He stood up again. They looked at one another uncertainly; at a loss, not knowing what to do next.
“It’s not on him, that’s a cinch. He may have put it somewhere around the place here, after he got back. The desk — we haven’t looked that over yet.”
“That’s going to be an all-night job,” she said, going over to it. “Look at the way it’s crammed with stuff. I tell you what; you go inside and take a look through the bureau-drawers, I’ll give this a quick going-over.”
“Quinn!” she called suddenly.
He came in on the fly.
“You mean it was in there? You came across it that quick?”
She was standing, however, with her back to the desk.
“No. Quinn, he was very well-dressed. I just happened to turn and something caught my eye. He has a hole in the heel of one sock, it’s showing just above the shoe. That doesn’t go with the way he’s turned out. The left one, Quinn.” He was already over by it.
The shoe dropped off with a light thud. The “hole” had vanished with it.
“The note,” he said.
He was already smoothing and starting to read the crumpled little slip of paper by the time she got over to him. They read it together the rest of the way.
It was hastily scrawled in pencil, on some impromptu edge that didn’t take pressure very evenly; the sort of a note written where there were no writing facilities readily available.
“Mr. Graves, I understand? I would like to speak to you in private, at your home, after you have taken the young lady home. And I don’t mean some other time, I mean right tonight. You don’t know me, but I feel like a member of the family already. I wouldn’t want to be disappointed and not find you there.”
Unsigned.
She was hectically elated. “She did, see? She did! She did come up here. She was the woman of the matches — we were right about it. I forget which one of us it was—”
He was less positive, for some reason. “But the mere fact that he received the note and tucked it in his shoe doesn’t prove she actually did show up here.”
“She was here, you can count on that.”
“How do we know?”
“Listen, anyone that would go this far would go the rest of the way, don’t kid yourself. This was no shrinking violet. A girl or woman that would scribble out such a defiant note, and strong-arm her way onto a conga-line, and smuggle it into the hand of a prominent well-to-do man like Stephen Graves, without even knowing him, mind you, and under the very nose of the girl he was engaged to marry, wouldn’t let anything stop her from coming around here and calling on him, once she’d made up her mind to it! Get this: ‘And I don’t mean some other time, I mean right tonight.’ That dame was
Then she added, “And if the character-reading approach doesn’t cinch it for you, give it the blindfold-test. That ought to do it.”
“What do you mean?”
“She goes with the kind of perfume that the match-folder gave off, and that I guessed at in the air of the room here when we came in the first time. The kind of a dame who would write a note like this is also the kind of a dame whose handbag would reek like that. She was
“It still doesn’t follow from that, that she shot him. She might have been here all right, and left, and then this cigar-mangling guy came in after she was already gone.”
“I don’t know anything about him. I do know there’s plenty of shooting-material right here in this note, even before she got to the point of personal contact with him.”
“There is kind of a threat in it,” he admitted.
“A threat? The whole thing is threat, from the first word to the last. ‘Mr. Graves, I understand?’ ‘I wouldn’t want to be disappointed and not find you.’ What else would you call that?”
He was reading it over again. “It’s some kind of a shake, don’t you think?”
“Sure it’s a shake. A threat almost always spells a money-squeeze, and particularly when it’s from a woman to a man.”
“ ‘I feel like a member of the family already.’ What does she mean by that? He was engaged to this Barbara. It makes it look like it’s someone he got tangled up with before then, and when she heard about him becoming engaged— All except for one thing—”
“Yeah, I thought of that too, when I first read it. All except for that one thing, as you say.”
“ ‘You don’t know me.’ So how can a guy get tangled up with someone, and still not know her? Unless maybe she’s fronting for some other dame, making the approach. She’s the, how would you call it — middleman? Maybe a sister, or someone like that.”
