It was a minute and a half including the elevator, and I fought hard to get hold of myself. I came down the corridor whistling something and clicked the keys a little as I pushed one against the lock. It didn’t fit, and I tried the next one, taking my time, fighting for coolness. Everything depended on the next few minutes and what I saw when I opened the door.
Seventeen
I turned the key and stepped inside, humming. “Where are you, baby?” I said.
She was standing in the center of the living room, alone, facing me, and when she winked I could feel the strain break inside me like a snapped violin string. She’d done it, as she’d said she would. She had hit him before he could recover, taking the play away from him and going panicky when they got the news, crying out that something had gone wrong and I’d be raging. And then, within a minute, they’d heard me outside the door.
“Mike—” You could hear her trying to cover up the terror in her voice. “Darling, I—I thought you were going to wait downtown. I mean, wasn’t there a race?”
I went over and kissed her, pretending to notice nothing wrong. “Sure. Turn on the radio, will you? I want to get the payoffs.”
She was staring at me with something like absolute horror. “The payoffs? Didn’t you—I mean, haven’t you—”
“I didn’t go to the bookie,” I said, as if I hadn’t heard her. “Ran into George Carnovan in the Oak Room and we got to shaking dice and talking about the Army. You remember George. You met him at Aspen, that time we were up there when it rained and ruined the skiing for three days. He’s got a traveling job now. Some paper outfit.” I broke off and turned around to her. “What’s the matter, Cathy? Turn on the radio. I want to find out what price we got. The results should be on in a minute.”
“Oh,” she said. “All—all right, dear.”
I was feeling a little better now, but the sweat was still clammy on my face. The door to the master bedroom was on the right and it was open, but the one to the dining room, on the left, was just slightly ajar. Lachlan would be in there, then, and she couldn’t make any move that would give it away for fear he was looking as well as listening. There was no way he could get out, so he had to stay and suffer. She’d built me up as a raging maniac when something went wrong, and in about two or three minutes I was going to know I’d lost a lot of money on Tanner’s Girl.
“You didn’t get the results, then?” she asked, her voice very small and tight, as if she were out of breath. “You don’t know if—if he won?”
“She,” I said, struggling for just the right casual tone. “It was a mare, name of Tanner’s Girl. Oh, she won, all right. But I want to get the price. According to the scratch sheet she was eight to one on the Morning Line, but well do better than that. Should get twelve to one, anyway.”
She didn’t say anything. I turned and looked at her, as if just noticing for the first time that something was wrong. “What’s the matter, Cathy? Don’t you feel well? You look pale.”
“I’m all right, dear. I—I mean, did you bet very much on the race?”
“Yes,” I said, lighting a cigarette. “My whole quota. Five thousand dollars. But there’s nothing to worry about. It was bet late and spread very thin. We’ll do all right on the price.”
“Your quota?” she asked blankly.
The radio was beginning to warm up now. It was playing music. “Skip it, Cathy,” I said, a little irritably. “I’ve tried a dozen times to explain it to you. It’s just a blind spot, I guess. But never mind. I want to hear this.”
“Darling,” she asked faintly, “could we go down to the bar? I think I’d like a drink.”
“In a minute,” I said impatiently.
“Please. Right now.”
“I said in a minute, Cathy. I want to hear the results of that race.”
Unless his nerve was very good, he should be getting the horrors. He might or might not have begun to get the implications of that stuff about the quota and betting late and spreading it thin, but he would as soon as that telephone rang.
“Darling, please.” She was doing it nicely. You could hear the horror in it.
“Go ahead,” I said. “I’ll be down as soon as I get this. Wait.” I broke off. The recording had stopped and the announcer was coming on. “This may be it now.”
“We now bring you the results of the eighth race at Hialeah,” the announcer began. Then the telephone rang. God, I thought wildly, both at once.
“Cathy,” I snapped. “Answer that. I’m trying to listen.”
She picked up the telephone and the clatter stopped. The radio went on: “The winner was Seven Sharps. In the place position it was Smoke Blue, with Miss Pouter third. Seven Sharps paid—”
“What!” I yelled. “What the hell does he mean, Seven Sharps?”
She had her hand over the telephone mouthpiece and was wailing, “Mike! Mike! It’s long-distance.”
“The hell with that. Did you hear—” Then I did a double take on it. “Long-distance? From where? Give me that!”
“It’s Miami,” she said faintly, collapsing into a chair.
I grabbed it out of her hand. “Hello! Hello!” I snapped.
“Dr. Rogers? This is Pan American—” the voice on the other end said, just as I pressed down the arm and broke the circuit. He couldn’t see it, the way I was standing, even if he were looking, and the noise of the radio would cover the click. I didn’t dare leave it down, because it might ring again, but when I let it up I could hear the dial tone.
“Yes. Yes,” I said. “This is Rogers. Go ahead. Carl? Is that you, Carl? Well, what the hell are you people—Yes, I just heard…What do you mean, what am I trying to do out here? I haven’t done anything but take your word, like a damned fool, and expect you to do what you’re supposed to.”
I still had the dial tone. The switchboard operator hadn’t unplugged it yet, but she’d be on the line in a minute. I covered the mouthpiece with my hand, keeping my back toward the dining room.
“What!” I yelled. “Of course I didn’t. Good God, do you think I’m crazy? I tell you it was five thousand, not a penny more. There wasn’t a bit of it placed before eleven o’clock, and it was spread out everywhere. What do you mean, five to one? It couldn’t have been…What?…Listen, you know better than to ask me if I’ve been talking…I don’t care where the money was coming from, there was nothing leaked out here! San Francisco? I tell you it’s impossible… You did what! Why, you stupid idiot, I ought to—Hello! Hello!” I jiggled the hook savagely, then slammed the phone back into its cradle.
Cathy was huddled in a chair, watching me with terrified helplessness. I pretended I didn’t notice her as I went raging across the room.
“Darling,” she asked tremulously, “what—what happened?”
“What happened! I’ll tell you what happened! One of those big-mouthed idiots back there got drunk and started talking, and now they’re trying to blame it on me! Somebody dumped over fifty thousand on that horse, and every bookie in the country was flooded with Tanner’s Girl money by posttime for the first race. They couldn’t even get their bets placed. And then it started pouring back to the track. He said twenty minutes after the mutuel windows opened for the eighth race, Tanner’s Girl was down from eight to one to five to one. So Carl sent the jockey out with instructions to run her into every blind switch he could find, even if he had to get clear off the track and chase her up an alley.”
Of course, the whole thing was a dream. There hadn’t been any big wads of money bet on Tanner’s Girl and probably very little coming back to the track; what had driven the price down was the thing I’d figured on from the first—the old two-dollar bettors out there at the track betting on her because she won last time.
“But why?” she asked, her voice breaking with fright. “Why did they want her to lose?”
“Why? Why? Because they decided I was the one who’d talked! I wasn’t there to defend myself, so I was the goat. They didn’t have anything bet, so why should
she win? They cut my throat. They left me out on a limb. They were going to teach me to keep my mouth shut! The dirty, rotten, big-mouthed—” I switched over to Spanish and ran through every dirty name I knew.
I whirled around to her. “Start packing. We’re going back there, and somebody’s going to have his tail in a sling when we get this thing threshed out. Trying to tell me that money was coming from San Francisco.”
I stopped then, as if noticing for the first time the look of horror on her face. I froze dead in my tracks, staring at her.
“Mike! Don’t look at me like that! Mike, please.”
“San Francisco, he said. Well, maybe somebody has been shooting off her little mouth.”
“Darling! Listen! Please.”
“Why, you little tramp!”
She pushed back in her chair, whimpering now. “Mike! I haven’t done anything. Honest!”
“So you wanted to know the name of the horse, didn’t you?” I grew very quiet and started to walk slowly toward her. “I remember now. You asked me what horse it was.”
With a roar of pure rage, I reached for her. I got the front of her blouse and it ripped as I jerked her out of the chair. “Why, you rotten, double-crossing, blabber-mouthed little tramp, I ought to kill you! I see it now. When the filthy pig couldn’t get anywhere trying to pump me, he got it out of you! So we’ve been going to picture shows, have we? Well, aren’t we just too cute!” I let go, and shoved her, and she fell to the floor.
Still cursing, I ran to the desk and yanked open a drawer. There wasn’t any gun in it, because I didn’t own one, but there was a big metal paperweight the size of a .45, and I banged it against the drawer getting it out, and shoved it in my coat pocket.
She was beginning to scream now. “Mike! No! No! No!” She tried to get up off the floor, came up to her knees, and lunged desperately at my legs. “Mike! Please!”
I peeled her off, lifted her, and threw her backward. She crumpled to the floor again, whimpering. “I’ll attend to you when I get back,” I said savagely, and ran toward the door. I could hear her still whimpering with terror as I slammed it.
Lachlan’s apartment was two floors above, but I didn’t bother with the elevator. I took the stairs two at a time, and was halfway up there before I suddenly remembered there wasn’t any necessity for acting, now that I was out of sight. The longer I was gone, the more time he’d have to get out of the apartment and run. I slowed down.
A Filipino boy in a white jacket answered the ring and I shoved past him before he could do more than utter a startled grunt. I plowed into the living room and looked wildly around. “Where’s Lachlan?” I demanded, with my hand on the paperweight in my coat pocket.
He was scared. “He not here. Go out long time ago.”
“Where is he?” I asked menacingly. I had to put on a good act because Lachlan would get in touch with him or come back sooner or later, and the more I scared the kid, the better story he’d give Lachlan.
“No understand.” He was taking refuge in pidgin English and pretending he didn’t know what I was talking about. I switched to Spanish and chewed him out, and he got that, all right. I went through all the rooms, pretending to be putting on a big search, but just stalling for time.
I came back to the living room, still looking wild and scaring the houseboy. I stood by the desk near the door, glaring around like a man who still hopes to find somebody to shoot, and I don’t know what made me glance down at the mail lying there. There were two or three opened letters and one envelope with its end slit. Maybe it was the foreign stamp that attracted my attention. The return address was printed, some construction company in Belize, British Honduras, and typed in above it was “Harold E. Goodwin, Supt.”
Like a man in a dream, I reached down and picked it up and slid the letter out. “Dear Mart,” it began, “It’s been some time since I’ve heard from you and I just thought I’d drop you a line and see if you have any plans for coming back to our old stamping grounds any time soon…”
I slid it back into the envelope and dropped it on the table. I was numb. I had forgotten Lachlan. I was thinking of a two-story house in a little desert town on the edge of the sand dunes and a man named Howard C. Goodwin and his wife. Suddenly it all balled up and hit me at once. I’d run up here as part of an act, pretending to be in a murderous rage because she’d lied to me, and when I got here I found out she had.
With an effort I pulled myself together. There wasn’t time to think about that now. We had to get out from under Lachlan. I shouted something threatening at the houseboy for the last time, and ran out the door. I’d been gone five or six minutes now, and it should have been long enough for him to get out of the apartment. And it was. When I got back, he was gone.
And so was Cathy.
I stood there, looking stupidly around the empty living room. Where could she have gone? This wasn’t part of the act. She was supposed to be here. The radio had been turned off and it was unbearably silent after that crescendo of violence, and I couldn’t adjust myself to the abrupt letdown. I wanted to make a noise of some kind, or run.
It had been only five minutes. She couldn’t go anywhere in that time. I went through all the rooms, idiotically, as if I were looking for a button lost off a shirt. When I came out into the living room again the telephone rang shrilly, knifing at the silence.
I answered it mechanically. “This is Inter-Continent Travel Service,” a girl said.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ve changed my mind.”
Lachlan was gone, so she must have gone with him. But that was stupid. She wouldn’t do that. Everything had gone according to plan right up to the moment I left the apartment, and when I came back five minutes later she had disappeared. Had Lachlan forced her to go with him? Had he been wise to the whole thing? Maybe he was taking her to the police right now, or the police had already been here and were looking for me now. I shook my head, trying to clear it and think.
I ran down the corridor and punched the elevator button. The car was a long time coming, and seemed to descend with agonizing slowness, as if it were filled with helium and had to be pulled down. I looked wildly around the lobby, and then hurried out onto the sidewalk. She wasn’t there. I went down the ramp into the garage. Both cars were in their stalls. I stared at them, and turned and ran out. I began to feel like a man in a nightmare. I thought about Goodwin, and then pushed him out of my mind. That would have to wait. The whole thing had blown up some way, and Cathy was in trouble. I looked up and down the sidewalk like a man in a trance.
I went back into the lobby. A man who was standing at the desk talking to the clerk turned and came toward me.
“Dr Rogers?” he said. “I’d like to speak to you for a moment.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. I had to get back to the apartment. She must be still in the building somewhere, and maybe she had gone back. I pushed past him, not even seeing him now.
“It’s quite important,” he said softly. “I think perhaps you’d be wise to listen to me, Reichert.”
Reichert. I stopped abruptly as the name crashed through my thoughts and hit me like a bucket of cold water. I turned and stared at him. “What?”
He smiled. “Perhaps we could go into the bar. Would you like a drink?”
“You say it’s important?” It was a stupid question. Even with Cathy going around and around in my mind, I could recognize danger when I saw it. It was there in the cool, incisive eyes and the probing intelligence behind them. He wasn’t unfriendly or threatening; he was just efficient.
“I believe you’ll find it so. Shall we go?”
We went. We sat down in a booth in the corner and ordered drinks. I tried to clear my mind to deal with this. Here was dynamite. And he wasn’t a policeman; or if he was, they had begun recruiting their cops from Harvard Law School. He was around thirty, with a lean, alert face and crew-cut hair, and an unshined shoe or a piece of lint on the conservative Brooks Brothers suit would have been as sloppy as a ten
ement clothesline on a destroyer.
“Perhaps I’d better introduce myself,” he said crisply. “My name’s Sheldon Gerard. I’m an attorney. Winkler, Hartman, and Gerard, of El Paso. However, right at the moment I’m just more or less performing an errand for my uncle, who is a banker in a little town”—the probing eyes glanced up and went right through me—“called Wyecross. You may have heard of it.”
The chill was spreading down my back, and I looked away from him until I could get control of my expression.
“My uncle,” he went on with the cool efficiency of a professional executioner, “is ill at the moment, and wasn’t able to travel, so he asked me to fly over here and take care of this for him.”
There was no hope whatever, but I tried to bluff anyway. “That’s too bad,” I said, looking at my watch. “But I’m afraid you’ve made a mistake somewhere in your doctors. I’m not an M.D., so if you’ll excuse me—”
“Nice try,” he said, with something like approval in the sharp gray eyes. “But to get on—I’ll be as brief as possible. To put it in four words, Reichert, the jig is up. My uncle, as you’ve probably already guessed, is a Mr. Howard C. Goodwin, of Wyecross. It might interest you to know that he suffered a nervous breakdown as a result of that expensive bit of hocus-pocus you and your friends sold him. Incidentally, it was a brilliant piece of work, and I believe you’d have got away with it entirely except for the thing that so often happens when a number of persons—some of them with police records—are involved. Around three weeks ago Mr. Wolford Charles fell afoul of the police in Florida on an old charge, and in the course of the investigation he let drop a few revelations concerning this particular bit of moonshine.”
I couldn’t say anything. I couldn’t even move. I wanted to get up and run, but my legs wouldn’t work. Charlie had been caught, and because she had beaten him and the double cross and taken all the money, he’d spilled it to get revenge. All I could do was sit there and listen while this remorselessly efficient machine dictated the bill of indictment.
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