Stewart Sterling - Dead of Night

“Oh! My God!” He glowered at me. “Do I have to take you, too?”

“Not if I can locate Miss Millett.”

“She’s not here.” He leaned over, held his head in both hands. “She’s gone over to Iceville. To see Keith. She said you told her Dow’s dead!”

“Yair.” It didn’t seem reasonable for him to be so utterly despondent, now Marge was a widow. “What’d Miss Millett want here?”

“Two thousand fish. I don’t carry that kind of money around in my pants,” he said dourly. “By this time next week I’ll be lucky if I’ve got two bits! She’s ruined me!”

“Think she shot Lanerd?”

He stood up slowly. “I wasn’t thinking about it one way or the other. I was thinking how she’s mucked up the program. First place, she comes breezing in here with about as much chance of being unnoticed as a tuba player carrying two tubas. She asks for me; right off everybody begins the buzz-buzz about her being Miss Hands on Stack O’ Jack! Mystery — gone to hell in a handbasket! Boss — ditto, I guess!” He cursed with deep feeling. “And then she wants me to dig up dough enough for her to get to Brazil.”

“Messes things up, yair. Show must go on. All that—”

“How, for crysake, can it go on when there’s no Mystery Girl? Even if there was a mystery any longer, which there wouldn’t be!” He smoldered.

“She have anything to say about Lanerd?”

“I couldn’t understand half what she was blubbering about, she was so overwrought.” He made an angry gesture of dismissal, as if to shove the whole tangle out of his mind for the time being. “You can ask her yourself, if you hustle; she only left for Iceville ten minutes ago. Keith won’t have that kind of cash on him, either. Take him a while to get it.”

“Going to South America, is she?”

“She babbled about Montreal, Havana, London. But her company’s going to Brazil, so I s’pose she’ll head there. She did say it made absolutely no damn difference where she went; she’d be hunted just the same.”

“Hunted? Yair.” She’d been warned about keeping away from cops; now she couldn’t go to them for protection.

“I told her she better hike straight to a hospital, get some rest. She thought I meant maybe she was cracking up. ‘No, Jeff, I’m not going mad.’” He did a good job of imitating her. “‘I wish I could go mad. It would be better than having to think of the terrible thing I’ve done.’ What you going to do with a star who hands you a line like that?”

“You have other problems, too.” I waved at the Munchie rehearsals.

“Hell, yes.” He added in the surliest tone, “Don’t go quoting me as saying she confessed.”

“I won’t.”

“She didn’t.”

He was afraid he’d said too much.

“All right, so she didn’t. How’d Mrs. Lanerd stand up to the news about her husband?”

A punch in the jaw wouldn’t have hit him as hard. “Marge might have grown to dislike the bastard, in time, if he’d lived,” he said dejectedly, “but now she’ll never forget him.”

I didn’t contradict him.

A patrol car with two stony-eyed sergeants idled before the Continental Building as I left. The sight of a uniform wasn’t as reassuring as it might have been, considering the danger I was in.

There was enough ringing in my ears without having to listen to a bawling-out from Hacklin or Reidy Duman or Harry Weissman for having stayed the hand of authority in its descent on Ruth or Auguste or Edie. It wouldn’t have helped my headache to explain how my Buick happened to stand on a Brooklyn corner with its windshield riddled.

It struck me forcibly, at the sight of those minions of the law, that maybe I’d been betting my cards too strong. When the showdown came I might look pretty silly, backing my judgment against all the badges. But I couldn’t afford to drop; I had so much at stake I’d have to play it out, regardless.

Keith Walch wasn’t at Iceville when I got to the big rink on West Fifty-Second. About a dozen girls in short white skirts and high white shoes, swinging long colored capes from their shoulders, swooped around the ice; Over the Waves came out of a wire recorder like a wheezy carousel. It was cool in there after the Death Valley temperature of the street; the butterfly capes and the easy, rhythmic movements were soothing to watch.

One of the cuties swooped over, stopped in a silvery spray of ice. Mister Walch? She didn’t know; she thought he might be in the Iceville office with Miss Millett. She bobbed her head in the direction of the office.

It was behind a flimsy gypsum-board partition with a thin, jerry-built door. Red paint notified the unauthorized to Keep Out — Millett Enterprises, Inc. The door wasn’t open but it didn’t have to be for the voice inside to penetrate. I couldn’t hear what the speaker was saying until I nursed the knob around noiselessly, pushed gently.

It was Walch. On the phone. In no genial frame of mind. “... they pick him up around half past ’leven last night, gallopin’ up Park Avenuh with nothin’ on ’cept his shorts, screamin’ bloody murder... sure, he was schwocked to th’ scuppers... cop took him back up to the apartment where those cream puffs ’f yours put the snatch on his suitcases, his clothes, his cush... huh?”

The door was at one end of a storeroom cluttered with theatrical trunks, spotlights, piles of three-sheet posters showing the Incomparable Tildy doing a split, five feet above the ice.

The agent howled like a wounded weasel. “... it means a hell of a lot to me... th’ cream puff who held him while th’ other one made off with his stuff was still there, gettin’ her clothes on... cop hadda run her in, too, an’ of course she counters by swearin’ out a complaint Yaker tried to rape her... he couldn’t get Lanerd at the hotel so he called me at th’ club. I spent all night with th’ dumb creep, diggin’ up bail, gettin’ a legal eagle to work on th’ cream puff, hirin’ a doc to examine her, make sure she hadn’t been hurt... now lissen, I got enough snafus to straighten out, without... huh?”

I didn’t make any undue commotion crossing to the opposite end of the storeroom.

“... yes, goddam it, all night... they wouldn’t let him go until she made a statement denying her assault charge... deal we finally made at five this morning was, if he gets his clothes back — I hadda get one of my suits from the club for him — an’ the suitcases, he’ll forget about the money in his wallet, eighteen hundred smackers, a nice price for a cream puff, godsake... but she claims she don’t know how to contact her chum-bum, except through you... so they’re both to meet y’ there at six o’clock... now lissen!”

He did the listening, for the length of time it took me to get where I could see in the office. He was alone, sitting on the small of his spine in a swivel chair with one foot cocked up on top of a desk drawer. He wore a mauve jacket over a lime-tinted sport shirt. He heard me or saw me, the second I saw him.

“... hold everything,” he snarled at the phone, “somebody jus’ opened a manhole, a big stink blew in... I’ll call y’ back.” He slammed the receiver down viciously. “Why, damn you! Don’t you get enough key-holing in your own dump? You gotta come over here?”

“Where’s Tildy?” There were a dozen glossy-print photographs of her tacked up on the partition; on the desk beside a pair of rocker-blade skates, a bronze paperweight with the familiar twirled-out skirt and shapely legs!

“Where you won’t find her, bud.” He came up out of the chair, his face mottling. “Half a mind to mark you up good; takin’ her to the Brulard last night, you—”