It was a reasonable story, not a flaw in it, the right words in the right tone. It went through Miss Bryce’s guard like a thrown brick. She said, “Well, in that case . . . Will you hold the wire, Mr. Cooper?”
I said I’d be delighted and to take her time, and she went away to look in a file. I leaned back and listened to the Venetian-blind cords rattle against the window frame. A chill breeze was beginning to rise outside, making a lonesome wailing sound.
The receiver said, “I have that information, sir. 1682 North LaSalle Street.”
“That’s too bad,” I said.
“I beg—”
“We know that address, Miss Bryce. She left there several months ago. I’d hoped she might have returned to the YWCA.” I thought of something. “Tell me, the girls there sometimes share their rooms, don’t they?”
“Why, yes. We—”
“Did Laura Fremont have a roommate?”
A pause while a paper rattled. “As a matter of fact, she did. A Mary Conrad. But she hasn’t been with us for nearly two years.”
“A forwarding address on her might help. You never know.”
More papers rattled. “We show 470 Surf Street for her.”
I scribbled it down on my calendar pad and was about to say something when she added, “That address is in care of Rehak, Mr. Cooper.”
“That’s fi— Hunh?”
“Pardon?”
I wet my lips. “Never mind. A crocodile just went by. You said Rehak?”
“That is correct.” Her voice was suddenly stiff with doubt. Chair company executives were never flippant. “Did you get the address, Mr. Cooper?”
“I got it,” I said. “It nearly tore my glove off but I got it.”
“What are you—?”
“Not the address,” I said. “The address is peachy. I’ll think of you every time I look at it. I certainly thank you, Miss Bryce. Isn’t it a lovely day?”
She banged down her receiver. I laid mine gently back in its cradle and patted it affectionately and whistled two bars of “Dixie” through my teeth. In care of Rehak. Not a common name at all. Either Gracie Rehak was back in the picture or this was the Paul Bunyan of coincidence.
I copied onto the envelope the address Miss Bryce had been lied out of and, after it, the name Mary Conrad. The phone book showed a long list of Conrads but no Mary Conrad on or near Surf Street. A few Rehaks, mostly in the heavily Polish section on the town’s southwest side. No Laura Fremont at all.
I folded the envelope small and neat and tucked it deep in my wallet, then unlocked a file-cabinet drawer and got out my underarm holster, complete with gun, and strapped it on. A tribute to the kind of people Grace Rehak had known in the past and might still know today.
I emptied the ash tray into the wastebasket and was closing the window when I heard the corridor door open and close and light steps come into the reception room and stop there.
I had a visitor.
CHAPTER 8
HE WAS standing in the center of the room, trying not to breathe in too much of its tainted air, eying the couch as if he might be thinking of sitting on it but hoping he wouldn’t have to. From between two long slim fingers a cigarette sent up a wavering line of pale smoke.
He turned sharply, after I poked my head through the communicating door, and I got a long, hairline-to-socks inspection from cold blue eyes set in an oval, fair-skinned face that appeared to have been shaved on the way up in the elevator. He had smooth dark hair with a side part, a thin smallish nose, a narrow tight-lipped mouth. The chin didn’t seem unusually aggressive but it wasn’t backing away either.
“I gather you’re Pine.” The tone of his light husky voice said he would make an effort to tolerate me but I wasn’t to expect any miracles.
“Uh-hunh. Come in and I’ll dust off a chair.”
I retreated behind the desk while he shrugged out of two hundred dollars’ worth of tailored gray cashmere topcoat. Without it he was a long-legged, long-waisted number, lacking several inches of the six-foot mark but slender enough to seem taller. His double-breasted worsted suit was a soft shade of dark gray, his shirt a pale blue that narrowly missed being white. Where the wings of a soft collar met was a bow tie in white-and-blue faille that picked up the colors in a carelessly arranged display handkerchief.
You never can tell what's behind an outfit like that. He could have just filed a bankruptcy petition or he might be carrying a gold-trimmed alligator wallet stuffed with thousand-dollar bills.
While he was getting into the customer’s chair alongside the desk, I went back to open the window again. By the time I was ready to sit down, his topcoat was draped carelessly over his crossed legs and he was looking hard at me from above a not very faintly curled lip. When that had gone on long enough for me to learn who was running the interview, he said crisply, “I’m here only as a favor to a friend, Mr. Pine. Private detectives are out of my line and I can see I haven’t missed much. So, if you don’t mind, I’d like to get this over with quickly.
“I like your approach,” I said. “In fact I’m crazy about it. Trot out your dirty linen and I’ll have a look at it.”
His face flamed. “There is no dirty linen, as you put it. I told you I’m acting for another party.”
“Yeah. Then speak your piece or walk out the door. My time’s not valuable but it’s my own.”
He swallowed it but the edges hurt all the way down. “Look here,” he said stiffly. “There’s no point in our being at each other’s throats this way. It so happens you’re causing a friend of mine no little worry and she’s asked me to help straighten matters out.”
He had my attention now—all of it. “This friend of yours —does she have a name?”
“I’m sure it will come as no surprise to you,” he said coolly. “Her name is Rehak—Grace Rehak.”
“What am I supposed to be doing that worries her?”
He lifted an eyebrow at me. “Oh, come now, Pine. Just for once forget this cagey routine. Yesterday Miss Rehak received 'a phone call telling her you were attempting to find her. Naturally she’s interested in knowing why you’re looking for her—as well as who hired you in the first place.”
“Why, sure,” I said airily. “I blab confidences at the drop of a hat. Can I lend you a hat to drop?”
He smiled without humor and laid an elbow on the edge of the desk and bent across it toward me. “Perhaps I could drop some money instead,” he said softly. “Would that make a difference?”
“Money,” I said, “is always pleasant. But it won’t buy my immortal soul, as the man says. How much money did you have in mind?”
“Well . . . ” His eyes roamed the office and whatever he was thinking of offering was revised sharply downward. “Let’s say two hundred dollars.”
“A nice round sum,” I said. “You can get a man killed for as much—in some circles. And all you want for this fortune is the name of a client. An opportunity like this doesn’t come along every day.”
Color began to rise in the graceful column of his neck, but his voice stayed tightly under control. “Do we make a deal, Mr. Pine?”
I found a match and lighted a cigarette while he waited for his answer. “Before I help myself to your money I’ll need some time to butter my conscience. Suppose I get in touch with you in a day or two?”
“That won’t do,” he said instantly. “It will have to be now.”
I sighed. “Do tell. You drive a hard bargain, Mr. Do you have a name or do I call you X17?”
His thin nostrils flared. “You can call me Smith.”
“Oh, yes. I’ve seen your name on a lot of hotel registers. Keep your king’s ransom, Mr. Smith. If Miss Rehak wants information from me, she’ll have to get it direct—in exchange for the information I want.”
“She’ll never agree to see you, Pine,” he said firmly. “She’s terribly frightened of blackmail. Grace has put her past behind her and made a new life for herself. If the . . . the people with whom she is now
associated should learn of her life three years ago . . . well, it would kill her. That’s why she’s beside herself with worry right now over your efforts to find her. That’s why she asked me to come to you.”
“Your friend has nothing to be afraid of from me, Mr. Smith. If I was to go in for blackmail, I’d have a plush four-room office suite and patronize your tailor. Tell her that—and tell her I’ll do business with her personally and in person, or not at all.”
He chewed his lip and shook his head and rubbed out his cigarette and shook his head again. “I don’t know, Pine,” he muttered. “I don’t see how . . . She’s so . . . ”
I said, “Does the name Laura Fremont mean anything to you?”
He sat very still, his eyes watching my face but seeming to go past it and on into a gray infinity. Presently he moistened his lips and said thoughtfully, “I’m afraid not. No. Is this Fremont person the one who hired you?”
“Just shooting the moon,” I said carelessly.
He stood up and shook out the folds of his topcoat. “I’ll tell her what you said, Pine. All I can do. Where do I call you—if it comes to that?”
“My number’s in the book,” I said. “If I’m not here you can leave a message with the clerk at my hotel. The Dinsmore Arms on Wayne Avenue.”
He shook his head again, then eyed me narrowly as a new thought hit him. “I might be able to make it five hundred, Pine.”
I said 'wearily, “Will you go out the door or out the window?”
He turned on his heel and left me, the topcoat trailing across one arm. I waited until the corridor door banged shut, then I got up and went quietly into the outer room and opened the door a crack and listened to the sound of short angry steps fade into silence. When I figured he had turned down the corridor to the elevators, I looked out, saw the dim length of hall was empty and went quickly along it in the opposite direction to the red globe marking the stairs.
At this hour only one of the two cages would be running. Being what it was, the Clawson Building didn’t run to much traffic. If my luck was in, that one elevator would be on its slow and shaky way up in answer to Mr. Smith’s ring.
Two floors below mine I came out into the hall and raced along it. I reached the double shafts just as the open grillwork began to vibrate. I jammed a thumb against the “up” button, heard a rasping buzz in the cage a floor below, and a moment later the car shuddered to a halt and the door slid back.
I already had a dollar bill out, rolled so the denomination didn’t show. The man at the controls was young in years and new on the job: some apprentice the union had sent over to break in before trusting him with one of the modern jobs sported by the important buildings around town. His lumpy, not very smart face was wearing a bored expression under a too-large uniform cap. The bored expression changed to slack-jawed wonder when he saw me standing there, a finger to my lips and the other hand waving a greenback at him.
A finger to the lips meant nothing to him. “Going up,” he said, several hundred decibels louder than necessary and gave me the jaundiced eye.
I stepped in quickly, slammed a hand down against the control lever and said softly, “Close that fat mouth of yours and listen. Get me to the first floor as fast as this pile of junk can make it.”
The buzzer exploded into sound and the number 8 fluttered against a field of white on the automatic chart above the controls. The operator said, “I got a pickup on eight, mister. You wanta cost me—?”
My elbow in his ribs pried him away from the lever. Before he could get his breath back I shoved the handle in the right direction and the cage began to sink. He said, “Hey!” weakly and backed away, his eyes popping.
“This job may not mean much to you,” I said. “But if you want to keep it, learn to humor the tenants.” I pushed the bill into his hand. “If the passenger on eight wants to know why the delay, tell him the super got on and you had to run him down first. Got it?”
He nodded blankly and I let him have the controls in time to keep us out of the basement.
After the elevator started up again I went over and stood behind the door to the building stairs. When it came down a little later, Mr. Smith got out and went quickly to the street door and away. I slipped past the gawking operator and reached the street in time to see the slim back under the gray topcoat on its way east toward Michigan Avenue.
When he was half a block away, I got over to the curb and looked for a cab in the oncoming traffic. Not a one in sight; there wouldn’t be. I began to walk east, keeping pedestrians between Mr. Smith and me, hoping he’d turn in at one of the shops or drop in somewhere for a drink: anything that would give me a chance to pick up transportation ahead of him.
It wasn’t my day. A sleek black Cadillac sedan slid past me, rolled to the curb and a horn sounded a pleasant musical note. I caught a glimpse of black hair under a perky hat, the earpiece of a pair of sunglasses and the shoulder and sleeve of a gray-fur jacket.
And then the gray topcoat cut off my view, the car door slammed shut, and the sedan floated on toward the avenue, made a graceful left turn there while the cop on duty gave the Fords and Chevvys the palm of his glove, and disappeared.
I got out a matchbook folder and started patting my pockets. One of these days I was going to start carrying a pencil. I stopped a paunchy bird in a green Homburg, borrowed his gold-plated fountain pen and wrote down the license number of the Cadillac sedan. A sudden gust of wind tried to get the folder before I could jam it back in my pocket.
Things were looking up. I had another lead now—a lead furnished by the obliging Mr. Smith. I was growing fond of Mr. Smith. Not the halfback type exactly, but a long way from drop-the-handkerchief. It was certainly kind of him to let me have this bright new lead. A lead to a girl I wasn’t really looking for.
CHAPTER 9
THE day had become suddenly chill, almost cold in fact. A pale sun stood halfway down the western sky and a stiff breeze from the northwest was rising in the streets. Topcoat weather, a month ahead of time. It happens that way around Chicago in the early fall. Another twenty-four hours, even less, and you could be back in front of an electric fan.
At three-twenty I turned my car wheels out of the streetcar tracks on Broadway and drove slowly east along Surf Street. It was a street of residential hotels and court apartments, once fairly expensive, now well on the way downhill. Leaves scudded along the deserted walks and window awnings, and sidewalk canopies made harsh flapping sounds.
Number 470 proved to be a gray-stone double building of four floors. A signboard stuck in the left-hand section of a small ragged lawn mentioned that this was the Surfway Apartments, ½-2-2½-3-room furnished apartments, Hoague&Pendelton agents, 131 West Washington Street, see janitor on premises. At the foot of the plate-glass door was an enameled plaque pointing out that all deliveries were to be made at the rear. It didn’t say what would happen if you were caught sneaking in with a quart of milk.
I pushed into the hall. The floor was gray-and-white stone squares, a little dusty, some of them chipped at the edges. There were twin rows of mailboxes with bell buttons over the name’ plates and a locked inner door with finger smears on the glass. The lifeless air was laced with stale cigar smoke.
M. Conrad, according to one of the plates, occupied apartment 311. But not alone it seemed. Underneath the name was another. B. Field. No mention of G. Rehak there or on any of the others in either row. I wondered if Gracie had changed her name to Field.
While I was wondering about it, the inner door popped open and a stout middle-aged party with a red face under a dark-gray hat came through. He saw me standing there, jumped guiltily and scuttled past me and out before the pneumatic gadget on the inner door allowed it to close. I got to it in time to keep the lock from taking hold and looked back over my shoulder to the street door. The red-faced bird was nowhere in sight. I wasn’t at all surprised. This was that kind of neighborhood.
I went on through into a dim narrow corridor with nobody around. Laye
rs of quiet hung there with only the sounds of the wind from far off and the throb of a motor in the street. No elevator but there was a flight of carpeted steps leading upward. I climbed them to the third floor and followed my nose along a hall even dimmer than the one downstairs. Doors lined it, stained a light walnut, with numbers in pale ivory at eye level.
311 was nearly all the way back. No push button next to it so I knocked softly and felt the door move sluggishly under my knuckles. The lack of light had kept me from noticing it had already been open a crack. While I was wondering if that was important I knocked a second time.
No answer. Through the thin opening I could make out the shadowy outlines of a table with a wide-shaded lamp, the arm of a couch, a ribbon of dark rug. The only sound was the plink. . . plink . . . plink of water dripping against a drain.
She might have been sleeping. With the door open? Stranger things have happened. I leaned a hand against the door, swinging it still wider and said, “Miss Conrad?” Not loud but still strong enough to be heard. I put my head around the edge of the door and opened my mouth to call the name a second time.
I saw the shoes first, high-heeled black suede pumps propped up on their toes, a slim ankle in each. Dark nylons on slender legs, the edge of a skirt hiked up past the knees, the curve of hips. Along the back of my neck the short hairs lifted and stiffened. Or maybe I only imagined that.
A doorknob rattled somewhere down the hall. I stepped through and closed the door to 311 with my back. The wrong thing to do but there I was.
The body was face down, legs pointed toward me, one cheek against the rug and the other veiled by a cloud of dark hair. All I could make out in that light but it was more than enough. Another day, another corpse, another knot tightening under my ribs and filling my mouth with a metallic taste.
I crossed over to the lamp and turned it on. The room’s grayness retreated to the corners. A living room, small, sparsely furnished with unimaginative stuff that was neither as tired nor as shabby as the neighborhood warranted. One window behind green draperies. Two doors, not counting the one to the hall. One was partly open, with the rhythmic drip of water sounding behind it; the other tightly closed, nearly touching the head of the girl on the floor.
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