Odor of Violets, Baynard Kendrick [best short novels .txt] 📗

horrible bloodstained poker. A false calmness took possession of her—the calmness of an actress who has been through many bad first nights. She nodded her thanks, and handed the proprietor a dollar from her purse as he set the coffee down.

“Give me a piece of wrapping paper, please,” she said. “I bought these galoshes hurriedly and they’re too small. Tomorrow I’ll take them back to the store.”

She wasn’t sure that he understood her, although he nodded solemn agreement. He took the dollar and shuffled stolidly away.

Norma forced herself to drink the hot, bitter draft, although she detested coffee loaded with chicory. It revived her faculties. While she waited for the proprietor’s return, questions began to parade themselves dancingly before her. She reviewed them with a sharpened mental astuteness. The answers were vitally important. One by one they capered by her—problems and incidents she should have calmly considered before.

Had Babs killed Paul Gerente?

Another question flashed through her mind before she could formulate a sensible answer. Was Paul Gerente the man in the cherry-colored dressing gown she had seen lying on the floor? Brutally she forced herself to conjure back a picture of the room. The man was about Paul’s size and build. Why, in the name of heaven, had she run away like a panicky child? It would have taken but a moment for her to walk closer to the murdered man to see.

Babs might have killed him, if the man was really Paul. Once he was passionately aroused, his methods with women were never tactful. Babs was nervous, high-strung, and strong. Frightened and desperate, the girl might easily have seized the nearest weapon and battled for escape from the apartment too successfully. It was a hideous thought, and Norma promptly put it away, yet she knew it was what she had dreaded from the instant she had picked up Babs’s galoshes in the hall.

Eagerly she seized upon the stronger terror which had overcome her in Paul’s apartment, that weakening premonition that somebody else had been there. Why hadn’t she looked into Paul’s bedroom, or spoken, particularly when she knew that someone had answered the ring of Paul’s bell?

She remembered the voice which called from the second floor, “Do you want Cameron?” Perhaps in her haste and excitement she had pushed the Camerons’ button in the foyer and never rung Paul’s bell at all. Babs might have blundered in onto a murdered Paul Gerente as Norma had done. But how? Norma struggled vainly for an answer. If Paul was murdered, surely a killer would not answer the door. There was another possibility which was sordidly depressing: Babs might have had a key.

A throbbing started over her right eye, rhythmic and painful. She pressed it with her finger tips and told herself silently, “A key might explain how Babs got in, but it doesn’t explain who opened that door for me.”

It was inconceivable that she had erroneously pressed the Camerons’ button; she even knew the location of Paul’s—the bottom one in the row.

Or was it? Her remembrance of the lighted vestibule on West Twelfth Street became indistinct and cloudy. Perhaps Cameron’s button was the bottom one on the row. Perhaps in ten years the bells had been changed. She found herself battling a dragging urge to go back to the Twelfth Street house and see. It was mad, she knew, but somehow before she faced Babs again she had to have some inkling of the truth. A simpler course presented itself—one which apparently could do no harm and which might work, with a little subtlety.

Norma left the table and walked to a phone booth in the corner. Leafing through the directory, she found an A. C. Cameron listed at the Twelfth Street address. Her heart was thumping uncomfortably when she dialed the number. A man’s voice answered pleasantly after a few rings.

Somewhat reassured, Norma said hurriedly, “I’m sorry to disturb you, Mr. Cameron, because you don’t know me, but I was wondering about the name plates on the bells downstairs. Apparently I rang your bell when I called on some friends a little while ago. If you remember, you called downstairs to me as I came into the hall.”

Cameron gave a friendly laugh and said, “Who is this speaking?”

Norma was silent a few seconds before she said, “Do you mind if I don’t say?”

“No, not at all, but you’re worrying yourself needlessly. I was expecting a friend and had my apartment door open. I heard a bell ring upstairs and called down, thinking it might be for me.”

“Oh!” said Norma faintly. “Then you didn’t push the buzzer and open the downstairs door?”

“Yes,” said Cameron, “I did. And whoever you rang answered too. That’s why I called down to you. My friend was coming from a cocktail party. Occasionally he gets mixed up on bells. There’s no harm done, though.”

“I’m sorry I troubled you.” Norma hung up. Cameron’s statement, “Whoever you rang answered too,” was running through her head liltingly. There was a train back to Hartford at eleven-fifty. She would take it and say nothing to anyone. Someone else had been in Paul’s room. She needed time to think things out. She could talk to Babs the following day.

CHAPTER V

ARNOLD C. CAMERON put the telephone back in its cradle and walked slowly halfway across the room. He stopped for a moment in front of a pier-glass mirror set in a closet door.

From the depths of an easy chair in the corner an attractive brunette watched him from under languorous lids as he brushed imaginary dust from the shoulders of his well-tailored sharkskin suit and pushed back a lock of his graying hair.

“It sounded like a woman.” The girl crossed slender legs and looked at her toe.

Arnold Cameron studied her reflection in the mirror before him and smiled. He was a man in his late thirties and was always reminding people who met him of someone they knew.

“It was,” he said.

“Who?”

He left his place at the mirror and stood for