Run to Death

by Patrick Quentin

  I bought a stack of magazines, chiefly for an excuse not to have to be chattering with Vera on the plane. But she was even more eager to pretend to read than I. As the plane took off, climbed and swerved away from the great sprawling city of Mexico, she assumed an intense interest in a magazine that told you how to make your home much more beautiful than anyone else’s for forty dollars a week.

  She hardly brought her nose out of it until we started to bank over the border town of Brownsville.

  It was being worse for her than for me. That realization brought me some grim kind of satisfaction. At least I had control of the jar. For her it was like a carrot tied just above a donkey’s nose.

  She had had plenty of time for evolving a plan to outsmart me at Brownsville. I was doubly on my guard. But she attempted nothing. The bags came through Customs, were weighed in again by Eastern Airlines, re-tagged and carried away to the plane which was to take us to New Orleans. I had the three new checks in my wallet.

  So far I was winning. It wasn’t much of a victory, of course. The real danger would begin with Halliday in New Orleans.

  Before the plane started I bought some unguentine and band-aid and dressed Vera’s finger again. Once we were in the air she lost herself in another magazine. Every now and then I chatted with her to seem natural, but most of the time I spent thinking about New Orleans. If I went straight to Mr. Brand, Vera would want to go with me and, since she was still officially my ally, I couldn’t stop her. It would be better to get hotel rooms first. Perhaps, in the hotel, I could work something.

  As the plane droned over the monotony of Texas a plan slowly materialized. But the plan only covered Vera. It did not provide for the safe-keeping of the jar. For all I knew, Halliday had killed Mr. Brand the way he had killed Deborah and Lena. If I took the jar to 1462 Dauphine Street, I might be delivering it straight into the enemy’s hands.

  I got increasingly jittery trying to think. By the time we had flown over the desolate bayous of Louisiana and dived to the airport I had still decided nothing. Something almost like panic seized me as we walked down the gang-plank.

  Vera seemed suspiciously calm now that we had landed. She linked her hand through my arm and said with a brightness that rang false:

  “Well, Peter, what we do first?”

  “Go to a hotel, I guess. We’re going to need a base of operations.”

  “Yes, yes. The St. Charles, yes?”

  She’d said that too quickly. The St. Charles Hotel was probably where she had told Halliday we would go.

  “Let’s make it the Montedoro,” I said. “I always go there.”

  “But the St. Charles is…”

  Her voice trailed off. Once again she was scared of pressing a point. Her fear of making me suspicious was keeping her hands tied. I was still winning.

  I had been in Mexico so long that I was used to the sound of Spanish-speaking voices, to the colourful gimcrack atmosphere, the informality. It was strange to be back where there were no beggars, where no furtive dogs padded in and out searching for garbage. We moved through the animated crowd of people, who seemed phenomenally smart and prosperous. Behind a bar an American bar-keep was serving American drinks. I could have done with a shot of whisky, but the bags would be coming through any minute.

  With Vera still on my arm, I started towards the baggage-room. Unobtusively, I kept my eyes peeled for Halliday, although I didn’t imagine he’d be crude enough to let himself be visible at the airport. There was no sign of him.

  But I was still in hopeless indecision as to what to do with the jar. It was too bulky to keep in my pocket. However careful I was, Vera might find a chance to steal it once we got to the hotel.

  A coloured porter came up, saying: “Bags, sir?”

  “Yes.” I drew my arm away from Vera’s hand. “Wait here. I’ll be back.”

  I gave the porter the checks and he started towards the baggage-room. I followed. So did Vera. Quite a sizeable crowd was gathered around the counter. Several other planes must recently have landed. Suitcases were being brought into the baggage-room from a back door. People were calling out, pointing at their bags, causing the usual confusion.

  Vera’s pigskin suitcase came through and was dumped near the counter.

  “There’s one,” I said to the porter.

  He scooped it up without consulting the check. My large suitcase appeared then. I pointed it out, and he got that, too. A new load of baggage was trundled in. I saw the gabardine bag. It was perched on top of the pile. A baggage man swung it down. As he removed it from the heap, I saw another gabardine bag on the trolley. It was the next bag the man picked up. He tossed it down on the floor close to mine.

  The bags were identical. They are made by the million. But I could recognize mine by an oil-stain on the side. A memory rushed back of the switch Halliday had tried to pull in Mexico. Suddenly I knew what to do.

  I scrambled through the crowd and, leaning over the barrier, picked up the gabardine bag that was not mine.

  “Here.” I pushed past Vera and handed it to the porter.

  He didn’t look at the check. I had known he wouldn’t because he hadn’t looked at the others.

  Once before I had got the wrong bag at an airport, and I knew the official routine. The man whose bag I had taken would presumably find out the mistake and turn in my bag. While the airline was trying to locate me, the bag would automatically be shipped to the lost-property office in Atlanta, Georgia.

  As the porter took the suitcases off to a taxi, I felt a thrill of triumph. It was tough on the innocent traveller whose bag I had snitched, but that was the least of my worries. Unless, by some almost inconceivable accident, he failed to run in my bag, the jar of sunburn cream would be utterly out of Halliday’s reach. And, once I was sure of my connection with Deborah’s uncle, I could, by calling the airport, have the bag flown back from Atlanta in a couple of hours.

  Vera had climbed into the taxi. I tipped the porter and directed the driver to the Montedoro Hotel. Ten or so minutes later, when we had reached the centre of town and were driving down Baronne Street, we passed the solid mass of the St. Charles Hotel. Vera glanced at it quickly and glanced away.

  I wondered whether Halliday was waiting for us there in the vestibule.

  We crossed Canal Street, which was crawling with Main Street activity, ducked into the old French Quarter and reached the Montedoro.

  A porter came out for the baggage. I asked for and got two adjoining rooms and, while we went up in the elevator with a bellhop, I ran through the plan I had concocted in the plane. I could see no reason why it should fail. We reached our rooms and I said:

  “When you’re through unpacking, Vera, come in for a council of war.”

  She smiled happily. She liked that. “Yes, Peter. Quick, I come.”

  The bell-hop took her into her room and then brought my bags into mine. I paid him off and closed the door. There were telephones in the rooms. I knew Vera was going to call Halliday. There was no way I could stop her, but I didn’t particularly care whether she did or not. We had made no definite arrangements. There was nothing she could tell him except the bare fact of our arrival and our whereabouts. I didn’t think Halliday would try anything as dangerous as a kidnap attempt from the hotel. She would tell him about the sunburn cream, of course. And he would tell her it was her job to get it.

  Unless I was very wrong, Halliday would be out of the picture for a while. Vera would be on her own.

  The bedroom was just an ordinary hotel bedroom with a bathroom in one corner. I crossed to see if the bathroom door had a key. It did. These weren’t Mexican walls. I knew I had no chance of listening in on Vera’s call. I opened my large suitcase and started to unpack.

  As I expected, in a few minutes there was a knock on the door. I opened it, and Vera came in without the hat and the silver foxes. She was still wearing the red suit. She had combed her hair and re-done her face. She looked magnificent—Hollywood’s idea of a ballerina in techn
icolour. I wondered why she didn’t go to the Coast and make a sensation in the movies, instead of running around with murderers.

  I picked up a bunch of ties and started to take them to the closet.

  She said: “Already I unpack. Am quick, quick. I help you, no?”

  I had expected that, too. Orders from Halliday must already have come through. I nodded to the gabardine bag.

  “How about working on that? Better take it in the bathroom, though. It’s mostly toilet stuff.”

  She made a dive for the bag. I was getting to know her so well I could read her thoughts. The sucker, she was thinking in her devious Russian mind, at last he hand me the sunburn cream on the silver samovar.

  She carried the bag into the bathroom. I strolled after her with the ties on my arm. As she stooped to open the bag, I took her elbow and drew her gently round.

  “Know something, Vera?”

  The black-wool eyelashes batted seductively, but she could only just control her impatience.

  “What, Peter?”

  “You’re something a guy could go nuts over.” Absurdly, although I didn’t mean it, I knew that at one time it could almost have been true.

  She giggled her throaty giggle. “Really, you think? You who are so to the wife tied.”

  “I could be untied.”

  I leaned towards her. She tilted her face upwards. Her hands came up to my shoulders.

  “Peter…”

  Her lips were almost on mine. They seemed grotesquely large, but perfect, like the red, curved lips of a pin-up girl on a poster.

  I slapped my hand over her mouth. She gave a muffled scream and started to struggle. I stuffed my handkerchief between her teeth. She almost bit me. I tucked her head under my arm and went to work tying her hands behind her back with a necktie.

  It is easy enough to subdue a woman, even one that kicks like a mule. In a couple of minutes I had her ankles tied, too. I made a proper gag for her mouth. She could breathe, but that was about all.

  “Upsy daisy.”

  I picked her up, swung round and dumped her in the bathtub. At the best of times it’s hard to get out of a slippery tub.

  She glared at me, her eyes blazing with indignation and shock. I grinned.

  “What is it, this tying and gagging?” I asked. “I know, is the old one, two.”

  I waved to her friendlily. I picked up the false gabardine bag. I might need it. I went out of the bathroom and locked it behind me.

  Operation Vera had been successful. Now for the far more dangerous Operation Brand.

  XXI

  I had disposed of Vera. But I hadn’t disposed of Halliday, and he was much the greater menace. Almost certainly he had been six or seven hours in New Orleans. That was time enough for him to have done to Mr. Brand what he had done to Deborah and Lena… and what his friends had probably done to Deborah’s father.

  My little success, however, had made me optimistic. And the colt in my pocket helped my confidence. I had to have a break some time. Perhaps this was the moment for it. Perhaps I would find Mr. Brand safely ensconced at 1462 Dauphine Street.

  I left the room, locked it behind me and downstairs turned the key in at the desk. I had brought the false gabardine bag with me because, if I did succeed in making contact with Mr. Brand, I would have to turn it in at the Airline office before I could retrieve my own.

  The hotel lobby was crowded with cheerful, touristy-looking people. As I moved to the swing door I saw a group of telephone booths. It seemed unlikely in this perverse tangle, where nothing came easy, that Mr. Brand would be listed in the telephone book, but I went over to the directory. I leafed through it to the B’s and, mildly incredulous, saw the name:

  Brand, William C.—1462B Dauphine Street.

  My feeling of near-success sky-rocketed. This was an omen. Obviously it was both wiser and safer to telephone to Mr. Brand before going to an apartment which might, by now, be a trap. I went into a booth and dialled the number from the book. Almost at once a man’s deep gruff voice answered, a voice which certainly did not belong to Bill Halliday.

  I said: “Mr. Brand?”

  The voice said: “Yes. This is he.”

  This was being almost too easy. I said: “I’m Peter Duluth. You don’t know me, but I’m a friend of Deborah’s.”

  “Deborah!” Mr. Brand’s voice was quiet, but I could trace suppressed excitement behind it.

  “I’ve got something rather important for you—something from Deborah. Can I come round right away?”

  “Of course, Mr. Duluth.”

  It sounded melodramatic, but I felt it wiser to add: “You may not know it, but there are people who might cause trouble. I’ll ring three times. Don’t let anyone else in until I come.”

  I had expected surprise, but Mr. Brands’ voice was even as ever. “Yes, Mr. Duluth, I am fully conscious of the danger. Three times?”

  “Three times.”

  I rang off. My hand was unsteady with excitement. Here was my break at last. This wasn’t going to end in a gun-battle with “sluggings and Chasings and Strippings”. It was going to end quietly in a peaceable apartment in an American city. I might even catch my night plane and keep my date in New York with Iris, after all.

  I left the booth and went back to the telephone book to write down Mr. Brand’s number against any future need. As I scribbled it on a piece of paper, I saw that he was listed a second time. Beneath his home address was printed:

  Brand, William C., Mining Engineer, and an address on Dock Street.

  So Deborah’s uncle was a mining engineer. I played with the implications of this information as I moved out of the hotel into the pale late afternoon sunshine.

  My watch showed four-thirty. I glanced up and down to make sure that Halliday wasn’t anywhere around. There was no sign of him. I started to walk, noticing the passers-by and convincing myself that I wasn’t being followed.

  I would have been, of course, if Vera had been able to warn Halliday that I was going out. The thought of Vera trussed up in the bathroom added to my sensation of satisfaction.

  I had been in New Orleans several times before, and knew it well enough. The Vieux Carré is pretty small. I was on Royale now. Dauphine Street, I remembered, ran parallel to it a couple of blocks over.

  After Mexico, New Orlean’s much-boosted French Quarter seemed rather phony. The old houses with their delicate iron filigree balconies had charm, but they were all faked up. Ye Old Antique Shoppe with little leaded glass panes. Mother Whosit’s Chicken Kitchen. The Only Original Absinthe Parlor. America can’t leave a good thing alone.

  As I passed a wildly antique drugstore that looked like something out of a Schubert Brother’s production of Naughty Marietta, I started seriously to think of Mr. Brand as a mining engineer. New ideas began to flutter in my mind like pigeons around a dovecot. South America is staggeringly rich in minerals. Deborah’s father was an archæologist. Archæologists dug things up.

  Was the solution of this involved mystery somehow tied up with a mine?

  I had reached Dauphine. It was another of the picturesque streets. A woman in an artist’s smock was being Bohemian and sitting in front of an easel on the sidewalk painting Gay Old New Orleans. My thought-pigeons were still fluttering. What if Mr. Brand in his archæological pursuits had stumbled on some mineral deposit, some vein which might have great value but whose authenticity wasn’t certain until checked by regular mining engineers? He could have sent Deborah to contact his brother, sent her secretly because there were other people with their eyes on the mine, too. And the other people could have been trying to stop her before she got to William C. Brand. Something like a mine which could make a fortune for anyone who got hold of it would have been a real incentive to wholesale murder and abduction.

  Until then I had never evolved even the crudest theory of what lay behind all that had happened to me. Had it been that? The Brand brothers and Deborah against Halliday and Vera Garcia.

  The numbers on Daup
hine Street started at Canal Street. I was in the two hundred block. I turned into Dauphine past the woman in the smock and headed downtown.

  The detective story could have contained some vital information about the mine in code. And the jar? What could be in the jar? A sample, perhaps, of the ore?

  At last the violence and terror of the past few days came out of the fantastic realm of jewels and Inca relics into a world of brutal commercial danger. But who were Mr. Brand’s rivals? It must be a sizeable organization to be able to abduct Deborah’s father in Peru, send Halliday after Deborah to Yucatan and employ Vera as an agent in Mexico City.

  Agent. The word opened up even wider vistas. Was some Government behind it all? In this age, dedicated to self-destruction, miniature unofficial wars for the control of minerals must be going on all over the world.

  Had I all this time been blundering around in a war?

  I reached the fourteen hundred block. The Vieux Carré was getting a little tired but it was still bravely quaint. No one had followed me. I was sure of that. And no one was loitering in front of 1462. It was an old house which had been renovated as an apartment building. The iron balconies had been painted red and were decorated with vines and geraniums in pots. The ground floor was occupied by an Art Book Store with engravings of clipper ships and books like The Romance of Louisiana in its window.

  At one side of the store was an entrance which led to the actual apartments. A sign classified it as 1462B. I went into the doorway. Names were printed on cards by the buzzers. Beside the buzzer for Apartment 4 was a card saying:

  William C. Brand.

  Feeling absurdly elated, I pressed the buzzer three times. Almost immediately the button above released the door-catch. I moved into a small hall, painted primrose yellow, and started up the stairs.

  After three flights, I came to the top floor. Brand apparently owned it all. His card was attached to the only door.

  The simplicity of it all seemed almost an anti-climax.

  I knocked on the door. It opened. A large man with red hair and very blue eyes stood smiling awkwardly at me on the threshold. He held out his hand.