The battle was joined. A battle in which her only weapons were her wits, her sheer nerve, and the feminine intuition that even a little chain-dancer is never without. She knew that from this point on every veiled glance she cast around her, every slightest move she made, must be made to count, because there would be no quarter given, no second chances.
The room was empty, apparently. A door, presumably to a bath, was already firmly closed when her eyes first found it, but the knob had just stopped turning, hadn’t quite fallen still yet. If it appeared that she didn’t know too much, the door would stay that way, wouldn’t open again. But if it developed she knew too much— Therein lay her cue; how to find out just what there was to know here, and what too much of it was. That door would tell her. She already had a yardstick to measure her own progress.
For the rest, drawers in the shabby bureau were out at narrow, uneven lengths, as though they had recently been emptied. A Gladstone bag stood on the floor at the foot of the bed. The bag was full, ready for removal. A number of objects were strewn about on top of the bureau, as though the room’s occupant had returned in some turmoil, flung them down on entering. There was a woman’s handbag, a pair of gloves, a crumpled handkerchief. The handbag had been left yawning open, as if the agitated hand that had plunged into it in search of something had been too hurried to close it again.
The Bristol woman sidled in after her, surreptitiously ground something out under her toe, but then a moment later, as she turned to face Bricky, was holding a half-consumed cigarette between her fingers again. Bricky pretended she hadn’t noticed it smoking away on the edge of the table, ownerless, until now. A man will often leave a cigarette balanced on the edge of a table or some other bare surface, a woman hardly ever.
It really was superfluous. That flexing of the doorknob just now, that shifting of light-tones on the wall before, had been enough to tell her all she needed to know.
Joan Bristol drew out a chair, adjusted it, swerved it, so that its back was to the closed door. Then she invited: “Help yourself to a seat.” Even if Bricky had wanted to sit somewhere else, she made it the only one available by taking the only other one herself. She lowered herself into it as though she were on coiled springs ready to be released at any moment.
She moistened her rouge-matted lips. “What’d you say your name was again?”
“I didn’t say, but you can put me down as Caroline Miller.”
The other gave her a smile of disbelief, but took it in her stride. “So you know some guy named Graves, do you? Tell me, what makes you think I know him? Did he mention me to you?”
“No,” Bricky said, “he wasn’t doing any mentioning of anybody.”
“Then what makes you think I—?”
This would have been sheer repetition, and she wanted to get past this point. “You do, don’t you?”
Joan Bristol tasted her own rouge some more, reflective. “Tell me, you been over to see him lately?”
“Pretty lately.”
“How lately?”
Bricky said with crafty negligence: “I just came from there now.”
The Bristol woman was tautening up inwardly. You could tell it quite easily on the outside, though. Her eyes strayed to some indeterminate point over and beyond Bricky’s shoulder, as if in desperate quest of further guidance. Bricky carefully avoided turning her head to follow the look with her own eyes. There was nothing but a door there, anyway.
“How’d you find him?”
“Dead,” said Bricky quietly.
The Bristol woman didn’t show the right type of surprise. It was surprise, all right, but it was a vindictive, malevolent surprise, not a startled one. In other words, it wasn’t the news that was surprising, it was the source of it.
She didn’t answer right away. She evidently wanted to “confer” with the recent shadow on the wall. Or it did with her. A brief spurt of water from a faucet somewhere behind the closed door, turned on, then quickly off again, was the signal to this effect.
“Excuse me a sec,” she said, getting up. “I must have forgotten to tighten the tap in there.”
She sidled around Bricky’s strategically-planted chair and slipped inside to the bath without opening the door widely enough to show anything beyond it. She closed it behind her for a moment, so the visitor couldn’t turn her head and look in.
