by Frances
“Her murderer,” Pam said.
“You jump, Pam,” Jerry said. “But probably her murderer.”
“You wouldn’t like me if I didn’t jump,” Pam said. “We both know that. And it’s foolish to call it a jump. He wanted her notes on the famous crimes.”
Jerry shook his head at that. He pointed out that that really was a jump. He said it might have been anything—anything that collects in an office desk, even in a month. Letters received at the office, or carried to the office for rereading and left in the desk. Little memoranda, scrawled on slips of paper. Or written on desk calendars.
They had both thought of that at the same moment. Their heads met over the desk. The desk calendar was there. The uppermost sheet said Tuesday, September 11. But the old sheets—the turned-back sheets—were missing. Two-thirds of the year had vanished. And the past month of Amelia Gipson’s life.
“Well,” Pam said.
She watched as Jerry leafed into the future, which was not to be Miss Gipson’s future. In early October there was one notation: “Dentist, 2 P.M.” That was to have been on October 9. Beyond that, in so far as she had confided to her desk calendar, Miss Gipson had had no plans.
“Perhaps she tore the old ones off and threw them away after they were finished,” Pam said. “The old days.”
“Perhaps,” Jerry said. “But I never knew anyone who did, did you? From this kind of a calendar, with rings meant to—to hold the past? For reference? Because that’s one thing calendars on office desks are for. Day before yesterday’s telephone numbers—things like that.”
Pam was nodding slowly.
“What happened,” she said, “was that everything was taken. Whether it meant anything or not. So we wouldn’t know what did mean something. Don’t you suppose it was that way?”
Jerry agreed it could have been. He was looking thoughtfully at nothing. Then he said, “Wait here a minute, Pam,” and went out of the office, and she could hear his steps going down the corridor. She stopped hearing them and waited in an office which had grown very still. She waited until surely it was time for him to come back. And then the lights in the general office went out. Pam was on her feet and crying, “Jerry! Jerry!” with her voice rising and then she was running through the office, dim and shadowy with only the light from the office behind her to dispel the darkness. As she ran toward Jerry’s office she saw that there was no light in it.
She was not afraid, except for Jerry. She forgot to be afraid. But it took her a moment to find the tumbler switch inside the door of Jerry’s office. And then she screamed, because Jerry North was on his hands and knees on the floor and was shaking his head in a puzzled fashion. She ran to him, but by then he was getting up and she stopped. There was a bruise on his forehead and in the center of it a thin line of blood where the skin was broken.
“Jerry!” she said. “Darling! Oh darling! Are you—”
She stopped, because, although his face was puzzled and not quite all together, Jerry was grinning at her.
“No, Pam,” he said, “I’m not all right, as you see. But I’m all right. I just bumped my head.”
“Somebody hit you!” Pam said. Her voice was high and tense.
Jerry started to shake his head and then stopped shaking it and put a hand to it. He saw blood on his hand and began to dab at the blood with a handkerchief.
“I fell into the desk,” he said. “Nobody hit me. But somebody pushed me. From behind, hard. Just as I was reaching for the light switch. It—it caught me off balance. And so I fell into the desk. It—it dazed me for a minute. But I’m all right.”
“Darling!” Pam said. “And I got you into it. You didn’t want to come. I made you.”
Jerry said it was all right.
“Come on,” Pam said. “We’ll go right home. We’ll get a doctor. We’ll—”
But Jerry, a little unsteadily, was opening a drawer in his desk. He brought out a handful of typewritten sheets.
“Miss Gipson’s notes,” he said. “On the four cases she’d finished. My copies. So they weren’t—”
He stopped, because Pam did not seem to be listening to him.
“Jerry!” Pam said. “There’s perfume in here. There was in Miss Gipson’s office, too, but I was too excited to realize it. The same perfume.”
Jerry tested the air. He nodded.
“Not mine,” Pam said. “Not what I’m wearing now, as it wasn’t before. That Fleur de Something or Other. The same as was in her apartment. The murderer’s perfume.”
Jerry did not say, this time, that she was jumping. He said he thought they ought to get out of there. They went out, leaving the lights burning behind them. It was Pam who rang the elevator bell, and kept on ringing it until the building guard brought the elevator up and glowered at them. This time he spoke, but not until they were at the ground floor.
“People could use the stairs,” he said then. “Coming down, anyway. Other people do.”
“Who does?” Pam said, quickly.
“Whoever just went out, of course,” he said. “Who did you think?”
“But who was it?” Pam said.
He shook his head at that.
“I just heard them,” he said. “I didn’t see nobody. Just steps woke me up, but they were gone before I looked.”
* Pamela North attempted to smell out a murderer in Payoff for the Banker. She was widely misunderstood.
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About the Authors
Frances and Richard Lockridge were some of the most popular names in mystery during the forties and fifties. Having written numerous novels and stories, the husband-and-wife team was most famous for their Mr. and Mrs. North Mysteries. What started in 1936 as a series of stories written for the New Yorker turned into twenty-six novels, including adaptions for Broadway, film, television, and radio. The Lockridges continued writing together until Frances’s death in 1963, after which Richard discontinued the Mr. and Mrs. North series and wrote other works until his own death in 1982.
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Copyright © 1958 by Frances and Richard Lockridge
Cover design by Andy Ross
ISBN: 978-1-5040-3119-6
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