Lady Afraid

by Lester Dent

  “I don’t understand fully,” Sarah said.

  “Lady,” he growled, “you’re not dumb, not that dumb. But I’ll tell it to you again: We agreed to do a deal for a price. Then we demanded more money—quite a lot more money—not to yell it to the world.”

  “You double-crossed someone?”

  Yellow-shoes laughed the briefest and most humorless of laughs. “Did we! Oh, sister!”

  “Who?”

  “Huh?”

  “Who did you double-cross?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Just yeah.” The black-top street pavement slid toward the expensive convertible as if it were being eaten silently. In the east, where the high, graceful, silver-boled palm trees made a fringe, and where housetops were not too high, there was rouge on the sky. The hint of dawn. Finally. Dawn was not here yet, but here was proof that the night was not really to be endless. “Yeah,” said the scared man again. “Yeah, I could tell you who hired us. I could do that. I probably will. I don’t see why not. But not until I see what Dewey says.”

  “I won’t—”

  He looked at her. His face could get ugly; it did. “You won’t what?” he prompted.

  Sarah was silent.

  “So you won’t tell anybody,” he said bitterly. “Jesus Christ! What kind of a sap do you take me for, toots? If we was to see a cop right now, you’d scream your head off. You and me have got no deal. You don’t even promise anything, see, and I’ll tell you why: You’ve got to tell the police the truth to clear yourself, and the truth will clear me and my friends…. Oh, the cops won’t like us for what we did. But who wants to be loved by policemen? They’ve got nothing more serious on us than impersonating an officer or some other small stuff they may think up.”

  “You took my son,” Sarah said coldly. “What do you call that?”

  “Lady, you’d be surprised how legal that was. Brill was no fool. And the kid is fine, as you’re going to find out.”

  “Are—are we going to the child now?” Sarah gasped.

  “That’s right.”

  Climax. Sarah was suddenly weak. The stuff that makes looseness poured through her. She had not expected this. She tightened her arms around Alice Mildred, but they seemed to have no strength left. The old lady had heard; she was crowding close to Sarah, wordless and trembling.

  Yellow-shoes drove with a kind of fox-faced intentness. Finally he put the gun away in his coat pocket. He had followed the bay front, keeping to the wide sweeping driveways, a man with a destination. After a while he turned to Sarah, and his face was more normal: the gray of fear had somewhat left it, and his color was yellowish.

  He asked, “Who was the big guy with you a while ago?”

  Sarah aroused, groped out of the quiet reverence that had come over her as she thought of soon seeing Jonnie. She looked blankly at the man.

  “What?” she said.

  “The long guy. He drove this car. He got out and went off toward the Lineyack house and left you two sitting in the car, just before I came up.”

  “Oh.” Sarah hesitated; she saw no reason not to tell him. “That was Most.”

  “Most. That his name?”

  “Yes. Captain Most.”

  “There is a guy lives on a black sailboat over at City Yacht Basin. Would that be him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who does he work for?”

  Sarah said, “A lawyer. An RFC attorney named Arbogast. Captain Most is the skipper of Arbogast’s new yacht, Vameric.”

  The man had hard bluish lips and they became slightly separated and he looked fixedly ahead. And finally he said, “Then this Most would be the one who killed Brill.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  THE KETCH SAT LIKE a soiled white goose on flat, glassy, utterly still canal water. Her ensign, which had been left impolitely on its staff through the night, had not been stirred by a breath of air for hours. The ketch itself was spoon-billed, beamy; she even resembled a goose somewhat. Her water-line length was about fifty feet and her overhangs made her deck much longer, she would probably pound hard in a sea and be sore on her gear and sore at herself. Her rig was no trim jib-headed affair; no modern foolishness like roller reefing here; she was gaffed in the old-fashioned way. Her tummy was fat with tumble home; she surely had a centerboard and little keel; she could sail on a heavy dew. And she could turn like a witch, and she wouldn’t be a tender boat. She seemed to be kept neatly enough: her hounds were painted a neat white, and her lines were precisely faked down on deck. The ketch lay to spring lines from the concrete canal sea wall. There was no other vessel near by.

  “You two wait here”—even before he switched off the car engine Yellow-shoes seemed to be alarmed by the air of silence about the ketch—“while I go aboard and explain the situation.”

  “Is my son aboard?” Sarah asked, having a thin, tight difficulty with her words.

  “Yeah…. Hey, now! Wait!” His hand sent Sarah back on the seat roughly; she had half risen. “Hold on! Take it easy!”

  “Please! Please let me see him! I want—”

  He shook his head. “I gotta explain things first. They don’t know about Brill. If you rushed on that boat now, it might not be healthy.”

  Sarah, wanting to scream out, strike him, anything to reach the little boy, held to calm with difficulty. “Hurry!”

  He grunted and went to the edge of the sea wall. There was no gangplank. He would have to leap aboard the ketch. He hesitated, peering at the boat uneasily, and suddenly put his hand in the pocket where the gun was. He called unsteadily, “Dewey! Dewey, you aboard?”

  This drew only stillness to enhance his fears. Sarah watched him, knowing he was afraid of ambush. She could see that his breathing was affected to the point that he kept his mouth continually open.

  “Dewey!” he gasped. “Dewey! Dewey!”

  Now a blackly alarmed voice, Dewey Cokerham’s, responded from inside the ketch. “Who’s that with you?” Cokerham asked.

  “The kid’s mother. His grandmother, too.”

  “You crazy fool!”

  “Dewey! Listen! I got—”

  “You stinking idiot!”

  “No! No, I got bad news, Dewey. Listen, wait’ll I tell you… Brandy Brill’s dead.”

  This silenced Dewey. Yellow-shoes turned and warned Sarah, “Don’t you try running away and calling the cops! The old woman, neither!” Then he had another idea. “You come here. Sit on the sea wall, where I can watch you.”

  Sarah loosened her arms from about Alice Mildred, discovering they had been there so long and tightly that they ached. She asked, “Mother Lineyack, will you be—”

  Alice Mildred’s voice, interrupting, was low, devitalized. “I shall be all right, Sarah.”

  “This man says Jonnie is here.”

  “Yes. I heard.”

  Sarah left the car then and came close to the sea wall. She gathered her skirts and sat. Yellow-shoes watched her. He said, “Hang your legs over the edge. I don’t want you jumping up and running.” She complied.

  He turned, jumped heavily to the ketch deck, walked aft, and clumped into the cockpit. He stood at the aft companionway and bent down, a hinge in his fat middle, but kept continually watching Sarah. He spoke to those inside and was answered. The voice he used and the voices they used were low, and Sarah could not understand the words. But there was a woman in the cabin, she knew presently.

  The conference at the companionway went on and on, and Sarah watched it until her eyes began to ache with a sensation that made the hard round shape of each eyeball quite noticeable. The men were arguing. Yellow-shoes said, “I don’t want the police after me for no murder. I want them to know the truth. And she’s the one to tell it to them.” He said this in different versions several times, and Cokerham’s replies were always unhappy and increasingly frightened. Sarah waited with difficulty. Now and then a nerve-strain pain stung her temple. The little boy being so near, on the boat, couldn’t seem quite real to her.

  Abruptly t
he conference at the companionway ended. Yellow-shoes straightened; he rubbed his aching back. “I knew you’d see it my way,” he said with relief.

  Now Dewey Cokerham came from the cabin, helping his tall body to rise by using heavy hands on the companion-way rail and on the hatch slide. The woman did not appear. But Sarah was sure there was a woman in the cabin. And she could imagine who it was.

  Cokerham drew near Sarah.

  “You remember me, Mrs. Lineyack?”

  Sarah nodded. She would not be likely to forget his paleness. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, you came to Captain Most’s boat. I recall you. You said your name was Ides. But it’s Cokerham.”

  He made a twisted mouth and jerked a hand at Yellow-shoes. “He told you my name, eh?”

  “No. No, we got that information from Mr. Maurice, the private detective.”

  His jaw dropped in surprise, and he said, “Oh, him… Maurice. Yeah, Brill gave you the Maurice and Black name as part of the buildup, didn’t he? I remember he said he was going to. He asked me the name of a private detective agency, and I told him about Maurice.”

  Sarah asked tightly, “Are you going to give me the boy?”

  He nodded. “On one condition.”

  “What condition?”

  “You stay here a couple of hours, give us a chance to get away.”

  Sarah almost gasped her relief. “Yes. Yes, I will do that,” she said quickly.

  They really mean me to have the boy. Sarah knew that her gaze must be stunned; wonderment must sit in her eyes like a wild bird in a cage that had been suddenly thrown open. She thought clearly: This man is afraid. Yellow-shoes is afraid. Their stomachs cannot take murder. Four of them conspired to extort money from someone; Brill was killed for it. These survivors wish to flee for their lives. It is that simple. And now Sarah was able to feel contempt for them, and it came to her that: Since they want to deal so badly, I can make them pay me something. I can make them tell me facts.

  “Listen!” she said. “When I face the police, I will need more facts than I have. You’ll have to tell me more.”

  Anxiety folded lines into Cokerham’s pale face; his eyes seemed to draw back more deeply in their sockets. “I don’t tie any rope around my neck!”

  Sarah said coldly, “As I see it, you expect the truth to keep the rope off your neck. You had better tell it to me.”

  Cokerham felt her contempt, and it put dark downward hooks at the corners of his unpleasant mouth. He was silent.

  Thunder spoke harshly in the northwest, distantly, its grumble coming to them mutilated by the buildings, the tall apartments, and the mansions that were all about, but not close, to the narrow, deep, too-still water in the canal where the beamy white ketch lay.

  “What don’t you know?” Cokerham asked heavily.

  “The reason,” Sarah quickly said. “Start with that.”

  The man jutted his jaw toward Alice Mildred and said, “That’s an easy one.” The convertible stood close to the sea wall; the old lady waiting in it had hardly stirred. Her ancient inward face was as unnaturally composed as clay. Cokerham added, “She’s ill. You knew the old woman’s been sick, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  He pointed a thumb at his own head. “Up here. Mental.”

  “I know. But what has that—”

  “Got to do with it? Plenty…. According to the doctor who’s been treating the old woman, she’s about off her trolley. The doctor’s name is Danneberg, and he’s supposed to be the best. Don’t get me wrong—Doc Danneberg’s not involved. But Brill got hold of Danneberg’s diagnosis of the old woman’s trouble, and he told it to me like this: The old woman’s an extreme cerebrotonic who of late years is being pressed close to a schizoid mental pathology. Brandy Brill liked words like that. The nomenclature of psychiatry, he called it. Anyway, that’s just a long-worded way of saying the old woman is in danger of going nuts…. You get what I’m talking about, don’t you?”

  Sarah said rather impatiently, “You’re telling me that Alice Mildred’s sanity hangs by a thin thread. Why?”

  “Why?” he said blankly. “How do I know? Ask her doctor why she’s ready to go batty. Ask the Lord why he made her that way.” He pulled down his shoulders, sneering, and added, “Lady, all I know is that the shock of losing the little boy was supposed to drive her nuts enough that her testimony wouldn’t hold up.”

  “Oh!” Sarah cried. “Is that why—” She looked at the man loathingly, finally understanding why all this had been done. It was evil; she was revolted. Her dislike of it slashed at the man. She said, “You must be mad yourself! Are you trying to tell me there was a plot to drive Mother Lineyack insane?”

  “That’s right!”

  “I’m—I can’t believe it!”

  “You’d better.”

  “You—oh, how bestial!” Sarah gasped.

  Cokerham was dug by her contempt and scowled up at her, pocketed his hands, finally said, “There’s worse things been done.”

  “And,” Sarah added, “I don’t believe it, either.”

  That stumped him and opened his mouth. “You don’t! Lady, do I look like I’m standing here lying to you?”

  You look like a pale rat fleeing the ship; a pale, starved, frightened rat, Sarah thought.

  She said: “Your looks haven’t anything to do with believing you. The thing just sounds preposterous. I don’t know much about criminals, but I hardly think crimes are committed for such devious reasons as the one you’ve given me. You say the object was to rob Alice Mildred of her sanity. You say that was the motive. Well, I say this: No one could be sure taking the boy would have the desired effect on Alice Mildred. It’s too uncertain. When you deal with the human mind you’re working with an intangible—and nobody is going to do such desperate things on such a slim chance.”

  “The guy who hired us had to take a wild chance.”

  “I don’t care. It doesn’t seem reasonable.”

  Cokerham scowled. “Well, maybe there was an extra angle.”

  “What angle?”

  “The old lady’s silence could have been bought by a promise to get the kid back to her.”

  “That’s utterly ugly too!”

  Cokerham ducked his head, turtle fashion, as if dodging a blow. He stared up at her. His mouth became loose and nasty.

  “Hah! You needn’t be so holy,” he said. “You were slated to be the one to drive her nuts.”

  White-faced now, sickened by the unjustness of being so spoken to, Sarah said, “Don’t you dare accuse me of such a thing! I may have been a fool, but I wasn’t malicious.”

  He sneered and said, “I hear you were easy enough talked into taking the kid. And that was supposed to be the thing that put the old lady away. That’s the kind of an easy sucker you were.”

  Disliking this evil, scared man as she would a shark, Sarah wanted to strike him. Her hands clenched and trembled. But there was much she wished to know, so she struggled for control and managed to ask almost reasonably, “You mean—the plan was to break Mother Lineyack? Do you mean to have her adjudged—legally—of unsound mind? You mentioned testimony—”

  “Never mind, never mind,” Cokerham said. “I’m through talking.”

  “Testimony? What testimony?”

  “Never mind, I said,” he barked at her.

  “Testimony?” Sarah demanded. “Testimony against whom? In court? Or where?”

  “I’m done talking,” he said.

  The cabin skylight sprang open a couple of inches. Through this space a woman spoke angrily.

  “That’s right, Dewey,” the woman said. “Everybody’s talking too much. We haven’t got all day.”

  Cokerham jumped. Yellow-shoes also. Both stared at the skylight. Sarah, also peering at the shadowed cabin interior covered by the skylight, could make out the face of the woman within. The Dunlap woman. Lida Dunlap, of Mr. Arbogast’s office; the one who had started her vacation today and was taking it on a boat, according to Mr. Arbogast.r />
  “Good morning, Lida,” Sarah said coldly. “Do you mind if I say I’m not too surprised to see you here? But tell me something, Lida—did you work a trick when I telephoned yesterday? You remember the phone call, don’t you? You said you would put Mr. Arbogast on the wire. But who did you really put on? Yesterday afternoon, this was.”

  But the Dunlap woman was of tougher stuff than the two men. That, or her fear was greater. She ignored the question, ignored Sarah. “Dewey, hurry up!” Lida Dunlap said.

  Dewey Cokerham growled, “I’m ready to go right now, Lida.” He turned away.

  “No! No, wait!” This was Yellow-shoes, jumping in front of Cokerham. “She’s gotta know more than you’ve told her, Dewey! She can give the police the truth and then they won’t want to saddle Brill’s killing onto us.”

  “Oh, shut up,” Cokerham said savagely. He stepped around the other man.

  Yellow-shoes wailed, “Dewey!” feverishly. “Listen, Dewey!” But Cokerham strode past, ignoring him. Yellow-shoes stumbled to Sarah, lifted his face. “You got it straight, haven’t you?” he asked Sarah anxiously. “Brill was hired to rope you in. And that story he told you about your right to the boy was legally sound, too. It had to be—in case you consulted another lawyer about it.”

  Sarah listened to words bubble out of Yellow-shoes. She searched his face for slyness, saw only the sour of fear. This man was directly and vulgarly a scared hireling. He poured out more words, a long river of them.

  Yellow-shoes said: “Me’n Dewey and Lida worked together to get the boy away from you. We got into your apartment. We didn’t want to do it on the street, in case you got hysterical and started yelling. He made two trips day before yesterday and I made one yesterday, trying out skeleton keys, before we found one that would fit your door. I pretended to be a cop, to get you away from the boy. Lida brought the boy here. I came here. Dewey followed you to see what you would do—whether you knew us. We figured you’d go to Brill’s office, then to the cops. You didn’t go to the police and then you went aboard that bugeye schooner and didn’t leave. Dewey got worried. There’s a lunchroom near the City Yacht Basin, and he asked there who owned the bugeye. They told him a Captain Most. Dewey finally decided to make sure you were aboard—he thought he might have missed you—and then notify the police where to find you. That’s what he did. But he waited too long, and you and Most were gone before the police got there. So he came back here. Brill went to demand money for not turning the whole story, together with the kid, over to some newspaper. But Brill didn’t get back. That worried us. So I went to different places to look for Brill, and I was looking for him around the Lineyack place when I saw his body. And then you showed up and I brought you here to give you the kid—show you we’ve done nothing criminal.”