A. Fair: Owls Don't Blink

Bertha said, “Where do we talk?”

“At the hotel. I’ve got rooms. The town’s still pretty crowded — tourist season still on.”

“Suits me,” Bertha said. “You found out anything yet, Donald?”

I said, “I gathered from the air-mail letter you sent to me in Florida that Mr. Hale was to give me the details so I could start work.”

“He is,” Bertha said. “I told you generally what he wanted in that letter. You must have been here three days already.”

“One day and two nights.”

Hale smiled.

Bertha didn’t. She said, “You look it.”

A taxi took us to a modern hotel in the business part of the city. It might have been any one of half a dozen large cities. There was nothing to indicate the romantic French Quarter which was within half a dozen blocks.

“Did Miss Fenn stay here?” Hale asked.

I said, “No. She stayed at the Monteleone.”

“How long?”

“About a week.”

“And then?”

“She walked out and never came back, just disappeared into thin air.”

“Didn’t take her baggage?” Hale asked.

“No.”

“Just a week,” he said. “I can’t believe it.”

Bertha said, “I’ve got a date with a bathtub. You haven’t had breakfast, have you, lover?”

I said, “No.”

“You look like the wrath of God.”

“Sorry.”

“You aren’t sick, are you?”

“No.”

Hale said, “I’ll retire to my room and get some of the dust and grime removed. And I think I can do a little better job of shaving than I did at this early hour on the train. I’ll see you in — how soon?”

“Half an hour,” Bertha said.

Hale nodded and went down the corridor to his own room.

Bertha turned to me. “Are you holding out?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I want to find out more things from Hale before I tell him everything.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know — just a hunch.”

“What are you holding out?”

I said, “Roberta Fenn stayed at the Monteleone Hotel. She ordered a package sent C.O.D., a dress she’d had fitted and on which she’d paid a twenty-dollar deposit. There was another ten dollars due. The dress came after she left. It stayed there for about a week, and then the hotel sent it back to the store. They had a record of it on the hotel books.”

“Well,” Bertha said impatiently, “ that doesn’t tell us anything.”

I said, “Three or four days after the dress was returned, Miss Fenn rang up the store, said if they’d send the package down to Edna Cutler on St. Peter Street, Miss Fenn would leave the money with Miss Cutler to pay the C.O.D.”

“Who was Edna Cutler?” Bertha asked,

“Roberta Fenn.”

“You’re certain?”

“Yes.”

“How did you find out?”

“The woman who rented the apartment to her identified the photograph.”

“Why on earth would Roberta Fenn have done anything like that?” Bertha asked.

I said, “I don’t know either. Here’s something else.” I opened my wallet, took out a personal I had clipped from a morning paper, and handed it to Bertha.

“What is it?” she asked.

“A personal that’s been running every day for two years. The newspaper won’t give out any information about it.”

“Read it to me,” Bertha said. “My glasses are in my purse.”

I read her the ad: “Rob F. Please communicate with me. I haven’t ceased loving you for one minute since you left. Come back, darling. P.N.”

“Been running for two years!” Bertha exclaimed.

“Yes.”

“You think Rob F. is Roberta Fenn?”

“It could be.”

“Shall we tell Hale all this?”

“Not now. Let him tell us all he knows first.”

“And you aren’t even going to tell him about this ad in the agony column?”

“Not yet. Have you got a check out of him?”

Bertha’s eyes grew indignant. “What the hell do you take me for? Of course I’ve got a check out of him.”

I said, “All right, let’s find out what he knows first, and tell him what we know a little later on.”

“How about that apartment? Can we get in and look around?”

“Yes.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

“Without arousing suspicion?”

“Yes. I slept there last night.”

“ You did!”

“Yes.”

“How did you arrange that?”

“I rented it for a week.”

Bertha’s face darkened. “My God, you must think the agency’s made of money! The minute I turn my back on you, you go around squandering dough. We could have got in there just the same by telling the landlady we wanted to rent it, and—”

“I know,” I interrupted, “but I wanted to go over the place with a fine-tooth comb and see if there was anything that she might have left there, any clue to what had happened.”

“Did you find anything?”

“No.”

Bertha snorted. “You’d have done a lot better to have stayed here and got a night’s sleep. All right, get the hell out and let Bertha get cleaned up. Where do we eat?”

“I’ll show you a place. Ever had a pecan waffle?”

“A what?”

“A waffle with pecans in it.”

“Good God, no! I’ll eat my nuts as nuts, and my waffles as waffles. And I’m going to check out of this hotel and go live in that apartment. We won’t have it a dead expense if I do that. When it comes to money matters, you—”

I slipped out into the corridor. The closing door bit off the rest of her sentence.

Hale pushed away his plate so as to clear a place on the table in front of him. “I’m taking the ten-thirty plane to New York,” he said, “so I’ll have to talk while Mrs. Cool finishes her waffle — if you don’t mind, Mrs. Cool?”

Bertha said, her words thickened somewhat by a mouthful of her second pecan waffle, “Go right ahead.”

Hale picked up his briefcase, propped it on his lap, and folded back the flap so he could have ready access to the interior of it.

“Roberta Fenn was twenty-three years old in 1939. That would make her approximately twenty-six at the present time. I have here some additional photographs — I believe Mrs. Cool sent you some photographs by air mail, Lam.”

“Yes, I have them.”

“Well, here are some additional ones showing her in different poses.”

He shot his hand down in the briefcase, pulled out an envelope, and handed it to me. “There’s also a more detailed description in there. Height, five feet four; weight, one hundred and ten; hair, dark; eyes, hazel; figure, perfect; teeth, regular; complexion, clear olive, skin very smooth.”

Bertha Cool caught the eye of the Negro waitress and beckoned her over. She said, “I want another one of those pecan waffles.”

I asked Bertha, “Are you trying to fit those clothes you threw away a year ago?”

She became instantly belligerent. “Shut up! I guess I—” She realized a cash customer was present and bottled up her temper. “I eat only one good meal a day,” she explained to Hale with something that wasn’t a smile, not yet a smirk. “Usually it’s dinner, but if I eat a heavy breakfast and go light on dinner, the result is the same.”

Hale studied her. “You’re just the right weight to be healthy,” he said. “You’re muscular and vigorous. It’s really surprising the amount of energy you have.”

Bertha said, “Well, go ahead with the facts. I’m sorry we interrupted you.” She glared at me and added, “And I didn’t throw those clothes away. I’ve got them stored in a cedar closet.”

Hale said, “Well, let’s see. Oh, yes, Roberta Fenn was twenty-three when she disappeared. She was an agency model in New York. She posed for some of the ads, the petty stuff. She never got the best-advertised products. Her legs were marvelous. She did a lot of stocking work — some bathing-suit and underwear stuff. It seems incredible a young woman who had been photographed so much could disappear.”