Golden Trap (19 page)

Slowly Shelda turned her head.

“Call out my name again—so he can hear you,” Lovelace ordered.

“Mr. Lovelace!” Shelda said, loud and clear.

“Keep looking from right to left.”

She turned her head, slowly.

“You are supposed, when I answer you, to come directly to me,” Lovelace said. “Don’t nod! Don’t give any sign that you hear me.” Lovelace’s breath made a whistling sound as he watched her. She was doing exactly what he said. “Good girl,” he said. “I assume you are supposed to locate me, walk to me, and then you drop and he opens fire. Call to me again.”

“Mr. Lovelace!”

“We’ve only got seconds before he guesses we’re up to something,” Lovelace said. “Walk, as though I’d answered now, to the left—to the far corner over there where the marble bench is. When you’re close enough, dive for cover behind the bench. Don’t hesitate, Miss Mason. It’s your only chance.”

It was a performance I’ll never forget. Shelda turned her head. She seemed to be listening. Then she walked, briskly now, toward the marble bench. At the last minute she took a headlong dive behind it.

Instantly Dark opened fire from the apartment. I could see him, as he emptied his gun at the bench.

Chips of stone flew off it. He sprayed the shrubbery around it.

And then his gun was empty and he disappeared.

“Shelda!” I called out.

“Keep still!” Lovelace whispered fiercely.

“But she may be—”

“Keep still!”

My mouth and throat were powder dry.

“Cold-blooded bastard,” Lovelace said softly. “She was supposed to point, like a bird dog, and then be caught in the line of fire.”

“He did fire at her,” I said. “She may be—”

“I think she made it,” Lovelace said. “Quite a girl, your Miss Mason.”

“He must know you haven’t got a gun that’s working,” I said. “You didn’t fire when he showed himself.”

“He may think it was because Miss Mason was in the way. We’ll know soon enough.”

“How?”

“If he has decided my gun is empty he’ll come out after me when he’s reloaded.”

“Then what?”

“Then it’s all over,” he said quietly. “He’ll walk out here, locate me, and empty his gun at me. When his gun is empty maybe you can take him. Now you inch away from me. Crawl over to the far corner by the wall. If we’re both together here you may get it too.”

“What chance is there someone will react to those shots he fired at Shelda?”

“Not much.”

“You can’t just lie here and take it!” I said.

“What else? If I try to run for it he’ll finish me with one shot and then you and Miss Mason don’t have much of a chance.”

“What would you do if you were alone?” I asked him.

“What could I do?” he said calmly. “I can’t walk. The minute he risks coming out into the clear all his doubts will disappear. He knows I’d fire at him when he makes a target of himself—if I could fire. There’d be very little difference, Mark. The only difference now is that he’ll be so concentrated on me you may be able to take him.” He reached inside his jacket and produced his gun. He held it out to me. “At least you can use it as a club,” he said.

“You’re committing suicide!” I said.

“The hell I am,” he said. “The building is burning and there’s no way out, Mark. That’s all. There’s one thing—”

“Yes.”

He brought his fist down in the soft earth of the flower bed. “I’d give an arm to know
why!
Who is Curtis Dark? Is he just Carleton’s gun, or is there something personal—some reason unconnected with Carleton? It’s a silly thing to say, but I wish I didn’t have to die without the answer.” He was looking past me toward the house. “Mark?”

“Yes.”

“If Marilyn comes through this, will you tell her how very much she was on my mind when the show ended? Last night—well, I thought there was a way, together, for both of us to make something out of the rest of the time left to us. I wanted it to happen.”

“I’ll tell her,” I said.

I was dreaming of heroics. Dark would come out, and somehow, between us, Lovelace and I would take him. Maybe we could make him enough trouble so that Shelda, if she was all right, could run for help. Sweat was running off me, though the morning was cold.
If
she was all right!

Then I felt myself freeze. The apartment door into the garden opened. Curtis Dark came out onto the terrace. He was carrying the jacket of his suit over his left arm. The sleeves of his white shirt were rolled up, and in his right hand was a gun. I could see the two patches of adhesive tape on his face, one over his left eye, one on his chin, which Shelda had probably put there out of the kindness of her foolish heart. There was a cigarette hanging from one corner of Dark’s mouth. He moved his right arm out from his body to make sure the shirt wasn’t binding its movement.

He didn’t seem to be in any hurry. He’d figured it out beyond a doubt for himself. We were fish in a barrel waiting to be had.

He came slowly down the path toward the sundial. He was looking carefully along the line of evergreen shrubs behind which Lovelace and I were hiding. He looked toward the marble bench where Shelda had taken cover. He was taking his time, figuring out just how to play it. He couldn’t be certain Shelda had misled him. Lovelace might be over there behind the bench with her.

He stopped, lifted his left hand and took the cigarette out of his mouth for a moment, and then replaced it. He had only one worry as far as I could see. He couldn’t know for sure that Lovelace was immobile, so he couldn’t risk getting so close that Lovelace could rush him before he was cut down.

He studied every inch of that hedge of evergreens, from one corner of the garden to the other. Once it seemed to me that he was looking straight into my eyes.

I can tell you now that the old cliché about a drowning man reliving his whole life in a matter of seconds is for the birds. I was drowning and I wasn’t reliving anything. I was only trying to figure a way to sink down through that flower bed toward China before Dark started to spray the place with bullets.

Dark hunched his shoulders as though he’d finally made up his mind on how to proceed. He took a step almost directly toward us. He must have seen something, an imperceptible movement of one of the shrubs, a glimpse of white shirt.

“Stay exactly where you are, Dark!”

The voice startled me into a violent movement. It wasn’t human. It reverberated through the whole neighborhood.

“Cops!” Lovelace whispered.

I realized then the voice had come through one of those hand-loudspeakers cops and firemen use in a crisis to talk to people a distance away.

Dark was a frozen statue, his head raised, looking up toward the buildings behind us.

“Drop your gun, Dark,” the foghorn voice ordered. “Don’t take another step. You’re in range of four expert riflemen.”

There was a faint crack and a bullet struck a flagstone not a foot away from Dark, whining as it ricocheted off toward the house.

“Next time it’s you, Dark,” the foghorn warned. “Drop that gun!”

I could see the corner of Dark’s mouth jerk in a sort of spasmodic twitch. Then he moved with incredible speed, not toward us but in a diving, rolling tumble toward the shrubbery along the left wall. Bullets tore up the earth and glanced off the stones all around him. I couldn’t tell if he was hit.

There was what seemed to be an interminable silence. In the distance I could hear voices. Evidently that fusillade of shots had gotten some people in the area out of bed.

The foghorn spoke again. “Sit tight in there, Mr. Lovelace, Mr. Haskell, Miss Mason. Do you hear? Sit tight. We’re coming in.”

“They’re up above us somewhere,” Lovelace said. We couldn’t look up without the chance Dark would spot us.

I think I hit Lovelace on the shoulder. “We’re going to make it!” I said.

“Get away from me,” Lovelace whispered. “We haven’t made it yet. He’s sure to make a last dive at me. Get away and you may still have your breakfast coffee.”

“Don’t be silly,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant.

“He isn’t going to make it,” Lovelace said. “He’s going to take his last chance at me. You can count on that. Get away from me, Mark. You may be able to work your way around to where Miss Mason is. You can’t help me by staving here. If you could, I’d ask you to stay. The cops just may get in here before he can move. Do what I tell you, Mark. Give yourself a chance.”

Let’s be honest. I wanted to leave him. I wanted to get just as far away from George Lovelace as I could. I could justify it. I was concerned for Shelda. I couldn’t do anything empty-handed against a crazy man with a gun. But for some cockeyed reason I didn’t want to leave Lovelace alone. He’d been alone all his life. He’d worked for an organization that wouldn’t lift a finger to help him out of a tight spot. He deserved a friend in the clutch just once. Anyway, I hesitated just too long.

“Lovelace!” It was Dark’s voice, harsh, angry. He couldn’t be more than ten yards away.

Lovelace’s hand tightened on my wrist again. He shook his head for silence.

“Let your friends go,” Dark called out. “They can walk into the house and I won’t touch them. I’ve got nothing against Haskell and Miss Mason. You and I aren’t going to get out of here alive, Lovelace, and you know it. Let the others go.”

I looked at Lovelace and he shook his head. “He’s just trying to locate me,” he whispered.

Where the hell were the cops?

Then there I was, face to face with Curtis Dark. He’d crawled around the corner of the evergreen hedge and he was on his hands and knees looking straight at me. I could almost have reached out and touched him. I was squarely between him and Lovelace. His gun was pointed straight at my face.

“I’ll give you one second to flatten out on the ground, Haskell!” Dark said.

One second isn’t very long and I knew he meant it. I went down, but as I did I threw a handful of flowerbed dirt straight in his face. Then the world seemed to explode in my ear. Dark was firing and firing—or so it seemed. I waited for something to tear into my head or back.

And then there was silence, and I was evidently all in one piece.

“It’s all right, Haskell,” a familiar voice said.

I rolled over and looked up at Lieutenant Hardy, standing over us with a smoking gun in his hand. I glanced to my right. Lovelace was lying against one of the bushes, clutching his left shoulder. But his eyes were open and he gave me a twisted little smile.

“Thanks, Mark,” he said.

I turned the other way. Curtis Dark lay, face down, in the soft earth. There wasn’t much left of the back of his head.

“How did you happen to get here?” I asked Hardy.

“You can thank your friend Chambrun for that,” he said. “As usual he came up with something at the critical moment.”

And then Shelda was kneeling beside me and her arms were around me, and her face was against my cheek. I could taste the salt of her tears. It tasted wonderful…

When I lifted Shelda to her feet, holding on to her for dear life, the first person I saw was Chambrun. He was coming toward us from the apartment, an old trench coat draped over his shoulders. He was still wearing last night’s dinner jacket.

“My dear Mark,” he said. His hand gripped my arm painfully. “You’re both all right?”

“About thirty years older,” I said.

“He’s a hero,” Hardy said dryly. “He threw dirt in Dark’s face. It made Dark rise up and I could see him. He got off one shot at Lovelace but then I got him.”

“I owe you for all three of them,” Chambrun said.

“Without you I’d have been home having my eggs and bacon about now,” Hardy said.

Some men in white came across the garden carrying a stretcher. Chambrun went behind the hedge with them to where Lovelace lay.

“Nobody phoned the cops from around this neighborhood?” I asked Hardy.—

“Nobody,” Hardy said. “But there wasn’t any shooting until we were already in place, thanks to Chambrun. When Miss Mason walked out into the garden we knew what was up, but all we could do was watch. With three of you here in the garden we couldn’t just barge in. We couldn’t see exactly where you were behind that hedge. We had to wait.”

“By the way, has my hair turned white?” I asked him…

Lovelace belonged in the hospital but they didn’t take him there at once. The young intern patched up the wounds in his shoulder and leg and gave him a shot of something and he was taken by ambulance to the Beaumont.

“He needs some answers so he can really relax,” Chambrun said. “It’ll do him more good than all the drugs in China.”

Shelda and I, clinging to each other like a couple of kids, rode with Hardy in a police car to the hotel. We didn’t talk because what we had to say wouldn’t have been good for Hardy’s young ears. Chambrun had gone ahead in the ambulance with Lovelace. Shelda’s apartment and garden were swarming with homicide men, taking fingerprints, photographs, and what have you, so we couldn’t have stayed there anyway.

In Chambrun’s office we found Lovelace propped up on a chaise longue which Ruysdale had materialized from somewhere. Chambrun was at his desk with Ruysdale standing at attention beside him. At a signal from him she went into the outer office.

“I think we are all too tired to tell this story more than once,” he said. He went over to the sideboard and poured himself a steaming demitasse of Turkish coffee. He suggested with a small gesture that we might like to join him. None of us did. Hardy and Shelda and I had all been conned into trying that hair-raising brew in the past.

Jerry Dodd was the first to arrive. He knew better than to ask questions, but he gave me a pat on the shoulder. “Good to see you in one piece,” he said.

Louis Martine was next, accompanied by his wife and a Jeanette Arnaud who looked as though her legs were rubber.

And then the owlish Mr. John Smith arrived with Hilary Carleton. The Englishman seemed to be almost pathologically calm.

“You understand I am here voluntarily,” he said to Chambrun. “I could claim diplomatic immunity, but—”

“Your boy is dead,” Chambrun said coldly. “And, as you see, George Lovelace is alive.”

Neither Carleton nor Lovelace looked at each other.