Dead on the Level

by Nielsen, Helen

  Casey could see why. “I like it,” he said, “unfinished or not. You really caught her.”

  “Thank you, kind sir,” Maggie beamed. “A remark like that practically makes me your slave for life.”

  It was difficult for Casey to keep on thinking what he wanted to think about Phyllis Brunner with her face staring at him from the canvas that way, a faraway something in her eyes and a vagrant smile loitering about her full lips. It brought back a haunting, dreamlike sensation that didn’t go with being cold sober. He looked away abruptly.

  “And you never saw Paula Browning again?”

  “Never. But one night a few weeks after this little escapade—which, by the way, couldn’t have been much more than a couple of months ago—I was thumbing through the evening paper when an item on the society page caught my eye—”

  Maggie unwound her legs, left the couch, and crossed the room to where a highly cluttered desk was half hidden in the corner. After a few moments of apparently methodless searching, she came up with a much folded page of newsprint. “Among my souvenirs,” she said, and passed it over to Casey. Under a heading of Betrothed he read:

  Mr. and Mrs. Darius Brunner II announce the engagement of their daughter, Phyllis, to Lance Gorden, prominent young attorney of this city …

  There was more, of course, but that was enough. Casey was already preoccupied with the photograph. It was one of those boy-and-girl-on-a-staircase things with Phyllis Brunner looking as lovely as nature had made her, and Lance Gorden grinning like a toothpaste ad. Gorden was big, blond, and rugged, and Casey hated him on sight.

  “He probably plays a mean game of tennis,” he muttered.

  Maggie agreed. “And looks awfully cute in shorts.”

  Impelled by a swift resentment he didn’t bother to analyze, and wouldn’t have liked if he had, Casey flung down the clipping and came to his feet. “All right,” he snapped. “So what have we got? Where does all this leave me? I’m not interested in Phyllis Brunner’s love life. All I’m interested in is where she’s disappeared to this time, and why. Particularly why. I don’t like being framed, even with one-hundred-dollar bills!”

  Maggie seemed awfully calm about it all. “Maybe you should be interested in her love life,” she suggested.

  “What’s that?”

  “I was just wondering—” She retrieved the newspaper fragment, pressed it out flat against the desk top, and studied it thoughtfully. A quizzical frown hoisted one eyebrow and puckered her mouth.

  “What day is it?” she demanded.

  “Day?” Casey echoed. “How should I know? I forgot to write in my diary last night.”

  “No, seriously! I was just thinking, it’s not long until Thanksgiving—”

  “Fine! I hear they serve turkey in the best jails.”

  “And Thanksgiving Day was the date for the proposed wedding. Casey—”

  But now Casey was catching on. “I’m with you,” he said, stepping quickly to the desk. “I’m practically breathing down your neck.”

  “You’re positive that Phyllis Brunner asked you to marry her?”

  “I told you, I could have dreamed the whole thing.”

  “Not the five thousand dollars, you couldn’t! Don’t you see, if Phyllis Brunner had rigged up a marriage with somebody else, namely, you, she wouldn’t have to go through with this wedding to Lance Gorden.”

  Maggie looked awfully pleased with herself, but Casey was dubious. “Wouldn’t have to?” he echoed incredulously. “Are you trying to tell me that any woman could find Gorden as repulsive as I’m sure I could?”

  “Why not? That strong, healthy type stifles our mother complex. After all, wasn’t Phyllis Brunner running away from something? She ran away when she came here, but somebody caught up with her and dragged her off. How do you know that she wasn’t running just as hard yesterday afternoon?”

  “And still is?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “But from what?”

  “That,” Maggie said, “is the question.”

  Casey thought it over. All of his life he had suffered from the delusion that there must be a reason for everything, and here it was creeping in again. He tried to remember how Phyllis Brunner had acted, whether or not she seemed to be running from anything at the Cloud Room; but it was no use. The only image he could conjure up was a pair of odd-angle eyes and the scent of a tangy perfume in her hair. Still, it was an idea. At this particular stage of things, any idea was worth following through.

  “You’re a good girl, Maggie,” he said at last. “Just for that, I think I’ll let you play on my team.”

  “Oh, fine!” Maggie retorted. “I take in a drunken bum so he won’t freeze, or something, and get myself neck-deep in murder. With that mouthy bartender on the loose, how long do you expect to have a team?”

  “Everybody looks like me. And I’ll wear a disguise. Your first assignment can be to go out and buy me a nice, un-Californian hat.”

  “And then?”

  And then? I have to find out, Casey thought. I may be a murderer, a bridegroom, or a clay pigeon, or maybe all three. But I have to find out.

  “It’s too chilly for playing tennis this time of year,” he answered. “I wonder what Golden Boy does with his afternoons.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  CASEY MORROW WORE a new hat in the rain, the collar of his trench coat turned up and his chin ducked down. Had he noticed, his own counterpart hurried past on either side, but Casey felt as conspicuous as an Eskimo on the Mojave. Casey Morrow, wanted by the police. Wanted for what crimes God alone knew. It would have been easy to argue himself out of this expedition, easy to put it off until the headlines cooled; but there was no place to hide. Even Maggie’s studio was just another address for danger, and waiting could be the worst kind of hell. His stomach felt as if he’d swallowed a whirling propeller by the time he turned in at the Brunner Building archway. He might have known that Gorden would have his office close to his prospective father-in-law’s business.

  Lance Gorden’s office was reminiscent of a Hollywood set before the economy drive. The reception room was paneled in something that would probably come under the title of pickled pearwood, the carpet was like a long-uncut lawn, and beyond the windows of this seventeenth-story roost the lake and sky had blended in an exquisite shade of dirty-mop gray. Considerably more exquisite was the well-stacked blonde seated behind a glass-topped slab that served as a reception desk. More exquisite, but not a bit less chilly.

  “Mr. Gorden isn’t in. I don’t expect him in. All appointments for the day have been canceled.”

  The words rolled out of her like a taped recording, and she didn’t look mechanically inclined at all.

  “I don’t have an appointment,” Casey said. “I just want to see Mr. Gorden.”

  “Yes, I know. That’s what you all say.”

  “You all?” Casey waded through the carpet and leaned over the desk. “Do you infer that I’m one of many callers, or are you from Dixie, honeychile?”

  “I’m not, but that line is. I told you, Mr. Gorden is out.”

  “Out where?”

  For an ash-blonde, this girl had the longest, blackest eyelashes Casey had ever seen. What’s more, she knew how to use them. “I’m Mr. Gorden’s secretary, not his nursemaid,” she retorted. “He didn’t leave a schedule.”

  “Then how do you reach him if something important comes up?”

  “Such as?”

  “I told you, I want to see him.”

  Behind the long eyelashes were extremely big brown eyes, and they weren’t a bit impressed by what they were glaring at. “If you’re from one of the newspapers, you’re awfully late,” she said.

  Newspapers? Casey considered. It sounded like a pretty good pitch, so he threw it. “In addition to other gifts too obvious to mention,” he said, “I see that you’re also telepathic. Don’t tell me that my colleagues have beaten a path to your door.”

  “Hours ago.”

  Case
y sighed. “That’s what I get for being a late sleeper.”

  He fished a package of cigarettes out of his coat pocket, offered it to the blonde, blew on his fingers to warm them after her icy refusal and then, spotting a silver lighter on a low table across the room, strolled over and helped himself to a light. The table was another glass-topped slab banked by a pair of shaggy divans and a deep-framed abstract painting that could have been executed with a slingshot. Casey hadn’t seen a place so lush since the last time he bought a pair of socks in Beverly Hills.

  “The boss must be doing all right for a new boy,” he murmured.

  “He eats regularly,” the blonde remarked.

  “I suppose Brunner threw a lot of business his way.”

  “I suppose he did.”

  “Including his own?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Such as his will, for instance?”

  For the first time, a slight smile played about the blonde’s provocative mouth. “Lieutenant Johnson was here, too,” she said.

  Johnson. Casey tried the name on a memory of a man in a blue hat and a gray raincoat, and decided that it fit. So Johnson of homicide had been nosing around Lance Gorden’s office. That made things very interesting. The propeller started up in his stomach again, but he hadn’t taken a risk this big for nothing.

  “I suppose Gorden’s pretty upset about Darius Brunner’s death,” he suggested.

  “I suppose he is.”

  “Did you know him?”

  “Brunner?” The girl tapped the glass slab with a handful of laquered fingernails. “Why, naturally! We were old college chums—rowed together at Yale! Now, listen, Mr. District Attorney, I have work to do—”

  But that was something Casey definitely doubted. The blonde had been listlessly buffing her nails when he came in, and, from the looks of her desk, Gorden’s paper work could have been dispatched at any convenient post-office inkwell. But her nerves were on edge and that could be a break in the right direction. He decided to stick it out for a few questions longer, anyway.

  “Brunner’s office is in this building, and I’ve heard that secretaries sometimes swap notes on their bosses,” he ventured. “You wouldn’t happen to know Brunner’s personal secretary, would you?”

  “Secretary!”

  The girl’s enunciation had been automatic; it was too late to cover up. “Maybe all wasn’t well with the Brunners,” Casey suggested, and she laughed.

  “What publication did you say you were from?”

  “I didn’t say. Why?”

  “Only that it must be something timely, like Godey’s Lady’s Book, if you think that’s news. Everybody knows the Brunners are separated. It’s unofficial, but everybody knows.”

  You learn something every day, Casey reflected. And now the situation was getting interesting. A daughter who likes to pull disappearing acts and seems allergic to her fiancé, a secretary who may be more than just a secretary, and the weeping widow of a wayward husband. Adding them up together, he began to feel as innocent as a babe.

  “And Gorden, I suppose, would have handled the divorce,” he concluded aloud.

  “There wasn’t going to be any divorce.”

  “You’re sure of that?”

  “Positive. Mrs. Brunner doesn’t believe in it.”

  That knocked one theory into a cocked hat. To wit—that Phyllis Brunner might have resented Gorden’s position as the legal representative of one of her parents against the other. It was a pretty weak theory, anyway, and Casey gave it up without a struggle.

  “So that’s why Papa Brunner lived in an apartment in the city, and Mamma Brunner stayed at the family homestead,” he mused. “Now where, I wonder, did the fabulous missing heiress live?”

  From the way the blonde looked right past him, Casey began to wonder if he had suddenly dematerialized. “You’ve heard of her?” he prompted. “You know, the girl who was going to marry your boss—or was she?”

  “Or was she what?”

  Unless Gorden’s secretary had turned baritone, somebody else was in the room. Casey whirled about, mentally cursing that heavy carpet and those whispering doors, and then, even without the benefit of the dentifrice smile, had no trouble recognizing Lance Gorden. He was still big, blond, and rugged, although his face looked a bit pale under a somber, navy-blue Homburg, and his hands were working nervously on the handle of a wet umbrella.

  “You’re dripping on the carpet,” Casey said.

  “Who is this man?”

  “He’s another newspaper reporter, Mr. Gorden. I’ve been trying to get rid of him.”

  It was marvelous how all of the bite could leave the blonde’s voice in such a fraction of time. Casey looked at her again and saw the glow in those big brown eyes, like silver frosting on a chocolate cake. No wonder she hadn’t wanted to discuss Phyllis Brunner. The kid had it bad.

  “Have you been out to lunch, Miss Nardis?”

  “Why, no, Mr. Gorden, but it really doesn’t matter.”

  “Then I think you had better go now. It’s getting late.”

  Gorden’s tone didn’t leave any room for argument. He just stood there, glaring at Casey and dripping all over the carpet. “Good-by, Miss Nardis,” Casey said, but the blonde didn’t so much as glance back when she went out.

  “And now, sir, what were you saying when I came in?”

  Casey considered the matter for a few seconds. He still preferred Maggie’s judgment over the blonde’s, but all that physique, especially when it looked as angry as Lance Gorden was looking, did command a certain degree of respect.

  “My memory isn’t so good,” he muttered.

  “You were intimating that some estrangement existed between Miss Brunner and myself.”

  “I was?”

  “You were.”

  “I wonder why.”

  “I’m asking the questions!” Gorden snapped.

  There was an instant when Casey felt a peculiar prickling sensation along the back of his neck. Something about the way Gorden kept fingering that folded umbrella brought to mind an ugly news photo of a bloody poker. And then he threw off the sensation and managed a weak grin.

  “Guess I must have picked up some scuttlebutt,” he said. “Somewhere or other I got the idea that Miss Brunner ran out on you a few months ago and tried to join a ballet troupe.”

  He could read almost anything he wanted to in Lance Gorden’s expression—anger, surprise, guilt. One would probably be as wrong as another.

  “You’ve been badly misinformed,” Gorden said tightly. “Miss Brunner is interested in dancing, along with the other arts, but that has never been the basis of any misunderstanding between us. Furthermore, I seriously advise you not to put your implications into print.”

  “Just now I’m not so much interested in what’s fit to print,” Casey remarked, “as I am in what isn’t. Are you sure there still wasn’t any misunderstanding between Miss Brunner and yourself when she went over to the Cloud Room yesterday afternoon?”

  This time he really expected to get the umbrella across his skull, but Gorden bit his lip and held tight. Then he relaxed slowly, placed the umbrella down on the glass-topped desk, and began fingering through two layers of coats until he came up with a gold-plated cigarette case. His hands were shaking as he got a light.

  “We had our differences, of course,” he said slowly. “Engaged couples frequently do. Then, too, Miss Brunner is high-strung and inclined to worry a great deal about her father.”

  “And his secretary?”

  Lance Gorden stared coldly through a thin curtain of smoke. “I beg your pardon,” he murmured.

  “I understood that Brunner was playing around.”

  “Ridiculous!”

  “You haven’t heard? Why, the whole town’s talking!”

  “If the whole town is talking, which is certainly news to me, then it’s talking sheer nonsense! I know the Brunner family intimately—”

  “And you don’t know that they’ve separated?”r />
  “Separated? Definitely not!”

  Gorden was getting his poise back. He even flashed a brief smile. “It’s true that Mr. Brunner took an apartment here in the city a few months ago,” he added, “but he did so on the advice of his physician. The long drives to and from his country residence were taking quite a bit out of him. That’s what I meant when I said that Miss Brunner worried about her father.”

  To anyone but Casey Morrow, Gorden’s words might have been convincing. But Casey possessed an indistinct memory of a proposal of marriage and a very distinct five thousand dollars that suggested considerably more than mere concern over the state of Darius Brunner’s health. “And when Miss Brunner did all this worrying,” he prodded, “did she always head for the nearest bar?”

  “I told you that she was high-strung!”

  “And lonesome?”

  Gorden’s poise was short-lived. There was a peculiar whiteness about his mouth, and he had trouble getting his voice under control. “I’m not sure what filthy angle you’re working on,” he choked, “but it’s certainly not in good taste.”

  “Neither is murder.”

  “That’s just what I mean. If you’ve no consideration for my fiancée’s reputation, and apparently you have none, then you might at least give some thought to the feelings of her mother. This tragedy has upset Mrs. Brunner enough without having her daughter’s somewhat erratic conduct distorted for the reading pleasure of the moronic element you so obviously serve.”

  “I sure hate to upset Mrs. Brunner,” Casey retorted, “but if her darling daughter bounced a poker off papa’s head, even the morons have a right to know.”

  “Phyllis?” For a moment Gorden seemed to grow taller, and he didn’t need the growth. He stared at Casey in unbelief, then slumped down on the small secretarial chair and sat there with his downcast eyes glued to his own haggard reflection in the glass top of the desk. “My God!” he whispered hoarsely.

  “You hadn’t thought of that?”

  “No, of course not!”

  “Maybe you should consult those morons you were complaining about. They probably had it figured out hours ago.”