Nothing In Her Way (2 page)

It was insane.

There wasn’t a quiver of an eyelash as Charlie introduced us. She’d never seen me before. She looked at me and said coolly and quite pleasantly, “How do you do, Mr. Belen?”

I could hear Charlie still talking. “Mike is an old, old friend, my dear. I am trying to persuade him to join us.”

I took it from her and played it deadpan. There didn’t seem to be anything else to do, and I was too dumfounded to think. God alone knew what she was up to, and there wasn’t any use even trying to guess. Was Charlie lying to me, or was she lying to Charlie? Since there was no known record of Charlie’s ever having told the truth about anything, the answer would seem to be obvious, but I wasn’t too sure. Dullness had never been one of her faults.

We sat down again, and she ordered a Ramos fizz. She was on Charlie’s side of the table, directly across from me, and when the drink came she leaned forward a little and said, wide-eyed, “I do hope you’ll help us, Mr. Belen.”

She could open a safe that way. In Salem, they’d have burned her—or they would have if there’d been enough women on the jury. Nothing had changed in two years. The dark red hair was short-cropped and as carelessly tousled as a child’s. Her face just missed being heart-shaped and petite, but there was nothing of the expressionless doll about it. It was mobile and almost flamboyantly alive, with only a subtle hint of the temperament you know damned well was there if you’d ever been married to her. She had a little dusting of freckles across the bridge of her nose, and her eyes were dark brown and a little long for her face. Right now there was a blue silk scarf knotted about her chin, the big bow coming up beside her cheek and giving her a deceptively little-girl look. She was a little girl, all right—the same loaded little girl with a short fuse.

We were divorced two years ago, and the only thing I’d heard of her in all that time was that she’d married some New York bookie named Lane. I thought of the last time I’d seen her. It was raining that night, too, and I remembered how black and shiny the streets were as we walked down the hill from the hotel in San Francisco. We said good-by quite calmly at the airline office on Union Square, and then I’d gone on to the men’s bar in the St. Francis and ordered a drink, suddenly conscious of how peaceful everything seemed—and how empty.

I snapped out of it and came back to the present, realizing I’d been staring at her. Charlie’s proposition had been nothing but a bore, but now it had exploded right in my face. There was a horrible fascination about it, and it boiled down to that same question: Just who was bamboozling whom? Was Charlie trying to sell me the sad story of Elaine Holman, or was she selling him?

But that was unbelievable. Charlie was a pro; he’d dealt in flimflam all his life; he had a mind like a steel trap; and he’d been around so long he wouldn’t bet you even money you didn’t have three hands on your left arm unless you’d let him take it home first and look at it. She couldn’t have the colossal nerve to try to pull something on him. Oh, couldn’t she? I thought.

I lit her a cigarette, and then one for myself. She gave me a smile that would warm a duck blind, and turned to Charlie. “I do hope Mr. Belen will join us. He’s perfect for the job, and you just know instinctively that you can trust him.”

I loved that. Maybe, I thought, in this idea they’re cooking up, they have to leave somebody alone for a few minutes with a red-hot stove.

“Charlie,” I said, “I still don’t get what you want me for, but would you mind telling me a little more what this is all about? Just how are you going to get Miss Holman’s money back for her?”

He took a sip of his drink and looked at me with a benign smile. “The modus operandi is somewhat involved, Mike. And we’d only bore Miss Holman, since she’s already familiar with all its ramifications. Suffice it to say that its axis, or focal point, is a real-estate transaction of a rather novel sort.”

“Who owns the real estate?” I asked.

“Miss Holman’s uncle.”

“And who’s going to buy it?”

He raised his eyebrows in gentle surprise. “Why, Miss Holman’s uncle, naturally.”

“Oh, I see,” I said. “That was stupid of me. But what are you going to do if the uncle’s guardian catches you at it? I take it they must have him put away somewhere where he can’t hurt himself.”

“Miss Holman’s uncle is a banker, Mike,” he said, a little pained, “and a very astute businessman. As I remarked, the deal is a bit complicated, and, as any masterpiece, it suffers in condensation.”

I could see very well he wasn’t going to tell me anything unless I came in. Charlie was no fool. And I didn’t want to get mixed up in their shenanigan, whatever it was. What I wanted to do more than anything in the world was to get her alone for a few minutes, before this thing had me wondering who
I
was, and see if I couldn’t shake a little truth out of her. I’d never realized before just what a beautiful thing a simple, unvarnished fact could be—if I ever ran into one again.

Just then she looked at her watch and said, “I’m going to have to run. I’m expecting a telephone call at the hotel.” She stood up. “I’m very glad I met you, Mr.—ah—Belen.”

Charlie let me beat him to it, a little too obviously. You could see his angle. Let her work on me. “I’ll walk around with you,” I said. “Or get you a cab.”

“I wouldn’t like to trouble you,” she said.

“No trouble at all,” I replied. “It’ll be a pleasure.”

The rain had slowed to a fine drizzle. Instead of turning toward Canal as we came out, she went the other way, toward the French Quarter. I fell in beside her and took her arm. We walked in complete silence for a block and then turned off into a side street and went another block. I looked back. Charlie hadn’t followed us. We stopped under an awning, out of the misty rain that swirled beyond us under the cone of light from a street lamp. She looked up at me, big-eyed, her face still.

“All right, Miss Holman,” I said. “Make me cry.”

“Mike, please,” she said. “I didn’t know it was you. He said he had somebody in mind—to help us, I mean. A friend of his. But I had no idea who it was.”

“Never mind who I am,” I said. “I can still guess that—I think. What I want to know is which one of you erratic geniuses is the mother of Elaine Holman, and why?”

“Well,” she said hesitantly, “I am.”

So my hunch had been right. She was trying to sell Charlie a gabardine mink. I wondered if she had any idea of the probable odds on that. But it could wait.

“Well, look,” I said. “I suppose you can explain it Let’s give it a try. I mean, why you’re mixed up in something with Wolford Charles, and what the hell you’re trying to do.”

She hadn’t changed expression. She was still watching me quietly with those big brown eyes.

“Isn’t there anything you wanted to tell me first, Mike?” she asked softly.

“Such as?” I asked, trying to sound tough about it.

“Well, I’m glad to see you.”

“I’m always glad to see you, Mrs. Lane.”

“I’m not married any more, Mike.”

“Off again, on again, Flanagan.”

“Jeff was killed. Eight months ago, by a holdup man.”

“Oh.” I wanted to crawl down a sewer. “I’m sorry, Cathy. I’m sorry as hell.”

“It’s all right. You were right, anyway. We were about to separate.”

“It’s too bad.”

“I’ve missed you, Mike.”

“And I’ve missed—” I stopped. What was the use in digging that up again? I’d always feel empty when she was somewhere else, and we’d always fight when we were together. You couldn’t win. “But let’s get back to this Holman pitch,” I said briskly. “Start talking, Cathy.”

“Well, there is an Elaine Holman,” she said.

“I thought there might be. But where is she?”

“In New York. I met her last year. And she does have an uncle who’s a banker in a small town named Wyecross near the Mexican border.”

“But what are you up to?”

“All right, I’ll tell you,” she said quietly. “I’ve found Martin Lachlan.”

“You’ve what?” I grabbed both her arms.

“That’s right.”

“When?” I demanded. “And why didn’t you write me?”

“I didn’t know how to reach you.”

“Wait a minute,” I broke in. “This man in Wyecross—this banker—he’s Lachlan. Is that it?”

She shook her head. “Lachlan’s in Mexico.”

“Where in Mexico?”

“If I tell you, will you help me?”

“Look,” I said. “I’ve been waiting to catch up with Lachlan as long as you have.”

“All right. He’s in Lower California—fishing, at La Paz. But he has an apartment in San Francisco, among other places, and that’s where we’ll find him when we’re ready.”

“Ready, hell. We’re ready now.”

“No, we’re not,” she said. Then she looked up at me. “Unless—How much money do you have?”

“Thousand—eleven hundred dollars. About that.”

“Then we’re not ready. It’ll take a lot more than that even with what I have.”

I began to catch on. “Then you dreamed up this Holman thing to raise the money? You sold Charlie on it, and he’s going to split with you?”

“Yes,” she said simply.

“I see. The end justifies the means.” It always did with her. “Even if it means helping Wolford Charles swindle some man who never heard of Lachlan?”

“That isn’t quite the case. You haven’t asked me yet who this Wyecross man is.”

“Who is he?”

“His name is Goodwin.”

“What? Not that one!”

“Yes. Howard C. Goodwin.”

“You sure it’s the same one?”

“Mike, darling, I spent a week in Wyecross, doing a survey for—for—I’ve forgotten the name of the agency—I know everything there is to know about everybody.”

As I said, dullness wasn’t one of her faults.

I was still holding her arms. For some reason I’d forgotten to turn them loose. “Mike,” she whispered, “you’ll help us, won’t you? I need—I mean, we need you.”

There’s always a warning, if you’ll listen to it. It buzzes when you’re playing cards with strangers and get an almost perfect hand, and it’s always smart to listen. I could hear it now, but very faintly, as I thought of the law and of Wolford Charles and of the mess we could get into. But I was touching her and she was looking at me, and Lachlan was somewhere at the end of it. I couldn’t hear it very well.

“Yes,” I said. “I’m with you. Let’s get started.”

I should have turned up my hearing aid.

We flagged a cab and went around to her hotel. We’d go out somewhere for dinner, she said, and she wanted me to meet Judd Bolton, a friend of hers from New York. He was in the deal.

“Does he know who you are?” I asked. “I mean, what name do you use around him?”

She laughed. “I’ve known him a long time, and he knew Jeff. I asked him to help me, and he was the one who suggested getting Charlie. Charlie’s the only one who thinks I’m Elaine Holman.”

“If he does,” I said.

I was itching to find out what else she had learned about Martin Lachlan, and to get a line on this thing they had rigged for Goodwin, in Wyecross, but there wasn’t time to get much information out of her. She said Charlie’d brief me on the Wyecross deal in the morning.

“They don’t know anything about Lachlan,” she said. “We do that alone.”

“That’s right,” I said. “Lachlan’s ours.”

He’d been ours for a long time. Except for the slight matter of finding him.

At the hotel she went up to the desk to call Bolton’s room. I watched her across the lobby, conscious that she was still one of the most beautiful girls I’d ever seen and thinking it was a shame more of them didn’t learn to walk. While she was talking, I drifted over to the newsstand to see if the Racing Form had come in. It hadn’t, and it was while I was standing there looking idly around the lobby that I discovered I wasn’t the only one watching her.

He was sitting like a limp doll in a big overstuffed chair near the doors with a paper in his hands, dark, thin-faced, a forgotten cigarette hanging out of the side of his mouth. The paper was lowered into his lap and he was watching her with the unwinking intensity of a hungry child. In a minute she turned away from the desk and he put the paper up again. I stood there a minute, wondering about it. It was probably nothing. Everybody looked at her. It was just 1926 again and he was asking her if she’d ever seen the view from his apartment window, before going back to tomorrow’s selections at Hialeah.

Maybe, I thought uneasily. If that’d been spring in his face, they ought to get the women and children out before winter.

In a few minutes Bolton came down, and she introduced us. He was about thirty, big, expensive-looking, and tough in a civilized sort of way. Maybe it was the eyes. They were gray and they didn’t say anything, but you got the impression they could be hard as well as urbane. We got off to a bad start.

She explained who I was and told him I was in the act. He smiled at me, with not quite enough nastiness to pin down.

“Horses a little off their form, eh?” he asked. It wasn’t hard to translate. I was a broke horse player looking for a handout.

“Are they?” I said.

I could see dinner wasn’t going to be much if we had to have him along, but I was ready to try. We were going to be in this thing together, and we might as well make some effort to hit it off.

We went over into the French Quarter and stopped in a little hole in the wall for a drink while we made up our minds where to eat. There were some Navy uniforms up front at the bar, and a row of empty booths, and in the back a jukebox with colored lights was sobbing its heart out over something. We walked back to one of the booths, while the uniforms looked her over for spavin and bowed tendons, and she and Bolton sat down on one side and I got in across from them with my back toward the door. She ordered a Martini, and Bolton and I settled for Scotch.

The drinks came. The uniforms drifted out and the place was empty except for us. The flood of tears from the jukebox shut off and it shifted over to something by Vaughn Monroe. “Salud y pesetas,” I said to Cathy.

She started to raise the Martini and then stopped, as if she had run into an invisible glass wall. The door had opened and closed behind me, and now I heard footsteps coming along the row of booths, unhurried footsteps sounding like a sequence out of a B movie. Bolton looked up over my shoulder and I could see his face get dirty with fear. I turned my head to try to see what it was in the mirror behind the bar. It was the man from the hotel lobby.