The Collection (125 page)

She smiled and disappeared into the kitchen and I
disappeared into the living room. I took a chair with a magazine rack beside it
and was leafing through the latest
Reader's Digest,
just reading the
short items in it, when Ollie came in looking rested and cheerful. “Morning,
Ed. Had breakfast?”

I told him I'd been up only a few minutes and had decided to
wait for company. “Come on, then,” he said. “We won't wait for Eve. She might
be dressing now, but then again she might sleep till noon.”

But she didn't sleep till noon; she came in when we were
starting our coffee, and told Mrs. Ledbetter that she'd just have coffee, as
she had a lunch engagement in only two hours. So the three of us sat drinking
coffee and it was very cozy and you wouldn't have guessed there was a thing
wrong. You wouldn't have guessed it, but you might have felt it. Anyway, I felt
it.

Ollie asked me if I wanted a lift downtown to do the
business I'd come to do, and of course I said that I did. We discussed plans.
Mrs. Ledbetter, I learned, had the afternoon and evening off, starting at noon,
so no dinner would be served that evening. Eve would be gone all afternoon,
playing bridge after her lunch date, and she suggested we all meet in the Loop
and have dinner there. I wasn't supposed to know Chicago, of course, so I let
them pick the place and it came up the Pump Room at seven.

Ollie and I left and on the way to the garage back of the
building, I asked him if he minded if I drove the Buick. I said I liked driving
and didn't get much chance to.

“Sure, Ed. But you mean you and Am don't have a car?”

I told him we wanted one but hadn't got around to affording
it as yet. The few times we needed one for work, we rented one and simply got
by without one for pleasure.

The Buick handled wonderfully. With me behind the wheel, it
shifted smoothly, didn't jerk in starting or stopping; it timed stop lights and
didn't straddle lanes. I asked how much it cost and said I hoped we'd be able
to afford one like it someday. Except that we'd want a sedan because a
convertible is too noticeable to use for a tail job. When we rented cars, we
usually got a sedan in some neutral color like gray. Detectives used to use
black cars, but nowadays a black car is almost as conspicuous as a red one.

I asked Ollie where he wanted me to drive him and he said
he'd like to go to see Dorothy Stark and his son, Jerry. They lived in an
apartment on LaSalle near Chicago Avenue. And did I have any plans or would I
like to come up to meet them? He said he would like that.

I told him I'd drop up briefly if he wanted me to, but that
I had plans. I wanted him to lend me the key to his apartment and I was going
back there, after I could be sure both Mrs. Ledbetter and Mrs. Bookman had
left. Since it was the former's afternoon off, it would be the best chance I'd
have to look around the place in privacy. He said sure, the key was on the ring
with the car keys and I might as well keep the keys, car and all, until our
dinner date at the Pump Room. It would be only a short cab ride for him to get
there from Mrs. Stark's. I asked him if there was any danger that Eve would go
back to the apartment after her lunch date and before her bridge game. He was
almost sure she wouldn't, but her bridge club broke up about five thirty and
she'd probably go back then to dress for dinner. That was all right; I could be
gone by then.

When I parked the car on LaSalle, I remembered to ask him
who I was supposed to be when I met Mrs. Stark---Ed Hunter or Ed Cartwright. He
suggested we stick to the Cartwright story; if he told Dorothy the truth, she'd
worry about him being in danger. Anyway, it would be simpler and take less
explanation.

I liked Dorothy Stark on sight. She was small and brunette,
with a heart-shaped face. Only passably pretty---nowhere near as stunning as
Eve---but she was warm and genuine, the real thing. And really in love with
Ollie; I didn't need radar to tell me that. And Jerry, age two, was a cute
toddler. I can take kids or let them alone, but Ollie was nuts about him.

I stayed only half an hour, breaking away with the excuse of
having a business-lunch date in the Loop, but it was a very pleasant half
hour, and Ollie was a completely different person here. He was at home in this
small apartment, much more so than in the large apartment on Coleman Boulevard.
And you had the feeling that Dorothy was his wife, not Eve.

I was only a half a dozen blocks from the office and I
didn't want to get out to Coleman Boulevard before one o'clock, so I drove over
to State Street and went up to see if Uncle Am was there. He was, and I told
him what little I'd learned to date and what my plans were.

“Kid,” he said, “I'd like a ride in that chariot you're
pushing. How about us having an early lunch and then I'll go out with you and
help search the joint. Two of us can do twice as good a job.”

It was tempting but I thumbed it down. If a wheel did come
off and Eve Bookman came back unexpectedly, I could give her a song and dance
as to what I was doing there, but Uncle Am would be harder to explain. I said
I'd give him the ride, though. We could leave now and he could come with me out
as far as Howard Avenue and we'd eat somewhere out there; then he could take
the el back south from the Howard station. It would amount only to his taking a
two-hour lunch break and we did that any time we felt like it. He liked the
idea.

I let him drive the second half of the way and he fell in
love with the car, too. After we had lunch, I phoned the apartment from the
restaurant and let the phone ring a dozen times to make sure both Mrs. Bookman
and Mrs. Ledbetter were gone. Then I drove Uncle Am to the el station and
myself to the apartment.

I let myself in and put the chain on the door. If Eve came
back too soon, that was going to be embarrassing to explain; I'd have to say
I'd done it absent-mindedly and it would make me look like a fool. But it would
be less embarrassing than to have her walk in and find me rooting in the
drawers of her dresser.

First, I decided, I'd take a look at the place as a whole.
The living room, dining room, and the guest bedroom were the only rooms I'd
been in thus far. I decided to start at the back. I went through the dining
room and the pantry into the kitchen. It was a big kitchen and had the works in
the way of equipment, even an automatic dishwasher and garbage disposal. A room
on one side of it was a service and storage room and on the other side was a
bedroom; Mrs. Ledbetter's, of course. I looked around in all three rooms but
didn't touch anything. I went back to the dining room and found that a door
from it led to a room probably intended as a den or study; there was a
desk---an old-fashioned roll-top desk that was really an antique---two file
cabinets, a bookcase filled mostly with books on construction and business
practice but with a few novels on one shelf, mostly mysteries, a typewriter on
a stand, and a dictating machine. This was Ollie's office, from which he
conducted whatever business he still did. And the dictating machine meant he
must have a part-time secretary, however many days or hours a week. He'd
hardly dictate letters and then transcribe them himself.

The roll-top desk was closed but not locked. I opened it and
saw a lot of papers and envelopes in pigeonholes, but I didn't study any of
them. Ollie's business was no business of mine. But I wondered if he'd used the
“Purloined Letter” method of hiding his missing will by having it in plain
sight in one of those pigeonholes. And if so, what had Eve been looking for
when she found it? I made a mental note to ask him about that.

There was a
telephone on top of the desk and I looked
at the number on it; it wasn't the same number as that on the phone in the
living room, which meant it wasn't an extension but a private line.

I closed the desk and went back to the living room and
through its side doorway to the hall from which the bedrooms opened. Another
door from it turned out to be a linen closet.

Ollie's bedroom was the same size as mine and furnished in
the same way. I walked over to the dresser. A little bottle on it contained
nitroglycerin pills. It held a hundred and was about half full. Beside it were
three glass ampoules of amyl nitrite like the one in my pocket, the one I'd got
from Doc Kruger last night at dinner. I looked at the ampoules and decided that
they hadn't been tampered with. Couldn't be tampered with, in fact. But I took
a couple of the nitro pills out of the bottle and put them in my pocket. If I
had a chance to get them to Uncle Am, I'd ask him to take them to a laboratory
and have them checked to make sure they were really what the label claimed them
to be.

I didn't search the room thoroughly, but I looked through
the dresser drawers and the closet. I wasn't sure what I was looking for,
unless maybe a gun. If Ollie kept a gun, I wanted to know it. But I didn't find
a gun or anything else more dangerous than a nail file.

Eve Bookman's room was, of course, the main object of my
search, but I wasn't in any hurry and decided I'd do a little thinking before
I tackled it. I went back to the living room and since it occurred to me that
if Eve was coming back between lunch and bridge, this would be about the time,
I took the chain off the door. It wouldn't matter if I was found here, as long
as I was innocently occupied. I could just say that I was unable to see
the
man I'd come to see until tomorrow. And that Ollie---Oliver to her---had had
things to do in the Loop and had lent me his car and his house key.

I made myself a highball at the bar and sat down to sip it
and think, but the thinking didn't get me anywhere. I knew one thing I'd be
looking for---pills the size and color of nitro pills but that might turn out
to be something else. Or a gun or any other lethal weapon, or poison---if it
could be identified as such. But that was all and it didn't seem very likely to
me that I'd find any of those things, even if Eve did have any designs on her
husband's life. One other thing I thought of: I might as well finish my search
for a gun by looking for one in Ollie's office. If he had one, I wanted to know
it, and he might keep it in his study instead of his bedroom.

I made myself another short drink and did some more thinking
without getting any ideas except that if I could reach Ollie by phone at the
Stark apartment, I could simply ask him about the gun, and another question or
two I'd thought of.

I rinsed out and wiped the glass I'd used and went to the
telephone. I checked the book and found a
Stark, Dorothy
on LaSalle
Street and called the number. Ollie answered and when I asked him if he could
talk freely, he said sure, that Dorothy had gone out shopping and had left him
to baby-sit.

I asked him about guns and he said no, he didn't own any.

I told him I'd noticed the ampoules and pills on his dresser
and asked him if he carried some of both with him. He said the pills yes,
always. But he didn't carry ampoules because the pills always worked for him
and the ampoules he just kept on hand at home in case his angina should get
worse. He told me the same thing about them the doctor had, that if one used
them often I hey became ineffective. He'd used one only once thus far, and
wouldn't again until and unless he had to.

After I'd hung up, I remembered that I'd forgotten to ask
him where the will had been hidden in his office but it didn't seem worth while
calling back to ask him. I wanted to know, if only out of curiosity, but there
wasn't any hurry and I could find out I he next time I talked to him alone.

I put the chain bolt back on the door---I was pretty sure by
now that Eve wasn't coming back before her bridge-club session, as it was
already after two, but I thought I might as well play sale---and went to her
room.

It was bigger than any of the other bedrooms---had
originally, no doubt, been intended as the master bedroom---and it had a
dressing room attached and lots of closet space. It was going to he a lot of
territory to cover thoroughly, but if Eve had any secrets, they'd surely be
here, not in Ledbetter territory like the kitchen or Ollie's office or neutral
territory like the living room. Apparently she spent a lot of time here;
besides the usual bedroom furniture and a vanity table, there was a bookcase
of novels and a writing desk that looked used. I sighed and pitched in. Two
hours later, all I knew that I hadn't known---but might have suspected---before
was that a woman can have more clothes and more beauty preparations than a man
would think possible.

I'd looked in everything but the writing desk; I'd saved
that for last. There were three drawers and the top one contained only raw
materials---paper and envelopes, pencils, ink and such. No pens, hut she
probably used a fountain pen and carried it with I in. The middle one contained
canceled checks, neatly in order and rubber-banded, used stubs of checkbooks
similarly banded, and hank statements. No current checkbook; she must have had
it with her. The bottom drawer was empty except for a dictionary, a
Merriam-Webster
Collegiate.
If she corresponded with anyone, beyond
sending out checks to pay bills, she must have destroyed letters when she
answered them and not owed any at the moment; there was no correspondence at
all.

I still had almost an hour of safe time, since her bridge
club surely wouldn't break up before five, so for lack of anything else to go
through, I started studying the bank statements and the canceled checks. One
thing was immediately obvious: this was her personal account, for clothes and
other personal expenses. There was one deposit a month for exactly four hundred
dollars, never more or never less. None of the checks drawn against this
account would have been for household expenses. Ollie must have handled them,
or had his hypothetical part-time secretary (that was another thing I hadn't
remembered to ask him about, but again it was nothing I was in a hurry to know)
handle them. This account was strictly a personal one. Some of the checks,
usually twenty-five- or fifty-dollar ones, were drawn to cash. Others, most of them
for odd amounts, were made out to stores. There was one every month to a Howard
Avenue Drugstore, no doubt mostly for cosmetics; most of the others were to
clothing stores, lingerie shops and the like. Occasional checks to some woman
or other for odd amounts up to twenty or thirty dollars were, I decided,
probably bridge losses or the like, at times when she didn't have enough cash
to pay off. From the bank statements I could see that she lived up to the hilt
of her allowance; at the time each four-hundred-dollar check was deposited,
always on the first of the month, the balance to which it was added was never
over twenty or thirty dollars.