The Promoter

by Orrie Hitt

  I discovered Mary Sharpe in the room where I had heard the recording made. I noticed, too, that Judith Call lay sleeping peacefully upon the settee. She was fully clothed.

  “Get dressed,” I told Mary. “And let’s blow out of here.”

  She nodded, shaking her head as though she were trying to clear it.

  “Christ,” she said miserably. “Christ!”

  She was naked, except for the shoes on her feet, and I knew it would do no good to look for her underthings. I got her coat from a hanger and helped her put it on.

  “Can you walk?”

  Her hair was all mussed up and there was a long scratch across the one cheek. She stared at me stupidly.

  “Can you walk?” I repeated. I slapped her hard across the face. The pupils of her blue eyes widened for an instant and then receded again into tiny pinpoints. “Answer me!”

  “Walk,” she said dumbly. “Have to walk. Have to get away — ”

  I told her I would help her, that she could hang onto my arm, and then I went over to the settee. I bent down and picked up Judith Call. She opened her eyes once, smiled faintly and closed them again. I looked about for a coat, found none and then walked to the door.

  “Come on,” I told Mary Sharpe. As she stared at me, unmoving, I cursed her. “Hurry!” I said.

  We got through the room, keeping in the shadows, without being detected but when we got to the stairs we ran into trouble. Mary’s footsteps were unsteady and, in the end, I had to carry both girls up to the first floor. Before we went outside I wrapped my overcoat around Judith.

  When we reached the cab, Nelson got out and opened the door.

  “Golly!” he breathed, looking at Mary. “What happened to you?”

  I pushed Mary into the cab and, with Nelson’s help, put Judith in beside her.

  “Look,” I told Nelson. “We had a little hassle in there and these two girls got roughed up a bit. I think they may have been slipped some dope.”

  His eyes widened and he whistled.

  “Golly, if I’d known that — ”

  “There’s no danger,” I assured him, closing the door. “I think both of them will sleep for quite a while.” I reached in my pocket and brought out a fifty. “Just cruise around for about an hour and stop back for me then. I should be ready by that time. If I’m not, or you don’t see me, don’t wait.”

  He started to protest, to inquire about what he should do if I didn’t put in an appearance, but I told him to stop borrowing trouble and walked toward the house.

  There was, however, little need for my concern. I found everybody still in the midst of revels of one sort or another, and I had not been missed. Even Eudora, when I told her I had to go, seemed uninterested. She just told me to call the first of the week and that she would make some arrangements for the other girl. I told her I’d do that, forced myself to kiss her once, lightly, and said good night.

  Five minutes later I was in Nelson’s cab, riding toward the city. Both girls were still in back, sound asleep. As we neared the Twin Cities Bridge, Nelson remarked that it had been a hell of a night. I agreed.

  15

  I HAD a rough time of it all day Sunday with Judith Call. Once, during the morning, she tried to throw herself through the window and I had to bat her hard, driving her against the wall, to keep her from winding up in the street. Later in the afternoon she tried it again and this time I slapped her face until it was beet-red. Finally, she fell exhausted upon the bed. She lay there sobbing.

  “You have to believe me, Judith,” I said as patiently as I could. I sat down on the bed. “You’ve got to realize that I’m trying to help you.”

  We stayed there like that, two people in a small room and yet very far apart, until long after dark. Her miserable self-recriminations episode had began, of course, about nine that morning when she’d suddenly come awake. Her mind, even late in the day, was still clogged from the effects of the dope and, I suppose, the tortures of her previous experiences.

  “Judith,” I pleaded again, “Please be reasonable! I want to help you. Your father wants to help you. Everybody wants to help. But you have to stop this crying long enough so we can talk. The tears won’t solve anything. Believe me, they won’t. My God, do you know what time it is? Almost ten o’clock! And neither one of us has had a thing to eat all day. Aren’t you hungry? Maybe if you ate something you’d feel better.”

  I kept talking to her this way, reasoning with her, trying to make her trust me and feel unafraid. Finally, when I mentioned her father again, she suddenly sat up. Her glance was defiant and bitter.

  “A lot he cares!”

  “But he does, Judith. He cares a great deal. He’s your father and he wants to help you.”

  A smile twisted her lips and she didn’t look at all like the pretty young girl I had first seen in New Rockford.

  “It’s too late now,” she said. Her eyes became angry as she stared at me. “Who are you? Another one?”

  She hadn’t recognized me. I was not surprised.

  “I brought you here,” I said. “But I’m not one of them.”

  “I slept in your bed?”

  “That’s right, you did.”

  “And you had your — fun?”

  I could have struck her for saying that. “I sat in that chair over there, watching you. I didn’t know what you might try to do when you woke up. And it was a good thing that I did. Twice, I had to stop you from jumping out of the window.”

  “You did?” She shook her head in disbelief. “I don’t remember doing anything like that. I think you’re lying.”

  “I’m not lying,” I told her. “You were at a party — do you remember that?”

  She sat up straighter on the bed, frowning.

  “I remember going somewhere. It was a big house.”

  “Yes. Were you drunk when you went there?”

  “We always drink, every day.” Then, as an afterthought, “How else can you live this way?”

  “You were given some dope. Sodium amytal. Undoubtedly it was given to you in the form of a pill. Can you recall taking anything like that?”

  She got up from the bed, wavering. Her hair, I noticed for the first time, was a terrible mess. She looked at least twenty years older.

  “Who are you?” she demanded. She glanced around the room, as though she were seeing it for the first time. “And what are you doing with me here?”

  “I’m a friend,” I repeated gently, moving between the girl and the window. “And I’m trying to help. If you’ll let me.” She stood perfectly still by the bed, trembling, and I walked toward her slowly, speaking as I did so. “Don’t you recognize me, Judith? Don’t you recall having seen me before?”

  Her eyes lifted to my face, lingering for an instant. And then, with an agonized sigh, she covered her face with her hands.

  “Oh, God,” she whispered, “I don’t remember you.”

  “I met you in New Rockford.”

  “You-did?”

  “When I came up to get material for an article on that sports car. Don’t you remember? Look at me, Judith! I’ve changed myself a little — a moustache, short hair, the glasses — but I’m the man who was there in the garage, taking pictures, the day you went off.”

  Her hands came away from her face and I stood there very close to her, looking down into her eyes.

  “Don’t you remember me, Judith?”

  Recognition came to her slowly, like the morning sun bursting through a cloud bank. And, not unlike the blazing fire of the sun coming up over a new horizon, it was sort of wonderful to see.

  “Oh, Mr. Morgan!” she sobbed, pressing in against me. “Mr. Morgan!”

  She clung to me for a long while, sobbing. But this time her tears were not those of fear or regret. They were the tears of hope.

  “I’ve been an awful fool,” she said at last.

  “All of us are, at one time or another.”

  “I want to be able to trust you, Mr. Morgan.”

  I
stroked her damp hair, forcing her head back so that I could see her face.

  “You can trust me,” I told her seriously. “I risked my life to bring you here.”

  She turned her head away and pushed free of my arms.

  She sat down on the bed again. She looked every bit like an innocent young schoolgirl who has just been berated by her favorite teacher.

  “I didn’t come to the city for this,” she reminded me sadly. “I came here because I thought I could get a job and because I wanted to be somebody.” Her hands went down over her body, touching it hesitantly as though it were now something dirty. Her eyes glistened again, filling with tears, but her voice was tragically steady. “Look at me now, Mr. Morgan. I’m a prostitute. The daughter of a minister — and in less than a month I’ve become nothing but a cheap — ”

  “You mustn’t say that.”

  “But it’s true.”

  “It’s true only if you believe it.”

  We talked for a long while, until almost midnight, before I suggested that we go out and have something to eat.

  “But I look so terrible,” she protested. “And I haven’t any coat.”

  I told her not to worry about the coat, that I’d pick up another one for her in the morning. “Tell you what, I’ll go down and get something,” I said, opening the door. “I won’t be gone long.”

  Truthfully, I didn’t want to leave her alone in the room but there wasn’t much I could do about it. And, anyway, she seemed to have calmed down considerably. She seemed thankful for what I had tried to do for her. As I walked to the restaurant in the next block, I thought again of some of the things she had told me. She hadn’t blamed Elsa Lang for any of her troubles. Elsa had told her that she didn’t know Anderson very well but Judith had taken a chance on the lead because she’d been so sick of things at home in New Rockford. I had asked her if she had any recollection of her night at the house, but all she could tell me was that she felt she had been talking to someone and that she had said many horrible things that she would not normally say. Her memory, I realized, was fogged with liquor, dope and terror. I might have insisted that she bare her indiscretions to me, but I did not. I am not morbidly curious.

  There was a newsstand on the corner near the restaurant and I picked up a copy of the Sentinel and two packs of Winstons. While I waited for the girl behind the counter to fix up two roast beef sandwiches and coffee to take out, I scanned hastily through the pages of the paper. Just as the waitress finished packing the food, I found the item I had been seeking.

  GIRL CONFESSES TO STARTING MODEL AGENCY FIRE

  The account was brief and to the point. It related that Miss Diana Sanderson, an employee of the Montana Model Agency, had been arrested for putting the torch to her employer’s premises. The damage, it stated, had been considerable and Miss Sanderson, before her removal to the City Hospital for examination by a psychiatrist, had said her only reason for starting the fire had been to get even with the management for not having put her on as a model. “Who wants to be a file clerk all her life?” Miss Sanderson had inquired.

  I paid the waitress and carried the carton into the street. The more I thought about Diana Sanderson the more I felt myself gaining respect for the girl. Perhaps her attention-getting method had been somewhat more drastic than I might have suggested but it had, without a doubt, created the desired effect. The only trouble now was that she might get sent to jail for what she had done. Or, facing jail, she might blurt out the truth and this could very easily reach Miller’s alert ears. I knew without deciding upon the method to be used, that I would have to do something to help her.

  Then I got a shock. My room, I discovered upon my return, was empty.

  The girl was gone.

  Not only that, but the top drawer of the dresser was open and a careful examination of it failed to reveal the twenty dollars I had left there for my room rent.

  I sat down on the bed, cursing. Either Judith Call was basically a good girl and she was merely trying to run away from herself and everyone who knew her, or she wasn’t any good at all and she was on her way back to the syndicate. Remembering her, I tried to believe that the former was true. But I could not be sure. And even though she might betray me to them, I had to keep on with my plans until the ring was smashed. Or until I was killed.

  16

  IT was nearly noon before I awoke Monday. When I saw what time it was, I jumped out of bed, swearing, and stumbled down the hall to the bathroom. A few minutes later I was dressed.

  Outside, I found the weather clear and cold. The wind whipped around the corners of the building, slamming me in the face, and I decided that Judith Call had gotten more than slightly chilly when she’d gone out the night before without a coat. But, then, she’d had my twenty dollars and this would have supplied her with more than enough with which to catch a cab, or rent a room, or, for that matter, to have returned to her home in New Rockford. On the other hand, it was quite possible that she had gone back to the brownstone on Tenth Avenue, in which case I would be forced to move very quickly and carefully.

  While I waited for my eggs in the restaurant I phoned Dr. Call. But, from the way he spoke, I knew that she had not arrived at home. I assured him, before I hung up, that I was doing everything in my power to break the ring which held his daughter. I did not, of course, mention that I had seen her, since I felt that this would only confuse the issue and could be of little solace to him. He pleaded with me for prompt action, saying that he would turn to the police if he continued to lose confidence in me.

  “Don’t do anything until the end of the week,” I cautioned him. “You’ll have some definite news from me by that time.”

  “I hope so, Mr. Morgan.”

  As soon as I had finished my breakfast, I took a long, unsteady breath and dialed the number at Eudora Channing’s house. If anything had gone wrong, if they had been suspicious of Mary or if Judith’s disappearance had been at all unusual, it seemed to me that she wouldn’t hesitate to tell me about it. There was no reason why she shouldn’t. If she felt I was out of line in any respect she could threaten me with the photos that had been taken at the brownstone.

  “Oh, Bill, darling!” she breathed when she found out who it was. “I’ve been waiting for your ring.”

  “Sorry, but I just got up.”

  Her laugh was low, intimate.

  “Big night Saturday night?”

  “You ought to know,” I said cheerfully. “I couldn’t keep up with you.”

  “Bill, listen.” Her voice was businesslike now, short and clipped. “Miller liked you, I think. And so did the others. But this is a producing business, Bill. We have to have — you know — stock. You get ten percent of what your girls do, no matter what. But we have to have a fresh supply. They become old hat to the customers and, not only that, they disappear. We lost one the other night, the girl who made the tape.”

  For the first time since the party I began to feel secure. Apparently the incidents had been accepted as a matter of course. Nobody cared. Only human lives were involved. And what did that mean when there were so many others who could be used for the same purpose?

  “I’m going out of town for a few days,” I told her. “To get the girl I spoke about. But I don’t want her on my hands after I return to the city. How would Friday night be, at your place?”

  “Say, at eight?”

  “Yes, eight would be good.”

  There was a long silence during which I visualized the look of anticipation in Eudora Channing’s eyes as she contemplated the fun they would be able to have with a real live innocent. It was almost enough to make me puke.

  “A thing like that is worth a fortune,” she breathed. “Really, Bill, it is.”

  “I know,” I agreed. “Why else would I spend all week running her down?”

  She told me it made her unhappy to think that I would be gone for so long. I don’t know whether she was lying or not. But I had made up my mind that I wouldn’t touch her again
even if it meant my life. I was glad when she finally blew a noisy kiss into my ear and I was able to hang up.

  Another dime connected me with the offices of Federson and Federson. Lucy Miller said she was delighted that I had phoned her. She consented, readily, to my suggestion that we meet at a nearby bar and discuss her future. She told me that she would get there shortly after five but that she would wait for me if I was late.

  City Hospital is in the north end of the city and by the time I reached there, riding the subway, it was almost two o’clock. After several unsuccessful attempts, I eventually learned the floor upon which Diana Sanderson was being held and, somewhat later, I was ushered into the office of the consulting psychiatrist.

  “Dr. Frank,” he said, rising from behind his desk and extending his hand. “May I assist you?”

  I told him who I was but, naturally, it meant absolutely nothing to him. I said that I was interested in Diana Sanderson and that I wished to talk to him about her.

  Dr. Frank was an extremely restless individual, very tall and thin, and when he spoke it seemed to be with a great deal of effort. He asked me if I was a friend and I told him I was. After he had confirmed this through a series of intercom communications, he became more friendly and talkative.

  “I talked with the girl this morning,” he said. “She seems perfectly normal, nothing out of the ordinary.” He smiled, obviously considering what he had just told me. “Oh, I grant you that normal people seldom run around setting fire to their places of employment, but — well, as I say, I think she is all right. I believe she was compelled to do what she did for some desperate reason but, so far, she has been unwilling to tell us about it. Perhaps she will. I don’t know. I’ll have to talk with her again.”

  I asked him if it were possible for me to see her for a few moments but he said this would be a violation of the rules since she was confined for having committed a crime.

  “Would you give her a message for me?”

  “I might. It depends on what it is.”

  “Just tell her Bill Morgan said for her not to worry. Tell her everything’s going to be all right.”