Hot Red Money

by Baynard Kendrick

  He put coffee into the automatic coffee maker and plugged it in, then went into the bathroom where he took a couple of aspirin and showered and shaved. In clean pajamas and bedroom slippers, he started energetically to restore his books to their proper places, his folders to the files, and to replace the contents of his antique mahogany secretary that was Anne’s pride and joy.

  Four cups of coffee kept him going until the distasteful job was finished. He had grown steadily more puzzled as the clean-up progressed. He’d told Ben Knox the truth when he said that he never kept anything of importance in the apartment. His files contained old letters, mostly from friends, with a sprinkling from very prominent men—news analysts, script writers, editors and teachers, half a dozen ministers, and three or four newspapermen, like himself, who were communist fronts.

  Maury made another check, concentrating on those names that were stamped in his mind in black indelible newsprint. There were some he’d protected, whitewashed clean; others that he had neatly lanced with innuendo; and some he had blatantly tossed to the wolves when the Communist Party found them no longer useful, by furnishing proof of their culpability and CP connections direct, firsthand, to the FBI.

  Hell, the Commies didn’t need those names, and didn’t have to search his place, nor any place else to get them. They knew them as well as they knew the name of Maury Morel. But they’d certainly ripped his place to pieces looking for something.

  Maury closed his files and sat down on the edge of his bed. He asked himself aloud: “Then why?”

  The Commies in their entire history had never had a front like Maury Morel, and never could get another one half as good again. He wasn’t any parlor pink or fellow-traveler.

  The CP Security Commission knew him as a hardened old-time comrade, and one with brains enough to win a Pulitzer Prize while apparently fighting them through the public press. They also knew that to be effective he had to get his stories on his own and write them by ear the way the chips fell. Like this Pringle thing, and Beshara Shebab. Some dumb comrade had sure played the fool the night before, and it wasn’t Morel.

  The Security Commission stood for a lot of clandestine dirty work, but that didn’t include murder. Sentencing an out-of-line man to death by knifing was far beyond the power of the Party Review and Control Commission in the U.S.A.

  That was a privilege reserved to countries under state control, such as Hungary, Russia and China. That was probably the only reason that he was alive today.

  Again he came back to the ever present question of what had they searched his apartment for. Had some jealous comrade dubbed him a spy? That was always a party weakness—jealousy—some cluck who thought he was smarter than you were because he understood nothing of what you were doing.

  That was silly! He’d been publicly denounced in the Daily Worker, and dubbed “Maury the Fink” for years—all a part of the grandstand play that kept him walking the fence to hold his job and protect his reputation. Stand on one foot and juggle three balls with one hand tied behind your back! There was every chance that he’d crack to pieces some fine day!

  Maury smacked a fist down in his palm. Sorenson! Erick Sorenson! He was posing as a defecting CP member and Maury had gotten Hal Gow to give him a job on the Globe-Star a year before to work under Maury’s supervision. He’d gotten Maury some information, but he’d turned out to have a minus I.Q. Hal had had to let him go.

  Out of pique, there was an even chance that he’d denounced Maury not only to the Party Review and Control Commission, but probably to the FBI.

  The FBI was clever as hell! They could fine tooth comb a ten room house and not leave a burnt match out of place, but that wasn’t the way they would search the apartment of Maury Morel. They’d wreck it, just like it had been wrecked the night before. Make it look like his Commie pals, who didn’t care. Always presuming the FBI wanted it to have that appearance.

  Well, FBI or Security Commission, that search had been a warning and Maury didn’t intend to let it go by.

  He looked at the clock. Twenty past noon. Nine twenty in San Francisco. He decided to call Anne. The sound of her voice, even that many miles away, would be comforting.

  He could dial San Francisco direct by dialing 415 and then the exchange and number of her father’s home. Andrew H. Malcolm, Nob Hill. The idea of that direct dialing fascinated him. No going through an operator. Just like calling someone next door. “This is Maury!” A real surprise for whoever answered the phone.

  He thought he had Andy’s number memorized. That sock on the head must have penetrated through the bone. Market … 5 … Market 6.… He reached out for the alphabetical telephone notebook that flipped up when you set it to the proper letter. It was missing.

  A quick glance around the possible spots in the bedroom where it might have been placed convinced him that it wasn’t there. Starting with the A’s and running through the Z’s, he tried to review the names that he and Anne had put down in the small directory. There were far too many.

  Half-a-dozen long distance, maybe, like the Malcolms, with their name, address, and telephone number. A few unlisted New York numbers. A couple of big wheels in Albany. A church dignitary in Ohio who had been with Maury on a TV interview. Most of them were in the regular phone book, if anyone cared to take the time.

  What kept bringing him back to Anne, and her parents, on Nob Hill?

  The big lever of the Communists was fear! They demanded unswerving loyalty, blind obedience, adherence to the party line without deviation, year by year. Wives were nothing. Children were nothing. Religion was nothing. Toss them away. Change your name. Move someplace else without any notice and leave them all flat as soon as they threatened to interfere.

  But Anne hadn’t threatened to interfere.

  Or had she?

  By God, he was starting to get the treatment himself when he asked such a question. It was easier to think that Hal Gow was suspicious, or Old Man Jeffers, or anyone of the G-S brass. Ray Lindeman, the taciturn, unapproachable Editor, or the laughing, joking, hard as a rock, Managing Editor, Everett Dupree.

  All of them had known that slimy creep, Erick Sorenson, better than Anne in the six months that he’d worked on the paper.

  Or had they?

  One of those doubting questions again. Questions that the Party counted on to fill a man with unsurety. Sorenson was a drip, with unkempt hair and wavering eyes, and a look of never having had a meal, or a bath, since the day he was born. His shoes were scuffed and his clothes were baggy.

  Sorenson’s kind of battle against life’s miseries was to rail at them with a perpetual whine. Yet that was the type that Anne wept over and wanted to mother, just as she wept over cowering dogs and mewling kittens and any creature that lived and breathed so long as it didn’t have a spine.

  She’d had the smelly Erick down many times for dinner, buying him steaks, opening him endless cans of beer, until Maury, driven by desperation, had pleaded business and fled to some nearby picture show leaving Anne to her masochistic enjoyment of Erick’s whimpers.

  Now Maury was wondering just how much falsehood, and how much truth, Sorenson might have whimpered into Anne’s receptive ear. Sorenson was a party member, but he couldn’t have guessed at Maury’s connection. He was too far down in the ranks to know anything about a member at the top of the scale.

  But Sorenson might have said anything. How much had Anne believed of it all?

  During the past six months a coldness had developed between Maury and Anne. She’d gotten polite, and Maury had never been fond of his wife’s politeness. Normally, she had a stock of contemptuous epithets which conveyed to Maury by their very tone that all was well between them.

  When he’d kissed her good-bye a month before as she boarded the plane, she’d said quite curtly, “Good-bye, dear. Take care of yourself.” It might have been her words alone that made him feel that her kiss was most perfunctory.

  Maury thoughtfully dressed himself, then went back to the living room. He
started rummaging slowly through the middle secretary drawer. He had picked its contents off the floor without much attention when he was cleaning up. The papers were shoved without order into the drawer. It took him a moment of fumbling through the jumble of stationery, envelopes, Scotch Tape, postage stamps, and string before he found what he was looking for: A yellow envelope returned from the drugstore just before Anne left containing a dozen developed color snapshots, and the films.

  It had struck him when he’d picked it up that it should have been thicker, but that had been only a pin prick to his perceptions and he hadn’t stopped to investigate. Now he found that the films were still in the envelope, but the twelve 4 x 4 snapshots were missing.

  They were pictures taken out at Jones Beach on a hot June Sunday, the month before. Anne and himself. Hal Gow, and his wife, Marge, and their two boys, three and four. There had also been the drippy Erick Sorenson, whom Anne had rung into the party.

  Ten minutes later, after placing a person-to-person call, he thrilled to the sound of Anne’s warm voice on the telephone.

  She sounded really glad to hear him. When the preliminaries were over and Maury had found that the family was well, except for a sty on Andy Malcolm’s eye, he plunged straight to the heart of what was bothering him.

  “Anne, you remember those pictures we took at Jones Beach last month? Hal Gow and Marge, and the kids, and Sorenson were with us.”

  “They’re in the middle desk drawer of your secretary, Maury. Why?”

  “They’re not. That’s why. I thought maybe you took them with you. Somebody ransacked the place here last night.”

  “Robbed us?”

  “Those pictures and the telephone index file, that’s all.”

  “Where were you?”

  “In St. Vincent’s. Somebody knocked me cold up an alley, but I’m okay now, except for a bump on the bean.”

  “Up an alley?” Maury could hear her sharp drawn breath. “Maury, are you in trouble?”

  “Honey, that depends entirely upon the point of view. I’ll write you all the details tonight. Air mail. Right this minute, I’m a little worried about you.”

  “About me? For heaven’s sake, why?”

  “Those snapshots, Anne, and the telephone file with your parents’ address in San Francisco. There was a man killed last night and I was in the thick of it.”

  “In the thick of a murder? Maury, you are in trouble.”

  “No more than usual, believe me. But I have a hunch that those pictures may be mailed to San Francisco so that someone out there can put the finger on you.”

  “Aren’t you talking a little wild? Why would anyone want to murder me? Why not Hal, or Marge, or their children, or Sorenson?”

  “I didn’t say your life was in danger, honey. It’s just that anyone can identify the rest of us in that group without pictures. They know where we are. We’re here.”

  “And what would they want to do to me?”

  “Threaten you, to frighten me—put pressure on me. I happen to love you, believe it or not, and Commie tactics are scare the loved ones and you get them all.”

  “I don’t scare easily.”

  “Listen, darling,” Maury’s voice grew desperate. “I want you to get suspicious, and that goes for your Ma and Pa. If anyone approaches you in the next few days—”

  “I won’t be here,” Anne said decisively. “I’m coming home as soon as I can get reservations on a plane.”

  “But Anne—”

  “I’ll wire you when to meet me.” She hung up.

  Maury replaced the receiver slowly, then took up a classified telephone directory and began to thumb through the yellow pages. An hour later in a hired car he was speeding out the Boulevard toward Amityville, Long Island.

  Chapter Six

  The Amity Rest home that Maury had located under Hospitals in the yellow pages of the telephone directory was one of eight or nine similar institutions in Amityville. Cloaked in respectable and secretive splendor, they bordered a tree-lined semicircular lane about two miles long on the edge of town.

  All of the Homes were private, and all expensive, shyly exhibiting their names on bronze plates so small that they had to be searched for.

  In the summer, shielded from the eyes of the curious by spacious shade trees, they might easily have been mistaken for the luxurious estates of the wealthy. Many of them had been, years before.

  But with a closer look, the vast spread of the grounds and the manorial houses, dotted about with cottages, couldn’t deceive anyone. The windows, protected from top to bottom with heavy prison screening, and the hurricane fences, closing off the road and separating the estates, one from the other, screamed institutions.

  Alcoholics. Manic-depressives. Psychopathics. Schizophrenics. Paranoiacs. Congenital idiots.

  The places screamed another message to Maury Morel: The public’s utter disregard, and the utter inadequacy of public funds provided to science to study, care for, and cure the hundreds confined in that long two miles. Yet billions were always forthcoming for scientists to do research on the most modern ways to kill.

  At least these inmates and their families had the money to pay. But what of the millions throughout the country who didn’t? Millions who faced life hopelessly through dreary days and tortured nights, confined to the care of overworked and underpaid doctors and nurses, carrying out their dedicated work in state institutions and county asylums that were bursting their walls with overcrowding.

  What of them, and their families, too? Families who faced the plight of loved ones night by night and day by day.

  There was an angle there: Don’t lose your mind unless you have money! It’s dry suicide for you and your family to be mentally ill and not be able to pay.

  Maury would discuss that angle with Hal Gow. Arrange to do a five day signed series. The Old Man would like it. Maybe even Ray Lindeman, the Editor, who disliked everything. Best of all, the Party would simply lap it up. Their line was suspension of nuclear tests now, and they’d been getting a trifle tough with Maury during the past year. He needed to strengthen his position with some good crusading, and such a series would do the trick, even if the facts were true. The articles might even win a nod from the head-shrinkers’ association—but his footwork would have to be very shifty or they’d find dat ol’ debbil socialized medicine hiding back of every syntax.

  A good place to feel the article idea out was the Amity Rest Home. Give the doctor in charge that line. Yes, that was it: The efficiency of their modern equipment—and how much it cost to put it in. The fine work they were doing—and losing money on every patient. Some anonymous case histories, and equally anonymous interviews with some of the patients. Have to be alone with them, naturally.

  “And, by the way, Doctor. Do you happen to have a patient named Turlock in here? A friend of mine. I’d like to talk with him. Get a good interview. Show it to you, of course, before it hit the paper.” That ought to do it.

  He turned the car into a horseshoe drive and parked in a space with several others. The house was granite and very large. Maury guessed at seventy-five rooms, maybe more. Front steps led up to a porch with Colonial pillars.

  The hurricane fence ran down to the road from each end of the house, leaving the horseshoe drive in three sides of an open square. A fountain, turned into a flower bed, allowed an undraped nymph atop it to dominate the middle.

  The porch, which covered half the front of the house, was two stories high. Three windows on each side of the wide front door had drawn shades inside, but no bars or screens.

  As Maury walked up the steps he looked up to the second floor. The windows were screened there. In one, he caught a glimpse of someone watching. A woman. She vanished quickly when she saw him looking. He felt a twinge of embarrassment, as though he had been caught playing the part of a Peeping Tom.

  He shook it off and went inside to a long wide hall, floored in big squares of black and white tile. The walls and ceiling were sanitary white. Undeco
rated, except for a fresco of intertwined curlicues, done in gilt just below the ceiling the length of each wall.

  A partition had been built at the back end of the hall to form a white dead end. On it, in a wide gilt frame, and lighted by a picture light, hung a full length painting.

  The subject was a semibald man with a Vandyke beard. He wore a frock coat and a gray foulard tie with a diamond stickpin. His face was more arrogant than kindly. He was posed with his right hand outstretched stiffly, palm up. Maury, perhaps unjustly, interpreted the gesture to mean that you’d better put some cash in that hand if you hoped to get in.

  There were waiting rooms with comfortable chairs to the left and the right. Near the arch to the right hand one, a woman of about thirty in a neat business suit sat back of a desk with a small switchboard at one end.

  She gave a careful appraising look at Maury’s expensive linen suit and two-toned summer shoes before doling him out a smile. According to a black sign with white letters that stood on her desk, it was perfectly safe to address her as Miss Flynn.

  Maury decided that an answering smile, no matter how weak, would be politic, but it irked him to have to give it. He was beginning to dislike everything about Amity Rest intensely, and he could work up no sense of kinship with Miss Flynn. She, including her manners and surroundings, seemed designed to drive you off your rocker instead of putting the solid ground of sanity back under your addled brain. Rest Home was right! He felt he’d be there the rest of his life, going battier every day, providing anyone ever got him in.

  “I’d like to speak to the doctor in charge.”

  “Oh.” Miss Flynn awarded him a second scrutiny, searching to find some unpardonable sin. “If you’ve come to visit a relative, and will give me your name and the patient’s name, I can arrange the necessary pass. That is, if the patient you wish to see has been here a week or more.”

  “No relative. I just want to talk to the doctor in charge.”

  “Oh.” Miss Flynn pulled a pad of ruled forms toward her and poised a ball point pen. “These are our regular admission forms. One has to be filled out before you can possibly talk to Dr. Rheinemann. May I have your name, please?”