The elevator stayed where it was. I took the service stairs three at a time to the ground floor. The delivery entrance was on my left and I barreled into the parking lot, and into heavy darkness. An alley stretched away from me and I went pelting down it, skirting trash barrels and garbage cans and coming out for air a good block from the hotel.
I went up a sidestreet at a fast walk and, when I hit a thoroughfare, started hunting for a cab. I caught one quickly, tumbled in, and gave Edna Loomis’ address. The cab cut across to Burnside and went left.
I peered at the top floor as the apartment house came into sight. There was a good deal of light. I looked along the street as the cab turned into it. There was no sign of a prowl car.
The driver swung up to the entrance. I paid him and ran into the building. The small lobby was empty. The elevator was down, waiting. It seemed to crawl as I got it headed for the fifth floor. I was in a real hurry this time. I had made up my mind that Edna Loomis was going to answer my questions one way or another.
I pounded down the hall to her door. I hammered on it and got no answer. I rattled the knob and the door came open, fading away from my hand.
She should have had better sense than that, I thought, and went on in.
The overhead lights were off but three floor lamps and a small table lamp were lit. They cast quite a glow. The room was empty. I passed on into the bedroom, not hesitating at all.
There was a bedlamp shining down on the bed, showing the wrinkled sheets, and emptiness.
I crossed the room and put my hand on the sheets. They were cold. I stood there looking around, disturbed. There was only the silence.
Deliberately I went to the closet and opened it. No one was there. I tried the bathroom door and it came open, letting pent-up steam surge against my face. I brushed at it and stepped on in. The shower curtains were drawn close around the tub and heavy beads of moisture hung in the air, on the curtain, and frosted over the face of the medicine chest mirror.
She had slept late, too late for the maid to get in and make up the bed. Then she had showered and gone out. That was the way it stacked up.
She had gone out, leaving the front door unlocked?
It had been recent, too, I thought, or the steam would have been more completely dissipated. On the other hand she had been out of bed for some time. It could mean nothing or it could mean a great deal.
I went to the shower curtains and drew them aside.
Edna Loomis’ beautiful model’s body was stretched out in the tub, face up. A shower cap was over her golden hair, hiding all but a few damp strands at the base of her neck.
She would still have been beautiful except for the ugly hole in the center of her forehead.
20
I WASN’T SURPRISED. I felt no emotion at all but anger, and at first that was directed at Edna Loomis. She was a fool. Walking a fence and trying to play on both sides.
And, too often, this was the way it ended.
I began to understand a lot of things as I stared down at Edna Loomis. My anger began to change direction. I could feel it boiling, working up to a head inside me. I left her there and went back into the living room, charging for the hall door.
The noise caught me in full step. I stopped and swung around. There was nothing behind me. There was no repetition of the noise. I stood listening, trying to recapture it, to hear it again.
A faint tinkling, a clatter of something metallic against wood. My mind caught and held that idea and then tried to locate the source of the noise.
“Nerves,” I said hopefully to myself.
But it didn’t ring right and so I moved now with slow, cautious steps, placing one foot gently in front of the other and letting my weight down on it before bringing the other one forward. That way I managed to inch over the rug without sound until I came to the kitchen door. It could only be the kitchen; I had already checked the emptiness of the bedroom and its closet.
The slow, snail-like progress irritated me. By the time I reached the kitchen doorway I was ready to explode inside. Taking a deep breath I plunged into the kitchen. My foot slapped on the linoleum. I tore a piece out of my fingernail in a wild lunge at the light switch. I caught it and flicked it down.
The bright lights overhead burst out at me, bouncing from harsh white walls. I couldn’t help it: my eyes squeezed themselves shut involuntarily.
Something hit me in the stomach. Something hard and at the same time yielding. I got my eyes open but still I couldn’t see anything. I reached blindly, got a handful of cloth and then hair. I tried to keep my balance by back-pedalling but all I could see were blurring, spinning walls, and I went down. There was a grunt and I felt the cloth and hair in my hands twist.
I closed my fingers down harder, rolled, and shot out a knee. The grunt became a sob of pain. I let loose, swearing.
“You damned fool,” I said, getting up. Reaching down, I helped Nelle to her feet. Her face was twisted as if she were badly hurt, but there was no pain in her eyes. She was about ready to bawl.
“Sorry,” I said, “but you shouldn’t have tried it.”
I put an arm about her waist and started for the big divan. Nelle was fighting back tears; I could feel her trembling beneath my fingers.
When we reached the divan her tears did cut loose. I sat down and drew her onto my lap. She tucked her head into my shoulder and bawled. I didn’t give a damn for anything right then.
Nelle came out of it first. With a final sniffle she stood up, then sat down a little distance from me on the divan. She rubbed her hip where my knee had hit it.
“Thanks, Nick,” she said.
“Where were you?” I asked inanely. As if I cared.
“Broom closet,” she said. She colored a little. “When I heard you I got scared and bolted out. The light came on and I put my head down. I thought I could …” She stopped and reached for a handkerchief. She used it. “… could,” she went on, “bull my way through. Like you do.”
“And the same thing happened to both of us,” I observed. “We get knocked on our respective cans.” Reaching out I took one of her hands.
“Did you see her?” I asked.
Nelle nodded with a jerky motion. She looked helpless sitting there. Her hair was tousled where my fingers had gone through it and the dark green blouse she wore was awry at the neckline. Reaching out, I straightened it.
“Did you …” I began. I changed it to, “Did Johnny?”
“I didn’t,” she said. “I would have this morning. But I changed my mind.”
I knew that. I asked, “What changed it?”
She looked down at her hand in mine and then raised her eyes. A nerve twitched at the corner of her wide mouth. “Johnny,” she said.
I could feel the misery in her voice. I said, “Let’s get out of here.”
She let me draw her to her feet. Her voice was dull. “We’d better call the police,” she said.
“Not a chance. Powers is down here looking for me—for both of us.”
“That’s all right,” she said. She began to cry again, but with soft, half-hidden sobs right now. “They were right all along, Nick. I found out that—Johnny …”
“Not the way I see it,” I interrupted her.
“I wish you were right,” she said. “But I saw him. He was running out of here.” She stopped, refusing to look at me. “Edna Loomis hadn’t been dead long when I got up here.”
• • •
I said, “Keep going.”
Nelle’s hand was tightly in mine and I could feel her weight more and more as weariness dragged her steps. I spotted a dark doorway ahead and drew her in with a quick jerk. She sagged against me and I could feel her trembling, and feel her breast as it transmitted the violent beating of her heart.
“I can’t run any more,” she said.
“We can’t stay here,” I told her. “Take deep breaths, take as many as you can.”
I released her reluctantly and stepped to the edge of the doorway. I
looked both ways along the darkened street. There was only darkness, with a lone street lamp dim at a distant corner. The nightmarish aspects of the past thirty minutes made me feel as if I were in the middle of a bad dream, needing desperately to awaken and yet unable to quite make it.
“We’ve got a chance,” I whispered to Nelle. I reached for her hand.
I could feel that she was about through. Her breathing was agonized and her whole weight seemed to be dragging against my hand right now. My own breath was about gone, too. There was a bitter, brassy taste in my mouth. But ahead was the street I wanted, and at last we stopped in the silent shadows by the corner.
There was no present pursuit and it made me wonder momentarily if it hadn’t been imagination before. But I knew better. Just as I knew it had been no accident that a prowl car was outside Edna Loomis’ apartment house when Nelle and I left there.
They turned a spot on us and Nelle bolted. Her panic started it and there was nothing I could do but follow. The damage had been done, all I could do was try to repair it. I got her into the basement garage and started hunting for Edna Loomis’ big car. Nelle knew it better than I, and so we located it quickly enough. The keys were in, as they were in any number of cars, and there was power enough to shoot us to the street and past the cops without even a hesitation of the big motor.
Nelle said that one of the cops was Powers. I wasn’t sure; I heard a” bullet whine by the window as we made a screaming skid and I couldn’t picture Powers as the kind to start shooting that way. Whoever it was started chasing us. And it didn’t seem that we had a chance. Besides being easily spotted in a car as fancy as Edna Loomis', we had the two-way radio set-up to pin us down.
At that we got enough head start to be out of sight just long enough to hide the car. We chose a neighborhood used car lot where the big job might go unobserved for a while. Then we caught a street car. We ended up where I wanted to go, in the deserted, silent warehouse district. But I knew it wouldn’t be long before Powers—if he was the one—figured that out, too, and came down on us.
Daylight wasn’t too far away and, with it, the warehouses would open. But I hoped for a few minutes breathing space before then. We came abreast of the doorway of Considine’s building and slipped into its partial shelter. I bent to study the lock. My shoulder hit the door and it swung inward. One look showed me that the lock had been jimmied.
“We weren’t first,” I said, and drew Nelle inside.
“This is Considine’s,” Nelle said.
“You’ve been here?”
“With Johnny,” she told me briefly.
We went up the stairs in heavy darkness. On Considine’s floor I lighted a match to locate the main doorway. It was like the one downstairs, hanging slightly open because the lock had been broken.
We stepped aside, away from the doorway. I put out the match and Nelle moved close to me. “I don’t like this,” I said. “Two doors jimmied.”
“Johnny had a key the other time,” Nelle said.
“When was this?”
“Last night.”
“After you left Edna Loomis?”
“Yes, after that.”
I said, “What did Johnny want?”
Her voice was low. “Papers. He hoped there was something the police might have missed.”
I was hoping the same thing. I said, “Unfortunately the cops don’t miss much.” I put a hand on her arm, silencing her, and listening. There was no noise at all from the outside. We might have been in a tomb.
I said, “What makes you think it was Johnny?” I added, “Besides seeing him run out of her place.”
She had some control over herself now and managed to speak without starting to cry. Some of the shock had worn off.
“The way he acted today,” she said. “This morning—yesterday morning, wasn’t it?—when I went back and told him about you hiring out to Edna Loomis. Johnny didn’t say anything then but he went out. He was gone a long time. When he came back it was late and he was terribly angry. He was mad at you and her and Kane Hall.”
“That leaves only you and Powers that he isn’t sore at,” I said. “But I still don’t see proof of his guilt.”
Nelle went on, her voice low and steady, “He kept saying that you’d turned on him. That you’d sold him out. I tried to show him that it didn’t make sense.” I could feel her hand on my arm, a light, warm pressure. “Because after I thought it over I knew you wouldn’t—not for ten thousand dollars or—or for her.”
“Nor both,” I said.
“I knew you had a reason,” Nelle said. “That you were playing some kind of game.”
I liked the feel of her close to me, of her hand touching my arm. “I was playing an angle,” I said. “But it went all to hell.”
“I tried to explain that to Johnny but he wouldn’t listen. He said, ‘He brought that damned Chimp up, didn’t he? He and Hall are helping Loomis sell me out.’ ”
“It doesn’t make much sense to me,” I said. “But it might to Johnny.”
“Then,” she said, “he went right out again. I was worried sick and I hurried to Edna Loomis’ apartment. I thought I could talk to her. I thought you might be there and—well, I might be able to find something to help.”
“When was this?”
“I got there shortly before you did.”
“I mean when was it that Johnny went out for the last time?”
“Just shortly before.” Nelle hesitated, judging it. “From the time he came in and accused you and Hall of helping sell him out until I—I found her wasn’t over a half hour.”
I said, “You were still willing to help Johnny when you went up to see Edna Loomis?”
“I am now,” she said quickly. “I’ll still help him, Nick. But I won’t lie for him any longer.”
“Johnny’s ranting made you change your mind?”
“No.” Her fingers tightened on my arm. “It was when I saw him running from her apartment. And then I found her like you did—in the bath.”
“Was the shower running when you found her?”
“Yes,” Nelle said. She sounded as if her throat held a huge, dry lump. “I turned it off—I thought it might help Johnny.”
“You thought he turned it on?”
Nelle said, “Yes, to hide the sound when he shot her.”
21
WE WAITED for nearly ten minutes in complete silence. I hated this kind of inactivity and kept thinking I heard a prowl car driving up outside. But I had to be sure we were alone.
We went into the office, fumbling through darkness. In Considine’s private room I checked the heavy draperies by feel and then snapped on the light. It was just as I had seen it last, except that the filing cases were gone, and there was no sign of the body.
“The cops took nearly everything,” I said.
Nelle nodded. “Johnny thought that he might have private files somewhere.”
I looked around. The safe was gone, too. I checked the desk drawers. Someone had cleaned them out. “Could be,” I said.
This room was hopeless. There was only one possibility that I could see, the room with the long table and the blackboard. I stepped that way and turned the knob. It gave easily enough but the door wouldn’t budge. I pushed a little harder. The door was loose in the frame, but it felt as if something heavy, something big and soggy, blocked it from opening.
Stepping back, I made a quick lunge and hit the door with my shoulder. It gave suddenly, opening about a foot as whatever was behind it yielded, then stopped with the same suddenness as it caught again.
A second lunge got me in. I found the switch and snapped on the light. Nelle started in behind me and I said, “Stay back.”
It was Les Peone. He was crumpled on the carpet where my push at the door had slid him. There was a hole, quite as neat as the one in Edna Loomis, in his forehead. His right hand was clamped around the handle of a small, deadly looking knife.
Turning off the light, I backed out fast. Nelle was wa
iting, wide-eyed, wondering. I said, “I think I found what I came for. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
• • •
It was run and run again. Every light from a car was a possible police patrol, every footstep on the pavement behind was a possible pursuer.
We found breathing space downtown, in the balcony of a second-rate, late movie house. It was less than half occupied at that ungodly hour and we sat in the top row near the projector. It felt good to stretch trembling legs and be able to quiet our breathing.
An usher brought someone up the steps and I felt Nelle beside me stiffen. “Look as if we came here to do some necking,” I said, and put my arm around her. She buried her face in my shoulder and I hid mine in her hair. The usher’s light stopped just below and to our left. When it was gone, neither of us moved for a while.
Finally I eased away. One of the reasons I had chosen this place was to have a chance to think, to sort out facts and try to put them together. With Nelle so close that was an impossibility.
She straightened up and managed a little laugh. “Was that just to fool the usher, Nick?”
“I wish the only person we had to fool was an usher,” I said.
Nelle settled back, her hands folded quietly in her lap. She seemed to understand. After a while, I said, “I can see only one answer, Nelle.”
She was silent and I tried to think again. “We’ve got to get back to town. To the Oxnan.”
Nelle came alert. “How?” I could feel the misery in her voice. I could understand it easily enough. It was no pleasure, no fun to be jerked from a fairly quiet existence to being wanted, cut off, pursued by the police of two cities.
“Let’s go,” I said shortly. I stood up and started out. She followed docilely. In the upstairs lobby, she said, “Go where?”
“Home,” I said. It made me want to laugh. Home—that was easy enough to say. But they would be watching the trains and busses, the airport and the highways. They wouldn’t miss having men posted at the bridge over the river.
Blondes are Skin Deep Page 14