by Medora Sale
“Good,” said Mr. Jones. “Maybe I’ll look at houses downtown later. So you meet us there in an hour, me and my wife, right?”
“I could pick you up if you like. Then you and your wife wouldn’t have to worry about driving there.” Eleanor preferred to keep her clients under her nose between houses.
“No. It’s better if we meet there. In an hour. Okay?”
Well, well, thought Eleanor. You never know when business is just going to fall into your lap, like manna from heaven. She put down the receiver and went for her book to look up the house she was supposed to be showing.
The west-end office had been a trifle sulky about the property. She had apologized for poaching; her client had seen the house and insisted on her showing it to him. “You know how they are,” she’d said guiltily.
“Yeah,” said the girl on the desk. “I know. Anyway, the house is empty now. They moved out last weekend, and it doesn’t show very well now. But they might be a bit soft on the price.” Eleanor’s heart sank. That meant everywhere there had been furniture, there would be great stains or dirt marks. It might even be one of those houses where the paint job didn’t extend to behind the big pieces, and a green room would have big pink patches where there had been chests and sideboards. She hoped they weren’t a fussy couple, after she had driven out all this way to show them the damn place. She was beginning to wish she had insisted that they deal with the west-end office. O greed.
The house was very large and rambling, with half-timbers, diamond-paned windows—the Tudor look. The grounds, she noted happily, seemed to be in good shape—neat grass, nice shrubs, a pretty tree. Good. A large tan Lincoln was parked out in front, and so she pulled into the empty driveway. Mr. Jones’ voice might be a bit rough, but his credit was apparently sound. Two men, expensively dressed in dark suits, got out of the car and walked over to her. “Mr. Jones?” she asked, holding out her hand. One of them responded with his. “Mrs. Jones didn’t come with you after all?” Damn. That meant they had changed their mind.
“She don’t really like looking at a lot of houses,” he said. “So her brother came instead. He knows what she likes.”
“Fine,” she said. Clients came in all shades of peculiarity. And even the strangest often bought houses. She pulled out the key with its big red tag on it—with the white slash across it to show that it came from the west end—and opened the door. Her heart sank even further. Huge curls of dust mingled with indescribable winter grime in the foyer and front hall.
“Nice house,” grunted Mr. Jones. “Nice and roomy.” Eleanor wondered if he had trouble with his eyes. If so, he might like this place. She conjured up the floor plan in her mind and headed confidently for the living room, trying to ignore the newspapers, torn and dirty, scattered on the floor, as she pointed out the working fireplace and the charming bay windows. Mr. Jones didn’t seem to be paying much attention to her. He opened a door at the back of the living room and said, “What’s this here?”
“That’s a study, Mr. Jones, although it could be used as a breakfast room or even a spare bedroom, since it’s close to the ground-floor washroom.” Eleanor had done her homework in that hour. She walked in past the two men toward the rear windows. “And you can see from here what a nice garden there is. Isn’t it a lovely—” Her sentence was cut off abruptly as Mr. Jones’ brother-in-law flipped her arm tightly up behind her back and clapped his other hand over her mouth.
Mr. Jones walked around in front of her and smiled. “Don’t worry, Miss Scott. Nobody’s gonna hurt you. Not now, anyways.” He looked at her appraisingly. “Nice hair.” She glared back. “I bet your boyfriend likes your hair, don’t he? No, don’t answer, I can tell he does.” He slowly pulled a smallish knife out of his pocket, held up a huge chunk of hair from the side of Eleanor’s head, and then, in one smooth gesture, hacked it off. Tears of pain started up in her eyes. “And because we’re nice guys, we’re gonna send your boyfriend some hair—like a memento, you know.” He smiled and shoved his face close to hers. “I got a piece of advice for you. You shouldn’t ought to go out with cops. Not with cops that tread on people’s toes. You tell your boyfriend. ’Bye now. Vito here will make you nice and comfortable for the time being.” He started to walk out of the room. “Stick her in the corner over there, Vito.”
Sanders looked up as Dubinsky came in from lunch. In front of him was a file folder stuffed with sheets of paper. “This just came up,” he said. “It’s the first crop of sightings from the sketch. It would have helped if bloody MacVey hadn’t been off for the weekend, though. By now this guy and his van are probably in Vancouver.” He picked up half the pile and dropped it on Dubinsky’s desk. “Might as well go through them and see if there’s anything worthwhile. Then grab Collins and get him to start sifting.”
“Anything come in this morning on the license number?”
“Are you kidding? There are hundreds of light brown vans out there, most of them have a number in them that looks like a nine, and none of them so far is owned by someone who says he likes to go out to attack women in one.” He picked up another set of reports. “When you finish those, you can look at these. Every van not more than five years old owned by a male, or a family in which there is a male between the ages of sixteen and forty-five. Have fun.” He yawned. “Did you drop the film off at the lab?”
“Yeah,” said Dubinsky. “They said it was exposed all right, and they’d develop it and get some prints over in an hour or two if it was that urgent.”
“I didn’t need them to tell me it was exposed. She’d hardly be keeping extra rolls of film in her lawyer’s safe, would she? But why didn’t she take it off and get it developed like anyone else?” He looked up again. “Yeah. They might have been that kind of picture. Funny thing for a girl to have around.”
“Depends on who’s in the picture,” said Dubinsky.
“Mm,” muttered Sanders. “Before you get started on that, I want to see if we can make any sense of this stuff.” He picked up a small slip of paper. “‘M.—3—Tues.’ and ‘G.—5—Tu.’ We found that on Friday; it was sitting by her phone and she was a very neat person, wouldn’t you say?” Dubinsky nodded. She was even neater than Sally. “So that must have been the Tuesday of the party at Marny’s or she would have thrown that out. If these numbers aren’t times, then what are they? What do you write down when you’re on the phone to someone?”
“Amounts,” said Dubinsky. “So you won’t forget them.”
“Three what? Five what?”
“Kilos?”
“That’s a hell of a lot, if we’re talking about coke. How about three grams? That’s hardly enough to worry about. Three hundred bucks worth?”
“In that case, the three could just as well stand for thirty or three hundred grams. Who’s M.? Mike?”
“Marny Huber, obviously. And G., of Course, is Grant Keswick. It makes sense. Why else would Jimmy Fielding be hanging around? So that would have made her a distributor. Which explains the large amounts of cash in her bank account and the extra twenty thousand she wanted to squirrel away somewhere.” He sighed. “Seems funny that she would be so upset at losing her job.”
“I don’t know about that. It was a good cover. Maybe she figured she’d just stay in the business until she made her pile, and wanted to have something respectable to fall back on. She should have stayed away from places like the After Hours, in that case.”
“I wonder where Mike fitted in with all this,” said Sanders, picking up the sad little note sent down by the Cobourg police. Dubinsky’s reply was interrupted by someone sticking his head in the door and throwing a letter On Sanders’ desk. It clunked as it landed.
“Mail for you,” he said. “Just arrived by special messenger. Since it was marked ‘urgent’ I thought I’d be a sweet guy and bring it up here.” He waved and disappeared.
Sanders picked it up. His name was neatly typed on the envelope al
ong with the word “urgent,” underlined in red. It was very thickly stuffed with something that felt like cloth. Inside it was something hard and lumpy as well. “Jesus,” said Dubinsky, “it’s probably a bomb.”
“Don’t be stupid,” said Sanders. “It’s too small an envelope.” He turned it over. “But I’m going to be goddamn mad if it blows up in my face.” He slowly eased up the flap and peered gingerly inside. His face suddenly went gray. “God almighty,” he breathed, and pulled out a long thick bundle of curly red hair and dropped it on his desk. Dubinsky leaned over to look at the envelope. Next he pulled out a door key, with a red Webb and MacLeod label on it, and an address on the label. Then he unfolded a piece of paper. His hands were trembling as he smoothed it down on his desk to look at it.
“Sanders,” it said briefly, “You can rescue the lady at the address on the label. And if you don’t want her to lose more than her hair, I suggest you stop meddling with Jimmy and his friends. You might hurry out there. She’s anxious to see you.” The message was typed and unsigned.
“Dubinsky,” he whispered, his voice shaking, “get the dispatcher. Send out an emergency unit to that address.” He pointed at the key. “Get someone working on where this came from. And get the car. We’re going out there now.” He took a deep breath, and then held up the key tag so Dubinsky could read the address. He dropped it in his pocket, looked back and picked up the hair, put it carefully into a clean envelope in his desk drawer, then headed for the door.
Eleanor felt as if she had been lying on the cold, dirty wood floor for at least a day. Her arms ached from being tied behind her back in an abnormal position. Her ankles were tied tightly together and then lashed to her wrists, preventing her from straightening out her legs and from attracting attention by kicking a wall. Her mouth was taped shut. The neighbourhood seemed to be absolutely deserted. Surely someone must think it odd that her car had been sitting in the driveway all this time? But then, she thought, why should they? Strangers had probably been going in and out of here for days, doing all sorts of things. In the distance she heard the rising and falling hoot of a passing ambulance. Much good that does me, she thought. It was joined, however, by the shrill scream of a police siren, which suddenly got so loud it sounded like two police sirens inside the house. The ambulance stopped hooting. The police sirens stopped screaming. She heard the pounding of fists on the door, then more pounding closer to her. There was a confused babbling of voices, then a crash of broken glass. “We’re in,” called a voice loudly, then footsteps began to move very slowly and faintly in a room behind her. She tried to make a noise, but Vito had done his job very well.
“There she is.” Above her loomed a uniformed figure, then two. “Miss Scott?” Hands quickly yanked off the tape before she could think about what they were doing, then untied the ropes on her hands and feet.
“Yes,” she said. “That’s me.” Running footsteps rang through the empty house. Sanders, following the sound of voices, came into the study and was instantly on his knees beside her.
“Are you all right?” he asked, rubbing her wrists, scarlet with rope burns, then pulling her up to her feet.
“Ouch,” she said. “Yes, I’m fine.”
Sanders drove back in grim silence with Eleanor beside him. Dubinsky was driving her car. Still thinking of bombs, Sanders had inspected the Rabbit carefully for signs of tampering. The lady next door, however, assured him the two gentlemen in the Lincoln had left the house at a brisk pace and had promptly driven away in their lovely car. “How in hell did you get yourself in that situation,” he said finally. “You went out all alone to meet someone you’d never even heard of to look at a house that isn’t even in your district. Christ! You’re lucky that’s all that happened to you.”
“I’m a real estate agent,” she snapped back. “If I only showed houses to people I knew, I’d starve. That’s the way we operate. On faith. I must say, you’re not very sympathetic.” Tears filled her eyes. “I didn’t have a very pleasant time in there.”
“I was too sick with worry to be sympathetic. I didn’t know what they had chopped off besides your hair.”
“Is that why all those cars and ambulances came? There seemed to be an awful lot of them.”
“Well—they sent out the works.”
“Where are you taking me, by the way?” she asked in a small voice as he turned off University Avenue onto Dundas.
“Where I can keep an eye on you, that’s where.”
“And my car?”
“That’s going where no one is likely to tamper with it for the time being. I don’t want to have to worry about you all the time.” He turned and glared at her for a second, then pulled the car into the garage.
Eleanor sat in his office, moving slowly from fury to starvation. “Is it too much to ask for something to eat?” she said finally. “I haven’t had any lunch, and it’s past two.”
Sanders looked up, then smiled. “Sure. I’ll send out for sandwiches.”
“Oh gee, thanks,” she replied, with heavy sarcasm. “And I have a friendly message for you from Mr. Jones and Vito.”
“Oh,” he said warily. “What’s that?”
“He told me to tell you that I shouldn’t go out with people who tread on other people’s toes. Who were those guys, anyway?”
“The whole thing had the nice clean touch of the professional. Somewhere we’re getting very close to the mob, and they’re reacting predictably.” He ruffled her hair. “But I’d rather they hadn’t got on to you.”
“Oh well,” said Eleanor. “I always wanted to know what I looked like with really short hair.”
Chapter 15
As Eleanor bit voraciously into the second half of her pastrami on rye, wondering if it was really going to tide her over until John agreed to release her and she could get a proper meal, a tech wafted in from the lab. “I hope you realize what service this is,” she said. “That ‘urgent’ had better be legit. They don’t look very urgent to me.”
“Was there anything on the film?” asked Sanders impatiently.
“Oh sure. Lots. Three shots out of a possible thirty-six were exposed, and you can almost see people in a couple of them. We did what we could. It’s Tri-X—we pushed it a little and it’s a bit grainy. You can’t get what isn’t there, you know. Whoever took them didn’t know much about light levels, I guess. So long.” She dropped the large manila envelope on the desk with a wink at Eleanor and left.
Sanders opened the envelope with great care and pulled three eight-by-ten glossy black and white prints out of it. Eleanor wiped the mustard off her fingers and pulled her chair over to get a look. The film had obviously been greatly underexposed, but it was possible to make out the faces of several people on each print. At first glance there was no apparent reason for the film to have been hidden away so carefully, but as Sanders pulled his desk light closer to look at the first enlargement, he whistled in triumph. In it they could see the smiling face of Jane Conway, dressed in something dark and hard to distinguish; leaning over her in a relaxed and affectionate way, was a tall man who looked vaguely familiar. Eleanor pointed at his face in astonishment. “It’s that politician. The one who was talking to Grant at the party. Well, well. He seems to be a good friend, doesn’t he?”
“Are you sure?” said Sanders. “Really sure?”
“Positive. Is he in the other picture?” Sanders picked up the next print and held it up to the light. “There they are again. See? She’s half turned, but you can tell from the dress and hair, sort of, that it’s her, and it’s an even better picture of—what was his name?”
“Wilcox. Paul Wilcox.”
“That’s right. But I don’t recognize the guy he’s talking to—the little guy beside him.” She pointed to someone who was apparently in earnest conversation with Mr. Wilcox.
“Ah,” said Sanders. “He’s a very interesting man to find in that group. The fam
ous Jimmy Fielding. You know—the gray Honda.”
“No wonder she hung onto these pictures,” said Eleanor. “They’re very suggestive, aren’t they? Who’s in the third one?” Sanders picked up a dark, badly focused shot in which it was just possible to make out the figures and faces of Conway and Wilcox, talking to a third man. Eleanor took the print and peered closely at it. “That’s Grant,” she said flatly. “I’m sure it is. Although you’d have a hard time proving it from this.”
“So it is,” murmured Sanders. “Isn’t that interesting. Conway, Wilcox, Fielding, and Keswick, all in cosy conversation. The government, the mob, and the arts, all together with one girl. I’m glad the head of the police commission isn’t in one of those pictures. That’s all we need.”
“What do you suppose they were all mixed up in?”
“Who knows? Contracts, government jobs, drugs—Fielding’s in drugs, but that’s not all he’s in. Maybe even murder. We’ll find out soon enough.” He paused for a second, and then, dismayed, looked at Eleanor. “My God, we have to do something about you. When does that child of yours get out of school?”
Her stomach contracted ominously. “Three-thirty. Why?”
“You are to call the school. Get someone you know—Roz Johnson—on the line. Tell her that you, and you alone, will pick up Heather, and you will be arriving soon in a patrol car. On no account are they to release her to anyone—whatever the reason—but you. Even if you call and ask them to change the arrangements. Have you got that?”
Eleanor shuddered. “Yes. Do you really think they’d—”
“They got you, didn’t they? And they’re going to get even unhappier once they figure out I’m not sitting on my ass doing nothing. Telephone.”
Sanders saw Eleanor off to pick up Heather in a patrol car, with instructions to go straight home and stay put until he called. The car and its occupants would stay with her. As soon as that was done, he turned his mind to more urgent problems. “Well,” he said to Dubinsky, “who do we pick up first?”