Ричард Деминг: The Second Richard Deming Mystery MEGAPACK™: 23 Classic Mystery Stories

Silently closing the window again, Mac slipped on his coat to go downstairs for dinner. As he pulled shut his door, he glanced along the hall casually, and saw what he expected to see. Diagonally across the hall from his room a door stood open about an inch, and the room beyond was dark. Apparently Thomas Cougar’s suspicions were far from allayed by the phone call to Dude Emory, and he intended to have every move Mac made watched.

Without glancing at the slightly ajar door again, Mac made straight for the elevator. A half hour later, when he came up again, his room had been expertly searched. So expertly that even though he had expected it, he himself had to look for ten minutes before he found evidence of the search in the form of a pair of socks replaced in an order different from the way he had memorized it.

At exactly six the next evening Mac rang the buzzer of Nan’s apartment. But instead of Nan answering the door, it was opened by Claire D’Arcy, who wore a simple blue house dress.

“Oh. Mr. MacDowell,” Claire said. “Nan would have called, but she didn’t know where you were staying. She was suddenly called out of town and had to catch a plane.”

“Oh.” Mac said, and waited blankly.

“Nan said to tell you she was sorry, and if you’d leave your number, she’d phone you tomorrow. In the meantime, I’m supposed to give you the cocktail she promised.” She stepped back and held the door wide. “Won’t you come in?”

“Thanks,” Mac said, following her into the living room. It occurred to him that perhaps Nan’s sudden trip was a stroke of luck, for he might never find another opportunity to sound out her apartment mate alone, and on impulse he said:

“If you haven’t had dinner, maybe you’d substitute for Nan — unless you mind being second choice. I planned to take her to the Blue Penguin.”

“I’m afraid I’ve already started cooking dinner,” Claire said. “And besides, I’m not dressed for dining out.” Hesitantly she added, “If you like, you may eat here. I always cook three times too much.”

“I wouldn’t want to put you to any bother.”

“No bother at all,” she assured him, and her eyes lighted with a shy eagerness that almost startled him, for he did not regard himself as the type of man maidens yearn for. He wrote it off as a symptom of loneliness, which might make her glad of any male company.

“Dinner will be ready in fifteen minutes,” she said, taking it for granted he would stay. “Please mix yourself a drink while you’re waiting. You’ll find everything on the side board.”

“Thanks, but I’d prefer a bottle of beer, if you have one.” Actually he preferred a cocktail, but Larry MacDowell’s drink had been beer, so now it was Mac’s.

“In the refrigerator,” she said. “You can drink it at the kitchen table and watch me cook, if you like.”

“That’s my speed,” Mac grinned at her. “I feel more at home in the kitchen.”

They ate at the kitchen table, and afterward Mac helped her with the dishes. Accustomed to dining almost exclusively in restaurants, the domesticity of the situation had a curious effect on Mac. He found himself enjoying the evening more than he ever enjoyed the glitter of cafes and night clubs. Under the influence of his obvious enjoyment, Claire’s shyness evaporated. Beneath the shyness Mac found a quiet intelligence and a nice sense of humor.

By the time the dishes were finished, they had become old friends, and Claire was laughing and chattering like a complete extrovert. Almost automatically their hands clasped together as she led him back into the front room.

When they sat together on the same sofa where Mac had been caught in the act of kissing Nan, Claire snuggled against his shoulder without a trace of her former shyness and looked up at him in almost open invitation.

With an effort Mac recalled that his purpose in staying to dinner was not pleasure, but business.

He made a face at her and asked casually, “How long have you lived here with Nan?”

“About six months. But I don’t live with her. She lives with me. It was my apartment originally. I met Nan at a party.” She moved away slightly. “Are you very fond of Nan?”

Mac dropped his arm across her shoulder and drew her back in place. “I barely know her. Seems like a nice girl, though.”

“Nicer than I?”

Mac frowned, not being particularly fond of coyness; then turned the frown into a grin. “You’ve got one big advantage over her. You’re here.”

“Rat!” she said, and started to twist out of his arms.

He pulled her back and kissed her. And suddenly her arms were about his neck and her lips were pressed against his so fiercely, he was startled. Compared to Nan’s cool lips, Claire’s were like fire. Mac experienced the combined sensation of wrestling with a leopard and holding one finger in a live wall socket.

When eventually he forcibly, broke the kiss to prevent suffocation, she snuggled against him with her head pressed to his chest and her soft hair tickling his chin.

“You shouldn’t kiss me like that,” she said in a muffled voice.

Mac gazed down at her bent head in amazement. “Does seem a waste of time,” he said sarcastically. “I can get the same effect by falling down a flight of stairs.”

“Who are you, Mac?” she asked in the same muffled voice.

“MacDowell. Larry MacDowell. Remember?”

“I mean, what do you do?”

“I’m a C.P.A.,” he said truthfully, though the only accounting work he had done since school was checking books for evidence on FBI cases.

“What’s your business with Nan?”

He frowned down at the top of her head. “What business with Nan?”

Suddenly she straightened and moved a safe two feet away from him. “Why do so many men come to see Nan who don’t seem to be men friends, but appear to have some business arrangements with her? All types men, like that awful Thomas Cougar. Who are they, and what do they want?”

“How should I know?” Mac evaded. “I just met the girl, and don’t know a thing about her. Maybe they’re business friends.” He paused, as though the thought had just occurred to him. “What is her business, anyway? She must have some kind of income to keep up her half of this place.”

“When she suggested we share the apartment, she said some money had been left her. She hasn’t any kind of job, and doesn’t do much of anything but move around socially. But lately I’ve gotten the impression these men who call on her have something to do with her income, and that she never inherited any money. I can’t explain it. It’s just a feeling, and it bothers me because I like Nan.” She looked at Mac in sudden suspicion. “Maybe you’re one of them, and know all about it.”

“You’re imagining things.” Mac said, and reached for her again.

Feeling he had obtained what little information Claire had, and that further questions might cause her to suspect he was pumping her and make her mention it to Nan, Mac decided to devote the rest of the evening to pleasure. But he discovered he could not dislodge the subject from Claire’s thoughts. Time and again she returned to her suspicion that Mac was one of the men somehow tied to Nan, sometimes bluntly accusing him of it, sometimes cajoling him to tell her what Nan was involved in, and never entirely accepting his protest that he had no idea what she was talking about.

In the middle of a kiss she would return to the subject, and finally Mac began to wonder — who was the pumper and who the pumpee. Her probing alarmed him for her own safety, for if curiosity led her to the point of questioning Nan, her questions might lead her to the bottom of the river.

He turned over in his mind the thought of warning her, but discarded it as too dangerous to his own position in case Nan ever learned of the warning. There was nothing to do but persist in his denials, and eventually he succeeded in smothering her questions by keeping her lips occupied.