by Helen Reilly
They started around the corner. Footsteps, not their own beat a sudden rapid tattoo. They decreased in volume. They were made by a man running away in a hurry. Off to the left beyond the dark rampart of the last stall a door closed.
McKee paused beside the Hazard cubicle, threw a quick look. The Hazard furniture there was disarranged. The drawer of a table was open, there were papers on the floor. He said over his shoulder as he sprinted for the door that had closed, “Stay here Pierson, I’ll be back.”
He ran lightly and swiftly down the five flights of stairs. There was no one on them. The door at the bottom led directly into the office. McKee opened it cautiously and looked out. His brows rose. Two men were standing in the middle of the floor staring at each other. They were Steven Hazard and John St. Vrain, the radio announcer.
There was wariness in their mutual scrutiny. St. Vrain said, lighting a cigarette, “Hello, Hazard, where did you spring from?” Steven Hazard waved vaguely. “I sprang through the door.”
McKee noted that he didn’t say which door as he continued, “Yourself, St. Vrain?”
The radio announcer said easily, “I’ve been looking over some junk of mine here.”
There was antagonism and covert watchfulness under the casual interchange. St. Vrain offered Hazard a cigarette. Hazard refused, took out one of his own brand. St. Vrain held a match to it. Hazard said, “Thanks.” St. Vrain said, “Well. So long. Say hello to Cristie for me,” and turned toward the door. Hazard threw down his smoke, rubbed it out with the side of his shoe, and watched him go.
Half a minute later, standing in the embrasure of the doorway outside, McKee saw a curious and interesting sight. St. Vrain was a good distance down the block, walking rapidly. Steven Hazard was well in the rear, but was following St. Vrain. As the latter disappeared around the corner, Steven Hazard broke into a sharp trot. The two men were not alone. Slipping along in the rear Todhunter covered them both.
Back in the office later, McKee examined the afternoon’s catch. The man whose search of the Hazard cubicle had been interrupted by their own arrival could have been either the radio announcer or Steven Hazard. The clerk said that both men had entered the warehouse before they themselves had got there and that both were upstairs, where they had a right to be since they both had storage cubicles. The clerk didn’t know which man had come down first. His only concern was with the opening of the front door which was announced by the ringing of a bell.
There was one item which might be significant, and might be chance. John St. Vrain had rented space in the Plymouth Warehouse on the day following McKee’s own official appearance on the scene.
Was the interrupted search of the Hazard booth an attempt to get possession of the missing gun for purposes of removing it permanently from circulation? Of the two men, Steven Hazard’s conduct was the more ambiguous. Why had he been trailing Johnny St. Vrain? There was the girl angle, of course. The radio announcer had taken Cristie Lansing out quite a bit before the intrusion of Hazard into the picture.
McKee returned restlessly to the major problem. Missing gun, missing maid, Steven Hazard. Three points of a triangle. Resolve the riddle they covered and the rest would come.
Located in a two-family house in Hempstead, Eva Prentice’s sister professed complete ignorance of Eva’s whereabouts. She said she hadn’t heard from or seen Eva since the previous July. The Scotsman sat erect in his chair. The time for cover, the advantage that cover gave their own work was over. Watch everybody, with special attention to Hazard, and find Eva Prentice at all costs.
He reached for the phone, called Headquarters and ordered a general alarm broadcast for the maid.
XI
Cristie Lansing stood at one of the long windows in the living room of Margot St. Vrain’s penthouse looking out over the roofs of the city. The light had begun to fade. Night was coming.
She held the key in one hand, the sheet of cheap note paper in the other. The envelope containing them had been slipped under the door with several other letters five minutes earlier. Bewilderment, and little stabs of fear, the fear that never quite left her these days, were going through her in waves. She lifted the letter with fingers that were stiff, unwieldy, and read it again. It said:
“Miss Cristie Lansing, go to 503A East 21st Street tonight at 8:45 sharp. Open the door of the basement apartment 1A with the key please find enclosed. You will find out something you ought to know about Sara Hazard’s death. Don’t let yourself be seen. When you get into the apartment, go behind the screen that is in front of the wash basin. And watch. Well wisher.”
Conflicting emotions clashed sharply inside of her, curiosity, dread, indecision, terrified surmise. She threw the letter from her. If only she could go to Steven. But she couldn’t. Steven had his own burden to bear; she had hers.
That he was bearing a burden which was becoming heavier and heavier had shown itself quite clearly in his actions, his manner, in the expression of his face when he thought he was unobserved, in his sudden silences, the peculiar look that flashed occasionally into the clarity of his eyes.
She couldn’t get close to him. The oneness between them was gone. It had begun to disappear with the advent of that tall, cold, clever Inspector with his endless questions about Sara and Sara’s death.
Cristie closed her eyes, shutting out Sara just as, at the back of her mind, she closed a door sharply on the blackness that lay behind it. The police weren’t going to be able to discover anything real. There wasn’t anything to discover. She had told herself that at the beginning. She repeated it firmly now, drawing on her courage, her strength.
She looked at the key. It was small and flat, with the usual notches. If she used it, what would it reveal? Would it deepen the terror that she had so far been able to keep under control, or would it place certainty on top of what were only frightened questions as yet? Who or what would she find within the room it would unlock? It might be a trap, a device to get her into a spot where she would have to talk. She wouldn’t go. It would be too dangerous.
She turned from the window, walked the length of the rug, paused beside the piano and stared at herself in the long mirror beyond it. She drew back, crushed herself into the curve of the polished rosewood. How dreadful she looked. Those shadows under her eyes, the way her eyes were sunk in her head, her color, even her lips were pale.
She went into her bedroom, put on lipstick with bold forceful strokes, used unaccustomed rouge, dusted her skin with powder, ran a comb through her hair. Whatever happened, she mustn’t show anything. She returned to the living room, picked up the letter, and the envelope, tore them both into shreds, watched them blaze in the fireplace, disappear. She took the key from the table where she had flung it, started for the bathroom, paused as Margot’s maid, Emma, came in and asked what she’d like for dinner. She slipped the key into her pocket.
Dinner was early. She ate alone. Margot was in Chicago on business. All during the meal, over coffee in the living room later, she kept up that fierce inner argument. Prudence said, stay where you are; don’t move; don’t do anything; wait. But another part of her said, it is better to know, you can fight the known, it’s the unknown that holds the real menace. She went backwards and forwards, up and down, trying to balance in nightmare.
If she did make up her mind to go...She threw a cloak over her shoulders and went out on the terrace. Propping her elbows on the railing she leaned over, and searched the street below with her eyes. Yes, he was there, the man Margot had pointed out to her on Monday evening, when she returned unexpectedly to the apartment on her way to Chicago. Margot had told her not to say anything about her flying visit. A vague shadow of wonder flitted across her mind at Margot’s desire for secrecy. She had said she didn’t want anyone to know she was in New York or she would be inundated with calls, and she had to get on to Chicago. Margot had told her something else, a way to get out of the building without being seen.
A moon was coming up in the East. It topped the serrated hori
zon, hung there a moment, a shining silver dish, suspended above a pinnacle. Cristie looked at it. Freedom and the possibility of escape if she went, if the cards fell right. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. She crushed out her cigarette, re-entered the penthouse and got her hat and coat.
She didn’t get off at the main floor. She ran the self-service elevator down to the basement where she emerged into a corridor flanked with doors. Margot had said the door labeled “furnace room.” Cristie passed “laundry,” “parcels,” went round a turn. There it was. She opened the door to the furnace room, negotiated oil tanks and asbestos-jacketed monsters and entered another large cement tunnel with various doors opening out of it. She must be under the apartment to the left. The basement there led her in turn to the one beyond and to the one beyond that. All four apartment houses were the property of one corporation and while they were under different names they were operated as a unit. When she finally emerged into the air she was on the avenue instead of on the side street where the watching detective still loitered opposite the main and apparently the only entrance to the penthouse.
Cristie hailed a cab. She kept the fur collar of her coat up and the rim of her hat, a wide dark brown hat, well down over her forehead. She rode as far as Second Avenue and Twenty-third Street, dismissed the cab and started to walk south.
At Twenty-first she turned east again. So far the neighborhood hadn’t been bad. It began to degenerate rapidly. Boarded and abandoned tenements, poor, meanly lighted shops loomed up. The address she sought was between Avenues A and B.
She paused in the gloom outside the five-story red brick tenement with its dingy windows, broken steps and sagged railings. The note said the basement. Entrance to the basement was to the right of the front door. There had once been a gate. The gate was gone. She descended three steps to a door in shadow under the porch, opened the door and stepped into a long narrow dimly-lighted hallway. An odor of ancient goulash, of dirt, decayed vegetable matter and strong soap pervaded the heavy air. There was no one in sight.
Cristie walked steadily to the door of Apartment 1A. Her nerves were steel tight. She fitted the key that had been sent to her into the lock without a tremor, and pushed open the door.
The apartment was in blackness. She halted, listened for a sound. There was none. She slipped inside, closed the door softly behind her and groped until she found the light switch. As the room sprang into brightness she saw that her informant had been accurate. The screen was there in the far corner. The room contained besides, a wide double bed, a bureau, two comfortable shabby armchairs, a card table, a portable tin ice-box and a meager assortment of crockery and glasses in the bottom of the washstand.
Cristie switched off the light. Crossing the floor she stepped behind the screen, propped herself against the wall and waited.
One of the faucets in the basin leaked. The drip, drip, drip against the dull pianissimo of the city that seemed a thousand miles away marked off endless spaces in a limbo without boundaries. Outside in the street a horse clumped by dragging a creaking huckster’s cart. A child cried distantly. The water dripped a little faster, slowed again. It went drip, drip, drip, and then drip on a long note.
The exhaustion of stretched nerves made her faintly drowsy. Her head ached. She snapped erect at the sound of metal against metal. Someone outside in the hall was fitting a key into the lock of apartment 1A. The door opened, closed. The light flashed on.
Cristie cowered back against the rough plaster of the wall. Just for an instant fortitude deserted her. She felt weak, ill. A man was standing with his back to the closed door. His eyes were fastened on the wash-stand that contained the crockery. They were narrow and bright and terrible in the intensity of their motionless gaze. The long strong face between upturned coat collar and gray fedora wore a look that Cristie had never seen on it before, a look that was savage, ruthless. The man was Steven.
Cristie forced down an involuntary cry. She leaned forward until she was opposite a slit between two leaves of the screen. Through this slit she watched Steven Hazard, the man who had suddenly become a stranger to her.
The shades of the room were drawn. Steven moved across the floor to the green washstand. He got down on one knee. He reached in and with the surety of one certain of his goal, pushed aside a pile of plates, moved a sugar bowl and lifted the cover of a vegetable dish. He took something out of the dish and replaced the lid. He stood up, his back was toward Cristie. She couldn’t see the object he held in his hands. He turned, and she did.
Light from the unshaded bulb in the -ceiling fell on the squat black automatic gripped in Steven’s fingers. Cristie’s heart pumped blood furiously, deafeningly. The gun the Inspector had questioned Steven about, all knowledge of which he had denied, the gun that had been in Sara’s possession on the night she died and that the police were searching for, Steven had it. Steven had known all the time where it was.
She couldn’t take her eyes away. She wanted to, but she couldn’t. Steven’s movements were slow, deliberate. He stared at the weapon. He took a clean handkerchief out of the breast pocket of his tweed jacket. He enclosed the gun in its folds. His sinewy brown hands worked busily. And then, all at once, he stopped doing anything. His head was up. He was looking toward the door. So fast that Cristie could barely follow, he was across to the bed, had folded the covers back, had lifted the far corner of the mattress and had slipped the weapon out of sight. Returning the covers to their former position, he slid to the switch and jabbed off the light. As blackness came down again, Cristie heard the door close.
Her breast was an anvil and someone was pounding on it with a hammer. She couldn’t think, couldn’t even feel. She knew only one thing. She had to get out of there and she had to get out instantly. Every step through the blackness was a searing ordeal. She reached the door at last, turned the knob with icy fingers. She was in the hall with the door closed when she heard someone coming down the steps from the street into the basement.
Cristie glanced around. There was no way of escape. Then she saw the staircase leading to the floor above. She ran toward it, up its worn treads, along the hallway above and without being stopped, out onto the high stoop and down into the dim night street.
Cristie didn’t go to sleep until almost morning and only then because she took a sedative. When she woke at nine she thought at first that the whole horrible experience hadn’t actually happened, that it was nothing but a bad dream. Then realization rushed through her, detailed, cruel, biting. The secret door at the back of her mind was wide open now. The fear that lurked there ranged the outer regions of her consciousness, misshapen, monstrous, terrible.
Every minute of every hour of the long day was an intolerable effort; getting up, eating breakfast, answering her maid’s smiling good morning, going to her drawing board, trying to do the sketches for Lyons. At two she went out for a walk in an effort to obtain surcease if only for a few minutes from her own bitter problem.
The sight of normal people, guiltless people, going unconcernedly about their own affairs, deepened the taste of gall on her tongue and drove her indoors again. At half past four she rang Steven. They were to have had dinner together. She couldn’t face it. His voice gave her a little shock because it sounded the same; there was no change in it. She had somehow or another expected there to be a change. Steven was a very good actor. Swallowing around a constriction in her throat, she said, “Hello, Steven? I’m afraid I can’t make it for dinner tonight. No. I feel rotten. I guess I’ve got a cold coming on.”
Steven expressed his concern, and before she could stop him said he’d be right up. The connection was broken. Cristie steeled herself. She took a shower, changed, and put on fresh make-up. Outlining the curve of her mouth in the dressing-table mirror she marveled at herself with a sort of dull wonder. There was no outward mark. She looked much as usual. It seemed incredible after what had come and gone.
When Steven arrived she was at her drawing board again. She smiled at him brightly, accepte
d his kiss, cut it short by upsetting a jar of Chinese white. Deception was easier than it looked. After the first few minutes she heard herself answering Steven in normal tones. The maid brought in cocktails. The drinks helped.
She was sipping the second one when the door bell rang and the maid ushered Inspector McKee and another man into the room. The latter was Kent, the Homicide Squad stenographer. Cristie put her glass down slowly and carefully. There was a change in the Inspector’s manner. Carelessness had dropped from his tall, lean, casually tweeded figure. His dark saturnine face was modeled in grave planes and there was no smile in his eyes.
Steven was on his feet. “Mr. Hazard,” McKee said, “I believe you made a little expedition last night.” His voice was cold, even, as he went on with his indictment. “You left your club at about eight-thirty. You took a cab to Grand Central. You got out of the cab and went down in the East Side subway to Fourteenth Street. You took another cab to First Avenue and Twentieth Street. You dismissed the cab there, crossed to Avenue A and entered the basement of 503A East Twenty-first Street. You went into room 1A at the back of the hall. You were in the room for about two minutes. You didn’t succeed in shaking off the men following you. One detective took you back to your club. The other, Detective Schwartz, searched the room after you left. Any explanation to offer, Mr. Hazard, of your desire to keep your expedition and its objective a secret?”
The words were concise, came like leaden balls out of a mold. Cristie crushed herself into a corner of the big couch, hands, feet and knees together. She held her breath waiting for Steven to answer.
“None,” he said.
The Scotsman leaned toward him, the last trace of conciliation gone. He said slowly, “Mr. Hazard, that room was rented and occupied by Eva Prentice, your former maid. You went there to collect something, something she had in her keeping. You went there to get this...”