Nightmare Town: Stories (32 page)

“To back all this up, he had let Miss Kenbrook go into the apartment building at three in the morning, in front of which a man had just been killed, without questioning her or mentioning her in his report. That looked as if he knew who had done the killing. So I took a chance with the empty-shell trick, it being a good bet that he would have thrown his away, and would think that -“

McTighe’s heavy voice interrupted my explanation.

“How about this assault charge?” he asked, and had the decency to avoid my eye when I turned toward him with the others.

Tennant cleared his throat.

“Er-ah – in view of the way things have turned out, and knowing that Miss Kenbrook doesn’t want the disagreeable publicity that would accompany an affair of this sort, why, I’d suggest that we drop the whole thing.” He smiled brightly from McTighe to me. “You know nothing has gone on the records yet.”

“Make the big heap play his hand out,” O’Gar growled in my ear. “Don’t let him drop it.”

“Of course if Miss Kenbrook doesn’t want to press the charge,” McTighe was saying, watching me out of the tail of his eye, “I suppose -“

“If everybody understands that the whole thing was a plant,” I said, “and if the policemen who heard the story are brought in here now and told by Tennant and Miss Kenbrook that it was all a lie – then I’m willing to let it go at that. Otherwise, I won’t stand for a hush-up.”

“You’re a damned fool!” O’Gar whispered. “Put the screws on them!”

But I shook my head. I didn’t see any sense in making a lot of trouble for myself just to make some for somebody else – and suppose Tennant proved his story…

So the policemen were found, and brought into the office again, and told the truth.

And presently Tennant, the girl, and I were walking together like three old friends through the corridors toward the door, Tennant still asking me to let him make amends for the evening’s work.

“You’ve got to let me do something!” he insisted. “It’s only right!”

His hand dipped into his coat, and came out with a thick billfold.

“Here,” he said, “let me -“

We were going, at that happy moment, down the stone vestibule steps that lead to Kearny Street – six or seven steps there are.

“No,” I said, “let me -“

He was on the next to the top step, when I reached up and let go.

He settled in a rather limp pile at the bottom.

Leaving his empty-faced lady love to watch over him, I strolled up through Portsmouth Square toward a restaurant where the steaks come thick.

The moon was not up and his apartment was on the opposite side of the building from the street – lights; the blackness about him was complete – he could not see so far as the foot of his bed.

Holding his breath, not moving after that first awakening start, he lay with straining eyes and ears. Almost at once a sound – perhaps a repetition of the one that had aroused him – came from the adjoining room: the furtive shuffling of feet across the wooden floor. A moment of silence, and a chair grated on the floor, as if dislodged by a careless shin. Then silence again, and a faint rustling as of a body scraping against the rough paper of the wall.

Now Carter Brigham was neither a hero nor a coward, and he was not armed. There was nothing in his rooms more deadly than a pair of candlesticks, and they – not despicable weapons in an emergency – were on the far side of the room from which the sounds came.

If he had been awakened to hear very faint and not often repeated noises in the other room – such rustlings as even the most adept burglar might not avoid – the probabilities are that Carter would have been content to remain in his bed and try to frighten the burglar away by yelling at him. He would not have disregarded the fact that in an encounter at close quarters under these conditions every advantage would lie on the side of the prowler.

But this particular prowler had made quite a lot of noise, had even stumbled against a chair, had shown himself a poor hand at stealthiness. That an inexpert burglar might easily be as dangerous as an adept did not occur to the man in the bed.

Perhaps it was that in the many crook stories he had written, deadliness had always been wedded to skill and the bunglers had always been comparatively harmless and easily overcome, and that he had come to accept this theory as a truth. After all, if a man says a thing often enough, he is very likely to acquire some sort of faith in it sooner or later.

Anyhow, Carter Brigham slid his not unmuscular body gently out from between the sheets and crept on silent bare feet toward the open doorway of the room from which the sounds had come. He passed from his bed to a position inside the next room, his back against the wall beside the door during an interlude of silence on the intruder’s part.

The room in which Carter now stood was every bit as black as the one he had left; so he stood motionless, waiting for the prowler to betray his position.

His patience was not taxed. Very soon the burglar moved again, audibly; and then against the rectangle of a window – scarcely lighter than the rest of the room -Carter discerned a man-shaped shadow just a shade darker coming toward him. The shadow passed the window and was lost in the enveloping darkness.

Carter, his body tensed, did not move until he thought the burglar had had time to reach a spot where no furniture intervened. Then, with clutching hands thrown out on wide – spread arms, Carter hurled himself forward.

His shoulder struck the intruder and they both crashed to the floor. A forearm came up across Carter’s throat, pressing into it. He tore it away and felt a blow on his cheek. He wound one arm around the burglar’s body, and with the other fist struck back. They rolled over and over across the floor until they were stopped by the legs of a massive table, the burglar uppermost.

With savage exultance in his own strength, which the struggle thus far had shown to be easily superior to the other’s, Carter twisted his body, smashing his adversary into the heavy table. Then he drove a fist into the body he had just shaken off and scrambled to his knees, feeling for a grip on the burglar’s throat. When he had secured it he found that the prowler was lying motionless, unresisting. Laughing triumphantly, Carter got to his feet and switched on the lights.

The girl on the floor did not move.

Half lying, half hunched against the table where he had hurled her, she was inanimate. A still, twisted figure in an austerely tailored black suit – one sleeve of which had been torn from the shoulder – with an unended confusion of short chestnut hair above a face that was linen-white except where blows had reddened it. Her eyes were closed. One arm was outflung across the floor, the other lay limply at her side; one silken leg was extended, the other folded under her.

Into a corner of the room her hat, a small black toque, had rolled; not far from the hat lay a very small pinch-bar, the jimmy with which she had forced an entrance.

The window over the fire escape – always locked at night – was wide-open. Its catch hung crookedly.

Mechanically, methodically – because he had been until recently a reporter on a morning paper, and the lessons of years are not unlearned in a few weeks – Carter’s eyes picked up these details and communicated them to his brain while he strove to conquer his bewilderment.

After a while his wits resumed their functions and he went over to kneel beside the girl. Her pulse was regular, but she gave no other indications of life. He lifted her from the floor and carried her to the leather couch on the other side of the room. Then he brought cold water from the bathroom and brandy from the bookcase. Generous applications of the former to her temples and face and of the latter between her lips finally brought a tremor to her mouth and a quiver to her eyelids.

Presently she opened her eyes, looked confusedly around the room, and endeavored to sit up. He pressed her head gently down on the couch.

“Lie still a moment longer – until you feel all right.”

She seemed to see him then for the first time, and to remember where she was. She shook her head clear of his restraining hand and sat up, swinging her feet down to the floor.

“So I lose again,” she said, with an attempt at nonchalance that was only faintly tinged with bitterness, her eyes meeting his.

They were green eyes and very long, and they illuminated her face which, without their soft light, had seemed of too sullen a cast for beauty, despite the smooth regularity of the features.

Carter’s glance dropped to her discolored cheek, where his knuckles had left livid marks.

“I’m sorry I struck you,” he apologized. “In the dark I naturally thought you were a man. I wouldn’t have -“

“Forget it,” she commanded coolly. “It’s all in the game.”

“But I -“

“Aw, stop it!” Impatiently. “It doesn’t amount to anything. I’m all right.”

“I’m glad of that.”

His bare toes came into the range of his vision, and he went into his bedroom for slippers and a robe. The girl watched him silently when he returned to her, her face calmly defiant.

“Now,” he suggested, drawing up a chair, “suppose you tell me all about it.”

She laughed briefly. “It’s a long story, and the bulls ought to be here any minute now. There wouldn’t be time to tell it.”

“The police?”

“Uh-huh.”

“But I didn’t send for them! Why should I?”

“God knows!” She looked around the room and then abruptly straight into his eyes. “If you think I’m going to buy my liberty, brother”-her voice was icy insolent – “you’re way off!”

He denied the thought. Then: “Suppose you tell me about it.”

“All primed to listen to a sob story?” she mocked. “Well, here goes: I got some bad breaks on the last couple of jobs I pulled and had to lay low – so low that I didn’t even get anything to eat for a day or two. I figured I’d have to pull another job for getaway money – so I could blow town for a while. And this was it! I was sort of giddy from not eating and I made too much noise; but even at that” – with a scornful laugh – “you’d never have nailed me if I’d had a gun on me!”

Carter was on his feet.

“There’s food of some sort in the icebox. We’ll eat before we do any more talking.”

A grunt came from the open window by which the girl had entered. Both of them wheeled toward it. Framed in it was a burly, red-faced man who wore a shiny blue serge suit and a black derby hat. He threw one thick leg over the sill and came into the room with heavy, bearlike agility. – “Well, well” – the words came complacently from his thick-lipped mouth, under a close-clipped gray moustache – “if it ain’t my old friend Angel Grace!”

“Cassidy!” the girl exclaimed weakly, and then relapsed into sullen stoicism.

Carter took a step forward.

“What -“

“’S all right!” the newcomer assured him, displaying a bright badge. “Detective-Sergeant Cassidy. I was passin’ and sported somebody makin’ your fire escape. Decided to wait until they left and nab ‘em with the goods. Got tired of waitin’ and came up for a look-see.”

He turned jovially to the girl.

“And here it turns out to be the Angel herself! Come on, kid, let’s take a ride.”

Carter put out a detaining hand as she started submissively toward the detective.

“Wait a minute! Can’t we fix this thing up? I don’t want to prosecute the lady.”

Cassidy leered from the girl to Carter and back, and then shook his head.

“Can’t be done! The Angel is wanted for half a dozen jobs. Don’t make no difference whether you make charges against her or not – she’ll go over for plenty anyways.”

The girl nodded concurrence.

“Thanks, old dear,” she told Carter, with an only partially successful attempt at nonchalance, “but they want me pretty bad.”

But Carter would not submit without a struggle. The gods do not send a real flesh-and-blood feminine crook into a writer’s rooms every evening in the week. The retention of such a gift was worth contending for. The girl must have within her, he thought, material for thousands, tens of thousands, of words of fiction. Was that a boon to be lightly surrendered? And then her attractiveness was in itself something; and a still more potent claim on his assistance – though not perhaps so clearly explainable – was the mottled area his fists had left on the smooth flesh of her cheek.

“Can’t we arrange it somehow?” he asked. “Couldn’t we fix it so that the charges might be – er – unofficially disregarded for the present?”

Cassidy’s heavy brows came down and the red of his face darkened.

“Are you tryin’ to -“

He stopped, and his small blue eyes narrowed almost to the point of vanishing completely.

“Go ahead! You’re doin’ the talkin’.”

Bribery, Carter knew, was a serious matter, and especially so when directed toward an officer of the law. The law is not to be lightly set aside, perverted, by an individual. To fling to this gigantic utensil a few bits of green-engraved paper, expecting thus to turn it from its course, was, to say the least, a foolhardy proceeding.

Yet the law as represented by this fat Cassidy in baggy, not too immaculate garments, while indubitably the very same law, seemed certainly less awe-inspiring, less unapproachable. Almost it took on a human aspect – the aspect of a man who was not entirely without his faults. The law just now, in fact, looked out through little blue eyes that were manifestly greedy, for all their setting in a poker face.

Carter hesitated, trying to find the words in which his offer would be most attractively dressed; but the detective relieved him of the necessity of broaching the subject.

“Listen, mister,” he said candidly. “I get you all right! But on the level, I don’t think it’d be worth what it’d cost you.” “What would it cost?”

“Well, there’s four hundred in rewards offered for her that I know of – maybe more.”

Four hundred dollars! That was considerably more than Carter had expected to pay. Still, he could get several times four hundred dollars’ worth of material from her.

“Done!” he said. “Four hundred it is!”

“Woah!” Cassidy rumbled. “That don’t get me nothin’! What kind of chump do you think I am? If I turn her in I get that much, besides credits for promotion. Then what the hell’s the sense of me turnin’ her loose for that same figure and runnin’ the risk of bein’ sent over myself if it leaks out?” Carter recognised the justice of the detective’s stand. “Five hundred,” he bid. Cassidy shook his head emphatically.

“On the level, I wouldn’t touch it for less’n a thousan’ – and you’d be a sucker to pay that much! She’s a keen kid all right, but the world’s full of just as keen ones that’ll come a lot cheaper.”

“I can’t pay a thousand,” Carter said slowly; he had only a few dollars more than that in his bank.

His common sense warned him not to impoverish himself for the girl’s sake, warned him that the payment of even five hundred dollars for her liberty would be a step beyond the limits of rational conduct. He raised his head to acknowledge his defeat, and to tell Cassidy that he might take the girl away; then his eyes focused on the girl. Though she still struggled to maintain her attitude of ironic indifference to her fate, and did attain a reckless smile, her chin quivered and her shoulders were no longer jauntily squared.

The dictates of reason went for nothing in the face of these signs of distress.

Without conscious volition, Carter found himself saying, “The best I can do is seven hundred and fifty.”

Cassidy shook his head briskly, but he caught one corner of his lower lip between his teeth, robbing the rejecting gesture of its finality.