The Oxford Book of American Det (47 page)

“Those things blow over,” I told her. “Your husband could take a trip to Europe.”

“You don’t understand,” she said. “He made a fool of himself once before. That’s why Bass had a clause in the partnership contract. Each of them put in two thousand dollars when they started the partnership. The articles of partnership provide that neither can sell his interest without first giving six months’ notice to his partner. And then there’s some provision in the contract by which Bass can buy Harvey out by returning the original two thousand dollars to him if Harvey gets in any more trouble with women. I don’t know the exact provision. Now then, I want you to nip this thing in the bud.

Harvey’s desperate. Something’s got to be done within twenty-four hours.”

“All right,” I told her, “I’ll see what I can do. What’s the girl’s address?”

“Diane Locke, apartment 3A, forty-two fifteen Centre Street. And it won’t do you any good to try and frame her, because she’s wise to all the tricks. I think she’s a professional; but try and prove it.”

“One thing more,” I told her. “I want the name of the lawyer.”

“You mean Diane Locke’s lawyer?”

“Yes.”

“I can’t give it to you.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know it,” she said. “He’s keeping very much in the background. He’s some friend of the girl’s. Probably he’s afraid, he might be disbarred for participating in a blackmail action.”

“How long has this thing been going on?” I asked.

“You mean the affair with that redhead? It started—“

“No,” I said, “I mean this,” indicating the office with a sweep of my hand.

“Since I couldn’t get anywhere with the detective agency,” she said. “Olaf, the janitor, is an electrician. He helped me rig things up. He got some old parts—“

“Think you can trust him?”

“With my life,” she said.

I lit a cigarette and said, “How about the wash-room? Is it open?”

“I’ll have to give you my key,” she told me, opening her handbag. Then she hesitated a second and said, “I think it’s in another purse. But the lock’s mostly ornamental. Any key will work it. Or you can use the tip of a penknife.” I looked down into her handbag. “What’s the idea of the gun?”

“For protection,” she said, closing the bag.

“All right,” I told her, “pass it over. I’m your protection now. You’ll get in trouble with that gun.”

She hesitated a moment while I held my hand out, then reluctantly took the gun from her purse and hesitated with it in her hand.

“But suppose you’re not with me, and something should happen? Suppose he should find the wires and follow them in here and catch me?”

“Keep with me all the time,” I told her.

The business end of the gun waved around in a half-circle. “Want me to go with you now?” she asked.

“Don’t be a sap,” I told her. “I’m going to the wash-room. I’ll be right back.”

“And if my husband comes in while you’re gone, I suppose I’m to tell him it’s not fair, that you’re seeing a man about a dog, and he mustn’t choke me until you get back.” I strode over to the door. “Keep your plaything until I come back,” I said. “When we go out, you either get rid of the gun, or get rid of me. You’re the one who’s paying the money, so you can take your choice.”

I crossed the office to the door, opened it, and pushed the catch so I could open the door from the outside. I wondered what would happen if Harvey Pemberton should make up his mind to go to the wash-room while I was in there, or should meet me in the corridor. I’d kill that chance by going to the floor below. I saw stairs to the right of the elevator, and went down.

The men’s room was at the far end of the corridor. The first key on my ring did the trick.

Five minutes later, when I got back to Mrs. Pemberton, I saw that she was nervous and upset.

“What’s the matter?” I asked. “Did something happen?” She said in a nervous, strained voice, “I was just thinking of what would happen if my husband ran into you in the corridor.”

I said, “Well, he didn’t.”

“You shouldn’t take chances like that,” she told me.

I grinned. “I didn’t. I ran down the stairs for a couple of flights and used the room on the fourth floor.”

Her face showed relief. “All right,” I told her, “let’s go. We’ll pick up my baggage and then I’m going to take you home. Then, if you don’t mind, I’ll borrow your car. I have work to do.”

“Have you any plan?” she asked.

“I’m an opportunist.”

“All right,” she said, “let’s go. We’d better run down the stairs and ring the elevator from the lower floor.”

We started for the door. She clicked out the light.

“Just a minute,” I told her. “You’re forgetting something.”

“What?”

“The gun.”

“It’s all right. I thought it over. I decided you were right about it, so I ditched the gun.”

“Where?”

“In the desk drawer.”

I switched the lights back on and went over to look.

“The upper right-hand drawer,” she said, her voice showing amusement.

I opened the drawer. The gun was there. I picked it up, started to put it in my pocket, then changed my mind and dropped it back in the drawer. “Come on,” I told her, closing the drawer and switching off the lights.

We sneaked across the hall and down the flight of stairs to the lower floor. I rang for the elevator. Olaf brought the cage up and I took another look at him. He was a big raw-boned Swede with a bony nose, a drooping blond moustache, and dog eyes. His eyes never left Mrs. Pemberton all the way down to the ground floor.

Mrs. Pemberton kept her head turned away from him, toward the side of the elevator shaft, watching the doors creep by. When we got to the ground floor, she turned and looked at him. It was some look. His eyes glowed back at her like a couple of coals.

Olaf opened the door, I took Mrs. Pemberton’s arm and we crossed over to the parking station.

“I’ll drive,” I told her. “I want to get accustomed to the car.” I drove down to the station, got my baggage and drove Mrs. Pemberton back out to the house. The butler carried my things up and showed me my room.

After he left, I opened my suitcase. There were two guns in it. I selected one with a shiny leather shoulder holster. I put it on under my coat and knocked on the door of Mrs. Pemberton’s room.

She opened the door and stood in the doorway. The light was behind her, throwing shadows of seductive curves through billowy, gossamer silk. I resolutely kept my eyes on her face. “I’m going out,” I told her. “Will you hear me when I come in?”

“Yes,” she said. “I’ll wait up.”

“If I cough when I pass your door, it means I have good news for you. If I don’t cough, it means things aren’t going so well.”

She nodded, stepped toward me so that her lithe body was very close to mine. She put her hand on my arm and said in that peculiar, throaty voice of hers, “Please be careful.” I nodded and turned away. My eyes hadn’t strayed once. Walking down the corridor and tiptoeing down the stairs, I reflected that I never had known a woman with that peculiar husky note in her voice who didn’t like to tease the animals.

Forty-two fifteen Centre Street was a three-story frame apartment house, the lower floor given over to stores. A doorway from the street opened on a flight of stairs. I tried the door, and it was unlocked.

I went back to sit in the car and think. It was queer the lawyer had never appeared in the picture except as a shadowy figure. No one knew his name. He was quoted freely, but he left it up to his client to do all the negotiating. Therefore, if the racket turned out to be successful, the client would be the one to collect the money. Then it would be up to her to pay the lawyer. That didn’t sound right to me. It was like adding two and two and getting two as the answer.

I looked the block over. There was a little jewellery store in the first floor of the apartment house. It was closed up now, with a night light in the window, showing a few cheap wrist watches and some costume jewellery.

I drove around the corner and parked the car. A catch-all drugstore was open. I went in, bought some adhesive tape, a small bottle of benzine, a package of cotton, a writing pad and a police whistle. “Got any cheap imitation pearls?” I asked the clerk.

He had some strings at forty-nine cents. I took one of those. Then I went out to the car, cut the string of pearls and threw all but four of them away. I pulled a wad of cotton out of the box, put the four pearls in the cotton and stuffed the wad in my pocket. I popped the pasteboard off the back of the writing pad, cut two eyeholes in it and a place for my nose. I reinforced it with adhesive tape and left ends of adhesive tape on it so I could put it on at a moment’s notice. Then I climbed the stairs of the apartment house and located apartment 3A.

There was a light inside the apartment. I could hear the sound of a radio, and gathered the door wasn’t very thick. I took a small multiple-tool holder from my pocket and fitted a gimlet into the handle. I put a little grease on the point of the gimlet, bent over and went to work.

The best place to bore a hole in a panelled door is in the upper right- or left-hand corner of the lower panel. The wood is almost paper-thin there and doesn’t take much of a hole to give a complete view of a room. Detectives have used it from time immemorial, but it’s still a good trick. After the hole is bored, a little chewing gum keeps light from coming through the inside of the door and attracting the attention of a casual passer-by.

Making certain the corridor was deserted, I dropped to one knee and peeked through the hole I’d made. The girl was redheaded, all right. She was listening to the radio and reading a newspaper.

Watching through one hole to make certain that she didn’t move in case my gimlet made any noise, I bored two more holes. That gave me a chance to see all of the apartment there was. I put a thin coating of chewing gum over each of the holes, went downstairs and waited for a moment when the sidewalk was deserted and there were no cars in sight on the street. Then I took the police whistle from my pocket and blew three shrill blasts. By the time the windows in the apartments commenced to come up, I’d ducked into the doorway and started up the stairs.

I held my pasteboard mask in my left hand. All I had to do was to raise it to my face, and the adhesive tape would clamp it into position. I backed up against the door of apartment 3A and knocked with my knuckles. When I heard steps coming toward the door, I slapped my left hand up to my face, putting the mask in position, and jerked the gun out of my shoulder holster. The redhead opened the door and I backed in, the gun menacing the corridor. Once inside of the door, I made a quick whirl, kicked the door shut and covered her with the gun.

“Not a peep out of you,” I said.

She’d put on a negligee and was holding it tightly about her throat. Her face was white.

“All right, sister,” I told her, “get a load of this. If any copper comes wandering down the hallway, you go to the door to see what he wants. If he asks you if anyone’s in here or if you’ve seen anyone in the corridor, tell him no. The reason you’ll tell him no, is that I’m going to be standing just behind the door with this gun. They’re never going to take me alive. I’d just as soon go out fighting as to be led up thirteen steps and dropped through a hole in the floor. Get it?”

She was white to the lips, but she nodded, her eyes large, round and dilated with fright.

“I stuck up that jewellery store downstairs,” I told her, “and I’ve got some swag that’s worth money. Now, I want some wrapping paper and some string. I’m going to drop that swag in the first mailbox I come to and let Uncle Sam take the responsibility of the delivery. Get me?”

She swallowed a couple of times and said, “Y—yes.”

“And I’ll tell you something else: Don’t hold that filmy stuff so tight around you. I’m not going to bite you, but if a cop comes to the door and sees you all bundled up that way, he’ll figure out what’s happened.

If there’s a knock, I want you to open the door a crack and have that thing pretty well open in front, when you do. Then you can pull it shut when you see there’s a man at the door and give a little squeal and say, ‘Oh, I thought it was Mamie!’ Do you get that?”

“You’re asking a lot of me,” she said.

I made motions with the business end of the gun. “You’ve got a nice figure,” I said. “It would be a shame to blow it in two. These are soft-nosed bullets. You’d have splinters from your spinal cord all mixed into your hip bone if I pulled this trigger. The cop in the doorway would get the next shot. Then I’d take a chance on the fire-escape.” She didn’t say anything and I jabbed at her with the gun. “Come on, how about the wrapping paper?”

She opened a door into a little kitchenette, pulled out a drawer. There was brown paper and string in there. I said, “Get over there away from the window; stand over there in the corner.”

I crossed over to the little card table. There was an ash-tray there with four or five cigarette ends in it and some burnt matches. I noticed that a couple of the matches had been broken in two. I pushed the tray to one side, spread the paper out, and took the cotton from my pocket.

When I opened the cotton, she saw the four big pearls nested in it and gave a little gasp. Standing eight or ten feet away as she was and seeing those pearls on the cotton, she felt she was looking at ready money.

“That all you took?” she asked in a voice that had a can’t-we-be-friends note in it.

“Is that all I took?” I asked, and laughed, a nasty, sarcastic laugh. “That jeweller,” I told her, “has been trying to get those four pearls for a client for more than two years.

They’re perfectly matched pearls that came in from the South Seas, and, in case you want to know it, they didn’t pay any duty. I know what I’m after before I heist a joint.”

I put the cotton around the pearls again, wrapped them in the paper, tied the paper with string and ostentatiously set my gun on the corner of the table while I took a fountain pen from my pocket to write an address on the package. I printed the first name which popped into my head, and a Los Angeles address. Then I reached in my pocket, took out my wallet and from it extracted a strip of postage stamps.