Deadline at Dawn

He pulled that inside-out too. “Nothing, either.” They made two little black balloons, half-deflated, at the figure’s hips. Like a pair of midget water-wings. He left them that way for the time being.

“Now the inside jacket one.”

This time his forearm had to coast along the dead chest to get in. His face didn’t show anything. There was a layer of stiff-shirting between, anyway.

“Take out everything,” she breathed, “no matter what it is.”

She made a sort of audible inventory for him as they went along, passing things from pocket, to his hand, to hers, to floor beside her.

They resembled, grotesquely, two overgrown kids playing with their pails in a sandpile, or making mud-pies or something. The way they were huddled over, knees cocked up. He didn’t say anything, but she could tell by his face he was thinking they didn’t have a chance — not in the little time there was left to them.

Behind them on the book shelf there was a clock. They both kept from turning to look at it by sheer will-power alone. But they could hear it. It kept chopping up the silence fine. It kept going tick-tock, tick-tock, so mockingly, so remorselessly, so fast. Never stopping, never letting up, going, going, going—

“Cigarette-case. Silver. Tiffany’s. Given to him by somebody with the initial B. ‘To S from B.’ Three cigarettes left in it. Dunhills.” Snap. She closed it again, put it down.

“Wallet. Pin seal, Mark Cross. Two fives and a single. Two ticket stubs from tonight’s show at the Winter Garden. C-112, 114. Third row in the orchestra, that must be. Well, we know where he was tonight from eight-forty to eleven, at least.”

“Two-and-a-half hours out of thirty-five years,” he said morbidly.

“We don’t have to go back through his whole life. We only have to go forward about two, two-and-a-half hours, from curtain-time on. He wasn’t killed at the Winter Garden; he was still alive when he walked out of there. That’s already narrowed the evening down a lot, that’s taken a big chunk out of it.”

“Anything else in it?”

“Business cards. Stafford, whoever that is. Holmes, whoever that is. Ingoldsby, whoever that is. I guess that’s about— No, wait a minute, here’s something else, in this second little compartment here. A snapshot. A snapshot of a girl in riding togs, and himself, both on horseback.”

“Let me see it.”

He scanned it, nodded. “That’s the one I saw him leave the house with, early tonight. She’s also inside there, in the bedroom, in a silver frame. I saw her when I went in before. Signed Barbara.”

“Then she didn’t do it. If she had, she wouldn’t still be in there in his bedroom in a silver frame. Just the frame might, by itself, but not her any more. That’s ordinary common sense.”

“That’s all for that pocket. Now I’ll take the four in the trousers, two side, two rear. Left rear, nothing. Right rear, spare handkerchief, nothing else. Left side, nothing. Right side, his latchkey and a gob of change.”

She counted it over listlessly, as if realizing how immaterial it was. “Eighty-four cents,” she said, and planked it down.

“That finishes the pockets of his clothing. And we’re still no further than before.”

“Yes we are, Quinn. A good deal. Don’t say that. After all, we didn’t expect to find a piece of paper with ‘To whom it may concern: So-and-so killed me,’ written on it, did we? We’ve pulled a name out of thin air — Barbara — and we know what Barbara looks like, and that she was out with him in the early part of the evening tonight. We also know where it was they were together. That trims the blank down to just the couple of hours before and after midnight. I think that’s a whole lot for just one set of pockets to tell us.”

Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock—

She looked down at the floor. She reached out and pressed her hand down atop his for a moment, as if to steady, as if to encourage him. “I know,” she said almost inaudibly. “Don’t look at it, Quinn. Don’t look around at it. We can do it, Quinn. We can. We can make it. Keep saying that.”

She got to her feet.

“Shall I put this stuff back?” he asked.

“Leave it there for now. It doesn’t matter much.”

He got up after her.

“Let’s take the room next,” she said. “The room around him. We’ve tried him, now let’s tackle the room, see what we can do with that.” They separated, with the corpse for an axis. “You start over there. I’ll start over here.”

“What are we looking for?” he said dully, with his back to her.

I don’t know, she felt like wailing. Oh, God, I don’t know myself!

Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock—

She dropped her eyes, to miss seeing its dial, even as she passed right in front of it. Like an ostrich with its head in the sand, she told herself. It wasn’t easy to do, either; it was over there on her side of the room, staring her right in the face. The books on one shelf had been parted in two to receive it in the middle.