A lot of money had gone into cutting her age from a good thirty-five to an excellent twenty-eight. Money, I judged, was where she could reach it any old time.
I looked at the blue alligator bag in her lap, at the rings on her fingers, at the single strand of pearls at her neck. I looked at the telephone, at my fingers, at nothing at all. I was
going home and put my head under a cold shower as soon as possible.
"I'm Constance Benbrook, Mr. Pine. Don't you think it would be wise to see a doctor? You may have a concussion."
I got out my cigarettes, ofifered her one, had it refused. I sat there and stared at the cigarette's tailored orderly smoothness until I was sure my eyes were focusing correctly. Sometimes a hit on the head throws them off.
All clear. I found a match and got the tobacco burning. The first lungful of smoke seemed to help. I looked up to find her brown eyes worrying over me.
"How do you do, Mrs. Benbrook. No, I don't need a doctor."
She lifted one delicately curved eyebrow. "You've impressed me already! How did you know it was Mrs. Benbrook?"
"You're wearing a wedding ring. From here it looks like one made to order by Peacock's. That means you're married and very rich. Elementary, Mrs. Benbrook. What can I do for you ?"
She laughed. Pleasantly, sincerely and without throwing her head back to do it. "A woman gets so used to wearing one. ... I want you to find my husband, Mr. Pine."
I breathed in some more smoke and shook my head. "I'm sorry, Mrs. Benbrook. I'm a one-man agency and, because of that, can handle only one client at a time. Not enough work comes in for me to build up a staff."
"You're working on a case at the present time?"
"That's right."
She hesitated, drew her lower lip between her teeth before letting it slip slowly free again. "I'm not sure . . ." She stopped there to rearrange the way she was going to say it.
"The fact that my husband is missing may have something to do with your present assignment."
The words seemed to hang in the air between us. It was the last thing in the world I would have expected her to say and I had a job keeping my thoughts off my face.
After a moment I said, "I'd like to hear a little more, Mrs. Benbrook. Even if it's nothing I can use, I won't go around repeating it."
Her ungloved hands moved restlessly in her lap, stroking the surface of her bag as though she liked to touch expensive things. She said, "I saw your name in the paper earlier this afternoon—in connection with a man named Walsh."
"Uh-hunh," I said encouragingly, when she hesitated.
"His real name is Wirtz, Mr. Pine. He's an old friend of my husband. Myles was on the board of a museum here in town for years and Wirtz did some work for the museum on several occasions."
I said, "By Myles you mean your husband ?"
"Yes. Myles Benbrook. We were married three years ago—I'm his second wife and quite a bit younger than he— and spent our honeymoon in California. We saw quite a bit of Raymond Wirtz out there.
"Then about two weeks ago he showed up at the house. Said he'd just driven in from California and was here on something awfully important, that he had taken a cheap room and would be here for ten days or so. We hardly recognized him, Mr. Pine. He looked actually haggard, and so nervous and jumpy he just couldn't sit still. He seemed to have added ten years to his age since we had last seen him."
"How old a man is he, actually?"
"Well, Myles is forty-seven and Mr. Wirtz must be about the same age."
68 HALO FOR SATAN
"He have a wife?"
"Yes. Although I've never met her. He married a younger woman a couple of years ago. It didn't last very long, I understand."
"Divorced?"
She thought about it, trying to remember. She looked lovely just thinking. "Separated, I believe. I'm really not sure."
I flicked cigarette ashes on the floor to join the mess already there. "Let's hear the rest of it, Mrs. Benbrook. If you don't mind."
Those large brown eyes were being wistfully hopeful now. "You're going to help me, Mr. Pine?"
"We'll see. I think so."
She hit me with a smile I felt all the way to my knees. "I'm so glad. I've been so worried about Myles."
I said, getting down to business, "Did Wirtz give you any details on this important matter he mentioned?"
"Not that I heard. But Myles and he spent almost two hours locked in the library that same afternoon. When they came out and Mr. Wirtz had left, Myles was terribly excited about something—^he w^ouldn't tell me what. I didn't see Mr. Wirtz again, although I know he called Myles several times in the next few days. I don't know what they talked about, but daily Myles seemed to become more and more nervous and—and irritable. Actually I saw very little of Myles from the time Mr. Wirtz arrived until he—my husband—disappeared entirely."
"How long ago did he disappear?"
"Three days ago."
"They know anything at his office?"
"Myles has no ofBce, Mr. Pine. He retired from business over three years ago. He had been a broker on La Salle Street
HALO FOR SATAN 69
until then, but only to keep himself occupied. You see, his father left him a great deal of money."
I got out of my chair, drew up the blind halfway and tugged open the lower section of window a few inches. Rain, steady but not especially heavy, fell straight down from a sky that seemed completely overcast now. I leaned my head against the window glass, grateful for the coolness, and some of the bees stopped buzzing in my skull,
"Are you all right, Mr. Pine?" A little worried, a little impatient, even a little seductive. That last surprised me into turning around.
She was smiling, not much but enough to show a white line that was the edge of her upper teeth, and there was frank approval of me in her eyes. I wondered fuzzily what I had done to earn it.
I came back and sat down again. My legs were steadier and my head had become something I could get along with. A drink would have completed the cure, but I no longer kept a bottle in the bottom drawer of my desk. The private-eye movies had made me self-conscious about it.
"Three days isn't very long, Mrs. Benbrook. Any other reason why he might leave you ? Granting, of course, that one reason might be this Wirtz matter."
She crossed her legs the other way, hiking the wool skirt up more than even rank carelessness should have managed. I could see a triangular portion of creamy skin above the top of one stocking. She made no effort to do anything about it.
"It's rather awkward to put into words," she said slowly. While hunting for the words, she opened her purse and took out cigarettes and a gold-ribbed lighter with her initials in platinum inlay on one side. Even the cigarette, oval, king-sized and straw-tipped, looked expensive. She lighted it before I could find my matches, and blew out a white plume
of smoke. "There may be another woman. I can't imder-stand why."
I couldn't either, just by looking at her. "Tell me about it.''
"About noon of the day Myles disappeared he was speak ing with a woman on the telephone in the library. I hapj)cned to pick up an upstairs extension and heard her say, 'Don't even tell her. You'd better make it after dark.' Myles evidently had heard the extension receiver go up, for he said, 'Good-by' immediately and hung up."
"Did this woman hang up right away?"
"No. Myles must have caught her by surprise. She said, 'Hello' very quickly a time or two. I cut in and said, 'I'm afraid my husband isn't on the wire. May I have him call you back?'"
"Uh-hunh," I said admiringly. "That let her know she had been talking to a married man. Did she answer you?"
"No. She put the receiver down at her end very softly."
"Did you try to trace the call ?"
She laughed shortly. "I wouldn't have the slightest idea how to go about such a thing."
"You mention this to your husband?"
"No. I didn't know enough to make it worth-while bringing up. I would
have had to be content with whatever explanation he gave."
I stroked the back of my head tenderly and made a halfhearted effort to keep my eyes off the rounded neckline of her dress. "Are you in love with your husband, Mrs. Benbrook?"
"Aren't you being insolent, Mr. Pine?" Cool but not angry, even faintly amused.
"How true. Forgive me. Are you?"
"My husband is a wonderful man. He is also not a young man." The still, careful look was back in her eyes and stronger than ever.
HALO FOR SATAN 71
I said, "I wouldn't call forty-seven old."
She dropped ashes from her cigarette into the glass tray I had put on the desk where she could reach it. Her hand looked strong and capable for all its too long, too red nails. "A man can be much older than his years in some ways, Mr. Pine. A woman doesn't like that." A ghost's ghost of a smile moved along her full-lipped warm mouth. "Not my kind of woman. But money is important—to my kind of woman."
I didn't say anything. My head ached and my mouth tasted like a vulture roost. Rain whispered against the window and a wet dusk was settling down over the upper reaches of Jackson Boulevard. It was time for me to go home.
My mind told me Constance Benbrook was a beautiful woman—and available, without too much trouble. My mind couldn't convince me I wanted her—at least not right then. Maybe some other day.
"You'll find him for me, Mr. Pine ?"
I shrugged. "Possibly. I'll try. You've given me hardly anything to go on, though. Maybe a list of his closer friends and a few business acquaintances. Suppose I stop by at your place some time tomorrow and pick it up. If you don't mind. Right now I'm a little fed up with my kind of job."
"Of course." Sympathetic and exciting at the same time. Not easy, even for a woman as beautiful as Constance Ben-brook. "The address is 6174 Sheridan Road."
I wrote it down while she stood up and smoothed her dress. "The afternoon some time? Say about two-thirty?"
"Two-thirty will be fine," I said.
She picked up her umbrella before I could get over to do it for her, and was on the way out when she remembered I probably worked for money. I told her we could go into that the next day and she said good-by and gave me a lingering smile and went away, leaving against the smell of wet
plaster the subtle scent of an expensive perfume to remember her by.
I closed the window and stood there looking at the rows of lighted windows in the office building across from me while I thumbed through my thoughts. At noon, Lola North and her .25-calibcr Colt automatic; at five o'clock Constance Benbrook and her sex appeal—if they still called it that.
Myles Benbrook was a friend of Raymond Wirtz. Ben-brook had disappeared three days ago after getting a phone call from a woman. Lola North was a woman and also interested in Raymond Wirtz. A connection ? Three days ago Raymond Wirtz, alias Walsh, had walked out of the office of Bishop McManus and hadn't been seen since. The corpse of a retired hoodlum had been found in Wirtz's closet. It might welj have been put there three days ago.
A connection? There's one laying around some place. Pine will find it. Pine can find anything. Pine can find your husband or your dog or strawberries out of season. Pine can find a blackjack, if you lay it against his skull.
Nuts.
I sneered at my reflection in the glass, took my hat off the linoleum and reshaped it, scowled at the mess on the floor behind the desk, turned out the light and got out of there. It was a pleasure.
A SQUAT and cheerful Negro hustler brought down my Plymouth. He flashed his teeth at me, said "Eve-nin', Mistuh Pine. Wet out, ain't it?" and opened the car door. Light from a neon sign over the cashier's cage gave a red cast to his ebony features.
"We must be thankful," I said, "because it's good for the crops. Also it takes the curl out of your hair and puts it in the crease of your pants. You can have it."
"Yassuh."
The combination of wet streets and the evening rush hour made reaching Pratt Boulevard, on Chicago's North Side, an hour's job. I stretched that into an hour and a half by stopping off at a neighborhood restaurant for a light dinner, before driving on and parking on Wayne Avenue, half a block south of the Dinsmore Arms where I kept two rooms and a kitchenette.
I locked the car and sprinted along the deserted walk to the Dinsmore. There were quite a number of my neighbors hanging around the softly lighted lobby waiting for the rain to let up. I crossed to the desk to get my mail and phone messages, if any.
It was too early for Sam Wilson, the pulp-magazine-reading night man, to be on duty, and the correct young man on the day shift had looked down his nose at me too often to waste my time on. He said there was no mail and no messages and his tone said I had a hell of a nerve for making him look. He might have been right.
73
I rode up in tlie self-service elevator with the blonde librarian who had taken the apartment across the hall from me a week or so before. It could have worked into a date, but she had a copy of Dante's Inferno under one arm and I figured I couldn't show her a time half so hot as that. After she closed her door I unlocked mine and went in and flicked on the light switch.
The two table lamps flanking the couch threw a soft restrained glow through the living room. I stood there with my finger still on the switch and blinked at two men coming through the swinging door that closed off the kitchenette from the rest of the apartment.
Both of them wore raincoats and moisture gleamed on sleeves and shoulders. One was tall and much too thin, with a long disagreeable face and small, hard gray eyes set close to a thin nose that had been broken once and set by a bootblack. The other man was of standard size, older than the first and he didn't look as though he got around very well. But his face was hard and more intelligent-looking than that of his companion . . . and he was the one with the gun.
I looked at the gun. It was a nickel-plated Bankers' Special with the sight filed away and it was pointed at me. I said, "I keep my money in the bank and my jewels in a hock shop. Why not try the guy next door?"
"Save the gags, Mac," the thin one said. "And take that hand off the switch before you make a mistake."
I lowered my hand. He walked around behind me, his feet soundless on my sand-colored carpet, and slid his hands lightly along my sides, patted my pockets and belt line. He forgot to feel around my knees for a stiletto but that was all right. I didn't have a stiletto. He said, "No rod," across my shoulder to the other man, his breath warm against my cheek and heavy with the smell of beer. I could have reached back and
clamped a headlock on him and used him for a shield. I could have gone over Niagara in an orange crate, too.
He came around in front of me and took hold of my coat lapel with a square hand that had black swirls of hair across its back and along the fingers.
"Nothing personal, Mac," he said in a soft voice. "You look like a nice smart lad who knows the score and hates trouble. We want your company for a while is all. On a little trip."
I looked from him to the man with the gun. "You can do better than that," I said. "What's the general idea?"
The hand holding my lapel jerked a little. Nothing rough, just enough to show who was doing the talking. The soft voice said, "I guess you better put on a raincoat, hunh? No sense getting rained on. Where would it be, Mac?"
"Bedroom closet," I said. "No hurry. Let's talk about this over a drink or two."
He dropped his hand from my coat, turned and walked on cat feet into the bedroom. He was back almost at once, my trench coat trailing from one hand. He felt in the pockets, then tossed the garment to me, his expression still friendly in a distant manner.
"Get into it," he said.
I put it on, my fingers stiff on the buttons. The old guy tucked the gun in a side pocket of his raincoat, leaving his hand in to keep it company. He tilted his head at the corridor door and we started toward it.
Knuckles rapped lightly on the opposite side.
The sound froze all three of us. The thin man, indecisi
on marking his face, looked from the door to me and back at the ■door again. His companion took the Bankers' Special very •quickly from his pocket and held it along his side, the barrel pointing at the floor.
This time the buzzer sounded.
I said, keeping my voice low, "The light shows under the door. That means I'm home, so my friend won't leave easy, and I don't have a back door. Any remarks?"
The thin guy made up his mind. "Put it away, Whitey," he said to the man w^ith the gun, then, to me: "We're going out. Tell your friend to come back later. And tell it the right way or earn yourself a slug. I mean it, Mac."
I shrugged. "Whatever you say."
His long arm shot out, twisted the knob and drew open the door.
Lola North was standing there, in the act of reaching for the buzzer again. At sight of the three of us her mouth unhinged slightly and she stepped back. She said very rapidly, "I'm sorry, Mr. Pine. I didn't know you were—busy. Shall I come back later ?"
I smiled at her like a man without a care in the world. "Was it something urgent, Miss North ? I can't say exactly when I'll be here."
She was wearing one of those reversible spring coats with the waterproof side out. Her blonde head was bare and raindrops sparkled along the strands like brilliants on gold wire. The high neckline of a yellow blouse showed between the open lapels of her coat. She looked lovely and cool and very, very intense about something.
"It can wait," she said reluctantly. "Of course. Perhaps tomorrow morning . . ."
She ran down like a dollar watch on that last word. Her eyes were suddenly fastened on the right-hand pocket of the man called Whitey, where his hand bulged against the material. Outlined in cloth was the unmistakable shape of a gun barrel, pointed at my liver. Her expression said my liver meant a great deal to her.
1
The thin guy caught on immediately. His hand made an eagle's swoop and caught one of Lola North's wrists and jerked her through the door and had it closed before she could protest.
The Long escape Page 6