Ричард Деминг - She’ll Hate Me Tomorrow

All at once the reason for the mysterious phone call from the woman struck her. In fact, all the odd events of that morning suddenly made sense. It seemed apparent that Whitey Cord had instigated the safecracking, no doubt spurred to action by Carl Vegas’ threat to arrange for a deposition to be mailed to the district attorney in the event anything happened to him.

As soon as the document was safely in Cord’s hands and he had read the contents, he had moved swiftly to eliminate not only Vegas, but the two witnesses to the murder of Otis Taylor. Apparently he still considered Tony Marzulla “safe” enough to leave alive.

The phone call had been to determine if Stella knew the contents of the affidavit. Obviously Whitey Cord had been behind it and, as he couldn’t afford to leave anyone alive who knew what Stella knew, he had sent his hired killers to dispose of her.

Setting down her drink without touching it, Stella ran to the outer office, grabbed her bag from her desk and raced to the door. Her high heels clattered along the tile hallway as she hurried toward the fire exit. She had just rounded the corner leading to the exit when she heard the doors of the elevator open. Stepping back out of sight, she pressed her back against the wall and waited, fearful that the sound of her footsteps might bring the killers to her.

She heard two sets of footsteps cross the hall and heard the office door open, so violently that it banged back against the wall. With pounding heart she stopped and slipped off both shoes. Carrying them, she continued on tiptoe to the fire exit, eased open the door and let it shut silently behind her again.

She ran down the stairs at full speed, replaced her shoes only when she reached the alley into which the fire exit spilled her, click-clicked up the alley at a jiggling trot and luckily caught a cab which was cruising along the cross street just as she emerged from the alley.

Jumping into the back seat, she gasped out her home address.

“What’re you running from?” the cabbie asked. With effort Stella brought herself under control. “I’m not running from, I’m running to,” she said. “I have to catch a bus, and first I have to make a couple of stops. Please hurry.”

“Sure,” the driver said cheerfully, and took off as though he were heading down the stretch at the Indianapolis Speedway.

Within minutes the cab pulled up in front of the brown-stone rooming house where Stella lived. Ordering the driver to wait, she ran up the steps and moments later was keying open her door.

Pulling a suitcase from her closet, she opened it and began flinging in clothes. She must have established some sort of a record for packing, for she carried the suitcase out to the cab five minutes after entering the rooming house. Most of her clothing remained in the room, but the suitcase contained all the items necessary for quick flight.

Her next stop was her bank, where she had the cabbie wait again. Her account stood at four hundred and eighteen dollars. She drew out four hundred.

Back in the cab again, she said to the driver, “The Greyhound Bus Terminal.”

It didn’t even occur to her to go to the police. Not after what had happened to Carl Vegas and the two innocent witnesses to Otis Taylor’s murder. And she had often read news items about witnesses against racketeers either disappearing or being shot down on the street. She didn’t have much faith in the efficacy of police protection.

At the bus terminal she noted by the call board that the first bus left in five minutes. She wasn’t concerned about direction; only about distance. Studying the stops the bus made, she noted that it reached the City of St. Stephen in twelve hours. That should make it somewhere between four and six hundred miles, she thought; a nice safe distance.

Approaching the ticket window, she said, “One way to St. Stephen.”

The Club Rotunda didn’t open until four p.m. and at five after four there wasn’t as yet a customer in the place. Waiters, finished with setting up their tables, stood about in groups, chatting. The bartender, his back bar already spick-and-span and his ice-well full of cubes, brooded over a racing form. Club Manager Sam Black, wearing a dark suit which had been cleverly tailored to minimize the massiveness of his chest and make him look less like a gorilla, had completed his final check of details and stood near the front door with a stupid expression on his face.

Black had deliberately cultivated the expression to hide a remarkably shrewd intelligence because it came in handy when customers he didn’t know inquired about the casino upstairs. He had used it so much that sometimes, as now, it automatically formed when it wasn’t needed.

An attractive young woman with golden-blond hair curling about a delicately featured face came in the front door and stopped hesitantly just inside. Sam Black, accustomed to judging the social status of patrons at a glance, automatically noted the good quality of the white knit suit she wore before noting the delectable manner in which it caressed the shapely body beneath it. Then he took a second look and wondered if he was getting old.

Approaching her, he erased the accidentally stupid expression and smiled pleasantly. “Table or bar, Miss?”

“Neither, thanks,” she said. “I’m just looking for a job.”

Black looked surprised. She didn’t impress him as the sort of girl who would have to settle for a waitress job. With her face, figure and well-bred bearing, it seemed to him she would have little trouble getting a job as a dress model. He said, “We don’t use waitresses. Only waiters.”

“Oh.”

“We use some girls — a cocktail hostess, a cloakroom girl and a cigarette girl — but I’m afraid those jobs are all filled.” He spoke with real regret, for she was not only a lovely girl, but the intangible air of breeding about her appealed to him. She possessed the aura of “class” he liked in Rotunda employees and which he found so hard to get.

“I see,” she said. “Thank you, anyway.”

She was starting to turn when he said, “Just a minute. There may be something upstairs in the... uh... banquet room. Let me check with the boss.”

Walking over to an alcove next to the cloakroom, he lifted a house phone and spoke into it. After a short wait he said, “Clancy? Didn’t you say something last night about needing a new girl up there?”

There was a pause. “Come on down and talk to one who just came in,” he said.

Hanging up, he said to the waiting girl, “There may be a vacancy in the upstairs cloakroom. The boss will be right down.”

A few moments later the mirrored doors of an elevator — directly across the room from the front door — opened and a slim man just under six feet tall stepped out. Only about thirty, or possibly a couple of years older, he had prematurely silver hair that was a startling contrast to his finely arched coal-black eyebrows. His even-featured, somewhat aristocratic face was slightly marred by a thin scar running from his left ear nearly to the point of his chin, but it didn’t really detract from his appearance. The girl decided it only made him look more interesting.

As he walked toward them, the controlled animal grace of his movements struck the girl at once. Though his pace approached indolence, there was something in his manner which suggested perfect physical co-ordination.

Halting a pace from her, the man exposed even white teeth in a friendly grin, then glanced at Black and said, “This the lady, Sam?”

“Uh-huh. This is the Rotunda’s owner, Clancy Ross, Miss. I don’t believe you gave me your name.”

“How do you do,” she said to Ross. “I’m Stella — Graves.”

Sam Black, catching the hesitation before the last name, hiked up his eyebrows and looked at Ross. The latter gave no indication that he had noticed it.