The phone rang sharply while I was reaching for it. I yanked my hand back without intending to and scowled, listening to it ring a second time before I answered.
“Would this be a man named Pine?” a woman’s voice drawled. It was a stagy voice, low-pitched, even a little sultry.
“This,” I said, “would.”
“I don’t suppose I have to tell you who this is,” the voice went on. “Or do you make a habit of pestering more than one person at a time?”
My fingers tightened slowly against the receiver’s chill surface. “Nice of you to call, Miss Rehak. Has my breath been getting a little too hot for you?”
“It’s not its heat I object to,” she said nastily. “What’s all the shooting, mister?”
“No shootings. This time it’s stockings. Much quieter.”
Out of a small pool of silence she said, “If that means something, I don’t know what. Exactly what do you want of me?”
“A few words is all. In person.”
“A few words about what?”
“Hunh-uh, Miss Rehak. Not over the wire.”
“Listen,” she said tightly, “do you think I’m a fool? This sounds like an invitation to be blackmailed. I’m not having any .”
“Are you ripe for blackmail?” I asked.
“Oh, Jesus! Either say what’s on your mind or I’m hanging up!”
“I’ve said what’s on my mind. It still goes.”
Her words took on an almost deadly calm. “As far as I’m concerned Grace Rehak is dead and buried. I can’t risk having anyone see me as Grace Rehak and you know why. I’d be at the mercy of every two-bit grifter that came along afterward.”
“Horsefeathers!” I said. “I don’t give two hoots in a bathtub if you’re the mayor’s wife. If I’m going to talk to you at all it’ll be face to face. Wear a veil if you want to. Or a section of stovepipe. Or hang up the phone like you’ve been telling me. I don’t mind spending another day or two on the job.”
“I’ve got to know what’s going on,” she said softly, more to herself than to me. Abruptly her voice was no longer soft. “All right. I’ll meet you. But it’ll have to be my way.”
“I’m listening,” I said.
A brief silence while she thought it out. “Where do you live, Pine?”
“The Dinsmore Arms. On Wayne Avenue, a block north of Pratt Boulevard.”
“Well. . . . Look, it’ll have to be late. I can’t get away much before twelve, one o’clock.”
“I can always sleep late the next day,” I said.
“I’ll be in my car,’ she said. “Parked along one of the side streets near your hotel. You tell me where.”
“Farwell Avenue,” I said. “Between Wayne and Lakewood, on the south side of the street. Leave your parking lights on. Will you be driving the black Cadillac sedan?”
I heard her breath catch. After a long moment she said, “Maybe I’m being careful for nothing. Or did Stu tell you the make of car I drive? It’s not like him to talk so much.”
“Stu,” I said, “is a clam. But he’s a clumsy clam. You plan on bringing him along tonight?”
“No point to that now,” she said bitterly. “He’s done all he can to help. I thought money was important to you private snoops.”
I said, “One o’clock then, Miss Rehak. I’ll be on time.”
“Wait a minute,” she said, her voice sharp now and a little loud. “I warn you I’m going to be carrying a gun. Don’t try anything funny!”
“Like what, Miss Rehak?” I said politely.
“Like flashing a light in my face. Or trying to force me to answer questions.”
“There will be some questions,” I said. “But the answers won’t expose your secret past to a cruel and merciless world. Incidentally, Chris sends his regards.”
“Who’s Chris?” she said suspiciously.
“What’re you trying to pull?” I said, just as suspiciously. “I’m talking about your father. Don’t tell me he’s dead and buried too?”
Her laugh was a short hard burst of sound. “My God, Pine, I’m surprised at you! When it comes to being clever you’re really a card. My old man’s name is Stanislaus Rehak -cut down to Stanley a long time ago-and he’s hated my guts ever since I was fourteen and dating the track captain at high school. When I blew town he was still living in the same stinking dump I grew up in. 322 South Twentieth, across the street from the Lincolnwood Dairy. You want the night foreman’s name over there?”
“I’ll bet you wouldn’t know the day foreman,” I muttered.
“I heard that 1” she snapped. “Okay, Mister Pine, I’ll keep our date, at the time and the place you said. After that keep the hell away from me if you want to stay healthy!”
She hung up hard enough to leave me a sore ear. I pushed away the phone and lighted a cigarette and continued to sit, poking the burned matchstick at the folder with the license number written under the flap. I listened to the silence around me and beyond that the whine of the restless wind.
It Grace Rehak was now the wife of thirty million bucks, her language was still from Bertha Lund’s parlor house. Or maybe she kept it under the shelf for use on private detectives. Or maybe she wasn’t Mrs. Lawrence Griswold at all.
I went back to the phone again and called the number I had started to call earlier.
“H’lo.”
“Harvey?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“This is Paul Pine, Harvey. How’s it going?”
“Okay.”
“I need some help on a small matter,” I said. “Can do?”
“Okay.”
“Got a license number of a Cadillac. Want the name and address of the party it’s registered to.”
“Okay.”
“Number 376-941. Illinois ’48. . . . Got it?” “Okay.”
“Want to call me back, Harvey?”
“Okay.”
I gave him my number and hung up. During my years as an investigator on the staff of the State’s Attorney, the rumor was strong that Harvey had once said five words in one sentence. Nobody actually believed it.
In fifteen minutes the phone rang. Harvey at the other end. “Pine?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Steven O’Flynn.”
“Steven O’Flynn?” I repeated blankly.
“Yeah.”
I shrugged. “Okay. Steven O’Flynn. What address?”
“1803 East Fifty-third Street.”
I wrote it out under Mary Conrad’s name on the calendar pad. “Nice going, Harvey,” I said. “How’re things around the department 2’”
“Okay.”
“One of these days I’ll stop by and say hello.”
“Okay.”
I cradled the phone, grinning, tore off the calendar sheet and reached for the phone book. It listed no Steven O’Flynn, on Fifty-third or off it. But Fifty-Third Street had cropped up before in this case and after a moment I remembered the circumstances. I flipped the pages rapidly to the T’s—and two pieces of the puzzle now fitted together.
1803 East Fifty-third Street was listed as the address of the Tropicabana—the night club first mentioned by Susan Griswold earlier in the day. Since then the name had kept cropping up—so many times that something would have to be done about it.
The time was seven-twenty. Tonight was to be my night with Gracie, and Gracie might have all the answers. But it wouldn’t hurt to know some of the facts beforehand—facts I could use in prying her loose from some of those answers.
I climbed into my hat and went on out the door.
CHAPTER14
THE Tropicabana turned out to be a narrow high-shouldered firetrap of two floors with gray stucco walls, a blinker sign on the roof and the air of impermanence common to all night clubs. I drove slowly past the entrance, left the Plymouth in a corner parking lot and allowed the gale to blow me along the walk and up to the front door.
The foyer was large, with a tropical décor that would fool nobody south
of the Arctic Circle. There were a lot of people in party clothes and the air smelled of face powder and the fragrance of good perfume and the odor of rich cigars.
Business was good enough for them to have the velvet rope up and a line waiting. A silver-haired captain of waiters stood at attention behind the rope, a packet of menus the size of billboards under one arm, the other hand ready in case somebody wanted to slip something green in it. Beyond him was a broad swath of white-clothed tables, and beyond that a dance floor and a platform holding a small orchestra in bright blouses and skintight trousers flaring at the knee.
At the straight ledge of the checkroom a curved brunette in a Hollywood sarong gave me a square of blue pasteboard in exchange for my hat. I looked at her empty smile and said, “Where do I find Steven O’Flynn?”
She said, “The boss? You’ll have to ask Mr. Carter, sir.” She pointed a flame-colored fingernail at a pair of velvet draperies on the opposite wall. I crossed over to them and pushed one aside and went into a shallow recess where a man sat behind a kneehole desk that held a lamp, a telephone and nothing else.
The man was slender and quiet-faced, a little on the elderly side, and they were letting him wear a dinner suit instead of a sarong. He gave me a gravely impersonal smile, hid his distress at my lack of dinner clothes and said, “May I help you, sir?” like a floorman in Ladies’ Ready-to-Wear.
“The name’s Pine,” I told him. “To see Mr. O’Flynn.”
A freshly manicured set of nails rose gracefully and settled on the telephone. But that was as far as it went. “Is Mr. O’Flynn expecting you, Mr. Pine?”
“Hunh-uh.”
“What did you wish to see Mr. O’Flynn about?”
“A personal matter.”
The eyes slid slowly from my face to my coat, found no suspicious bulges under either arm, then crawled slowly back to my bright and cheerful countenance. “Mr. O’Flynn,” he said gently, “will want to know something of the nature of your call. I’m afraid that will be necessary, sir.”
“And quite right,” I said. “Tell him it’s about a black Cadillac sedan—his.”
There might have been a wrinkle in the smooth skin of his forehead by now, but it was gone before I could be sure. He lifted the receiver without haste, pressed one of several buttons set in the standard, waited ten seconds, then said, “Carter, Mr. O’Flynn. In the lobby. A Mr. Pine wishes to see you about one of your cars. The Cadillac sedan. No, sir. Shall I ask—? Yes, sir.”
The receiver went back as silently as a snowflake falling on a wool blanket. Without looking at me the man put a finger under the edge of the desk. A faint whirring sound followed and a section of the paneled wall behind him slid aside, letting me see the door of a small self-service elevator.
I hadn’t expected anything like that. I looked from the elevator to the man behind the desk. In his quiet way he was enjoying my expression.
“Second floor,” he murmured. “Third door on the left.”
“That’s quite a gadget you got there,” I said. “Just the thing for these long winter evenings.”
He smiled his impersonal smile and said nothing. I went past him into the elevator and leaned a thumb against the only button in sight. The panel slid into place, sealing me off in a silent cell, and the cage went up as smoothly as lifting your hand.
Up there was a narrow corridor carpeted in soft gray between walls of soft yellow. Even the doorknobs along it looked soft. I turned left and counted off three of them and knocked. The lock clicked and I pushed open the door and walked in.
Not the night-club office you see in high-budget pictures. No Cezanne originals on leather walls, no long-fringed Orientals, no baroque magnificence. Just three fluted-glass windows along one wall, battleship linoleum underfoot, a few straight chairs, an adding machine on a stand, a battered swivel chair between a piano-legged oak table and an early American roll-top desk against the far wall. In the swivel chair, watching me come toward him, was a medium-bald man in shirt sleeves.
He gave me a long dispassionate stare out of bland blue eyes, took a bulldog briar pipe out of his lipless mouth and pointed its stem at a chair near the oak table.
“Rest yourself,” he said in a clear baritone voice. “I’m afraid I don’t have the pleasure of your acquaintance. I’m O’Flynn, Steven O’Flynn. With a V,” he added, as if he expected-to find an account of our meeting written up in tomorrow’s paper.
I was in the chair by this time, looking at him across the table. He was a barrel-chested, slope-shouldered Irishman who could have been five years on either side of fifty. His round, pink-skinned face was as hard as a jail-house wall, with small blunt features and a fringe of sandy hair bordering a naked pate. The flesh-colored button of a hearing aid was screwed into his right ear, its wire running under the soft collar of his white shirt. I hoped I wouldn’t have to yell at him.
He said, “What’s this crack about my Caddy, Pine?”
I said, “I had a visitor this afternoon. A man named Smith. After he left, a car picked him up. It was your car, Mr. O’Flynn.”
“What about it?”
“I’m anxious to get in touch with Mr. Smith,” I said. “He overlooked leaving his address with me at the time and picking him out of the phone book would be kind of difficult. Then I thought of his using your car, so I figured you’d be the one to help me.”
Light moved along his pale eyes as his gaze shifted to the pipe in his hand. “I don’t know anybody named Smith. You’ve made a mistake somewhere along the line.”
“Everybody,” I said, “knows somebody named Smith. There’s too many of them not to. But I don’t think this guy’s name is Smith at all.”
His jaw hardened. “Then what the hell do you expect me to do? Tell you about a man whose name you don’t know?”
“It was your car,” I said. “I assume you’d know who you lent it to.”
He looked at me stonily for a long moment. Behind his lack of expression thoughts were being born. “You said it different before,” he pointed out. “A minute ago you mentioned that a car, my car, had picked Smith up. That sounds like somebody else was behind the wheel.”
“A woman was driving.”
“A woman,” he said tonelessly. “You didn’t say that before.”
I got out my cigarettes and matches. O’Flynn dug a Woolworth ash tray from a welter of adding-machine tape and cancelled dinner checks and pushed it over where I could reach. He picked up a mechanical pencil from the same dime store and made a meaningless mark on a scratch pad and put it down again and leaned his folded arms on the table, waiting for me to say more. In the silence the rustle of marimbas came faintly into the room from the first floor.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s talk about the woman instead. Did she borrow your car this afternoon?”
“Borrowed is hardly the word,” he said evenly. “It so happens that Caddy belongs to my wife.”
“Sorry I bothered you,” I said, preparing to stand up. “Mrs. O’Flynn will be the one for me to see then. Does she happen to be here tonight?”
“Sit still, Pine.” His voice was cold and his eyes far colder. He unfolded his arms and knocked the dead ashes from his pipe into the ash tray. He turned the swivel chair and reached a tin of tobacco from the roll-top and began filling the bowl with slow care. Light from behind the frosted glass of the ceiling fixture glinted on the reddish fuzz covering the backs of his hands.
“What’s behind all this yapping?” he said. “You a cop?”
“The private kind,” I said. “No authority, nothing to back me up. No reason why I can’t be thrown out. If that’s what you want.”
He struck a match and held it to the pipe, eying me over the flame as it sank and rose under his inhalations. He blew out the match with a gust of smoke and continued to hold it between two fingers.
“Tell me some more about this man Smith,” he said casually. “What’s your interest in him?”
“I’m looking for a certain woman. He knows
where she is.”
“What’s her name?”
“Grace Rehak.”
His expression said the name meant nothing to him. “What does she look like 2“”
“I never saw her, Mr. O’Flynn. I’ve heard her described, but it might be the wrong description.”
“Let’s hear it anyway.”
“Small, black-haired, brown eyes. Figure like a boy’s is the way I got it.”
He shook his head slightly. “That could fit any one of a million. What do you want her for?”
“I have to hold back something,” I said. “That’s the part I’m holding back.”
His wrist jerked sharply, throwing the match on the floor, and he leaned forward and stared at me through narrowed lids. “You said Smith called on you today. Wouldn’t he tell you where to find her?”
“No.”
“Why wouldn’t he?”
“It seems she’s changed her name,” I said, “and doesn’t want her present identity to be hooked up with the old one.”
“When did this switch take place?”
“Can’t say exactly. Not more than two years back and maybe much more recently.“
His lipless mouth was a white-edged straight line now. “Why did she have to take on a new name? And who hired you to find her?”
“We’re back to that part I can’t talk about, Mr. O’Flynn.”
He showed me his teeth in what wasn’t a smile. “On your feet, wise guy,” he said clearly. “Take the air. Crawl on out. And stay away from my wife if you like living.”
“What’s the matter?” I said, staying where I was. “Has she got black hair and brown eyes?”
His face turned so red it bleached out his hair. He came out of his chair and around the desk at me, his hands balled into fists. On the outside I didn’t move a muscle and my grin was as steady as I could make it.
Halo in Brass Page 10