“Is that where she was? I wondered. I tried to call her and couldn’t get her.”
“That’s where. We checked it out just as a matter of routine. They were seen on the course and in the bar, and Farmer’s car was seen in the parking area. It’s a late model. There’s a kid who works around the area, trimming the shrubs and controlling the litter, and he remembers the car particularly, because it had a full house.”
“Full house?”
“Like in poker. On the license plate. This kid’s sort of simple, and he amuses himself by trying to find the highest hand on the plates. Farmer’s has three sixes and a pair of treys. It was his car, all right. Registry verifies it.”
“Well, that’s good work, neat and conclusive, but it doesn’t get us any closer to Myrna.”
“Forget Myrna, Percy. She’s our problem. We’re working on it, and we don’t need you getting in the way.”
“Thanks.” Knowing when I’d been dismissed, I stood up to leave.
I went away, and with the help of several distractions I was able to keep Myrna pretty well confined to a dark closet at the back of my mind until that night when I was home in bed. Then she got out and began to make a nuisance of herself. I tried deliberately to think of someone else in her place, namely Hetty, but it didn’t work. Lying on my back and staring up into the darkness, I let her prowl my mind without restrictions, and she began to repeat her performance in the Normandy Lounge, the whole sequence of action; I saw her crawl onto the stool, saw her lift a martini glass toward a face that was a shadow in a dark mirror, and then, all at once she was walking swiftly across the hotel lobby beside Benedict Coon, and I could see the back of her. No more.
No more? Well, not quite. I could also hear her. I could hear the staccato rhythm of her spike heels on terrazzo, and I could hear at the same time, like an echo, a fainter, farther sound. Not another sound, but the same sound at a different time, and in a different place. The different time was a rainy afternoon not long ago, and the different place was the hall outside my office. There is a distinctive quality to the rhythm and cadence of a person’s walk, if only you have the big sharp ears to pick it up, and I was ready to back my ears with odds that the person walking down the hall was the same person walking across the terrazzo floor.
Why? I asked myself the question with my breath caught in my throat and the short hair rising on the back of my neck. Why should Dulce Coon, wearing a blond wig and spike heels and Hollywood goggles and superimposed sex, meet her own husband in a downtown bar?
Well, that was easy enough to answer. Lots of wives met lots of husbands in various places for various reasons. As for the wig, women who could afford them were wearing them nowadays like hats. They changed hair with their mood and their dress.
What was more pertinent, why had she lied about a blackmailer who had probably never existed, and why had she deliberately arranged for a certain Percy Hand to witness a phony meeting in a shadowy lounge that had surely been carefully chosen for that reason?
That was a two-part question, and the answer to the first part was obvious even to me. She had simply wanted to plant a red herring, a blond bomb to divert suspicion from where it might otherwise have been directed. The answer to the second part was also clearly implied, and the implication was that Percy Hand, plying his trade in a side street with most of the trappings of failure and few of success, was a made-to-order sucker for a clever woman with murder on her mind. I didn’t like the idea, but there it was, and it annoyed me considerably.
But wait a minute. Dulce Coon had been at the Cedarvale Country Club. She had been playing golf and drinking drinks and eating early dinner with her shirttail cousin. There were witnesses who said so, and the witnesses had satisfied Brady Baldwin, who was a hard man to satisfy. Could I be wrong? Had old Percy’s big ears and little brain collaborated to lead him astray? Well, it was entirely possible. It had been done before. But still, lying there in bed and listening again to the sound of a woman walking, allowing for the differences in flats and spikes and wood and stone, I had a grim conviction that it was, in both times and places, no one but Dulce Coon.
Then another gorgeous idea bloomed all at once in my little hothouse brain. Not really an idea, though. It was more the remembrance of a minor observation that suddenly assumed a significant relationship to a scrap of information. Maybe it meant something, and maybe it didn’t. But it brought me up and reaching out into darkness for the phone, and I dialed in darkness a number that I knew by heart and touch. At the other end of the line, another phone rang and rang, and I kept hanging on and on. Eventually a blurred and cranky voice broke in.
“Wrong number,” the voice said. “Get off the line.”
“Wait a minute, Hetty,” I said. “Don’t hang up.”
“Who’s this? It sounds like Percy, but I don’t believe it.”
“Percy’s who.”
“Damn it, Percy, it’s almost three o’clock in the morning.”
“Hetty, I just want to ask you a simple question.”
“The answer is no. I’m too young, and you’re too poor. It wouldn’t work out.”
“As you say. Now, will you answer my question?”
“You haven’t asked it yet. How can I answer it if you won’t ask it?”
“Here it is. What kind of heart trouble did Benedict Coon have?”
“How would I know? Is there more than one kind?”
“According
