Margery Allingham - Ellery Queen’s Anthology. 1960

I didn’t call Graves. I went to his apartment, a brownstone in the East Fifties. He opened the door to me, and when he saw me his face went the color of the chartreuse walls in his living-room.

“Vance!” He didn’t try to stop my coming in. There was a glass shaker of Martinis on the coffee table in front of the fireplace. Our Austin had been drinking alone.

“What’s the matter with you? You look sick,” I said.

“Is there any news about Erika?” he asked.

“Would I be here if there was? When did you hear she was missing, and how? It hasn’t been made public.”

“Miss Adams called me.”

I should have known Kathy would be miles ahead of me.

“I told her all I know,” Austin said. “I bumped into Erika on Fifth Avenue around 6 yesterday, and invited her to the Bijou Club for a cocktail. We sat around for an hour or so. I... I tried to persuade her to have dinner with me, but she said she had another date.”

“Who with?”

“She didn’t say.”

“Why are your hands shaking?” I asked him.

He stuffed them in his pocket. “I’m worried about Erika,” he said.

“Why? She’s just gone off with some friends and forgot to let us know.”

He didn’t say anything to that. He just stood there, wetting his lips.

“You got a different theory than that?” I asked him.

He shook his head.

“Then what are you worried about?”

“Layne being murdered,” he said, “and then Erika not turning up.”

“You think there’s a connection?”

“Look, Vance; I—”

“You’ve been thick as thieves with Erika for months,” I said. “You must know where she went after she left you.”

“So help me, Vance, I don’t. We separated at the Bijou Club about 7 — and that’s the last I saw of her. This noon I read about Layne in the papers. I tried to call Erika at home but the phone was always busy. Finally Miss Adams called me, and I heard Erika hadn’t come home last night and was still missing.”

“What did you do after Erika left you last night?”

“I... I ate dinner at the Bijou and came back here.”

There was something about him I couldn’t put my finger on. Concern for Erika was natural, but he acted scared out of his wits.

“Listen, Austin; if I find out you’re not telling me everything you know, so help me I’m coming back here and take you apart, piece by piece.”

“Why shouldn’t I tell you everything I know?” he said.

“I’m darned if I know, Austin, but for some reason you don’t smell good to me.”

“I swear I’ve told you everything I know,” he said. For a minute I thought he was going to cry...

When I got out into the cool night air again I began to work on really big ideas — technicolor ideas. I started thinking about Joe Ricardo, and the leak from Mike’s files, and Ricardo’s little frame-up of the phony item. I wondered if Ricardo was playing rough. He might think he could use Erika as a means of twisting Mike’s arm, and was waiting for Mike to get good and worried before he put the twist on. My ideas were big, and I felt brave.

I went straight up to Ricardo’s hotel suite and asked to see him, which was not much less foolhardy than the Charge of the Light Brigade.

A smooth guy let me into the place and nobody acted tough at all. I had to wait only a minute or two before somebody took me into a small living-room where Ricardo was sitting at a desk going over some papers. Ricardo is strictly not a movie-type mobster. He has gray hair and a friendly face and you can tell he spends time at a gym keeping down his waistline.

“Hello, Vance,” he said; “you’re too late.”

“What do you mean, too late?”

“The cop beat you to it.”

“What cop? What are you talking about?”

He looked a little bored with me. “McCuller. What other cop?”

“Look, Joe; let’s start over,” I said. “And this time make some sense.”

Ricardo leaned back in his chair. “Tell Mike I’m surprised at him. He ought to know I always play it strictly on the level.”

“Joke,” I said, “but I don’t get the point.”

“I could get annoyed with you, Vance,” Ricardo said. “I would not frame an alibi for anybody, not even my mother. I might need to be believed some day on my own account, so I couldn’t risk a phony.”

“Frame an alibi?”

“Even if I would have done it, I’m not a mind reader, Vance. If Mike wanted me to say he was here for two hours instead of about 25 minutes he should have said so.”

It seemed suddenly very hot in there and Ricardo’s face looked blurred. I wasn’t sure I’d heard him correctly. “Mike didn’t need you to say he’d been here for two hours last night. I said so. I know. I waited for him across the street.”

Ricardo’s shoulders rose and fell. “I didn’t say you weren’t across the street for two hours, Vance. But Mike wasn’t here for more than 25 minutes and I’m not going to perjure myself to say so. I told McCuller the truth.”

“I want to get this straight,” I said. “I came in here with Mike. I saw him go up in the elevator. Then I went across the street and waited—”

“There are about five different ways out of this hotel, Vance.” He let that sink in for a long time and I swear there was a look of sympathy on his face.

“I don’t know what’s going on, Vance,” he said. “Confidential stuff has been leaking, and I’ve proved it. Mike has had a reputation for honesty. That’s why he gets away with what he gets away with. Now he offers the cops a phony alibi. His ex-son-in-law is murdered, one daughter is arrested for that murder, and the other daughter disappears. I don’t know what’s going on, as I said. But don’t stick your neck out too far, Vance, until you know what you’re sticking it out for. That’s just common sense.”

When I got down into the lobby of Ricardo’s hotel I was still trying to juggle times and motives in my head. It had been about midnight when Mike and I went to Ricardo’s the night before. That meant that from 12:30, roughly, until 2, when he picked me up in the bar across the street, Mike had been on the loose somewhere. He’d left me sitting in that bar for an hour and a half while he went somewhere he didn’t want me to know about. Somewhere like Waldo Layne’s room.

A blind anger swept over me. If that was it, then he was deliberately letting Joan take the rap for something he knew she hadn’t done! That wasn’t like Mike, though. He always played dead level, even with people he had no use for, and he couldn’t hate Joan that much! But suddenly I had to know what he’d been up to. I couldn’t spill anything until I had the answers.

I tried to put myself in his place after his talk with Ricardo, when he’d discovered, without any question, that someone was leaking the stuff out of his files. The story was that somebody had called up Johnson, Ricardo’s friend, and tried to blackmail him with the framed story. The somebody had been a man. If I’d been Mike, and I wanted to start checking, I’d have gone to see Johnson and asked him about the phone conversation.

Johnson is a threatrical producer and I knew he had an office at the theater where his production of Underdog is running. I went there to see him. It was about 40 minutes before curtain time and he was in his office on the second floor of the theater. He wasn’t too cordial, but he saw me. He was a nice-looking, fairly young man.

“If Malvern wanted any more information from me he should have come himself,” Johnson said.

“I’m here on my own,” I said. “If you’ve heard the news today you know things are pretty messed up in Mike’s life.”

“That’s the understatement of the week.”