by Zelda Popkin
"We built a business, Rockey and I. A business, did I say? An empire. My dear, you have no idea! The district attorney has no idea! My brain, my organizing ability. Rockey? Just a front and a gat.
"But my hand never lost its skill. That back-hand of Phyllis' was so easy. Those letters did confuse you, didn't they? I knew they would. And a short drive on a pleasant autumn evening to mail them. That was a piece of business! Forgive me for bragging a little bit. After all, there's no fun in being clever if nobody knows about it. You feel that way, too, don't you, my dear?
"Phyllis had written me. Once or twice. Some sentimental drool. She had become a bore. Ah me." His sigh had a mocking gayety. "I've always had a fatal fascination for women. I'll wager even you could have begun to like me just a little bit. Well, see who's here." The wheels whirred faster. "We've only been doing sixty. We'll show them seventy, eighty, ninety - anything they like."
The wail of sirens, the putt-putt of straining motors came faintly to her ears, the sounds of motorcycle pursuit. Her heart leaped in hope.
Saxon Rorke hunched over his wheel. "The sons of bitches!" he exploded. "We'll show 'em speed!"
On the floor Mary Carner prayed: "Oh dear God, let them catch us. Oh dear God, send us a blowout."
The tires screeched around a curve. And another. And another. The heavy car lurched drunkenly in a skid. Rorke swung the wheel and cursed as he righted the car. The pursuing motors were a faint throb in the far distance, growing fainter, and then louder, nearer again, on a level stretch. And then again the wide, crazy swirl on a curve, a scrunch over gravel, and thunder, splitting ear-drums and metal and earth and sky.
Mary Carner woke to the vinegar and mouse-droppings stench of ether, the touch of a smooth, cool finger on her wrist, the rustle of a starched skirt, and Chris Whittaker's voice saying: "And you promised to watch out for her."
She forced her eyelids open. Why, it was Chris out there in the fog. And there was Johnny Reese next to him, looking solemn. What were they doing here?
Sensation groped back to the sway of a car, to the vibration of motors under her head, the slither of wheels. This place stood still. This was a room. There was a light near her head. It must be night.
"Where am I?"
"Hush dear. You're all right now." That was a nurse answering.
"Am I in a hospital?" Her tongue felt stiff, her mouth parched. She was conscious of weights on her legs, of stiffness in her arms, of a throbbing ache in her head, of pin jabs of pain in her face.
"Yes, dear. You're going to be all right. Only you mustn't talk."
She tried to raise her head. That was Chris' face. But it was turning like a windmill.
The nurse pressed her head gently back to the bed.
"You'll have to lie very quiet. You gentlemen must leave now. She'll be all right."
Chris' voice said: "Good night, darling. I'll be here in the morning." And after him Johnny Reese: "You're a swell kid." And her own voice, wailing weakly: "Can't I have a drink of water?"
And then days and nights of pain and drugged sleep and nurses and doctors rustling back and forth and bandages replaced and stitches pulled and casts removed and weights and pulleys changed and tasteless, soggy food on trays and flowers in brown umbrella stands and Chris and Johnny Reese on opposite sides of the bed, holding her hands, stroking her fingers, looking at her pityingly and glaring at one another. And Sophie, and the Inspector, and Laverne Sullivan and Terry Cayle and the rest of the "girls," anxious-eyed ghosts, dimly seen through the mists of pain. And nobody telling her anything at all except: "There, there, darling. You're coming along fine."
Hours passing. Days passing. Weeks passing. And herself strangely disinterested in anything save surcease of suffering. A whole world telescoped into a hospital room.
But at long last, a wheel chair and her own silk negligee, replacing hospital shrouds, and May sunshine in a colorful solarium on the roof and the nurse retreating, leaving Johnny Reese in the chair beside her.
"This is something else again. You look human now."
"Have I any scars, Johnny?"
"Nope. You're not in my class. They did a fancy job on you."
"I was badly cut up, wasn't I?"
"Like hamburger. But you should have seen the other guys."
"Rorke?"
"Yep. Rorke. And his yellow pal. They saved the state lot of dough. Both of them. You don't want the details, do you? They're too gory."
She shuddered and was silent, threading her white fingers.
Johnny Reese went on: "Rorke was dead when the state police got there. Those Jersey cops. They don't hold with speeding. No matter how low the guy's license number is. God bless 'em. The speedometer froze at a hundred when it hit the tree - 'case anybody ever ask you how fast you were riding. They did you a favor, those babies did. Wrapping you in a robe. And Rorke had shut the ignition. No fire. Only a smack. The Chinaman was still breathing. Did you know he was more than just a handy man around Rorke's place? A record and a racket all his own. The big shots gave him a slice of the business. A special lottery game among his own countrymen. He'd done time for it. That's why we was so careful to wear gloves."
Mary said: "I realized it must have been Li in MacKinoy's apartment when Weinstein mentioned the horn-rimmed glasses and the pointed yellowish chin."
"And I never tumbled. Me that was bragging about a fly-paper memory. Me thinking Gene Vigo and wondering did he wear a disguise. I'm a dope."
She shook her head. "No, I was the dope. Johnny I was terribly stupid. It was my fault, all my fault. Flo Gordon needn't have died, if I hadn't been so stupid."
Johnny Reese's eyes opened wide. "You stupid! You were so much smarter than the rest of us. The Inspector swears he's going to get right down on his knees and apologize. And you know how he hates getting down."
Her lips smiled but her eyes were grave. "I killed Flo Gordon. I should have realized sooner. I was in Rorke's apartment when MacKinoy called him. I heard Li leave the place by the terrace. But I never suspected."
"Well, you trusted the guy. You weren't the only one."
"Even Phyllis did. He was so disarming, friendly. Remember his dogs? And you saying a man who liked dogs was a person you could trust? Even Miss Franzine's dog wagged its tail at him. He was very clever, Johnny. The cleverest man I ever knew. How carefully he worked out his alibis! He called Lyman Knight's house to say that Phyllis hadn't kept her appointment. I was stupid too. When I realized Phyllis hadn't written down her date with him - and a person as meticulous as Phyllis would have written down that date as well as all her others that day. But I didn't think it was important. Not at first. Not till the other things began to pile up. After all, it was Rorke who insisted upon reporting her disappearance to the police. That took suspicion from him right away. If he'd had any guilt in the matter, he'd surely not be anxious to have the crime discovered. He wanted us to think that and we did. Ten days had passed, and no one had found the body and not a soul had squealed. He felt that he was safe, had the situation well under control. MacKinoy wouldn't talk, because MacKinoy was too deeply involved with him and Nardello and the rackets. MacKinoy couldn't squeal without ruining himself. Nardello and Gordon could be trusted. They were all old hands at keeping their mouths shut. Vigo probably didn't know. Why should they have told him? And then, when Rorke realized that the police had no notion at all of where to look for Phyllis, he threw us all completely off the track by forging those two letters. He wished the police to assume, if the body was ever found, that she had been killed after Nardello and Flo Gordon were in jail, so that the crime could not be traced back to the Nardello gang, and through them to him."
"We did him the favor. We assumed it, all right."
"And when MacKinoy killed himself, we immediately assumed MacKinoy had positively committed the murder. Bullets never lie, you know."
"That was the Inspector. I didn't swallow that hook and sinker."
"Oh no? I suppose you thought that the poor,
demented father had murdered his daughter?"
"I did not." Johnny reddened with indignation. "As a matter of fact, I had another person in mind all the time."
"Peterson?"
"Nope, he was your baby. I thought of Struthers. When I realized he was Clarkson, and a guy with a record, who had ducked out of sight without leaving a trace, I was sure he was our man if we could locate him. We found him all right. He'd moved to Miami. He had a wife and kids to support. And he was getting pretty darned tired of having his past mistakes kicking him down whenever he started to get on his feet. And he was a little scared, too."
"Scared . . ." Mary said. "I never saw so many frightened people. That Sophie, for one. Is she all right, Johnny?"
"She's O.K. We found her a job. She says as soon as you get home, she's quitting her place to take care of you." He grinned. "Even if you haven't got a job and can't afford to pay her. She says you were wonderful to her. You fed her, consoled her, and even took her to an elegant hotel to sleep."
"She did us a great service. She told me definitely that Saxon Rorke was the man we were after. She had spoken to Phyllis of some man who had been associated with the horrors she'd been through. She had seen his face in the newsreels of the Nardello arrest. Phyllis was sick at the time Nardello was arrested, was out of touch with things. And when Sophie told her about the motion picture, she went to see it. And she saw Saxon Rorke, the man she was head over heels in love with."
"Y'remember," Johnny reminded her, "that when we first went up to Rorke's place, one of the reporters mentioned that he thought he'd seen Rorke in court that day and the wise baby told us that cock and bull story about the summons for letting the dogs run loose in the park, and like dopes, we swallowed that one too. He sure had us buffaloed. He never missed a trick."
"Except Peterson. Y'know, Rorke never even saw Peterson. He was completely surprised by the mention of Peterson's name."
"That makes it even," Johnny answered. "Because Peterson was just as surprised when he heard about Rorke."
"You located him?"
"We did. In Gothenburg. That's a city in Sweden. The place he came from. And here's the pay-off. He ducked out because he was sure he had killed Phyllis."
"He killed Phyllis?"
"So he thought. Y'see, it was this way: He was a nervous old coot. And he owned the property at fifty-nine. And he was trying to sell it for a good price. And then the Gordon woman starts her place next door and he begins to get the jitters. Is scared the value of his property is going to go down with neighbors like that. (He put this all in the deposition he made over in Sweden.) And he complains to Miss Knight and asks her to do something about it. And Miss Knight promises him she's going to see that the police close up the place and she does. She nags them into pulling a raid, but she don't know when exactly it's going to be pulled, see. But on the day Phyllis disappeared, Peterson comes to her office with more news."
"I remember," Mary interrupted. "He phoned her frantically several times that day and finally got to see her."
"That's right. Well, the news he has for her is that a friend of his, a super in the apartment house in back, has told him he thinks he's seen some people going in the back door of fifty-nine. Peterson's terribly excited. He's positive something terrible's going to happen to his house. He asks her to go with him and see. She's busy that day and she makes a date to meet him at the place in the evening. She wants to take an officer along, but he says no: it ain't necessary because he has a gun - that little Fourth of July cannon, that's what he was bragging about - and anyway it's his house and why should he be afraid in his own house? He takes a flashlight. And he opens the areaway door. And as they go through the basement, she's in front of him, see, they see a light in the kitchen, and they hear voices. And he gets nervous and trips over his own feet and his eye glasses fall off and then he can't see very well what's going on. All he sees is there's a table and people around it. And one of them's a woman. And he hears Miss Knight scream: 'Saxon' and a man with a foreign voice - that was probably Rockey, although Rockey still says no - say: 'Who's your girl friend?' And a man gets up from the table, and says: 'Well, Phyllis. Come and join us. Have a drink.' But Miss Knight screams: 'You scoundrel, that's who you are!' And the big man says: 'But you'll never tell anyone.' And he raises his hand, with a gun in it. And that second the girl pushes back against Peterson, and he drops the flashlight, and Peterson's gun goes off in his hand. And the girl falls down, and Peterson is sure he killed her with his pistol and he runs like hell and blazes. And he sees a police car and the wagon on the corner and he's sure they're coming for him. And he ducks into the subway and down to the ferry and packs his duds and gives away his cat, and beats it like the hard times was chasing him, back to Sweden."
"And for now we have it all," Mary said. She sat in silence for a few moments, watching the lengthening shadows on the solarium floor. Then she said: "The ghosts have come back, to tell us about the feast of death. And in my purse there's a list of words that tell the story too. Out of the memory, the subconscious mind of a girl who saw and heard what happened - Flo Gordon's Bessie Jackson. That was the thing I went to the prison for, and the court - to search the records of the raid, hoping one of those girls had dropped a hint in her testimony or in a quiet talk with the psychologist that would bind Rorke to the crime. Some eyewitness evidence. More than surmise. I felt from the beginning that the people in the basement at fifty-nine had had some connection with the house next door and that there would be some way we might trace those women. When I learned that Flo Gordon had been a cigar-smoker, I was certain it was she who had left the lipstick stained butt on the table. And she had seen what happened there and I hoped that if she knew, some others of that menage knew too."
"But when did you first hit on Rorke?" Johnny Reese asked, puzzled.
"I was worried about him when I realized Phyllis hadn't written down the date at the Rushmore Grill. But I never really tumbled until Sophie directed me to that newsreel and pointed out Rorke as a man directly connected with Flo Gordon and the Nardello rackets. And when Weinstein told us about the man with the hornrimmed glasses and the yellow chin at MacKinoy's door, the whole picture took shape."
"But what I don't understand is why you didn't tip us off. Didn't you trust me?"
"Of course I did. Petulance. Ego. Or possibly I didn't believe my own knowledge. I had to he sure. And I thought if I could get a witness, if I could get any direct evidence…I got it, Johnny." Her face brightened. "The afternoon after I left you, I went first to a newspaper office, to look into their files on both Nardello and Saxon Rorke, to see whether at any time, any newspaper had mentioned either man's birthplace. It was necessary to know about them - about Rorke especially - his background, how he had come to be the big shot he was. I found to my amazement that at one time or another in interviews each one had mentioned the same Massachusetts town as a place of origin. I sent a wire to the police chief there. Rorke found the answer under the door when he came to my apartment to look for me. No, I wasn't there. Sophie and I had ducked out. You see, I had found something else that afternoon. I had seen Rorke's car, and there was white sand on its tires and floor and freshly washed stains on the upholstery of the front seat, and Ramon Allones cigars in the compartment. And when I heard that he was coming to my place that night, I grabbed poor, bewildered Sophie and ducked out. I was frightened. I was scared pink when I wrote those letters to you and Chris."
"You femmes are all alike," Johnny scoffed. "You go looking for trouble - and when you find it you lose your nerve."
She smiled at him: "I had delusions of grandeur, I guess."
Behind her, Chris Whittaker's voice said: "That's my line. I said it first."
The detectives turned together. "Oh Chris, but I never believed it when you said it."
Chris Whittaker bent over her chair, put an arm around her shoulder, kissed her. "Have to break every bone in your body to convince you. I never saw such a woman. 'Sfunny, Reese, she's s
tubborn as all hell, and conceited and sassy and sometimes just plain dumb, but good gawsh, how I love her."
"Me too," said Johnny Reese.
"Oh yeh? I got here first, youngster. You scram. I'm visiting my girl."
Johnny Reese stood up. He grinned broadly. He extended his hand to Mary. "Well, so long, sister," he said. "It was nice knowing you. Any time you have a fight with the store dick, call me up. I'll take you to the movies."