“My imagination has no limits, Miss Lund. Why talk about it?”
She sighed. “I suppose,” she said with weary patience, “the way to get rid of you is to tell you what little I can about Gracie. She left Lincoln three years or so ago. I’ve heard from her two or three times since. The last was that she might go to New York.” She nodded slowly. “As it happens, I had a card from her from there.”
“When was that?”
“Hell, how would I know? I threw the card away.” She took a cigarette from a white plastic box near the ivory telephone and screwed it into the ivory holder. “Must be all of a year ago.”
“No more than a year?”
She clamped strong white teeth around the holder and struck a match with her thumbnail. “It might be.” She blew a thick streamer of smoke between us and waved it away. Light from the overhead fixture glinted dully on the unpainted nails. “I can’t be sure.”
“She might have gone back to Chicago since then,” I suggested.
“Sure. Or even South America. They like her type down there, I hear.”
“What was her type?”
She looked blank for a moment. I said tiredly, “I don’t mean her type of work. I’m asking for a description of her. Or did you throw that away, too?”
She said hotly, “I’ve had about all of you I’m—” She stopped abruptly and bit down on the holder. “Gracie was small, black-haired, dark brown eyes. Figure like a boy’s. Pretty in a weak, helpless sort of way. Men with large forceful wives found her very appealing.”
“Somebody must know more than that about her,” I said. “Her family, for instance.”
”I never knew her people.”
“Anyone at all you can suggest I see?”
“No one at all, Mr. Pine. I’m so sorry.”
I uncrossed my legs, stood up, took my hat off a corner of the desk and put it on my head. “Thanks for not a goddam thing,” I growled. “You’ve sat there and fed me a pack of lies—and not out of natural meanness alone. I’d say you don’t want Gracie Rehak found. I’m going to find her, Miss Lund, and I hope enough dynamite comes out of finding her to blow you out of this cathouse and into pokey. It will be a pleasure. Good night to you, Miss Lund.”
Her mouth was a wolf trap and two spots of color flared in her cheeks. Very carefully she put the cigarette down and then very quickly she jerked open the center drawer of the desk and brought out a small black gun.
The gun was still coming up when I "leaned down across the desk. I locked a set of fingers around her thick wrist and banged it sharply against the wood and the gun fell back into the open drawer. It was in my hand and I had straightened up before she caught her breath.
I listened to her swear in a dry monotone like the buzz of a rattler. When she started repeating herself my interest died. “You left out one of my uncles,” I said. “But he never amounted to much anyway. Get the pimple, sister. I need to get out in the fresh air.”
“Give—me—that—gun!”
“How would you like picking it out of your teeth?”
She stabbed blindly at the buzzer. Her hand shook until I seemed to hear the bones rattle. Thirty seconds of silence as tight as a piano wire before a small knock at the door. Marty put his head in. “Yeah, Bertha?”
Her expression was the only answer he got. It was answer enough. His eyes swiveled to me. He saw the gun in my hand and jumped slightly. I motioned for him to come all the way in. I patted his pockets and under the arms. He had no more gun than a penguin. The room was so quiet I could hear him breathe.
I said, “These things always turn out like the second feature at the Bijou. Shooting me would have been unsmart, Miss Lund. I think you just wanted to scare me a little, hunh?”
She moved her lips but nothing came through them. I looked down at the gun in my hand. A Colt .25 automatic. Deadly across the width of a desk in the hand of a marksman. I took out my handkerchief and covered my fingers while emptying the magazine and the remaining shell in the chamber. I snapped the magazine back into place and tossed the gun onto the nice white carpet. It hit with a dull thunk, bounced once and came to rest.
"Thanks for having me in, Miss Lund,” I said. “I may drop you a bread-and-butter note one of these days. If I can find any white ink.”
It didn’t bring down the house. Neither of them moved while I was closing the door on my way out.
CHAPTER 6
IT WASN’T much past eleven o’clock when I parked the car a block north of the hotel. The city had turned in for the night. A pedestrian or two moved along the silent length of Twelfth Street, and in the pale-yellow glow from a coffee-shop window a cab driver leaned against a lamp post and picked at his teeth with thoughtful care.
Only one of the hotel elevators was operating at this hour. A sleepy bellhop ran me up to the fourth floor, muttered, “Good night, sir,” and was dropping out of sight before the door clanged shut.
I stood in the dim and empty corridor, getting out my room key tied to an oval of maroon fiberboard and listening to the whir of the descending cage and the sound of water running in a shower stall close by. It had been a long evening, a disappointing evening, even a dirty evening. The smell of Bertha Lund’s place of business was still bitter in my nostrils. I lighted a cigarette, dropped the match into a sand jar and went on down the hall to 421.
I had the door open and was reaching for the wall switch when the blow caught me. I must have made a wonderful target. I didn’t even have a chance to yell.
“On the head,” I said. “It always happens to the back of your head. You ought to wear a Bessemer steel hat.”
I giggled into the rug. Bessemer steel. Will a ton be enough, sir? That’s a mighty big head you got there. Two tons? Thank you, sir. Shall I wrap it up or will you wear it?
I opened my eyes. Bright specks floated and darted like a school of minnows through a velvet ocean. Black velvet. Only five yards to a customer during our special sale.
I blinked away the specks and pushed up until I was on my hands and knees. The carpet was hot and gritty under my palms. I started to crawl. I was as weak as a three-card flush. I kept on crawling. My head banged into the side of the bed. I got over the shock of that and managed to get up on the mattress. The Alps would have been colder but not as high. I lay there panting, feeling the bed, the room, the hotel, the universe—all revolving.
Some time passed. More than five minutes but less than two weeks. I reached for the headboard and pulled myself up and leaned against it. More time passed. I thought about turning on a light. A matter of getting on my feet and strolling over to the desk and finding the lamp. I could do it. I would do it—after a while.
I stood up. The blackness lurched, steadied, lurched again. The window was a pattern of horizontal stripes in alternate black and gray. That would be the Venetian blind, lowered but not completely closed. No reddish tinge to the darkness beyond it. The haberdasher across the street had turned off his sign. A penny saved was a penny earned.
Enough of this. I wavered across the room to where the desk should be. My hand was already out to find the lamp there. My fingers brushed its shade. And the toe of my shoe thudded against something firm yet yielding.
A long frozen pause. No sound in the room except tortured breathing. Mine. I leaned both hands against the desk, not looking down, and slid my foot carefully along the length of whatever it had hit against.
Just turn the lamp button and you’ll know. I didn’t want to turn the button. I already knew. I wanted to walk out of this dark room, out of the hotel, over to my car and away. What about your bags? The hell with my bags! A suit and a few shirts and some uninitialed underwear. And socks—don’t forget the socks. The hell with the socks, too!
I turned the button.
He lay on his side, knees bent, arms straight down. The snappy gray-blue uniform was no longer snappy and the upper part no longer gray-blue. The face was the face of Chester Weedlow, but behind that was a red-and-gray smear instead
of a head.
Three fast strides got me into the bathroom. The bowl was waiting, its lids up. I vomited. They must have heard me in Detroit.
Years later I straightened up and pushed the lever. I sat on the edge of the tub until my legs stopped shaking and my hands were ready to obey orders. I stood up and turned on the bathroom light and found a glass on a shelf behind the mirror. I drank some water and smoked half a cigarette and looked at a gray strained face in the mirror. It was a face that needed a long vacation. I grunted and went back into the other room.
Both my bags were open and the contents scattered. The dresser drawers were pulled out and the stuff in them jumbled together. Nothing seemed to be missing. Nothing would be, unless it was clothing the guy had been hunting for. I doubted that. Then what? My wallet was still in my hip pocket. Money, identification, business cards—all in place. The envelope with the notations about Laura Fremont was pushed down behind the handkerchief in my breast pocket where l had put it hours before.
My hat was on the floor, its crown pushed in, a flattened cigarette next to it. I bent and took up the hat and fumbled it back into shape while I stared at the cigarette. It had been lighted once but only a few puffs taken before a foot had snuffed it out. My brand. Probably the one I had lighted in the hall. It must have fallen out of my mouth when the sap landed. Somebody hadn’t wanted the rug to be ruined. Blood and brains will wash out, but a cigarette burn is always bad.
The body still lay near the desk, in a shadow where the lamp rays didn’t quite reach. Chester Weedlow. Twenty-one years were all he’d had. Through school and on into a job, such as it was. Then, with no warning and for no good reason, the end of the trail. Not that he cared any more. He was past caring. Maybe nobody would care—except me. And I couldn’t prove a thing.
I ripped off the bedspread with savage hands and covered the body. The bourbon was still on the desk, tightly corked. It didn’t appear to be loaded with arsenic. I took a long swallow without bothering to use a glass. It burned like a superior grade of carbolic acid after what my stomach had been through. But it gave me the strength to do what had to be done.
The telephone felt cool, even a trifle damp. Anger was beginning to rise in me. A dull anguished anger born of futility. A click came over the wire and the prissy voice of the night clerk said, “Operator.”
“Get me the police,” I said.
CHAPTER 7
IF CHICAGO had changed any during my five days away, it wasn’t for the better. Traffic swore and grumbled in the canyons of the Loop, elevated trains screeched on the same sharp curves, pedestrians crossed blindly against the lights, and the sooty façades of towering buildings stood shoulder to shoulder with an air of hostile serenity.
I kept an office in the Clawson Building on East Jackson Boulevard. Two rooms on the eighth floor, the inner one fitted out with an oak desk and swivel chair, a couple of brown metal filing cabinets, one window and an atmosphere filled with the smell of damp plaster, aged cigarette smoke and one of the cleaning women’s cologne.
There was an accumulation of mail on the linoleum under the letter drop. I scooped it up, raised the blind and the window beyond to let in the sounds of the city. .A gray and white pigeon on the outside ledge gave me the heady eye, said, “Welcome home, Pine,” and went away on pigeon business.
The mail amounted to nothing that couldn’t have stayed on the floor another week. I lighted a cigarette, fished an address book from the windrows of junk in the center drawer, looked up David Ingram’s office number and dialed it.
The girl put me through, after taking my name. A receiver went up and one of those voices too heavy for the telephone said, “Good morning, Paul. When did you get back?”
“About an hour ago,” I told him. “Thought you’d like to know I’m working for the Fremonts.”
“I’m interested, of course. What did Sweetland have to say?”
“About what you expected. The way I hear‘it, the two of you floated through college on bootleg alcohol and black coffee.”
His chuckle shook the receiver. “Matt’s quite a guy. As smart an attorney as you’d hope to find and a heart the size of his belly. This business of paying most of your fee for the Fremonts is an example.”
“He told me about that,” I said. “They were his first clients twenty-three years ago. Seems they were buying a house at the time and needed a fixer to read the fine print in the deed. They looked at his diploma in its shiny new frame, paid respectful attention to his law-school double talk, called him ‘sir’ and paid his fee with five sweat-soaked dollar bills.
“After that they always came to him with their problems. Theirs were simple problems and far apart: advice on insurance and a small argument over a special assessment the town pushed through one year. Then a couple weeks ago the old man came to him about the daughter being missing, which is how come he asked you to recommend a private dick. You suggested me and I thank you—I think.”
“You think?” he said sharply. “What’s wrong with the job, Paul? The Fremonts give you trouble?”
“They wouldn’t give anyone trouble, Mr. Ingram. Their girl is gone and they’re frantic in a genteel, sorry-to-trouble-you way. No. There’s been a murder.”
A deafening silence came from his end of the wire. I could picture him with his feet in Peal shoes up on the acre of mahogany desk in the large book-lined room with its thick wine-colored carpeting and oil portraits of Supreme Court justices.
“Paul.”
“Yes; sir?” “I’m exceedingly sorry if I’ve unwittingly been the cause of your being involved in anything . . . ” The sentence was getting too complex and he let it taper off.
“Officially,” I said, “I’m not involved. The Lincoln cops came up with the answer while buffing their nails. They think some prowler broke into my hotel room and was caught in the act by a bellboy, who lost half his head under a blackjack as a reward. They took my deposition and let me leave town. They almost yawned in my face it was that simple. The case; not my face.”
“Only,” Ingram said with slow emphasis, “it’s not that simple. Is that what you’re saying?”
“Uh-hunh. There’s a dike named Bertha Lund out there who runs a poor man’s bordello. I went out to get a line on a girl of hers who used to know Laura Fremont. I was careless enough to let Bertha see a book of matches from the hotel I was staying at. My guess is she sent someone to go through my luggage for a line on what I was up to. But I didn’t tell that to the town whittlers. I had no proof to begin with, and they’d have asked questions I wouldn’t have liked to answer.”
The sound of his breathing rustled against my ear. In the office next to mine the fat little dentist was using his drill.
I went on talking, finishing it up. “I don’t think any of this ties in with Laura Fremont. She once knew a girl who took the primrose path—if they still call it that. A girl who either doesn’t want to be found or can’t afford to be. Anyway, I thought you’d like to know how I made out.”
He said he appreciated it and to let him know any new developments and we hung up. I sat there, one leg over a chair arm, and eyed the blonde on the Varga calendar above the filing cases. She was wearing very brief heliotrope overalls three degrees tighter than her skin, and from the looks of things had just come down from the haymow. I judged the hired man had gone back to his chores.
Looking at blondes would solve no problems. I took my leg off the chair and threw it under the desk and brought out the envelope with the few lines about Laura Fremont written on its back. I smoothed it out and laid it on the desk and smoothed it again. I thought of a hall with naked plaster walls separating closed doors. I thought of a young colored girl with a shy smile and an armload of towels. I smelled the smell of disinfectant and a brand of soap worse than the odor it was supposed to eliminate. I thought of a white web of a room with a fat spider of a woman in it. I remembered a hotel room clammy with the feel of air conditioning and on the floor a body with a slice of horror for
a face and nothing behind the face except red and gray ooze.
My teeth bit into a knuckle. I said, “Ouch!” in a surprised voice. I picked up the envelope and read off the two addresses. YWCA, 814 North Dearborn Street. 1682 North LaSalle Street. Both would house working girls who were short on cash and long on hope. Both were in a frowzy district on the northern fringes of the Loop. The Y would be as antiseptic as a hospital corridor and with about the same amount of homelike atmosphere. But it would also have a file on tenants past and present.
The phone book listed several entries under YWCA. I called the one on North Dearborn and explained what I was after. The receiver made popping noises, a girlish voice said, “. . . keep his hands to himself, or—” followed by an abrupt and bottomless silence. While I was wondering if I was still with the YWCA or stranded somewhere off in an old conduit, a line opened and a briskly feminine voice said, “Miss Bryce speaking. May I help you?”
“More than likely,” I said. “Awhile back you had a tenant named Laura Fremont. I’d like her forwarding address.”
“We are not permitted to give out such information, sir.”
“My name is Cooper,” I said. “With the Acme Chair Company.” My tone indicated she was probably sitting on one of our products and if there was any more nonsense I’d come over and jerk it out from under her. “Rules are rules, Miss Bryce, and I understand you must observe them. But this isn’t a matter of trying to collect a bill and I’m not a jealous suitor. About two years ago we promised Miss Fremont a position as soon as we opened a certain department in our organization—a position, I might add, she was most anxious to have. Unless I can locate her, we’re going to have to fill that job elsewhere. Would you like to call me back on this?”
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