With my left hand I turned the first door’s knob. With my left foot I kicked it open.
Nothing happened.
I put a hand around the frame, found the button, switched on the lights.
A sitting-room, all orderly.
Through an open door on the far side of the room came the muffled yapping of Frana. It was louder now and more excited. I moved to the doorway. What I could see of the next room, in the light from this, seemed peaceful and unoccupied enough. I went into it and switched on the lights.
The dog’s voice came through a closed door. I crossed to it, pulled it open. A dark fluffy dog jumped snapping at my leg. I grabbed it where its fur was thickest and lifted it squirming and snarling. The light hit it. It was purple—purple as a grape! Dyed purple!
Carrying this yapping, yelping artificial hound a little away from my body with my left hand, I moved on to the next room—a bedroom. It was vacant. Its closet hid nobody. I found the kitchen and bathroom. Empty. No one was in the apartment. The purple pup had been imprisoned by the Whosis Kid earlier in the day.
Passing through the second room on my way back to the woman with her dog and my report, I saw a slitted envelope lying face-down on a table. I turned it over. The stationery of a fashionable store, it was addressed to Mrs. Inés Almad, here.
The party seemed to be getting international. Maurois was French; the Whosis Kid was Boston American; the dog had a Bohemian name (at least I remember nabbing a Czech forger a few months before whose first name was Frana); and Inés, I imagine, was either Spanish or Portuguese. I didn’t know what Almad was, but she was undoubtedly foreign, and not, I thought, French.
I returned to her. She hadn’t moved an inch.
“Everything seems to be all right,” I told her. “The dog got himself caught in a closet.”
“There is no one here?”
“No one.”
She took the dog in both hands, kissing its fluffy stained head, crooning affectionate words to it in a language that made no sense to me.
“Do your friends—the people you had your row with tonight—know where you live?” I asked.
I knew they did. I wanted to see what she knew.
She dropped the dog as if she had forgotten it, and her brows puckered.
“I do not know that,” she said slowly. “Yet it may be. If they do—”
She shuddered, spun on her heel, and pushed the hall door violently shut.
“They may have been here this afternoon,” she went on. “Frana has made himself prisoner in closets before, but I fear everything. I am coward-like. But there is none here now?”
“No one,” I assured her again.
We went into the sitting-room. I got my first good look at her when she shed her hat and dark cape.
She was a trifle under medium height, a dark-skinned woman of thirty in a vivid orange gown. She was dark as an Indian, with bare brown shoulders round and sloping, tiny feet and hands, her fingers heavy with rings. Her nose was thin and curved, her mouth full-lipped and red, her eyes—long and thickly lashed—were of an extraordinary narrowness. They were dark eyes, but nothing of their color could be seen through the thin slits that separated the lids. Two dark gleams through veiling lashes. Her black hair was disarranged just now in fluffy silk puffs. A rope of pearls hung down on her dark chest. Earrings of black iron—in a peculiar club-like design—swung beside her cheeks.
Altogether, she was an odd trick. But I wouldn’t want to be quoted as saying that she wasn’t beautiful—in a wild way.
She was shaking and shivering as she got rid of her hat and cloak. White teeth held her lower lip as she crossed the room to turn on an electric heater. I took advantage of this opportunity to shift my gun from my overcoat pocket to my pants. Then I took off the coat.
Leaving the room for a second, she returned with a brown-filled quart bottle and two tumblers on a bronze tray, which she put on a little table near the heater.
The first tumbler she filled to within half an inch of its rim. I stopped her when she had the other nearly half full.
“That’ll do fine for me,” I said.
It was brandy, and not at all hard to get down. She shot her tumblerful into her throat as if she needed it, shook her bare shoulders, and sighed in a satisfied way.
“You will think, certainly, I am lunatic,” she smiled at me. “Flinging myself on you, a stranger in the street, demanding of you time and troubles.”
“No,” I lied seriously. “I think you’re pretty levelheaded for a woman who, no doubt, isn’t used to this sort of stuff.”
She was pulling a little upholstered bench closer to the electric heater, within reach of the table that held the brandy. She sat down now, with an inviting nod at the bench’s empty half.
The purple dog jumped into her lap. She pushed it out. It started to return. She kicked it sharply in the side with the pointed toe of her slipper. It yelped and crawled under a chair across the room.
I avoided the window by going the long way around the room. The window was curtained, but not thickly enough to hide all of the room from the Whosis Kid—if he happened to be sitting at his window just now with a pair of field-glasses to his eyes.
“But I am not levelheaded, really,” the woman was saying as I dropped beside her. “I am coward-like, terribly. And even becoming accustomed—It is my husband, or he who was my husband. I should tell you. Your gallantry deserves the explanation, and I do not wish you should think a thing that is not so.”
I tried to look trusting and credulous. I expected to disbelieve everything she said.
“He is most crazily jealous,”
