It had been a bitterly cold day, but now the temperature had risen slightly but not comfortably. A sharp, damp, gusty wind had come up, and before it were blowing flurries of big, white snowflakes.
“Could be a white Christmas,” I said, as we started into the revolving door.
“Could be a blue babe,” Gibby murmured as we came out of the revolving door.
I looked at the babe. She was standing there in the wind and snow waiting for the doorman to whistle down a cab for her. She was wearing no wrap, no coat. She held her bare arms close against her, and I could see her bare shoulders quiver with the cold of the wind. Seeing her from the back, I had a feeling that there was something familiar about her. Something familiar about the dark blue dance dress, something familiar about the blue-black hair smoothly drawn back to the smooth knot that rested so neatly at the back of her head just where it met her throat.
Gibby went to her and took her arm. She turned to him and, for all the fact that her lips were trembling with the chill, a happy light leaped in her face. You could hardly call it an expression. It was an incandescence.
“You can’t go out in this without a coat, Miss Salvaggi,” Gibby scolded.
“I’ll be all right, thank you,” the late Homer Coleman’s secretary said through chattering teeth. “I’m just getting a taxi.” That happy light had already faded out of her face.
“Taxis aren’t that warm,” Gibby insisted. “Where’s your coat?”
“I didn’t bring one.”
Holding her firmly by the arm, Gibby led her back through the revolving door into the lobby. Firmly he put her in one of the lobby chairs. He stood over her and for a moment or two watched her shiver.
“It’s been cold all day,” he said. “How did you get here without any coat?”
“Taxi,” she said, and the word came out in seven or eight syllables. Her teeth were chattering that violently.
Gibby called a bellhop. He ordered a cup of coffee and a jigger of brandy.
“That’s better,” Gibby said. “You’ll wait for your coffee and brandy. You need them to warm you up. While you’re waiting you’ll tell us what this really is, why you were going out in the cold without your coat.”
I expect she would have blushed then if it hadn’t been that she was too shaken with chill to blush. “It’s one of those crazy fashion things,” she said. “I don’t have any proper evening coat, and they are too expensive to buy because I wouldn’t use one often enough to make it practical. I hate the way a girl looks in a formal with a business coat over it. I was warm enough in the cab coming here, really I was. I guess it’s just that I’m tired now, and the snow.”
“And your coat is upstairs in one of those rooms with the rest of your office clothes, and you don’t want to go up there to sleep or even to change or get your coat?” Gibby added.
She looked at him as though he were mad. I was confident that she wasn’t faking. Gibby’s shot in the dark had hit nothing. It had just gone zooming away through the darkness.
“I don’t have any room,” she said. “I always go home.”
The boy came with a tray. It had a pot of coffee on it and a sugar bowl and a cup and saucer and a jigger of brandy. Gibby put three lumps of sugar in the cup and poured the brandy over it. He filled the cup with hot coffee. He handed it to the girl.
“Drink that,” he said. “It will make you stop shivering.”
Dutifully she drank the coffee down. It did help. Her shivering was easing off. She handed the cup back to Gibby.
“Thank you,” she said. “You have been very kind. Now I must go home.”
“Not till we find your coat,” Gibby said.
Through a long moment she looked at him. The look convinced her. He was adamant. It was no good going on with it.
“I feel such a fool,” she said. “I lost my check and it is my office coat and I thought I’d look such a yokel trying to get it without a ticket and telling them it was a gray tweed. I was going home without it.”
Gibby shook his head. “Pneumonia,” he said, “wouldn’t make you feel a fool. It would make you feel awfully sick.” He gave her his hand and pulled her out of her chair. “Come on, half-wit,” he said.
He took her to the checkroom. We caught them just on the last of the shutting up.
“Do you have a gray tweed coat with a Macy label in it?” Rose Salvaggi asked the checkroom girl. “You should have one left over.”
“Check, please,” the girl said.
“I seem to have lost it. I can’t find it anywhere.”
“Remember the number?”
“No, I didn’t…” she began. Then, stopping short, she started again correcting herself. “No,” she said, “I don’t remember the number.”
The checkroom girl produced a gray tweed coat with a Macy label. It was Rose Salvaggi’s coat. She described the gloves that would be in one pocket and the handkerchief that would be in another. Gibby helped her into the coat.
“Isn’t that better than being cold?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Much better. I don’t know why I was such a fool. Now I must go home.”
“Yes,” Gibby agreed. “Now we will take you home.”
CHAPTER THREE
HOME PROVED to be a longish ride. It was Queens, specifically an apartment in the farther reaches of Forest Hills. Driving out there, Gibby asked some questions. He also had some answers, but they could hardly have added up to less. He worked away at the matter of the private rooms on the fifth floor of the Butterfield. Reasonably enough, it seemed to him that the explanation we had been given for the private rooms should apply most exactly to Rose Salvaggi.
“Did you go all the way out to Forest Hills after work today?” he asked.
“I had to,” she answered. “I couldn’t wear a formal to the office.”
Gibby shook his head. “It was a mighty quick turnaround,” he said. “I didn’t know any girl could dress that fast.”
“I’m a working girl. I have to dress fast.”
“The other girls have rooms at the hotel,” Gibby said.
“I know.”
“If we hadn’t come along, how would you have gone home?”
“Cab to the subway, subway to Forest Hills, cab to the apartment.”
“Alone this time of night?”
“I’m no sheltered debutante. I’m a working girl. I can take care of myself.”
“I’d think a bed at the Butterfield would be much pleasanter all around.”
She shrugged. “That’s a matter of taste,” she said. “I prefer to go home.”
“Why?”
“I’d just prefer it.”
“Meaning none of my business?” Gibby asked.
She forced a smile. “Meaning that if I explain, you’ll think I’m a snob.”
Gibby grinned at her. “The Butterfield is a fashionable hotel,” he said.
“I have nothing against the Butterfield,” she told him. “I don’t like sleeping five in a room and with girls I hardly know.”
They went into that. They explored its various facets. They kicked it around. Her position as a secretary to a v. p. kept her at something of a distance from other girls who worked at Fiveborough National. It was not that she had no friends among her fellow employees, but that there was never the opportunity for the development of such intimacies as would grow up between girls who, day after day, worked together in the same department. Each of those rooms at the Butterfield would be used by an intimate little group. In any of those groups she would be the outsider. She would feel strange.
“Mr. Coleman did offer to get me a room,” she said, “but of course I couldn’t let him do that.”
“Why not? The other girls don’t seem to mind.”
“That’s different. That comes out of department funds. I am the only girl in Mr. Coleman’s office. It would have been a room for me alone, and Mr. Coleman would have been paying for it. I couldn’t let him do that.”
“This Col
eman sounds like a good boss,” Gibby remarked with seeming carelessness.
“He’s wonderful,” Rose Salvaggi murmured. A kind of glow came over her voice as she spoke of the man. There was something like worship in it. “He is a really good man. He cares about people. There is nothing he cannot understand, nothing for which he won’t have sympathy. I suppose it sounds sloppy to say that everybody loves Mr. Coleman, but it’s the simple truth. There is no man in the world who has more friends than Mr. Coleman. Those of us who have the luck to know him well, we adore him; but even people who meet him for just a moment, they feel it too. They come away feeling that they have made a friend. I’m in his office and I know what goes on. Sometimes it seems as though there can’t be anyone anywhere in the city who is in trouble without bringing their problems to Mr. Coleman, and he has time for everybody. He helps everybody. You have to know him to believe what he’s like. He’s wonderful.”
Gibby chuckled. “In love with the boss?” he asked.
For a moment she was indignant, and then the thought came to her that he would be teasing her. She laughed, “Don’t be a fool,” she said. “I wish I could have had a father like him.”
“He’s a good father?”
“He’s unmarried.”
“Funny,” Gibby remarked. “Funny for a man everybody loves.”
She shrugged. “I told you you have to know him to believe what he’s like,” she said.
Gibby yawned. “I never believed in fairy tales,” he said. “I bet the woods are full of people who hate his guts.”
She flared up at that. “What a horrid thing to say!” she exclaimed.
“Only normal,” Gibby said. “Everybody has enemies.”
“Ordinary people may,” she argued. “A man like Mr. Coleman doesn’t. He couldn’t.”
Gibby laughed. “Most extreme case of boss worship I ever saw,” he said.
She sniffed. “You just never have known anyone like Mr. Coleman,” she said. “It would just be impossible to be his enemy. A man would have to be a monster. He would have to be crazy.”
We had already had this from Cary Willard; but as the girl said it, it was different. She said it so simply. It was so evident that her words came from the heart. I had no feeling that she might have an ax to grind.
Gibby changed the subject. He asked her about those girls who worked in Branch Banking. He was curious about them, not that I wasn’t. They had seemed so young, so childishly silly, so absurdly Amazonian. One wondered what manner of work a bank might find for young people to do when the young people appeared to be so conspicuously substandard. That, of course, went for Albert Gleason, too. He also worked in Branch Banking, and he had certainly seemed hardly better than dimwitted. It even went for James Sully, their chief. I had pegged him as some sort of dull and ploddering superclerk. I was remembering that Lansing had said in his praise that Sully had more seniority than any other chief in the bank. As faint praise goes, that might well have been the faintest, and it had given me the idea that Branch Banking might well be a department where a man could get ahead on nothing more than having been around long enough.
The girl told us about the department, and it did sound as though it might be just the place where a James Sully could preside over Albert Gleason and the bevy of damsels who had debagged him. Branch Banking handled bank clearings. In the course of each business day each Fiveborough National Branch sorted into three classifications all the checks that had come in at the tellers’ windows that day. There were the checks drawn against accounts in that individual branch. Those could be cleared simply right on the spot. They were charged against the account on which they had been drawn and credited to the account into which they had been paid.
A second classification contained checks that had been drawn against accounts in banks other than Fiveborough National. Those checks were credited to the accounts into which they had been paid and then were sent to the Clearing House, where they would be charged against the banks on which they had been drawn and would be distributed variously to those various banks.
The third classification contained the checks that went to the Branch Banking department in Fiveborough National’s main office. In this classification were checks drawn against an account in one Fiveborough National branch and deposited to an account in another Fiveborough National branch. The checks in the individual branches were credited to the accounts into which they had been paid and then they were sent, not to the Clearing House, but to Branch Banking in the main office. There they were counted and the amounts totaled up. Each branch was credited on the main office books with the sums represented by the checks they had accepted at their tellers’ windows and had cleared through Branch Banking. Then the bundles were broken down and sorted according to the branches against which they were to be charged.
At this point in her explanation Gibby broke in on her. “You say bundles?” he asked. “What kind of bundles? Do they put the checks in sacks or what?”
She shook her head. “No,” she said. “We have canvas straps. They take a pile of checks and hold them together with one of these canvas straps. That makes a bundle.”
I wanted to ask if the canvas straps were, by any chance, black, but I said nothing. It was obvious they would be.
“These girls do the sorting?” Gibby asked.
She told us that they did. It was all they did. She broke down the whole operation for us. The bundles of checks came in from the branches to James Sully’s desk. He passed them on to Albert Gleason or one of the other men in the department, and they ran up the amounts in each bundle on an adding machine to check the tapes and the totals against the tapes and totals the branches had sent in attached to their bundles. Then the bundles were given to the girls. The girls sorted them according to the branches on which they were drawn, and fresh bundles were made up to go out to the branches that would charge them against the accounts on which they had been drawn.
These new bundles went to Albert Gleason and his fellows for totaling up, and the totals were charged against the various branches on the main office books.
“That explains it,” Gibby said.
“Explains what?” the girl asked.
“The dim-wits that work in Branch Banking. The jobs don’t sound as though they would be taxing for even their abilities.”
“It’s an easy department,” she said generously. “It’s a place where kids can get their start in the bank.”
Gibby said nothing about the start those kids seemed to be getting.
We left her at the door to her apartment and headed back to Manhattan. We drove for quite a while in silence and when I broke it, it was for only the idlest sort of sleepy comment.
“There’s a girl,” I said, “who’ll be having a bad shock in the morning.”
Gibby’s response brought me wide awake.
“If she hasn’t already had it,” he said.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“It means that the party tonight didn’t turn out at all the way Mr. Coleman’s secretary expected it would. She didn’t lose her coat check, and just because she is Mr. Coleman’s secretary it may be that we will still have to know just what did go wrong with her tonight. I don’t believe a word of that stuff about a formal dress and a business coat.”
“Girls are like that,” I argued.
“A girl who is like that buys herself a wrap whether it’s practical or not. The girl’s no fool, but she made a big play for making us think she’s even more featherwitted than the gang from Branch Banking. We’re going to have to know why.”
“Any theories?” I asked.
“One leaps to the eye,” Gibby said.
“It doesn’t leap to my eye.”
“She’s a lovely looking girl and no date for the dance. The lady wrestlers in Branch Banking had dates, so what’s wrong with our Rose? Couldn’t it be that she did have a date and it happened that the date was the boss?”
“That’s a shot in the dark,” I said.
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Gibby made no attempt to deny it. “Until you have some light on a case,” he said, “the dark is where you do your shooting. You have to. You have no choice. It would add up, though. You must see that. Homer G. Coleman brings her to the party. Her coat check, therefore, is in Homer G. Coleman’s pocket. In the course of the evening she loses track of her boy friend—I’m putting the most innocent interpretation on it—and then it comes time to go home. She’ll look for him. She’ll inquire around about him. She’s expecting him to see her home, and she can’t get her coat because he has the check for it. So she does ask around and she learns that he’s been murdered. At that point she thinks it better that she shouldn’t announce that he’d been her date for the evening. She hopes that maybe it won’t come out. She starts home without her coat. Unhappy accident for her that we ran into her.”
It was reasonable enough. I had to grant him that, but, nevertheless, it rang no bells for me. I was remembering the way she had talked to us about Coleman. I was remembering the simple warmth that came into her voice, and I just couldn’t believe the girl had been able to fake that.
“I can take a shot in the dark, too,” I said.
“Why not?” said Gibby.
“Ellerman picked her up with those other babes. She’d had nothing to do with their horseplay, but, before we came along and turned her loose, she’d had a bad time. It upset her, put her in such a stew that all she wanted was to get away from the Butterfield. She didn’t even remember to pick up her coat. She was upset.”
Gibby shook his head. “Even in the dark,” he said, “your marksmanship is usually better than that. You say we turned her loose and she was so upset that she just wanted out of there. She made a beeline for the street and didn’t stop even long enough to pick up her coat. That’s the slowest beeline I ever heard of, a couple of hours.”
He had me there. “And on that basis,” I said, “you contend that she spent that time looking for Coleman.”
“She had to spend it some way. You do have to account for all that time.”
“I can think of one way to account for it, the most natural way in the world.”
The Corpse Who Had Too Many Friends Page 5
