Lost Among the Angels (A Mercy Allcutt Book) (30 page)

      “It wasn’t a fancy hotel,” I muttered, embarrassed, although why I should have been, I don’t know. People are supposed to do good deeds for other people, aren’t they? Anyhow, now that the criminals had all been picked up, I suppose Babs and Barbara-Ann could return to their apartment. Their shabby, depressing apartment.

      Oh, well. As Ernie was fond of pointing out to me, I couldn’t rescue the world.

      When we got to Phil’s desk, Ernie pulled out a chair for me, and he took the one I’d been sitting on earlier. Matty Bumpas was being questioned by Phil.

      “Was Babs involved in this scheme of yours, Bumpas?” Phil asked, frowning menacingly and using a voice that would have scared me if it had been directed at me.

      “Babs?” Matty Bumpas had as sour an expression as I’d ever seen on his face. Or “puss,” as the gangsters call it. According to Ernie. “Naw. She damn near skinned me alive when she realized I’d lost some of the money.” He looked around, as if searching for someone. “She
will
skin me alive if I’m here when she shows up. When they kidnapped her, I knew I’d better leave town.”

      “Why didn’t you just bail her out?” asked Phil.

      “With what?”

      Ernie decided to join the conversation. “I don’t suppose you’ve ever considered working for a living at a real job, have you, Matty?”

      Matty Bumpas shot him a very mean-looking frown. Phil chuckled.

      “Ernie’s right, Matty. You’re apt to get killed if you keep up your present way of life.”

      “Go to hell,” muttered Matty.

      A penetrating shriek rent the smoke-filled air, and Matty leaped to his feet, knocking his chair over backwards, and made as if to escape. Sullivan neatly thwarted that intention, but Matty kept struggling.

      “You goddamned son of a bitch!” the same voice that had shrieked cried out. “You lousy, rotten bum!”

      Babs Houser had arrived.

      Acknowledging the meaning behind Phil’s nod at him, Ernie hurried to intercept Babs before she could carry out the will of the State of California by herself and kill Matty Bumpas. She fought like a wildcat for several seconds before Ernie got her calmed down. He did it by twisting her arm behind her back, which I suppose was a brutal tactic, but it worked. I must say that I wished Barbara-Ann Houser had at least one decent parent. It was becoming increasingly apparent to me that life was unfair more often than it was fair, unless I was only becoming jaded.

      Shooting murderous glances at Matty Bumpas, Babs settled herself in the chair Ernie had vacated, and unloaded more damning evidence against her erstwhile lover than Phil ever could have got from Matty himself. Babs must have raked up every single sin Matty Bumpas had committed in the past ten years.  As for Matty, he sat in glum silence, apparently believing he’d be better off in jail than anywhere Babs could get at him.

      It was all very interesting, but I was beginning to feel pretty achy, and I really wanted to go home. I still had to drop by the office and pick up my handbag before I could do so, and in order to do that, I either had to walk to the Figueroa Building on my scraped and bandaged legs or wait until Ernie or somebody else could take me there. 

      Unless I caught a cab. By George, until that moment, I’d never even considered hiring a taxi to take me to work.

      Because I didn’t want to interrupt the continuing interrogation of Matty Bumpas and Babs Houser, I quietly excused myself and got up from my chair.

      Ernie frowned at me. “What are you doing?” he whispered.

      “Don’t mind me,” I told him. “I’ll be fine.”

      “But—”

      Phil asked him a question, diverting his attention from me. I took the opportunity to scoot. As long as Mr. Godfrey was safely in police custody, I didn’t fear for my well-being, and Ernie shouldn’t either.

      It was almost five o’clock when I got back to the Figueroa Building. It had been a busy day, and I realized I hadn’t taken time for luncheon. Lunch. Therefore, it was no surprise that my stomach growled when I paid off the cabbie and wearily pushed the door to the lobby open.

      Lulu looked up from filing her nails and saw me. Her eyes went as round as saucers and she dropped her emery board. “Cripes! What happened to you?”

      So I told her. It was actually fun to narrate the day’s adventure, since Lulu was an appreciative audience and made several cries of astonishment during my recitation. Except for rescuing Mrs. Von Schilling’s poodle, my life hadn’t been chock-full of adventures to date, so I made the most of this one. When I got to the part about Mr. Godfrey accosting me on the plaza, Lulu clapped a hand to her cheek, almost putting her eye out with one of her fingernails.

      “That fat man? The one who’s always bringing you flowers? He asked you to
marry
him?”

      “He didn’t so much ask as assume,” I said wryly. “He grabbed me by the arm and tried to yank me off. I presume to a registry office or a judge or something.”

      “For land’s sake!”

      When I got to the part about Han Li’s shop and the gangsters, her mouth fell open and stayed that way until I was on my hands and knees on the Plaza.

      “You mean to say, you tripped the man with your
body?
” Her voice throbbed with admiration.

      “Yes, indeed. I’ll probably have a shoe-shaped bruise on my ribs for a week or more. And then there are my knees.” Ruefully, I stuck out my leg to show Lulu my poor battered knees. Not to mention my skirt.

      “Lands sakes,” she whispered, awed. “I didn’t know Ernie did that kind of work. That’s … that’s … well, it’s thrilling.”

      “It was pretty thrilling,” I admitted. “And the police have Mr. Godfrey, too, so I don’t have to worry about going to and from work by myself any longer, either.”

      She gasped. “You couldn’t even walk to work by yourself?”

      I shook my head. “Ernie wouldn’t let me.”

      “Oh, Mercy, that’s just awful!” She didn’t mean it. What she meant was that she considered my being pursued by Mr. Godfrey almost as exciting as my having tripped an armed gangster.

      I nodded and decided that memories probably improved with age and that I’d appreciate this one a good deal more after my scrapes and bruises healed. “But I want to go upstairs and get my handbag and go home now. I’m bushed.” And starving to death, although I didn’t tell her that.

      “I should say you have a right to be,” said Lulu, in amazement.

      So I limped to the elevator, pulled the lever, and climbed aboard when it groaned to a stop on the first floor. I was getting very good at operating it by this time, and even though it was slower than walking the three flights to Ernie’s office, my knees hurt, my ribs were beginning to ache, and other muscles that I hadn’t known about until that day were beginning to make their presence known. In other words, I was stiff as a board.

      I had just retrieved my handbag when Ned showed up. I ought to have anticipated this, but I hadn’t, and I don’t suppose I sounded exactly thrilled to see him. “Ned,” said I, not bothering to mask my weariness.

      “Lulu told me what happened,” he said in a voice that sounded unusually dull.

      “Yes, it was pretty exciting.”

      “Exciting?”

      I only sighed. “I’m tired, Ned. I need to go home now.”

      He shook his head. “She said you’re going to marry Godfrey.”

      “You misunderstood, Ned. He wanted to marry me. I didn’t want to marry him.”

      His head continued to shake slowly back and forth. “I don’t like girls to cheat on me, Mercy.”

      I’d been locking my desk. At that comment, I jerked my head up and squinted at him. “I beg your pardon?”

      “It was the same thing with June. She was my girl, and Godfrey stole her from me.”

      A horrible doubt began to niggle at my consciousness. “J-June?”

      His head stopped shaking and began nodding. “She was my girl. Godfrey stole her.”

      “June Williams?”

      More nodding.

      Uh-oh. “Um … Ned, do you know that somebody killed June Williams?”

      Still nodding, he said, “She cheated on me.” He took a step closer. “I don’t like it when girls cheat on me.”

      “Um … did you happen to follow Ernie and me when we went to Pasadena the other day?”

      He nodded some more, and my insides started churning sickeningly at the same time that my brain began to whirl. Had I been wrong about Mr. Godfrey all along? Had Barbara-Ann Houser been right when she’d told me Ned was peculiar? Well, of course, she had been! Ned
was
peculiar. Even
I,
a straitlaced prude from Boston, could tell that. But was he
violent?
Was he
murderously
peculiar? Was he … I swallowed …
insane?
Frantically, I searched the office for weapons I could use to defend myself in case he was. Unfortunately, the office was barren of protective weapons.
Darn
it!

      “Um … Ned. Are you the one who hurt June Williams, by any chance?”

      “Hurt her? She hurt me.”

      He’d begun scowling at me, and his face expressed the trouble he was having in trying to decide exactly what to do with me, a woman whom he’d decided had cheated on him. How did these stupid men come to these idiotic conclusions? I decided to mull the matter over later. At that particular moment, I only wanted to get out of there.

      I could hit him with a chair. It didn’t seem like the best way to thwart a maddened murderer, if Ned was one, but I didn’t perceive any other options. First, though, I guessed I might as well try to bluff my way out of the office.

      “Listen, Ned, you’ve completely misunderstood what happened today. In actual fact, I helped to capture both Mr. Godfrey and two drug-dealing gangsters. I’m very tired now, and want to go home.”

      “On Bunker Hill,” said Ned dully.

      “Yes. On Bunker Hill.”

      Good Lord, how did he know that? Had he followed me? But I’d thought Mr. Godfrey was the one who’d been following me. Figuring there was no harm in asking, I did so. “Have you been following me, Ned?”

      More nods. “You cheated with Mr. Templeton, too, didn’t you?”

      Darn it, this wasn’t fair! When I’d agreed to be Ernie’s secretary, I’d hoped for a little excitement. I hadn’t anticipated actual danger to my own personal self. “I didn’t cheat with anybody!” I hollered, furious. It had already been a rough day, full of terror and scraped knees and no food. I didn’t want to end up dead at the end of it; I wanted to be able to tell my sister and her husband and maybe Mr. Easthope all about it! “Didn’t your mother ever teach you that it’s not polite to follow people around? How
dare
you spy on me!”

      He looked puzzled. “Spy on you?”

      Lord, preserve me from stupid people! “Yes! That’s what it’s called when you follow people around.”

      His chin jutted slightly, quite a feat for so sparse an object. “You were cheating.”

      “I was not!”

      “Were, too.”

      “Oh, go away!”

      His stupid head began shaking again. “I’ve got to punish you for cheating on me.”

      Oh, dear. I presumed this was where he’d whip out a cord or something and proceed to try to strangle me. Well, I wasn’t going to sit around and wait for that to happen. I jumped up from my chair, an activity that made my knees silently scream for mercy, and grabbed it by its laddered back. “Get away from me, you murdering fiend!” It occurred to me that I’d told Mr. Godfrey that same thing earlier in the day.

      Stupid day.

      “No, I have to punish you.”

      To heck with that. Taking the bull by the horns, so to speak, I rushed at Ned, wielding my chair like a battering ram. He was bigger than I, but not by much, and I guess my charge shocked him, because he staggered back and said, “Whuff!”

      Grabbing the doorknob as I passed, I slammed the door as I hurled myself out into the hallway and headed for the stairs.

      And there, of all people in the universe, was Mrs. Von Schilling, looking approximately as slinky as Theda Bara on a hot date, carrying Rosie. Although Rosie barked a greeting, I didn’t stick around to chat. I raced past them both.

      I got to the elevator just as Ned threw the office door open and collided with Mrs. Von Schilling. Both went down as I pulled the lever to open the doors and pressed the “down” button, hoping maybe Ned would believe that I’d taken the elevator rather than the stairs. Slim chance, but I was willing to try anything at that point. Ned was up again in a flash, as was Rosie.

      
“Sic him, Rosie!”
I shrieked, not expecting much from the command, but hoping.

      Mrs. Von Schilling started screaming. She would. She wouldn’t think of doing anything useful, like tackling Ned or anything, being the type of woman who preferred being rescued to helping rescue others.

      Rosie, on the other hand, was not so snooty that she didn’t express her resentment at being treated so roughly by a crazed lunatic. She started barking up a storm and snapping at Ned’s heels. He tried to swat her away with his hands, but didn’t have any luck. She was tiny and quick and thoroughly incensed. She chased him down the hall after me, leaping at his pant legs with her sharp little doggie teeth and snarling. I saw with shock that Ned had pulled out a knife and was making slashing gestures at her as he hopped around and tried to avoid getting bitten. She was too quick and he was too distracted, I guess, to do much damage, but I wasn’t sure how long that could last.

      I couldn’t allow Ned to hurt Rosie. It would have made more sense for me to run down the stairs, but poor Rosie was in danger, not to mention being a heroine, curse it, and I couldn’t allow her to suffer for it. I screamed,
“Stop stabbing at that dog, you wretch!”

      And then, because I figured even Mrs. Von Schilling might pitch in to help a person if there was no alternative and her dog was in danger, I decided to try to trip Ned, as I’d done the other man earlier in the day. Then, if I succeeded, perhaps Mrs. Von Schilling and I could sit on him or something until the police arrived. Provided we could restrain him long enough to call the police. I ducked into the stairwell, but didn’t head down the stairs. While Ned seemed to be keeping an eye on me still, his attention was seriously diverted by Rosie, who didn’t seem inclined to let him get away with knocking down her mistress and kicking her. Good old Rosie. I vowed that I’d get myself a poodle as soon as I could.