“All right.” I took her hand. “I think you mean it. I still can’t figure why, and I still don’t believe you’d want me to take you up on it.”
“I know what I want. I usually get it.”
“That isn’t the point, Candy. Let me ask you a question: How many times have you been in love?”
“I lost count long ago.”
“You see!”
“I don’t see anything.” She toyed with the platinum cigarette case. “I wish people could talk about love without being trite. But it isn’t possible. There’s been so much written about it that you always sound like you’re repeating something you’ve read.” She let that sink in, and then went on. “Get this straight, Kirk. I’ve absorbed a large slice of life in my twenty-two years. That makes me wild, but it doesn’t make me dumb. When the real thing comes along: I know it.”
There it was. On a solid gold platter, ready to serve. I felt sorry as hell. What she was doing took courage. My knowledge of the English language wasn’t helping me. I knew the words, but I didn’t have the thoughts to back them up.
She stared at me levelly with her big blue eyes. I said slowly, “I wish we’d met a couple of years ago, Candy.”
She nodded. “I thought it was that way.”
“Let me explain. Dana and I want to get married. Unfortunately, her husband doesn’t see it like that.”
She laughed. There wasn’t much mirth in it. She said, “Candy Livingston also ran.”
“You’re a grand pal. It just happens that I’m all tied up emotionally.”
She asked abruptly, “How come Ricardo can’t be pushed into a divorce?”
I gave it to her briefly. There was an interesting light in her eyes. “I’m not checking out,” she said. “Not as long as Dana stays married.”
I still couldn’t think of anything that fitted. I liked her better, at that moment, than ever before. But that wasn’t being in love. She wasn’t Dana. She straightened up, and started to laugh. “I’ve really put you on the spot, haven’t I?”
I said, “I’m dazed, that’s all.”
“I’ll answer some of the questions you’re too considerate to ask. I fell for you the night I met you. Don’t ask me why. I wouldn’t be knowing the answer myself. I thought you could be had—in one way or another. I was all full of bright remarks: you would make your passes, and I’d tell you that the line formed on the right. But nothing like that happened, and I found myself staying awake nights thinking about you. The more I thought, the more it seemed to me that I’d enjoy having you around all the time. Maybe it’s because you didn’t make a play for me.”
She reached for another cigarette and lighted it. “Just remember this Kirk: Until you hear from me to the contrary, the proposal stands. Nod your head and I’ll come running. Now let’s drop it.”
That suited me fine. I started to say something. I don’t know what it was, but it didn’t matter because I never finished. A pair of arms were around my neck, a pair of soft, warm lips were pressed against mine. The universe commenced spinning.
She pulled away and got up. She said, “Better fix yourself up. You’re all over lipstick.”
I went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. I dabbed at my lips. I walked back into the room and tried to be nonchalant. I wouldn’t have gotten away with it except that she was willing to string along.
She carried the ball from then on. No more talk of love or marriage. She’d made her pitch and it hadn’t worked out. She was more of a person than I had thought. Crazy as three seagulls, perhaps, but there was something solid underneath.
We sat around and talked. We killed a lot of time. We killed it until almost three o’clock.
I insisted on taking her home. I knew she had an estate on Long Island, but that wasn’t where I took her. I rode her to a white apartment house that had a lobby choked with chromium and glass. She didn’t ask me upstairs. I went back in the same taxi. I flopped in my reading chair and said, “Wow!” I felt uncomfortable and at the same time I felt good. It was something to reflect that I had said No to twenty million dollars.
This was another night when I was slated to stay awake. There were getting to be too many of them. I made some firm resolutions. Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man . . . and I let it stop there.
At four o’clock my eyes were still pinned back. I was thinking of a lot of things and none of them fitted.
I was trying to connect Candy Livingston with the hundred thousand dollars which had been put to my credit at the bank. It wouldn’t mean a thing to her, and she might have felt that it would boost my morale when the big moment occurred. But that was wrong, too, because when the hundred thousand had been given to me I hadn’t even met Candy. I had no reason to believe she knew I was alive. So what might have been a good theory had to be pitched out of the window.
I don’t know what time I got to sleep. I do know that I felt drugged when the alarm clock went off. I took a shower and shaved while the coffee was percolating. I drank three cups of it. I looked out of the window and watched the sun trying to come up. I said, “Aw nuts!” and reached for my coat and hat. I got to the office late. A couple of the boys grinned and winked. They probably thought I had a hangover.
I telephoned Arthur and invited him to have dinner with me that night. At a nice, quiet, little table d’hote restaurant. He said he’d be tickled pink, and told me he was back on full-time duty and feeling good. His arm was sore, but it didn’t really bother him.
I held off speaking to Dana until late afternoon. When I did call her to say I wouldn’t be seeing her that evening, she was perfect. Her only reference to the previous night was casual. We talked for a few minutes and that was that.
Arthur met me at the restaurant. He looked nervous and worried, but that was nothing new. He asked how my work for Ferguson was getting on. We finished eating and went back to my apartment.
Arthur flopped in one chair and I sprawled out in another. Arthur pulled out a cigarette and tried to fit it into his holder. He used a special kind of a gadget that was supposed to protect him from nicotine. He was afraid of getting stomach ulcers.
The holder dropped out of his hand and rolled under the couch. He got down on his hands and knees and started searching for it. I started to help him, and he said he had it. He got up with the holder, and also with something else. He said, “You should tell the maid to sweep behind the couch, too.”
I shrugged. He said, “Finder’s keepers, isn’t it?”
“It all depends on what you find.”
“A quarter.” He smiled. “That’s a lot of money to a guy like me.”
He held it in his palm. I looked at it without interest. Then something clicked. I said, “Let me see that.”
He seemed surprised by my abruptness. He handed me the coin.
It was a quarter, all right, but it was like no other quarter in the world. One segment of it, perhaps a fifth of the coin, was absolutely flat. The rest of it was okay. Arthur said, “You can have it. I don’t believe it could be spent.”
I was staring at the coin. My brain was doing nip-ups.
I said, “You found this under the couch, Arthur?”
“Yeh. Sure. Why?”
I turned it over and looked at the other side. That was flat, too. I don’t know what else I expected. Ideas were crowding in on me; ideas that I didn’t like.
Arthur said, “Why all the excitement over a bum quarter?”
I said, “This is a very special quarter, Arthur. I know who it belongs to.”
“Well . . . ?”
“It belongs to Ricardo. It’s his luck piece. He’d rather lose his right eye than this.”
Arthur shrugged. “So it’s a busted quarter and you found it. You give it back to him. What’s wrong with that?”
“More than you know.” I moistened my lips. “I’m wondering how it got here. Ricardo has never been in my apartment.”
Arthur said, “You’re nuts. If the coin was here, Ricardo must
have been.”
“Not when I was at home.”
Arthur and I stared at each other. I knew we must be thinking the same thing. Maybe Ricardo had been in my apartment one night when I wasn’t at home.
Maybe he had been there with a girl named Ethel Brower.
CHAPTER XIV
A SILVER COIN. A busted quarter that had been stepped on by a streetcar and wasn’t worth any part of two bits. A coin that was worth a million in superstition to its owner and which had no business at all in my apartment.
I kept turning it over and over like a pancake that wouldn’t cook the same on both sides. I could be wrong, of course. Maybe another streetcar had run over one-fifth of another silver quarter. That was possible, but improbable. What was even more improbable was that the second silver quarter should find its way into my room.
It was a nice room, but too many things had happened in it recently. Too many things that didn’t belong. This battered coin, for one thing. The body of a girl who had been strangled to death, for another.
Arthur Maybank sat watching me. He ran slim, delicate fingers through hair that was too sparse for so young a man, and waited for me to say something. He didn’t have long to wait.
I said, “You’ve known Ricardo and Dana almost as long as I have. Didn’t either of them ever tell you about this?”
He shook his head. Then he smiled, just a little bit. “And so far,” he said, “you haven’t either.”
“It’s quite a story. It deals with superstition, and your scientifically trained mind will reject it. But you musn’t.”
He said, “I won’t. I meet a lot of superstitious people at the hospital.”
“The yarn goes back about ten or twelve years. At that time Ricardo Sanchez was unknown. He was a fairly good-looking guy who knew a lot of dancing and wanted to do something about it. All he’d ever succeeded in doing was to remain in a half-starved condition. Like a lot of optimists on the fringe of show business, he wouldn’t give up. Maybe he was too lazy to do regular work; maybe he had the soul of an artist. Knowing him, you can take your choice.
“Whatever breaks he’d been having were bad ones. He had extended his limited credit until his friends either cut corners to avoid him or he did the same to them for fear they’d request the return of loans which he couldn’t return. He had an agent—they all do—and he had borrowed so much from his agent that he never went near the office. He was ill-fed, poorly clothed, discouraged and just about ready to become a beautiful floorwalker so that he could eat occasionally.
“One day, crossing Third Avenue, he saw something on the car track. It was a quarter. A car had run over a small portion of it. Four-fifths of the coin was still good money. The remaining fifth was flat. What it meant to Ricardo right then was doughnuts and coffee, provided he could persuade someone to take it.
“His version of what happened is rather vivid. He went into a greasy little place called The Coffee Pot. He asked the tough gent behind the counter whether he’d accept the mashed quarter. The counterman told him to get the hell out of there: he didn’t have no time to waste on no bums.
“Up to that moment, according to Ricardo, he had reconciled himself to slow starvation. Having been almost in possession of something to eat impelled him to do something he would never otherwise have done. He went looking for the only person he knew who might possibly stand another touch: his agent. He wanted to sell his quarter to the agent for a quarter he could spend. He wanted food.”
I paused long enough to fill my pipe and light it. “I’m giving you the details, Arthur, because they’re very important. Without them, you’ll never understand how a thing like this can come to mean so much to an otherwise intelligent man.”
“Don’t apologize.” Arthur was leaning back and watching me through half-closed eyes. “I’m more than interested.”
“Knowing that he faced a two-to-one chance of being pitched out on his ear, Ricardo went to his agent’s office. He met the agent just as he stepped inside the door. But to his amazement, he didn’t get thrown out. The ten-per-center grabbed him and said Ricardo was just the man he wanted to see. He said there was an immediate opening in the chorus of a new musical that was on the verge of a Broadway opening. Would Ricardo take it? Ricardo would. He did. At the same time he borrowed five dollars from his agent. He didn’t say anything about the flattened quarter. He kept that in his pocket and started thinking of it as a luck piece.
“He got the job. He held it. What was more, he studied the routines of the dance team that was featured in the show. One night, in the middle of the show, the male half of the dance team turned his ankle. They were about to cut the spot when Ricardo convinced the stage manager that he could do it. They let him try it. He grabbed twice as much applause as the principal had ever received. When he finished, he felt in his pocket and found the coin had been with him. He didn’t need any more convincing. It was a luck piece, all right.
“He kept that coin, and he started up. He was a natural-born dancer, and all he had needed was the opportunity. Before the end of that show’s run, he and a girl partner had supplanted the original couple. He and the girl went from there into a nice, small club as a ballroom team. Wham! Then a better engagement and another one still better.
“The rest you know. He became recognized as one of the greatest ballroom dancers in the world. He finally met Dana, saw that she was the answer to a dancer’s prayer, taught her all he knew—and married her. And through all of this he held tight to that luck piece. He credited it with all the luck he’d had. Several years ago he bought one of those little flat 18-carat cases which are called pill boxes. He had it lined with purple velvet and he put his luck piece in it. There’s probably nothing in the world he values so highly.”
I ran out of breath. Arthur said, “If it means that much to him—and if he lost it—why wouldn’t he have missed it?”
“Because of the little gold pill box. I imagine that after all these years a man wouldn’t be opening it all the time to see whether the luck piece was there. As long as he had the gold box, he’d presume the coin was inside. That could explain why he hasn’t missed it.”
“Maybe he has.”
I shook my head. “I don’t think so. I’d have heard about it. So would everybody else who knows him.”
Arthur said, “You think that the box might have opened and the coin dropped out . . . under certain circumstances?”
“It’s possible. If Ricardo happened to be under enough nervous strain at the time, he might not notice.”
“That still doesn’t explain why he was here. You say he has never visited you. If you’re right on that, he must have been here when you were out.” Arthur crossed one leg over the other. “That’s rather far-fetched, isn’t it, Kirk?”
“Tell me how else could the coin get here?”
“All right. But you may not like it. Suppose Dana brought it.”
I gave that a thorough going-over. I said, “I can’t buy that one, Arthur. First, she wouldn’t dare to take the luck piece out of the box. Second, she would have had no reason for doing it. Third, she wouldn’t have brought it here. Fourth, if she had done all this—and had lost it—she would have told me.”
He smiled. “You make out a pretty good case. Which leaves us with only one alternative. If it’s the same coin, then Ricardo must have brought it. So let’s ask ourselves this: When did he come and why?”
I said, “A girl I never saw in my life—a girl named Ethel Brower—was murdered in this apartment on the third of February. There isn’t any logical answer to what she was doing here. We can put her in the category with the coin.”
“But why here?”
“You had a theory once,” I said slowly, “that Ricardo might actually be in love with Dana; that he might have suspected she was coming here that night, and have been jealous. If that were true, he could have made a mistake, killed this Brower woman believing it was Dana . . . then got out as fast as possible.”
Arth
ur looked steadily at me. He said, “I know I suggested that, Kirk. At the time it sounded reasonable. The way you tell it, I can’t believe it.”
“Why not?”
“Too many flaws. Mind you, I still don’t like Ricardo. I still believe that he could be in love with Dana. But where Ethel Brower fits in or why Ricardo should have met her here . . .”
I said, “We don’t know anything about the people Ricardo knew . . . long ago. This Brower woman could have fitted in there, couldn’t she?”
“Naturally. But look, Kirk . . . it’s still all full of holes.”
“Okay. But these things have happened. We didn’t imagine them. Not any more than you imagined you were shot at. Where does that belong in this crazy pattern? And what do I do next?”
Arthur said, “If I were you I’d take it to the police.”
I hesitated. “I may have to eventually. But not until I’m forced.”
“Why?”
“Dana. You understand the situation between Dana and me. But what would the public think?”
“Yeh . . . I know . . .”
“And suppose Ricardo isn’t mixed up in all this stuff. I give this coin to the cops and what do they do? They start shoving him around. The newspapers get it. It’d make juicy copy.”
“Suppose he is the bad boy?”
“The minute I’m convinced of that, I’ll tell the police. Up to now, they’re as stalled as I am. They know about the killing of Ethel Brower. They know that somebody deposited a hundred thousand dollars to my credit at the bank. They know someone tried to kill you for no discernible reason except that you are a friend of mine—”
“That’s ridiculous!”
“Don’t kid yourself. That’s the only possible motive, even though it doesn’t make a nickel’s worth of sense. I’m in the middle of something I don’t understand. But I can’t see myself throwing Ricardo—and, incidentally, Dana—to the wolves without more proof than this.”
“Isn’t it a bit dangerous, playing detective, Kirk?”
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