I dashed over a flagstone terrace onto a smooth lawn. And there was the sea before me—placid and lovely beyond a beach of smooth, white sand.
A low, wooden pier ran out a hundred yards or so into the water. In the dying moonlight, it looked like a dark, spidery tentacle reaching out from shore.
Wetzlaff’s yacht probably docked there, I thought, as I dashed across the lawn. Behind me lights went on at the front door. Loud, excited voices clamored on the night. Guns spat after me….
* * *
—
I heard the strident whine of passing bullets. One bullet plunked audibly in the sod by my left foot. But the moon was almost down, the light was bad, and I was moving fast toward a fringe of palms and palmetto fringing the lawn and running along the beach.
Unharmed, I reached the black shadows under the first palms and cut along the beach to the right. They didn’t seem to be following. It wouldn’t have been much use anyway. The undergrowth gave too much cover.
One thing puzzled me. I didn’t recognize the beach. It wasn’t Miami Beach, or along the shores of Biscayne Bay. The surf had the slow, powerful surge of the open sea.
Wetzlaff’s place, obviously, was somewhere along the coast north or south of Miami. There’d be another house somewhere ahead; a telephone, an automobile, perhaps, to get me back to the hotel.
And when I got there Lucille, the wench, was going to get shocked into her age—unless she’d lammed already.
Then I thought of Gus and Joe, my bodyguards. If I’d been doped, what of them? Wetzlaff and La Palmer must have known there’d be a kickback from this. They couldn’t take chances on those two men talking. By that time I was as cheerful as a flood of tears.
I stopped, listened, heard no sounds of pursuit. So on I went. This stretch of coast was lonely. The dry sand whispered underfoot. The big palm leaves rustled dryly. The undergrowth at my right seemed to grow thicker, wilder.
The moon went down and the night was black. The breaking waves had little ghostly ripples of phosphorescence. Now and then the beach curved gently. No lights appeared.
I was still shaky, weak. My right hand was swollen and sore. The sand made walking hard. I began to tire, but I kept on stubbornly. When daylight came, I wanted to be a long way from Wetzlaff’s house. For they’d come after me. They couldn’t afford to let me get away. If I rested, went to sleep; if I slowed up and let them get in sight of me after daylight, it would be farewell, sweet farewell for Mike Harris. And I liked him in spite of his dumb mistakes.
So, dopey and half-asleep, I kept going. The palms were black and mysterious on my right, the sea shimmered vaguely on my left, the pale strip of white sand stretched out ahead, and I plodded on—on—on….
Wouldn’t there ever be another house? Didn’t anyone else live along this stretch of the coast? Then, suddenly, the palms ended—and there was a house with lighted windows, with rest and safety. Sweet safety. Sweet rest.
Mike Harris could still run. I discovered that as I crossed a lawn and came to the house. Just before I reached the door someone called over at my left: “Stand still, damn you!”
And the heartbreaking truth hit me like a blow. The door glass was broken. I had merely made the circuit of an island—and was back at Wetzlaff’s house again. They had me, and I was helpless….
CHAPTER VI
Trixie Shows
They came at me from two sides, trapping me there by the door. Three of them. I thought they were going to shoot. Instead, for thirty seconds after they reached me, they hit me with everything but the flagstones underfoot.
Fight back? I tried. What chance did I have? They even kicked me after I went down.
From what they said as I was yanked up again, I gathered they had spotted me returning along the beach, had tumbled to what I had done, and had eased to the house and waited for me.
By that time, the front door was open, the lights were on, and Wetzlaff and his house guests were crowding out.
“Bring him in!” Wetzlaff snarled.
Hired eggs, tough eggs, had jumped me. Two of them held me by the arms and hustled me into a big, brightly-lighted living room. The first thing I saw was my bodyguards, Gus and Joe, sitting gingerly on the edge of straight-backed chairs. Their arms were tied behind, their ankles were loosely tied.
Gus Wayland turned one sorrowful brown eye toward me. The other was black-and-blue and swollen shut.
“Boss,” Gus said reproachfully, “I seen it coming.”
“But you didn’t duck fast enough,” Joe Jacobs grumbled sourly. He had the cauliflower ear, the scar on his jaw, and the shoulders of a wrestler. And now, sour and morose, he scowled at me. “These guys say you’re a detective,” he said.
“Do they?” was all I could think to reply through my swollen lips.
A blue-black stubble covered Wetzlaff’s face. He was chewing on the stub of a cigar. The big diamond on his right hand glinted as he took the cigar from his mouth and addressed me with savage sarcasm. “So you thought you’d lam out?”
“I wish I’d kicked you in the jaw before I left,” I told him; and reached for a handkerchief to wipe blood from my lip. The mug on my right grabbed my arm. “You’ve already frisked me!” I snapped. “Don’t be so nervous!”
“Shall I crack him, Chief?” he begged Wetzlaff.
“Not now. You’ve almost ruined him already.”
The young man I’d met at the bottom of the steps had a strip of adhesive plaster on his cheek. His look was venomous.
And Bernie Cushman was grinning. Two other men, about his age, were strangers to me. I’d have picked them out as crooks in any crowd. Cushman’s blonde was there, dressed again, and four other girls I remembered vaguely as having seen on the yacht. They were molls or they wouldn’t be here. Everyone looked sleepy.
Wetzlaff chewed the stump of his cigar again and glowered at me. Then he rolled it over to the corner of his mouth and demanded: “What the hell were you doing with ‘Dates’ Palmer?”
“That her name?”
“Don’t stall with me!”
“I met the lady at the Miami-Plaza. I never saw her before. She told me her name was Lucille Palmer.”
“Yeah? What’s your name?”
“Michael Harris.”
“Where you from?”
“Cleveland,” says I, with a faint glimmer of hope.
“What were you doing in Miami?”
Wetzlaff was talking as if, after all, he didn’t know much about me. Had he been guessing upstairs? I hung on to the original story I’d given Lucille Palmer.
“I came to Miami to enjoy myself,” I said.
“And hooked up with ‘Dates’ Palmer right off?”
“I met her while I was in swimming.”
“What was the idea of the flash front and these mugs for bodyguards?”
“I’ve received kidnaping threats,” I gave him with dignity. “My lawyers advised the bodyguards. Will you—you please explain all this?” I asked coldly. “The law, I assure you, will have something to say about it.”
Wetzlaff chewed his cigar in silence.
Bernie Cushman shrugged.
“Well,” he said, “there he is. What d’you make of him?”
Vera Shane, the blonde, spoke up petulantly. “I told you you were making a mistake, Jack.”
Wetzlaff snatched a folded piece of paper from his pocket and shoved it out at me.
“If you’re a young squirt on the loose, what the hell are you doing with this letterhead from the Blaine Agency in your billfold? What’s this writing on the back?”
He almost caught me off-guard.
“Oh—that?” says I, thinking wildly. “Why—uh—while I was in New York, I hired detectives from the Blaine Agency. Those are some memoranda in my—uh—
private shorthand. That top note says to write a letter to my Aunt Louisa, in Omaha, Nebraska. Her oldest son broke his ankle last month, and—”
“All right, dammit, all right!” Wetzlaff broke in angrily. He glowered at me. “But I don’t like the way you went into action upstairs. You didn’t act like no damn fool then.”
“I—I was frightened, I’ll have to admit,” says I meekly.
The blonde hummed under her breath: “What a hell of a mess—what a hell of a mess. When this red-headed lamb gets loose, then what, suckers?”
Wetzlaff snapped: “Throw him in that attic room! Lock those other two mugs down in the old wine cellar! We’ve got to get some sleep!”
* * *
—
The attic room was up under the eaves. A rabbit couldn’t have crawled through its one small window. The air was hot, stale. An army cot comprised the furniture. The two men who had brought me up locked and bolted the door.
I went to sleep. There wasn’t anything else to do.
The sun was glaring through the tiny window when a hand on my shoulder awakened me. One of the men who had brought me in was there by the cot.
“Wetzlaff says to get you washed up and bring you down for grub,” he said curtly. “Make it snappy.”
By the sun it was about noon. Out of that little hell-hole under the roof, with a quick shower, a shave with a safety razor he handed me, and in my clothes again, I felt better. A radio was playing downstairs. Dishes were clattering, people were talking, when my guard brought me into the dining room.
Wetzlaff set down a glass of beer and pointed to an empty chair on my side of the long table. “Get some groceries,” he growled.
The men wore white linens and flannels. The girls were in gay sport clothes. Sleep had helped their dispositions. The guard stood behind my chair and I sat down gaping at Lucille Palmer, seated across from me.
She had blue shadows under her eyes. Overnight she had aged years. And she was in a vile temper.
“So you’re here, too?” I queried.
“Oh, for God’s sake! Do I have to listen to you gabble and bleat on top of everything else?”
“Dearie,” said one of the girls silkily, “you liked it well enough last night.”
Lucille snatched up her glass of beer. I thought she was going to hurl it at the speaker. Then she put it down and flared at Wetzlaff: “Tell those floozies to lay off me or I won’t be responsible!”
“Let her alone!” Wetzlaff mumbled.
The rest of the meal was more amicable. Wetzlaff harked back to old times. I gathered Lucille had once worked the badger game and Wetzlaff had been one of the gang. He’d come a long way since then.
I gathered further that Lucille had turned a neat trick on Cushman two years before in San Francisco. Cushman had almost taken a rap because of it. He’d threatened to get her then. That explained why she had come out of the telephone booth looking for trouble.
When the meal was over, Wetzlaff spoke bluntly. “All of you scram outside. I’m going to be busy for a little while.” Then he directed my guard, “Take him in the living room. I want to talk to him in a few minutes.”
In the living room I took a cigarette from a box on a table and smoked moodily. My guard loitered near the hall doorway. He had a gun in a pocket. I knew what to expect if I tried to make another break.
There was a library behind the living room. Wetzlaff was in there with Lucille Palmer. In the quiet which fell I could hear their voices. Wetzlaff’s grew louder, threatening. Lucille came back at him angrily. I listened. And what did I hear?
Wetzlaff: “You’ve got those letters in Miami somewhere! Are you going to cough up?”
La Palmer: “For the tenth time, no!”
All ears by then, I heard Wetzlaff angrily say: “I’ve tried to give you the dope straight! With those letters and the squeeze I can give him, I’ll make that two-timing old billy-goat cough up a half million! You’ve got no business monkeying with a set-up like that!”
Lucille snapped back: “Where do you get off telling me my business? Stick to your racket and I’ll stick to mine! You’ve already spoiled one sweet sucker I was shaping up! There will be hell to pay over him!”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah!” said Lucille, hard and fighting mad.
Silence for a moment. Then Wetzlaff said something in a lower voice. Her reply was shot with sudden panic.
“So that’s your out? All you guys in the racket are kill-crazy! You—you can’t do anything like that!”
* * *
—
Wetzlaff laughed at her, ugly, sneering. After a moment he asked, “Are you going to cough up those letters and take your split?”
“Louis Layre put you onto this, Jack! You’re using the same arguments he gave me! The dirty, double-crossing rat!”
“Never mind Layre! Are you going to be reasonable?”
“No!” Lucille fairly screamed at him. “For the last time, no!”
Wetzlaff cursed her then. “We’ll see about that!” And suddenly I felt sorry for Lucille Palmer.
Something else was on my mind at the same moment, too. A low, droning sound outside the house had swiftly increased in volume. I recognized it now as the motors of an airplane. They were sputtering, missing…
The front door opened. One of the men looked into the living room. “Where’s Jack?” he asked the guard.
“Next room.”
Wetzlaff opened the library door and met him.
“There’s an amphibian plane landing here, Jack! Something’s wrong with its motors!”
Wetzlaff began to swear again. His face was dark with anger. “We don’t want anyone here!”
“Well, it’s coming down!”
“I’ll see about that!” Wetzlaff spoke over his shoulder to Lucille Palmer. “Wait in here with the boy friend until I get back.” And to the guard, “Watch ’em both.”
He hurried out with the other man.
I’d moved to the front window by then. Lucille joined me. The corners of her mouth were white, drawn. She was breathing hard from strong emotion.
She ignored me as we stared out the window at the twin-motored amphibian plane which swooped low over the water beyond the pier. It landed amid sheets of spray and taxied with coughing, spitting motors to the beach.
Wetzlaff and his guests hurried down to meet it.
On its landing wheels, the amphibian wallowed slowly up on the smooth, dry sand. The engines stopped. Wetzlaff stepped forward and talked to the pilot.
He broke off as a young woman in a gay sport suit emerged from the plane, ducked under the wing and joined him. The pilot followed her. A few moments later Wetzlaff and the strange young woman started toward the house. She was laughing as they talked. And Wetzlaff was smiling broadly.
A sick feeling suddenly hit the pit of my stomach. That tiny, slender, good-looking little bundle of fluff strolling at Wetzlaff’s side was Trixie Meehan!
CHAPTER VII
A Chance to Die
Lucille Palmer recognized Trixie also. I saw her startled expression, saw her bite down on her lower lip. Her eyes flashed to my face. Her expression wasn’t pleasant.
Under her breath she said, “So she’s here, too!”
Trixie’s face was clear as she came to the flagstone terrace with Wetzlaff. Not a line of worry in it. She’s never looked more cuddly and helpless, more lovely and happy. Just a lost little girl trustfully meeting the world. The windows were open. I heard her chuckle delightedly.
“Such a lovely house, Mr. Gadsden. How nice of you to have it right here where our plane broke down.”
Wetzlaff’s smirk was almost fatuous. The lug! “For a little lady like you, I’d have a house anywhere I thought she’d drop down. Here, sit under the umbrel
la at this table. I’ll order something cold.”
“So thoughtful of you,” Trixie cooed.
Wetzlaff called an order in the front door and rejoined her. I heard Trixie telling him how she’d hired the plane for a joy-ride out beyond the Gulf Stream. After they finished the drinks, Wetzlaff stood up and said he’d show her the house.
The guard had closed the door between our room and the hall. Lucille jumped up, walked to the door and called through. “Jack, I want to talk to you a minute!”
Wetzlaff came in alone. Lucille led him to the other end of the room, talked under her breath. I heard Louis Layre’s name mentioned. Wetzlaff’s face hardened. He nodded and rejoined Trixie in the hall.
Lucille lighted a cigarette and began to hum cheerfully under her breath. I felt like throttling her. She’d knifed Trixie in some way. And if Wetzlaff caught Trixie off-base just once…
I was afraid—horribly afraid.
Trixie saw most of the house but the living room. Outside again with Wetzlaff, I saw her staring at the plane. “Someone’s helping my pilot,” she said.
“One of my men,” Wetzlaff said calmly. “He’s an expert mechanic; he will find the trouble in no time.”
“That’s—comforting,” Trixie said. Some of her gayety had vanished.
Wetzlaff lighted a cigar, leaned back in his chair and watched the two men working on the plane. He seemed to be waiting for something.
The two men at the plane suddenly started toward the house, one walking ahead of the other. Doubt turned to certainty; then fear swamped me as I made out Trixie’s pilot being herded to the house with a gun in his back.
The pilot was pale, flustered, when he reached the terrace. “What’s the idea of this gun?” he demanded of Wetzlaff.
The gunner, a long, rangy fellow in dirty white canvas trousers, replied for him. “Chief, he was pullin’ a fast one. Nothin’ wrong with those motors.”
The Big Book of Female Detectives Page 41