"Ready?" he called. Her greenish eyes were bright, and she met him with a smile of what seemed to be warm comradeship. He nodded hopefully toward the parking space where his shabby coupe waited. "May I drive you back to town?"
"Sorry, but my car's here." She seemed to catch her breath. "Aunt Agatha had a bridge party, and she went back to town on the bus."
"Oh." He tried not to show his disappointment, or his doubt of Aunt Agatha's reality. "Then how about our date for dinner?"
"I called Auntie, and she says I may go." Her gay smile warmed him.
"Wonderful!" he whispered. "Where do you live?"
"The Trojan Arms," she told him. "Apartment 2-C."
"Huh!" He couldn't help blinking. That swank apartment-hotel was another business enterprise of Preston Troy, and Barbee had written puffs about it for the Star. The cheapest suite in it, he knew, would cost two hundred a month. April Bell was doing very nicely for a cub reporter—unless, of course, Aunt Agatha should happen to be both real and wealthy.
"But I'll meet you." The tall redhead didn't seem to see his bleak astonishment, and something in her soft, husky voice made him forget it. "Where shall we go?"
"The Knob Hill?" he suggested hopefully—although that suburban night spot was really too expensive for reporters on the Star's scale of pay.
"I'd love it," she purred.
He walked with her out through the windy night to her own parked car. It was a long maroon convertible, worth four thousand, he estimated uncomfortably, on the black market. Not many cub reporters drove such opulent machines. Perhaps, he hoped, it belonged to Aunt Agatha.
He opened the door and she stepped in quickly, as graceful in her white fur as the tiny jade carving in his pocket. She took his hand for an instant, and the touch of her strong cool fingers was exciting as her voice. He put down the impulse to kiss her, afraid that would spoil everything. His breath hastened. Murderess or not, April Bell was going to be a fascinating girl to know.
"Bye, Barbee," she whispered. "Till nine."
Barbee drove back to town in his prewar coupe, and stopped at his desk in the long city room to hammer out his stories for the Star. Writing, he was glad of the terse, stereotyped objectivity of modern journalese.
Dr. Lamarck Mondrick, famed anthropologist and founder of the Humane Research Foundation, just returned from two years of excavating prehistoric sites in the remote Ala-shan desert, fell dead last night at the municipal airport, dramatically cut off as he attempted to tell newsmen what his expedition had discovered.
That was the lead. He went on with the simple facts of the tragedy, filled out with his own knowledge and biographical facts culled from the file in the morgue. He was glad that a formal obituary had no space for anything about April Bell, or the assassinated kitten in the trash can.
Eagerness hurried him back to the battered old coupe. Sliding under the wheel, he found himself empty-handed, and realized he had forgotten to buy a bottle. It was months since he had passed the Mint Bar, he thought, without stopping for a shot and maybe a bottle to take along. April Bell might be good for him.
His own apartment was two shabby rooms, with kitchenette and bath, in a run-down two-story building on Bread Street. The decayed neighborhood was too close to the mills, but the rent wasn't too high for his pay and the landlady didn't seem to care how much he drank.
He bathed and shaved, and discovered himself whistling happily as he looked for a clean shirt and a suit that wouldn't be too shabby for the Knob Hill. April Bell might be what he needed. He had closed the door behind him at eight forty when he heard the telephone ring inside. He hurried back to answer it, shaken with a sudden apprehension that she had decided not to see him.
"Will?" The voice was a woman's, calm and yet intense. "I want to talk to you."
It wasn't April Bell, and that quick dread relaxed its grasp. In a moment he recognized the clear, gracious voice of Mondrick's blind wife, serenely sweet, reflecting nothing of the shock he knew she must feel.
"Can you drive out to see me, Will?" she asked. "Right away?"
He frowned at his watch. The Knob Hill was forty blocks out Center Street, beyond the river and outside the city limits. The old Mondrick house, just off the university campus, was forty blocks in the other direction.
"Not right now, Rowena," he stammered awkwardly. "Of course I want to do everything I can to make things easy for you. I can come out in the morning, or maybe later tonight if you need me. But right now I have an engagement that I can't break—"
"Oh!" The sound seemed almost a cry of pain. The receiver was silent for a moment, and then Rowena Mondrick's calm sweet voice asked very softly: "With that Bell woman?"
"With April Bell," Barbee said.
"Will, who is she?"
"Huh!" Barbee caught his breath. You had to hand it to Rowena. She certainly kept up with the world, in spite of all her tragedies. "Just a fresh girl reporter," he said, "on the evening paper. I had never met her before tonight. Turk didn't seem to like her, but I thought she was pretty slick."
"You didn't!" the blind woman protested, and then begged urgently: "Break your date, Will! Or put her off, until you have time to come and talk with me. Won't you? Please!"
"Sorry," he muttered awkwardly. "But I really can't, Rowena." A faint resentment edged his tone, in spite of him. "I know you don't like her—and your dog doesn't. But I find her very interesting."
"I'm sure you do," Rowena Mondrick said quietly. "It's true I don't like her—for an excellent reason, that I want to tell you whenever you have time to listen. So please drive out when you can."
He couldn't speak of all the reasons behind his interest in April Bell—he wasn't even sure that he fully understood them. Yet a flood of pity for the blind woman in her bereavement made him regret his impatience, and he said clumsily: "Sorry, Rowena. I'll come to see you as soon as I can."
"Watch yourself, Will!" cried that sweetly urgent voice. "Watch yourself with her tonight. Because that woman plans to injure you—dreadfully!"
"Injure me?" he whispered unbelievingly. "How?"
"Come out tomorrow," Rowena said, "I'll tell you."
"Please explain—" Barbee gasped before he heard her hang up. He put the receiver back, and stood a moment wondering what she could have meant. He could see no possible reason behind her words—unless she had turned her dog's savage lunge at April's kitten into a personal antagonism.
Rowena Mondrick, he remembered, had been given to spells of moody strangeness ever since he knew her. Usually serene and normal as any seeing person, keenly alive with her friends and her music, often even gay—sometimes she left her piano and ignored her friends, seeming to care only for the company of her huge dog and the caress of the odd silver jewelry she wore.
Her strangeness must be a natural aftermath of that ghastly event in Africa, Barbee supposed, and Mondrick's sudden death had awakened her old terrors. He'd see her in the morning, and do what he could to soothe her irrational fears. He'd try to remember to take her a couple of new records for the automatic phonograph Sam and Nora Quain had given her.
But now he was going to meet April Bell.
The bar at the Knob Hill was a semicircular glass-walled room, indirectly lit with a baleful, dim red glare. The seats were green leather and chromium, too angular for comfort. The whole effect was sleek and hard and disturbing—perhaps it was intended, Barbee thought, to goad unsuspecting patrons into buying drinks enough so they wouldn't be aware of it April Bell flashed her scarlet smile at him from a tiny black table under an arch of red-lit glass. The white fur was tossed carelessly over the back of another chair, and she somehow looked utterly relaxed in the angular seat, as if this deliberately jarring atmosphere didn't disturb her. Indeed, her long oval face reflected a satisfaction that seemed almost feline.
Her rather daring evening gown was a deep green that accented the eager green of her slightly oblique eyes. Barbee hadn't even thought of wearing dinner jacket or tails, and for a mom
ent he was uncomfortably aware of his gray year-old business suit, a little too loose on his lank frame. But April didn't seem to mind and he forgot, in his instant appreciation of all the white-wolf coat had hidden. The white, well-groomed flesh of her seemed infinitely desirable, yet something made him think of the blind woman's warning.
"May I have a daiquiri?" she asked.
Barbee ordered two daiquiris.
He sat looking at her across the little table, so close he caught her clean perfume. Almost drunk before the drinks came with the sheen of her red hair and the dark intensity of her long eyes, the warm charm of her eager-seeming smile and the lithe vitality of her perfect body —he found it hard to recall his plan of action.
The velvet caress of her slightly husky voice made him want to forget that he suspected her of murder— yet he knew he could never forget, until he learned the truth. The frantic unrest in him, the sharp conflict of bright hope and vaguely dreadful terror, would not be stilled.
He had tried, driving across the long river bridge, to plan his inquiry. Motivation, it seemed to him, was the essential point. If it were true that she knew nothing of Mondrick, and had no reason to wish him harm, then the whole thing became fantastic nonsense. Even if the kitten's accidental presence had actually caused the fatal attack, that unfortunate coincidence should trouble neither him nor the law.
Barbee didn't like to consider the other alternative. This tall redhead, smiling with her intoxicating hint of special comradeship through a foot or so of smoke-hazed air, seemed to offer him more than a lonely, faintly embittered newspaperman could quite dare dream of, and he didn't want to knock her gift into the dust. He wanted her to like him.
He didn't want to find a motive; he shrank from trying to discover why she might have desired Mondrick's death. Yet a score of unsolved riddles came crowding to haunt him, each casting its sinister shadow across the girl's gay smile. Who had been Mondrick's "secret enemy," awaiting the coming of a "Child of Night"?
Suppose April Bell were a member of some desperate conspiracy? In this seething postwar world, when nations and races and hostile philosophies still battled to survive, when scientists fashioned another more shocking agency of death each day, it wasn't hard to picture that.
Suppose Mondrick and his party, on their long trip home across the battlegrounds of Asia, had secured evidence about the identity and aims of those conspirators—and brought it back in that wooden box? Taking extreme precautions—fully aware of some danger they couldn't avoid—they had attempted to broadcast their warning. But Mondrick, before he could name the menace, had fallen dead.
April Bell had killed him—he couldn't quite escape the cold finality of that. Whether it was freakish accident or premeditated homicide, the black kitten she had brought to the plane in her snakeskin bag must have been the fatal instrument. He didn't like the implication, yet there it was.
Their daiquiris came, and her white teeth smiled over the glass. She was warm and real and near, and he tried desperately to shake off the hard constraint of his suspicion. After all, he told himself, it was utterly fantastic. In a world which afforded such efficient instruments of homicide as knives and cyanide and tommy guns, no serious murderer would think of depending on the protein dust from the fur of a black kitten carried across the victim's path. No efficient modern killer, he assured himself, would place any reliance on a strangling ribbon knotted around a kitten's throat and a pin thrust through its tiny heart. That is, unless—
Barbee shook his head and raised his glass, with an awkward little smile, to clink against April Bell's. The longer he let himself brood over those vague improbabilities surrounding Dr. Mondrick's death, the less pleasant they appeared. He determined to devote himself entirely to the more attractive business of an evening with the most fascinating woman he had ever met.
What if she were a witch?
That is, he amended the phrase, what if she had wished to bring about Mondrick's death and expected to accomplish it by garroting little Fifi? After all, he was fully fed up with his life as it had been. Eighty hours a week on Preston Troy's dirty yellow rag for a wage that hardly paid for his rent and meals and whisky. He had been drinking nearly a fifth of cheap bourbon a day. April Bell, even if she believed herself a witch, might prove to be a more exciting escape.
She looked at him as their glasses chimed, and her long dark eyes held a cool, smiling challenge.
"Well ... Barbee?"
He leaned across the tiny octagonal table.
"To ... our evening!" Her vital nearness took his breath. "Please, April—I want to know about you—everything. Everywhere you've been, and everything you've done. Your family and your friends. What you dream about, and what you like for breakfast."
Her red lips curved in a slow feline smile.
"You ought to know better, Barbee—a woman's mystery is her charm."
He couldn't help noticing again the even white strength of her perfect teeth. They reminded him of Poe's weird story—something about a man haunted by a dreadful compulsion to pull his sweetheart's teeth. He tried to shake off that untimely association, and started to lift his glass. A shudder made it tremble in his hand, and the pale drink splashed on his fingers.
"Too much mystery is alarming." He set the glass down carefully. "I'm really afraid of you."
"So?" She watched him wipe the cold stickiness of the spilled drink off his fingers, the smile on her white mobile face seeming faintly malicious, as if she were laughing at him secretly. "Really, Barbee, you're the dangerous one."
Barbee looked down uncomfortably, and sipped his drink. Until tonight, he had thought he knew about women—far too much about them. But April Bell baffled him.
"You see, Barbee, I've tried to build an illusion." Her cool voice mocked him with that secret laughter. "You've made me very happy, accepting it. Surely you wouldn't want me to shatter it now?"
"I do," he said soberly. "Please, April."
She nodded, and red lights burned in her sleek hair.
"Very well, Barbee," she purred. "For you, I'll drop my painted veil."
She set down her glass, and leaned toward him with her round arms crossed on the tiny black table. The white curves of her shoulders and her breasts were near him. Faintly, he thought he caught the natural odor of her body, a light, dry, clean fragrance—he was glad it had escaped the advertising crusades of the soap manufacturers. Her husky voice dropped to match his own soberness.
"I'm just a simple farmer's daughter, really," she told him. "I was born here in Clarendon county-—my parents had a little dairy up the river, just beyond the railroad bridge. I used to walk half a mile every morning to catch the school bus."
Her lips made a quick half smile.
"Well, Barbee—does that shatter my precious illusion enough to suit you?"
Barbee shook his head.
"That hardly dents it. Please go on."
Her white expressive face looked troubled.
"Please, Will," she begged softly. "I'd rather not tell you any more about me—not tonight, anyhow. That illusion is my shell. I'd be helpless without it, and not very pretty. Don't make me break it. You might not like me without it."
"No danger." His voice turned almost grim. "But I do want you to go on. You see, I'm still afraid."
She sipped her daiquiri, and her cool green eyes studied his face. That secret laughter had left them. She frowned a little, and then smiled again with that air of warm accord.
"I warn you—it gets a little sordid."
"I can take it," he promised her. "I want to know you—so that I can like you more."
"I hope so." She smiled. "Here goes."
Her mobile face made a quick grimace of distaste.
"My parents didn't get on together—that's all the trouble, really." Her low voice was forced and uneven. "My father—but there's no use digging up the unpleasant details. The year I was nine, Mother took me to California. Father kept the other children. It's that cheap, ugly background tha
t I built my illusion to hide."
She drained her glass nervously.
"You see, there wasn't any alimony." Her flat voice turned bitter. "Mother took her own name back. She worked to keep us. Hash-slinger. Salesgirl, stenographer, carhop. Movie extra. Finally she got a few character bits, but it was pretty rough sledding for her.
She lived for me, and tried to bring me up to play the game a little shrewder.
"Mother had a poor opinion of men—with reason enough, I'm afraid. She tried to fit me to protect myself. She made me—well, call me a she-wolf." Her fine teeth flashed through an uneasy little smile. "And here I am, Barbee. Mother managed to put me through school. Somehow, all those years, she kept her insurance paid up. I had a few thousand dollars when she died. By the time that's gone, if I do as she taught me—"
She made a wry little face, and tried to smile.
"That's the picture, Will. I'm a ruthless beast of prey." She pushed her empty glass aside abruptly—the gesture seemed nervous, somehow defiant. "How do you like me now?"
Shifting uncomfortably before the penetrating keenness of her faintly Oriental eyes, Barbee was grateful for the waiter's approach. He ordered two more daiquiris.
In a lower voice that seemed to hold a faint bitter mockery—perhaps of herself—April Bell asked, "Does the ugly truth behind my poor, torn illusion make you any less afraid of me?"
Barbee contrived to grin.
"As a beast of prey," he said as lightly as he could, "your equipment is splendid. I only wish that reporters on the Star's payroll were fair financial game." A hard earnestness came back into his uneasy voice. "But it's something else that I'm afraid of."
He stared at her. For he thought her white, perfect body had imperceptibly tensed. He thought her long greenish eyes had narrowed alertly. Even the faint, fragrant scent of her now carried a subtle warning, it seemed to him—as if she had been an actual thing of prey, crouching beyond that tiny black table, wary and deadly. Her instant smile didn't quite erase that startled impression.
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