Too Many Crooks (16 page)

"Shell," she said, "are you leaving right away?"

"Practically this minute."

She shrugged. "Well, I might as well go to bed."

"Might as well."

I brought my clothes out of the bathroom and she went inside it and shut the door. I heard the shower running as I emptied the pockets of my suit and transferred everything to my jeans. When I put on my watch, I noticed it was midnight on the nose. There were a couple of things more I wanted to tell Betty, so I sat on the chair and waited for her. While I waited, I looked at the postcard I'd found in the pocket of my suit coat. I'd forgotten putting it in my pocket when I'd left Los Angeles. I was still looking at the card and Emmett's scrawled signature, thinking back over the good, good times we'd had, when Betty called, "Shell?"

"Yeah?"

"I'm coming out."

"Well, come on."

"I just took a shower. I don't have anything on."

"Well, come on."

"Close your eyes. Don't look."

"One eye is closed." I waited. Nothing. "OK," I said. "Both eyes are closed. Firmly. Sort of."

They were, and I kept them closed. I heard the door open, heard her feet pad on the carpet, the faint whisper of her passage, then the rustle of sheets as she pulled the covers down. The bedsprings creaked and I knew the next whisper that I heard was Betty sliding down into bed, under the covers, her skin brushing against the cool sheets. I thought: I am going to retire from the detective business. No sense getting involved in situations like this. This will kill a man just as quickly as a hole in the head.

"All right. You can open your eyes."

I opened them. Betty lay in bed, the pillows still under her and both arms behind her head, dark hair fanned out over them. The covers were pulled up under her chin. She was smiling. "I feel so alive," she said.

"That's great. I feel half dead already. Listen, Betty—or what did you tell Peterson your name was? Coochie Williams? Listen, Coochie, I wanted to fill you in on my schedule. Just in case."

Her face sobered. "I understand."

"OK. From here I'm going to a parking lot on Twelfth and Pepper, where my Cad is. I'll get the camera out of the back, then pick up Petey. We'll bust into Gordon's office, beat the safe, and if the will's there, I'll take some shots of it. You sit tight here, because I won't be back for a while. I'll phone, but I won't come here again till I'm finished."

"Just pictures of the will won't be much help, will they?"

"No, but it's a good start. Honey, the way these guys are lined up against us, we'll need a lot of little things. I'm hoping I can get the big things from Baron himself. He may be the only man who knows all there is to know about this Seacliff operation. Maybe we can convict him out of his own mouth."

She frowned. "I don't see—"

"I've got a couple of ideas. You're a smart cookie, Coochie, so lend an ear. Tell me what you think."

When I called her Coochie again, she chuckled, and naturally that caused some commotion under the covers.

I talked for two or three minutes, explaining my plan in detail, and every once in a while she would take a deep breath. The covers, which had been so firmly beneath her chin, were drooping a little. I, too, was drooping a little.

Finally, I said, "So there it is. It's the only thing I can think of. Considering how deeply we're in this."

Her face was furrowed in thought. Obviously, she was concentrating on what I'd said, and she rolled a little to one side and put an elbow under her, leaning on it. The covers started to slip and automatically she grabbed for them with her other hand, but apparently she was concentrating so completely that she didn't realize she'd grabbed only the sheet. She still was completely covered, but there is one whale of a difference between being covered with a sheet, a blanket, and a bedspread and being covered with only a sheet.

"I'll be darned," she said. "Will it work?"

She held the sheet at her throat and it lay smoothly against her, following the curves. I cleared my throat. "Should. Assuming, of course, that I manage this tonight, get to the Cad, find Petey, miss all the cops and crooks, then manage to reach Baron and make him talk."

She was quiet for a moment. "You'll need help with Baron, won't you?"

Now I frowned. "I suppose. But I'll manage that."

"Just a minute, Shell." She sounded slightly angry. "You know as well as I do that—in your own words—I'm in this now as deeply as you. I can't even show up for work until this is over. I'm just as interested in seeing Baron and the rest caught as you are. So
I'll
help you. Why don't you stop treating me as if I were a child? I'm not, you know."

"Yes, um, I know. Well, maybe you're right. I'll call you later today, anyway. Let's worry about it when the time comes."

All the time I'd been sitting here, I'd been holding Dane's postcard in my hand. She glanced at it and said, "What's that?"

I handed it to her. "The last card I got from Em. Typical of him. That's what started me on this."

She read the card. "Golly."

A thought struck me. "I almost forgot something important. The cops know by now that you and I took off from Lanny's together. If I should wind up with Carver, say, in the clink, and I don't have a bullet in me, he'll . . . he might start asking me where you are." I swallowed. "I don't think I'd tell him, but maybe I would. So if I don't get in touch with you by daylight, you blow. Get the hell out fast. Understand?"

She frowned. "If I do leave, and you're all right, how will I find you? How will I know where you are?"

"Well, if everything's OK, I should get back here before sunup. But if not, we could meet somewhere—the Red Cross stand, say. We can't gad about much, but I'll check there every four hours starting at 8 a.m. if I can. Eight, twelve, four, and so on. OK?"

She nodded.

I grinned. "So the Red Cross stand is our base of operations. Who knows, I might even be hiding under the damn thing waiting for you. Anyway, no matter what, you blow when the sun comes up. That settled?"

She moistened her lips. "Yes."

"Well, so long, honey," I said. "I've got to see Petey before the bars close." I turned toward the door.

"Shell." It was just a whisper. I barely heard her speak.

I turned and she said, "Shell, kiss me good-by. Just once. Really kiss me, just once."

She rested on her elbow, left hand holding the sheet loosely at her breast. Her head was lowered slightly and she wasn't smiling.

I saw her moisten her lips as I walked toward her. I eased my weight gently to the side of the bed alongside her and slid my hands beneath her shoulders. Both of her arms went around my neck as I leaned toward her, and I saw her eyes close a moment before my own eyes closed and her lips pressed against mine.

A shudder passed through her, then her arms tightened around me, tightened even more. The skin of her shoulders and back was warm and soft against my fingers.

I kissed her, just as she'd said, really kissed her just once, but I should have known that I wouldn't stop with one kiss. Maybe I should have known that she wouldn't.

I stood up, turned off the light, and walked back to the bed. After all, I was thinking, the bars don't close till two o'clock.

Chapter Fifteen

I barely made it to the Gorgon Room.

Getting the camera equipment from my Cad had been easier than I'd expected; I'd just walked in, got the keys, and opened the trunk, then left. It was certain that the cops hadn't located my buggy yet, or I wouldn't now be at the Gorgon Room.

It was a few minutes after two, but that was all to the good because the bar had cleared out except for Petey and one young couple, who soon left. Not Petey, though. It appeared that Petey, by God, was never going to leave.

I stood outside the bar looking in through the front window, and I could see good old die-hard Petey looking sadly around him at all that emptiness.

Finally, Petey got up and walked toward the door. As he came outside I said, "Petey. Hey, Petey."

He whirled. "What the hell are
you
doing here?"

"I asked Coochie to call you. I had to get in touch with you."

"Where is she? Where is she?"

"She isn't coming, Petey. I'm sorry. I wanted to have you meet me, but I didn't want to phone, myself, or give my name. There's a little heat on me in this town."

He just stared at me for half a minute. At last he spoke. "Why, you sonofabitch, you."

We dwelt upon my ancestry, pro and con, for a couple of minutes then I was able to explain the general idea of what I wanted, and finally he came back to normal. "What's the caper?" he asked. He squinted at me. "What the hell you do to your ugly chops? And what kind of outfit is that thing?"

I came right out with it. "I'm disguised."

"Yeah, sure." He flapped his arms and yakked loudly.

"Here's the play, Petey. You can take it or leave it. All the cash I've got on me is four hundred and twenty dollars. The four hundred's yours to take a keister for me. Any cash you find in the box is yours."

"Four hundred, huh? Don't seem like much. Think there'd be anything in the keister?"

"I don't have any idea."

He frowned. "Where is this? You case it?"

"Haven't cased the spot. I don't even know what kind of box it is. I know where it is, that's all. Absolutely all."

His expression told me plainly that this was no way for a man to go about his business. In a few minutes, though, he said, "Well, maybe. If I wasn't havin' the shorts, horrible, I wouldn't even listen."

I said, "One thing. You in with Norris?"

"I ain't workin' for nobody. I told you before, I'm on a vacation. I ain't going near Norris, if that's—"

"No, the safe's in a lawyer's office. It's hot, too, you might as well know that. If we get caught, they'll scrape us off the sidewalk in the morning. I won't give you a bum steer, Petey, but if there's no color in the can, I'll throw in a couple Cs extra. Assuming, of course, that we make it all the way."

He thought about it. "OK. Gimme the four yards. But I don't guarantee nothing."

I gave him the money and he said, "Where's the spot?"

"Four, five blocks from here."

"Meet me here in a half hour. I'll bring my own crate." He walked away.

After half an hour Petey showed up in a new Ford. I got in and he drove to Sycamore and parked smack in front of the Braeden Building, Petey explaining that he didn't want to be carrying a ton of equipment blithely down the street. It took him fifteen seconds to open the front door, and I helped him carry some tools up four flights to Room 420, lawyer Ferris Gordon's office. Petey practically breathed the door open and we went inside. Petey was a one-man mob.

Petey started prowling around the room while I used my own pocket flashlight briefly to look the place over. There were chairs on my left, the desk straight ahead with a swivel chair behind it. The safe was a bulky green job in the corner on my left. A few feet this side of the safe were the only windows in the office. This was an outside room and the windows overlooked a side street that ran into Main. The windows were big, but covered with venetian blinds. I walked over and looked out. A few feet on my left was the fire escape running up and down the building's side, its platform near me opposite a closed door just past the wall, at the end of the corridor outside the office here. I shut the window, made sure the blinds were closed, then stood beside Petey.

He finished examining the safe in the light from his flash and said, "Hell, this is candy. I could chew through this thing. We'll rip it."

"Think there might be an alarm of some kind?"

"Yeah, a toy. I already slapped a jumper on the bug." He got busy, using a drill on the safe. It didn't make much noise and in a few minutes he said, "Gimme the can opener."

I'd carried up the section of a heavy, curved bar, pointed at one end. I handed it to him and he said, "This'll be like opening a can of beans."

The way he talked, I figured we'd be gone in another ten minutes, but it was over an hour before the whole job was finished. After sticking a hunk of pipe over the end of his can opener and using it to rip off the metal plating, he banged away with a hammer and chisel at the fire brick and clay inside, making what seemed to me like one hell of a lot of noise. Finally, though, he got up, wiped his forehead, and said, "There she be."

I took over. Kneeling before the wrecked safe, I sprayed the light from my flash around inside. There were a lot of legal-size papers and documents that I pawed through without finding anything of interest to me. Then, in a metal drawer, which Petey had already opened, I found Emmett Dane's will. Or at least a will signed "Emmett Dane."

It was four heavy, crinkly sheets of paper, with double-spaced lines of typing covering them. The last sheet was signed "Emmett Dane" and also bore the signatures of the two witnesses who had attested the will; neither of the two names was familiar to me. A paper clip held something attached to the back of the will. I slid the clip off and looked at what I held in my hand. Besides the will, there were half a dozen other legal-sized papers, apparently from Dane's effects, all bearing his signature. But there was something else: five glossy four-by-five photographs. Five photographs of Dane—and Dorothy Craig.

Each of them had been taken with Em and Dorothy seated together, three shots of them at a table and two in a booth. In three of the shots, highballs were before them, and in two, the remains of a dinner were still in evidence. In the highball shots, Dorothy wore a low-cut black dress; the other pictures showed her in a different outfit, a print dress with a square neck. Dorothy had managed in each of the shots to adopt a pose suggestive of intimacy: leaning toward Dane and smiling into his face; a hand on his arm.

The total effect was that of an elderly man enjoying a few stolen moments with a young and desirable woman. Undoubtedly when Baron and Dorothy had arranged for these shots to be taken, that was the impression they'd wanted the pictures to make. I knew, of course, that these were simply photos of Emmett Dane discussing the mess here in Seacliff with "Lilith Manning." To anybody else, though, it would appear that Dane was dining and drinking with his "fiancée," Dorothy Craig, to whom he had left so much in his will.