I had a gun — a Germany Army Luger I’d brought home from Europe. Tomorrow I would buy cartridges for it. I would find out where he lived and wait outside his house. I had never seen him, but he would be the only man five or six inches taller than myself going in or out of that house. To make absolutely certain, I would step up to him and say: “George Moon?” And when he admitted that he was, I would take the Luger out of my pocket and put a bullet —
A terrific weight fell on me. I clawed air and fell to my hands and knees. I looked for what had hit me and saw only a long, dark furniture warehouse on my left. I started to rise, and the toe of a shoe flashed out and kicked me in the face. It knocked me down on one shoulder.
My eyes rolled frantically in their sockets, and I saw him standing over me. Light flowed obliquely from across the street and touched his squat, solid torso and the thick, short object dangling from his hand.
“I’ve plenty to pay you back for, sport,” he said.
I knew his voice. I lifted my head a little and looked up at Larry’s broad face hideous in the shadows. Anger gave me sudden strength. I put my palms flat on the sidewalk and started to lift myself. Once I had knocked him cold in the cramped space of a car. I could do it again if I could get up to my feet.
Larry kicked me again in the face. I fell on my side.
“Let’s see how tough you are, sport,” he said. “Let’s see how much you can take.”
I saw his foot go back. My head was too heavy to lift. I pushed a forearm in front of my face, but the rest of my body was open to his foot. There was nothing I could do about it.
All at once Larry was running away.
I heard a voice shout, “Hey!” and then somebody was bending over me. “You get into a fight, Mr. Breen?”
The face of the detective named Perc was inches above my own.
“That’s Larry!” I said thickly.
“Who?”
“Vital’s partner. For God’s sake, get him!”
It took a couple of seconds for the information to work through the detective’s skull. Then he said, “That guy!” and leaped to his feet.
I turned my head a little. The detective was pulling out his gun as he ran, but by that time Larry had disappeared around the corner. I tried to sit up. My stomach churned, my head spun, the whole left side of my face was numb. I lay on the sidewalk with one arm propping me up and breathed noisily through the mouth. I remained alone in the heart of Brooklyn at a still early hour of the night.
Then I realized why no other person had come by, why no heads were stuck out of windows. There were no dwellings within a hundred feet of where I lay. The warehouse covered half the block on this side, and across the street there was a closed garage. Larry had picked his spot. And the time that had passed since he had hit me over the head could still be measured in seconds. The detective had been shadowing me and so couldn’t have been far behind. It does not take long to slug a man and kick him in the face.
A car approached, swept by. I was unnoticed or ignored as a drunk. From the opposite direction a second pair of headlights crawled toward me. This car stopped at the curb. A woman got out.
“Adam Breen!” she cried and bent over me.
She was again wearing that short, belted blue coat, and the wide blue ribbon around her long bobbed hair. She got an arm under my shoulders and helped me to sit up.
“Your face!” Molly Crane said. “Who did it?”
“A guy who lay in wait for me,” I told her. “He slugged me.”
“But why?”
It was her job to ask questions of people who were dying or sick or hurt and then write about them in the paper. It was too much effort for me to make pointless conversation, so I didn’t.
The detective was coming back. He was alone. I sat with my head against Molly Crane’s hip and watched the man’s quick nervous strides.
“He got away,” he said, irritably. “Chances are he ran into one of the apartment houses around the corner.” He peered down at me. “That was Larry, you said — the one you claim was Jasper Vitals partner?”
“Now will you cops believe he’s real?”
“Well, what I saw of him answered your description. A short, wide guy. Too bad I didn’t know him right away. From where I was it looked like you two started to scrap. I came to break it up. I didn’t know you were being slugged.” The detective stooped and came up with my hat. “Crown bashed in. You were lucky you wore a hat. What’d he do to your face?”
Molly Crane said angrily: “Can’t you see Mr. Breen is badly hurt? Call an ambulance.”
“Yeah, and send out a prowl car alarm.” He glanced around and then at Molly. “Will you stay with him while I phone?”
“Of course. But hurry. He’s bleeding.”
I touched my numb face and then looked at my fingers. There was less blood than I had expected. The detective was already halfway to the corner.
“Do you think you can stand?” Molly Crane asked me.
I got up to my feet with only a little help from her. My legs wobbled. She held me with a strong, competent .arm about my waist,
“What’s the matter with him, lady?” A man without a collar and a woman in a cloth coat thrown over a housecoat stood on the other side of me.
“He fell and hurt himself,” Molly Crane told them. “Will you please open that car door?”
The man hurried around me to pull open the door. “We live down the block,” he said. “My missus saw him laying on the sidewalk and called me to go out and see.”
“I thought maybe he was hit by a car,” the woman said.
“He fell and hurt himself,” Molly said. “Can you get into the car, Mr. Breen?”
“What about the ambulance?” I said.
Her arm pressed me forward. “Sit and wait for it in the car.”
I got into the coupe under my own power. I sank low in the seat and put my head back. It felt better that way.
The car started to move, and Molly Crane said: “Why wait for an ambulance? You’re not hurt that badly. I know where you live. In fact, I just came from your house.”
I closed my eyes. For a while I was afraid that I would pass out. I clung to consciousness and gradually my stomach stopped jumping. It was only a three-minute ride to my house, but the car was still moving. My sense of time must have gone haywire, like in a nightmare. Cars swished by us in surprising numbers. That was odd because cars didn’t go fast enough on Brooklyn residential streets to swish and we couldn’t be near any speedway. I opened my eyes. Many pairs of headlights bore down on us and swooped by. We were driving between high concrete walls. I sat up too quickly and pain nearly tore my head off.
“Where are we?”
“The Manhattan Bridge,” Molly Crane said and glanced sideways at me.
This time I straightened up more slowly, and my head could take it. It was the two-way lower pass over the Manhattan Bridge all right, and ahead I could see the Canal Street end.
“Why didn’t you drive me home?”
“With you looking like that?” she said. “You’d scare your wife to death.”
“Then why didn’t you wait for the ambulance?”
She kept her eyes on the road. “I can clean up your face in my place.”
The car went over a bump and shook me, tightening a ring of fire around my skull. I sank back. I was too exhausted to argue. And it wouldn’t have done any good.
She cut across Manhattan and then drove north and stopping the car on West Fourth Street. She got out first and came around to my side. I put a foot out and carefully pushed my body after it. My head was endurable if I didn’t move it suddenly. I clung to her arm. She led me into a tenement house which had been scrubbed, and chopped up into small apartments. On the stairs I smelled perfume in her hair which, unlike most women’s hair, was not lower than my nose when I was standing.
Her apartment was the usual thing in renovated tenements. You stepped directly into a living room which was overcrowded by a couch and a
n armchair and a table and minor stuff. The kitchenette was an alcove with a curtain in front of it. The bedroom and bathroom led directly from the living room.
I sat at one end of the couch while she arranged cushions against the other arm of it. I wondered if there was a husband.
“Do you live here alone?” I asked. She patted the cushions down. “All alone.”
There was a phone on a small stand near the entrance door.
I was rousing myself to make the effort to stand up when I felt her hands on me. “Here, let me help you off with your jacket.” She stripped it off, loosened my collar and eased me down on the cushions.
“The skin isn’t even broken,” she said. “There’s only a slight bump. He must have hit you with something like a rubber sap and your hat deadened the blow. You were lucky.”
She was a fine nurse, quick-moving and gentle. She fed me aspirins and washed the blood off my face and cleaned the cuts on my cheek. I winced when her probing fingers touched the sore spot on the back of my skull.
“I mean it,” she said. “You say he kicked you twice, but there isn’t anything broken in your face. Only a nasty bruise and a couple of cuts. I suppose you rolled with the kicks.”
“I don’t remember. He probably wanted to put his foot through my face. Can I have a drink?”
“Water or coffee. Hard stuff won’t help your headache.”
“Coffee,” I said.
I lay flat on my back with my face turned to her as she puttered in the kitchenette. She wore a beige jersey dress which. blended with her honey-brown hair and molded her figure. She could have got a job anywhere for a Greek goddess or an Amazon queen.
I shifted my eyes to the phone. I felt strong enough to go to it. I didn’t move. I closed my eyes, and suddenly I was asleep.
CHAPTER TEN
When I awoke, the overhead light was out and only a subdued floorlamp spread a soft glow from one corner of the room. Molly Crane sat in the armchair. She held a tall, half-empty glass on her crossed knee. Her face was as immobile and classic as marble. I thought that she was as beautiful as any woman I had ever seen.
She saw me lift my wrist to look at my watch. “You’ve slept nearly two hours,” she said. “Feel better?”
“Much. A nap always does wonders for me.”
I stood up. My legs were all right and my head had felt worse during bad headaches. I walked as far as the phone and looked down at it and came back to the couch.
“Aren’t you going to call your wife?” she said.
“No”
“She must be worried about you.”
“Did you call her?” I asked.
“I wanted to while you slept, but I decided that she’d think you were terribly hurt if anybody phoned for you. Do you mean to say you’re going to let her worry? The police must have told her what happened.
I sat with my hands between my knees. “I’m not going home. You’ve got to help me disappear.”
Her gray eyes looked me over. She said nothing.
I laughed harshly. “No, not with the bag. You’re wasting your time believing I know anything about it or who murdered Jasper Vital. There's nothing I -can tell you to make it worth the trouble you’ve taken to kidnap me.”
She lifted her highball, sipped it, returned it to her knee. “Is that what I did?”
“You stole me from the detective and the ambulance. You saw a chance to bring me to your apartment while I was sick and groggy. I’d talk to you in delirium, or because I wouldn’t have the strength to hold out against your questions, or because I would be overwhelmed by your kindness.”
“Naturally I want a story,” she admitted.
“You were kind,, though,” I said. “You patched me up and let me sleep. I’d like to give you something for your paper, but there isn’t anything. You can’t even print that George Moon tried to kidnap my daughter for a little while this afternoon. I can’t prove that he was the one.”
“So it was George Moon?” she said quietly. “Your wife didn’t know.”
I looked at her. “That’s right, you told me you were at my house.”
“I’m a newspaper woman,” she said. “I don’t give up. This evening I went to see you. You had left a short time before. Your wife was glad to have somebody to talk to. She told me what had happened to your daughter this afternoon. Then I drove to the police station to see if they had anything for me there, but I never reached it. I saw a man lying on the sidewalk.” She drank. “I saw your daughter. She’s lovely, and so much like you,”
“Like me?” I said. “Part of me.” I walked across the room and back. “When I left the police station this evening, I made up my mind to kill George Moon. I didn’t care about being caught as long as that would save them. Now I’m not sure that I could step up and kill any man in cold blood. And if I could, I’m not sure I’d accomplish anything. A lot of different people seem to want that bag. They wouldn’t lay off because Moon is dead, and neither will his organization.”
“There wouldn’t be much organization without Moon,” Molly said.
“Do you know him?”
“I’ve heard of him. In my job I know something about most of his kind. He’s smart and ruthless and politically powerful.” '
“What’s his racket?”
“He’ll put his hand to anything that’s crooked and pays off.”
I paced the floor. “Then it’s the only way. I’ve got to make him think I’ve been kidnaped.”
“By me?” she said softly.
“By Larry and a mysterious woman.” A shadow flickered across her red mouth. “Go on.”
I said: “Look at it through the eyes of the police first. The detective who shadowed me left me battered in the arms of an unknown woman while he went to call an ambulance.” I frowned at her. “Does he know you?”
“I’m sure he’s never seen me before.”
“Good. When he returned, he found me gone and the woman and her car gone. He reported me missing and police rushed to my house to see if I’d gone there. Then a hunt started for me — one that’s going on this minute.”
She leaned forward. The floorlamp caught her eyes and the flecks of yellow in them glittered. “And when you don’t turn up tomorrow, the police will start to wonder why you’ve disappeared.”
“They’ll be pretty sure why and how. They’ll now have to accept the existence of Larry. Enough of him was seen by the detective who chased him to jibe with the description of him I’d given. At first thought it would seem that Larry had beaten me up to pay me back for having knocked him out Monday evening. But he’s out for more than revenge; he’s after the bag and whatever information he thinks I possess. And there’s the mysterious woman who stole me away. Lieutenant Woodfinch puts the pieces together and gets something like this. Larry’s had one bad experience being alone in a car with me. This time he has an accomplice, a woman waiting nearby in a car. His idea is to slug me and toss me unconscious and harmless into the car. The detective comes on the scene too soon, but the woman is clever. She gets rid of him by sending him to call an ambulance. While he’s gone, she lures me into her car, and I’m too battered and dazed to know what’s happening as she drives me off. The proof that she did that is furnished by the man and woman who saw me virtually dragged into the car by her. And now I’m in Larry’s hands, delivered to him by the mysterious woman. And at this moment Larry must be working on me with his knife to induce me to talk.”
“Neat, if a trifle gaudy,” Molly commented and took a small sip of her highball. “A police alarm already must be out for me.”
“Why for you? For a mysterious woman. You told me the detective didn’t know you.”
“But he saw me,”
“He saw a woman, that’s all. The street was dark. I doubt if he got a good look at your face or knows the make of your car. As for the man or the woman, they saw even less of you. I was leaning against you. Only a patch of your face was visible, and hardly visible at that.”
“A
ll right, I’m safe,” she conceded, “and the police are sure Larry kidnaped you. What does that get you?”
I ran a hand through my hair and touched a sore spot on my scalp and winced. She held the glass in front of her chin and watched me gravely over the rim.
“This is all directed at George Moon,” I said. “The police will give the story of my kidnaping out to the papers and he’ll read it. Or if they hold it back, he’ll find out anyway. I think he has ways of learning whatever the police know.”
“You can take my word for it that Moon has wires into high places.”
“Then tomorrow morning at the latest he learns I’m gone. He’ll be even more sure than Lieutenant Woodfinch that Larry has kidnaped me. He knows Larry. Vital and Larry were part of his organization in the south. During the ride Larry told me that he and Vital tired of working for peanuts. What’s in the pigskin bag must be part of what they’re after. Moon knows it, and knows that Larry is still after-it. So he is convinced that Larry has me, which is the whole point of my disappearance.”
Molly uncrossed her legs and rolled her glass between her palms. “And Moon will leave your wife and daughter alone because while you’re in Larry’s hands he can’t scare you into giving up the bag. Or he’ll think you’re dead because Larry would likely kill you when he got what he wanted out of you.”
“Yes.” I stood in front of her chair and looked down at her. “You’re a newspaper reporter. You’ve had more experience with such things. What’s wrong with it?”
“Nothing very much. Except that your wife will go crazy worrying about you.”
“I know.” I felt sick again, not now because of the beating I had. taken. “What else can I do? I’ve got to divert Moon from Carol and Esther.”
“Call her up and tell her not to say that she’d heard from you.”
I turned to the phone and looked at it. “I can’t take the chance,” I said hollowly. “The wires might be tapped by the police or by both. Or Esther might confide in somebody, a friend or a relative, and it will get out. It will be hard on her, but not as hard as anything happening to Carol. Eventually I’ll be back.” I looked down at Molly. “It depends on you.”
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