Mute Witness by Robert L. Fish

Author:Robert L. Fish
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Crime
Publisher: Deutsch
Published: 1965-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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ChapterSix

* * *

Saturday — 3:20P.M.

“Lieutenant? Stanton’s on the line.”

“Good. Put him on.” Clancy shoved aside the report he had been working on and leaned back, waiting. The switchboard clicked. “Hello, Stan?”

“Hello, Lieutenant.”

“Where are you?”

“Back at that same drugstore on Columbus where I met you this morning. Mary Kelly is across the street from the apartment, watching. She’s busy jabbering with a couple of old hens down there; my hunch is they’re probably forming a committee to stop stick-ball playing on the block. I can see everything from here.”

“And?”

“And I’m going to get a bite to eat as soon as I report. I haven’t had time to eat yet, even.”

Clancy stared at the telephone. “Forget your stomach for a minute. Where did she go? The blonde?”

“Oh.” Stanton took a deep breath. “Well, she headed right for the New Yorker Hotel with no stops in between. She had the cab drop her at the 34th Street entrance, and then she practically ran inside. I parked in the taxi-loading space there and flashed my badge when the doorman tried to give me a hard time. Anyway, I left the heap there and hustled inside just in time to see this blonde stepping into an elevator. The door closed before I could catch up with it — I knew I couldn’t take a chance of losing her, so I went over to the phones where I could watch the elevator she took, and called in and asked the Sergeant to send somebody out to give me a hand, and he said he’d send Mary Kelly …”

“Get on with it,” Clancy said impatiently.

“Well, I had to hang around the lobby where I could watch the elevators; I couldn’t even go over and question the elevator-operator that took the blonde upstairs, because they got two banks of elevators there, and I was afraid if I went over to this operator, see, she might come down the other bank in the meantime, so …”

“For God’ssake! Get on with it!”

“So I figured as soon as Mary Kelly came I could check on the operator, but before she came this Renick woman comes down a different elevator — which proves I was right — and heads for the mail-desk …”

Clancy frowned. “The mail-desk?”

“Yeah. She heads for the mail-desk and talks to one of the clerks there for a few seconds and then this clerk hands her an envelope. And she shoves it into her purse and pulls out another one and hands this other one to the clerk. A smaller one …”

“Hold it!” Clancy thought a minute and then snapped his fingers. “Of course! Sure!”

“Of course what?” Stanton was puzzled; then light dawned. “Do you know what was in those envelopes, Lieutenant?”

“I can make a pretty good guess,” Clancy said. “Steamship tickets. That’s why she was so long a time leaving her apartment this morning — I thought it shouldn’t take her that long to dress.” Things were falling into place. “She was telephoning the travel agency, telling them to leave the tickets for her at the hotel.

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