“Who was on the phone?” she asked.
“None of your damn business,” I said. “Don’t get nosy.”
She flushed. “You don’t have to be rude!”
I said, “Easy, Teddy. I never told you the devil didn’t deserve you. I figure I’ve still got some change coming, as far as rudeness is concerned.”
She looked up at me and drew a long, ragged breath. Her eyes were big and shiny in her tiny face. “I—I don’t understand you, Jim. I don’t understand myself. I know you’re a dreadful person, and I tell myself I hate and despise you, and then I come here and—and you’re almost human in your funny, overbearing way, and I—oh, I don’t know what I’m trying to say!” She gulped at her drink, and looked up again. “What happened? What went wrong with your plans?”
“What makes you think something went wrong?”
“Well, Mrs. Rosten—she escaped, didn’t she? She came home a mess, but alive and hopping mad.” Before I could offer an excuse or explanation, Teddy shook her head quickly. “Never mind. I don’t want to know anything about it. I don’t care, just so she’s alive. Why—why, I might be a murderess now!” She glanced at me. “It’s all right, isn’t it? You have your money, all of it. I don’t mind. I must have been insane! I deserve—I don’t mind about the money. But you will go away, won’t you—and forget I ever asked you to—It was horrible,” she breathed. “Simply horrible!”
“What was horrible?”
“All that waiting at the house, making conversation, trying to act natural, not knowing how we’d hear. I thought I’d throw up when the telephone rang, honest! And then hearing her car come up the drive like a maniac was at the wheel, or somebody who’d been—terribly hurt and was trying to get home before—before she—passed out or died.” The childish blue eyes looked up at me, remembering. “And the car screeched to a halt outside, and we heard her get out and stumble up the steps—and I remembered what you’d said about—about smashed faces and ripped out fingernails. I thought I’d die, watching that door, waiting to see what—I wouldn’t go through another minute like that for a million dollars!”
I said, “You hate Mrs. Rosten. She’s responsible for your daddy’s death. Remember?”
Teddy didn’t seem to hear. “And then she was standing there like that, like a—a tattered ghost, like something that had clawed its way out of a damp grave, and I knew if she saw my face she’d know, and I managed to spill my drink—” Her voice trailed off.
“Quick thinking,” I said. “Did it work?”
“I think so. I don’t think she suspects. I’m going back to New York in the morning,” Teddy said breathlessly. “I should never have come! I’ve made a perfect little fool of myself! Why, I really haven’t any proof at all, have I? I guess I was just, well, dramatizing. I just don’t know what I was thinking of!”
I looked down at her for a little while without speaking. It was the first clear profit of the evening’s work: I could cross one name off the list. She wasn’t acting. She honestly believed she’d just missed becoming a blood-stained criminal; which meant she believed in her ruthless accomplice, the criminal Lash Petroni. She had no suspicion she was talking to a phony. Whoever had listened to those tapes recorded in Jean’s room, it wasn’t she.
I felt kind of sorry for the little girl, standing there with her prettiness tarnished and her self-confidence destroyed. A night’s sleep and a change of clothes would fix her up in one respect, but it would take some time before she got over the shock of discovering that she wasn’t nearly as wicked as she’d thought. I was tempted to let it go at that; but this was no time for sentimentality. I couldn’t afford to let her off the hook as long as there was a possibility of her exerting useful pressure on one of the others.
I took the purse from her hands, got the money from my dressing gown pocket, and stuffed it back the way it had been. I put the purse into her hands.
She said quickly, “But I want you to have it.”
“I’ll have it,” I said. “When I’ve earned it.”
She stared at me, wide-eyed. “But you can’t—I mean, you don’t have to—I mean, I don’t want—”
“Who the hell,” I said, “cares what you want, now? You started the ball rolling, how are you going to call it back? Go to New York, go anywhere you please. You’ll know when the payoff is due. You’ll read about it in the papers. You have the dough ready. Okay?”
“No!” she gasped. “No, it’s not okay. You must be crazy!”
“You had your chance to pull out this afternoon,” I said. “Don’t talk crazy to me, doll. At least I don’t change my mind sixteen times a minute. I’ve got this thing going now, I’m looking forward to doing a job on that snooty dame, and you’re not chickening out on Lash Petroni, understand? What the hell do you think this is, anyway? You don’t turn a guy like me on and off like a lavatory spigot!” I had her by the arm, leading her towards the door. “Now get out of here—”
As I reached for the knob, it was turned from outside; I stepped back, shoving Teddy aside. The door opened, showing young Orcutt standing on the threshold. He looked at me and he looked at the kid.
“I thought,” he said quietly to her, “you might be just about ready to leave, Teddy.”
She hesitated, sniffed, and ran to him. “Oh, Billy!”
I asked, “Do you spend your life trailing her around, Billy?”
He said, “It is my ambition to do so, sir.” He caught sight of himself in the dresser mirror, straightened his tie, and put his arm around the girl. “I’m working on it, you might say.” For all of being a plump boy, he had a kind of impressive dignity.
“There’s some risk involved in a plan like that.”
“You made that quite plain the last time we met, sir. I’m afraid my performance wasn’t very noteworthy.” He paused, and went on, “Just the same, I will tell you again what I told you then. Leave her alone, Mr. Petroni. I don’t know what’s between you and I don’t care. Just stay clear away from her, hear? The next time—”
“What about next time, punk?” I asked sneeringly.
“The next time,” he said gently, “you’ll have to kill me. Come on, Teddy. My car’s downstairs. I’ll take you back to the motel.”
I watched them go out, frowning. There might be less to little Teddy Michaelis, as far as the case was concerned, than had appeared at first, but young Orcutt, with his habit of popping up at odd moments, was becoming more and more interesting.
The phone started ringing behind me. I closed the door and looked at my watch. Mrs. Rosten was calling back right on time; it had been exactly half an hour since her previous call. I shivered, for some reason, as I went to talk to her.
16
It was a large place on the water, some distance out of town. By the time I reached it, the moon was getting low and a mist was rising. My headlights sent long white fingers searching the lawns and trees ahead of me as I followed the winding drive around to the rear of the house, as instructed. There wasn’t a breath of air moving. The small sound as the house door opened seemed as loud as a gunshot.
“This way,” Mrs. Rosten called softly. I got out of the car and joined her. She said, “I apologize for the back door, but I thought you’d rather not attract any more attention than necessary.”
I said, “It couldn’t just be that you’re ashamed of your guest, lady.”
She was wearing something long and pale that whispered when she swung to face me. I couldn’t see her face clearly, but her voice was sharp, “Can’t you forget that twisted pride for one minute, Petroni? I said please over the phone, didn’t I?”
She turned away, leaving me to follow her ghostlike figure through a dark kitchen and a succession of dark rooms into a small, softly lighted, booklined study in which a fire was burning. I noted a gun rack over the fireplace. A leather sofa faced the fireplace. It looked quite comfortable and inviting. On the low table before the sofa was a silver tray holding an array of bottles, two glasses, a silver ice buc
ket, and so help me, a real honest-to-God soda-water siphon. I hadn’t seen one of those in years.
She had stopped to close the door behind me. I turned to face her. We stood like that for a moment. I pursed my lips and whistled softly.
“Not bad. That must be just about the quickest recovery in history.”
She’d got her hair up again, drawn back smoothly from her face. It had a dark, velvety luster she must have worked hard to attain in such a short time. I don’t know the technical distinction between a negligee and a peignoir, but she was wearing one of those elaborate boudoir creations, creamy white against her brown skin, high-necked and long-sleeved, lace to the waist and layers upon layers of nylon below, reaching the floor all around her.
In this day of trick pajamas and Peter Pan nighties, it’s a real treat to see an attractive woman dressed for seduction in a garment with some grace and dignity to it. It raises the whole business of sex to a higher plane, in my opinion. I assumed that seduction was what she had in mind, dressing like that—or at least that it was the idea she wished to plant in Lash Petroni’s crude mind, for reasons yet to be determined. In a way it was a relief. I hadn’t been sure she wouldn’t greet me with a shotgun, or the police.
“You have the tact of an ox, Petroni,” she said. “Never remind a woman of looking like hell, particularly when it was your fault. Come to that, you look a little better yourself.”
That was a lie. I’d seen myself in the mirror as I left the hotel room in my other Petroni suit. The man who’d looked back at me from the glass had been a real cool cat. I wouldn’t have trusted him in the same house with Whistler’s grandmother.
“It’s a wet damn bay,” I said.
“Let’s drink to that,” she said, smiling. “It’s something we can agree on, anyway. What will you have?”
I watched her sweep past and bend over the silver tray. There wasn’t any peekaboo stuff; there were no provocative displays of skin or limbs such as often go with the negligee bit. She was a great lady entertaining at home, but I couldn’t help the distracting thought—as Lash Petroni, of course—that dignified though she might look in the regal gown, she probably had on very little underneath it.
I cleared my throat and said, “Bourbon and water, lady. Hell, make it soda. I haven’t seen one of those fizz-water machines in action since I was a kid.”
“Is that so?”
She tried to sound interested, but her smile was mechanical. The polite mask slipped for just a moment. She didn’t give a damn what Petroni had or had not seen as a kid, and the idea of pretending to be fascinated by the horrible creature’s revolting childhood turned her stomach. But she caught herself, and brought my drink to me, and smiled again, doing a better job this time.
“Sit down, please,” she said, and laughed softly. “There! I said it again. Please.” She moved towards the couch. “Where did you grow up, Petroni—Jim? That’s your name, isn’t it? Jim?”
“That’s it,” I said. “Jim.”
“You may call me Robin.”
“Okay, Robin.”
She sank down on the couch, and patted the space beside her. “Please sit down. You make me nervous standing over me like that. You must be just about the tallest man I know. Did you play basketball as a boy, Jim?”
It was time to exert a bit of pressure. She couldn’t be allowed to think Petroni was a complete fool. I looked down at her deliberately, and gave her a slow, mean grin.
“Cut it out, lady. All you have to be is polite. If there’s any seducing to be done, I’ll do it.”
Sitting there, she looked up quickly. I saw hatred flame in her dark eyes, but only for an instant. Then she was laughing.
“All right,” she said, “all right, Jim. I deserved that. I underestimated you. I was only testing my weapons, if you know what I mean.”
“I know what you mean.” I sat down beside her. “Let’s not worry about my childhood. You don’t give a damn about my lousy childhood. Have you got anything on under all that glamor?” I touched the filmy stuff of her skirt, draped across the leather sofa between us.
It caught her by surprise. “Why—why, just a nightgown,” she said.
“I bet it’s real pretty,” I said. “Maybe we’ll get to it later. Right now I figure we’ve got other business than my childhood and your lingerie, but don’t give up hope.”
That brought her to her feet. Two quick steps took her to the fireplace. She reached up, and swung to face me with a double-barreled shotgun in her hands. The business-like weapon, though very handsome for a gun, went oddly with the feminine fragility of her appearance.
“You despicable creature!” she said. “You revolting animal! Just because you force me to be civil to you doesn’t mean—” She stopped.
I yawned deliberately, and gave her that mean Petroni grin again. “So,” I said, “now we know. Wet or dry, you’re still a snooty bitch, and I’m still a revolting animal, and any resemblance to nice people having a cozy drink before making beautiful music is strictly, like they say in the movies, coincidental.” I swung my feet up on the couch, and leaned back with a sigh of contentment. “Ah, that’s better. It’s been a long, busy day. Put the blaster away, honey. I figured you had one loaded and ready somewhere. It was either that or cops; you’d want some protection from a despicable creature like me.”
“Get your damn feet off my furniture!”
I yawned again. “Cut it out, sweetheart. You’ve proved you’re not a pushover. I’ve proved I’m not a pushover. Let’s stop making faces at each other, huh?”
I tasted my drink without looking at her or the gun, which wasn’t as easy as it sounds. At that range, a twelve-gauge would take my head off if she got careless with the trigger. I was relieved when she laughed shortly and put back the weapon. Nylon whispered as she moved away across the room. I turned my head at last and saw her standing at the window, looking out. After a while, I set my drink aside and went to stand behind her.
The big study window looked down on a dark harbor with a T-shaped dock. There were lights on the dock. Some sailboats were anchored or moored farther out; they seemed to be floating in mist. A power cruiser with a broad, square stern displaying twin exhausts and the name Osprey lay along the stem of the T; and a big white schooner was tied across the far end. Apparently the Freya had been brought out of hiding after the story in the paper. A lighted porthole indicated that somebody was on board. Well out beyond the harbor, an arching chain of lights hung over the mist, reaching off across the Bay.
“I hate that damn Bay Bridge,” Robin Rosten said abruptly. “We used to have a ferry, you know. It was picturesque and—well nice. They wrecked my farm, some of the best land in the state, to build that bridge right after the war. You didn’t know I was a farmer, did you, Jim?”
“No,” I said. “I didn’t know.”
“I was, though. Louis couldn’t understand that; he thinks when you have money all you ought to do is sit back and spend it. He couldn’t understand why I wanted to go around in boots, smelling like a barn. I had a beautiful dairy farm north of here; and they ran their approach highway right through the middle of it. Four lanes of concrete and a fence. They wouldn’t even let us cross it. We had to go halfway to town to use the north pasture, which wasn’t really practical. You don’t know why I’m telling you this, do you?”
“No,” I said. I put my hands on her shoulders. “But you go right ahead and tell me. I’m listening.”
“Easy,” she murmured without turning her head. “Take it very easy, Jim. I don’t like to be mauled.”
“Nobody’s mauling you,” I said. “I wouldn’t maul you.”
She laughed. “You have a very short memory.”
“That’s different,” I said.
“You’re a horrible man.”
“Sure.”
“I still haven’t got all the sand out of my hair. How did you know I wouldn’t call the police?”
“Some chances you’ve got to take. I thought you’d
rather deal, one way or another. It was a gamble.”
“What would you have done if I had called them?”
“I had a story to tell.”
“I know. I saw the way you left my shoes and purse on the beach.”
“There was this crazy society dame, see, who got drunk and tried to drown herself. Petroni just happened along in time to fish her out.”
“It’s a ridiculous story.”
“Maybe. I had answers to most of the questions, not good, but good enough. I’ve got people who’ll hire lawyers for me, as good as yours. It would have been your word against mine. And afterwards you’d have got another phone call. And if you’d sent the maid with a snotty message this time, well, the rich Mrs. Rosten might just kind of managed to bump herself off on the second try. I was laying the ground work, you might say.”
“You’re a dreadful person,” she said. “Leave my zipper alone, darling. I don’t like to be picked at.” She reached back and caught my hands and brought them forward, and leaned back against me, inside the circle of my arms, holding my hands to her breasts. “There’s a cheap thrill for you, you despicable creature,” she said without turning her head.
There wasn’t anything under my hands but Robin Rosten and some lace. It was, let’s say, a disturbing sensation, even for a man as devoted to his country’s interests, as dedicated to his mission, as that grim, implacable undercover operative, Matthew Helm.
I cleared my throat and said, “Which brings up the question, why does the aristocratic Mrs. Rosten, instead of simply having him arrested, invite a nasty hoodlum into the house to fondle her tits.”
She stiffened against me. “Don’t be coarse.” Then she laughed and relaxed. “I like you, Petroni. You’ve got a refreshing directness. And you don’t pretend to be something you aren’t.”
Here was another woman telling me I wasn’t pretending, sincerely or otherwise. I remembered something else Teddy Michaelis had said. I’d have to put the kid straight. She’d done the older woman an injustice. They weren’t spectacularly large, but they’d certainly be missed.
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