Plot It Yourself

“Then I have a suggestion. I saw three of them yesterday, Jacobs and Rennert and Miss Ogilvy, but not Alice Porter. She didn’t answer her phone. As you know, Miss Rowan’s place, where I’m going, is near Katonah, and it’s less than half an hour from there to Carmel. Miss Rowan expects me at six o’clock. If I leave now I can go to Carmel first and have the afternoon for making the acquaintance of Miss Porter.”

“Is there anything in the mail that requires attention?”

“No. Nothing that can’t wait.”

“Then go.”

“Right. I’ll be back late Sunday evening. Do you want a report on the three I saw before I go?”

“No. If you had anything exigent to report you would have said so.”

“Sure. Miss Rowan’s phone number is on your desk. I’ll give her your regards. Don’t overdo.”

He hung up. The big fat bum. I wrote the phone number on his memo pad, went to the kitchen to tell Fritz good-by, got my bag, and was gone.

There is always traffic on the West Side Highway, twenty-four hours a day, but it thinned out beyond the city limits, and north of Hawthorne Circle I had long stretches to myself. After leaving Route 22 at Croton Falls and meandering through patches of woods and along shores of reservoirs for a few miles, I stopped for an hour at the Green Fence, known to me, where a woman with a double chin fries chicken the way my Aunt Margie did out in Ohio. Fritz does not fry chicken. At two o’clock I was rolling again, with only a couple of miles to go.

There was no point in phoning, since I was there anyway, but I almost had to, to find out where her cottage was. The cop on Main Street had never heard of Alice Porter. The man in the drugstone had, he had put up prescriptions for her, but didn’t know where she lived. The man at the filling station thought her place was out toward Kent Cliffs but wasn’t sure. He advised me to consult Jimmy Murphy, who ran a taxi. Jimmy rattled it off: a mile and a half west on Route 301, right on a blacktop for a mile, right on dirt for half a mile, mailbox on the right.