Shadows Everywhere (3 page)

Keeping the powerful shotgun leveled on Garvy, Sanders closed the door with a backward motion of his foot, and took a step closer.

Garvy had only had a gun pointed at him once before, and he was frightened, but he kept his voice steady, tried to throw Sanders off guard. "Have a chair," he said, waving at the cushioned chair by the desk.

Sanders ignored the offer. "You've caused me a lot of grief, Mr. Garvy, more than you'll ever know."

"You'll have even more grief if you pull that trigger," Garvy said, staring at the two gigantic apertures of the shotgun barrels. He knew what a gun like that could do at close range. One twitch of Sanders' finger could shatter Garvy like a flesh-and-bone skeet target.

"I doubt if I have the capacity to experience any more sorrow," Sanders said in a weary voice.

"There's no need to," Garvy said quickly. "The whole thing's over. There's no harm done to you–you're back with your family, your reputation's clear–your wife will love you and trust you all the more!"

"No harm done," Sanders repeated in a low, oddly laughing voice that sent a blade of fear through Garvy. "No harm done ..."With seeming pain he raised the shotgun to his shoulder and sighted down the long barrels at Garvy.

"Sanders, wait! You've no reason! I don't even know you! I never meant you any harm! Didn't cause you any harm–everything's the way it was before! Please!" Garvy's heart was crashing against his ribs. He felt an overpowering urge to run for the side door, yet knew he shouldn't.

"You don't understand," Sanders said in a soft, drained voice. "I loved Janet Windemer very much...
very, very much!"

The two men's eyes locked in suspended time. Then suddenly Garvy did run for the door, exploded into the frenzied motion of panic from where he had stood behind the desk. There was a loud, split-second double roar as, leading him perfectly, Raymond Sanders brought him down in mid-flight.

Thirty seconds later came the sound of another, single shot.

She almost begged to be kidnapped, so I intended to oblige. Thana Norden was her name, the wife of Norman Norden, the millionaire lemon drink king. Old man Norden–about seventy years old–kept to himself in their big house on Florida's ocean coast, while his young wife Thana kept the bartenders busy in the big hotels up and down Collins Avenue.

Norman Norden worshipped his wife, and in the news releases concerning his civic activities, and in the society page write-ups, he never failed to mention the fact. "Worth all my money," he had said of her in one TV interview. That had stuck in my mind.

Thana acted the part of something worshipped. She was a very well-built brunette, of medium height and weight, about thirty, with large, slightly tilted brown eyes, long legs and a flaunting elegance about her. Her specialty, the way I heard, was to lead men on and then not deliver. She might not have been rare that way, but she was rare in a lot of other ways, and she loved to bring it to everyone's attention. I sat and heard her hold court with her bought friends in a lounge one evening. "My jewels... my car... he'd do anything for me... flying to Paris next Tuesday...why, he'd give a fortune to kiss my hand. Those were the sort of remarks that dotted her conversation.

After watching Thana for a few weeks, I found that her favorite pastime also fitted in with what I had in mind. She liked to take long, solitary walks on the beach. I'd sit concealed in my old car and watch her stroll in the moonlight, and I'd consider the possibilities. I was almost forty now; the big break had never come. Everything I'd ever done had always started sweet and ended sour. Was I considering something stupid out of some mounting desperation, or had I realized finally that I had to take a chance?

I can't say I made up my mind all at once, or even consciously, but one day I realized that I
had
made up my mind.

So that night I took one final draw on my cigarette, took one final look through the windshield at the small figure of Thana Norden below me on the beach. She was walking barefoot in an evening dress, about to disappear around a gentle rise of sand. A long swelling wave rose from the dark ocean and rolled toward her to sigh and splay gently about her feet. In the moonlight she glistened like pure gold.

The kidnapping itself would be the easiest part; but where would I hide a package like Thana Norden?

I figured the answer to that would have to come later. The thing for me to do now was to learn all I could about Norman Norden himself. That way I'd know better how to proceed, and how much to ask for ransom.

It was easy to find out what I wanted to know about Norden–so easy it kind of scared me. He was more important than I'd thought, worth more than I'd thought. He'd inherited over a million dollars and the Norden Lemon Drink Company from his father, Milton Norden. Then, with the increasing popularity of concentrated frozen lemonade, he'd built his father's business to ten times its former size and branched out into manufacturing other food products. Alone, without an heir until Thana, Norman Norden had acquired a huge home in New England, a plush New York town house, two swank penthouse apartments in Miami and a vacation 'cottage' in the Bahamas. He spent ninety-nine percent of his time in the sprawling mansion in Miami Beach, and from his office there he conducted his vast business.

On a particularly broiling, humid afternoon I lay on my back in bed and decided after some deliberation to ask $250,000 ransom for the precious Thana. With that figure in mind, I fell asleep listening to the rain begin to fall.

That evening, before it began to get dark, I had a quick snack, then drove to look over Norden's Miami property. I'd learned that both penthouses were used for business purposes only, and that they were seldom used at all. If someone very important came to town on Norden business, the larger penthouse with its pool atop the Brently Building was opened and put at the client's disposal.

I parked near the Brently Building and looked up at its top floor. According to the business-magazine article I'd read at the library, this, the more used of the two penthouses, was occupied for only a few weeks out of the year.

Squinting up into the sunlight, I could make out long rows of draped windows. A little casual conversation with the doorman told me the penthouse was unoccupied now, and the tiniest seed of an idea began to sprout in my mind.

When I saw the site of the second penthouse, smaller and less expensive than the first, on the top of the twenty-story Martinaire Hotel, that seed took root. The Martinaire was part of a section of older buildings, onetime fine hotels that depressed economic conditions were forcing out of business. What interested me most about the old but stately Martinaire was the vacant west wing. That wing, I discovered, was being remodeled to contain fewer but larger rooms. The front of the building was a sheer twenty-story rise, but the west wing rose only twelve stories to stair-step into the main
section of building. I investigated further, then walked back to my car, smiling.

I had everything planned and was ready to act two evenings later. I tried to make up my mind when to perform the actual snatch, and as I followed a slightly drunk Thana Norden out of a bar that night about eleven o'clock, I decided then was as ripe a time as any if she were heading for her late walk on the beach.

Thana must have been even drunker than usual, for I had some trouble keeping my old sedan up with her fast and reckless driving. She pushed her little red sports car so hard it was almost suicidal, her dark hair whipping behind and around her in the wind. She was something, Thana Norden was, like a heroine from a book.

Finally she parked the car where she usually did, ran down to the beach and bent gracefully sideways to remove her shoes. I parked down the road about a hundred yards in the direction I knew she'd be walking and sat waiting, my hands clenched on the steering wheel.

After what seemed a long wait, I saw her below, walking slowly and carrying her shoes in one hand, looking out as she often did to the rolling dark sea. I got out of the car, shutting the door softly behind me, and watched her walk past before I started down toward her.

The sighing of the waves kept her from hearing me as I approached from behind, and when I touched her shoulder she whirled with a startled look in her pale face. "Thana Norden?"

'Yes...?" she said, frowning as if I'd interrupted her from complex thought. "What do you want?"

"You're coming with me," I said, watching her eyes for the fear that would allow me to manage her; but there was no fear–only annoyance, indignation.

"You must be out of your mind!" she snapped.

"You
must be. A solid-gold girl like you, in the habit of walking alone on the beach at night. You were bound to be stolen."

"Stolen?" Now she looked at me curiously. "You're
kidnapping
me?"

"You've guessed it."

"You're serious?"

I nodded, drawing the small .32 revolver from my belt.

She looked up at the stars and laughed. "All right," she said when she was finished, "I'm kidnapped. You go ahead and call the shots."

"Walk along with me," I said, motioning with the revolver, and side by side we began the walk toward my car. Thana didn't seem frightened at all, didn't even seem nervous, though in a way she seemed excited, almost like a pretty girl embarking on a much anticipated date.

When we reached the sparsely grassed earth we stopped so she could put her high-heeled shoes back on. Then I prodded her ribs with the gun and we walked on faster toward the car.

I let Thana drive while I sat beside her with the revolver leveled at her side. I was glad to see that in the confines of my car she seemed more frightened than before.

"Back to the city," I ordered her.

"My makeup is in my car," she said as we passed her parked red convertible.

"It stays there. It won't matter what you look like for the next few days."

She drove on, staring ahead at the curving dark road.

"How much ransom are you going to ask?" she said after a while.

"More than you're worth."

"I'd like to say you can't get away with it, but you probably can. My husband will pay plenty to have me back."

"Thanks for the moral support. Now be quiet and drive."

"I'm not stupid, you know," she said lightly, "even though I am beautiful. I know I'm worthless to you dead, so don't bother with your threats."

"A lot can happen to you without your dying," I told her. That seemed to get to her, and I saw her jaw muscles tense as she tried to concentrate on the road.

"I said I wasn't stupid," she remarked after a few minutes. "After you get the ransom money I will be worthless to you, and you've let me see your face. You know I'll be able to identify you."

"Sure you will, only you'll never see me again, and I can change myself enough so no one will be able to identify me from your description." What I told her was true. Acting had been one of my many short-lived careers that had turned out to be something other than I'd thought, so the art of altering my appearance wasn't new to me. My normally sand-colored hair was dyed black now and combed low over my forehead, and the shape and thickness of my eyebrows were subtly changed by dark pencil. The fashionable dyed mustache I wore could also go when the time came. Naturally I wouldn't he seen anymore at my usual haunts, because my old life as a self-described beach bum would be over.

A tractor-trailer whined past us with difficulty, doing over seventy. I cautioned Thana to stay below the speed limit. Death-defying driving seemed to be a habit with her.

When we reached the Martinaire Hotel I had Thana drive around the block and park in the alley alongside the vacant west wing. I moved quickly, with the smoothness and economy born of careful planning.

After reaching into the back seat and grabbing the duffle bag I'd brought, I shoved Thana roughly from the car, followed her with the gun pressed against her. Through a lockless wooden door I took her inside the empty wing to a small room that probably had been used to store linens or cleaning equipment. A light in that room couldn't be seen from outside, and by the glow of my flashlight I bound Thana tightly to a metal support and pressed adhesive tape over her mouth. She sat limply without a suggestion of struggle, and her dark eyes were trained on me as I took one final look at her by the flashlight beam, then walked from the room and closed the door behind me.

Within twenty minutes I was back, and when I opened the door to the small room and switched on the flashlight, Thana was looking at me as she had when I left. I'd parked my car ten blocks away in the garage I'd leased and taken a cab back to within two blocks of the Martinaire Hotel. From there I'd walked the rest of the way.

I untied Thana but left the tape across her mouth, and jabbing the small of her back with the gun barrel, marched her outside again into the alley. With one deft toss I looped a thin, weighted rope about the bottom rung of the counterbalanced steel stairs of the old fire escape and pulled them down. Then I slung the duffle bag over my shoulder and motioned Thana to climb ahead of me.

It seemed like an hour, that climb. We passed darkened window after darkened window as we rose. During the day this part of the building would he teeming with workmen, but at this time it was completely deserted and ideal for my purpose.