Lady Afraid (7 page)

She made the engine go. She had thrown off some excitement and she could blame darkly her failure to remember how to start a flooded engine. Never one patient with her own shortcomings, forgetting how to start a flooded engine seemed particularly stupid. The way you did it was to step hard on the accelerator so that the throttle was wide open and turn the engine over a number of times with the starter, thus clearing out the too-rich gasoline mixture. Flooding was a frequent occurrence with boat engines, and she should have known.

Puzzled now, namelessly afraid, unable to fit sense to what had happened, she drove a few blocks in a direction the other machine might have gone. She found no trace of it. She sent the car wildly toward her apartment.

Leaving the car in front of her apartment house, she remembered she didn’t have her key. This came to her as she laid her hand against the lobby door. The key was in her purse, which she had left on the living-room table. The door resisted her, for it was locked.

Her finger was hard and aching for an age against the call button before Mr. Cline came. Mr. Cline flapped in nightshirt and robe.

“Gee whiz, Mrs. Lineyack!” The old janitor’s rheumy eyes blamed her for disturbing his sleep. “I heard you first time you rang.”

“You were asleep?”

“Course I was!” the old man said grumpily.

“But—then no police—have been to see you?”

“Huh?” Surprise whipped the old janitor erect, widened his eyes, tugged his jaw downward. “Cops?” he said. “What cops do you mean?”

Wordless with the hard weight of new fears, Sarah pushed past him and to the elevator. Mr. Cline pattered along after her, carpet slippers slapping against his feet. He cried excitedly, “What’s this? What’s wrong, Mrs. Lineyack? Something wrong?”

“I don’t know,” Sarah said in a not at all solid voice. “I think so. Will you come up, please, and let me into my apartment.”

The old man’s moist eyes followed her into the elevator; reluctantly, timidly, he got in himself. The years had carried him past any liking for excitement, and also his life had not been successful, so that he was a man easily filled with apprehensions.

Sarah strode out on the fourth floor, and the janitor hung back and his plaintive, “Mrs. Lineyack, what’s the matter?” was a plea that he have none of this. Sarah came back and gripped his arm. “Please open my door, Mr. Cline!”

He unlocked the door. Sarah flew past him with arms down tight at her sides. Already she had a sick sense of what she would find. And it was so. It was as she expected. Jonnie was not in the bedroom. Jonnie was not in the apartment anywhere. Her son was gone. Jonnie was gone.

Hardly any of Mr. Cline’s timidity left him, but, head extended turtle-fashion, he ventured into the apartment. His eyes watched Sarah as she fell in a frenzy upon the places that a two-and-a-half-year-old boy might have gotten by himself.

On the bedroom chest of drawers the electric clock purred so gently that it could not be heard more than a few inches away, and in the kitchen the refrigerator was but a trifle more noisy. Elsewhere there was stillness, except inside Sarah, for her pulse was hammering in an erratic way, like an animal coughing. The old man giggled. “Looks all right to me, Mrs. Lineyack!” he said shrilly.

Sarah came woodenly toward him and past him and on to the elevator. A silly grin rode the janitor’s face; he swiveled to watch her. He tittered. “Nothin’s wrong as I can see. Whassa matter? You just get scared?”

But in a moment his grin lost its reasons for being—relief, inane glee—it was only a shape on his tired, sleep-dulled old face. For Sarah had gone into the elevator and the elevator descended, leaving Mr. Cline behind.

In the street there were small foxtails of darkish smoke drifting from the exhaust pipe of her rented car to remind Sarah that she had not shut off the engine. She got behind the wheel and pulled the shift lever toward her and down for low gear. But before the machine had gone more than a few feet she caught a sound, an alarming whimper, eerie in the night-gripped city. She stopped the car and listened…. The sound was a police siren. Approaching.

Here, suddenly, was dilemma. She stood confronted with the need for a decision. Take her chances with the police now?
I am the victim of a strange thing.
A dark plan had closed on her. And it seemed logical that, since there was a plot, it would have foreseen—planned on—the logical fact of the police arresting her. Ergo, to confute the enemy, she must avoid arrest. She would talk to her lawyer before she did anything. She drove on.

The police car came into the street three blocks behind Sarah. Two white eyes and a single red one, its lights reeled into view. Sarah made sure that it was going to curb itself at her apartment building. After that she turned the first corner and drove carefully a little under the speed limit.

Attorney Calvin Brandeis Brill had his office in the Biscayne Center Building, a few blocks from Miami’s impressive skyscraper county offices building. Sarah had been there twice. In all, she’d had seven personal interviews with Brill. The two at his office, three at her apartment, two on what might be called dinner dates. That seemed a lot for the few days since Mr. Arbogast’s employee, Lida Dunlap, had introduced her to Brill.

The Biscayne Center Building, encased in gaudy brick that was just a shade less white than it had once been, seemed empty of life. The cigar stand stood hooded; wall-cases were shuttered and padlocked. Chipped and scarred floor tiles had that slippery air of having been recently scrubbed.

Sarah’s footsteps, driven in haste, made quick whetting sounds in the sour cavity of the lobby. She reached the elevators. There were four. One waited, holding open a large empty dark mouth. She began ringing, a finger on the call button hard and continuously. A fitful clucking began in the shaft behind the wired-glass doors, and by fits and starts another cage came and the doors opened awkwardly. A crone face peered out at her suspiciously.

“Attorney Brill’s office,” Sarah requested, stepping into the elevator.

The woman was about fifty, sloppy-fat, with hair like the mane of a gray mule. She peered owlishly. “Ain’t nobody here.”

“Please take me to the fifth floor!” Sarah said impatiently.

Sullenness touched the woman and she used a large dusting rag for gesturing. “Ain’t a soul around, I tell you.”

Sarah shook her head. “No… I’m sure Mr. Brill would return to his office. He would be expecting—well—he is surely here.”

“Brill, huh? And what floor you say, dearie? Fifth?” The charwoman snuffled and scrubbed her nose with the back of a hand. She complained, “I tell you there ain’t no use—”

Sarah’s tension drove an angry edge against the woman’s disgruntlement.

“Take me to the fifth floor, please. And hurry,” she commanded.

The other shrugged, her mouth corners got a sullen warp, and she banged the doors shut and slapped the control over. The cage jumped unpleasantly. “I ain’t supposed to do this!” she snapped.

Sarah remembered Lawyer Brill’s office door. A neat pastel-green steel door with an opaque glass and the gold-lettered words:
CALVIN BRANDEIS BRILL
,
Attorney-at-Law.

The number was 540. Sure of the door, positive of it, she went straight to it. But at once she sensed the absence of something that should have been here.
There was no name.
The lawyer’s shingle was no longer on the door. Sarah took this fact unwillingly, incredulously—actually wanting physically to back away from it.

No name. No shingle. The opaque glass in the door had no light behind it. Yet this was Brill’s office. It was the right number, 540. The number
was
540…. When she had been here before, Brill’s name had been conspicuous and resplendent on the door where now there was nothing.

Sarah had the feeling of standing on no foundation at all, with the sense of being robbed of reason. She felt her control drawing apart at the seams, and suddenly, able to do nothing against hysteria, she threw herself at the door. “Mr. Brill!” she cried. “Mr. Brill!”

The charwoman had been standing with hands planted on hips. Now the old woman’s arms dangled; her face jutted forward in surprise. She didn’t look sorry. Quite the contrary. The only thing this meant to her was that here was a pretty, well-dressed woman with trouble. The monotony of a night filled with scrub brushes was broken.

“Dearie,” she said, “that’s an empty office.”

Sarah did not turn and gave no sign that she had heard. But her hands no longer pounded, but merely rested, against the door.

“ ’S empty, I tell you.” The old woman was shuffling close now, sounding like something being dragged on the floor, and she added, “I oughta know! I give it a sweep when I done this floor.”

“It can’t be!” Sarah said in a tight, far voice.

The charwoman sniffed gleefully. “Okay, don’t believe me, then.”

“You only mean there’s no one in there, don’t you?”

“Nope, I mean there ain’t nothing, dearie. Nothing! Nothing but the bare walls.”

“But that can’t be true!”

The old woman’s head was tossed; she had been insulted. And she liked it because it was more excitement. The old woman flourished the dust rag so that it popped noisily.

“Sister, I’ll just show you. I got a key. I’ll show you—we’ll see!” she said indignantly.

In a moment the door sprang open under the grimy hand, and Sarah stumbled through. She faced blank walls, bare flooring, and windows without blinds. A naked empty suite consisting of reception room and inner sanctum.

Blue! She stared at the walls. Blue. Brill’s office walls had been this shade. There was no question now about this being Brill’s place. It was.

“Did Mr. Brill move to another office in the building?” Sarah demanded. “He must have?”

The charwoman had reached a conclusion of her own. She leered and asked, “Some guy give you the slip, huh?”

Sarah ignored this and wheeled and went into the inner office. Here the emptiness was not complete to the last detail. A telephone, a handset, stood on a Miami directory on the bare floor. She sank beside these.

The old woman was being ignored and she resented it. She slapped the rag about vigorously. “Well?” She made the word ring out in triumph like a rooster crowing on a fence. “Well, are you satisfied, dearie?”

Sarah took up the telephone.

“Hey! I ain’t so sure,” said the woman, “that I’m gonna let you use that phone.”

Sarah turned slowly and slowly took a step toward the woman. She said, “I think I’ve had enough.” And the woman fell back and lost her grin, along with most of her pleasure in the situation. She watched wordlessly, her face twisting into various expressions, monkey-like.

Sarah’s finger moved the telephone dial. She had a good memory and it yielded Mr. Arbogast’s phone number, even as excited as she was. She got a quick answer.

“Mr. Arbogast?” Sarah asked tensely.

“Yes,” replied Mr. Arbogast’s jolly-man voice. “Oh!… Sarah, isn’t it?”

“I wasn’t sure you would be home. I thought you might still be—not at home.” She paused, trying to level her breathing.

Something in her urgency yanked some of the softness from Mr. Arbogast’s tone. It sounded as if he must have brought the phone close to his plump lips. “Sarah, is something wrong?”

Sarah said, “That attorney, Calvin Brandeis Brill—the one I talked to you about this afternoon—can you tell me whether he has changed his office? Has he—”

“Wait! Hold on, Sarah.” Mr. Arbogast sounded startled. “I’m puzzled. An attorney? Brill, you say? I don’t believe I understand.”

“Brill—the lawyer about whom I spoke to you.”

“You spoke to me—but—why, you must be mistaken. When?”

“This afternoon.”

“No, no, Sarah. I don’t recall that.”

“But I did!”

She could picture Arbogast’s soft mouth open in surprise at the other telephone, the dependent, acquisitive little mouth.

“Why, I did not talk to you this afternoon, Sarah.” He said this with conviction.

“But you did! It was about ten minutes after two. Yes, about that time.”

“You… Was it at my office?”

“Yes. On the telephone.”

“But I wasn’t even there in the office at ten past two, Sarah. I was still at lunch, I think, at that time.”

“You know Brill, do you not?”

“You say the man’s an attorney? What is his full name, my dear?”

“Calvin Brandeis Brill.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You don’t know him?”

“I’m afraid not. I do not believe I’ve heard the name before.”

“But the man is a lawyer! And you did tell me—”

“There are many lawyers,” said Mr. Arbogast slowly. “Sarah, what is—These are very odd things you are saying.”

“Yes, odd,” Sarah said dully. “Very odd.” She breathed deeply against tightness and then added, “Thank you, Mr. Arbogast.” And then she laid the handset gently on its cradle.

The charwoman’s face had by now tried many expressions, all of them indignant, and had settled on one of sullen pleasure. She scratched a thigh with two fingers, then folded the dust rag precisely in a square.

Sarah dialed another number on the telephone. This time she called Miss Fletching, secretary to Mr. Collins, who owned the yard.

“Miss Fletching, this is Sarah,” she said tensely. “Did I get you out of bed? I’m sorry. Can you give me Captain Most’s telephone number?… Yes, I’ll wait.” Shortly Mr. Collins’s secretary returned to the wire and gave her Most’s number. Sarah’s “Thank you” was quietly given, and again she dialed.

Most’s voice, oddly thick, finally responded.

“Sarah Lineyack speaking, Captain Most,” Sarah said gravely. “Could I see you immediately? It is quite important.”

His reply, while not given at once, was, “Of course. I’ll have to dress and go get my car.”

“No! No, I’ll come there.”

Most was again hesitant, and she sensed that he did not wish it that way.

But when he spoke, it was to tell her how to find him.

A
S SARAH DROVE SHE
had time to weigh the reasons—emotional or whatever they were—for taking this to Most. The notion of seeing Most had sprung at her quickly, strongly, coming in a way that she had learned to trust. There is an innate force about a solid idea that lets you realize its value instantly, and this had been like that. Most was Arbogast’s employee, the man Arbogast had hired to skipper
Vameric.
Therefore Most logically had an interest in this strange thing—it touched his boss.
But Most is probably the strongest man I know
, she thought. Although their acquaintance had been short, she had given Most a pattern in her mind, and it was not a weak pattern. He was a man of fiber, a quiet man, one who spoke softly and backed it with common sense and good reasoning. She remembered hearing stories about him having a temper, and they might be true, but a temper is sometimes to a man’s credit.