A. Fair - Owls Don't Blink

“How about newspaper clippings?”

“I told Elsie Brand to go down to the library and copy stuff from the files of the newspapers. Donald, you’ve simply got to get busy and find that girl.”

“Which one?”

“Roberta Fenn.”

“I found her once.”

“Well, find her twice,” Bertha said with a flash of temper.

“I’m worried about Hale.”

“What about him?”

“He’s carrying water on both shoulders.”

“Now you listen to me, Donald Lam. We aren’t conducting a society to purify the motives of our clients. We’re running a detective agency. We’re trying to make money out of it. If a client comes to me and says he wants to find someone, and puts up the money, it’s the money that really does the talking.”

“So I gathered.”

“And that’s business.”

“Perhaps.”

“Oh, I know it isn’t your way. You go around charging windmills. You think that just because we’re running a detective agency, we’re supposed to be knights of the Round Table. You find damsels in distress and fall for them, and they fall for you, and—”

“But I’m still worried about Hale.”

“So am I. I’m afraid he’s not going to pay us our bonus.”

“Didn’t you put the agreement in writing?”

“Well — well, there’s a chance he might squirm out of it on a technicality — just a technicality, you understand. What worries you about him?”

I said, “Let’s look at it this way. Hale came from New York. He hired us in Los Angeles to find a girl in New Orleans. It was absurdly easy to find her.”

“But Hale didn’t know that,” she said.

“The hell he didn’t. Hale knew exactly where she was living. He could have put his finger on her at any moment. He’d been out with her just before he came to see us.”

“That may not mean anything.”

I said, “All right, we’ll pass that and go on to something else.”

She said, “Nix on that stuff, Donald. That’s what Hale said he wouldn’t stand for.”

“Why did he say that?”

“I don’t know. Probably because he didn’t want to be bothered by having us waste our time and his money on a lot of foolishness.”

I said, “We found Roberta. You were to go and see her the next morning. Hale was supposed to be in New York. He wasn’t in New York. He was in New Orleans.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because I checked up at the airport. The man who traveled to New York and back using the name of Emory G. Hale weighed a hundred and forty-six pounds.”

“Perhaps the weight was wrong.”

I smiled at her.

“Oh, don’t be so damned superior! Go ahead, if you feel that way about it. Tell me the rest of it.”

I said, “You put in a call for Hale at New York. You couldn’t get him, but Hale called you and said he was calling from New York, or some intermediate point where the plane was grounded. You don’t know whether he was or not. No one knows. He could have been within a block of the hotel. All he needed was some girl to say into the telephone, ‘New York is calling Mrs. Bertha Cool. Is this she? Hold the line, please.’ ”

Bertha’s eyes were ominous. “Go ahead. Get it all out of your system.”

“When he showed up in New Orleans the next morning and I told him I’d found Roberta Fenn and we started down to her apartment, he knew she wasn’t there.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because he went along with me.”

“What does that have to do with it?”

“Don’t you understand? She knew him as Archibald C. Smith. The minute she saw him, she would have said, ‘Why, how do you do, Mr. Smith? What brings you here?’ Then the cat would have been out of the bag. He knew that. Therefore, if he had thought she was there, he’d have sent me down alone to call on her.”

Bertha was interested now. “Anything else?”

“Lots of it.”

“What?”

“The only real witness to that exact time of the shooting is a girl by the name of Marilyn Winton. She’s a nightclub hostess. She was just entering the apartment house when she heard the sound of the shot. She looked at her wrist watch a few minutes later. She places the shot as being at exactly two-thirty-two.”

“What about her?”

I said, “Emory Hale was seen entering that apartment house at about twenty minutes past two.”

“You mean that’s where he was when he was supposed to have been in New York?”

“Yes.”

“Who saw him?”

“I can’t tell you.”

Her face darkened. “What the hell do you mean you can’t tell me?”

“Exactly that. It’s confidential as yet.”

She glared at me as though she wanted to bite my head off. “Some girl,” she said. “Some little trollop who’s trying to take you for a ride tells you that she saw Hale entering the apartment house, and you mustn’t say anything, just keep it confidential. So you turn your own partner down because some little petticoat with a sweet smile looks languishingly up into your eyes, and gives you the works. Bosh!”

I said, “One other person told me that was true.”

“Who?”

“Hale.”

“Donald — do you mean to say that you talked with him about it? Why, the one thing that he impressed upon us was that, under no circumstances, were we to start speculating about him. He wanted—”

“Take it easy,” I interrupted. “He didn’t tell me about it in words. He told me about it by his actions.”

“What do you mean?”

I said, “He became anxious to meet this Marilyn Winton. I arranged to take him to the nightclub. We poured four or five drinks down each other. He was trying to find out how much I knew. I was trying to find out what he wanted.”

“Did you make him pay for the drinks?”

“Certainly. I may be dumb on financial matters, but I’m not that dumb.”

“What did you find out?”

“He got to talking with Marilyn Winton about the time she’d heard the shot, whether she was absolutely certain it was two-thirty-two and not three o’clock.”

“Well?”

“She told him that it was two-thirty-two by her wrist watch. So Hale admired the watch and asked her to let him look at it.”

“Well, what’s with that?”

“At the time,” I said, “he was drinking Coca-Cola and gin.”

“And what does that have to do with what we’re talking about?” she demanded impatiently.

I said, “He put the drink down below the table, holding it in between his knees while he turned the wrist watch around, looking at.it. A floor show was on, and the lights were dim. His right hand, holding the wrist watch, dropped below the table for a few seconds. After that he blew his nose a couple of times and whipped his handkerchief around rather promiscuously. Then he put the glass back on the table, and while he was doing that, put the wrist watch in the handkerchief. Then he handed the wrist watch back. Marilyn held a napkin to it. Then she moistened the napkin in a glass of water and moved it along her wrist just underneath the wrist watch.”

“Don’t bother me with all that stuff,” Bertha said. “What’s all that got to do with it? What do I care how many times he blew his nose? Just so he pays the money, he can blow his damn head off, for all I care. He—”

“You don’t get it,” I said. “The thing the girl did-putting water on her napkin and rubbing it along her wrist — that’s the significant thing.”

“Why?”

I said, “The wrist watch was sticky.”

“I don’t get you.”

I said, “You dip a wrist watch in a glass of gin and Coca-Cola, leave it in there for a minute or so, and then bring it out, wipe it off hastily with a handkerchief, and the watch is apt to be sticky — enough sugar in the Coca-Cola, you know.”