All the juice I squeezed out of it was that in some strange manner, the blasting of a police informer down on the Bowery six days ago was connected with the death of a millionaire adman on Fifth Avenue. It didn’t add up.
I totaled the columns over again while I watched the gas trucks under the wings of the DC6; later, as I marched up the ramp, grinned at the seductive sally in the stewardess uniform, strapped on my belt. I was still ponderin’ when we zoomed over the honeycomb of lighted windows that was New York, zipped across the strip of burnished metal that was the Hudson, gained altitude for the mountains.
By the time we came down through a threatening thunderstorm, three hours later, to the field beside the Ohio, I’d reached one certain conclusion. Tildy Millett was the core of it; she probably knew the killer; certainly she knew what the cryptic “Never forget four” meant.
At Cincinnati there was half an hour before the DC3 left for Lexington. I pushed through a call to New York, to Fran.
She was contrite about letting Tildy get away from her at the Brulard. The skate star had called a bellman to see if he could buy her a hairbrush on Sunday; while the bellman had the door open, Tildy’d simply slipped out and run down the stairs.
Fran’d had a horrible night with Tildy. It had taken the skater hours to get to sleep. Hours of tears, nerves, incoherencies. Even after the Rip Van Winkles had taken effect, the star of the Icequadrilles had tossed and writhed and moaned and talked in her uneasy slumber.
Fran couldn’t make much out of it, beyond the constant calling for Dow — Dow — Dow. “Oh, one thing, Mister V. About half past three, when I thought she was quieting down, she began to laugh like a maniac.”
“In her sleep?”
“Sound asleep. Then she said, very clearly and bitterly, as if reproaching him, ‘One for sorrow, two for mirth, hahahaha.’ It made my skin crawl to listen to her.”
“That was all? No more? Just one and two. No four? Or seven?”