Eudora Drew, seeing a picture of her as she lay across the bed with the scarf biting into her throat.
For some moments I stood undecided. There seemed nothing much I could do. I had nothing to work on. The front-door bell rings. She says it’s the grocerman. She goes into the lobby. She vanishes. No cry; no bloodstains; no nothing.
But I had to do something, so I went to the front door and opened it and looked at the door of the opposite apartment. It didn’t tell me anything. I stepped into the passage and dug my thumb into the bell-push. Almost immediately the door opened as if the woman who faced me had been waiting for my ring.
She was short and plump, with white hair, a round, soft-skinned face, remarkable for the bright, vague, forget-me-not blue eyes and nothing else. At a guess, she was about fifty, and when she smiled she showed big, dead-looking white teeth that couldn’t have been her own. She was wearing a fawn-coloured coat and skirt that must have cost a lot of money, but fitted her nowhere. In her small, fat, white hand she held a paper sack.
“Good morning,” she said, and flashed the big teeth at me.
She startled me. I wasn’t expecting to see this plump, matronly woman who looked as if she had just come in from a shopping expedition and was now about to cook the lunch.
“I’m sorry to trouble you,” I said, lifting my hat. “I’m looking for Nurse Gurney.” I waved to the half-open front door behind me. “She lives there, doesn’t she?”
The plump woman dipped into the paper sack and took out a plum. She examined it closely, the eyes in her vacant, fat face suspicious. Satisfied, she popped it into her mouth. I watched her, fascinated.
“Why, yes,” she said in a muffled voice. “Yes, she does.” She raised her cupped hand, turned the stone out of her mouth into her hand in a refined way and dropped the stone back into the sack. “Have a plum?”
I said I didn’t care for plums, and thanked her.
“They’re good for you,” she said, dipped into the sack and fished our another. But this time it didn’t pass her scrutiny and she put it back and found another more to her liking.
“You haven’t seen her, have you?” I asked, watching the plum disappear between the big teeth.
“Seen who?”
“Nurse Gurney. I’ve just called and I find the front door open. I can’t get any answer to my ring.”
She chewed the plum while her unintelligent face remained blank. After she had got rid of the plum stone, she said. “You should eat plums. You haven’t got a very healthy colour. I eat two pounds every day.”
From the shape of her that wasn’t all she ate.
“Well, maybe I’ll get around to them one day,” I said patiently. “Nurse Gurney doesn’t happen to be in your apartment?”
Her mind had wandered into the paper sack again, and she looked up, startled. “What was that?”
Whenever I run into a woman like this I am very, very glad I am a bachelor.
“Nurse Gurney.” I felt I wanted to make signs the way I do when I talk to a foreigner. “The one who lives in that apartment. I said she doesn’t happen to be in your apartment.”
The blue eyes went vague.
“Nurse Gurney?”
“That’s right.”
“In my apartment?”
I drew a deep breath.
“Yeah. She doesn’t happen to be in your apartment, does she?”
“Why should she be?”
I felt blood begin to sing in my ears.
“Well, you see, her front door was open. She doesn’t appear to be in her apartment. I wondered if she had popped over to have a word with you.”
Another plum came into view. I averted my eyes. Seeing those big teeth bite into so much fruit was beginning to undermine my mental stability.
“Oh, no, she hasn’t done that.”
Well, at least we were making progress.
“You wouldn’t know where she is?”
The plum stone appeared and dropped into the sack. A look of pain came over the fat, blank face. She thought. You could see her thinking the way you can see a snail move if you watch hard enough.
“She might be in the—the bathroom,” she said at last. “I should wait and ring again.”
Quite brilliant in a dumb kind of way.
“She’s not in there. I’ve looked.”
She was about to put the bite on another plum. Instead she lowered it to look reproachfully at me.
“That wasn’t a very nice thing to do.”
I took off my hat and ran my fingers through my hair. Much more of this and I would be walking up the wall.
“I knocked first,” I said, through clenched teeth. “Well, if she’s not with you I’ll go back and try again.”
She was still thinking. The look of pain was still on her face.
“I know what I would do if I were you,” she said.
I could guess, but I didn’t tell her. I had a feeling she would insult at the drop of a hat.
“Tell me,” I said.
“I’d go downstairs and see the janitor. He’s a very helpful man.” Then she spoilt it by adding, “Are you sure you won’t have a plum?”
“Yeah, I’m quite sure. Well, thanks, I’ll see the janitor like you said. Sorry to have taken up so much of your time.”
“Oh, you’re welcome,” she said, and smiled.
I backed away, and as she closed the door she put another plum into the maw she called her mouth.
I rode down the elevator to the lobby and walked down a flight of dark, dusty stairs to the basement. At the bottom of the stairs a door faced me. It bore a solitary legend: Janitor. I raised my hand and rapped. A lean old man with a long, stringy neck, dressed in faded dungarees, appeared. He was old and bored and smelt faintly of creosote and whisky. He squinted at me without interest, said one word out of a phlegmy old throat, “Yes?”
I had a feeling I wasn’t going to get much help out of him unless I shook him out of his lethargy. From the look of him he seldom came up out of the darkness, and his contacts with human beings were rare. He and Rip Van Winkle would have made a fine business team, providing Winkle took charge of things; not otherwise; decidedly not otherwise.
I leaned forward and hooked a finger in his pocket.
“Listen, pally,” I said, as tough as an Orchid City cop. “Shake the hay out of your hair. I want a little co- operation from you.” While I talked I rocked him to and fro. “Apartment 246—what gives?”
He swallowed his Adam’s apple twice. The second time I didn’t think it would come to the surface again, but eventually it did—but only just.
“What’s up?” he said, blinking. “What’s the matter with Apartment 246?”
“I’m asking you. Front door’s open; no one’s there. That’s where you come in, pally. You should know when a front door’s been left open.”
“She’s up there,” he said owlishly. “She’s always up there at this time.”
“Only this time she’s not. Come on, pally, you and me are going up there to take a look around.”
He went with me as meek as a lamb. As we rode in the elevator, he said feebly, “She’s always been a nice girl. What do the police want with her?”
“Did I say the police want anything with her?” I asked, and scowled at him. “All I want to know is why the front door’s open when she isn’t there.”
“Maybe she went out and forgot to shut it,” he said after turning the matter over in his mind. I could see he was pleased with this idea.
“Now you’re getting cute,” I said as the elevator came to a creaking standstill. I was glad to get out of it. It didn’t seem strong enough to haul one, let alone two people. “Did you see her go out?”
He said he hadn’t seen her go out.
“Would you have seen her if she went?”
“Yes.” He blinked, and his Adam’s apple jumped a couple of notches. “My room overlooks
