“It’s any damned thing you want to call it,” she told him. “But let me tell you something: Bernie called Taylor up last Friday and told him he’d give him just three days to come across.”
Ned Beaumont brushed a side of his mustache with a thumb-nail. “You’re not just being mad, are you?” he asked cautiously.
She made an angry face. “Of course I’m mad,” she said. “I’m just mad enough to take them to the police and that’s what I’m going to do. But if you think it didn’t happen you’re just a plain damned fool.”
He seemed still unconvinced. “Where’d you get them?”
“Out of the safe.” She gestured with her sleek head towards the interior of the apartment.
He asked: “What time last night did he blow?”
“I don’t know. I got home at half past nine and sat around most of the night expecting him. It wasn’t till morning that I began to suspect something and looked around and saw he’d cleaned house of every nickel in money and every piece of my jewelry that I wasn’t wearing.”
He brushed his mustache with his thumb-nail again and asked: “Where do you think he’d go?”
She stamped her foot and, shaking both fists up and down, began to curse the missing Bernie again in a shrill enraged voice.
Ned Beaumont said: “Stop it.” He caught her wrists and held them still. He said: “If you’re not going to do anything about it but yell, give me those markers and I’ll do something about it.”
She tore her wrists out of his hands, crying: “I’ll give you nothing. I’ll give them to the police and not to another damned soul.”
“All right, then do it. Where do you think he’d go, Lee?”
Lee said bitterly that she didn’t know where he would go, but she knew where she would like to have him go.
Ned Beaumont said wearily: “That’s the stuff. Wisecraeking is going to do us a lot of good. Think he’d go back to New York?”
“How do I know?” Her eyes had suddenly become wary.
Annoyance brought spots of color into Ned Beaumont’s cheeks. “What are you up to now?” he asked suspiciously.
Her face was an innocent mask. “Nothing. What do you mean?” He leaned down towards her. He spoke with considerable earnestness, shaking his head slowly from side to side with his words. “Don’t think you’re not going to the police with them, Lee, because you are.”
She said: “Of course I am.”
7
In the drug-store that occupied part of the ground-floor of the apartment-building Ned Beaumont used a telephone. He called the Police Department’s number, asked for Lieutenant Doolan, and said: “Hello. Lieutenant Doolan? m speaking for Miss Lee Wilshire. She’s in Bernie Despain’s apartment at 1666 Link Street. He seems to have suddenly disappeared last night, leaving some of Taylor Henry’s I 0 Us behind him. . . . That’s right, and she says she heard him threaten him a couple of days ago. . . . Yes, and she wants to see you as soon as possible.. . . No, you’d better come up or send and as soon as you can. . . . Yes.. . . That doesn’t make any difference. You don’t know me. I’m just speaking for her because she didn’t want to phone from his apartment. . . .” He listened a moment longer, then, without having said anything else, put the receiver on its prong and went out of the drug-store.
8
Ned Beaumont went to a neat red brick house in a row of neat red brick houses in upper Thames Street. The door was opened to his ring by a young Negress who smiled with her whole brown face, said, “How do you do, Mr. Beaumont?” and made the opening of the door a hearty invitation.
Ned Beaumont said: “‘Lo, June. Anybody home?”
“Yes, sir, they still at the dinner-table.”
He walked back to the dining-room where Paul Madvig and his mother sat facing one another across a red-and-white-clothed table. There was a third chair at the table, but it was not occupied and the plate and silver in front of it had not been used.