“Yes, sir.”
“From Dr. Worth’s room he will be taken down to Mr. Endicott’s room and will stay there until morning.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I want you to tip the men off on guard down here that I want it known I am going home until tomorrow. Tell Mr. Hollander that if he asks to see me. I am leaving the house now and may be gone for a couple of hours, more or less. Then I’m coming back. I’ll rap on this door here, and you let me in.”
“Yes, sir.”
“There’s probably a lounge or something in that room there just off this hall. I’ll spend the night on it.”
“Yes, sir.”
“What is the name of the gentleman who is coming?”
“Thomas Hollander, Lieutenant.”
“Good.”
Lieutenant Valcour went outside. The normal orderliness of life returned comfortingly with the first deep breaths of cold night air. He walked the short half block to Fifth Avenue and hailed a taxi. He got in. He gave the driver, through the half-opened window in front, the Riverside Drive address of Marge Myles.
XII
12:30 a.m.—Madame Velasquez Stirs Up Muck
The taxi ran north along Fifth Avenue for a few blocks and then bore left into the leafless, frosty stretches of Central Park. It was deserted of pedestrians. Occasional yellow lights showed the vacant surface of benches and empty walks.
The average worthlessness of any person’s reactions when suddenly confronted by the police, Lieutenant Valcour reflected, was a curious phenomenon. It was his belief that only rarely were such reactions the result of the moment at hand. They were instead a subconscious scurrying backward to some earlier time when something had been done by that person, or known by that person, which might then have brought him into the grip of the law. No one—he included himself in the arraignment—led a blameless life. No, not even the saints, for they had their periods of expiation, which in themselves presupposed blemishes that required the act of expiation for their erasure. And so it was with people when, even in the role of the most innocent of bystanders, they were confronted by the police. Inevitably there lurked a certain fear, an instinctive thrusting out of defenses as a guard against the chance discovery of that early blemish. …
Take Hollander, for instance. Every word of his telephone conversation had been a negative defense, and yet one could not link it necessarily with the attack on Endicott. No, not necessarily. It was perfectly obvious that Hollander had expected something to happen to Endicott, and equally obvious that he was worried about the fact that Mrs. Endicott might be involved in it, but one couldn’t say that he had been involved in it himself. …
The taxi stopped. Lieutenant Valcour got out, paid the driver, and dismissed him.
Riverside Drive seemed about ten degrees colder than the midtown section of the city had been. Or was it fifteen or twenty degrees? A northerly wind blew iced blasts from the Hudson River and at him across the treetops of the terraced park. Marge Myles, Lieutenant Valcour decided as he took in the façade of the building that housed her apartment, did herself rather well.
A sleepy and irritable Negro casually asked him “Wha’ floor—’n’ who, suh?” as he entered the overheated lobby. The boy was smartly snapped into full consciousness by the view offered him of Lieutenant Valcour’s gold badge.
The proper floor proved to be the fourteenth.
As the hour was hovering about one in the morning, Lieutenant Valcour was considerably surprised at the promptness with which the door swung open in response to his ring, and considerably more surprised by the querulous voice that emerged from beneath a wig, dimly seen in the poor light of a foyer, and said, “Well, I must say you took your own time in coming. Put your coat and hat on that table there, and then come into the parlour.”
Lieutenant Valcour complied. He followed a dimmish mass of jet bugles into the more accurate light of a room heavily cluttered with gold-leafed furniture and brocades.
“I’m Madame Velasquez—Marge’s ma. I ain’t Spanish myself, but if there ever was a Spaniard, my late husband Alvarez was.”
The wig on Madame Velasquez’s head offered no anachronism to the bugles of her low-cut dress. Its reddish russet strands were pompadoured and puffed and showed at unexpected places little sprays of determined curls. The face beneath it bore an odd resemblance to an enamelled nut to which nature, in a moment of freakish humour, had added features.
“Now I want you to tell me at once, Mr. Endicott, what you have done with my little Marge.”
Lieutenant Valcour with curious eyes tried to probe a closed door at the other end of the room.
“I expected to find her here, Madame Velasquez,” he said quietly. “Isn’t she?”
“She ain’t. And what is furthermore, Mr. Herbert Endicott, you know she ain’t.” Her voice had grown shrill, but without much volume. It was rather the ineffective piping of some winded bird.
“What makes you say that, Madame Velasquez?”
The bunched strands of artificial jewellery that were recklessly clasped about Madame Velasquez’s thin neck quivered defiantly.
“And you never met her here at seven,” she said. “I suppose you’ll say you wasn’t to meet her here at seven. Well, I got this note to prove it. There, now.”
She handed Lieutenant Valcour a sheet of notepaper that reeked of some high-powered scent.
Make yourself at home, Ma [read the note]. Herb Endicott was to meet me here at seven. He didn’t come although he was to take me to the Colonial for dinner. I am going to the Colonial now and see if he is there. Maybe I did not understand him right, Ma. I will be home soon anyways.
“And it is now,” said Madame Velasquez, “after 1 a.m.”
“She knew you were going to pay her this
