He pocketed the salt shaker and rose to thread his way through the tables of diners to the rest rooms. Lisolette watched him as he went.
He really is a very handsome man, she thought. So sweet and, more important, fundamentally honest. She wondered if, it were really true that there were warrants outstanding for him in some states. Surely nothing that a good lawyer couldn’t handle with sufficient time and patience.
She let her gaze wander around the room. It had been so enjoyable an evening until they had received word of the fire. Even then, for a time it had been something of a carnival. Until, as the waitress had said, the ambulances had arrived. A few of the diners were still on the promenade watching the activity below. She and Harlee had drifted out for a while, but the sight of the stretcher bearers and the sound of the windows crashing into the plaza below had taken all of the thrill out of it for her.
Even now there was still the distant whine of more sirens filling the air as additional trucks roared up to the building. She listened, imagining the ordered-and disordered confusion far below. She hoped they were making good progress and that none … She wouldn’t think about that, she promised herself. One of her students had become a fireman and she had never forgotten the shock when his name had appeared in the papers as a hero who had given his life to save some people in a slum fire. She stirred restlessly. Something was nagging at the edge of her mind but she couldn’t quite put her finger on it.
The sirens, she thought. Of course. The sirens and the crashing of glass and the - commotion in the street below and probably the telephone operators calling the rooms to notify the tenants of the fire. Enough noise to wake the dead, and very definitely the living.
Only there were people who would never hear the sirens.
People to whom such alarms meant nothing, people who lived in a silent, speechless world, who talked with their hands and read each other’s lips.
Tom and Evelyn Albrecht. She knew they were retiring early, that he had been exhausted by many evenings of night work and had been looking forward to the holidays so he could catch up on his sleep.
The ambulances or the wail of the police cars. They wouldn’t have heard the telephone, if the operator had tried to warn them of the fire.
Little Linda had been taught how to use the phone, but she and the other children would have been put to bed before their parents. Even if Linda awakened when the phone rang, what would she know of evacuating a building, of fire alerts, or even of staying put and placing wet towels around the doors and over the ventilation grills?
Linda was all of seven years old.
Perhaps she should tell NEss Reynolds, she would know what to do.
She could call down and alert the security people or the firemen.
She caught Quinn’s eye and motioned for her to come over and Quinn signaled that she would be there in a minute. Lisolette fidgeted, growing more worried and impatient by the second. If only Harlee would return.
No-he was a dear but he was the sort of man who was at his best in a drawing room or at a formal dinner, not at all the type who could rise to an emergency.
Quinn had moved to another table of diners and was talking quietly with them, undoubtedly trying to calm them, Lisolette thought. There was no telling when she would come back.
Lisolette made up her mind then, rose and walked to the far end of the dining room where the house phones were. She quickly dialed security. But there was no dial tone, no subliminal garble of conversation in the receiver, She tried another phone with the same result. The phones were dead, she realized, and probably had been for perhaps half an hour or longer.
She thought of poor Schiller, trapped in her small apartment, then resolutely put him out of her mind. There was only one thing to do and it was taking a terrible risk. She had no idea that someone else might not have thought of the Albrechts and warned them by now, that perhaps they were quite safe or perhaps they had never been threatened at all.
The fact that she was gambling with her life never entered her mind; the possibility that she was gambling with the Albrechts’ did.
And there was also the thought of what her father would have done.
She glanced over at the elevator bank again. Mr. Leroux and the two’couples he had been talking with had left; Mr. Leroux had gone back to His table for a moment and the two couples were standing by the entrance to the scenic elevator at the opposite end of the foyer.
Nobody was looking in her direction. She hastily pressed the down button, then hurried to a nearby empty table, picked up a discarded napkin and drenched it with water from the table pitcher. She might need it, she thought, and hastened back to the elevator bank.
She remembered Harlee just as the elevator door quietly opened.
He might think that she had deserted him in panic and be disappointed in her-the least he would do would be to worry about her.
But it wasn’t practical to wait and confide her plans to him; he would try to stop her. Well, perhaps she could make it up to him later. She quickly entered the elevator and pushed the button for the thirty-fourth floor. There would probably be smoke, she thought, though again, perhaps not. The fire was floors below and she wasn’t even going as far as the sky lobby.
The thought occurred to her again that she might very well be embarking on a fool’s errand, but in one sense she hoped so.
The cage slowed and stopped. The moment the door opened, she detected smoke. The odor grew stronger as she walked down the hall; the air itself was hazy with it.
It grew denser as she half ran toward the Albrecht apartment.
Doors were open on both sides of the corridor now, indicating their hasty evacuation by tenants, and the interiors were thick with smoke.
In one she saw smoke billowing from the ventilation grill and she automatically pulled the door shut. She was now genuinely frightened for the safety of the Albrechts.
They lived in a dead-end corridor where the smoke was thick and choking, harsh in her throat. She could feel her lungs begin to labor.
She stopped briefly to tie the sodden napkin around the lower portion of her face so it covered her nose and mouth. It helped a little.
The door to the Albrecht apartment was closed and, predictably, locked. It meant nothing, she realized. It would be locked whether they were home or if they had left unless they had left hastily, as had the other tenants along the corridor. She pounded on the door, hoping that the children inside might hear even if their parents couldn’t.
She knocked again, then realized she was wasting time when time might be very valuable.
She fished in her purse and pulled out her charge-a-plate from Grammercy’s Department Store. How many times had she read about doing this in her favorite mysteries or seen it on television suspense shows?
Pray to God that they had not shot the dead bolt. She knelt down and suddenly felt like crying. There was a thin metal molding running around the door frame, preventing direct access to the area around the lock. She hit the strip of metal in frustration and anger, then noticed that it gave slightly. The molding was tacked onto the frame by a relatively few small rivets.
She felt quickly in her purse for her fingernail file, inserted the point between the molding and the frame, and drove it in for several inches, then wrenched it sideways. The file bent, and with a screech of pulled rivets, the molding gave slightly, the paint cracking up and down from the point of insertion.
She drove the file in farther and pried again, and the gap between the molding and the frame widened. One more time and there was room to insert the credit card.
She could see the faint glint of brass where the lock’s tongue slid into the striker plate in the door frame. She pushed the card in between the door and the frame, directly against the curved tongue.
She couldn’t tell whether the tongue was sliding back or not; then the card twisted out of her perspiring fingers. She wrapped a handkerchief around the end she held and tried again. For a moment there was no movement; then the tongue abruptly slid back. She turned the doorknob and pushed, almost tumbling into the apartment.
Inside the room, the air was heavy with smoke. For a minute she was caught up in a fit of coughing; then she
