Deadline at Dawn полностью

She lopped that off short. “Nuh, never. That’s one thing, if you knew more about women— You’ll never find a woman using another woman for go-between, in a squeeze-play stemming from heart-interest stuff. Don’t ask me why, but that’s the hard-and-fast of it. A man might, in business or some kind of crookedness. But never a woman, in anything of this kind. She either does the dirty work herself, or it doesn’t get done.”

“Then he wasn’t tangled with her. And yet she had something on him.”

“And he knew she had something on him, or at least had a hunch she did. The way he acted after getting the note shows that. He met the writer of it part of the way, on her own ground. Look, see what I mean? Barbara was jealous of another kind of a note, which she thought this was. Of a friendly, a too-friendly note, from somebody that he knew, that he was flirting with behind her back. All he had to do to calm her down was show her this, show her what kind of a note it really was. But he’d rather keep it to himself, even at the cost of letting her work herself up and of parting from her on bad terms. Why shouldn’t he want to show it to her? Or better still, why didn’t he get up from the table then and there, go over and accost the woman before she left the place. ‘What d’you mean by this? Who are you? What’re you driving at?’ Force the thing out into the open.” She shook her head. “He had more than a slight suspicion that there was something behind it that needed to be handled with kid gloves, and you can’t tell me different. That she had at least part of a leg to stand on, if not the whole two; that there was fire somewhere behind the smoke. He played it her way, soft-pedalled it. And why should he have to? People don’t do that. Would you—?” Then she quickly cancelled that out. “Oh, never mind you; you’re no good at that stuff, anyway. I forgot that, from before.”

He had been prepared to look flattered for a moment; he let the look slip off again.

“In other words,” she went ahead, “it rang the bell somewhere or other, deep inside him, when he got it. It wasn’t just a bluff, out of thin air.”

She was starting to get herself together, as if ready to go out again. “All that’s neither here nor there. The main thing is, we’ve got her now. I’m almost sure we’ve got her. And I’m going out and find her.”

“But we still don’t know her name, what she looks like, where she hangs out.”

“We can’t expect life-sized photographs to be handed us in this. I think we’re doing pretty good as it is, starting in from scratch the way we did. At least she’s become a live person now, she’s real, instead of being just a will-o’-the-wisp like she was until now. Just a whiff of perfume in a room, that’s already gone. We know that she was at the Perroquet around midnight; she must have been seen there. His girl told you something about her. What was it, now? A tall redhead, a light-green dress. Number Three on the conga-line. They can’t all have been tall redheads in light-green dresses down there tonight.” She flung her hands encouragingly wide, to impress it on him. “Look at all we’ve got!”

“The place’ll be closing by now.”

“The people that count, the people that can really help, they’ll still be around. Waiters, checkroom girl, washroom attendant, all like that. I’ll trace her from there if I have to go over the hairbrushes in the dressing-room one by one for stray red hairs—”

“I’m going with you.” He went over to the bedroom-doorway, put out the light in there. Then he went toward the bath. “Just a minute,” he said, “I want to get a drink of water in here, before we go.”

She went on out to the stairs without waiting. She thought he’d be right after her. Then because he wasn’t, she stopped and waited, two or three steps down from the top. Then because he still didn’t come, she turned and went back again the two or three steps, and into the lighted room once more.

She could see him standing there motionless just past the bath-entrance. She knew even before she went in and joined him, that he’d found something, that he’d seen something, by the intent, arrested way he was holding himself.

“What is it?”

“I called you and you didn’t hear me. This was lying in the tub. That shower-curtain must have hidden it from us until now. When I was getting a drink, my elbow grazed the curtain and it fell further back than it was. And this was there, on the dry bottom of the tub.”

It was light blue and he was holding it taut between both hands.

“A check,” she said. “Someone’s personal check. Let me see—”

It was made out to Stephen Graves, for twelve thousand five hundred dollars and no cents. It was endorsed by Stephen Graves. It was signed by Arthur Holmes. It was stamped, in damning letters diagonally across the face of it: Returned — No Funds.

They exchanged a puzzled look across it, she now holding one end, he the other. “How’d a thing like this get into the bottom of a bathtub?” she marvelled.