A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

“She mentioned she’d found out from one of the neighbors that I was married to a detective. Maybe she was looking for protection.” Or maybe, I said to myself, she was planting evidence against her husband. First with the insurance salesman, now with Katie. Somehow it smelled a little fishy to me. Women will gossip about other women’s husbands maybe, but never their own. This one had. She hadn’t just talked at random either. She’d shot off her mouth where it would do the most good; she’d created two star witnesses for the state in case anything happened.

“Wait a minute,” I said. I went and got the two hairpins I’d picked up upstairs and rinsed off the one I’d found on the bathroom floor. Then I went back to Katie. “You’re a woman,” I said. “How was she wearing her hair?”

It took her four and a half minutes to tell me all about it, without once repeating herself. Then I showed her the two hairpins. “Which would go with that?”

“Why, the amber one of course.” She nearly laughed in my face.

“Only a man would ask a thing like that! How could a blonde like her use a black hairpin like this other one? It would have stood out a mile off.”

“Here’s four bits,” I said. “Run along to the movies, you’ve earned it. And I don’t want you around when the boys come down to see Fraser.”

I jiggled the two hairpins up and down in my hand. The black one was the one I’d found in the bedroom. Something told me that Mrs. Drew, when she showed up a few months from now to cash in on that ten grand, was going to turn out to be a dark-haired lady. But I wasn’t going to wait until then to make sure. I very much wanted to meet her now.

I got my claws in the superintendent and hauled him in from the hallway, where Katie had lingered to give him instructions about kalsomining our ceiling. “Mrs. Fraser had a woman visitor sometime during the day today,” I told him. “Think hard.”

“I don’t have to,” he said. “She came right up to me and asked me which entrance to take, it must have been her first visit.” The building is one of those inner garden things with four wings.

“She had dark hair, didn’t she?”

Then he goes and spoils my day. “Nah, she was as blond as they come.”

I recovered after awhile. Just because he’d seen one caller didn’t mean there hadn’t been others later on that he hadn’t seen. “You didn’t see her when she left, did you?” That was asking too much. But not of him, it turned out; he seemed to know everything that was going on. “I think I did at that,” he said. “I ain’t sure.”

“Whaddye mean?” I said impatiently. “If you got a good look at her going in, how could you miss knowing her when she came out?”

“I don’t know if it was her or not,” he said. “I saw someone come out of there that looked like her, was dressed just like her, but when she went in she was alone and when she came out there was a guy with her. I wasn’t close enough to her the second time to tell if it was the same one.”

“That’s because y’mind ain’t trained,” I snapped. “Now forget all about her coming out and just concentrate on her going in. That ought to be easy because you said she stepped right up to you. All right, got it?” He nodded dumbly. “What color was she wearing?”

“Black.”

“Well, wasn’t there some ornament, some gadget or other on her that would strike your eye, catch your attention?”

“I didn’t notice,” he said.

“Close your eyes and try it.”

He did, then opened them right up. “That’s right, there was,” he grinned happily. “I saw it just now with my eyes shut. She had a big bow on the side of her hat.” He snapped his fingers. “Yeah, it must have been her I saw coming out, the second one had it too. I spotted that same bow all the way across the court.”

“See how it works?” I said. “Drop around sometime and we’ll be glad to give you a job — scrubbing the floor.” So she had a guy with her when she left. That explained who had done the smoking in the clothes closet up there. Clothes are too sacred to a woman, whether they’re her own or not, for her to risk getting sparks on them. It would take a man not to give a damn where he lit up.

It was still all balled up to me. The best I could do was this: the lady-visitor had arrived first, openly, and been let in by Mrs. Fraser. Then when Mrs. F. wasn’t looking she had slipped a male accomplice into the flat and he’d hidden in the closet and waited for a favorable opportunity to jump out and give her the works. I scratched the part out of my hair. That was lousy, it stank. First, because the woman had gone right up to the super of her own free will and let him take a good look at her when it would have been easy enough to avoid that. Second, because she was a blonde, and the hairpin I’d picked up was a black one. Third, because it was Mrs. Fraser herself and not anyone else who had gone around planting suspicion against her husband. You might almost say that she had lent a hand in her own murder.