The Red Carnelian

by Phyllis A. Whitney

  I shivered as we went in. “Gracious, Sondo, don’t you have any cheerful records?”

  “I’m not in a cheerful mood,” Sondo said. “I’m remembering that Monty’s dead, if no one else is.”

  I glanced at her in surprise. It wasn’t like Sondo to display sentiment of any variety.

  The girl was up on a stepladder, a paintbrush in her hand, and tacked on the wall before her was a huge sheet of heavy, seamless paper. Sondo was at work on a background for one of the red windows Tony had been planning.

  “Red is the color of the year!” Sondo announced derisively, and smeared a streak of scarlet casein paint across the paper.

  The workroom was as wildly untidy as Sondo herself. Rolls of paper and bolts of cloth spilled over a table. There were tacks scattered on the floor and a hammer balanced precariously on the edge of a shelf. A half-finished sketch smeared by a penful of India ink was tacked to a drawing board.

  This room was wholly Sondo’s. Monty might have left his more orderly imprint on the rest of the department, but here Sondo had gone her own untidy way. The work she produced was first-rate, her salary small, so it had been wise to let her alone.

  Not that many people ever dared give orders to Sondo. She was a domineering little person with a will like a hurricane. What she chose to do she did, and left destruction in her wake if she was opposed. Even Owen Gardner was a little afraid of her, and I could remember more than once when Sondo had flown furiously to Monty’s defense and vanquished the merchandise manager himself.

  “You said you wanted to see me,” I reminded Sondo. “Has anything new come up?”

  “Nothing new,” she said. “Our friend Hering was over here this morning telling me all about his photographic memory. I’ll bet he was right about Chris never coming up to the waiting room at all. He was taking one of his mental pictures of that perfume counter during the questioning last night and he could rattle off the names of every perfume bottle on display. In order, too. So I think there’s something fishy about Chris.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Look,” Sondo said, “I’m no fool. I was around Monty enough to know something about him. He wasn’t in love with Chris. What possible appeal could she have had for him? A big, husky kid with that empty kind of prettiness that means no brains.”

  “You’re a little hard on her,” I protested.

  Sondo sat down on the top of the ladder and waved her paintbrush at me. “How can you be so generous when she sneaked in behind your back and took him away from you? How can you stand the sight of her when—”

  “If that’s all you wanted to talk about, I’ll be getting back to work,” I told her quietly.

  Helena was glancing at the sketch on Sondo’s drawing board, and she laid it down and turned around. But she didn’t say anything.

  Sondo went right on. “It’s not all I wanted to talk about. I think it’s up to somebody to find out the truth about that marriage. Those dumb coppers never will. There was something worrying Monty before he got married and if we could find out what it was we might have a key to the whole thing. And once we get that key in our hands—”

  I looked up at her, startled. There was something so utterly vindictive about the expression on her ugly little face that I was dismayed. A surprising thought began to form in my mind, but before I could get used to it and accept it, Helena took the play away from me.

  “So you’re another one who was in love with Montgomery,” she said calmly to Sondo. It was no question, but a quiet statement of fact.

  Sondo didn’t take it quietly. “Don’t be idiotic!” she snapped, and went furiously back to her painting.

  I felt a little upset. It had been no secret to me that Monty exerted a tremendous attraction for women, and that he was not above the dubious enjoyment of exerting it consciously, even where he had no interest in the woman. And Sondo, for all her lack of feminine appeal, was a woman. But if Monty had done this—and he must have known he was doing it—

  I turned toward the door and saw Carla Drake standing there. There was no telling how long she had been there, or whether she had heard anything of our conversation. She wore a beautifully-cut suit of powder blue that emphasized the rather lush curves of her figure and set off her fair skin and silver hair to advantage. But she didn’t look quite real, quite flesh-and-blood.

  She came into the room like a sleep-walker, apparently seeing none of us, and went straight to the phonograph. There was a packing box beside the machine and she sat down, clasping graceful hands about her blue-skirted knees. Her head tilted back so that her silver hair hung below her shoulders and her eyes were rapt and dreamy.

  Sondo looked down at her and said sharply, “Cut it out, Carla!”

  But if the model heard, she gave no sign, listening with all her being to the baritone’s voice.

  “To live it again is past all endeavor,

  Except when the tune clutches my heart . . .”

  Sondo dropped her paintbrush and came down from the ladder. In three catlike steps she crossed the room, lifted the needle from the record. Carla started, blinked, came out of her trance.

  Her eyes looked old, somehow, in her youthful face. That was something I’d never noticed before. If ever a woman had a tragic past, it was Carla. The evidence was there in her eyes.

  But now they flooded with tears and she spoke sadly to Sondo. “You don’t understand. It’s that piece. It has wonderful memories for me. You said I might come up here and listen to it any time.”

  “The trouble is you get drunk on it,” Sondo said curtly. “You’ve got to be able to take music or leave it, the way I can. But you get tight on it the way Tony gets tight on liquor.”

  “Who gets tight?” It was Tony himself. He came in carrying a portable phonograph of the same make as Sondo’s and set it on a table. “Let me have one of your records, Sondo. Not that damn Bolero! This is the contraption Bill Thorne made for the window, but there’s something wrong with it.”

  Carla got up from the packing case and Tony glanced her way.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked. “You’re supposed to be over in Monty’s office getting fingerprinted.”

  The model glided smoothly toward the door. “I know. I just happened to hear the music and—” she broke off, turned back to Tony. “Do—do they know anything more? About him, I mean?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Tony said. “The police aren’t exactly showering information around. If they have any to shower.”

  “I just wondered,” Carla said gently. “There’s nothing anyone can do anyway. It’s all written there ahead and what must come will come.”

  Across the room Helena was studying her palm again and Carla looked at her.

  “How is your hand today, Miss Farnham?” she asked.

  Helena opened and closed it a couple of times. “A little sore. But it will be all right.”

  “I was so sorry about scratching you,” Carla said. “It was very clumsy of me.”

  “The fault was just as much mine,” Helena told her.

  I think I was the only person in the room who paid much attention to the little byplay. But I was curious because I’d caught again in Helena’s eyes that odd look I’d seen the night before, as if she were remembering something. And it seemed to me that the two women were regarding each other with a certain wariness of expression.

  Then Carla slipped noiselessly out the door and Tony glanced after her.

  “I’ll take Dolores any day,” he said. “That jane gives me the creeps. All that stuff about what-must-come-will-come. She’s nuts. What do you let her come up here for?”

  “I like people who are slightly nuts,” Sondo told him. “And she can come up here any time she likes. Nobody’s promoted you to the position of display manager yet.”

  Tony picked out a record haphazardly and slipped it into place in
the machine he’d brought. “Maybe not. But they will after those windows I’m putting in the end of the week. They’ll make State Street sit up and take notice.”

  Helena glanced at her watch and murmured that it was time she got to work. Sondo and Tony were paying no attention, so I put a hand on her arm as she went by me.

  “Helena,” I said softly, “did you tell anyone about that piece from the ring that I put in my smock pocket?”

  She looked a little startled. “No—I don’t believe I did. Why?”

  “Never mind,” I whispered. “Tell you later.”

  When she’d gone, I turned back to Tony and Sondo. Tony’s interest was entirely on the machine and Sondo was watching him with open curiosity. The record whirled and the music started, but it came out with an odd, tinny vibration. Tony listened for a moment and then lifted the needle.

  “See what I mean? It was all right when I played it yesterday. So what’s got into it now? I suppose some of Bill’s gadgets have come loose.”

  “You’d better let Bill tinker with it then,” Sondo said. I’ve seen what’s happened before this when you go taking things apart.”

  Tony ignored her. “Linell, that office boy of yours lives west, doesn’t he? How about letting him off early tonight so he can drop this at Universal Arts? I’m still going to put that golf window across.”

  “I don’t mind,” I told him. “Keith’s just sitting around waiting for me to get to work anyway. Which reminds me that that’s what I’d better do.”

  But I didn’t hurry back. I ran into one of the girls from advertising and she wanted to hear the latest, so I stopped to talk a few moments. By the time I reached the office it was empty. Evidently Keith had gathered up courage to face the fingerprinting.

  Until this moment I hadn’t been really frightened, but a reluctance to step through the door swept over me. Suddenly, I was afraid.

  I looked around quickly to make sure no crouching figure hid behind the door. The room was quite empty, but I was uneasy, disturbed. It was as if some mark had been left upon it, as if it had in some way been changed. I’d been too dazed before to notice details, but now I was sure that something was wrong.

  I sat down at my desk, with sweat breaking out on my forehead and on the palms of my hands. Something was different, out of line.

  I couldn’t find it at once and I began to check carefully in my mind. On the wide window ledge, conveniently ready to my hands, were stacks of current and back issues of all those magazines that are bibles of the fashion trade. My desk was heaped with clippings of ads from Cunningham’s and rival stores—all the usual litter. But an ordered litter, because it made sense to me.

  What, then, was different?

  The glue pot on my desk was uncovered. Leaving sticky things around like that wasn’t a vice of mine, and Keith was essentially neat. Whoever had used the glue brush had been hurried and untidy about it, for there were smears on the desk and down the side of the pot.

  I sat back in my chair and began a systematic study of the walls. It was there the trouble lay, I felt sure. There was something different, something changed. And then I saw it.

  On the wall just behind my desk, fitted neatly in among the other pictures, was a portrait that had not been there before. It was a black-and-white, a coyly posed beauty winner in a lastex bathing suit. A very Hollywoodish sort of picture and not one I would ever have chosen to grace my collection.

  I got up and walked over to the wall, slid my hand over the paper. The glue wasn’t dry. This page had been pasted on my wall that very hour.

  8

  I stood for a moment with my fingers touching the picture. Then I went over to the magazines stacked on the window ledge and paged hurriedly through the top one. It didn’t take long to find what I was looking for—a ragged edge where a page had been torn out.

  Sure enough, that bathing suit pose had been ripped from a current issue. Selected at random, to hide a blank space left where another picture had been peeled from the wall?

  Whoever had struck me down earlier that morning had been in my office not only to get that bit of stone, but also for the much stranger purpose of removing a picture from my wall.

  Carefully I lifted an edge of the newly glued page. It had been fastened roughly, the glue smeared on the back in splotches so that it wasn’t fixed tightly. It tore a little as I pulled it off. The picture underneath had been torn too as it was removed, but there the glue was old and easily pulled loose. Only one corner of the former picture remained—not enough to give a hint as to the identity of the picture.

  Of course I knew I’d remember it. I’d arranged those walls myself, with Keith’s help. And I’d looked at them six days a week for months on end. I could almost recite by heart the order of my little art gallery. In just a moment now the image of that missing picture would flash before my mind’s eye. I could almost grasp it—almost—

  But each time it eluded me provokingly and I was sitting there with my palms pressed over my eyes, struggling vainly to remember, when Keith came in.

  “What’s the matter, Miss Wynn?” he asked in a startled voice.

  “It’s nothing,” I said. “But I want you to do something for me. Do you see that space on the wall there? I want you to remember what the picture was that was pasted there.”

  Keith looked at the space for a moment and shook his head in bewilderment.

  “Never mind.” I was weary. “I can’t remember either. But keep it in mind. It will come back to us sooner or later. Someone came into this office, tore down one picture and pasted up another. Your guess as to why is as good as mine.”

  He looked about the office with quickly shifting eyes. It made me nervous just to watch him.

  “Forget it,” I said. “You’d better get to work and go through the store to check any torn or soiled signs that need replacing.”

  Anything, I felt, to get him out of sight. He left with an air of being more than willing to go. The phone rang and I picked up the receiver.

  “Hello,” said a very faint voice, “this is Chris.”

  I tried to sound cheerful. “Oh, good morning, Chris. How is everything?”

  There was a moment’s silence, as if that were not a matter she cared to go into. Then she went on hurriedly.

  “Listen, Linell. I’m in the store using a house phone. But I don’t want to go roaming around and have people ask me questions, so I can’t come up to see you. But I’ve got to see you. Alone. I need your help, Linell. I need your help, Linell. I need it terribly. Will you meet me for lunch?”

  “Of course,” I assured her. “Wherever you say.”

  “At a quarter to twelve then. Do you know that little Polka Dot place over on Washington? Father’s taken me there to lunch several times and it’s fairly quiet. If we get there before noon perhaps we can get a booth and be able to talk in privacy.”

  “I’ll be there,” I agreed. “Take care of yourself, Chris.”

  She rang off and I thought about this new complication. So Chris was in the store. And Sondo was behaving very queerly about Chris. Which meant—what, if anything?

  But I wasn’t going to sit there any longer struggling with problems that were too much for me. I took out a fresh sheet of paper and this time I went straight to work and got the thing done.

  Red is the Color of the Year

  Red for Daring

  Red for Courage

  Be Dramatic in Red!

  That settled that. Now it could go over to the sign department to be lettered. But if it was going to take me two days to write four very ordinary lines, where would my job be in a week’s time?

  Someone said, “May I come in?” Susan Gardner was standing in the doorway. I laid down my pencil in surrender. There was no use even trying to work.

  “Hello,” I said. “Of course you may come in.”

 
Owen Gardner’s wife sat down hesitatingly in the chair opposite my desk. She was wearing a frock that was a masterpiece of style and quality but, as usual, on her it was a little dowdy. She had the sort of figure which encouraged a dress to ride up in the wrong places, and fostered a relief map of wrinkles. She made habitual little gestures of smoothing out and pulling down, but the result was negligible. Then she gathered her forces for a plunge into frankness.

  “This has all been so awful,” she began in a hurried, breathless voice. “Monty murdered and Chris a widow in two weeks. There were reporters out to our place this morning, and more detectives. But I want to talk to you about Chris.”

  “I’m very fond of Chris,” I assured her. “I’d like to help if I can.”

  Susan nodded. “I know. You’ve been so kind to her all along. Though sometimes I think she’s had too much kindness. I’ve tried so hard to make it up to both Owen and Chris by being all the things Owen’s first wife was not. But sometimes I feel that I’ve failed completely.”

  Her voice fluttered off into silence and she looked around at the bright pictures on my walls.

  Owen admires beautiful things. He admires beautiful women like those models up there in your pictures. She was like that, you know. Glamorous. His first wife, I mean. He’s never talked about her much, but I can guess. And sometimes I wonder—when a man has a taste for women like that, does he ever really get over it?”

  It was disturbing to realize that back of Susan’s manner, back of her self-effacement, existed so wistful an envy of all that she was not.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I said, in an effort to be reassuring. “It seems to me that once a man has been fooled badly, he’d be more apt to turn to a woman who was entirely different from the first one.”

  “Do you really believe that?” Susan said, with touching eagerness. Then she went on apologetically. “But I didn’t come here to talk about myself. I believe Chris is worried about something more than Monty’s death. She’s in a state of fright that borders on hysteria. And she won’t talk about it to me at all. But I know she’s having lunch with you and I thought she might tell you what she won’t tell those who are close to her. If we could just find out what’s wrong, perhaps we could help her.”