Deadline at Dawn

“But if they were bawling each other out, or burned up?”

“A match doesn’t count as a favor. It’s not like the drink or the smoke. He would have almost reached without asking. Anyway, for him to borrow, there’d have to be a discarded folder around without any left in it, the one ahead of the one he borrowed. And there isn’t.” He bounced one bent knuckle off the top of the chairback. “They weren’t here together.”

“All right, they weren’t here together. But that don’t help much. Which came first? Because whichever is the one that came last is the one that did the killing.”

“We’re gaining ground backwards by the minute,” he said gloomily.

Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock—

They both looked down at the floor, over the other way, away from it.

They were standing there close by those two chairs. The whole thing had taken place by those two chairs.

Maybe it was because they were looking down avertedly like that, trying to avoid the sound of the clock. It must have been a difficult thing to see. The carpet itself was brown. Suddenly she followed her own look down. Went all the way down, half-prone, on the point of one knee and the palm of one hand. Her hand thrust a little ways under the chair, the second chair, of the folder and mangled cigar-butt, came out again. She straightened up, holding her palm upturned now, poking at something in it with one finger.

“Don’t tell me something else—?” he gasped incredulously.

“Well, look at it for yourself,” was her answer.

It was small; the exact size of a half-dime. It was brown. It was half-moon shaped; rounded on the outside, straight down the middle. It had two little holes in it, intact, and the remnants of two more indenting the straight edge. A corkscrew of brown thread still dangled from the two that were intact.

“Broken button,” he breathed almost reverently.

“Vest?”

“No, cuff. Those ones that you don’t use, on the outside of the sleeve. I mean that we don’t. Too small for anything else.”

“It must have been split for some time, maybe from the last dry-cleaning his coat got, and it finally dropped off tonight in the chair. Maybe he moved his hand too much, gesturing or with that cigar.”

“How’d it get under, though?”

“Fell down over the side, I think. And then maybe in getting up angrily, he gave the whole chair a shove over a little, and that put it below it, where it was already lying.”

“How do we know it isn’t Graves’? It may have been kicking around here on the floor for days.”

“Well, we’ll try matching it up right now, settle that point before we go any further. That’s one thing we can do, thanks be! It’s got to be from a brown or tan suit. I don’t have to be a man to know that blues or grays don’t have brown buttons. And he’s lying in a tux right now, it’s not from that.”

She went into the bedroom, flung open the clothes-closet, pulled on a light-cord. “Windows all right?”

“Yeah, I covered them up.” His eyes widened ingenuously, peering forward over her shoulder. “Will you look at that! How can a guy live long enough to wear all that many—”

They both thought the same thing, without saying it: well, he didn’t.

The browns and their offshoots were in a minority, as they are for some reason in almost any grouping of men’s clothes, whether large or small. “Here’s a mustard-color thing it could have gone on.” She took the hanger down, turned up the bottom of one sleeve, then the other, ran her fingernail rapidly down the line of vest-buttons. “All on.” She put it back. “Here’s a brown.” She took that down in turn, went over it.

“Don’t skip the back trouser-pocket,” he cautioned. “The one on the left usually buttons down — at least it does on mine.”

“Nope.” She put it back again. “That’s all. No, wait, here’s an extra jacket, hanging up there on a hook all the way back, must be old as the hills. That’s a brown, sort of.” She tried it, hung it up again. “Wrong type buttons; solid, with an eyelet in back, instead of pierced through. None gone, anyway.”

She tweaked the light-cord, closed the door. “So it’s not his. It’s from the man who came, and chewed the cigar, and was sore at him, and may — or may not be — left-handed.”

They went back inside again, swiftly striding. “We know two things more about him now, Quinn. D’you realize that? He’s got on a brown or tan suit, and there’s one button either gone or half-gone from one of the sleeves of his coat. My God, if we were professional detectives, d’you know what we could do with all that? With only half of all that?”

“But we’re not,” he said, tasting something imaginary — and not very pleasant — on his own lip with the tip of his tongue.

“We’re going to have to be, tonight.”

“This is the biggest city in the world.”