Manhunt. Volume 5, Number 5, May 1957

“Okay, get your jacket on, and start getting out of here.”

“What’s the matter with you? What are you talking about?”

“I think it’s time for you to change your hideaway,” I said. “I’ve got a feeling that cops are getting close to this place.”

“No,” he said, but now he was chewing on both lips.

“Yes,” I said. “Here’s my idea. Slip into a jacket and go over to my place.” I gave him my address and apartment number, and my keys. “Nobody’ll be looking for you there. Except me. I’ll stay here for a short while. When I go, I’ll lock up.”

He closed the collar of his sport shirt, went to a closet, unhooked a suburban coat, and shrugged into it. He was as pale as the belly of a shark. He shoved a hand into his trousers’ pocket. “Here are my keys,” he said.

“I don’t need your keys.”

“Then how’ll you lock up here?”

“I have Vivian Frayne’s keys.”

I took them out and jingled them. He looked as though he were going to faint.

“Where’d you get those keys?” he said.

“From the cops. One of those keys fits here, as you know.”

“I know,” he said. “What the hell goes? Have you been trading information with them?”

“No, sir. Else they’d be here already.”

That seemed logical to him. He nodded, seemed to want to ask another question, changed his mind, and went back to eating his lips as he buttoned the coat.

“Either I or Sophia, one of us, or both, will be back at my apartment pretty soon,” I said. “We’ll use the same system. Five short rings, a pause, then one long one. You get that, open up. Otherwise, don’t open up, just stay put.”

He started for the door.

“There’s a taxi waiting downstairs,” I said.

He turned. “You think of everything, don’t you?” He said it almost sardonically.

“I’ve been paid five thousand dollars to try to think of everything,” I said.

When he was gone I brought Sophia Sierra out of the bedroom. I said, “Take off the coat, kid. Make yourself comfortable.”

She took off the coat and made herself comfortable.

“According to you,” I said, “she didn’t have a bank vault, and according to me she couldn’t have had your letters in her apartment. On the other hand, she had a key to this place, and she was free to come here even while Phelps was away — according to him. So, throwing all those accordings together — this would be the spot where she’d hide something out, provided she had something to hide out. I don’t think she even trusted Phelps on that deal. If she had, Phelps would have told me. He’d have produced those letters. The guy’s trying his best to get out from under: told me about threats he heard from Pedi, told me about her fear of you, told me that Vivian was convinced that you had a deep hate going for her. Now, if Phelps knew where those letters were, he would have produced them for me: it would prove up that hate you were supposed to have for her.”

“Yeah, yeah,” she said, breathlessly.

I continued to ramble. “So if they’re here, they’re somewhere where Phelps wouldn’t be likely to fall over them. That excludes all the usual places. What does it include? Well, I’ve been in the business of looking for things for a long time, and people just don’t have any special imagination when it comes to hiding things. They’re influenced by movies and television, and they do the usual ordinary thing, and, somehow, they think they’re doing something unusual.”

She was on her feet.

“I’ll start with the bedroom,” she said.

I went for the rose-colored nude, reclining over the fireplace, maybe because I’m attracted to rose-colored nudes, and sure enough, first crack, there was the Scotch tape on the brown-paper back. I worked fast, ripped open the back, and pried out three letters complete with envelopes. They were all addressed to Vivian Frayne, all in one handwriting, feminine and flowery. But there was another envelope there, a legal-sized envelope, unaddressed, blank but sealed and somewhat bulky. I opened that quickly. It contained a marriage certificate from Montreal, Canada, expressing a marriage between Vivian Jane Frainovitski and Stephan Burton Pedi. It was dated four years ago. The envelope contained one other document: it was a certificate of divorce from a court in Montreal, Canada, dissolving this self-same marriage between Vivian Jane Frainovitski and Stephen Burton Pedi. That was dated three months ago. I replaced the documents in the envelope and stuck that into my pocket. Then I put back the rose-colored nude and, with three envelopes in my hand, I went to the bedroom. Sophia Sierra straightened from bending to look under a radiator.

“These the letters?” I waved them.

She came near. She looked at the letters in my hand.

“Yes,” she said. “All three?”

“All three,” I said.

“Gimme.”

I did not give. I put the letters behind my back.