“Sleepyhead,” she said.
I leaned my head back far enough to tilt hers up, and kissed her on the mouth.
“How long you been in here?” I mumbled against her lips.
“Too long, with you sleeping. How do you feel?”
“Good enough to make a habit of this. What time is it?”
“Eleven o’clock—at night. You slept all day. To make a habit of what?”
I showed her.
WE HAD a one A.M. supper of steaks, French fries and salad. During the day Bobby had done some shopping.
“Good?”
“Delicious.”
Bobby grinned. “I’m doing what the psychologists call reinforcing the habit.”
“It doesn’t need any.”
We sat over our coffee-with-brandy and cigarettes. “I read about the hearing in the papers,” Bobby told me. Just a small article on the next to the last page of the first section.”
“The only reason it got in was Dr. Lord. He was big news.”
“They railroaded you,” Bobby said angrily.
I shrugged. “It was convenient for everybody.”
“But that isn’t all they did to you. You could barely stand on your feet when you came in here. What happened?”
I told her over a second cup of coffee and another cigarette.
“You mean they actually tried to—kill you?” she said. Suddenly she looked up. “Are you safe here? They know where you live. They know where to come and get you.”
“Sure I’m safe. Killing me when they could make it look like I sapped a deputy sheriff is one thing. Murdering me in cold blood, that’s something else.”
“But if they arrested you once, they could do it again.”
“How? They arrested ah unconscious man and were going to kill him before he ever reached jail. That was all they wanted. There won’t be any charges now. As far as “they’re concerned, I never even visited Bonner. Since I got away.”
“What are you going to do now?”
“I haven’t thought about it.”
“More coffee?”
I drew a line across my gullet. “It’s up to here.”
“Chet,” Bobby said, her face grave and troubled. “Did Dr. Lord” really get that letter from the agency, like you said? Or did you make it up?”
“Make it up? Don’t be silly.”
“And the agency got a subtle threat from Judson Bonner?”
“Sure. I told you. But from where I stand it looks like Dygert’s calling the signals, not Bonner.”
“Anyhow. And that’s why Dr. Lord—jumped?”
I nodded. Suddenly I knew what Bobby was driving at. She stood up and went to the sink with a handful of dishes. She didn’t say anything. I came up behind her and touched her shoulder, but she stiffened.
“Listen, kid,” I said. “I know what was bothering you. Well, it’s over now. We know why Dr. Lord took his own life. It had nothing to do with you or how he felt about you.”
She swung around. Her hair looked very light against the dark blue robe. Her eyes gleamed with tears.
“But I helped them,” she said.“Don’t you see, I helped them.”
“It could have been anyone.”
“No! I did it. It was me.”
“All they wanted, all they needed, was—”
“I know that. You don’t understand what I’m trying to say. I led Dr. Lord on. It was part of my—technique.” She made it sound like an ugly word.
“You’re imagining things. You told me you liked him.”
“Of course I liked him. I thought he was the most interesting man I’d ever met. I told you that.”
“Then what’s eating you?”
“Because I led him on, because I didn’t discourage him about feeling the way he did, he … kept seeing me.”
“I told you, Bobby. If it wasn’t you it would have been somebody else.”
She smiled at me. It was a bitter smile. “Do you really believe that?”
“No.”
“Then I helped them kill him.”
“You’ve got it all tied up logically,” I said, “with a cockeyed kind of logic. The only thing it isn’t, is true.”
“I’m quitting,” she told me all at once in a rush of words. “I’ve got some money. I’m all through. I don’t have to do it. I’m finished with being a fancy telephone whore.”
She started to cry.
She ran into the bedroom, flung herself on my bed and cried into my pillow. Sitting down near her, I took her hand. She turned over and I bent down and kissed her gently. Snuffling like a little girl, she knuckled her eyes. I gave her a handkerchief and she blew into it in an unladylike fashion.
“So quit,” I said. “Is that something to cry about?”
She grinned up at me, and I wiped the tears off her cheeks. “I—I guess it sort of calls for champagne.”
“That’s better. Here, blow your nose again.”
“Oh, Chet. Being with you makes me feel so wonderfully—clean.”
UNDER the circumstances, that was about the nicest thing a girl had ever said to me, but I didn’t want her getting solemn again so I said: “There goes my reputation.”
She took it half seriously. “I don’t mean it like that at all, silly. You know what you do to me.”
“Step one,” I said. “The lady quits. Step two. Where does she go from here?”
Bobby sat up and looked away from me. “I wasn’t going to tell you,” she said. “I mean, I don’t have any long range plans, but—”
“I’m listening.”
“No. Forget it. You’ve got your own worries. You’re a private detective without a license to practice.”
“They haven’t taken it away in D.C. yet.”
“But you said they will. Didn’t you?”
“Don t worry about me. What about you?”
Instead of answering, she got up, went into the kitchen and attacked the stacked dishes furiously. I dried them for her. “You should have seen your building super,” she said. “I told him I was your secretary. He nearly swallowed his teeth. They are false, aren’t they?”
“Yeah. But stop changing the subject.”
She started to scrub the sink. “Sure,” she told me, “I have some plans. But I’ll be darned if I’ll talk about them now.”
“Why not?”
She grinned. “I know you. You’ll try to talk me out of them in a weak moment.” The grin faded. “Well, there aren’t going to be any weak moments.”
We took the conversation into the living room, but I couldn’t get anything out of her. Some time around the middle of the night we sent some brandies down to put the steaks to bed, had a final cigarette, and turned in. There wasn’t any funny stuff about who should sleep where. The only comfortable sleeping place in the apartment was the double bed in the bedroom, so we both used it. She had seemed so preoccupied that I decided not to touch her, but after about ten minutes lying there in the dark she came into my arms with a funny kind of little growl.
Afterwards, she cried softly.
“What’s the matter?”
“I’m so happy when I’m with you. Nothing’s the matter. I’m just so happy.”
I kissed the Back of her neck and slept holding her in my arms. She must have turned over in her sleep, because I awoke later facing her. Her breath was like a baby’s and in the darkness I thought I saw a little smile on her lips. I went to sleep again.…
In the morning she was gone.
I found her note in the kitchen, read it and called myself some ugly names. The note said:
Chet darling,
I have a luncheon engagement this afternoon with Jerry Trowbridge. This is hard for me to explain. I tried to tell you but couldn’t. I don’t want to crawl off with my tail between my legs. Remember once I told you I was free, white and twenty-one? That still goes, but it means something else now. When I first contacted Trowbridge I told him I’d propositioned you about doing some work for your agency—the
kind a girl like me has been known to do. I said you hadn’t told me anything definitive one way or the other, but now that you were forced to close up shop I was turning to him. He seemed pretty eager to buy what I had to sell. I’m not altogether sure where it will lead, but I’ve got to find out. You see, after what happened to Duncan Lord, I feel this is the only way I can retire (that’s a funny word to use, isn’t it?) and still look into a mirror without throwing things. I don’t have any specific plans really. The only thing I know is I’ve got to try and make them pay for what they did to Dr. Lord, because no matter what you say, I was to blame too. Call it a self-imposed penance, if that makes sense.
There’s one other thing I wanted to say. I think I’m falling in love with you. We’ll find out about that later. Won’t we, Chet?
Bobby
P.S. I’ll get in touch with you again after I establish some kind of a relationship with Trowbridge and, I hope, Ernie Dygert.
I read the note again over a cup of strong coffee. I looked at the part where she said she thought she was falling in love with me. The words didn’t change. I tried to get a clear picture of my own feelings toward Bobby, and couldn’t. We’d never been together when the only thing that mattered was the two of us, and how we felt; never been together long enough to see if it would wear thin after the incredibly strong physical attraction we felt for each other simmered down some; never been together where there wasn’t a bed, and our need and a desire to make the rest of the world go way.
“We’ll find out about that later,” Bobby had written. She hadn’t added, but could have: “Right now I’m too busy sticking my head in the lion’s mouth.”
I called her apartment. There wasn’t any answer, of course. I dressed and went to the office.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
FIRST really cold day, ain’t it, Mr. Drum?” the elevator starter in the Farrell Building said conversationally. “I’ll bet we get some snow this year by Thanksgiving. Well, that’s the way it is, I always say. Late summer, early winter. You get a late summer like we had, they kind of forget all about the autumn. Too bad,” he added dolefully. “Autumn’s my favorite season. How’s about you, Mr. Drum?”
I mumbled an answer.
“By the way, guy was asking about you. He went back up to wait. Going out of town for Thanksgiving, are you?”
I said I didn’t think so, then the elevator doors closed and we went up. I got off on the sixth floor and walked down the hall to my office. The outer door, which leads into the little waiting room, was not locked. I never lock it, so the potential cash customers have a place to park themselves if they want to wait for a private eye one of whose virtues is not steady hours.
He was seated in the waiting room and got up as soon as I came in. He had a hard face and thin, almost fleshless lips. He had the knowing, cynical eyes of a cop.
“Mr. Drum? I’m McGrath, District Licensing Bureau.”
“Come on in,” I said, and opened the door to the inner office. In a moment we were seated facing each other across my desk. The room had a stuffy, dusty, unused smell. I opened the window and brisk, cold air blew in.
“Now, then, Mr. Drum. This won’t take a moment. As I believed you know, one of our men attended your Richmond hearing.”
I opened my mail, waiting for him to go on. He had that this-is-a-painful-duty tone of voice, so I had a pretty good idea of what was coming. The only mail of any interest was a letter asking me to join the Baker Street Irregulars.
“Do you intend to appeal it?”
“Yeah, sure. I guess so. I’ve been too busy to do much thinking about it.”
“Busy doing what?”
“Personal stuff,” I said.
“Good. I’m glad you aren’t involved in any investigations, Mr. Drum, because I’m afraid that until such time as you appeal the decision of the Richmond hearing the Bureau considers it necessary to suspend your license in the District of Columbia. If the appeal is refused, we could then give you a full scale hearing here in Washington. If it is approved, why then, naturally, we would return your license to you.”
“You guys take a lot of chances,” I said.
“I beg your pardon? Oh, I see. You must have your little joke. But I needn’t tell you that the relationship between the law and the members of your profession is a delicate thing and that, in order to merit the privileges granted you under the law …” He made quite a speech about it, lit a cigarette, gave me an extremely faint apologetic smile and asked for my license. I gave it to him. That left a pale-green rectangle on the dark-green wall where it had been hanging.
“Of course, I don’t have to tell you not to use your photostats illegally?”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I was planning to turn a neat profit selling them.”
He was a man without a sense of humor, or maybe it wasn’t so funny. Anyway, he gave me a severe look, shook his head and left with my license, frame, glass and all, tucked under his arm.
Before I had time to feel sorry for myself, I had another visitor.
I heard her high heels click-clacking in the hall, heard the outside door open, and saw a woman’s silhouette behind the pebbled glass of the connecting door. For a moment I thought it was Bobby. But the silhouette wore a large picture hat which had a brim as wide as her shoulders, and Bobby wouldn’t wear a hat like that.
The connecting door opened, and she came in.
SHE WAS the kind of redhead that makes them make up all those stories about redheads. She wore her hair long and it made the skin of her face look almost the color of milk. She had green eyes. A green-eyed redhead, she was, with a figure that would stop the shadow on a sundial. She wore a severely simple gray dress, three-inch spike heels that would make her about five-ten, and too much lipstick but no other make-up. When she smiled she showed a little too much in the way of teeth, but considering all her other assets you could forgive her that.
She smiled and said: “You must be mad.”
“I haven’t gone to my psychiatrist yet today,” I said.
“No, I don’t mean that kind of mad.” She smiled again. “I mean angry.”
“Why, does it show, Miss …”
“Mrs. Bonner. It doesn’t show. I know all about you.”
“Sit down, Mrs. Bonner,” I said. “It is Mrs. Judson Bonner?”
“The only one in this whole business,” she said, acknowledging the full name with a nod, “who has a right to be madder than you.” She sat down, crossed her fine long legs and displayed her knee.
“I’d like a cigarette.”
I gave her one. While I lit it she held my hand a little longer than necessary. “And a drink too, if you’re like all the private detectives I’ve read about.”
Out came the office bottle and two paper cups. “Pros’t,” I said.
“Why, I haven’t heard that in years. Pros’t to you.” She tilted her head, and the drink was gone. There were faint wrinkles on the skin under her jaw and I realized for the first time that she was a good deal older than she looked. Thirty-four or -five, I thought, with a teenager’s taut, high-breasted, long-limbed figure.
Putting the paper cup down she said, “I followed you the other night, you know. If it was you in the sheriff’s car.”
“Guilty as charged.”
“They were going to do away with you. Gilbert told me. He wasn’t crazy about you, but he liked the idea of killing you even less. I’m glad you managed to get away.”
“What’s your beef, Mrs. Bonner?”
“Beef? Oh, I see. Because of what I said. In a word, Mr. Drum, my beef is Ernie Dygert. Give me another drink.”
I poured it for her, half the paper cup this time. She sipped it steadily, like most people sip iced tea. “My, that’s good. Might I have one more?”
This time I filled the paper cup, without comment. I was still working on my first drink. If she had much more I thought she might float out over the transom into the hall.
“Ernie Dygert,” she said, after
drinking half of the full cup, her voice not thick but her words spaced further than they had been when she first came in, “is a no good son of a bitch.”
“Granted,” I said.
The smile showed her gums this trip. It seemed a shame that someone hadn’t told her about that.
“My husband was a very great man,” she told me, “an independent conservative in an age when most conservatives get their ideas from either Time magazine or the Chicago Tribune. He was doing an important job, and doing it well. I helped him. We were a pretty good team, I thought. A few years back I was just his secretary, you know.” She held out her glass. “I needed that. One more, please? Just a small one; I’ll say when.”
I POURED. A small one turned out to be half the cup. “Say it again. I like the way you say it.”
“Pros’t.”
“Pros’t, Mr. Drum. We were a fine team, as I said. The work we were doing became so important that I convinced my husband to retire from the Senate and devote full time to it. You might call him a one-man lobby for the preservation of the American way of life.”
That didn’t get anything out of me. The way some people saw Judson Banner, he was a one-man lobby for the preservation of the American way of life as Judson Bonner had decided the American way of life ought to be.
“Then Ernie Dygert came along.” A look of drunken hatred, exaggerated almost to the point of burlesque, contorted her face. “Listen to me,” she said. “You can say what you want about my husband, but he has standards. He’s a good man. A great man.” Mrs. Bonner looked around slowly in drunken suspicion, then leaned forward across the desk and waggled a fingernail the color of her hair in front of my face. “Judson’s got a theory. There’s a skeleton in every man’s closet, he says. So, if the government makes a mistake, puts someone in a position where he’s liable to hurt this country, Judson feels it’s time the skeleton, or the dirty wash, or whatever you want to call it, was aired. Like Duncan Hadley Lord. In a hypothetical case—say, Duncan Lord—Judson goes to the man first. If he agrees to do the right thing, if he will alter his policies in line with the best interests of the country, what we’ve found will go no further. But if he refuses—and Duncan Lord refused, Mr. Drum—then Judson has no recourse but to air the dirty wash. You see? He’s fair.”
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