by Leslie Ford
“You’ll feel better, admittin’ it, Mrs. Blake. I guess we all do crazy things we don’t like to admit to anybody, one time or another.” He let her stand there in a dazed wonder at herself an instant. “What is it you were goin’ to bet? If you’d been a bettin’ man, that is, Mrs. Blake.”
Her face lighted up in a sudden delighted smile, and sobered as quickly. “You know Mr. Hanzenhofer? The baker over on Mercer Street?”
Swede Carlson nodded.
“Well, he runs a night shift, and he won’t let any of them smoke in the kitchens. I don’t think it’s a kitchen at a bakery, but where they make the bread and stuff and bake it. Or any place—he’s mean about it, really. So they go out in back, where there’s that lattice place, where he has the grapevine. They go out there and smoke when he’s not looking. And maybe—I mean, if any of them happened to be out there, and anybody went along the alley—” Carlson nodded again. “I’ll look into it. Now, you listen to me, Janey. I’m going to call you that, because Gus is a friend of mine.” He saw her stiffen, and went calmly on. “I’m goin’ to wait downstairs while you go get your things and get that baby of yours. Then I’m goin’ to take you down to your mother’s. Now, you’re not to say anythin’ to anybody, about what you hold me here. Not your mother, or your father, not even Gus. Hear? You’re not to say anythin’ about that shoe print, or anythin’ else. I’m like you, Janey. I’m not easy to scare. But I’m sort of scared right now. I’m goin’ to be worse scared if somebody happens to find out maybe you’re not so stupid, after all. You just don’t say anythin’ to anybody ’cept to me.”
He took her arm and started back to the kitchen door with her.
“Let’s look at it this way, Janey. If I’m right, and I’d be the last fella in Smith County to think I ain’t, somebody came in here last night to get somethin’ you all have got. Or—but we’ll skip the other; We’ll assume it’s somethin’ you’ve got he’s got to get a hold of. Now you think that over, and keep your mouth shut about it. You hear, Janey?”
“Yes,” Janey Blake said. “I hear. I—think they must be mistaken, but I—I still hear. I promise. I won’t say a word.” She was a woman, Swede Carlson reflected, but somehow he believed her when she said it.
FIFTEEN
AT FOUR O’CLOCK Connie Maynard swung her typewriter back from the side of her desk and put the cover on it. She took one more look at the paper before she folded it, took her bag out of the drawer, powdered her nose, put on more lipstick, and got up to get her coat on the hinge behind the door. She was very pleased with herself, and with the paper. It was the most exciting edition of the Smithville Gazette that had come off the old presses since she’d come there six months before. And she was the girl responsible for it. Gus’s room was still empty. Nobody had even bothered to turn on the light. Gus had walked off, Miss Constance Maynard had taken charge without a qualm or a moment’s panic. The whole thing had gone off as smoothly as anything had ever done around the Gazette—more so, because Gus wasn’t in there snapping at people and pulling stuff and putting last-minute stuff in that wasn’t of any world-shaking importance, no matter what the people of Smithville who’d called it in might think. And she’d yanked the last obituary off the front page, which was more than Gus had had the courage to do. Who cared whether some old Miss This-or-That threw in her last chip? The fact that the whole front page was a magnificent if left-handed obituary of one Doc Wernitz did not at the moment occur to her. For once, there was real news in Smithville. She put on her coat and stuck the paper in her pocket. Her father would like this.
She went out into the quiet pressroom, comparatively quiet with the presses closed down until Monday and everybody rushing around to get through and go home.
“Good night!” She waved her hand around generally. Gus’s habit of being the last man out had always seemed to her an irritating bit of occupational egocentricity, especially when she wanted him to stop by the Sailing Club or the house and have a drink before he went home to dinner. Ed Noonan the city editor was still at his desk, his eyes with no lashes batting every once in a while like an old lizard’s on a stump in the sun. His green eyeshade was pushed back and stood up around his bald dome like an emerald halo. The country editor’s alpaca coat with a hole in each elbow hung on the hook behind him. Connie frowned a little. There was too much corn flourishing around the Smithville Gazette. A vigorous, strenuous course of contour plowing was what the place needed.
Ed Noonan batted his old lizard eyes down. His skin was dry as a lizard’s, too.
“Aren’t you going home, Ed?” Connie stopped to pull her gloves on.
“No. Got to stick around to meet a fellow.”
“Gus?”
It was out of Connie’s mouth before she knew she had said it. But before Ed could answer, if he intended to answer, which was doubtful, the storm door pushed open abruptly, the plate-glass door following at once, and Swede Carlson came in. Charged in, Connie thought, stepping hastily back out of the way of the door.
“Where’s Gus? I want to see him.”
He spoke to Ed Noonan, not Connie. Ed shook his head.
“Where is he, Miss Maynard?”
Connie should have shaken her head, too. She realized it on her way home, but not at the moment. “I don’t know where he is,” she said. Her voice flattened like a cobra head. “Nobody knows where he is. Nobody’s seen him since morning. He walked out of here and left me to get the paper out all by myself. With Ed’s help, of course.”
She added the last seeing the startled shift of Chief Carlson’s eyes toward the city editor. She did not see Ed Noonan’s left lid lower slightly or the bleak flicker of response in Carlson’s. “If you want Gus, you’ll have to find him,” she went on. If Chief Carlson thought she’d forgotten this morning in her office he was very much mistaken. She was even skipping a cocktail party to go home and tell her father, and perhaps Chief Carlson would find himself with leisure to write his experiences instead of telling them to people. And he must have thought of that himself; she could see the change taking place in him right there by the door.
“Well, that’s all right, Miss Maynard,” he said. He was smooth as anything, all of a sudden. “I guess it’s you I want to see, not Gus. You can probably tell me more than he can, if that’s the way of it.”
He pulled the Gazette out of his overcoat pocket. It was folded to the box in the middle of the front page. “Mighty smart reportin’, here.” He tapped it with a blunt forefinger. “Just where’d you get this information about Doc Wernitz, Miss Maynard? That’s all I want to know.”
“That’s information from private sources, Swede,” Noonan said. He lowered both eyelids and dragged at his cigarette. “You could easy take legal steps to make us disgorge, I guess. But that’d be a lot of trouble. Nobody here can claim the reward. I guess Gus’ll tell you where he got it soon as he comes in. I don’t know, or I’d tell you. I doubt if Connie knows, either. Do you, Connie?”
“No, I don’t.”
“So that’s the way it is, Swede.” Noonan leaned back in his chair. “If I was you and I wanted Gus, I’d do what they call a pub crawl. That’s what he looked like to me when he went outa here this morning. Like a guy that was going to go and get drunk as hell. I don’t say he did. I say he looked like he was going to. And I’m sittin’ around here because my daughter’s husband is going to come and buy me a drink or two. Stick around, both of you. He’s got all kinds of dough.”
Connie looked at Carlson. She couldn’t tell whether Ed was lying or telling the truth, or what Swede Carlson thought about it. Their faces were at opposite poles of complete inscrutability. Carlson stuck the Gazette back in his pocket and moved over to the desk.
“Mind if I use your phone?”
“Go ahead.” Noonan pushed it over to him. “Mind if we listen?”
“Go ahead.” He dialed a number and waited, the phone pressed close to his large purple-tinged ear. “Carlson speakin’,” he said. “Listen, son. I want G
us Blake. Yeah. That’s right. You know Gus Blake. I want him tonight, drunk or sober. 1941 coupe, black. What’s his number, Ed?” He repeated the license number in the phone. “No, I don’t want him in the jailhouse, I want him wherever he is. Even if he’s in the—” he remembered Miss Maynard, “in the library readin’. I want to talk to him. Hear? Relay this to Williams at city headquarters and tell him I said would he put his men on it. Hear? Get on it, son. I want to talk to him before somebody finds him and cracks him over the skull, too. And I’m not foolin’, hear?”
“He must unless he’s stone-deaf,” Connie said lightly. Chief Carlson put down the phone. “Well, I’ll shove along, Ed.” He went to the door. “If you see Gus, Miss Maynard, tell him I’m lookin’ for him. Hear?”
As he went out, Connie turned sharply to Noonan. “Where is he? I’ve got to know!”
Noonan pushed his chair back, its top edge resting in the groove in the plastered wall behind him. “If anybody else asked me that question, Connie, you know what I’d do?” he said dispassionately.
“No. What?”
“I don’t know myself. It would all depend. But don’t you ever ask me another question like it.”
He crossed one foot over his knee and held it with both hands, whether from custom or for purposes of self-restraint, Connie couldn’t tell.
“In this business you don’t lie, Connie—especially not to the cops. If they ask you a direct question, you give ’em a direct answer. If you don’t know, you say so. If you know and can’t tell, you say that. You don’t do one thing and say the other. If you do, first thing you know you’re out in the snow right Bat on your royal white palfrey—and try to find some news from them that’s fit to print or anything else. Good night, Connie. Hear?”
“Sorry.”
She opened the door. Ed Noonan’s grating voice stopped her halfway through it. “Maybe there’s one more thing I could say before you go, Connie.” He teetered forward and back again, still holding on to his foot. “When Swede Carlson says he wants Gus before somebody cracks him on the head, he ain’t kiddin’. Swede don’t have time for the funny papers.”
Connie’s lips tightened. She shut the door quietly behind her. Gus Blake could take care of himself without any help. If Gus wouldn’t stick his neck out far enough to offend people by keeping their obituaries off the front page, he was hardly likely to stick it out so far he’d get his skull crushed in. Gus was smarter than most people thought. How psychic did Ed Noonan think he was?
She got in her car, switched on the motor, and let off the brake.
“Home, Connie,” she said deliberately. “Home. You’ve been kicked around enough today.”
She left her car in the drive in front of the house and hurried up across the wide white-pillared porch to the door. She hoped John Maynard was at home. She needed somebody to re-establish her battered ego. And he was there. She could see him through the narrow slit where the green-gold curtain had been carelessly drawn at the library window. He was pacing slowly back and forth in front of the fire, his hands in his pockets, his head bent down, lips moving, heavy brows pulled together in concentrated furrows. Connie frowned. That meant his frazzle-haired, giraffe-lipped old-maid secretary was there. The only time John Maynard ever paced, eyes on the floor, was when he was dictating.
Connie stopped a moment in the hall, listening for the low, rich, mellow rumble of his voice. She cocked her ear more intently. He must be almost through. She waited for Miss Delabear’s high-pitched nasal voice to come clacking through the door.
That’s funny, she thought. She heard the phone ring in the pantry and cocked her ear the other way. It might be Gus calling her. Her pulse quickened at the thought, and slowed again as she heard the buzzer in the library, heard the chair knock against the desk and her father’s friendly drawl as he answered. Her face brightened. He was alone, then. She took the paper out of her pocket, took her coat off and laid it over the mahogany newel post, and gave herself a cursory glance in the mirror behind the banked chrysanthemums, waiting a moment for him to finish before she went over and opened the library door, the paper in her hand. She hoped he hadn’t seen it yet. He usually waited for her to bring it home.
“Hi,” she said, smiling gaily. He was just putting down the phone, and not smiling till he saw her. Then his handsome face composed itself into its customary bland and amiable lines.
“Hello, Connie honey,” he drawled. “How’s my girl?”
There was something missing. She felt it in the atmosphere more than she saw it in her father’s face or heard it in his voice. Her own warm anticipatory pleasure chilled.
“What’s the matter, Daddy?”
Her eyes fell on the Gazette spread out on the desk in front of him. His hand was still on the phone. He reached out, pressed the bell under the edge of his desk, and took the phone up again.
“Lawrence,” he said, “I’ve gone out if anyone else calls the next couple of hours or so.” He put the phone down and smiled at his daughter. His facial muscles smiled, she realized. The youthful brown eyes fixed on her had failed to get the word.
“Nothin’s the matter, Connie,” he drawled pleasantly. “Just a mite wore out tellin’ people to call Gus, not me, and havin’ them tell me they already called Gus. Where is Gus, by the way, Con?”
She felt an unaccountable relief. “Golly, Daddy.” She came across the room and flopped down in the deep leather chair by the desk. “I was afraid for a minute it was me you were mad at. I don’t know where Gus is. He came in looking like a cross between Mussolini and a rattlesnake and barged out, leaving me to get the paper out. I thought I’d be panicky about it, but I really wasn’t. That’s what I dashed home to tell you. I thought you’d be pleased with me.”
A mildly humorous light twitched in her father’s eyes for an instant and disappeared. He glanced down at the front page of the paper.
“I’m mighty pleased, honey,” he drawled. “Where was old Ed, all the time? He barge off, too?”
“No, Ed was there.” The warm tingle in Connie’s cheeks sharpened her voice. “But I was responsible. Even if he did write the leaders. I’m not pretending I ran the presses and made all the deliveries, either.”
“Keep your shirt on, Con,” John Maynard said mildly. He tapped the box in the center of the front page. “Where’d Gus get all this about Wernitz, honey? You any idea? It’s mighty interestin’ to me,”
“None at all. You’re the second person who’s asked me that.” The flush in her cheeks deepened. “Chief Carlson was fit to be tied.”
“He was? Well, that’s interestin’, too. So at least Gus didn’t get it from him, did he, Connie?” He folded the pages. “I expect Gus don’t want to tell anybody just where he did get it. Ever thought of that, honey? That maybe that’s why he didn’t stick around very long today?”
“Oh,” Connie said. “Oh.” She hadn’t thought of it. And maybe that did explain it. With what old Ed had told her about direct answers to direct questions, and legal methods making people talk who didn’t want to talk, that could very well be it.
“But maybe not,” her father added as he saw her eyes brighten. “Gus is an unpredictable sort of bastard, in my experience with him. I wouldn’t draw any conclusions, myself.”
He put his chin down on his shirt collar and folded his hands across his stomach, his elbows resting on the arms of his chair. After a moment he looked up.
“Carlson’s trying to find Gus?”
Connie nodded. “He’s got the whole force out after him. He was trying to scare me and Ed into telling him where Gus had got to. He said somebody might try to cave Gus’s skull in, too.”
“That so?” John Maynard said. “Well, Carlson’s supposed to be a pretty level-headed sort of fellow. I expect he knows what he’s doing.”
“Oh, rot!” Connie snapped. “Carlson’s a—a half-wit, if you want to know my personal opinion of him. He came in the office—”
Her father nodded. “I know. He told me
he was in talkin’ to you.”
“He did?” She let the cigarette she’d reached for drop back into the box. “Did he tell you what he said to me? Practically accusing you of murdering Wernitz? Swindling him out of his property and then killing him to save your own reputation? Did he tell you that’s what he said to me?” She straightened her body up in the leather chair and got to her feet. “He didn’t have the guts to tell you that, I’ll bet.”
“Sit down, Constance,” John Maynard said.
She dropped abruptly back in the chair. Her mouth dropped open a little. Neither his voice nor the smiling lines on his face had changed, but everything else had. She tried stupidly to remember when he’d called her Constance before. Not for years. Not since she was fifteen and had called her mother a liar at the dining-room table.
“Sit down and listen to me, honey.”
His voice reached her across a dazed stretch of intense and breathless silence. A stranger was speaking to her. Under the outward guise of familiarity and friendliness, a stranger was sitting at her father’s desk, as impenetrable as bedrock, a whiplash concealed in his slow, mellow drawl.
SIXTEEN
“WHEN I SAID you had brains, maybe it wasn’t brains but imagination I was talkin’ about,” she heard the stranger say. “Imagination’s all right, except when it gets too powerful and goes off the track unless there’s brains behind it to keep it where it belongs. The trouble with you, honey, is you’re like a hound bitch in the springtime. You ain’t usin’ the brains you got, daughter. You’re figurin’ you’re Constance Maynard, so let everybody else go to hell and stay there. You ain’t thinkin’ about nobody else but Constance Maynard. When people start doin’ that, Connie, they’re licked before they leave the post. That’s a mistake. You’re makin’ a goddam fool of yourself, Connie, and I just hate to see it, honey. Swede Carlson knew you was doin’ it. So does everybody else.”