The Corpse That Walked

by Octavus Roy Cohen

  She shrugged shapely shoulders. "You're not so hard to take."

  "Wait till you see..." He touched his bandages.

  "So what? So you'll look like Lew, and that certainly couldn't be called a novelty for me." She eyed him speculatively. "You know," she said, "you weren't so bad-looking before they started carving you up."

  "Thanks, lady."

  "You weren't handsome, but you looked... well, regular. I'll remember that."

  "What do you mean?"

  "When you're playing up—like you got to do. You know, yelling at people in public, shoving 'em around... that was always tough to swallow with Lew. It'll be easier now because I'll remember that this really ain't you at all, see?"

  "You mean, he used to embarrass you?"

  "And how! Not that I got any kicks coming. Lew always treated me swell."

  He was frankly interested. He said, "Look, Sunny... and don't answer if you don't want. But I'm curious."

  "Most men are."

  "You were on the stage, weren't you?"

  A smile appeared on her lips, her eyes crinkled at the corners, and then her laugh swept through the room. "My Gawd!" she gasped. "On the stage, he says. Look, Alan, it wasn't the stage. I was a night-club showgirl. You know, one of the dames that they put shoes on one end, feathers on the other, and a small sarong in between. And that's about all I ever did. I can't sing and I can't dance. Nature fixed things up somehow so I've got these and those. I had enough of 'em so I caught Lew Hartley's eye. That was three years ago. Now look at me: automobiles, sables, diamonds... I ain't saying I'm all I ought to be, Alan, but believe me, I have a lot of fun."

  "You're a darned nice girl."

  Her face went dead suddenly. "Stow it!" she said harshly. "And get me straight. I'm not nice. I'm tough and I'm hard. I've got a body but no conscience. I don't ask favors, and I never dish 'em out. Down here"—she touched a spot just below her left breast—"I haven't got a heart. It's a ruby. And up here is a head—but it isn't soft." She got up abruptly and walked across the room. At the door she turned. "Get that straight, mister—and keep it straight. Don't ever expect me to be decent, and you won't be disappointed."

  The door slammed behind her. She walked down the hall, and almost collided with a slim, wiry, gray-clad figure. Chuck's voice was dangerously soft. He said, "Just a minute, sister. What gives?"

  Her eyes blazed hotly into his. "On your way, Chuck," she snapped. "I'm in the mood to be alone."

  "You ain't been alone for the last hour."

  "So what? I been playing nursemaid."

  "And loving it."

  Her eyes got hard, almost as hard as his. "I don't like that crack, Chuck. Not even a little bit."

  "And I don't like how things been going."

  "Meaning what?"

  "Meaning you're supposed to remember that this guy ain't really Lew Hartley."

  She stared at him, then whirled and vanished into her own room. Chuck Williams stood staring after her. He was trembling. The relationship existing between this gorgeous creature and Lew Hartley was one thing. It was something he understood. But if she were falling for Alan Douglas...

  He looked long and hard at the door of Alan's room. He reached up under his left armpit and touched the ugly little snub-nosed automatic that always rested there.

  "It'll be a pleasure," he told himself softly. "A real pleasure."

  Chapter Eight

  The pre-Christmas season in New York was gay, but for Gail Foster there was a strange emptiness. Day after day she went to her office and efficiently discharged her duties as confidential secretary to the president of an important real-estate company; she attended the usual parties and went to her customary number of theaters and movies. She loved the magnificence of the Yuletide decorations in Rockefeller Center; but even there her appreciation was tinctured by poignant memories.

  Alan had been gone for scarcely more than two weeks, yet she missed him with an acuteness that defied analysis. It had been on Christmas Day, one year before, that Alan had blurted out—very unexpectedly—a proposal of marriage. He had said, abruptly, "It would be wonderful if you'd marry me," and she made a reply that always had struck them as the height of absurdity.

  She looked up at him and said, "What made you say that?"

  "I don't know." He seemed as startled as she was. "Maybe it's because I'm in love with you."

  And so they had become engaged, and they had spent Christmas Day together wondering how it happened, and why they hadn't even suspected that it was going to. It was a Christmas to top all Christmases, a day of happiness and also of thanksgiving. No, it would never again be just Christmas. It would be always the anniversary of their engagement.

  And so late on the night of December twenty-fourth, Gail sent Alan a wireless. She addressed it to him as a passenger on the steamship Tropicana at sea somewhere off the coast of Ecuador. It was a rather crazy message, but it would reach him Christmas morning and he would understand.

  HAVE YOU YET DISCOVERED WHAT MADE YOU SAY THAT? AND DO YOU MISS ME AS MUCH AS I MISS YOU? THIS IS ALSO CHRISTMAS, ISN'T IT?

  Having sent the wireless, Gail felt better. She attended a tree-trimming party, and through all of it she was thinking, Tomorrow Alan will get that wireless. I wonder what he'll answer.

  But Christmas morning came and went and Christmas dinner was eaten with her father, and all that afternoon and evening she waited for the answer that Alan was certain to send from the Tropicana.

  When, by lunchtime on the twenty-sixth, she had heard nothing from him, a touch of the old fear returned. This wasn't at all like Alan. Even if he had forgotten the day or simply hadn't thought about sending her a wireless, her message demanded an answer. And no answer had come.

  She was too much in love to have any silly pride, and so late that afternoon she sent another wireless to the ship:

  IS SHE BLONDE OR BRUNETTE, LATIN OR AMERICAN? HOW COME YOU AIN'T ANSWERED THE PLEA OF MISS LONELYHEARTS? ME AND TIME WAIT FOR NO MAN.

  That night and the next day seemed interminable. She felt the faintest sense of resentment, but she cast that aside as unworthy.

  But facts were facts. She had sent Alan two messages, two light, gay messages that carried the undertone of her love for him. And he had not acknowledged either.

  There had to be a reason. She considered every possibility, and only one seemed logical: Alan must be ill. She couldn't visualize him as being so ill that he couldn't dictate an answer to the wireless operator, yet it was possible, and no other explanation seemed adequate. She waited most of the twenty-eighth, and then in desperation sent a wireless to the purser of the Tropicana:

  HAVE SENT TWO MESSAGES TO ALAN DOUGLAS WHO IS PASSENGER YOUR SHIP. HAVE RECEIVED NO ANSWER. PLEASE WIRELESS MY EXPENSE WHETHER HE IS ILL AND IF HE RECEIVED MESSAGES.

  The cablegram was waiting for her when she got back to her little apartment the next day. It was from Callao, Peru:

  YOUR TWO WIRELESSES RECEIVED BUT NOT DELIVERED. ALAN DOUGLAS LEFT THIS SHIP HAVANA DECEMBER ELEVENTH.

  GERALD GRAVES, PURSER, S.S. TROPICANA

  Gail stood staring down at the message. Its import was clear, but there was no explanation. The more she thought about it, the more certain she was that Alan must be ill. He had got off the ship in Havana almost three weeks ago. He was too considerate not to write her of any change in his plans, and an airmail letter would have reached her in a day. The only possible explanation seemed to be that he was ill and unable to write. Perhaps at this very moment he was desperately ill in some Cuban hospital...

  Gail spent a restless night, and in the morning she went to her office for only a half hour: just long enough to request and be granted a leave of absence. Her employers were surprisingly co-operative, and so was the airline reservation clerk, who gave her a seat on a plane flying to Havana the next day.

  Chapter Nine

  Gail hadn't the faintest idea what she expected to find in Havana. She wouldn't have wagered that she would find anything
at all. But here she was, definitely embarked on a quest that she herself admitted was not quite sensible—and she had no single regret. Whatever she learned in Havana—even if she learned nothing—this was better than staying home and waiting, waiting…

  When the big silver plane landed in Cuba the next afternoon, she got through the customs quickly and was whirled out to the Hotel National, which the stewardess had recommended. She was given a neat single room on the fourth floor. She unpacked the smaller of her two suitcases, and then went downstairs for a consultation with the taxi starter.

  A few minutes later she found herself arranging for the services of an interpreter. This gentleman, slim and dapper and acutely aware of his client's gender and attractiveness, insisted that before she commenced attending to whatever business had brought her here, she should devote one day, at least, to seeing the sights—a suggestion that she politely but firmly declined. She explained her basic problem, and he was instantly sympathetic.

  "Is very difficult," he said.

  "Yes, I know."

  "In Havana are many clinicas, many hotels."

  "We'll visit them all."

  "Will take much time."

  "O.K."

  He smiled brightly. "That is the same like Spanish," he complimented. "In Havana also we say O.K. when we mean O.K."

  They hired a car and went first to the office of the local agent of the line that operated the ship on which Alan had sailed. The gentleman in charge became exceedingly affable after taking a long, lingering look at Gail. He said that he surely would consult their records, and had she yet visited the Casino?

  The results there were definite but not precisely informative. Alan had left the Tropicana at Havana on the eleventh of December, despite the fact that he originally had booked passage for Chile. Beyond that... "Quien sabe, senorita? Who can say what happen after that?"

  "Can you find out whether he was ill when he left the ship?"

  "Maybe yes, maybe no. I ask my friend who is one of the medical inspectors."

  "Now?"

  "Manana, senorita. Today, he no work any more."

  And that was that. Gail sensed that she must curb her impatience, must adjust herself to the bland indifference to speed that was most definitely a national trait.

  Her next visit was to the Anglo-American Hospital, where she talked long and earnestly with a pleasant superintendent and a starched and highly efficient British head nurse. They assured her that Alan had not been a patient at their institution. They both promised to do a little investigation and to communicate with her at the hotel if they learned anything.

  That was the beginning of five days of hectic and unavailing search. Ramon, her interpreter, was very friendly, very sympathetic, and moderately efficient. He took her to every hospital in and around Havana, even to the maternity hospital, which struck her as carrying efficiency just one step too far.

  But the hospitals yielded no evidence of Alan. At the hotels, she was more fortunate. On the register of the Sevilla, she found Alan's signature as of December eleventh. There was no question then that he had left the ship and checked in at the hotel. She learned that he had left the Sevilla on the morning of the twelfth, but the clerks could give her no further information. They did not remember Mr. Douglas, and certainly they did not recall whether he had been ill. But the evidence pointed the other way. Obviously he had not been too ill to come to the hotel and to register for himself.

  She visited all the steamship agencies and learned nothing new. Then she went to the Prado office of Pan American Airways. No, Mr. Douglas had not booked passage for South America. But in response to the question as to whether he might have flown back to the States, the clerk came beaming to her with their records of December twelfth.

  Alan had flown to Miami on the ten-o'clock Clipper that morning. Quite positively. The clerk saw a tragic light in the clear gray eyes of the pretty girl, and he went with her to the immigration office. There they found the landing card that had been issued to Alan when he stepped off the Tropicana and had been taken from him when he boarded the Clipper for Miami.

  Beyond that? Gail was bewildered. The more she thought, the further away she seemed to be from a solution. Alan had been well enough to spend an evening in a Havana hotel. Alan had been back in the States from the twelfth of December until today, which was January fifth. And in all that time he had neglected to get in touch with her: no message, no letter, not even a post card.

  She booked passage for Miami that night on the Florida. Somebody spoke to the genial purser of the ship, and he saw to it that she had a room alone. And all through that night as she lay awake and listened to the swish of the sea against the sides of the sleek little liner, she thought. She was hurt, bewildered, and worried. Somewhere, somehow, there was an answer—if only she could find it.

  And then she remembered a man in Miami she had known for years: the sort of man it is a privilege for any girl to know. She hadn't thought of him before because she had not planned to visit Miami. Thinking of him now, she regarded herself as a most fortunate person.

  Vance Crawford had always been in love with Gail. He was big and bluff and enthusiastic. She knew that she could trust him implicitly.

  And so it was that when she finally dozed off for a few brief hours of fitful sleep, Gail Foster was thinking not so much of Alan as of this other man: this Vance Crawford, to whom she could pour out all her worries, all of her bewilderment.

  "He'll help me," she told herself. "And I need help."

  Chapter Ten

  There was something very comforting about Vance Crawford. Sitting there opposite him at a corner table in the restaurant, Gail Foster felt that she had never been quite so grateful to anybody in her life.

  Vance was a big fellow. His waistline already had commenced to expand, and you knew instinctively that ten years from now, at forty-one, he'd be paunchy unless he did something about it; but you also knew that he'd never take that much trouble.

  His hair was a shade lighter than Gail's, his eyes were blue, and his mouth was pleasant. For all his size and maturity, he had an impish quality. It showed in the way his mouth twisted when he smiled, by the way his eyes crinkled at the corners, and in his lazy, Southern drawl.

  Vance was local representative of a company that produced a line of retail electrical appliances ranging from refrigerators to vacuum cleaners. He was an all-year resident of Miami and boasted that he knew pretty nearly every regular citizen and a heap of the winter transients. He had hundreds of friends and no enemies. And the fact that he was single could be explained only by the fact that years before, when he was living in New York, he had fallen in love with Gail Foster and had never got over it.

  Over coffee and liqueurs, Gail told him her story. She talked with a frankness and freedom that made her feel guilty because she more than suspected that this big, easygoing St. Bernard of a man was still fond of her, and she hoped that she wasn't hurting him. Once she interrupted her recital to suggest something like that, and he put his big hand over hers and said, "Listen, sugar, I took my place in the back row long ago. And if there's any way I can help you to be happy..."

  She talked for a long time, finding relief in expressing all of the doubt and worry that had tormented her. She brought her story up to the moment, and then leaned back in her chair and looked straight at him.

  "Tell me the truth, Vance," she begged. "Am I crazy?"

  A quizzical little smile twisted his mouth. He said, "I wouldn't say that, Gail. If anything's loco, it's the setup, not you."

  "You're not simply saying that to make me feel better?”

  "Not entirely. Of co'se..."

  "Of course, what?"

  "Maybe they just changed their plans and wanted to have one more talk with Alan before he took off for Chile. So he got off the ship, flew back heah, and then maybe went right on about his business."

  "But wouldn't he have told me?"

  "Why? 'Specially if they asked him not to? He'd figure y
ou wouldn't be worryin' about him, so he'd let things ride as they were."

  "You're saying that, Vance, but you don't believe it."

  "I never said so, honey."

  "Do you believe it?"

  His head moved slowly from side to side. "Maybe I don't," he confessed. "Maybe I think it looks kind of funny. S'pose we discuss what you've got in mind, and what we can do about it."

  "All right. We know that Alan flew from Havana to Miami on December twelfth. Maybe we can double-check that by going over the records at Pan American, and perhaps even seeing his customs declaration. He must have signed that himself, and that would prove he actually got here."

  "You sure are thorough, Gail. You know he left Havana on that plane; now you want to be sure he got heah. You reckon maybe he jumped out on the way over?"

  She laughed with genuine amusement. "I must be slightly nuts."

  "You're mighty sweet, that's what you are. It's a pity you got to waste it all on a mining engineer instead of a nice, steady young man like me. But since you did, why, I reckon we got to produce him out of the haystack."

  She said, "The only trouble with you, Vance, is that you're much too nice."

  "Yeah, I know. I was destined to be the best friend of a lot of nice girls. Nobody seems to take me real serious. But go ahead."

  "I will. And promise not to laugh. I have a crazy feeling that I might find out something here in Miami. The same intuition that sent me on this wild-goose chase. Even if you think I'm crazy, you will help me, won't you?"

  "You got no call wastin' breath like that."

  "I know. Maybe that's why I came to Miami in the first place—because you're the one man I need most."

  "You quit flingin' compliments at me. Just tell me what time tomorrow morning I'm to pick you up."