“First tell me the rest.”
“The rest was hard labor. Kistler got Waller down, and the two of them busted the lock; the chairs fell when the doors pushed open; your key was still in one of the locks. They rushed in, pulled up the shades, and there you were, with a big wad of cotton batting covering your face, still sopping with the God damn dry cleaner. Kistler did a lot of work on you, young lady. If you’re glad to be alive yet, you can thank him for it.”
“He is nice, isn’t he?”
“Sure. Even men think he’s nice.”
“That proves it. I’ll do a nice job of thanks. No sign of where the ether came from?”
“Oh, sure. Empty can by the couch. Kleenfine.”
A picture flashed back into my mind.
“Oh, my goodness! Miss Sands!”
“What’s that?”
“Miss Sands. I was upstairs to ask her a question. She was pressing clothes. And cleaning spots off them with a dry cleaner on a rag. I saw the can.”
“Kleenfine?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I brought that out yesterday, in a way. Asked them all if they had a can. She admitted it. She and Mrs. Waller both did. It’s a common home cleaner. They both showed me their can, partially full. You can’t base much of a case on that alone. Anyone can buy it.”
He was eyeing me narrowly.
“It’s the sort of plan a woman would think of,” I began slowly.
“Um. Before we go into that, there’s something I want to go into with you. What did you go upstairs to ask Miss Sands?”
“Oh. Well, I was hot on the trail of Mr. Halloran then. And I was thinking about the cat in the hall at ten o’clock. Someone caught it and put it back in the kitchen before midnight. So I went up to ask if anyone had seen or heard anyone who might have done so.”
His eyes were hard on my face.
“Who’d you ask?”
“Why, Mr. Buffingham first, and then Mr. Grant, Miss Sands, the Wallers. Mr. Kistler wasn’t home either time, of course. None of them had heard anything.”
Lieutenant Strom sat forward impressively.
“Has it penetrated your little noodle that a lot worse things happened to you night before last than were necessary to keep you out of the way of a little ransacking? If you’d been found two hours later than you were, probably only one hour later, you would have been dead. Whoever came here that night came with deliberate intent to murder. To murder you.”
“Oh my,” I said as if I were Mrs. Halloran. “It sounds awfully bloodthirsty when you put it that way.”
He snorted. “That isn’t what you should be saying. You should be asking a question.”
“Why, you mean?”
“Exactly.”
“Well, I was in the way. And then I have sort of been nosing around, you know.”
He snorted again. “Do I know!”
“But it doesn’t do me any good to pull in my horns now,” I pointed out. “Because whatever I’ve done to make someone want to murder me, I’ve already done. Or if it’s something I know, I already know it. I can’t undo it or unknow it. The only thing I can do is go ahead and get him before he gets me.”
“Dacres the lionhearted. You might acquaint me with a few of your hidden secrets.”
“Well, of course it’s too late to tell you about the closet in my kitchen. I really forgot that myself.”
“Former comment repeated.”
“Then there’s the receipt book. I found that on Saturday when you gave me permission to look through Mrs. Garr’s things, and Mrs. Halloran and I found the money. I haven’t seen you since, you know. I don’t suppose your fat detective told you how much time I spent looking at that receipt book?”
“No!”
I told him all about it then. He was very much interested in my theory that the high rents paid by Miss Sands and Mr. Buffingham represented blackmail, and that the Wallers in turn had been blackmailing Mrs. Garr. Then I told him what I’d deduced that morning from the state my rooms were in, but he only listened with half his mind to that, and said yes, he’d thought the same thing.
He got up briskly when I ended, and said he was going to work on how my would-be murderer had gotten in and out of my apartment. I got out of bed and into my negligee and slippers. I showed him how I fixed the doors at night; the metal lock of my double doors hung by a shred now, but when we forced the doors together and hooked the chairs under the knobs they were still tight, even without the lock.
With his two flanking detectives, he spent a good half hour on those doors, examining the hinges, the casings, the knobs. Van got on the outside to force the doors; the chairs fell with a clatter that would have waked me a dozen times over even if I’d been drunk, which I wasn’t.
“That’s the way Kistler says they fell in when he and Waller broke in here Tuesday morning,” said the lieutenant.
“No one could go out through those doors, lock them, leave the key inside, and hook the chairs under the knobs after himself,” I said. “That’s flat.”
“We’d sort of figured that, too,” the lieutenant replied dryly.
“Are you sure he—it—wasn’t still in here when the door was broken in yesterday morning?”
“Well, the first thing Waller says he did was to look around, and Kistler saw him do it. I guess he even took some time off from you to look around himself, being a little mad. They both swear there couldn’t a soul have escaped ’em. After we got here we looked again, and there wasn’t a trace. This place isn’t so big anyone could have hid out on Waller or Kistler, either.”
After that he went on to the windows. I’d had the windows open, of course. From the top. But they were screened. Well screened, being on the ground floor. One screen was new—the one the
