Confidentially Yours (14 page)

I heard a car coming this way. There were street lights ahead and behind me. I ducked into the alley back of Clebourne and fell flat behind some garbage cans, sobbing for breath. As the car went past its spotlight raked the shadows, but missed me. I lay still for a moment, trying to collect my wits after all we confusion. I couldn’t go back to the office, even if I could get there. They’d search it, along with the house. But the Duquesne Building was in the next block; all I had to do was keep to the alley, cross one street, and I’d be behind it. I got up and ran again. The intersecting street was clear. I made it across, and ran on toward Montrose. I ducked into the small vestibule at the rear of the building, and collapsed, too winded to move. A car went past on Montrose, flashing its spotlight up the alley.

The door to the left opened onto the stairs going up to the second floor; the one on the right was the rear entrance to Roberts’ apartment, leading into the kitchen. When I could get to my feet, I backed up as far as I could and crashed into the latter with my shoulder. On the third lunge the bolt tore out and it swung open. I stepped inside, closed it, and flicked on the cigarette lighter to look about for something to prop it shut. There was a small table next to the refrigerator. I shoved it against the door, holding the lighter with the other hand, and then stood looking down at the linoleum in horror. There were spatters of blood on it. The lighter went out. I flicked it on again. The blood was coming from a cut on the back of my left hand. I’d left a trail of it all the way from that apartment house that a Boy Scout could follow. I let the lighter go out and stood listening to the drip, drip, drip, as it fell and spattered in the darkness. Even if I could move on the streets now, there was nowhere else to go.

W
ELL, I’D KNOWN ALL THE
time they had to get me sooner or later. There was no use standing here crying about it; at least I could make use of the little time I had left. I looked at my watch; it was twenty minutes of four. The chances were they wouldn’t discover that trail of blood until after daybreak, which was another three hours.

I groped my way to the bathroom. There was no window here, and I could turn on a light. I washed the blood off my hand. It was only a superficial cut from a piece of that falling glass; in all the uproar I’d been so charged with adrenalin I hadn’t even felt it. I rooted around in his medicine chest for a Band-aid and stuck it on, but the blood continued to ooze out around the edges, so I wrapped a towel around it. I wouldn’t bleed to death from a scratch like that.

There were two windows in the apartment, one in the living room-bedroom, facing Montrose, and the other in the kitchen, looking out into the alley. I closed the door from the kitchen, tore a blanket off the bed and draped it across the curtain rods of the window in here to cut off any seepage of light, and switched on a lamp. The furnishings were meager; it wouldn’t take long to search the place. A dresser stood against the front wall, next to the door going out into the shop. The bed was in the corner beside it, under the window. At the foot of the bed was the door to the bathroom, with a small clothes closet beside it, while a desk stood against the wall opposite the window.

I started with the dresser drawers, and by the time I’d finished them I knew somebody had beaten me to it Whoever it was had made some effort to replace things with at least a semblance of order, but there was no doubt the place had been gone over. If there’d been any clue here as to Frances’ identity or how Roberts had learned it, there was slight chance it was here now. He’d had two nights. Getting in had been no problem, apparently; if he’d had a key when Frances was living here, he probably still had it. The locks hadn’t been changed. Then I remembered Scanlon and Ernie had been in here looking for the name and address of Roberts’ next of kin. Maybe that was all it was. I moved on to the desk.

In the drawer were a dozen or more letters, thrown in haphazardly in their envelopes after he’d read them. Two were from his brother in Houston and were apparently the ones from which Scanlon had obtained the address. The others were all from girls, mostly in Houston and Galveston, handwritten on a variety of different pastel shades of stationery—though several of them would have been safer written on asbestos—and through all of them ran the same complaint: why didn’t he write? Apparently he’d had a way with women, all right, but when they were out of sight he forgot about them. I skimmed through them hastily, reading a line or two in each paragraph and tossing them back into the drawer, not really expecting to find anything that had any bearing on his murder. The last one I picked up was postmarked Los Angeles sometime in November and in addition to being written on rough lavender paper it was perfumed. It was only three pages. I raced through it and had already tossed it aside in disgust when I did a double take over a word on the last page. “...
clippings
...”

Clippings?

I grabbed the letter up again.

“…you rascal, you never have even acknowledged those clippings you asked me for last summer, and when I think of the trouble—and risk—I went through to get them for you, well, honestly, I think you’re a cad, sir. That’s spelled s-t-i-n-k-e-r. The librarian almost caught me cutting them out of the papers in the file, and wouldn’t my face have been red? At least you could tell me whether they were the ones you wanted— and also, Mr. Mysterious Roberts, what you wanted them for. Don’t tell me you know the girl! Because if you do, I don’t know whether to be worried about you, or just jealous. She must have been really something, in spades, and a dreamboat for looks, judging from the pictures. That is, if you like the type. Meow! Now you write to me, you villain, and tell me all…”

I threw the letter aside and began pawing through the drawer again. There were no clippings, and no other letter postmarked Los Angeles. I yanked the drawer out and looked under it to see if they were stuck to the bottom. I swung back to the dresser and did the same with the drawers in it. There was nothing. I went through them again, more thoroughly this time, unfolding the clean shirts, unrolling socks, and tearing out the paper liners in the bottom. I tore the bed apart and examined the mattress, searched the pockets of the suits hanging in the closet and felt the linings of the jackets. The knowledge that what I sought had actually been here was maddening. Well, they might still be here; there was still a chance he hadn’t found them either. I went through the two suitcases in the closet and poked at the linings, tore the papers off the shelves, looked in the sweatbands of the two hats I found, lifted the dresser and the desk away from the wall and searched behind them, tore up the rug, turned over the chairs and checked their cushions, examined the wallpaper, looked in the water tank of the toilet in the bathroom, and under the old-fashioned tub. I peered through the barrels of two shotguns, and felt inside rubber boots. I couldn’t turn on a light in the kitchen without blanking off the window, but I’d found a flashlight that would be safe enough, so I started out there, tearing papers out of cupboards, looking in cereal boxes and in the stove and refrigerator, even in the icecube trays, and minutely examining the linoleum for traces of its having been disturbed. I found nothing. If he’d kept the clippings here, George had already got them.

I went back into the other room, closed the kitchen door, and slumped wearily on the bed. It was four-thirty; it had taken almost an hour. A car went past on Montrose, its tires squealing as it made the turn into Clebourne. In my mind I could see them criss-crossing the town, flashing their lights into doorways and shrubbery, blocking the exits.
Take no chances; he’s insane, and he may be armed.

I craned my neck and stared up at the ceiling. George’s offices were directly over my head. Reaching over on the desk for the phone, I looked up the number in the directory dialed it, and sat smiling bitterly as I listened to it ring. I shrugged, and let the receiver drop back on the cradle.

I’d better call Barbara and remind her. She should be back at her apartment by now. She answered on the first ring. “Hello?”

“Duke—”

“Oh, thank Heaven! I’ve been scared blue. Where are you?”

“In Roberts’ apartment. Look—they’re going to find my suitcase in the office. Remember, stick to your story and there’s nothing they can do; there was no way you could have known I was back there—”

She cut me off. “Never mind that. What did you find out from Doris?”

I told her. “She won’t admit it, but she knows Junior broke in here that night to burglarize the place. She wasn’t able to get hold of him to tell him I’d had to break the date with Frances, so he thought he was going to have the place to himself and could find where she kept the Saturday receipts from the shop. But of course he walked in on two people, and I don’t think there’s any doubt now the other one was George. I just checked, and you can hear the phone in his office from down here. For having a girl friend on the side, in a small town, you’d never find a cozier arrangement. I suppose he worked a lot at night.”

“Yes, and usually alone. I used to see the windows lighted at night when I’d be coming home from a date or from a movie. He never asked for any stenographic help, so I just assumed he was reading law on cases he was working on.”

“It was a beautiful set-up, all right. If anybody— Fleurelle, for instance—tried to call him, all he had to do was go out through the kitchen, up the stairs, and answer it. But when Junior walked in on them that night, he must have lost his head. I doubt he intended to kill him —he was just taken by surprise and hit him too hard with something. They probably didn’t have any trouble getting the body out of here, since they could bring the car into the alley right to the back door, but from then on there was a lot more at stake than a scandal and divorce.”

“Then on top of that, she pulled out of the arrangement and married you.”

“Right. So all George had for his trouble was a potential murder charge hanging over his head—”

She broke in, “And Roberts probably didn’t even know about that part of it at all.”

I grinned coldly. It was hard to imagine sympathizing with a blackmailer, but you could almost feel sorry for poor Roberts. He had a nice safe racket going, extorting money from a girl standing in front of him, and all the time he was inadvertently threatening to expose a homicide committed by a very dangerous man standing behind him. “It’s a miracle he lasted as long as he did. That’s actually what got him killed—the fact he didn’t know George had any connection with her at all. But if he exposed her, the whole thing might come out. What he was gouging her for, God only knows, except that it must have been something that happened before she ever came here.”

“But how do you suppose Roberts could have found out about that?”

I told her about the letter from the girl in Los Angeles and its reference to clippings. “I’ve searched every inch of the apartment and there are no clippings here, so Roberts either kept them somewhere else or George beat me to ’em. It still doesn’t make much sense, anyway; the news stories could only verify something Roberts already suspected, but she came here from Florida, he was from Texas, and the clippings must have been from a California paper. Naturally, I was hoping that one of those detectives in Miami or Houston would turn up some lead that would indicate she and Roberts had known each other before, but since that didn’t pan out we’re still as far from home as ever.”

“Except for one thing. Roberts was a policeman at one time.”

“Yes, there’s still that.”

“What happened in Doris’ apartment?”

“I pulled one of my dumb stunts,” I said ruefully. I told her about reaching for her to shake her. “So when about the last stitch she had on came off in my hand—”

“Yes, hardly anything would be more calculated to reassure a girl already about to jump out of her skin than tearing off her bra. But never mind; what do we do now?”

“Now?” I said. “You’re going to keep denying you even knew I was in town. And I’m going to thank you for all you’ve done. Over and out.”

“But can’t we tell Scanlon what we’ve found out?”

“We can’t prove a word of it. And besides, there’s nothing so far even to indicate George killed Frances, or any reason he would have—”

“Reason? He hated her.”

“Maybe, but there’s no proof. George is a lawyer, and he’s covered in every direction. He’s too smart to leave anything to chance.”

“But he’s already made one mistake we know of. When he killed Roberts, that thing about the different-sized shot.”

“It was a minor one, and nothing that’d ever tie it to him. Anyway, they’ll be here before long.”

“They’ll never think to look for you there.”

I told her about cutting my hand. “As soon as it’s light they’ll pick up the trail and follow me right in here.”

“But maybe I could pick you up there at the mouth of the alley—”

I interrupted her. “Not a chance. They’ve got the whole town staked out by now, and anything moving will be stopped and searched; they’ve probably got road-blocks on the highway. There’s nowhere to go, anyway. Thanks again for everything, Barbara. You’ve been wonderful.” I hung up before she could protest.

I sagged wearily down on the bed, past all caring, and stared at the blood-soaked towel around my hand. Footsteps scuffed along the alley, and I heard another car go careening up Montrose. Somewhere a man shouted. I looked around at the mess I’d made of the room searching it, and groped in my pockets for a cigarette. The pack was empty. I wadded it up and threw it in a corner. Well, at least they’d come out even—the cigarettes, and the short happy life of John Duquesne Warren. The telephone rang. I reached over listlessly and picked it up.

“Listen, Duke,” she said excitedly, “I’m going to tell them where you are.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” I said. “It’s a good idea; it should get you off the hook—”

“Please! Will you stop talking about that? If they’re going to find you before long anyway, we have nothing to lose. I’ve got the glimmerings of an idea, and I need some leverage.”