Connie pushed her chair back. “Will you tell me what you’re talking about?”
“It’s hush stuff, Con. Confidential as hell. He covered Janey’s overdraft for her this morning. Three hundred and twenty bucks’ worth of nice new overdraft. You should have seen Fergie. He almost had tears in his eyes, his secretary told me.”
He helped her on with her coat.
“I think it’s swell. I just wonder why he did it, is all.”
“Why shouldn’t he?” She took her compact out of her bag and powdered her nose.
Why on earth had he done that? What had happened? What earthly reason—
“Well, don’t snap at me, Con,” Dorsey said equably. “It’s none of my business. All I was wondering was what Carlson’s going to think. Your father isn’t a noted philanthropist. Or didn’t you know that? Or am I wrong? Anyway, it’s a bank secret. I guess I shouldn’t have told you. For Pete’s sake, don’t tell him I told you. I’ve got trouble enough on my hands as it is.”
“Why? What trouble have you got?” Not that she cared. She had trouble of her own she’d rather worry about just now.
“That’s why I’m taking you to lunch, baby.
I
need an alibi!”
He grinned at her as she looked at him blankly. “You— you need an alibi?”
“That’s what I said. Come on to lunch and I’ll explain it.”
Her pulse quickened as she snapped her bag shut and took her gloves out of her pocket.
“Fine,” she said. “Come on.”
If Dorsey Syms needed an alibi, she was thinking quickly, she’d be glad to help him. If her father needed one, then Dorsey’s could crash. The minute the police knew— There were people Connie would rather have thrown to the wolves. Dorsey Syms was the only one begging for it. She smiled brightly at him as they went through the pressrooms.
She stopped just before they got to the door to wave over to the dry old man in his shirt sleeves at the desk marked
City Editor
, in the corner by the front window. “Goodbye, Ed, I’m going out to lunch.” Dorsey opened the long plate-glass door into the narrow vestibule. He stood aside, holding it open for someone coming in the storm door from the street.
“Cheese it, the cops!” He grinned back at Connie, and at the tall thin man who had stopped and was holding the storm door open for them to come on through. “Raiding the joint, Bill? You know my cousin Constance Maynard? This is Lieutenant Williams, Connie.”
“Oh,” Connie said. The smile faded from her eyes. “Of course.” She recognized him now he’d taken off his green felt hat. “How are you? Is there anything I can do for you before I go out? Gus Blake isn’t here.”
Lieutenant Williams stepped back into the street. “No, it was Gus I wanted to see,” he said. “I’ve just been down to his place. About that entry he had last night. Where is he, do you know? I’d like to get in touch with him.”
“I don’t know where he is,” Connie said.
She looked over at the empty space along the Reserved line in front of the
Gazette
building. “His car’s gone. Maybe he’s gone with Chief Carlson out to the Wernitz house. But I don’t know, Lieutenant. He came in this morning and left right away. I assumed he’d gone home.”
And if he hadn’t, she was thinking, maybe he really didn’t know about the entry, as Williams called it. Even Gus wouldn’t be that casual about his possessions—she hoped. She turned to her cousin.
“You haven’t seen him?”
“Not since he was in the bank. That was about ten-thirty. I didn’t get a chance to talk to him.”
The detective put his hat back on. “It’s funny he wouldn’t stick around,” he said. “Around home, I mean.” He seemed more puzzled than perturbed. “You were with him, I understand, Miss Maynard. When he got home last night. Didn’t he seem to think there might be some connection between the entry and the Wernitz deal? I just told Swede Carlson. He hadn’t heard about it. That’s the trouble with this county-city setup. Your right hand don’t know anything about your left one till the trail’s stone-cold. What did Gus say about it, Miss Maynard?”
“He didn’t say a thing,” Connie said. “Nothing at all. I don’t think he knew anything about it. Mrs. Blake didn’t mention it while I was there. And Gus certainly wouldn’t have gone off and left her and the kid and taken me home if he’d known anything about it.”
Lieutenant Williams looked at her.
“Yeah,” he said slowly. “Carlson and I both thought it looked a little sort of—well, sort of—”
He let it hang there without saying sort of what, perhaps because he saw the large figure of the county chief coming up the street toward the
Gazette
office.
“Well, if you see him tell him Swede and I are looking for him, will you?”
He tipped his hat perfunctorily and walked off to meet Carlson.
Dorsey glanced at his cousin. Her cheeks were flushed a little. She went quickly across the sidewalk to her car and opened the door before he could reach it.
“Why don’t you lay off Janey, Con?” he inquired calmly as he stepped in after her and pulled the door shut.
“Why don’t you mind your own business, Dorsey?”
She jammed her foot down on the starter. The engine roared. Dorsey saw Carlson and Williams look around at them, and go on talking again. Swede Carlson, his shoulder propped against the telephone pole on the curb, his overcoat open, both hands in his trousers pockets, leaned his head to one side and spat magnificently into the gutter. Dorsey saw that Connie was too annoyed to see that the chief of the county police was still looking at the shining green convertible, if Lieutenant Williams was not.
“I’d like to know just where the hell Gus
has
gone,” she snapped as she pulled out and into the stream of market-day traffic. “And another thing I’d like to know is just where he got all that inside dope on Wernitz. And what he went to the bank for. He never goes to the bank.”
Dorsey Syms reached in his pocket and got out a cigarette. He reached forward and pressed in the lighter on the dash.
“So
I
ought to mind my own business,” he remarked equably.
Janey put the last
of
little Jane’s things in the blue canvas suitcase and snapped the lid shut. She hurried, listening breathlessly down the stair well, starting at every rattle and shiver of the house as a truck jolted by in the street, and the creeping sounds in the hot-water pipes up the wall.
“Put Flopsie in, too, Mummy.” Little Jane came over with the white lop-eared rabbit in her arms. Janey started to refuse, and remembered. She mustn’t let little Jane see she was frightened and nervous.
“Of course,” she said. “We wouldn’t leave Flopsie. Who’d give Flopsie her lunch?”
“And Daddy. Who’ll give Daddy his lunch, Mummy?”
Janey’s throat tightened. “Daddy’ll get his lunch downtown. And we’ve got to hurry, sweetie. What else shall we take?” She tried not to look down at the troubled blue eyes in the round, sober little face turned up to her. “Daddy loves to eat downtown. Hurry, now. We’ll take your coat and leggings downstairs and put them on down there, and then we’ll get a taxi and go see Grandma. I’ll take the suitcase down and you stay here till I come. Here’s your book. Look at the pictures till I come back.”
She took the suitcase out into the hall. Her own was already packed and waiting at the foot of her bed. She listened a moment, went along to the front room, picked up her hat and coat and looked hastily around. She didn’t want to leave anything behind that she’d need and have to come back for, and she had to hurry. She had to get little Jane out of the house. Lieutenant Williams had been there, with his camera and fingerprint powder, soberly going all over the basement and the pantry and dining room, and all over the back yard. The footprint was gone. She hadn’t even mentioned it to him. The colored boy was already frightened at the way she’d run out when she saw him seeding the grass where it had been; there was no use for the police to start blaming him. The way they’d moved around and talked when they thought she wasn’t listening had destroyed the last poignant hope that somehow none of it had really happened, or that, if it had, it was all over now and there was nothing to worry about any more. But even if it hadn’t, she had to get out anyway. The sickening terror in her stomach when she’d heard the basement hinge whine and the pantry board creak was almost more than she could bear, even when she found it was only Gus. He must have thought she was crazy, if he thought about it at all. Or that she was just stupider than usual. If he hadn’t thought already she was being stupidly contrary, he’d never have made the fuss about the grass patch and the floor board. And she’d never really cared about either of them. It had always been a joke before.
She looked over the top of her dressing-table, pulled open the drawer, and saw her evening bag there. The sleeping-pills— She remembered suddenly. The orange capsules she’d taken from Mrs. Maynard’s table. They were still there. The one she’d dropped and Connie had given back to her was halfway to the river by now, or wherever Smithville’s sewage went. She took the yellow tissue with the rest of them in it, went to the bathroom, and flushed them down to follow it. That really would have been a crazy and stupid thing to do. Who would have taken care of little Jane? It was more than stupid, it was wrong. But it was all over now and somehow very remote, as if it had been another Janey in another life, too hurt and confused to know what she was doing.
She started back to the bedroom and stopped, catching her breath sharply. It was the doorbell. Someone at the front door. Normally she would have run downstairs to open it—but nothing was normal in that house any more. “Be careful,” Lieutenant Williams had told her. “I don’t want to worry you, Mrs. Blake, but you ought to be careful who you let in the house.” He hadn’t said, “Even if it’s somebody you know,” but she’d sensed it. Or was it just something inside of herself that told her that? Or just nerves? The bell rang again. She ran to the front room, pushed the window up, and looked out.
“Who is it?”
As she saw who it was, her hands tightened on the sill. It was Chief Carlson. The big Swede. Her mouth went dry suddenly. The checks at Wernitz’s— She realized oddly that she’d forgotten all about that. Even when Orvie Rogers had given her the envelope from his father and mumbled something about slot machines it had seemed all very unreal. There was no time to think about it, then, because the police came right away and Orvie just stuck it in her hand and got out. He probably thought the police would think it was funny, his being there when he should be at the plant. The envelope was in her red sweater pocket in the suitcase now.
But looking out now on Swede Carlson’s thick, foreshortened figure, Janey remembered the slot machines again.
“I’ll be right down,” she called.
She picked up her hat and coat and the suitcase and stopped at little Jane’s door. “You read quietly, sweetie, until I get back. I won’t be long.”
In the front hall she put the suitcase down by the stairs and laid her hat and coat on the chair. She opened the door. “Come in, Mr. Carlson.”
He dwarfed the tiny hallway as he came in. It looked even smaller than it did with Gus in it, as tall but not as wide either way. Chief Carlson’s eye went straight to the suitcase.
“Goin’ somewhere, Mrs. Blake?” he asked pleasantly.
Jane swallowed quickly. Would he think she was trying to run away—or try to stop her going?
“Just down to my mother’s on Charter Street,” she said breathlessly. “I’m taking my little girl. I’ve got to go, Mr. Carlson. I—I’m afraid to stay here. I—”
“That’s a smart idea, Mrs. Blake. I’m glad you’re goin’.”
So this was Gus Blake’s Janey he was always hearing about. She’d been pointed out to him on the street, but he’d never seen her close up without a hat on. Scrawny little thing, compared with Mrs. Carlson, anyway. Pretty eyes; washed out—she was scared—but still pretty. What was she scared of him for? Or what else would it be?
“I was just talkin’ to Lieutenant Williams,” he said.
“He told me about you last night. Mighty plucky, Mrs. Blake. I bet Gus was mighty proud of you.”
“Gus—doesn’t know anything about it.” She moved back into the dining-room. “Would you like to sit down here? The living-room’s upstairs.”
“And your bedroom’s on the third floor, I understand. That’s where you called the operator from?”
Janey nodded.
“Why didn’t you tell Gus, Mrs. Blake?”
As her chin lifted he thought for an instant she was going to say it was none of his business. She turned her blank blue eyes to look not at him but through him. Not as scared now as she was when he came. He waited, wondering if she was going to say, “Because Gus came in with Connie Maynard and went out with her and so the hell with Gus, Mr. Carlson.”
“He—he’s very busy,” she said. “I didn’t think it was important enough to worry him about it.”
His bleak eyes rested on her for a moment. “Suppose you show me around, Mrs. Blake,” he said quietly. “And tell me all about it.” He smiled a little. “I’ll be careful not to make any more noise ’n I can help.”
He saw the flush creep along Janey’s high, pale cheekbones. “I’m sorry,” he said. He hadn’t meant to hurt her feelings.
“It’s all right,” she said quickly. “I suppose it was stupid of me. But I’m pretty stupid, anyway, I guess. But it’s just that I—I don’t want little Jane to grow up always scared of everything, like thunder and the dark and dogs and caterpillars and things. I don’t think people have any fun if they’re always afraid of everything.”
Swede Carlson nodded. “You’re right, Mrs. Blake. Doc Wernitz, for instance—he was afraid of the dark. I guess the fella that murdered him—if he should just happen to be the one came here—figured a little slip like you would be too afraid to open her mouth and scream—much less have the pluck and brains to get to the phone right away. I sorta figure that’s why he turned the lights off first. So you’d be so scared you wouldn’t know what it was he was after.”
She was almost to the pantry door on her way to take him down to the basement. She flashed around and stood rigid, her finger tips on the end of the table to steady herself, her eyes wide, changed from blue to sooty-black, staring at him, her lips parted, moving soundlessly, repeating the word he had used deliberately.