made sense. And because Ellen was in an unregistered room it would have complicated things for Vic to call her through the hotel switchboard. He had to go up there to deliver the message, whatever it was. And finding the body and not knowing how deeply Lorraine was involved, Vic had gone into the deep freeze rather than say the wrong thing.
How had Lorraine known Ellen was in the hotel? There was only one way that she could have known. She had to have been someplace close to whatever it was that had panicked Ellen. If it hadn't been Lorraine herself, Johnny reminded himself suddenly. He tried again to think of the figure hunched down over the steering wheel of the dark sedan. Could it have been a woman? He shook his head; he didn't know. Could Lorraine have killed Robert Sanders and followed Ellen Saxon back to the hotel to kill her, too? Possible. Not probable. For one thing, Lorraine was known to hotel personnel. Still He looked up and around suddenly. His preoccupation had carried him half a block beyond Vic's apartment, and he turned and retraced his steps. Seen in the daylight, the neighborhood and the building were depressing. A rust-streaked iron fence with blunted pikes stood sentinel across the building's frontage and on both sides of the walk to the front door. He entered the gate and strode up the narrow cement strip; once past the door the vestibule was more spacious and attractive than hinted at by the exterior.
He pressed the button beneath the neatly lettered name plate, and tried to visualize Lorraine Barnes from the few times he had met her. A no-nonsense woman, he would have summarized it. Younger than Vic. No beauty. Attractive? He tried to remember; somehow The buzzer blasted through his reverie, and he leaned into the mouthpiece. “Johnny.”
“Come right up.”
He knew it was the second floor; he walked up, and she was standing in the open door of the apartment when he emerged into the hall from the landing. She stood aside to let him enter. “I do appreciate your taking this trouble, Johnny.”
He listened to the cool voice; he waited while she closed the door, then followed her inside from the short hall into a living room furnished in quiet good taste. A sofa of the type that could be made into a bed ran along the longest wall, and two comfortable armchairs were at the far end of the room facing the television set. The sofa's and armchairs' slipcovers were a flowered pastel, and almost matched the drapes. A wedding picture stood beside the percolator on the coffee table, and Johnny looked down at a younger-looking Vic and a Lorraine who seemed not to have changed at all.
“Coffee?” she asked him. “It's all ready. Sit down.”
He didn't want the coffee, but he wanted to talk. He sat down. He watched her brisk movements; he knew now that he had forgotten the details of her looks in the intervals between seeing her. And she was attractive. About thirty-five. Good figure. Very good. Hair well kept up. A detached attitude, and an expression to match.
He looked at the high neckline on her light blue sleeveless dress with its ruffled collar. Go ahead, Killain; ask her if she's scratched up under that high neckline. Sure, go ahead and ask her. This is only Vic's wife.
She served him on a small tray, bringing it over to his chair, black coffee with a tiny matched creamer and sugar bowl. As he sweetened the coffee she nodded to something back of him, and he half turned to look at the small bag on the floor. “I packed a few things for Vic I thought he might like to have.” Johnny nodded, and she continued evenly, with no particular emphasis in her tone. “Since I heard the radio this morning I'm not so sure I shouldn't pack one for myself.”
Johnny didn't pretend to misunderstand. “This Sanders thing? The police call you?”
“Not this morning.” Her lips smiled, but her eyes didn't. “I imagine they'll feel confident of getting it all at this session to which they so politely invited me. I'm afraid the whole thing could be a bit of a mess.”
He looked at her curiously. “In what way?”
“There are… ramifications. Ellen ran a bookkeeping machine over at the office. I'd been a stenographer until recently. Ellen-”
“Until recently?”
The light-colored eyes-gray? Blue-gray, Johnny decided — never wavered. “I've been acting as private secretary to Mr. Sanders.” Johnny held his tongue as her pause seemed to invite comment. When she resumed she had changed direction. “Did Ellen come directly to you last night? Or this morning, rather?”
“Yeah.” He sat up alertly. “Why?”
“Because I sent her to you.” Lorraine Barnes smiled faintly. “A fact I believe you would have deduced eventually. She refused to come back here with me, and she was afraid to go home. I finally suggested you. She jumped at it.”
“A lot of good I did her.” His voice was harsh. “Where was this?”
She turned a hand over palm down, resignedly. “Let's say in the very near vicinity of Robert Sanders' apartment.”
“Did you know Sanders was dead?”
“No. I might have managed differently if I had, but that's hindsight, of course. I only knew that Ellen had seen something that had frightened her nearly out of her mind. I couldn't get a coherent sentence out of her. We couldn't stand on the sidewalk; I put her in a cab and sent her on to you.”
“Do you know why Ellen was there, or with whom?”
“No. She would answer no questions at all. I came back here, but I couldn't leave it alone. I had to know what had frightened her, or I felt that I did. I had something at stake myself. I called Vic at the hotel and asked him to have her call me back. He was surprised; asked me why I thought she'd be there. I told him I'd sent her to you, and he said oh, yes, that he knew where she was, but why on earth he went up there-”
“He got a bad break on that.” Johnny explained about the unregistered room. “With Ellen not registered, there was no rack or phone listing for her. Vic could have asked the operator to ring an unregistered room, but since it was me that put Ellen in there he might have thought it was important to me not to have the operator know it. When he found the body he didn't know if or how deeply you were involved, so he said nothing.”
This time it was Lorraine Barnes' turn to say nothing in a pause that invited comment. While the silence lengthened she studied a fingernail's gloss and buffed it lightly on a fold of her dress. She spoke finally as Johnny was casting about in his mind for a fresh assault upon her glacial calm. “I'm not going to tell the police that I was anywhere near Robert Sanders' apartment this morning, Johnny.”
He stared at her. “That's your business, but you know they're gonna shake you to your back teeth? You think you can make it stick?”
“I'm relieved to hear you say that it's my business. As for making it stick-why, you never know until you try.” Her voice was quiet, unruffled. Nerve, he thought admiringly. She had nerve in great, jumped-up bunches. “I believe that Ellen was the only one who saw me; I'm going to hope that she was.” Her tone was factual, with no hint of apology. “You see, Johnny, for Vic there can be no satisfactory explanation for my being in that neighborhood this morning. I wish no further involvement. Vic would want it that way.”
The hell of it is, Johnny thought, Vic would want it that way. This cool-voiced little witch might be the whore of all the world, but Vic would want what she wanted. He put down his coffee cup. “If you're not going to tell the police why did you tell me?”
She smiled, the same faint smile that was not really a smile at all. “A calculated risk. You're no fool, Johnny. Sooner or later you would have figured out what sent Vic up to Ellen's room. If you were going to tell the police everything you know, or suspect, there wasn't a great deal of point in what I was planning. I had to know where I stood.”
“What makes you think I haven't told them everything, or won't this morning? I'm under the gun downtown, too, you know.”
She considered him steadily. “I don't have to be right, but I think you're a little too primitive for that.” She removed a pair of white gloves from her handbag. “Are we ready?”
“You may think you know what you're doing,” Johnny pointed out as he rose to his feet, “but on the street where I live you'd be classified in a hurry. Fruitcake. Grade A.”
“If there's a medal goes with it I may apply later.”
“You could be forgetting one important item,” he suggested. “For my money, somebody killed Sanders, then followed Ellen across town and killed her. You were with Ellen, for a few minutes anyway. If the killer saw you too, where does that leave you?”
Lorraine Barnes drew on her gloves with a snap. “Next in line, you mean? I would very much like to see him try to kill me.”
