Ричард Деминг: The Second Richard Deming Mystery MEGAPACK®

“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.

When he left the apartment at midnight, his suit was rumpled, his collar covered with lipstick and his head was spinning like a gyroscope. So far out of his mind had Claire D’Arcy succeeded in knocking Homicide, Inc., he almost forgot to bother to check if he was still being tailed.

It was only when his eyes fell on the door of the room diagonally across from his own and noted it was still ajar that he came back to the present.

Inwardly he grinned, wondering if the spy beyond the door had noticed the red smear on his collar and would report to Cougar that his throat seemed to be cut.

At noon the next day the room phone awakened Mac. It was Nan Tracy.

“I’m sorry about last night,” she said in a tight, unnatural voice.

“That’s all right. What’s the matter?”

“Got a business deal on.” She seemed to be under terrific excitement, for her tone was so forced, her voice nearly cracked. “If you haven’t had lunch, get some, because you won’t have another opportunity. I’ll pick you up in an hour.”

“I’ll be waiting in the lobby,” he said quietly.

So he was to be given an assignment, he thought. Probably, the result of her plane trip last night. He hoped it was a one-man assignment. Managing to fail to murder his designated victim would be easier without a witness.

But apparently it was a big mission, for Thomas Cougar and another man were with Nan when she arrived. Mac rose from the lobby sofa where he had been waiting when the three entered, and Nan introduced the second man as Arnold Link. He was a squat, broadly powerful man with “gorilla” written all over him.

Cougar said, “You three wait here a minute,” and his tone made it almost an order.

Mac stared after him puzzledly as the pale killer crossed to the desk and employed the house phone, which could be used only to phone rooms. In a moment Cougar returned and all of them stood waiting, as though expecting someone to join them.

“What’s up?” Mac asked tentatively.

Nan and Cougar stared at him fixedly, as though they had not heard the question.

Squat Arnold Link said in a toneless monotone, “You’ll find out when we get there. We do not blab in hotel lobbies.”

A man who apparently had gotten off one of the elevators suddenly joined the group. Without surprise Mac noted he was the same man he had seen in the lobby with Cougar the night he peered over the banister.

“Benny Chisholm,” Cougar said briefly, “Mac MacDowell.”

Benny was a tall, gangling fellow with a large nose and freckles. His wide, yokel-like eyes were blandly innocent, but the effect was spoiled by a mouth which was nothing but a cruel, lipless gash. He nodded without offering his hand.

My friend across the hall, Mac thought, and glanced at Nan. With a shock he realized she was actually smiling, but her smile did not come up to the promise at which her usual grave expression hinted. It was fixed and brittle, and her eyes glittered as though she were under intense strain.

The smile made the hair on the back of his neck rise, and something about the flat look with which the three men regarded him warned him of danger. It suddenly occurred to him that he somehow might have been found out, and the gathering might not be a mission at all, but a one-way ride for MacDonald Sprague.

“I forgot to leave my key at the desk,” he said abruptly, and before anyone else could speak, turned on his heel and walked rapidly across the lobby.

Tossing his key on the desk, he said to the clerk in a quick but low voice, “Phone room 418 for me and tell Mr. Crowell I can’t meet him for lunch.”

Instead of immediately returning to the group, he cut diagonally across to the tobacco counter and bought a package of cigarettes. As he paid for them, he saw from the corner of his eye that the clerk was just setting down the phone. Now it was necessary to stall at least a moment in order to allow George Doud time to act on the code message.

Turning toward the group, he called, “Be right with you,” then deliberately opened the cigarette pack, removed one and lit it at the tobacco counter’s gas lighter.

All five of them crowded into a long black sedan which was parked in front of the hotel. Squat Arnold Link drove, Nan sat next to him in the front seat, and Mac found himself between the Strangler and the freckled Benny Chisholm.

“What’s the deal, now that we’re out of the lobby?” Mac asked as they pulled away.

“It’ll keep a while,” Cougar said shortly. The thick-shouldered chauffeur drove smoothly, obeying all traffic rules in town, and when they left the city, limits, pushed up to a sedate fifty miles an hour and kept it there.

At the end of the hour, about thirty-five miles from town, the driver said, “Taxi tailing us.”

Mac started to twist his head rearward, but Cougar said sharply, “Keep your face front.” To Link he said, “Pull over and park.”

Immediately the sedan slowed, pulled onto the shoulder and stopped. In a few moments a cab went by without slowing.

“Got butterflies in your stomach, Link?” Cougar asked contemptuously. “Just because a taxi travels the same speed we do, doesn’t mean we’re being tailed.”