by Jerry eBooks
The house where Susan lived was one of a dismal row of identical five-story tenements fronting the narrow side street, empty and desolate at past two in the morning. A pinpoint of light burned in the vestibule, but the hall within was unlighted, and uncarpeted stairs ascended from dimness to obscurity.
Climbing them, Ted Storme breathed the odors of vermin-riddled wood and moldering plaster, of cabbage and Parmesan cheese and garlic, of sweat-rotted clothing and unaired bedding and unwashed bodies, all merged in the miasmic aura of poverty. From behind scabrous doors came snores, a sick infant’s fretful whine—
He stopped short, hand tightening on the child’s hand he held. Below, the vestibule door had creaked open.
His tautly listening ears heard no entering footsteps, no human sound below there.
“Come on, Ted.” Susan tugged at him. “We’ve got to go all the way up.”
“I thought your mother had a weak heart.”
“She never goes out, and the top floor rear’s the cheapest rent.”
“I see.”
They got going again and reached the top landing at last. The door to which Susan pulled Storme and opened shut them into darkness ominously silent save for a pit—pit of water from some leaking faucet.
Her hand disengaged itself from his. He heard her patter way from him, heard a chair scrape, and blinked in the dazzle from an overhead fixture. The child climbed down from the chair she had mounted to reach the pull chain.
“Wait here while I see if Mom’s decent,” she whispered, and went across the room toward a closed door.
This was a kitchen. At least it held a gas range, a sink and gray slate laundry tub, and an old-fashioned ice-box, but there was also a round dining room table at its center, oilcloth covered. Along one wall was a cot bed and a rickety bureau with innumerable photos stuck around the mirror’s ill-fitting frame.
“Mom,”Susan called, opening the door. “Are you decent, Mom?”
CHAPTER VI.
RESCUERS.
NO answer. Storme started toward the child, chiding himself for letting her face alone what might be inside that room.
“Mom!”
A bedspring creaked, releasing the breath that hung on Storme’s lips, and as the crumpled plaid dress was swallowed by darkness the shadow of a voice came from within.
“Susan! Susan, baby. Where have you been?”
“To the—to where Gram’s working. You had a spell and I went to get her to come home and make you better, but she couldn’t come.”
“You shouldn’t have gone all that long way. I just fainted, dear, and. . . . Who’s in the kitchen?” Terror flared into the faint voice. “Whose shadow’s that on the floor?”
“Ted’s, Mom. Gram sent him to take care of you.”
“Light the light, Susan,” the mother’s voice said, and then more loudly, though still feeble, “You in there! Why are you hiding from me?”
“Not hiding, Mrs. Castle.” Storme went through the door into abrupt brightness. “Merely waiting until Susan told you I was here.”
This room was almost filled by the double bed on which Viola Castle lay. The deep-toned green silk of lounging pajamas, threadbare but still somehow reminiscent of luxury, outlined the terrible emaciation of her long body. Her disordered hair was a crimson flame about a hollow-cheeked, triangular face sharpened by suffering, and out of which gold-flecked brown eyes as large and terror-filled as a doe’s at bay, laid themselves on his face.
“I don’t know you,” her blue-tinged lips whispered.
“No reason why you should.” The hand that Susan had taken was only skin and long, delicate bones, but its nails were meticuously cared-for. “You’ve never seen me before and the first time I ever even heard of you was tonight, when your little daughter told me about you. So”—Storme smiled reassuringly—“you see you’ve no reason to know me, certainly none to be afraid of me.”
“You—you’re not—”
“One of Dorgan’s gang? No.” There was no time for finesse. He would have to chance the effect on her of what he must tell her. “But I’ve got some bad news for you. Er. . . . How about your going out in the other room for a while, Susan, while I talk to your mother?”
“No!” Viola Castle’s free hand flung up. “No! She won’t leave me alone with you.” Storme shrugged. “Very well. She’ll have to hear, then. Listen, Feet Dorgan is dead, and your mother is under arrest for killing him.”
“Did—did she?”
“No, but she’s going to have a hard time proving it, and in the meantime what’s left of his mob are hunting you. She found a way to ask me to take you and Susan to a place where you’ll be safe from them.”
“You’re lying!”
“Why should I?” His eyes were on the flutter of heart blood in the dreadful hollow of the woman’s throat. “To kid you into telling me where that money is hidden? You wouldn’t tell that to your own mother to keep your child from starving.” The fingers of the upthrown hand spread with startlement. “To eat food bought with it, you told her, would be like eating your husband.”
“You know that,” she whispered. “You could know it only from her.”
“Precisely. Please believe me, Mrs. Castle. Please believe me that your mother sent me to protect you from your enemies. Please come with me to my own quarters, where you’ll be safe from them.”
“Let’s, Mom,” Susan broke into the momentary pause. “Let’s go with Ted. He’s nice. He’s good and kind and—and we can trust him, Mom. I know we can.”
“The instinct of a child,” Storme urged, low-toned. “You’re her mother. You should know how right it must be.”
Viola Castle’s eyes were still large-pupiled but, studying him, some of the fear went from them.
“Very well,” she sighed. “We’ll go with you.”
“Good.”
They decided there was no need to take time for her to change. It would be enough if she put on stockings and shoes while Susan packed the battered suitcase she hauled out of a closet. Storme discreetly withdrew to the outer room, half-closing the door between, and tried to stem his impatience by looking at the photos that encircled the speckled dresser mirror.
The autographs sprawled across them evoked echoes of Homeric laughter out of times past. Eva Tanguay, Pat Rooney. “From Eddie Leonard to a great-hearted trouper, Jennie Wrenn.” Great-hearted was right. He had an odd fantasy that these old friends of hers were asking him something and in his mind he answered them.
“I won’t let her down. She wants me to take care of those two she loves first, but when I’ve got them safe in my home I’ll do my best for her.”
A muscle twitched in his cheek and his head twisted to the sound of footfalls in the hall just outside.
The dark door rattled with a touch on its knob.
Before Storme could get there it was opening. The light showed him Cal Carroll, tall and sinister in the widening slit, left hand on the knob, right hovering near his tuxedo’s side pocket.
“I got tired waitin’ for yuh downstairs,” the Texan rumbled “So ah come on up.”
Storme recalled hearing the vestibule door open and Susan’s telling him that they were going to the top floor, rear.
“Quite a climb, isn’t it?” Storme said.
Did Carroll’s not coming right on up after him mean he was unaware of the Dorgan mob’s interest in the Castle’s? Likely. He was, after all, an out-of-towner, probably imported for the single job of murder.
“Okay,” he sighed, trying it out. “Let’s get going.”
But Cal Carroll shook his head. “No need to go anywhere,” he said. “I can give yuh what I’ve got for yuh right here.”
“The devil you can!” Ted Storme grunted, bunching muscles for a struggle he had no chance of winning but which might make enough noise to arouse the house and so bring at least temporary safety for Susan and her mother. “You—”
Once more breath caught in his throat. Carroll had stepped aside and a girl w
as coming in through the door ahead of him, her honey-hued short hair touseled, her violet eyes drowsy, her bright blue velvet wrap parted on a white shimmer of satin.
“This is Mimi,” the Texan said, pushing the door shut.
Storme’s mouth twisted. “Brought a witness along so you can be sure of collecting?”
“Collectin’ ?” The big man looked puzzled. “For what?”
“The job you came here to do, of course.”
“I don’t get yuh.”
“I do, Cal.” The girl put a hand on his arm. “He thinks the same about you that Jock and I did, like I told you in the cab. He thinks Dorgan hired you to kill him.”
“Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat! I clean forgot.” Carroll chuckled. “Shucks, son. I never heard of this Dorgan maverick till Mimi here told me about him, and as for gunnin’ for yuh, I ain’t had a shootin’ iron on me for more years than you’re old.”
“No? Then what was it you put your hand on in your pocket when you invited me to walk out of the Biarritz with you?”
“In my. . . . Leapin’ bullfrogs! So that’s why yuh slugged me. Here!” The Texan’s hand went into that pocket, came out with something it thrust at Storme. “This is what I’ve been huntin’ yuh for ten months to give yuh.”
It was an oval piece of porcelain not quite big enough to cover a man’s palm. Its edges were chipped and the colors in which a young woman’s face had been painted on it were faded, but the eyes that looked out from under the piled-up pompadour of a bygone era were wistful, the mouth sad and sweet.
“She looks like you,” Mimi said.
“My mother,” Ted Storme murmured, the hand that closed over the miniature trembling a bit. “Where did you get this, Cal Carroll?”
“She gave it to me the day she told me she’d decided between me and my best friend.” New lines seamed the older man’s leathery skin and his eyes were bleak as his voice. “That night I shook foot loose from where I figgered I wasn’t wanted any more, bein’ that kind of fool, and lost track of ’em. Long afterward I cashed in big, but I found out there was one thing I couldn’t buy with money, and that was the only thing I wanted—somebody that belonged to me and me to them.
I started out to backtrack ’em and found out—”
“Skip it,” Storme snapped. “What you found out is my business and no one’s else.” But some of the hardness had gone out of his tone and his expression. “What I want to know, right now, is why you didn’t tell me all this at the Biarritz bar instead of—”
Carroll laughed whole-heartedly.
“Wranglin’ yuh into that fool bet?” he said. “I wasn’t none too shore yuh was the Ted Storme I hoped yuh was, and that was the only way I picked to check. When yuh turned yore back on that fly like it was two bits yuh had ridin’ on it instead of a thousand iron men, I knew ah’d come to the end of the long trail.” Carroll chuckled reminiscently. “That minute I could have been standin’ in front of Peg Dillon’s honkytonk watchin’ Rod—watchin’ yore pa stake a hundred-thousand-barrel oil well on a scrap between a doodlebug and three ants and never turn a hair when he lost.”
“He told me that story once.” Storme was at last convinced the bronzed out-lander was What he said he was. “But you must know hundreds about him that I’ve never heard.” His gray look drifted to the bedroom’s half-closed door. “They’ll have to wait, though, till—” He checked, slid an arched-brow glance to Mimi and away again.
Carrol caught it. “The lady’s all right, Ted. If it wasn’t for her, might be neither of us would be here. She saw that Foster doodlebug trail us out of that honkytonk and run out in front.”
“She’s the girl in white who sent the policeman into the parking lot?”
“And has been havin’ an all-fired rough time of it ever since. This Dorgan ranny got hold of her.”
“Dorgan wasn’t so bad,” the girl protested. “It was Foster and Bert Judson and that awful Judge Lee.”
Storme’s nostrils pinched. “You were with Feet Dorgan’s party?”
“Not at first. I went there with Jock Haddon, but afterward I was at their table.”
“I want to talk to you.” Excitement pulsed in Ted Storme’s voice, repressed but electric. “You’re coming along to my place with . . . Excuse me.”
He whirled, thudded heavy-heeled into the bedroom. Viola Castle was up, supporting herself by a hand on the bed’s footboard, her flaming hair neat, orange-red rouge livid on her ashen lips.
“You heard?” he flung at her.
“Yes, Ted. They sound all right.”
“This mess may be working out better than we had any reason to hope. Hey, look. You can’t make it down all those stairs, the state you’re in. I’ll have to carry you.”
“Will you, Ted? I—I think I’ll like that.”
Her frail body was no weight at all in his arms. Hers went around his neck and her cheek nestled against his with a child’s sigh of contentment. But Susan was troubled.
“What about Gram, Ted? You promised you’d bring her home to us.”
“That I did, honey, and I’m beginning to hope now that I may be able to keep that promise.”
It was Carroll’s turn to look bewildered when they came out into the kitchen, Storme carrying a woman in green pajamas with a shabby coat thrown over them, a little girl lugging a valise almost as big as herself.
“No time to explain now, Cal,” Storme said. “I’ll tell you about it in the car. Grab that bag and come along.”
“Yuh’re Rod Storme’s son, all right,” the Texan chuckled as they started out and down the stairs. “That kind of singin’ note in yore voice. He used to get it, just like that, when he was on the prod. ‘Come along, Cal,’ he’d say, his eyes as gray and hard as diamond bits. ‘Come along. We got a job to do.’ ”
CHAPTER VII.
POKER DATE.
CAL CARROLL sat with Mimi and Ted Storme in the gambler’s almost monkishly ascetic room. The sleep of exhaustion had overtaken Susan even before they had reached here and they had persuaded her mother to lie down with her in the bedroom.
“Two minutes after this Ashton Lee gets to that police station, I was wonderin’ if they wasn’t goin’ to jug me for the crime of bein’ robbed,” Cal was saying. “Shucks, I says. Give me back my roll and I’ll call it a day. Lee shakes hands all around and beats it out in such a tearin’ hurry he don’t even wait for Foster, and that doodlebug grabs a cab and takes out after him, so I got to wait till another one comes along.”
“Lee got back to the Biarritz in time to walk in on Jenny Wrenn four or five minutes after Dorgan was shot,” Storme said. “But I’d like to know how much earlier he got there.”
“Don’t tell me yuh’re figgerin’ he may be the one done the shootin’.”
“Well, think it over. We can discard any theory that some enemy of Dorgan’s just happened to be prowling around in the lot behind the dressing room and just happened to see him through that lighted window. The killer must be someone who knew Dorgan had gone backstage, and where. And look at Lee’s behavior when he walked in there. He showed no surprise at finding Dorgan a corpse but went right at the old lady, foisting on her a self-defense plea that would avert suspicion from the real murderer and at the same time give him a lever with which to extract from her or her daughter a lead to the seventy-five-thousand dollars which, incidentally, is motive enough for any killing.”
“Look, Mr. Storme.” Mimi leaned forward eagerly. “Judge Lee didn’t know Dorgan was going backstage till just before he went back there himself. I know, because he asked me where he was, and that must have been right the very minute Dorgan was being shot.”
“Was it?” Storme’s fingers drummed on the arm of his chair. “Mimi—do you remember the music ending with a single saxophone phrase that sounded like, ‘That’s All’ ?”
The girl’s efforts to recall screwed up her pert features till she resembled some pigtailed tad in a classroom.
“I don’t . . . oh, yes, now I rememb
er. There was just that one sweet sax singsing, ‘That’s All-lll.’ ”
“Good. Now was that before or after Lee showed up?”
“Before. I’m sure it was before. Bert Judson was just drinking his last glass of champagne and then he passed out, but the people were clapping and yelling. I almost cried because I was afraid they’d wake him up, but they didn’t and I started to get up, and just then Judge Lee was there, looking down at me through those awful glasses.”
“That ties it up.” Storme looked triumphant. “I heard that saxophone too, a half-second after the shot and I’d had time to get into the room and talk with Jennie Wrenn before Lee appeared.
Carroll seemed puzzled. “Just what does that prove, Ted?”
“That he had time to establish an alibi. Look. He and Dorgan must have planned to talk to the old lady together, before he went to the police station to fix things for Foster. He rushed back as soon as he could, but instead of coming in through the front entrance he went backstage. Remember, he still had his coat on when he talked to Mimi and he’d have had a tough time getting past the checkroom girls that way. He drove into the parking lot and went around in back of the casino, spied Dorgan where he knew he would be and blasted him. He threw his gun into the room, and dived into the Biarritz through that same fire exit we came out of.”
“Gee, Mr. Storme!” Mimi exclaimed. “You’re wonderful. The only one I could think it might have been was Norma.”
“Norma?”
“The brunette I told you about, the girl Dorgan told she might be cracking wise just once too often. Even I was scared the way he looked at her, almost as scared as Jock was when he heard Dorgan say about him, ‘That phony’s going to find out he’s made one wrong play too many,’ but Norma didn’t turn a hair. She was burned up, though, I could tell that. And then she went to the powder room and never came back. And the way her bag bumped against the table, I was sure she might have a gun in it.”
Carrol chuckled, “Don’t I recall yore sayin’, Ted, that the murder gun was little and pearl-handled? A woman’s weapon.”
