“Just what do you know about all this?” he said softly.
“About all what, Mr. Hollander?”
“About the police being in the house.”
“Isn’t it just too thrilling?”
“Uh-huh. Whom do they suspect?”
Miss Murrow began to feel friendly again. He was so good-looking. She wished she had a whole lot of exciting and important information to give him that would keep him standing there listening, so that she could just stare at him and try to put her finger on the source of that amazing effect of fluidity.
“They haven’t said whom they suspect, really.” She lowered her voice to an appropriate pitch. “But I know they think it’s somebody who is in the house.”
Hollander’s voice was a whisper. “You wouldn’t say it was Mrs. Endicott whom they suspect, would you?”
Miss Murrow appeared a trifle shocked. “Oh, it would be too dreadful to think a wife would harm a husband. But it does happen.” Her mind tabulated the news offered daily by the papers. “Why, it happens almost every day. Oh, you don’t think—”
“Certainly I don’t think she did it,” Hollander said fiercely. “It’s what the police think that I’m trying to get at. What makes you so sure they’re going to hang it onto somebody who’s in the house?”
Miss Murrow nodded toward the bathroom door. “From the way they’re guarding Mr. Endicott from being attacked again. From being attacked,” she added, “before he can make a statement.”
“Then they’re still just guessing?”
“Just guessing.”
It seemed to satisfy Hollander, and he managed to convey the impression that the conversation, so far as he was concerned, had come to an end. Miss Murrow went over to her chair in a corner of the room and sat down. He was deep, she decided. Yes, a deep creature, with deep impulses. …
Cassidy and Hansen tilted back their chairs a bit and, with loosened collars, settled for the last tiring watches of the night. They had nodded briefly to Hollander, and he had nodded just as briefly in return. He looked to them like a good scout. Like one of the boys. Regular. Cassidy tried to remember what that last line of hooey was that the lieutenant had shot at them about Hollander. Something about cats. About two cats, that was it, watching a promenading and nearsighted mouse. Nuts.
Hollander took an armchair and pushed it close to the head of the bed. It was an upholstered armchair, heavy, and with a tall solid back. He placed it so that its back was to the bathroom door. The back also obliquely obscured him from a full view on the part of Nurse Murrow. He vanished into its overstuffed depths and settled down. His eyes travelled slowly along the spread until they came to rest with a curious fixity on the smooth, masklike face of his friend Endicott.
Then the pupils of Hollander’s eyes contracted until they glittered like the heads of two bright pins.
XIV
2:01 a.m.—An Empty Sheath
It was just after two o’clock when Lieutenant Valcour stepped to the pavement and paid his fare to the driver. The cab snorted away and left silence hanging heavy on the street. The bachelor apartment house where Hollander lived had an English basement entrance. He found Hollander’s name among a row of five others and pressed the proper button. After he had pressed it four times, a voice answered him through the earpiece of the announcer.
“Who and what is it?” said the voice.
It was the Southern voice.
“This is Lieutenant Valcour of the police department talking.”
“Oh. Mr. Hollander has already left, Lieutenant.”
“Thank you, I know that. I want to come upstairs.”
“Fourth floor, Lieutenant—automatic lift.”
“Thank you.”
The release mechanism on the door was already clicking. Lieutenant Valcour entered a smart little lobby and then an electric lift. He pressed the button for the fourth floor.
“Sorry to bother you like this,” he said, as he stepped out into a private foyer, and stared curiously at the young man facing him.
“No trouble at all, Lieutenant.”
“That’s very kind of you, Mr.—”
“Smith, Lieutenant—Jerry Smith.”
“Since when?” asked Lieutenant Valcour gently, as he started to follow Mr. Smith into an adjoining room.
“Why, what do you mean, Lieutenant?”
The man stopped, and his soft dark eyes stared earnestly at Lieutenant Valcour from a ruddy, slightly dissipated-looking young face.
Lieutenant Valcour removed his hat and placed it on a settee. “Nothing much, Mr. Smith,” he said. “Certainly nothing beyond the fact that I saw you one morning last month in the lineup down at headquarters. In connection with some nightclub business, I believe. The charge fell through, I also believe, because the woman involved preferred the loss of her emerald necklace to the loss of prestige she certainly would have suffered during the publicity of a trial had she pressed the case. That’s all I mean, Mr. Smith.”
“I don’t suppose, sir, I could convince you of my innocence?”
“No, I don’t suppose you could.”
“It was my misfortune that the case never did come to trial, Lieutenant. I could have cleared myself then.”
“Nonsense. You could have brought counter charges—sued for damage for false arrest.”
Mr. Smith looked inexpressibly shocked. “We of the South, sir, do not bring charges against a lady.”
“Well, the ethical distinction between swiping a woman’s necklace and bringing charges against her is a shade too delicate for my Northern nerves to grasp.” Lieutenant Valcour crossed casually to a chair placed before a secretary and sat down. “Sit down, Mr. Smith,” he said, “and tell me something about your friend Thomas.”
“The straightest, squarest gentleman who ever lived, sir. Why …” Mr. Smith plunged into a panegyric that would have brought a blush even to the toughened cheek of a Caligula.
Lieutenant Valcour permitted him to plunge. While the flood poured into his ears, his eyes were inconspicuously busied with such papers as were on view in the secretary.
Tom, darling [he read on the folded half
