Murder is the Pay-Off (16 page)

“Murdered—” He could see her lips frame it.

“I’m afraid so, Mrs. Blake. That’s why I’m askin’ you to show me around, and tell me everythin’ you can think of. Forget all this stuff about your bein’ stupid. Gus wouldn’t ever have fallen in love with a stupid girl no matter how pretty she was.”

He saw he could have saved his breath. She hadn’t heard him.

“Oh—then you—you don’t think it’s my baby he was after? It’s not little Jane?” she gasped. “Oh, if I was sure it wasn’t little Jane they were after, I—I wouldn’t be half as scared!”

The big man’s bleak eyes were warmer.

“Because— Oh, you see we haven’t got anything a burglar would want. This silver—” She threw her hand out at the tea service on the sideboard, a wedding present from Orvie Rogers’s parents. “That’s all we’ve got that’s valuable. And he—he went right past it. I couldn’t think of anything else they’d want but little Jane—maybe on account of something Gus wrote in the paper. But if it’s not little Jane, I’m not afraid anymore!”

Swede Carlson mentally shook his head.
The poor kid,
he thought. That was why she’d looked out the window upstairs, as though the devil himself might be at the door. His face was a shade grimmer. What a night she must have spent, with Gus off gallivanting all over the country with the Maynard witch. Sometimes it looked like the brighter a fellow was the bigger fool he was. And if Janey Blake was stupid, he’d take them stupid every time. And she really meant it. A little color had come back into her cheeks and her eyes had lost the washed-out stare and come alive again. Afraid of kidnaping—not afraid of murder.

“That the way I figure it, Mrs. Blake,” he said quietly. “I don’t know what he was after. But I don’t figure it was any kidnapin’. Now, suppose you just tell me what happened. Everythin’, hear?”

The loose board, the whining hinge, the fuse box, clean as a whistle under the gray powder Williams had left, the basement steps, the hinge whining again, the latch clicking, the glow moving slowly and steadily up the stairs— Janey heard and saw and explained it all.

“And out here,” she said. She opened the kitchen door. “I didn’t tell Mr. Williams, because it was gone. It was a man’s footprint in the damp ground here, where it washes from the drain spout when it rains. I—I’m sorry, but it got raked over this morning. He—he must have been running, because the toe was a lot deeper than the heel. It was about an eleven, and sort of pointed. I mean not blunt like your shoes, but sort of narrower at the tip, like an evening—”

She stopped, looking up at him, blinking her eyes. Swede Carlson looked down at her. He was reflecting philosophically that if he ever died of apoplexy it wouldn’t be in his own bed like a decent God-fearing citizen. It would be right at the feet of some blank-faced, blue-eyed dame saying, “I’m sorry, but I washed his fingerprints off the door, they were all covered with blood, it looked as if I never scrubbed.” He took out his handkerchief and blew his nose savagely. Her voice, coming as through the distant roar of the Volga booming across the bosom of the Little Mother of all the Russians, sounded thin and reedlike in his congested ears, “—not blunt like your shoes, but sort of—” And then she was standing there looking at him blank and half-dazed again.

“Isn’t that funny?” she said. Her eyes wandered off across the garden to a little bunch of bamboo stalks lying on the ground by the frostbitten chrysanthemum in the border. “That’s just what it looked like. I thought there was something funny about it. It looked like the print you’d make with a pair of patent-leather evening shoes.” She looked back at Carlson. “You—you don’t suppose it could have been anybody that—that was at the Maynards’ party? The men had on dinner coats. But that doesn’t make any—any sense. Who would—I mean, they were all our friends, Chief Carlson!”

She twisted her fingers together quickly, the pitch and tempo of her voice rising in indignant protest. “It couldn’t have been anybody who’s a friend of ours!”

“It looks like the fella that killed Doc Wernitz was a friend of his,” Swede Carlson said, in as matter-of-fact tone as he could manage. “He wouldn’t have been in the house if he wasn’t. Nothin’s turned up missin’, so far, that we know of.”

She was looking down at the raked patch of earth. “He was going that way.” She pointed to the iron gate at the end of the narrow garden. “If he went through there, he must have got away down the alley. Do you know what I bet, Mr. Carlson? Not bet—I don’t mean that.” She amended it hastily. “Because I’m never going to gamble any more. I lost over a thousand dollars on the slot machines.”

She broke off, her jaw dropping, her eyes wide. She raised her hand halfway to her mouth and dropped it to her side again. “Why, I’ve—I’ve said it! I’m not afraid to say it anymore! But—that’s wonderful, isn’t it? I’ve been— I’ve been too ashamed to admit it to anybody else!”

“You’ll feel better, admittin’ it, Mrs. Blake. I guess we all do crazy things we don’t like to admit to anybody, one time or another.” He let her stand there in a dazed wonder at herself an instant. “What is it you were goin’ to bet? If you’d been a bettin’ man, that is, Mrs. Blake.”

Her face lighted up in a sudden delighted smile, and sobered as quickly. “You know Mr. Hanzenhofer? The baker over on Mercer Street?”

Swede Carlson nodded.

“Well, he runs a night shift, and he won’t let any of them smoke in the kitchens. I don’t think it’s a kitchen at a bakery, but where they make the bread and stuff and bake it. Or any place—he’s mean about it, really. So they go out in back, where there’s that lattice place, where he has the grapevine. They go out there and smoke when he’s not looking. And maybe—I mean, if any of them happened to be out there, and anybody went along the alley—” Carlson nodded again. “I’ll look into it. Now, you listen to me, Janey. I’m going to call you that, because Gus is a friend of mine.” He saw her stiffen, and went calmly on. “I’m goin’ to wait downstairs while you go get your things and get that baby of yours. Then I’m goin’ to take you down to your mother’s. Now, you’re not to say anythin’ to anybody, about what you hold me here. Not your mother, or your father, not even Gus. Hear? You’re not to say anythin’ about that shoe print, or anythin’ else. I’m like you, Janey. I’m not easy to scare. But I’m sort of scared right now. I’m goin’ to be worse scared if somebody happens to find out maybe you’re not so stupid, after all. You just don’t say anythin’ to anybody ’cept to me.”

He took her arm and started back to the kitchen door with her.

“Let’s look at it this way, Janey. If I’m right, and I’d be the last fella in Smith County to think I ain’t, somebody came in here last night to get somethin’ you all have got. Or—but we’ll skip the other; We’ll assume it’s somethin’ you’ve got he’s got to get a hold of. Now you think that over, and keep your mouth shut about it. You hear, Janey?”

“Yes,” Janey Blake said. “I hear. I—think they must be mistaken, but I—I still hear. I promise. I won’t say a word.” She was a woman, Swede Carlson reflected, but somehow he believed her when she said it.

At four o’clock
Connie Maynard swung her typewriter back from the side of her desk and put the cover on it. She took one more look at the paper before she folded it, took her bag out of the drawer, powdered her nose, put on more lipstick, and got up to get her coat on the hinge behind the door. She was very pleased with herself, and with the paper. It was the most exciting edition of the
Smithville Gazette
that had come off the old presses since she’d come there six months before. And she was the girl responsible for it. Gus’s room was still empty. Nobody had even bothered to turn on the light. Gus had walked off, Miss Constance Maynard had taken charge without a qualm or a moment’s panic. The whole thing had gone off as smoothly as anything had ever done around the
Gazette
—more so, because Gus wasn’t in there snapping at people and pulling stuff and putting last-minute stuff in that wasn’t of any world-shaking importance, no matter what the people of Smithville who’d called it in might think. And she’d yanked the last obituary off the front page, which was more than Gus had had the courage to do. Who cared whether some old Miss This-or-That threw in her last chip? The fact that the whole front page was a magnificent if left-handed obituary of one Doc Wernitz did not at the moment occur to her. For once, there was real news in Smithville. She put on her coat and stuck the paper in her pocket. Her father would like this.

She went out into the quiet pressroom, comparatively quiet with the presses closed down until Monday and everybody rushing around to get through and go home.

“Good night!” She waved her hand around generally. Gus’s habit of being the last man out had always seemed to her an irritating bit of occupational egocentricity, especially when she wanted him to stop by the Sailing Club or the house and have a drink before he went home to dinner. Ed Noonan the city editor was still at his desk, his eyes with no lashes batting every once in a while like an old lizard’s on a stump in the sun. His green eyeshade was pushed back and stood up around his bald dome like an emerald halo. The country editor’s alpaca coat with a hole in each elbow hung on the hook behind him. Connie frowned a little. There was too much corn flourishing around the
Smithville Gazette.
A vigorous, strenuous course of contour plowing was what the place needed.

Ed Noonan batted his old lizard eyes down. His skin was dry as a lizard’s, too.

“Aren’t you going home, Ed?” Connie stopped to pull her gloves on.

“No. Got to stick around to meet a fellow.”

“Gus?”

It was out of Connie’s mouth before she knew she had said it. But before Ed could answer, if he intended to answer, which was doubtful, the storm door pushed open abruptly, the plate-glass door following at once, and Swede Carlson came in. Charged in, Connie thought, stepping hastily back out of the way of the door.

“Where’s Gus? I want to see him.”

He spoke to Ed Noonan, not Connie. Ed shook his head.

“Where is he, Miss Maynard?”

Connie should have shaken her head, too. She realized it on her way home, but not at the moment. “I don’t know where he is,” she said. Her voice flattened like a cobra head. “Nobody knows where he is. Nobody’s seen him since morning. He walked out of here and left me to get the paper out all by myself. With Ed’s help, of course.”

She added the last seeing the startled shift of Chief Carlson’s eyes toward the city editor. She did not see Ed Noonan’s left lid lower slightly or the bleak flicker of response in Carlson’s. “If you want Gus, you’ll have to find him,” she went on. If Chief Carlson thought she’d forgotten this morning in her office he was very much mistaken. She was even skipping a cocktail party to go home and tell her father, and perhaps Chief Carlson would find himself with leisure to write his experiences instead of telling them to people. And he must have thought of that himself; she could see the change taking place in him right there by the door.

“Well, that’s all right, Miss Maynard,” he said. He was smooth as anything, all of a sudden. “I guess it’s you I want to see, not Gus. You can probably tell me more than he can, if that’s the way of it.”

He pulled the
Gazette
out of his overcoat pocket. It was folded to the box in the middle of the front page. “Mighty smart reportin’, here.” He tapped it with a blunt forefinger. “Just where’d you get this information about Doc Wernitz, Miss Maynard? That’s all I want to know.”

“That’s information from private sources, Swede,” Noonan said. He lowered both eyelids and dragged at his cigarette. “You could easy take legal steps to make us disgorge, I guess. But that’d be a lot of trouble. Nobody here can claim the reward. I guess Gus’ll tell you where he got it soon as he comes in. I don’t know, or I’d tell you. I doubt if Connie knows, either. Do you, Connie?”

“No, I don’t.”

“So that’s the way it is, Swede.” Noonan leaned back in his chair. “If I was you and I wanted Gus, I’d do what they call a pub crawl. That’s what he looked like to me when he went outa here this morning. Like a guy that was going to go and get drunk as hell. I don’t say he did. I say he looked like he was going to. And I’m sittin’ around here because my daughter’s husband is going to come and buy me a drink or two. Stick around, both of you. He’s got all kinds of dough.”

Connie looked at Carlson. She couldn’t tell whether Ed was lying or telling the truth, or what Swede Carlson thought about it. Their faces were at opposite poles of complete inscrutability. Carlson stuck the
Gazette
back in his pocket and moved over to the desk.

“Mind if I use your phone?”

“Go ahead.” Noonan pushed it over to him. “Mind if we listen?”

“Go ahead.” He dialed a number and waited, the phone pressed close to his large purple-tinged ear. “Carlson speakin’,” he said. “Listen, son. I want Gus Blake. Yeah. That’s right. You know Gus Blake. I want him tonight, drunk or sober. 1941 coupe, black. What’s his number, Ed?” He repeated the license number in the phone. “No, I don’t want him in the jailhouse, I want him wherever he is. Even if he’s in the—” he remembered Miss Maynard, “in the library readin’. I want to talk to him. Hear? Relay this to Williams at city headquarters and tell him I said would he put his men on it. Hear? Get on it, son. I want to talk to him before somebody finds him and cracks him over the skull, too. And I’m not foolin’, hear?”

“He must unless he’s stone-deaf,” Connie said lightly. Chief Carlson put down the phone. “Well, I’ll shove along, Ed.” He went to the door. “If you see Gus, Miss Maynard, tell him I’m lookin’ for him. Hear?”

As he went out, Connie turned sharply to Noonan. “Where is he? I’ve
got
to know!”

Noonan pushed his chair back, its top edge resting in the groove in the plastered wall behind him. “If anybody else asked me that question, Connie, you know what I’d do?” he said dispassionately.

“No. What?”

“I don’t know myself. It would all depend. But don’t you ever ask me another question like it.”

He crossed one foot over his knee and held it with both hands, whether from custom or for purposes of self-restraint, Connie couldn’t tell.