Free Murder by the Book by Frances and Richard Lockridge

New York knew what he was talking about when he talked about the Norths. The entry read:
    â€œMrs. T. Upton, g-i up. hist of 49. Dehy. sl ht. comp. th. adm. dr int. v. adv bl d & gis. hs MD cf w.”
    Each letter was well formed, distinct. Dr. Edmund Piersal had written a small, neat hand. If—Jefferson checked back through the book, checked the entries in the checkbook. There was no probable doubt that Dr. Piersal had written the last entry in the book; there was no doubt that it referred, as this Mrs. North had thought it might, to Mrs. Upton. Mrs. T——Of course. Tucker Upton, M.D. They came down frequently during the winter, because there was always a breeze on the Keys, and not always in Miami. A surgeon, Upton was, as Deputy Sheriff Jefferson remembered it. And maybe Dr. Upton, asked, could make sense of what Dr. Piersal had written.
    Jefferson read the notations several times, “g-i up.” Sounded a little like instructions to a horse. “Dr int. v.” didn’t sound like anything at all. “Hs MD.” Husband MD? “Cf w?” Conceivably, “confer with?” It was anybody’s guess. The whole thing was.
    Jefferson had an impulse—a quite unreasonable impulse—to take the book around to the hotel and show it to this Mrs. North. That was evidently absurd. If it meant nothing to him, why would it mean anything to her? And it was she who had found the body. If this New York cop hadn’t given her such an emphatically clean bill of health—On the other hand, of course, she had been right in thinking there might be some such notations in the doctor’s notebook—the book for “jotting in.” Serve her right to be shown what had been there, to be as puzzled by it as he was.
    He had reached for the telephone to check on the whereabouts of Mrs. Rebecca Payne, to discover whether she was at the hotel. He had been distracted. He might as well drive around to the hotel and find out for himself. It would be cooler in an open car; cooler at the hotel. It would be cooler almost anywhere than it was where he was. If he happened to run into Mrs. North—
    Mrs. Rebecca Payne did not answer the telephone when he called her room. She did not respond when she was paged. With Paul Grogan, a worried Paul Grogan, along, Jefferson went to the single room, on the second floor, on the street side, assigned to Rebecca Payne. The maid had not reached it yet. Grogan said “Tchk-tchk.” It was empty; her clothes were in the closet—the enormous closet. (In its earliest years The Coral Isles had catered primarily to fishermen, and had provided more amply for their gear than for their persons.) Her luggage was in the closet. Her toothbrush and a tube of toothpaste were in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, and cold cream was there, and a box of face powder—Rachel. There was a small bottle of white pills, with a physician’s name and a prescription number, the notation “As directed.” Jefferson shook a pill into his hand and touched it with his tongue, and the taste was bitter. Phenobarbital, at a guess.
    Grogan watched the tall, youngish man. He watched, it seemed to Ronald Jefferson, with some anxiety. Which was, on the whole, understandable; Paul Grogan was not happy about any of this.
    â€œYou’ve no idea where she may have gone?” Jefferson asked.
    Grogan had not. There were many places she might be—on the tennis court, sunning in the protected area of the beach, in the solarium. But she had been paged in all these places—except in the women’s solarium—by a boy who knew her. The attendant in the solarium reported three women sunning, and one under the vigorous hands of a masseuse, and that none of them, to her certain knowledge, was Mrs. Rebecca Payne.
    Jefferson got what description Grogan could give—a slender dark girl, black hair and black eyes, a thin face. “Probably if she went to the