A. Fair: Owls Don't Blink

Pellingham nodded.

“He wasn’t,” I said.

“How do you know he wasn’t?”

“Because we watched the building. He didn’t leave. No one left the building, except a somewhat elderly woman. Then the police came.”

Pellingham said, “That’s the strange thing about it. After the police got that anonymous tip over the telephone, two detectives went down there. They rang Fenn’s apartment, and somebody buzzed the door open. They went up, and there was no one in the apartment.”

I said, “The night I went up to call on Roberta Fenn, Nostrander knocked at the door. He hadn’t buzzed the outer door. Roberta stalled him along, and then told me I’d better leave. I left right after Nostrander did. When I got out of the street door, I looked up and down the street. I didn’t see Nostrander anywhere.”

“Well, what’s the answer?” Pellingham asked impatiently.

I said, “Nostrander must have had some other friend in the apartment house, a friend on whom he’d been calling pretty regularly. It’s pretty reasonable to suppose that this would be a girl friend, and that when she realized that Nostrander was still infatuated with Roberta Fenn she’d be pretty jealous. Marilyn Winton has the apartment right across the hall from Roberta’s apartment.”

“After the murder, various people came to that apartment house, rang the bell of Roberta Fenn’s apartment, and the entrance door was promptly buzzed open. If Roberta Fenn had returned to her apartment, she’d have been killed, but whenever the wrong people entered the apartment, they didn’t find anybody there. What every one has overlooked is that the occupant of any apartment can press the buzzer which opens the street door . Figure it out for yourself.”

Pellingham scowled savagely.

I said, “Marilyn Winton says she heard the sounds of the murder taking place at two-thirty. She’s the only one that did. I think if you give Hale the right sort of third degree, you’ll find that he was actually talking with Nostrander at about two-thirty. Suppose after he left, Marilyn Winton walked into Roberta Fenn’s apartment, looking for a showdown.”

“But she heard the sound of a muted shot at two-thirty.”

“She says she did. If I intended to go into someone’s apartment and kill him at three o’clock, I could manufacture a pretty good alibi by telling my friends that just as I opened the street door of the apartment I’d heard a shot at two-thirty, couldn’t I?”

Pellingham kept looking at me as though I’d jerked a veil from in front of his eyes.

Bertha Cool said, ‘“Fry me for an oyster!”

Pellingham gave a low whistle. He reached a sudden decision. “All right, Lam,” he said, “you’re going back to New Orleans with me.”

“That’s what you think,” I told him, and walked up the stairs and through the entrance to the Navy Recruiting Bureau, before either of them knew where I was going.

I said to the man behind the desk. “Donald Lam reporting for duty.”

“Okay, sailor. Go through that door. There’s a bus waiting out in back, get in.”

Bertha and Pellingham got in each other’s way, each trying to get through the door first. Pellingham had forgotten his Southern manners.

A man in uniform stuck a bayonet across in front of them. They stopped as though they’d been figures performing on a picture screen and the film had stopped.

Pellingham pointed his finger at me. “I want that man.”

The man behind the desk said, “So does Uncle Sam.”

I turned and blew a kiss to Bertha. “I’ll send you a postal card from Tokyo,” I said, and walked through the back door.

I read about the blowoff in the paper as I was approaching San Francisco on a train packed with young Americans who were looking for a scrap.

Hale had told the whole story as soon as he realized he wasn’t going to get hooked for murder. He’d been shadowing Nostrander. Everything else had failed. He wanted Nostrander to admit that the service of the papers on the wrong woman was a put-up job. He found Nostrander in Roberta Fenn’s apartment, and Nostrander was drunk. Hale had been prepared to offer him a ten-thousand-dollar bribe to sell out, and because he didn’t want to get hooked for bribery in case Nostrander refused, he’d built up an elaborate alibi that.would make it appear he’d gone to New York by plane.

Marilyn Winton had been placed under arrest. Police had the deadwood on her. She’d been trying to get Nostrander to marry her. That was the unfortunate love affair which had turned her sour on the world.

Marco Cutler had confessed to the murder of Craig, but he still insisted that police had planted the gun. He claimed that he’d actually ditched the murder weapon in New Orleans in an apartment which had formerly been occupied by Roberta Fenn so that his detective, Hale, could bring pressure to bear on Roberta.

As the train pulled into San Jose and stopped for twenty minutes, I sent Bertha Cool a wire:

Edna Cutler should be good for a ten thousand fee because we have brought undisclosed assets into the community funds. Silk stockings aren’t made in Japan, Will send you a cherry blossom instead. Love.

The man at the Western Union counted the words, took my money, said, “You’ll want to put an address on this, Mr. Lam, where the party can reply?”

I didn’t crack a smile. “Care U.S.N., Tokyo,” I said.

He wrote it down.