Odor of Violets

by Baynard Kendrick

  The girl laughed and lowered her lids inquisitively. “Monsieur happens to be Madame,” she said, “and Madame happens to be away. It’s after hours except for customers with late appointments. Suppose you stop in tomorrow.”

  Spud gave an embarrassed smile and took another glance at the woman visible through the door.

  “My name’s Rogers,” he said. “Perhaps you can help me. I just wanted to know if my wife’s still here. I was to meet her sometime after eight, but I was delayed.”

  “What Rogers?” asked the girl.

  “Stephen.” Spud clutched at the first name which came to his mind. “I believe Mrs. Rogers comes here regularly.”

  “There are three customers inside.” The girl stood up. “Wait just a minute while I see.”

  She went toward the booths and closed the door behind her, shutting them off from view.

  Spud walked swiftly over to the cashier’s cage and peered through the bars, taking in a telephone switchboard, a safe, a glass-topped desk, and a couple of files. He left the window and sat down in a chair, feeling that for once the Captain must be wrong. There was decidedly nothing suspicious, nothing out of the way, about the House of Bonnée. New York was filled with such outfits, catering to the city’s women from the Bronx to the Battery. He stood up again as the girl came back through the door.

  “Your wife’s almost ready,” she said. “Won’t you sit down and make yourself at home? We carry a unique line in the House of Bonnée. I’ve been trying to interest Mrs. Rogers in this particular brand of perfume.”

  She took a bottle from the steplike shelves and adroitly broke the seal. Leaning over Spud, she smiled, removed the stopper, and held it to his nose. It was pungent, and strong with a sweet acidity.

  “It’s twenty dollars an ounce,” said the girl, “and the newest thing in our line. It’s called Black Violets.”

  “I’m sorry.” Spud reached up and pushed the bottle away. “I wouldn’t care if it cost seventy-five dollars a dram—it doesn’t appeal to me.”

  “You get used to it in time.” The girl stoppered the bottle and returned it to the shelf.

  Spud reached into his pocket for a cigarette, took it out, and searched for a match. It was very peculiar how heavy the match seemed to be. He closed both hands tightly about it, trying to keep it from falling to the floor. With one last effort, before his hands dropped inertly beside him, he grasped the cigarette and broke it in two.

  2

  Cappo shut off the engine of the Packard at twenty minutes past nine. He had a streak of frugality when it came to spending the Captain’s money on the car. The past thirty minutes had become ones of agony at the thought of high-test gasoline being uselessly burned. Twenty minutes more dragged by lingeringly before he once more started the motor. A short distance down the block a machine moved away, leaving a vacant parking space. Cappo moved the Packard on down until it was nearly opposite the Tanner Building and backed it in. Not until then was he able to distinguish the lettering on the windows of the House of Bonnée. Again he put out the headlights and shut off the motor.

  Spud had been gone an unconscionably long time, but he had given Cappo no orders to investigate or interfere.

  The man in the Protective Agency uniform came back again. Cappo shivered under the warmth of his chauffeur’s driving coat and turned away.

  Upstairs in the Tanner Building, the lights went out in the windows of the House of Bonnée.

  Cold air struck in sharply at the Negro. He twisted around with relief, thinking that Spud had returned, and found the blue-uniformed watchman holding open the door of the car.

  “Waiting for someone?” the watchman asked.

  “Yessah,” said Cappo.

  The man got in beside him and closed the door. “You’ve been here an awful long time. Who are you waiting for?”

  “The gentleman I drive for.”

  “Oh,” said the watchman. “Who’s he?”

  “He’s my employer,” Cappo told him steadily. “The man I work for.”

  “You said that before. What’s his name?”

  “That’s his business. I don’t see that it means anything to you.”

  “Where did he go?” the watchman asked sharply. “You sound suspicious to me.”

  “I don’t care how I sound. It’s his business where he went. I don’t even know.”

  “Oh, you don’t?” The watchman’s voice rang with quick unfriendliness. “I don’t suppose you know anything about a lot of robberies that’ve been going on around here either.”

  “Nothing,” said Cappo.

  “I think we’ll see about that. Start your car, you’re coming along with me.”

  “What’s your authority?”

  “This,” said the watchman. He clicked the safety off the .45 automatic on his knee.

  3

  “You’ll have to lie quiet. You’ve been very ill.” The woman in the nurse’s uniform adjusted the bed lamp so that she sat in the shadow.

  Spud moved his head wearily on the pillow, fighting a nausea that clutched at his stomach threateningly. His senses were numb and dull, yet beating against his brain with the rhythmic blows of a woodsman’s ax was the thought that somewhere in the not so distant past he had rushed headlong into a trap with all the rash precipitation of an arrant fool.

  He opened his eyes and gazed achingly at a wall. The room he was in was windowless and quiet except for the woman’s breathing and the monotonous hum of a ventilating fan heard through a grille in one corner. Rough cloth was against his skin. He glanced down at his chest. It took him several seconds to realize that he was in a single bed clad only in a hospital nightgown.

  Memory began to trickle back slowly. Cappo, Fifty-seventh Street, the girl with the perfume bottle, and the House of Bonnée. Then the tiny stream of thoughts rose and grew until he felt himself drowning in bitterness as he remembered Maclain.

  The Captain trusted him as he trusted no other living man. He had given him a job to do, a simple job, and Spud Savage had bungled it by showing no more foresight than a ten-year-old boy. The mechanism of the Ediphone seemed to be grinding against his nerves, mockingly repeating the message from Duncan Maclain: —

  “Be cautious, because it’s dangerous as hell! . . . I’ve become the quarry now. If you find anything suspicious, get in touch with Colonel Gray. Tell him to keep an eye on me.”

  No one knew the Captain’s methods better than Spud Savage. The Captain was about to walk deliberately into a situation where a single slip meant death. He was pinning his faith on Spud and Colonel Gray, and Spud had failed.

  He tried to move his arm and found that the sheets were tucked in tightly about him. Then a stab of hope cut into the pressure of his self-recrimination, bringing the painful relief of a surgeon’s lance.

  He had thought of Cappo. Cappo knew where he had gone, and Cappo was free. Spud relaxed with a lethargy even more foreboding than before. An organization which struck with such surety and finesse in a game played for nations would not have overlooked Cappo.

  One single chance remained—a chance that he had not been unconscious too long, and could find some desperate means of getting away. Even if he failed to escape alive, he must get the Captain’s message to G-2.

  He lay quiescent, certain that the woman’s eyes were looking at him all the time. Moving the fingers of his right hand as unobtrusively as possible, he began to work the covers free. The sheet was nearly untucked at the side of the bed when a key turned in the door. Spud drew a long breath, held it a few seconds, and released it cautiously.

  A powerful, thick-set man in interne’s white came into the room. He wore an operating mask which almost entirely hid his face. Spud watched him from under lowered lids as he carefully locked the door and pocketed the key.

  “He’s restless,” said the woman in the nurse’s uniform.

  “I was afraid of that.” The doctor spoke throatily. “I’d better give him an injection which will help him sleep until dawn.�
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  Spud felt a constriction around his heart when he learned it was not yet day. There might still be time to save Maclain if he acted immediately.

  The doctor came forward, stood beside the bed for some minutes looking down at Spud, then lowered the sheets a trifle and bared Spud’s arm. The nurse left her chair to stand on the other side of the bed. Spud drew up his knees, forming a tent of the bedclothes. At the same instant, the table lamp gleamed on a hypodermic in the doctor’s hand.

  Once Spud Savage was aroused, few men living could move with such unexpected agility. The doctor took a pinch of Spud’s flesh between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand and leaned over to drive the hypodermic home. As he did so, Spud’s arms snaked from under the covers, reached up with simian strength to grasp the doctor’s head, and smashed the masked face down with crushing force against an upraised knee.

  Blood stained the surgeon’s face, and the hypodermic clattered to the floor. The whipcord fingers of Spud’s right hand fastened on the doctor’s throat with a strangler’s grip, searching for the carotid artery. With his left hand, Spud jerked the covers free and threw them over the doctor’s head. He left the bed like a dementia praecox case fighting for freedom and landed on top of the physician on the floor.

  The doctor cried out hoarsely from beneath the muzzling covers, circled Spud’s arm with muscular hands made doubly strong by fear, and vainly tried to tear the throttling fingers free.

  Lights went up in the room. Spud’s yellow eyes glared up at the nurse standing above them with an automatic in her hand. His lips curled back in a grin which held a tinge of insanity.

  The woman fired just as Spud whirled underneath the doctor, lifting the hundred and ninety pounds two feet clear of the floor. He heard the shot as the bullet plowed up splinters three inches from his ear. He hoisted his feet with a wrestler’s trick, planted them in the doctor’s stomach, and heaved the struggling man free. The hurtling body smashed into the nurse, slamming her against the wall.

  Spud came to his feet like a rubber ball. Before the woman could raise the gun again, he hooked a left to her jaw. She sagged down unconscious to the floor. Spud snatched the automatic from her limp fingers and cracked the butt down twice on the doctor’s head. He ripped the covers from the helpless form, undid the belt, and jerked the interne’s trousers free, slipping them on over his own bare legs and tucking in the hospital gown. The doctor’s white coat followed. He took the key from the coat pocket and unlocked the door.

  He pushed the switch, turning off the ceiling lights. Again the room was dim, lit only by the table lamp. Spud turned the knob and opened the door cautiously. He stuck out his head, reconnoitering the dimness of a narrow uncarpeted hall.

  From the ventilator up in the corner of the room a gun popped with no more noise than a champagne cork being drawn. With a bullet in his back Spud sank slowly to his knees just as he stepped through the door.

  CHAPTER XXII

  1

  OFFICERS SHERIDAN and Dietz of the Connecticut State Police had just turned their patrol car halfway between Bridgeport and the New York State line on the Merritt Parkway and headed north again when they got the call: —

  “Watch out for black convertible coupé,” the radio announcer droned into the darkness of their car. “New York license N-0002. Better block the tollhouse if necessary to stop this car. Driver must be drunk. Outran patrol car at entrance to Parkway doing better than ninety-two.”

  “Holy mackerel!” said Trooper Dietz. “Maybe if we step on it and head her toward New York City, we’ll be in time to see him go by. He’d outrun this crate of ours if he’s doing seventy-two. The last time I got her up to sixty-eight, she nearly threw a wheel.”

  “What are you grousing about?” asked Sheridan. “We can always fire our guns at him and toot the siren.”

  “Yes—if we see him,” said Dietz. “If he got up to ninety-two at the entrance to the Parkway, by the time he gets here he’ll be running a temperature of a hundred and four.”

  He whirled the patrol car skillfully through a cutoff and backed it into a siding to wait for the prey.

  “Maybe it’s Barney Oldfield trying out a new set of tires he wants to give his kids for Christmas,” Sheridan asserted with a sigh. “You remember last week when that guy—”

  He broke off. Far up the road they heard a roar.

  “Step on it,” he told Dietz. “You wouldn’t want New York State to pick up such a fine.”

  “Hell,” said Dietz, “if I have to run him across the state line, he’ll be so far ahead the New York cops’ll never see him, and they’ll probably pinch me.”

  He shot the patrol car out onto the Parkway with the siren pulled wide. The band of light that flashed before his eyes followed by a streak of black gave him the impression that somebody had suddenly drawn a paintbrush along the sky. Dietz coughed uneasily and jammed the accelerator to the floor.

  “Don’t try to pass him,” Sheridan advised facetiously. “It’d be dangerous at this speed, particularly if he’s drunk.”

  “I don’t think he’s drunk. I think he’s had a shot and he’s trying to fly.”

  “Look out,” Sheridan warned. A sedan was pulled up at the side of the road.

  “He missed her,” said Dietz as they flashed by. A distraught lady leaned from the automobile window waving her hands hysterically.

  Warning signs reading “Slow” popped up and were gone. Ahead, the yellow lights of the tollhouse rushed to meet them. Dietz heaved a sigh of relief. Parked in wedge formation beyond the tollhouse, four other state cars were blocking the road efficiently.

  Sheridan wiped sweat from his forehead and climbed out as Dietz braked down beside the New York coupé. A man in a felt slouch hat and a camel-hair coat was sitting behind the wheel.

  He looked at Sheridan as though the officer were a bad oyster and said, “Good God! I paid my toll—why are you fellows bothering me?”

  “There’s a fifty-mile speed limit on this parkway,” Sheridan began.

  “Yes,” the man exclaimed impatiently, “and it’s too damn slow.” He reached down for the pocket of his car and Sheridan, ready to suspect anything, went after his gun.

  “Don’t shoot,” said the man. “I’m Santa Claus, and I’m heading for a Christmas party for motherless orphans.”

  “You’re heading for the cooler,” said Sheridan.

  “That’s what you think.” The man opened his fist and laid his hand palm up on the side of the door.

  “Nuts!” said Sheridan. “I wish you fellows would shoot off rockets.”

  He turned around and called to the blockading cars. “It’s a Sewer Inspector, boys, from the WPA. Get out of his way and let him go by.”

  The man at the wheel looked up into the rear-view mirror and with one hand went carefully to work on the shoulder of his camel-hair coat, brushing off imaginary snow.

  2

  The clerk behind the desk in the apartment hotel at Seventy-second and Riverside Drive looked up from working on his transcript just in time to see the man with slightly graying hair disappear behind the elevator door. The clerk sat idly chewing his pen, watching the elevator indicator ascend to the top floor.

  “Who was that?” he asked when the boy came down again.

  “Somebody calling on Captain Maclain.”

  “In a pig’s ear it is! Why don’t you send people over to the desk when they come in? Captain Maclain’s away.”

  “So’s my father, most of the time,” the elevator boy said disgustedly, “but my mother’s almost always there.”

  “I can figure out without using mathematics,” said the clerk, “just what days your father was gone. Mr. Savage is out, too, and there’s nobody up there. Now go up and get that man and bring him down again.”

  “I don’t have to take such talk,” the elevator boy muttered as he slammed the door.

  Five minutes later he was back down again.

  “Where is he?” asked the night clerk.

/>   “How do I know?” The boy stared back defiantly. “He’s not up there.”

  “Not up where?”

  “Where I took him,” the boy explained impatiently. “On the twenty-fourth floor.”

  “Oh, is that so?” The clerk turned to the switchboard, plugged in Maclain’s apartment, and rang the bell.

  After a couple of minutes of continuous ringing on the clerk’s part, the elevator boy inquired with a jocular air, “Well, what did he say?”

  “I’ll show him,” the clerk said nastily between his teeth. “He can’t come into this hotel and just disappear.”

  He walked out from behind the desk and went to the lobby door.

  “Mike,” he told the doorman, “get a cop. A burglar just came in here.”

  “Sure,” said Mike. “Where is he?”

  “How the hell do I know?” the night clerk demanded. “That sap Thomas took him upstairs and let him off at the twenty-fourth floor. He’s probably started up there and is working down. Don’t let any vans back up here, load, and drive away.”

  The doorman put a whistle to his lips and whistled shrilly. A taxicab swept up to the curb and stopped.

  “Beat it!” said Mike. “I’m trying to get a cop.”

  “I’ll send you one.” The cab driver gave a loud Bronx cheer, and pulled away.

  “You could phone,” the elevator boy reminded the clerk when he returned to his desk.

  “That’s why you’re an elevator operator instead of a night manager.” The clerk dipped his pen in the ink and threw a blob on the floor. “Well-run hotels don’t have police cars screaming up to the doors.”

  “No,” said the elevator boy. “They whistle for taxis to carry their burglars away.”

  “You go to hell!”

  An officer, wheezing slightly, lumbered in through the front door.

  “I’m sorry,” the clerk told him, “I didn’t mean you.”

  “Where’s the burglar?” the cop demanded.

  “Ask the elevator boy.” The clerk turned back to his transcript. “He took him up to the twenty-fourth floor.”