Too Hot to Hold

by Day Keene

  The intern nodded. “I’ll talk to them. Get her a gown and take her up to Ward B. I’ll fill out the report and check her again this afternoon.”

  The intern walked around and behind the bed and Linda Lou could no longer see him. She could dimly hear his lowered voice and the voices of two other men. “How is she?” one of them asked.

  “I’m Manson,” the other man said. “I believe you know Sergeant Hooper.”

  “Yes,” the intern said. “I do. Nice to see you, Hooper. Now as to the girl. I’d say nothing serious. No broken bones. No internal injuries. More shock than anything else. What happened to her?”

  “As we get the story,” Manson said, “she tried to cross Forty-second Street in the rain and ran into a truck. The driver said he just looked up and there she was.”

  “It happens every day.”

  Manson added, “With one exception. What witnesses we could find say she was running when she was hit. You know. Like she was frightened. Or maybe someone was chasing her. She say anything to you?”

  “Just that she felt all right,” the intern said.

  “Is it okay for us to talk to her now?”

  “Of course.” There was a brief scrape of feet and the intern added, “But before you do I’d appreciate any information you have on her. For my report.”

  “It’s right here,” Sergeant Hooper said. “On her Illinois driver’s license. The name is Linda Lou Larson. Clark Street Arms Hotel. Occupation model.”

  “How about money?”

  “Four hundred and forty-four dollars and sixty-five cents. Plus the return half of a New York Central round-trip ticket from Chicago.”

  Linda Lou closed her eyes again. A model. That was a laugh, though God knew she’d tried. But all the agencies said the same thing. Her measurements and proportions were perfect but she was too short. You had to be at least five feet five to work for the better agencies. Some of the smaller agencies didn’t care how tall a girl was. All the men who ran them wanted to know was how a girl looked flat on her back. But if she’d intended to go in for that sort of thing she might as well have stayed at Della’s. She was trying desperately not to think of Mr. Dix or the parcel but the conversation in the hall made it impossible.

  “Chicago, eh?” the intern asked. “What’s she doing in New York?”

  “That’s what we want to ask her,” one of the other men said.

  Linda Lou pulled the sheet up to her chin and tried to make herself even smaller than she was. When she opened her eyes, two pleasant-faced middle-aged men were standing beside the bed, smiling down on her.

  “I’m Sergeant Hooper,” one of them introduced himself. “And this is my partner Officer Manson.”

  Linda Lou acknowledged the introduction with a sweep of her eyelids. “How do you do?”

  “We’re fine,” Hooper assured her. “How about you, Miss Larson?”

  Linda Lou tried to smile. “Fine, now. And if it’s all right with you gentlemen, as soon as the nurse brings me my clothes, I’ll leave.”

  Officer Manson patted her arm. “Take it easy now, Miss. You had a nasty experience.”

  You should just know how nasty, the girl thought.

  Manson asked, “Do you mind if we ask a few questions?”

  Linda Lou tried not to look frightened. “What sort of questions?”

  “About how the accident happened.”

  “Oh. Well, I just tried to cross the street.”

  “In the middle of the block?”

  “I was in a hurry.”

  “That seems obvious.” Sergeant Hooper made a few notes in a small, black leather book. “How long have you been in New York, Miss Larson?”

  Linda Lou considered her answer. She didn’t know too much about the police, but she did know it was wise to tell them as much of the truth as possible. “Just since this morning,” she said. “I came in on the Twentieth Century from Chicago.”

  Manson smiled, “That drawl doesn’t come from Chicago.”

  “No,” Linda Lou admitted. “I was born in Florida. Near a little town on the Tamiami Trail.”

  Sergeant Hooper wrote the information in his book. “Why didn’t you take a cab from the station?”

  Linda Lou took a deep breath and lied. “I couldn’t get one.”

  “So you walked toward Fifth Avenue?”

  “That’s right.”

  “In the rain?”

  “I was wearing a raincoat.”

  “How about your baggage?”

  “I didn’t have any.”

  “You’re positive?”

  “I’m positive.”

  Officer Manson took over the questioning. “Look, Miss Larson. Believe me. We’re trying to help you. You’ve had a nasty experience and the doctor says you’re supposed to rest, but there are a few questions we have to ask you. Are you in some kind of trouble?”

  Linda Lou evaded the question. “I think you’d call it trouble to be knocked down by a truck and have all your clothes taken away and come to in a strange hospital.”

  “That’s not the kind of trouble I mean,” Manson said. “According to witnesses, you were running across the street through the rain, as fast as you could run, when you ran into that truck”

  “I was hurrying,” Linda Lou said.

  “Was someone chasing you?”

  “No.”

  “Had someone frightened you?”

  Linda Lou liked these men. They were trying to help her and she was tempted to tell them the truth. But if she did, Mr. Dix would kill her or have her killed. She felt as if she was still running, lying in the bed. Mr. Dix would probably have her killed anyway if she didn’t recover the parcel. He would never believe she’d been so frightened she’d bolted out of the cab leaving all that money behind.

  She wished now she hadn’t been so curious, but it was partly Mr. Dix’s fault. If he hadn’t warned her over and over not to open the parcel and told her a hundred men would be happy to kill her for it, she wouldn’t have been so curious to know what she was carrying. So she’d opened the parcel and there was all that money. And from then on she’d been terrified. It had been only natural when the big man had opened the door of the cab and pointed a gun at her through his trench coat pocket that she’d panicked. She hadn’t wanted to die. She hadn’t run away from Della and waited on tables in Jacksonville and worked in an office in Memphis and become a twenty-six girl in Chicago to die at nineteen.

  Manson said, “I asked you a question, Miss Larson. Had someone frightened you?”

  “No,” Linda Lou lied.

  “Then why were you running across the street against traffic?”

  The girl said the first thing that came to her mind. “I saw a cab on the other side. Or thought I did.”

  “In all that rain?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Manson tried a new line of questioning. “You hadn’t had a fight with your boy friend? You weren’t trying to get yourself killed?”

  “No.”

  “But you do have a boy friend?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  Sergeant Hooper passed the palm of his hand over his mouth, then nodded to Officer Manson. “We’re wasting our time here. That will be all for now, Miss.”

  For a moment Linda Lou was hopeful. “I can leave?”

  “In a day or two. The doctor says you seem all right but he wants to hold you for observation.”

  Linda Lou could feel a fine film of perspiration forming over her entire body. She couldn’t stay where she was. She had to get out of the hospital and try to recover the parcel as soon as she could. She protested, “But I have to leave.”

  “I’m sorry,” Sergeant Hooper said. Then he and Officer Manson disappeared again and she could hear them talking to the intern.

  “I begged to be sent to Bellevue,” the intern said. “But this is earning your shingle the hard way. So a babe gets bumped on her pretty fanny. From the report I have to fill in you’d think she had her uterus taken out.”
/>   Both officers laughed.

  “You fellows get what you wanted?” the intern asked.

  “No,” Manson said. “We didn’t. The girl is much more scared than hurt. But she’s not talking about why she’s scared.”

  “Is that important?”

  “It could be. She’s both scared and lying. According to the story she tells she was running across the street because she’d seen a cab on the far side. This is Forty-second Street, mind you. At rush hour. With it raining so hard you couldn’t see fifteen feet.”

  “You figure someone was chasing her?”

  “Could be. Anyway, I think we’ll snoop around a little.”

  “And the girl?”

  “Hold her as long as you can. Just as a precaution. We feel there’s something wrong with the set-up. We know she’s frightened of something and we’d like to find out what it is before it catches up with her.”

  “Okay. We’ll hold her as long as we can,” the intern said.

  Linda Lou continued to lie very still after the voices died away. It was the first time she’d ever been in a hospital but she was pretty sure the hospital wouldn’t let her go until the police said she could leave.

  Meanwhile the parcel of money was getting more and more lost. Anything was possible now. When his New York office phoned Mr. Dix and told him she hadn’t arrived, Mr. Dix might even think she’d stolen the money.

  She cried silently. She wished she was back in Chicago. She almost wished she was back at Della’s. Even if everything had gone right, there was still the other problem to be faced. Mr. Dix wanted her. He’d told her so in his office in so many words while he had tried to put his fat hands where all men wanted to put their hands. Linda Lou lifted the sheet and looked down at her body. But she hadn’t let him then and if she did get out of this mess she wouldn’t let him when she got back to Chicago. She hadn’t gone through all she had only to wind up in bed with a limp old man. If that had been all she’d wanted out of life she might as well have gone into the back room with fat Tom Haffey. At least he hadn’t smelled of garlic.

  The nurse helped her to sit up and slip into a short hospital gown, then swabbed a spot on the fleshy part of her arm with a piece of cotton soaked in alcohol.

  “No. Please,” Linda Lou protested, then winced as the hypodermic needle pierced her flesh.

  “Doctor’s orders,” the nurse said crisply. “Just a little something to quiet our nerves.”

  Linda Lou doubted if her nerves would ever be quiet again. She forced herself to think so she could tell Mr. Dix exactly what had happened. Perhaps, if she told him the truth, he would believe her.

  To begin with her train had been fifteen minutes late. Because she was late and frightened she hadn’t even stopped to claim her luggage. She’d gone directly to the street from the station and gotten into the first cab she could and told the driver to take her to the St. Walter Hotel.

  Two hundred or three hundred feet from the station, the driver had pulled to the curb and mumbled something about his windshield wipers not working and had gotten out to fix them.

  Frightened as she was, wondering if it were a possible trick and the driver knew what she was carrying, she had stuffed the parcel between the cushion and the back of the seat. She’d attempted to memorize the driver’s license so she could identify him if she had to.

  Then what she’d feared might happen, what Mr. Dix had warned her might happen, had happened. A big man, with the brim of his hat turned down and the collar of his coat turned up had yanked the door open and pointed his concealed gun at her.

  But had the big man really pointed a gun at her? The more she thought about it the less certain she was.

  He hadn’t pointed a gun. He’d had his hand in his coat pocket and she, already terrified, had imagined the gun. Her relief was immediate and intense.

  For the first time since she’d regained consciousness, Linda Lou allowed herself to hope. Following her line of reasoning, if the man hadn’t been a killer, if he hadn’t been after the parcel, it could still be where she’d stuffed it, or even waiting for her in the lost and found department of the taxi cab company. To an unknowing eye, it was only a gift-wrapped parcel of no particular value.

  She had to remember the name on the cab driver’s license. The first name was Mike. She was sure of that. She remembered because she’d thought at the time it was odd to combine an Irish name with an Italian one. She had it now. The last name had been Scaffidi. All she had to do was phone the lost and found department of the cab company and ask them to check Mr. Mike Scaffidi’s cab and hold the parcel they found in it for her.

  Linda Lou tried to swing her feet and legs off the high bed and partially succeeded before the nurse noticed her and returned her to her former position. “Now, now. We mustn’t excite ourselves, must we?” the nurse said. “We wouldn’t want to be put in restraints, would we?”

  Her body numb and her tongue thick from the sedative she’d been given, Linda Lou attempted to protest. “Cab,” she said distinctly. “Must call the cab—” Then the sedative taking hold, her eyelids fluttered shut and her voice trailed off into an unintelligible murmur just as the youthful intern, finished with his paper work, handed the nurse the order transferring her patient from the Emergency Room to a bed in Ward B.

  “What gives with her?” he asked the nurse.

  “She wanted to call a cab,” the nurse told him.

  FIVE

  BRADY DIDN’T KNOW one day could be so long. The click of the keys on the I.B.M. machines and the battery of typewriters around him were so many tiny mallets thudding against the back of his head. The voices of his fellow workers sounded strained and unnaturally loud.

  Brady decided to tell no one about his find, especially May. May’s sharp tongue was hinged on both edges. Once she learned he’d found the money the news would be all over their neighborhood within an hour. Brady reluctantly admitted something to himself: he’d been a fool to marry May. He’d allowed a few good home-cooked meals and a few hurried dalliances on a divan, after the children had gone to bed, to trap him into a loveless marriage. He’d been a bachelor pigeon, a sitting duck, a fugitive from a lonely hotel room. He didn’t love May. May didn’t love him. A widow with two children to support, she’d merely traded her body and what homemaking skill she possessed for a steady meal ticket

  And now there was Alice to consider.

  At the thought of Alice, Brady forgot the money and considered his fifteen-year-old stepdaughter. Alice had matured early. At fifteen she was as physically developed as she would ever be. Her breasts were larger than May’s. She had a pretty derriere and lovely thighs and she insisted on displaying them to him on any occasion when May happened to be out of the house.

  “Please,” she’d begged him. “Please. I’ve been with boys but never with a man. Please. Please, Jim. Mother’ll never know.”

  Brady patted the perspiration from his face. There was one word for Alice. Alice was a little bitch. If the situation didn’t hold all the potentialities of a family tragedy, it could be very funny. A fifteen-year-old girl who admitted she was no longer a virgin, eager to replace the amateur efforts of the boys with the mature lovemaking of her thirty-four-year-old stepfather. And he didn’t dare to tell May. Without question she’d side with her daughter and probably have him arrested for attempting to force his attentions on the child.

  “If you don’t, I’ll tell Mother you did,” Alice had said last night. “I’ll tell her you’ve been seducing me since right after you and Mother were married.”

  Brady put his elbows on his desk and sat with his head in his hands. The mess a man could make of his life, without half trying…

  Five o’clock finally came and Brady shrugged into his trench coat and tucked the brief case under his arm. He would count the money in one of the booths in the men’s washroom at Grand Central.

  Fifth Avenue was gray with dusk. It had stopped raining but the air was raw with promise of winter. As he walked south t
oward Forty-second Street, he occasionally glanced behind him. No one had been waiting when he left the building. No one was following him. No one knew what he had in his brief case.

  He was well pleased with himself until a new worry assailed him. He couldn’t take the parcel home. May had sharp eyes. She would immediately spot his bulging brief case and wonder what he was carrying. She might even open it and May was the one person in all the world whom he didn’t want to know that he’d come into money. May would have it spent before he could take off his hat and coat.

  The little things. The little things that matter.

  Brady cut down Forty-third Street to Sixth Avenue and entered a small luggage shop and bought an exact duplicate of his own cheap brief case for four dollars and eight-five cents. During the ride home on the train he could scuff it up and rub a little soot into the leather, May wouldn’t be able to tell one case from the other. And after he’d counted the money he could leave his old case with the parcel in it in one of the lockers in Grand Central. It would be perfectly safe there until he figured out some better place to keep it.

  When he reached the station he went directly to the lower level washroom. It was crowded with commuters. He had to wait for a stall, then had to get change from the attendant so he could drop a dime in the slot.

  Once inside, his anticipation was so great that his hands perspired so badly he had trouble unzipping the case. The parcel was still in it. Sitting on the toilet top he took out one sheaf of bills. They were of three denominations, twenty, fifty and one hundred dollars bills, none of them new, all of them bills that had been in use for a while and would be impossible to trace.

  He’d counted to three thousand five hundred dollars and was barely started on a second sheaf when a heavy hand rapped on the door and a man asked: “You going to stay there all night? I got a train to make.”

  “Just a minute,” Brady called.

  He went back to fingering the bills but he’d lost track of the total he’d already counted. It was either four thousand five hundred or five thousand four hundred. Either way, he’d barely begun. It would take him at least two hours to count the bills in all the sheaves. And the man outside was rapping again. This wasn’t the place or time to count the contents of the parcel.