Cameron, who had been sitting where he could command a view of the stairs ever since Madeline had left the rest of them, abruptly got up and went after her.
Mrs. Drew was calling her from the bedroom doorway now. “Madeline!” She still failed to hear her mother because of the thunderous crash of the water, made even more resonant by the tiling around it.
Cameron reached the bedroom entrance in turn, glimpsed the discarded clogs and toweling robe, and that held him back for a moment.
Mrs. Drew was at the very entrance to the bathroom by now, still trying to make herself heard. She finally ventured toward the vibrating curtains, drew one of them gingerly aside.
“Madeline,” she shouted exasperatedly. “I’ve been shouting my head off! Are you going to stay in there all eve—”
The water was gushing down in crystalline emptiness behind the curtains, reflecting nothing pink but only the bluish-white of the tiles backing it. At the same moment the flirt of a breeze-stirred curtain dangling vacuously over one of the wide-open bedroom windows caught Cameron’s eye.
In the gasflame-blue smoothness of the vivid sky, a single splash of silver stood out, the evening star that Tannhäuser sang about. Its rays seemed to stream, elongated, down toward the earth, like wet paint, running because it hasn’t yet had time to dry. Under it, along the luminescent road that reflected the sky’s brightness upside down, like a steel rail, her eager little roadster coursed along, throbbing as though it were in love itself. Little friendly roadster, smuggled out to a nearby garage with connivance of one of the servants, bedded there in hiding throughout the day, tuned up and waiting for the moment of flight. Little roadster that no detective in the world could overtake now any longer, because its mistress was in love, and love has wings, doesn’t bother reading speed gauges.
Hurling like a bullet along its concrete trajectory toward the city, toward the bridges leading into it, toward the supreme rendezvous.
Neckscarf streaming out flat behind her like a pennant on the bosom of the wind. Hair trying to do likewise around all its unbound edges. She was like a latter-day Valkyrie cresting the curved surface of the earth, into the black fastnesses of night. She looked back once or twice, but in derision, not in any real misgiving. The wind tore her laughter from her teeth.
Once an intersection held her up—there were such things, even love had to pay heed to them or risk the consequences of more successful pursuit from closer at hand—and she stood erect in her car, full length, and shook her fist at the sullen red light that impeded her until it blanked out, as if in astonishment at such defiance.
There were two bridges to choose from, a near one and a far. Shrewdly she chose the far, the one that meant turning out of her way and then retracing it, knowing he might have sent word ahead to the likeliest one, she might be halted and held for him there, at its approaches.
She crouched down low in her seat, averted her head as she trundled by, caught in the interlocking mesh of traffic and slowed to a more sedate pace now. But the bridge traffic policeman, there on his little shallow concrete island, close enough to have touched her door-handle, never even glanced at her.
That had been the last hazard. Nothing could stop her now; nothing more.
The city’s serrated outline crept up into the sky, in gun-metal, smoked pearl, dark-purple and charcoal-black, and she went rushing down the long descending arc of the bridge to entomb herself at its feet.
The others were waiting for him at the bridge approaches, where he’d signaled ahead for them to join him, when he came lumbering in in the unwieldly Drew town car, too big and heavy to be risked at the rate of speed her roadster had attained.
He jumped out of it, changed into the faster police car they had there. The siren wailed out and the bridge traffic ahead shored over to the side, in a long, curley-cued, frontal breaker, to give them clearance.
“Nothing doing?” Cameron asked. The answer was obvious, or she would have been there in their custody when he arrived.
“Not a sign of her. We’ve checked every car going through for the past twenty minutes. She may have got through just ahead of us.”
“She couldn’t have made it that fast. She took one of the other bridges, then, and beat the dragnet through.”
“What’s she being stopped from?” one of them asked him.
“Stopped from being killed,” he answered tersely.
Her demented, love-smitten little roadster came sluicing around the corner of his street on a kiting turn that almost swept it up onto the sidewalk, straightened out for the final heat and bore down toward the opposite curb on a long diagonal that finally closed in directly opposite his door.
It shuddered and jarred her, with the wrench she gave its brakes.
Sudden silence. She’d arrived. She was there.
She sat there for a moment, as though she were as spent as the car from the long race. Turned her head and looked at the doorway, waiting there for her, so shadowed, so inscrutable, yet somehow so batedly expectant. As if it were holding its breath to see whether or not she intended to come into it.
It needn’t have taken pause; no power on earth could have kept her outside of it.
I’m here, my love, her heart murmured. Did I keep you waiting? Am I late?
She flung open the door, and letting it swing idle behind her, skimmed across the sidewalk and inside. A diagonal edge of shade, like a knife blade, sheared down her back and took its brightness off.
The stairs were nothing to her winged feet. She stopped outside his door and quirked her head a moment, listening. There was no sound, no sound at all. But she smiled in a surety, a confidence, that could not be gainsayed.
She touched at her hair, at her scarf, at her coat, to make what he saw look better, to make him love her more.
Then she raised her hand and knocked.
There was no answer.
But she only smiled that smile again.
She thrust her face closer to the door, the better to be heard.
“Open,” she coaxed in a throbbing, low-toned voice. “It’s me. Don’t you remember me? I have a date with you.”
The door swung slowly open, without there being anyone visible behind it, not even the hand that turned and held its knob.
She spread her arms wide for the embrace that was to come. She went in that way, arms outstretched at their widest.
The door swung slowly shut.
The whole stair structure from top to bottom throbbed and pounded, like the rolling drumbeat accompanying an execution, and one by one they came hurtling off it, Cameron in the lead, and slammed to a stop in front of the door.
Sudden silence, then, for a moment only.
A streak of flame spit from Cameron’s hand, a shot raged out thunderously, and the decrepit lock splashed into particles.
Cameron moved the toe of his shoe, and the door was wide open.
Again silence; but this time not for just a moment. Long, long silence. Nobody moved. There was no more need to. Nobody said anything. There was no good saying anything.
A couple of them drew their breaths in lingeringly; like you do when something hurts you pretty badly. It did hurt them; it would have hurt anybody.
She was alone in there. Half propped and half lying on a sort of settee there was in the room. Almost like in life, when you feel too indolent to straighten up as the door opens and someone comes in. Except that one leg was out a little too far, as if it had delivered a spasmodic death kick and then never quite dropped all the way back to rest again.
She seemed to be looking out at them, from in there, just as they were looking in at her, from where they stood huddled. Almost as if to say, “Come on in and close the door, don’t just stand there.”
But her face was what was worst about her. He’d kept the blood from going down, and now it never would any more, and it had turned . . .
The face that they’d all looked at under the Carlton clock (“ I wouldn’t treat you this way; won’t you try
me?”), they would have gagged at, and backed away, and run from now. No one would have wanted it now, nor even recognized it.
Cameron walked quietly in and turned his head the other way as he went past her. A detective, but he turned his head the other way; that was his parting homage to what she’d once looked like.
There was a calendar on the mantel, the numerals “31” in jumbo black digits on its topmost leaf.
Cameron tore the leaf off, let it flutter to the floor.
Then his head went down limply, in abject defeat.
It was the yellowed, faded, almost blanked-out snapshot of a young girl, that must have been taken years ago. Of a young girl, standing on a porch step, one foot raised to the step behind her, smiling into the sun.
Cameron found it on the floor in back of the dresser when he shoved that bodily out of the way. Not even on the floor, but partially in it, imbedded upright in a crack, so that only the top rim of it peered forth.
It might have been originally inserted into the frame of the dresser mirror and been shaken loose at some violent dislodgement the entire piece of furniture received. Such as one man hitting another a blow to the jaw and sending him sprawling back against it. Or it might have been berthed inside one of the drawers themselves and fallen through a gap in the back of it, down to the floor, at some swift movement of opening or closing. Such as an unexpected knock at the room-door could have brought about.
Anyway there it was. And it belonged to no predecessor of the last tenant, they established that. The floor had been scraped and the room painted just prior to his occupancy, the landlady told them.
“Find this girl,” said Cameron grimly, “and we find him.”
He broke that down still further. Everything in police work must be broken down; there are no generalizations.
“And to find her, we have to find out two things. When it was taken and where it was taken.”
He had six enormous enlargements of it made, about the size of a window pane. Every shadow, every detail stood out. And where the lines weren’t firm enough, they were retouched. But nothing was added. Then he took one to each of the head buyers of women’s apparel in the six largest department stores in the city.
“I want your opinion on the date this was taken, as closely as you can give it to me, on the basis of what the subject is seen to be wearing.”
The analyses came back in from one to five days. A composite of them, with repetitions eliminated, ran as follows:
Lack of shoulder padding in coat: 1940. Shoulder padding was first introduced by us in our 1941 models.
Straight up-and-down lines of coat (trade term “box coat”): no later than 1939. Fitted coats began to appear 1940; caught on by 1941.
“Rolled” lapels: out by 1940. Deeply-notched, flat lapels, such as in men’s wear, after that date.
Fullness of skirt: before 1942, when wartime restrictions on material came in.
Closed-toe shoes: before 1940, when open-toes swept market.
Hair-do: introduced by the actress X—in picture Y—. Release date of picture, summer 1940.
Costume jewelry: one strand of pearl beads, such as subject is wearing close about throat, in vogue late 1940, early 1941. Following season, two and three strands. Previous to that, long strands, lying on bosom.
But they all alike added this note of warning: “Make allowance of one entire season (that is, spring to spring, or fall to fall) for the sake of probable accuracy. Background in exhibit appears to be rural, and subject not ultra-smart or clothes-conscious. It takes from six to twelve months for vogues launched by us in key cities to attain full acceptance throughout country.”
Most of it was Greek to him. But they were experts, he took them at their word.
Boiled down (and with the aid of a tendril twining one of the porch posts in the background) he got this out of it. Early spring, no earlier than mid-March, no later than mid-April; no earlier than the year 1940, no later than the year 1941—the snapshot had been taken.
“Now we only have to find out where,” he said.
And when he looked at the two white porch steps, the two white porch posts, the skimpy dab of clapboard house front, and the extreme edge of a window with a lace curtain showing in it, which was all the snapshot gave him (three million square miles of the United States, and every hamlet in every county in every state could have produced pretty much the same vignette if called upon to do so!), he was ready to give up in despair then and there.
But instead he just buckled down and went ahead working on it.
6.
THE FIFTH RENDEZVOUS
Cameron shrugged. “How do you go about finding out who the best-loved woman in a guy’s life is? Ask him?”
His chief shrugged back. “Do you know of any other way? That’s your problem.”
Cameron held his jaw as though it ached. “It’s not an exact measurement, you know. You can’t go to anyone with a scale and weigh it out.”
“I know,” his chief said drily. “It’s tough, it’s a stickler. I don’t want to hear how tough it is. I just want to hear the answer. The correct answer. So when you’ve finished squirming and wriggling, will you kindly go out and bring it back to me?”
Cameron writhed, executed a sort of rotation from the waist up, then brought his torso back to where it had been before. “But how ? Just by watching him. That might take weeks. It’s something that’s kept on the inside, anyway. Sometimes it doesn’t even show on a guy’s face.”
“Then get on the inside and get with it!” Cameron’s chief bounced his knuckles down on the desk and up again.
“There may be nobody.”
“Everybody likes somebody, some one somebody, just a little better than he likes anybody else. It’s put into them. It’s nature. With men, it’s a woman. With women, it’s a man.”
Cameron sighed dismally. “It’s an impossibility, Chief.”
“I admit,” his chief said stonily.
“But I’ll go out and do it.”
He didn’t get any thanks. “Of course you will. Only, why didn’t you get started five minutes ago, instead of sitting here wasting both of our time, cringing away from it?”
“Have you got him pretty well card indexed?”
“Thoroughly. All the preliminary work’s been done.”
Cameron leaned forward. “Then give me a list of all the women in his life. Can you do that? Have you got one?”
“I can,” his chief said. He thumbed a lever on his desk. “And one is about to come into being now although it wasn’t in existence in just that form until this minute.” He gave the order, he shut off the lever again.
“And let me advise you,” he said while they were waiting, “not to go at it in reverse; not to go to them, the women, and try to find out from that direction. Because every woman in a man’s life thinks, or would like to think, she’s the best-loved woman in that life. It has to come from the man himself.”
It came in the form of a very small, neatly typed list; five names on it.
Cameron studied it carefully. “Not many women in his life.”
“It may not be on there. That isn’t holy writ. You were the one asked for that. Remember, this is just from external observation—and at a respectful distance. It didn’t get inside him. So watch yourself.”
Cameron put it away in his billfold, stood up. “I’ll find out,” he promised. “I’ve thought of a way.”
He didn’t get any praise. “What a delayed departure,” his chief remarked astringently. “If everyone took as long when I sent them on an assignment, we’d still be working on the Rosenthal case.”
Cameron was at the door now. “He mayn’t know himself. May never have thought about it before. But he’ll tell me. I’ll know.”
The receptionist combined the perfect grooming of a mannequin and the icy manner of the headmistress at a girls’ finishing school. She had no doubt been hired for just those qualities, or else she would not have displayed them so copiously.
“Do you have an appointment?” she said down her nose.
Cameron shook his head.
“Well, I’m sorry—” she started to say. “Does he know you?”
He gave her a look. “When your house is on fire, do you have to know the fireman before you let him put a ladder to your window?”
Her brows went up. “This has to do with fire ladders, then?” she sneered.
“That was just a figure of speech, as you are perfectly well aware.”
“Well, what is the nature of your business?”
“Police business.”
Her brows went up once more, but this time without the accompanying sneer. “Oh. Is there—is there something I can do? I mean, if it’s about a ticket or a violation—”
“There is nothing you can do except to get me in there to see Mr. Ward. I realize what your duties are, but there is a time and place for everything. And, believe me, this is not the time to try to keep me out of his office.”
“Just a minute,” she said, almost hastily. “Come in,” she said, when she had returned, and held the door for him. Then closed it on the two of them.
Ward was standing up behind his desk. He had on a very light-colored gray suit. He had been handsome up to about five years ago; now it was slipping away. His hair was still richly dark, but there was a lighter tipping, a frosting, beginning to glint here and there, as on a silver fox fur. His eyes were extremely intelligent, but it was a kindly, forebearing intelligence, not the shrewd hardness of a typical businessman.
“I’m Cameron, of the police department,” Cameron introduced himself.
Ward shook hands across the desk. He looked politely blank and not very interested.
“Miss Koenig tells me—” He didn’t finish it. He hadn’t meant to.
“I don’t like to come here to your office like this, but after all, it’s the kindest way. The telephone is pretty heartless at certain times. . . .”
“Kindest? Heartless?”
“I have bad news for you,” Cameron said bluntly. He took out the typed list, held it so that it lined his own hand.
Rendezvous in Black Page 17
