Assignment — Stella Marni

by Edward S. Aarons

  "I have to see him," Durell persisted. "Where can I reach him?" Markey said, "You're supposed to go back to D.C., Sam."

  "Later. After I've talked with Blossom."

  "You sound sore about something."'

  "I am. He tore my room apart here at the Carlton."

  "Jesus, no." Markey was shocked. "Sure it was Harry?"

  "He left his name with the desk clerk, and he didn't do that by accident. He wanted me to know it was he who searched my bag. Why?"

  "He doesn't like you."

  "Because I pushed him a little?"

  "I told you, he wants Stella Marni all for himself. So you pushed him and he's sore at you. You don't want to see him right now, Sam."

  "Where does he live?"

  "Sam, look..."

  "I can find out easily enough," Durell said. "It might take me all of ten minutes. I thought it might be simpler to ask a friend. Good night. Tom."

  "Now, wait, Sam."

  "Where does Blossom live?"

  Durell heard Markey's deep, resigned sigh. "Out to hell and gone in Brooklyn. But it's not the Brooklyn you're thinking of. This is down by the shore. He's got a house there — used to be his mother's — and he's always lived there, as far as I know. Hard by the marshes. I've been out there a few times — good boating and fishing. If you know where and how. Conley Road, Number Seven-eighty-six. But I tell you it's no good, Sam. He won't talk to you. He won't give you the time of day. This one is his baby and he's wrapping it up himself."

  "How come you fellows put up with a prima donna?" Durell asked.

  "Harry is all right. Hell be fine, once he gets this girl off his brain. Forget it. Sam. as a favor to me."

  "Thanks." Durell said. "Say hello to Bunky for me."

  He hung up.

  He knew that Markey was right. Forget it, steer clear of Blossom, stick to the other leads. Frank Greenwald had mentioned something called the New American Society. Look into it. And the coercion ring — two women, four men, Frank had said. Start digging under the rocks and stones. Check on that Krame fellow who has the studio. Trace back Frank's moves. Find old Albert Marni.

  He wanted to get to Stella.

  He told himself that maybe this thing wasnt for him, and he could call McFee right now and get off it and then call Deirdre and have her wait up for him in her house on the Chesapeake and he could be there in three hours for coffee and sit with her by a fire in the fireplace when the sun came up this morning over the bay, with all the solitude and intimacy of her place just for the two of them.

  He thought of Stella, remembered the crazy, hot look in Blossom's eyes when her name was mentioned, and something chilled in him and he felt fear for her, because Blossom hadn't taken her back to the district office for questioning. He had taken her someplace else. A private place. And Stella would have had to go along, like it or not, until it was too late when she discovered what Blossom might have had in mind...

  Durell quit his hotel room abruptly. There was an urgency in him now. He was sure Stella Marni had some answers for him. And he wanted to know whether she had tricked him deliberately, or if Blossom had forced her away. He believed it to be the latter, since Stella had actually gone to his hotel room; she wouldn't have gone there if she hadn't planned to keep her promise to talk to him in exchange for her escape from the studio and the murder investigation. That time had been one of tremendous stress for her, and he wanted to see her against another background, one of quiet safety. She was an enigma, with her cool, intelligent eyes and the poise of a frightened goddess ready for flight. He wanted to see her again to satisfy himself personally about her, almost as much as for any other reason he could think of.

  It took twenty minutes for the desk clerk to rent a car for him and have it delivered. Durell bought a large street map, studied it while he waited, discovered the shortest route to Conley Road, and drove there as fast as traffic permitted.

  At two o'clock in the morning, the road was a dim ribbon snaking out of the monotony of lower Brooklyn toward the shore. The streets were dark, cold, and wet. When the houses thinned out and the shimmering water appeared here and there like tentative pseudopods thrusting into the solidity of land, Durell drove the rented Chevy slower, checking house numbers. There was a stretch of three vacant blocks where no houses were in evidence; then two or three appeared; then none again. He thought he had gone too far when he saw the house ahead and knew at once that this was his objective.

  It was big and old, high and arrogant, stained gray by wind and weather, but well kept. The road came to a dead end just beyond it. There was a small channel behind the house, a dim tongue of water that reached back into a vast area of grassy marsh and finally merged with the winter sea. The air was cold and raw, smelling of salt. There were no lights in the house as he drove by and parked at the barrier at the end of the road.

  Durell turned up his coat collar as he walked back. There was a combination garage and boathouse behind the Victorian house, and he trudged across the lawn toward it, shivering in the raw November wind that swept in from the sea. He saw now that there was at least one lighted window in the house, where a slit of yellow glimmered from under a drawn blind on the north side. The boathouse door was open, yawning darkly. Blossom's car was there, between a skiff mounted on sawhorses and a small cabin cruiser up on a wheeled trailer. The car radiator was still warm. Turning, Durell walked back to the front porch of the house, found an old-fashioned iron bellpull in the door and yanked on it.

  The faint murmuring of a man's voice inside stopped abruptly.

  He rang again.

  Someone started to cry out and there came the sharp sound of a blow, then silence again; and then footsteps approached as Durell considered trying to break the door lock. The double-leafed, old-fashioned door with frosted-glass panes was suddenly yanked inward. Light streamed around Harry Blossom's gaunt figure. He was in his shirt sleeves; his long yellow hair looped down over his forehead, and there was no surprise on his thin, bony face.

  "Come in, Durell." He grinned suddenly. "I've been expecting you."

  "You might have left a note and saved my time," Durell said.

  "I knew you'd be here. Come in. It's cold out."

  Durell moved inside with a feeling of wariness. Blossom's regulation gun was in an underarm holster, and the agent looked capable of using it despite his words and manner. He looked curiously around the wide central hallway. Blossom was a bachelor, and the place was kept as tidy and as meticulously as if his mother were still alive. There was a smell of mildew in the house, but the place was free of dust, comfortably furnished in the Victorian style his parents had chosen.

  "Is Stella Marni here?" Durell asked.

  "Straight ahead. Second door to your left."

  Durell looked at Blossom's pale yellow eyes. The man breathed heavily, as if he had just finished a sudden sprint. "Go on," Blossom said. "She's all right. You don't think I'd be fool enough to hurt her, do you?"

  The room Durell entered was furnished as a small sitting room, with Queen Anne chairs, a Victorian love seat, a small Sarouk rug, heavy plush draperies on the tall windows. Sight and sound of the marsh wilderness outside were abruptly cut off. A small fire burned in a fireplace with an arched marble mantel above it. There was a smell of fear in the room.

  "Hello, Stella," he said quietly.

  She sat stiffly in one of the Queen Anne chairs near the draped windows. Her hair had ruddy glints, stolen from the crackling fire. She looked briefly at him and then at Blossom and then considered her hands, folded in her lap. There was a mark on her left cheek, as if Blossom had slapped her. Durell had no doubt that he had. Yet he was conscious of deep relief at finding her here, seeing she was safe, with nothing drastic having happened to her. He heard a small gilt and cloisonné clock ticking busily on the mantel in its mounting between two bronze cupids. It was two-thirty in the morning and there were faint violet shadows under the girl's eyes. Her green skirt and sweater modeled her long, perfect figure
in classic lines as she sat on the chair.

  "Go on, Stella," Blossom urged. "Say hello to your friend."

  "I shouldn't have believed you," she said to Durell "You tricked me. You're all — alike, aren't you?"

  "Tricked you?"

  "You asked me to wait in your room so Blossom could pick me up," she said.

  "That isn't true."

  "He said he wanted to ask a few more questions," she went on in a flat, expressionless voice. Her fingers, trembling slightly, betrayed her. "I've grown accustomed to his persecution. He said he had a lead as to where my father might be, and that's why I went with him, even when we didn't go downtown to the office where he questioned me before, even when we drove all the way out here. He gave me hope. I actually began to believe he was taking me to my father. But we came here instead."

  "Are you all right?" Durell asked. "You're not hurt?"

  She shook her head. "How could I be all right? I trusted you. I thought at last — foolishly — that someone was really going to help me."

  Durell swung back to Blossom. "If she's under arrest, she doesn't belong here. What are you up to, Harry?"

  "My own game. And I told you to stay out of it."

  "You dealt the hand and I'm in. If you think Miss Marni had anything to do with the Greenwald murder, you should have taken her downtown, not here."

  "I have my own methods." Blossom was undisturbed. "Sit down, Sam. I have no beef with you any more. I've got you boxed now, you know. You're in trouble. I warned you. You can't say I didn't give you a chance to step aside, but no, you had to keep meddling. Stella was at that studio tonight. I'm not a fool, I know she was there. Either she killed Frank Greenwald herself or she knows who did it."

  "Do you think she could slug two grown men, killing one and almost killing the other?" Durell asked.

  "She could, if they trusted her."

  "Art didn't trust her," Durell pointed out.

  "Well, she was there. She hasn't admitted it yet, but she will. When she does, then we go downtown. She's not leaving this country. She's going to be tried for murder and conspiracy." Blossom spoke with glistening eyes, as if the girl weren't there. "We're going to make a deal, Sam, because you're not a fool, either. You know what you've done, getting this girl out of the studio, sending her to hide out in your hotel room so you could have her to yourself. But I jumped ahead of you, eh? I knew it was just the kind of thing you might try to do, and I was right." Blossom's thin voice rasped and he took the gun from his holster and held it negligently. "I thought I asked you to sit down. Twice."

  "Don't throw a gun on me," Durell said.

  "Then do as I say. I mean it You're in no position to argue. You could be held on this, too — concealing a murder suspect, withholding vital evidence, misleading the law. You're out in left field, boy. You're on your own, and you're alone and in my hands."

  Durell ignored the gun and walked across the room to Stella Marni. Her hands were twisted tightly together in her lap. He drew them gently apart. "Come on, get up. Were leaving here. Blossom has no right to detain you in his own house like this. He's in trouble himself."

  The girl looked up, her green eyes enormous. Something glimmered in their wide depths, hope rising through despair at what she had thought was his betrayal of her. Her lips parted softly and she stood up fluidly, gracefully, looking beyond Durell to Blossom.

  "Hold it," Blossom said.

  His gun was pointed at them. His thin face shone with sweat. His eyes were crazy. "This girl is an important witness. She's my witness, and she stays here until she tells me the truth."

  "Do you like her company?" Durell asked quietly.

  "Maybe I do. She's a bitch, but maybe I like bitches. She thinks I'm dirt. She talks about me as if I was a member of her own damned secret police. She hates my guts, but I still like to have her around." Blossom's grin was more of a grimace. "So move away from her, Sam, or I'll have to kill you."

  "You don't mean that."

  "Try me. Move~"

  The girl trembled. "Please... don't do anything foolish. Blossom cannot hurt me any more. There isn't anything I can tell him. I haven't said anything at all to him. Don't get into trouble because of me."

  Blossom said contemptuously, "Durell is already in trouble over you, baby. Like me. I don't know what it is..." He paused and drew a deep breath. "Last chance, Sam. You're duck soup. You can't argue about it You went off the deep end, hiding her. and now you're dead meat."

  "All right," Durell said. He moved away from the girl toward the fireplace, toward Blossom, his tall figure resigned until, with a movement too fast for Blossom to check, he suddenly struck for the gun. His hand caught it, twisted it, forced the muzzle down. It went off with a shattering blast in the small, plushy room. The girl made a small screaming sound. Blossom sucked air, tried to wrench the gun up again. His eyes flicked to the girl, and there was nothing rational in his pale, flaring gaze. Durell drove his right band into the man's hard stomach, twisted the gun lower. Blossom was like a tough, triple-ply strand of cable. He bent but he did not break. He tramped on Durell's foot with his heel, and Durell smashed at his face, shouldered him back off balance. Blossom's heel caught on an ornate hassock and he stumbled back, still clinging to the gun, and pulled Durell with him when he fell to the floor.

  Blossom's right arm and gun hand were pinned flat to the Sarouk rug by Durell's weight. The gun crashed. And crashed again. Blossom was triggering it deliberately, heedless of where the slugs went. Glass broke across the room, the shards tinkling on a marble-topped table. Blossom's breath hissed. His face was white, lips skinned back, teeth glistening. He might have been grinning.

  "This is an order," he gasped. "My case, my right — stop resisting — or I'll make — charges."

  Durell suddenly snapped Blossom's wrist back and the gun shot from Blossom's fingers. At the same moment, Blossom succeeded in flexing a knee and kicking Durell across the room. He caught at the marble-topped table, his eyes seeking the gun, and he rolled toward it. Blossom came on him in a wild leap, arms outstretched. He was wide open for that instant. Durell checked his jump for the gun, spun, and swung hard. Blossom's momentum doubled the impact of the blow, and he dropped as if he had been poleaxed.

  Durell straightened, breathing deeply. Blossom did not move. He walked to the table, aware of the girl pressed against the nearby wall, her eyes big with fear, and picked up the gun. Then he returned to Blossom and rolled him over so his face was not pressed into the rug. No serious damage had been done. The house was isolated, and the shots Blossom had fired hadn't alarmed anyone, if indeed they had been heard at all outside.

  The fire on the marble hearth crackled quietly. It made copper highlights in Stella Marni's blonde hair, glistened in the shine of her eyes, made her parted lips look wet and soft.

  "Is he all right?" she whispered.

  "He'll come to in about ten minutes."

  "He will be wild. He will never forgive you. Hell make you pay and pay. You will lose your job. Why did you do it?" "

  "I want to talk to you," Durell said.

  "Yes. Oh. yes. But not here."

  "Let's go, then," he said.

  He found her coat hanging on a walnut clothes tree in the center hallway and held it for her when she shrugged into it. She was shivering. The marks on her face where Blossom had slapped her were more clearly defined. He looked back at Blossom on the floor of the little sitting room. Blossom's fingers were scratching feebly at the silky rug. He emptied Blossom's gun, pocketing the cartridges, and left the gun on a small table in the hallway before he followed the girl outside.

  Chapter Seven

  He drove east in the rented car, skirting a wide expanse of desolate salt-water marsh. A few lights from developments to his left winked feebly in the early-morning gloom, but they were more than a mile away, beyond the swamp and slough that had so far discouraged even the swarming, antlike contractors who had checkered this area of the island with their monstrous rows of imperson
al, identical, assembly-line houses.

  He was acutely conscious of the girl huddled on the seat beside him. He sensed her delicate perfume, the quiet perfection of her face and body, and he understood Blossom a little better.

  "Where are we going now?" she asked in a small voice.

  "I don't know yet."

  "You took a terrible risk for me, didn't you? After all, Blossom is an important law officer. I understand you are, too, but his orders are to be obeyed. Will you be in trouble now, because of me?"

  "Yes," he said. "Some trouble. A barrel of it."

  "I'm sorry. I mean, I know what trouble is," she said quietly, "and I keep thinking about poor Frank, and why he died. Because he was in love with me, I mean." Her Budapest accent was just a lacing of huskiness in her carefully chosen words. "I don't want to bring unhappiness to anyone. That is why I must go back home. If I stay here against their orders, others will suffer, too. I thought it would be best and simplest if I just said I wanted to go home, when the Senator asked me. But it doesn't work out that way, and now I do not know what to do. I feel as if you have taken matters out of my hands."

  "Yes."

  "Will Blossom set the police after you?" she asked.

  Durell considered it for a moment. "I don't think so. He stepped out of bounds himself, taking you to his own house instead of to the office, as he should have done. Of course, he can claim reasons for it, but he might find his explanation embarrassing. However, he might hunt for us on his own account. He's sure to do that."

  She shivered. "He frightens me. I have never met such a man as he. In some ways, Mr. Durell, he is a little like you. He is so efficient. I mean, he knows precisely what he is doing, and he does not waste a single word or movement. But the way he feels about me, it is as if I were unclean, as if I should bathe every time he touches me. And he always touches me. She paused. "I suppose X explain all this very badly."

  "Has he ever said he's in love with you?"