Стюарт Стерлинг - Collection of Stories

Thrilling Detective, July 1940

When Gil Vine laid three cents on the cigar stand in the lobby of his office building and said: “Times,” he noticed a pair of legs. Good-looking’ legs they were, encased in sheer chiffon, standing by the elevator bank. He glanced up, but the fur collar of her coat was pulled up around her face so he could only see a pair of hazel-green eyes watching him intently.

When the tobacconist gave him his morning paper with the greeting, “Looks like a real snowstorm, Mister Vine,” the proprietor of the Vine Investigating Agency saw the girl start violently. And after he’d entered the up-car and the girl followed, there was no further doubt in his mind. This girl was waiting for him and she didn’t want anyone else to know about it

He got off at the fourth. The girl tagged along a few feet behind, all the way down the corridor.

“Come on in,” he said without turning his head. “Nobody around.”

She gasped. “Gilbert Vine?” she said, softly.

“Yeah.” He acted as if it was an every day occurrence for a smartly-dressed girl to trail him cautiously to his office door. “Close the door. That’s right. The armchair, there, is for clients. Sit down and catch your breath.”

He was doing his best to put her at ease, but she didn’t react. She sat down, threw open her coat and waited, white-faced and grim. When he had slid into the swivel chair behind his desk, she said:

“You used to know Bill Corinth, Mister Vine?”

“Sure. Bill and I worked out of the same office for the F.B.I. Bill send you to me?”

The detective saw her lips tremble.

“Not exactly. He used to talk about you a lot. He always said if he were in a jam, he’d rather have you working for him than the whole police force, so...”

Gil Vine grinned. When he grinned, a network of crinkles formed at the corners of his eyes and his long bony face seemed suddenly to contradict the steel in his gray eyes and the iron in his grizzled hair.

“I’ll buy Bill a drink on that.”

“You can’t — not anymore.”

Tears welled up in her eyes. Her voice was unsteady.

“I didn’t know.” He reached over and patted her sleeve. “Want to tell me about it? Bill was a damn good friend of mine.”

She looked miserably down at her lap.

“He was a good friend of mine, too. We were going to be married.”

Vine waited. There was something more to this than heartbroken distress. He couldn’t figure what it was. She pointed to the folded newspaper he had laid on the desk.

“It’s in there. He was killed. Last night.”

Vine flipped the paper open, found the heading:

She went on, and her voice was husky as she spoke.

“The terrible thing is, the police think I killed him.”

He rattled the paper without looking up.

“It doesn’t say that here, Miss...”

“Estabrook. Louise Estabrook. It’s almost as bad as that. It says, ‘a citywide search is under way for the young woman who accompanied Mister Corinth to the skating rink at the Radio City Plaza last night.’ I was with him. But I didn’t...”

“Of course you didn’t,” he said, soothingly. “Probably the police don’t believe you did, either. But they have to say something to reporters. And they will want to question you.”

“They’ll arrest me,” she insisted, “but I don’t care about that. It doesn’t make any difference what happens to me, now Bill’s dead. The only thing I want is to see that the person who murdered Bill is made to pay for it. So I’ve come to you.”

He stood up, walked over to the window and watched the snow for a minute, with his back to her. Then he said:

“I’ll do what I can — on one condition.”

She nodded. “Anything.”

“It’ll be tough. You’ll have to give yourself up.”

“Go to prison for something that I didn’t do?”

He made an impatient gesture.

“You’re a long way from a cell. Even if they hold you without bail, I wouldn’t worry. Look at it this way — if you had murdered Bill, sooner or later, they’d shove you in the jug, anyway. Since you didn’t, your being arrested may throw the real murderer off his guard for a while. Now” — he tapped the newspaper with his forefinger — “tell me the straight of it. What did they leave out here? How much of this is on the level and how much is hoke, made up by someone on the rewrite desk?”

She thought for long seconds before replying.

“What they’ve got is true, as far as it goes. Bill called me for dinner last night. We went over to one of those steak places, off Broadway. He didn’t seem to have his mind on the meal at all. Once, when I asked him if there was anything wrong, he said” — she caught her breath — “ ‘Not between you and me, there isn’t, hon. Don’t mind me. I’m just trying to dope something out.’ Then, after dinner, we walked back through Fiftieth Street. Out of a clear sky, Bill suggested we go down to the glass-enclosed restaurant beside the skating rink at the Plaza and have a couple of drinks.”

Vine made his swivel chair squeak.

“Seems to me I read something about an ice show they’ve got there this week.”

She nodded. “The St. Moritz troupe. Fancy skaters and a couple of those daredevils who jump through blazing hoops. Anyway, we got a table where we could watch, but before the waiter brought our order, Bill got up and said, ‘I’m going to make a couple of phone calls, honey. Don’t worry if I’m not back right away’.”

“What time was this?” asked the detective.

“It must have been half-past nine when he went away and that — that was the last time I saw him.”

“You didn’t see him meet anyone? Talk with anyone?”

She bit her lips to keep from crying.

“No. I just waited there for him to come back. He never did. I watched the troupe do their set and then got dizzy following the crowd on the ice, skating round and round. Finally, when the music stopped and the lights went out and everybody went home, I decided Bill simply wasn’t coming back, so I paid the check and went home, too.”

“Didn’t you try to get in touch with him?” Vine asked.

“Oh, yes. I phoned his hotel half a dozen times. He hadn’t come in. I was worried, of course, but it never occurred to me anything serious had happened to him. Then I opened my paper this morning and learned he’d been found in the lower courtyard of the Plaza, his head crushed in and the ice underneath him all...”

She flung her arms on the desk, buried her face and wept soundlessly.

He let her cry for awhile.

“We better get it over with, Miss Estabrook.”

She lifted her head, dully.

“If I’m going to be arrested on a charge of murder, shouldn’t I get a lawyer?”

He shook his head. “Don’t bother with that, yet. They won’t charge you with homicide. Worst they’ll do is hold you a couple days for investigation.”

They went down to the street, and walked over to the Forty-seventh Street station. Just before they went up the steps between the green globes, he gripped her arm.

“You’re not holding anything back, are you? Because if I’m going to work on this thing, I need to know all there is to know.”

“I haven’t the slightest idea why Bill was killed or who did it — or anything,” she said. “He never talked to me about his work.”