“We’ll sleep on it,” Lotty suggested. “Paul is loving his guard duty, but he couldn’t do much against men with machine guns. Besides, he is an architecture student and should not miss too many of his classes.”
We went back into the living room. Jill was curled up on the daybed, watching the movie. Paul was lying on his stomach, looking up at her every few minutes. Jill didn’t seem aware of the impression she was creating—this seemed to be her first conquest—but she glowed with contentment.
I went into the guest room to make some phone calls. Larry Anderson said they’d finished my apartment. “I didn’t think you’d want that couch, so I let one of the guys take it home. And about the door—I’ve got a friend who does some carpentry. He has a beautiful oak door, out of some mansion or other. He could fix it up for you and put some dead bolts in it, if you’d like.”
“Larry, I can’t begin to thank you,” I said, much moved. “That sounds like a beautiful idea. How did you close the place up today?”
“Oh, we nailed it shut,” he said cheerfully. Larry and I had gone to school together years ago, but he’d dropped out earlier and further than I had. We chatted for a few minutes, then I hung up to call Ralph.
“It’s me. Sherlock Holmes,” I said. “How did your claim files go?”
“Oh, fine. Summer is a busy time for accidents with so many people on the road. They should stay home,
but then they’d cut off their legs with lawnmowers or something and we’d be paying just the same.”
“Did you refile that draft without any trouble?” I asked.
“Actually not, I couldn’t find the file. I looked up the guy’s account, though: he must have been in a doozy of an accident—We’ve been sending him weekly checks for four years now.” He chuckled a little. “I was going to inspect Yardley’s face today to see if he looked guilty of multiple homicide, but he’s taking the rest of the week off—apparently cut up about Thayer’s death.”
“I see.” I wasn’t going to bother telling him about the link I’d found between Masters and McGraw; I was tired of arguing with him over whether I had a case or not.
“Dinner tomorrow night?” he asked.
“Make it Thursday,” I suggested. “Tomorrow’s going to be pretty open-ended.”
As soon as I put the phone down, it rang. “Dr. Herschel’s residence,” I said. It was my favorite reporter, Murray Ryerson.
“Just got a squeal that Tony Bronsky may have killed John Thayer,” he said.
“Oh, really? Are you going to publish that?”
“Oh, I think we’ll paint a murky picture of gangland involvement. It’s just a whiff, no proof, he wasn’t caught at the scene, and our legal people have decided mentioning his name would be actionable.”
“Thanks for sharing the news,” I said politely.
“I wasn’t calling out of charity,” Murray responded. “But in my lumbering Swedish way it dawned on me that Bronsky works for Smeissen. We agreed yesterday that his name has been cropping up here and there around the place. What’s his angle, Vic—why would he kill a respectable banker and his son?”
“Beats the hell out of me, Murray,” I said, and hung up.
I went back and watched the rest of the movie,
The Guns of Navarone,
with Lotty, Jill, and Paul. I felt restless and on edge. Lotty didn’t keep Scotch. She didn’t have any liquor at all except brandy. I went into the kitchen and poured myself a healthy slug. Lotty looked questioningly at me, but said nothing.
Around midnight, as the movie was ending, the phone rang. Lotty answered it in her bedroom and came back, her face troubled. She gave me a quiet signal to follow her to the kitchen. “A man,” she said in a low voice. “He asked if you were here; when I said yes, he hung up.”
“Oh, hell,” I muttered. “Well, nothing to be done about it now…. My apartment will be ready tomorrow night—I’ll go back and remove this powder keg from your home.”
Lotty shook her head and gave her twisted smile. “Not to worry, Vic—I’m counting on you fixing the AMA for me someday.”
Lotty sent Jill unceremoniously off to bed. Paul got out his sleeping bag. I helped him move the heavy walnut dining-room table against the wall, and Lotty
brought him a pillow from her bed, then went to sleep herself.
The night was muggy; Lotty’s brick, thick-walled building kept out the worst of the weather, and exhaust fans in the kitchen and dining rooms moved the air enough to make sleep possible. But the air felt close to me anyway. I lay on the daybed in a T-shirt, and sweated, dozed a bit, woke, tossed, and dozed again. At last I sat up angrily. I wanted to do something, but there was nothing for me to do. I turned on the light. It was 3:30.
I pulled on a pair of jeans and tiptoed out to the kitchen to make some coffee. While water dripped through the white porcelain filter, I looked through a bookcase in the living room for something to read. All books look equally boring in the middle of the night. I finally selected
Vienna in the Seventeenth Century
by Dorfman, fetched a cup of coffee, and flipped the pages, reading about the devastating plague following the Thirty Years War, and the street now called Graben—“the grave”—because so many dead had been buried there. The terrible story fit my jangled mood.
Above the hum of fans I could head the phone ring faintly in Lotty’s room. We’d turned it off next to the spare bed where Jill was sleeping. I told myself it had to be for Lotty—some mother in labor, or some teen-ager—but I sat tensely anyway and was somehow not surprised when Lotty came out of her room, wrapped in a thin, striped cotton robe.
“For you. A Ruth Yonkers.”
I shrugged my shoulders; the name meant nothing
to me. “Sorry to get you up,” I said, and went down the short hallway to Lotty’s room. I felt as if all the night’s tension had had its focus in waiting for this unexpected phone call from an unknown woman. The instrument was on a small Indonesian table next to Lotty’s bed. I sat on the bed and spoke into it.
“This is Ruth Yonkers,” a husky voice responded. “I talked to you at the UWU meeting tonight.”
“Oh. yes,” I said calmly. “I remember you.” She’d been the stocky, square young woman who’d asked me all the questions at the end.
“I talked to Anita after the meeting. I didn’t know how seriously to take you, but I thought she ought to know about it.” I held my breath and said nothing. “She called me last week, told me about finding Peter’s—finding Peter. She made me promise not to tell anyone where she was without checking with her first. Not even her father, or the police. It was all rather—bizarre.”
“I see,” I said.
“Do you?” she asked doubtfully.
“You thought she’d killed Peter, didn’t you,” I said in a comfortable tone. “And you felt caught by her choosing you to confide in. You didn’t want to betray her, but you didn’t want to be involved in a murder. So you were relieved to have a promise to fall back on.”
Ruth gave a little sigh, half laugh, that came ghostily over the line. “Yes, that was it exactly. You’re smarter than I thought you were. I hadn’t realized Anita might be in danger herself—that was why she sounded so scared. Anyway, I called her. We’ve been
talking for several hours. She’s never heard of you and We’ve been debating whether we can trust you.” She paused and I was quiet. “I think we have to. That’s what it boils down to. If it’s true, if there really are some mob people after her—it all sounds surreal, but she says you’re right.”
“Where is she?” I asked gently.
“Up in Wisconsin. I’ll take you to her.”
“No. Tell me where she is, and I’ll find her. I’m being followed, and it’ll just double the danger to try to meet up with you.”
“Then I won’t tell you where she is,” Ruth said. “ My agreement with her was that I would bring you to her.”
“you’ve been a good friend, Ruth, and you’ve carried a heavy load. But if the people who are after Anita find out you know where she is, and suspect you’re in her confidence, your own life is in danger. Let me run the risk—it’s my job, after all.”
We argued for several more minutes, but Ruth let herself be persuaded. She’d been under a tremendous strain for the five days since Anita had first called her, and she was glad to let someone else take it over. Anita was in Hartford, a little town northwest of Milwaukee. She was working as a waitress in a café. She’d cut her red hair short and dyed it black, and she was calling herself Jody Hill. If I left now, I could catch her just as the café opened for breakfast in the morning.
It was after four when I hung up. I felt refreshed and alert, as if I’d slept soundly for eight hours instead of tossing miserably for three.
Lotty was sitting in the kitchen, drinking coffee and reading. “Lotty, I do apologize. You get little enough sleep as it is. But I think this is the beginning of the end.”
“Ah, good,” she said, putting a marker in her book and shutting it. “The missing girl?”
“Yes. That was a friend who gave me the address. All I have to do now is get away from here without being seen.”
“Where is she?” I hesitated. “My dear, I’ve been questioned by tougher experts than these Smeissen hoodlums. And perhaps someone else should know.”
I grinned. “You’re right.” I told her, then added, “The question is, what about Jill? We were going to go up to Winnetka tomorrow—today, that is—to see if her father had any papers that might explain his connection with Masters and McGraw. Now maybe Anita can make that tie-in for me. But I’d still be happier to get Jill back up there. This whole arrangement—Paul under the dining-room table, Jill and the babies—makes me uncomfortable. If she wants to come back for the rest of the summer, sure—she can stay with me once this mess is cleared up. But for now—let’s get her back home.”
Lotty pursed her lips and stared into her coffee cup for several minutes. Finally she said, “Yes. I believe you’re right. She’s much better—two good nights of sleep, with calm people who like her—she can probably go back to her family. I agree. The whole thing with Paul is too volatile. Very sweet, but too volatile in such a cramped space.”
“My car is across from the Conrad Hilton downtown. I can’t take it—it’s being watched. Maybe Paul can pick it up tomorrow, take Jill home. I’ll be back here tomorrow night, say good-bye, and give you a little privacy.”
“Do you want to take my car?” Lotty suggested.
I thought it over. “Where are you parked?”
“Out front. Across the street.”
“Thanks, but I’ve got to get away from here without being seen. I don’t know that your place is being watched—but these guys want Anita McGraw very badly. And they did call earlier to make sure I was here.”
Lotty got up and turned out the kitchen light. She looked out the window, concealed partly by a hanging geranium and thin gauze curtains. “I don’t see anyone…. Why not wake up Paul? He can take my car, drive it around the block a few times. Then, if no one follows him, he can pick you up in the alley. You drop him down the street.”
“I don’t like it. You’ll be without a car, and when he comes back on foot, if there is someone out there, they’ll be suspicious.”
“Vic, my dear, it’s not like you to be so full of quibbles. We won’t be without a car—we’ll have yours. As for the second—” She thought a minute. “Ah! Drop Paul at the clinic. He can finish his sleep there. We have a bed, for nights when Carol or I have to stay over.”
I laughed. “can’t think of any more quibbles, Lotty. Let’s wake up Paul and give it a try.”
Paul woke up quickly and cheerfully. When the plan was explained to him, he accepted it enthusiastically. “Want me to beat up anyone hanging around outside?”
“Unnecessary, my dear,” said Lotty, amused. “Let’s try not to attract too much attention to ourselves. There’s an all-night restaurant on Sheffield off Addison—give us a call from there.”
We left Paul to dress in privacy. He came out to the kitchen a few minutes later, pushing his black hair back from his square face with his left hand and buttoning a blue workshirt with the right. Lotty gave him her car keys. We watched the street from Lotty’s dark bedroom. No one attacked Paul as he got into the car and started it; we couldn’t see anyone follow him down the street.
I went back to the living room and dressed properly. Lotty watched me without speaking while I loaded the Smith & Wesson and stuck it into the shoulder holster. I was wearing well-cut jeans and a blouson jacket over a ribbed knit shirt.
About ten minutes later Lotty’s phone rang. “All clear,” Paul said. “There is someone out front, though. I think I’d better not drive down the alley—it might bring him around to the rear. I’ll be at the mouth of the alley at the north end of the street.”
I relayed this to Lotty. She nodded. “Why don’t you leave from the basement? You can go down there from inside, and outside the door is hidden by stairs and garbage cans.” She led me downstairs. I felt very alert, very keyed up. Through a window on the stairwell
we could see the night clearing into a predawn gray. It was 4:40 and the apartment was very quiet. A siren sounded in the distance, but no traffic was going down Lotty’s street.
Lotty had brought a flashlight with her, rather than turn on a light that might show through the street-side window. She pointed it down the steps so I could see the way, then turned it off. I padded down after her. At the bottom she seized my wrist, let me around bicycles and a washing machine, and very slowly and quietly drew back the dead bolts in the outside door. There was a little
click
as they snapped open. She waited several minutes before pulling the door open. It moved into the basement, quietly, on oiled hinges. I slipped out up the stairs in crepe-soled shoes.
From behind the screen of garbage cans I peered into the alley. Freddie sat propped against the back of the wall at the south end of the alley two buildings down. As far as I could tell, he was asleep.
I moved quietly back down the stairs. “Give me ten minutes,” I mouthed into Lotty’s ear. “I may need a quick escape route.” Lotty nodded without speaking.
At the top of the stairs I checked Freddie again. Did he have the subtlety to fake sleep? I moved from behind the garbage cans into the shadow of the next building, my right hand on the revolver’s handle. Freddie didn’t stir. Keeping close to the walls, I moved quickly down the alley. As soon as I was halfway down, I broke into a quiet sprint.