Lady Afraid (14 page)

Sarah nodded bitterly. “So he said.”

“I don’t like that much,” the private detective stated.

“If I described Brill, Mr. Maurice, maybe you would know him.”

“Well, you can try that.”

But when Sarah had given him the clearest word picture of Brill she could form, Mr. Maurice shook his head. “That doesn’t hook up to anybody I know.”

Sarah described Yellow-shoes.

Another headshake. “Him neither,” Mr. Maurice said.

Ides was next. Sarah clearly remembered what Ides looked like. She had been so frightened when Ides confronted her on the bugeye that the man had cut a sharp image into her mind.

Mr. Maurice fiddled with his bathrobe cord. “I think we got a bite,” he said. “You say a pale skin, eh? Kind of dry-looking, wasn’t it? Did he have asthma?”

Sarah leaped to her feet. “Yes! Why, yes! I believe he did! The heavy, labored breathing when he stood there on the bugeye listening—he hadn’t been hurrying. Asthma would explain that, wouldn’t it?”

“Yeah, but the sand-throated voice you mentioned tipped me off,” said the private detective. “Only I didn’t meet him as Ides. Name then was Cokerham, or something like that. Dewey Cokerham, I think it was. I met him in a bookie place three or four times, and he got to trying to tell me how to pick horses and I remember giving him my business card, figuring a guy that nuts about playing the races is likely to have girl-friend or wife trouble and need a snooping job.”

“Where does Cokerham, or Ides, live?” Sarah asked excitedly.

“Search me.”

“Could you find out?”

Mr. Maurice scratched his head, then he looked at Captain Most, and it was to Most that he spoke, saying, “Well, now we’ve come to what I usually call professional services.”

Most nodded. “I’ll hire you.”

“Cost five bucks.”

“That isn’t much,” Most said.

“It is for the job—if I’m lucky,” Mr. Maurice said dryly. “A guy who follows the nags the way this Ides or Cokerham does would have his address with the bookie so the bookie’s runners could call on him to take or leave dough. All I gotta do is phone the bookie, Ted Roan—if I’m lucky.”

Frowning, understanding that he had been sucked in, Most burned over it in silence; then he smiled a thin smile. “What was it the automobile mechanic said? For tightening the bolt, ten cents; for knowing what bolt to tighten, five dollars.” He extended a greenback.

Mr. Maurice chuckled. “You’re okay, pal.” He pocketed the bill and opened the door. “Take me a couple or three minutes. You folks like to wait inside?”

They stepped into an imitation-Spanish front room filled with the sort of stuff that comes all in one truckload from a furniture store that has a Spanish-room display. Sarah sat on a straight-backed chair under an imitation-tapestry banner that hung from a make-believe iron spear. Most perched dubiously on a stool. The stool had iron legs.

Mr. Maurice shuffled through a plaster arch into a hall, then into a bedroom, and closed the bedroom door. Instantly there were voices. His voice, the woman’s. Excitement quickly came into both voices. The private detective jumped back into the room.

“The girl’s called the cops!” he said shrilly. He looked at Sarah and explained, “She recognized you from a description she heard over the radio earlier.” He grimaced and spread his hands and added, “When I called her out and asked funny questions about Brill and Black, she concluded I wanted the cops called. You better scram.”

Most said sharply, “What about Cokerham or Ides’s address?”

“I tell you what—you call me. Half an hour. Telephone. If I’ve got it, I’ll give it to you.”

Nodding, Most said, “It would help a lot if you meant that.”

Mr. Maurice suddenly seemed older and a little pale. He said, “Lover!”

His wife appeared behind him in the bedroom door and she was holding a twelve-gauge repeating shotgun horizontally at the level of her hips. She said, “It’s all right, Abel.”

They stood there, a frightened man and wife, wanting only to be clear of this thing; certainly they now had no wish to help, and this was understandable, if self-centered, harsh.

A film of moisture appeared on Mr. Maurice’s forehead, like a frying pan that had been greased. He said, “Get out of here! You been going to the movies and seeing the shamus play tricks on the cops. In real life it don’t go that way. Get out. I don’t want no shooting scrape in my house. Get out!” His voice, climbing, ended on a note flutelike and hysterical.

Sarah watched the woman with the shotgun—she knew the woman was frightened, as apt to shoot as not. Then Sarah felt Most’s hand on her arm. He drew her to the door; they went out into the night. They walked to the station wagon. Most started the engine, and they drove away. They were silent.

Sarah presently commenced to tremble, beginning with her knees. The shaking was not bad, but there was nothing she seemed to be able to do that would stop it; nothing that her thoughts could seize would help; she simply could not end the trembling.

She sat dry-eyed, vibrating foolishly, and thinking of Jonnie, remembering the boy close to her; the child in her arms as he had been when she had left the Lineyack house with him. She remembered how she had carried him, how it had felt.

“My son? Where is he?” Sarah sank her anguished face into both hands. “I’m afraid, Captain Most! I’m so afraid for Jonnie that I think it is going to paralyze me!”

Most muttered, “Yes, I know,” in a bothered tone. And he drove on in silence, baffled by the impossibility of performing a transfusion of his own calmness to her.

Most had, since leaving the private detective’s home, driven south, then west, and now the station wagon moved on a boulevard that, considering the lateness, had a reassuring amount of traffic. There was still evidence of the rain the day before, pools of water that now looked old, and Most avoided these. Glancing often at Sarah, his eyes seemed to be trying to find her composed. But while her thoughts were forlornly with the little boy, she was as hopeless as she had been at any time.

“You’d better have some coffee,” Most said abruptly.

Sighting a curb-service place ahead, he studied it as it drew near, concluded it was free of police, and turned in. He had seen that there were no waitresses serving cars; at this hour you parked and went inside for whatever you wanted. There were several other cars already in the place and two trucks. Most stopped the station wagon conveniently in black shadow beside one of the trucks. He switched off the engine, punched out the headlights.

“I’ll bring something,” he offered. Then he added, “But it won’t be right away. I’m going to make a phone call.” He sat still for a few seconds before explaining, “I figure we should start the police hunting for Lida Dunlap and for Cokerham-Ides. I’ll call the night city editor I talked to before—Wilson—and tell him this is Cohen, the retired newspaperman, again. I’ll give him enough to get him excited about Cokerham and the Dunlap woman.”

Sarah nodded. “There is another thing we might try.”

He had opened the door. He turned and waited expectantly. “What?”

Sarah said, “The private detective mentioned the name of a man who might have Cokerham-Ides’s address—a bookmaker named Ted Roan. Do you suppose Ted Roan would give you the address?”

Most looked at her with satisfaction. “I was going to surprise you with that,” he said. He got out and walked, into the lunchroom, a tall angular man who clearly was pleased that she had thought of asking the bookie.

When he was no longer in sight, Sarah settled back with the certainty that her anxieties would make another onslaught. They did. She defended herself against them.
The end can be worth all this
, she thought. If in the end she possessed the child she had created. It had been worth so much to have possessed him the little time she had. To hear his voice… Paul’s voice, she decided. He had Paul’s voice. Paul, had he been alive, would have been delighted, because Paul had fancied himself as a singer, and he
had
been good. Paul, whose weaknesses had been thrust irresistibly upon him by Ivan Lineyack, had been worthy of fathering her child. She remembered, with bitter sweetness, how they had enjoyed Jonnie when he was a small baby. A tiny child had been such a wonder; everything had seemed so different. Sarah had lived all her life on or around boats, and there is a kind of salt-pork reality about boats and the sea—a man’s world.

Paul’s life had been softer than hers, so he may not have felt the wonder of a baby as much. Each thing about Sarah’s tiny baby had been deeply, heart-clutchingly exciting to her. What powder to buy, his formula, the proper softness of blanket—these became adventures greater than any she had known. The discovery that little babies shouldn’t sleep with pillows in their cribs, lest they smother, had been a greater thunderclap than having a sloop dismasted and sinking under her ever had been. Nothing had touched her so much before; nor had she dreamed anything could. With her baby in her arms warmly alive and excruciatingly a part of her, she had felt blindly surprised and the luckiest person there ever was.

Sarah was sobbing quietly out of bottomless despair when Most returned. Most had come briskly. Sight of her tears blunted the excitement that was at him. He merely slid in behind the wheel and sat there in silence, a tray holding coffee and sandwiches balanced uncomfortably on his knees. “A woman’s best relief valve is her tears,” Sarah blurted finally.

He cleared his throat, said, “I phoned the editor. He will see that the police put Cokerham and Lida Dunlap on their hunted list.”

His fingers closed tentatively on a tall paper cup containing coffee as black as midnight.

He added, “And Ted Roan, the bookie, came through with Cokerham’s address.”

“You found out where Cokerham, or Ides, lives?” Sarah gasped.

“Yes…. This may surprise you. It did me. He—Remember how he called out ‘Ahoy!’ as if he had been around boats?”

“Yes.”

“He’s a boat hand. He’s the paid skipper on the Lineyacks’ cabin cruiser,
Jonnie II
.”

Sarah’s throat whipped tight with surprise. “Ides works for Ivan Spellman Lineyack?”

“Cokerham is his name. The Ides was just something he thought of.”

A kind of wooden composure laid hold of Sarah. There was implication here, or interpretation, which could not be ignored.

She said, “This involves the Lineyacks directly.”

“It sure does.”

Sarah made a decision. “I want to talk to Ivan.”

Most agreed at once. “Maybe you should. But it might not be an easy thing to manage.” He lifted the coffee and held it out to her. “Drink your coffee. We’ll see what can be done. I got you hamburgers. That all right?”

F
ROM THE LUNCHROOM THEY
drove back to Miami Beach and to the Lineyack home. Time, it seemed to Sarah, was walking on very slow feet; she could not believe her own wrist watch until Most showed her his. The hour was really not yet five, still full night. Most tugged his coat sleeve back over the watch and returned his hand to the steering wheel, with a forefinger outstretched toward the Lineyack place.

“That it?” he asked.

“Yes.”

He slackened speed, but not enough to seem to be loitering, as he drove past the Lineyack home. The house was on Most’s side of the street, and as Sarah watched the house she could also see the play of feeling, his reaction to the mansion, on Most’s angular, taciturn features. He was impressed. Surprise jerked his eyebrows into crutch arches. The tanned buckram composure of his face was momentarily unsettled. He had clearly expected a less pretentious place.

In a few moments, with the Lineyack home now dropping behind them, he said, “Somebody misplaced the Kansas City Union Station, didn’t they?”

She waited. She knew he was awed. He had seen startling evidence of wealth and power. Perhaps it had come to him for the first time that she was pitted against great power. And he, aiding her, could expect to feel its violence.

If Most had thought of all this as an adventure for adventure’s sake, he saw differently now. Sarah waited for a sign that he had wavered. She recalled how, when the police car had fallen in behind them as they were en route to Arbogast’s apartment, she had wondered if Most carried it too well. Did he like excitement overmuch? This was still unanswered.
Why
, she thought,
it’s becoming awfully important to me to know what stuff this man is made of.
She had already seen that he was not afraid of other men. But why should he be? He was a man of overaverage muscularity; he would know by now that few men could best him. But how would he react, confronted with power in the hands of a foe? Real power—he couldn’t hope to match money power. How would he stand up to that sort of opponent?

He said, “I saw no police machine. But with that shrubbery, we can’t be sure there isn’t one in the driveway.”

Still unsure about him, Sarah described the spot where she had parked her rented car while she went for the boy.

“Good enough,” Most agreed. “We’ll stop there and look the place over.”

She felt idiotically relieved. He was no more than respectful of the enemy. She repressed a silly impulse to giggle at her upsurge of doubts about him.

Most curbed the station wagon, stilled the engine, and blacked the lights. He turned to Sarah, asking, “You think if the police aren’t around that the best way is to walk right in?”

“There is no other way. If I telephoned first, Ivan could notify the police,” Sarah said.

“True…. I might make a contact, arrange a meeting.”

She shook her head. “No! No, that smacks too much of—of evasion, of hiding.”

Most was silent in the darkness for a bit. “I take it that you wouldn’t trust Ivan not to double-cross you.”

“Exactly.”

“It must be upsetting to a man to know you hold such an opinion of him,” he said soberly, and he opened the door and swung his long legs out.

Alone, solitary in all the great, sprawling house, there was one lighted window. That one was in front, a square dim eye. In the rear there were three cars standing in a four-car garage. All had Maine license plates. “Lineyack machines,” Sarah whispered. Elsewhere there were no cars. Most drew Sarah into the furry shadows. “See that lighted window. Ground floor. I’ll have a look. You wait.”