the rush and excitement, the everlasting pressure of work. There were always deadlines in my job, just as there were on a newspaper. For a few weeks the theme song would be spring. Then overboard with spring and on with hot weather. Cotton for warm days ahead, while one was still trailing through the puddles of April.

  But right now red. I had to think of a word. Just one more word before I left the office.

  I looked about at the bright pages lining the walls, but for once inspiration was a laggard. There was scarlet and gold in a ballet picture of Coq D’Or, there was a nail polish ad—hands with blood-red nails arranging delicately hued seashells on a dark table, there was a crimson coat on a famous model. Red everywhere—but no adjective to catch fire in my tired brain.

  Let the word go. I’d get it tomorrow. Now I’d run over to talk to Tony and then I’d go home.

  The section of the eighth floor leading to the window display department was deserted. A long corridor ran past echoing storerooms and closed doors, ending in a strip of floor that was like a drawbridge flung between stairs and freight elevators. The rooms of window display lay beyond.

  This was one of the days when the display people came down early to work in the side windows before the store opened. Nearly everyone had gone home in the afternoon, and now the place was empty and quiet.

  Window display consisted of a series of rooms of various sizes, separated by steel gray partitions rising part way to the high ceiling. Monty and Tony each had an office on the right, with a little anteroom between, where Monty’s secretary usually stayed. It was empty now because the girl’s brother had become seriously ill and she had taken a leave of absence to go down to her home in southern Illinois.

  On the left, running along the window side, stretched rooms, like a row of boxes, open above the partitions, and open on the corridor they shared. These included numerous prop rooms, Sondo’s workroom, the room in which the mannequins were kept.

  Tony’s office was empty and for a moment I thought he must have gone. I stood there wondering what to do next, feeling again that strong sense of predestination, of something I must do.

  I began to walk slowly down the corridor, past the room where old sets were kept, past shelves containing bolts of material and rolls of wallpaper, past Sondo’s workroom without looking in. Above my head, like the intertwining branches of a forest, hung artificial pine boughs with long green needles and white-tipped cones—decorations from last Christmas.

  The whole place had a touch of the fantastic. It was a through-the-looking-glass world where anything could be found, anything could happen.

  And then I heard Tony’s voice and paused for an instant, startled. Ringing suddenly through that quiet place it had an eerie, insane sound. As if Tony Salvador were talking loudly to himself.

  But he wasn’t talking to himself. I was still more amazed as I caught the words.

  “Darling,” he was saying, “I don’t know what I’d do without you. You’re the only one who ever listens. You know I’m good, honey. You know I’m the best damn’ window decorator on the street. And then I have to be up against a louse like Monty. You know why he won’t let me get ahead, honey? Because I’m better’n he is.”

  I pulled myself together and walked quickly to the door of the mannequin room. This was scarcely discretion on Tony’s part and it had to be stopped, no matter who was with him. If Monty ever overheard a conversation like that, Tony would be through whether he wanted to be or not.

  The mannequin room was a huge jumble, with Tony himself in the middle of it, waving a plaster arm of feminine contour as he talked. Tony was tall and very dark, with those Latin good looks which have such a romantic appeal for women. But it was the girl who sat in a chair with her back to the door that interested me.

  She wore a hooded scarlet evening cape, and her black lace formal draped gracefully over crossed knees and fell to the point of one silver sandal.

  “Come on in,” Tony invited. “I don’t keep any secrets from Dolores.”

  It was one of the window mannequins. The figure was so amazingly lifelike that for just a moment I’d been fooled.

  “Tony!” I cried in exasperation. “Do you have to be such a fool? That voice of yours carries all over the floor. What if Monty came in and heard what I’ve just heard?”

  “What difference does it make?” Tony’s gesture with the arm was debonair, if grotesque. “I’m through anyway.” He chucked the mannequin under her papier maché chin. “Going to devote all my time to you now, gorgeous.”

  “Do you think you could sober up long enough to tell me what happened?” I asked.

  He grinned at Dolores. “She thinks I’m tight. But I’m not half so tight as I’m going to be an hour from now. Oh, well—I’ll tell her. It was that damn phonograph, Linell. That bird attachment Bill Thorne worked out. “It’s a swell idea and I was ready to put it across tomorrow in the golf window on State Street. And what do you think happened?”

  “Let me guess,” I said. “Monty didn’t like it.”

  He leaned an elbow against a wall cabinet labeled “Half Figures,” and nodded wisely. “Smart girl. He said he wasn’t going to have Cunningham’s windows put on a drugstore level. And he told me to go back to the farm. Me!”

  “So you’re going, is that it?”

  He glared at me. “No, I’m not going. But we’ll see what he can do on his own for a while. He’s got by on my ideas long enough.”

  I was scarcely listening to Tony. The mannequin room had always been the strangest, most fascinating spot in the whole store. I never could resist poking around in it to see what I could find.

  All about the walls ranged deep cabinets, each with its own closed door, containing mannequins. In one corner was a collection of unclad figures waiting to be carried down to the windows, or put away for future use. While down the middle of the room stretched a long table with a scramble of hands and legs upon it, a wig or two, some hair ornaments, artificial flowers, and something that looked like a Flit gun. I picked it up curiously.

  “Bothered by flies?” I inquired and squirted the green spray experimentally out into the room. The odor of pine needles was pungent.

  “There now!” Tony said. “That was one of my ideas. Remember last Christmas when the whole first floor smelled of pine trees? That was because I sent somebody down to spray it every morning. But I’m not going to think up anything more.”

  I put down the spray gun. “Well, it’s your nose, if you want to cut it off. Aside from the bird in the tree, is the window finished? Nothing for me to look after?”

  Monty had said I had a good eye for accessories and small details and lately I’d been working more closely with the decorating end.

  Tony considered. “There’s some new jewelry that’s supposed to be promoted for sport wear. Lapel pins or something. Maybe you’d better pick out some stuff. I’m not going back.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” I assured him. “And, Tony—sleep it off before you quit. The rest of us appreciate you around here, if Monty doesn’t.�
��

  Tony put out the plaster arm and shook hands with me gravely. “Thanks, lady. But I think I’ve had about enough of Sondo and Monty.”

  “All right,” I said. “So long.”

  The light was on in Sondo’s workroom, but I didn’t stop to look in. It was getting on toward the closing hour and I didn’t want to go home too late. There was a time later on when I was to find myself wondering if it would have made any difference if I had looked in.

  I stopped at my office to pick up a smock for slight protection against the chill of the display windows, and then went downstairs.

  The main floor was thronged with last minute shoppers. Around the costume jewelry counters the women were three deep. That ad of Chris’s had drawn business all right. It was the last thing she’d written for Cunningham’s.

  I pushed through to the counter and caught Helena Farnham’s eye.

  “I need some things for the golf window,” I told her. “Brown, maybe, to go with green. A couple of lapel pins. Nothing dangly.”

  It took more than a big sales day to destroy Helena’s outward efficiency, but there were lines of fatigue about her eyes and as she brought out a tray of pins and set them before me, her hands trembled a little.

  “If I never see another piece of costume jewelry it will be too soon,” she murmured. “My feet are killing me.”

  “Bed for us both the minute we get home,” I said. “I’ll take that brown wooden seahorse with the scarlet head. And maybe the gold anchor.”

  I filled out a borrow sheet and gave it to Helena. Then, pins in hand, I crossed the aisle to the long section of middle windows. Here a stairway cut down to the basement, dropping away below the paneled walls, so that no counters ranged along the windows in this section.

  There were padlocks on all the doors that led into the windows, but most of the time nobody bothered to lock them. I put my hand on a door that looked like a panel of the wall and then stood quite still, waiting.

  Waiting because a curious sense of reluctance had seized me. A reluctance that had to do with the opening of that door beneath my hand.

  But that was nonsense and I shrugged the notion aside. The door opened easily and I drew it shut behind me as I stepped into the window. It was cold and I shivered as I stepped between a wing of compo board and the framework that held Sondo’s painted background.

  Everything was as it should be. There was nothing strange or unaccountable about the scene. Heavy homespun curtains were pulled across the plate glass, shutting off the view from the street. I went across and parted a fold to look out and see what the weather was like.

  The yellow light was gone and rain was coming down in earnest. The afternoon was stormy dark. Street lights were on and people scurried by close to my window, the lucky few with umbrellas, the rest with heads bent against the rain.

  I dropped the curtain and turned back to my little window-stage of a world. Above my head a spotlight flung its beam upon four mannequins grouped on an island of peat moss “earth.”

  The idea had been to contrast old style golf fashions with the new, and there were two swank, modern mannequins wearing the sport clothes of the moment and equipped with the latest in steel shafted golf clubs. These two regarded with evident amusement the two seated, long-skirted figures with golf bags that were anything but streamlined, and old wooden clubs.

  The background represented a rolling expanse of grass with a country club in the distance, and there was a cleverly contrived tree of plywood with a slightly larger than life-size bird on one of its branches. Wires ran down behind the tree, so evidently the phonograph was backstage.

  I smiled. Poor Tony and his welcome-sweet-springtime!

  But the window was chilly and I didn’t want to stay. There’s never any regulating the temperature of the windows. In summer it’s like being in a hothouse behind the plate glass, and in winter it’s practically outdoors. But nobody seems to care except the decorators.

  One of the mannequins wore a brilliant scarlet sport jacket and the mere sight of that color made me feel jumpy again. I either wanted to get away from it, or else think of a word to describe it and banish it from my mind. Something sophisticated and challenging. “Blood,” Keith had said. Goodness knows that was challenging enough.

  I fastened the wooden seahorse on a green lapel and stood back to view the effect. Good. And the gold anchor would look stunning against that scarlet. I moved gingerly so as not to step on the peat moss and track it about the window. Someone had already tracked it a little. Tony, probably, mad and not caring. It would have to be vacuumed in the morning before the curtains were opened. There was a chipped fragment of something that might have been part of a costume jewelry piece showing up dark against the carpet. I put the scrap in my smock pocket, meaning to drop it in a waste-basket later. A window must be spotless before it is uncovered.

  It was then I noticed the stick lying at one of the mannequin’s feet. Tony was getting careless. The thing had simply been tossed down there on the peat moss and nobody had bothered to remove it. I bent and picked it up.

  It was the broken upper end of a wooden golf club. Monty should see that! The boys in window display had been known to indulge in horseplay on occasion, but they seldom broke anything. Oh well, it wasn’t my problem. I thrust the stick into a golf bag leaning against a mannequin’s knee and turned quickly.

  Turned with a queer chill running through me. A chill that was more than the chill of the window. For suddenly, eerily, I’d had the feeling that I was being watched. It was as if someone, something, had stood for an instant behind one of the fluted wings peering out at me.

  Had there been a movement over there on the left? Or was it only a trick of reflected light?

  “Who’s there?” I called in a low voice.

  But the words fell flat, without echo or answer; the mannequins watched impassive, empty-eyed. Nerves, I thought in annoyance. This day had been too much for me and the sooner it ended the better.

  I forced myself to stand quietly for a moment with my back to the street, looking over the display for any further flaws, considering the lighting. That baby spot wasn’t just right. I could go around to the switch box at the back and adjust it. Then I’d be finished.

  I slipped carefully between wings and background, accustomed to the difficult task of moving in such cramped quarters without knocking anything askew. “Backstage” there was a narrow strip of passageway leading to an intersection where the switch box was located.

  The window decorators were forever leaving props about behind the scenes and I stepped past the unclad half figure of a mannequin, ducked to miss a pair of silk stockings which dangled from a hanger hooked carelessly on a strip of framework. I reached the alcove which contained the switch box and came to a dead stop.

  This, I knew, was the moment toward which I had been moving with dreadful certainty all day long. All the wires which pulled me had been stretched so taut that I had only to scream to snap them.

  But I couldn’t scream. I could only stand there staring at the man who lay at my feet beneath the switch box. He was sprawled face down, and beside him was the steel-clubbed head of a broken golf stick.

  There, too, was that ruddy hue I could not escape. Dulling the shine of steel, staining the floor, crimsoning the blond hair of that limp and grotesque figure.

  It was Michael Montgomery and I knew, instinctively, that he was dead.

  I could only stand there sharply aware of small things that were of no consequence. The chill of the window, the shine of Monty’s shoes, the way his right hand was tightened into a fist. How many times later I was to recall all those small details, recall them frighteningly in my dreams, and unwillingly when I was awake.

  All that was Monty, his cruelty, his charm, his vitality, had been resolved at last. Someone had taken upon himself the meting out of justice. Someone—someone. It was the
significance of that word that brought me back to life.

  For all I knew the murderer might be hiding in that very window. I had to get away quickly. I had to get back to the bustle and safety of the store, call for help, raise the alarm.

  But at the very moment when I turned toward the single passageway of escape, I heard a sound that was more frightening than any sound I’d ever heard in my life. It was faint—a clicking and fumbling.

  A sound made by the latch at the entrance to the window. Someone was opening the door.

  4

  I stood there in that narrow passageway, my blood drumming wildly in my ears and Monty’s body sprawled on the floor behind me. Stood there, waiting agonizingly through seconds that seemed like years, while someone climbed into the window.

  The head and shoulders of a man appeared first, then his whole body, and I experienced an instant of almost agonizing relief. But with recognition came a guarded tightening.

  It was Bill Thorne. But why was Bill Thorne coming into this window? As far as I was concerned, who was Bill Thorne? What did I really know about him? And how could I forget that only a little while before he had threatened to punch Monty’s head?

  “What are you doing here?” I asked in a voice that sounded strained and cracked.

  He looked at me queerly, but I must have been a strange sight with my face bloodless with terror.

  “What’s up?” he asked.

  I could only repeat my question as if I knew no other words. The second time he answered me.

  “I’m looking for Monty. I got tired of waiting around upstairs for him to show up. Thought I might catch him down here. Linell, what’s the matter?”

  He sounded natural enough and if he was looking at me a little strangely, that too was natural, considering how I was behaving. I made a feeble motion toward the alcove and the switch box.

  “Back there,” I gasped. “Back there on the floor! You’re too late!”