Nets to Catch the Wind

by Dolores Hitchens

  “I wouldn’t do that. There are easier poisons than the one she took.” Again the sliding glance, searching for the empty water glass.

  Amy gripped her wrist. “You know who did——”

  A faint smile trembled across Mrs. Schneider’s mouth. “It’s much too late to frighten me, Mrs. Luttrell.” The tone was gentle, almost friendly. “If you had come yesterday to threaten, there might have been something left over, some scrap of terror I wasn’t using in that other business. . . .” The smile grew stronger, though the eyes remained dead and dark. “Now there is nothing but relief. A dull relief. The dentist’s drill is still there, pressing the nerve, but I’ve taken novocain.” The cold fingers tightened on Amy’s arm. “I don’t know where the Tzegeti child is. Don’t waste any time here.”

  Amy shook her savagely. “You know something you’re not telling.”

  “I came out here a little past midnight. It’s a pretty spot, don’t you think? I wanted time to come to the inevitable conclusion—even though it was inevitable—and then when I saw what I had better do. . . .” Her head trembled suddenly and the lock of silver hair came down. She didn’t try to put it into place again. Her body had taken on an attitude of heaviness, of slack unbalanced weight. “Now I’m just going to forget—even about the blackmail——”

  Amy stepped back, studied Mrs. Schneider. A bird had awakened in the yard, had thrown a few chirps out into the silence. There was a ruffle of wings. The glassy surface of the little pool broke under the impact of some dew, and the red plum and yellow acacia bloomed together in the rolling water. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “Vernon . . . he must be at Cunninghan’s office. That’s where he called—you’d better go.” Mrs. Schneider dragged the words forth, then slid over face-down on the couch.

  Amy saw the extension telephone in a niche behind the small bar. She ran over to it, listened to make sure the wire was alive, then dialed Dr. Sprague. “I’m calling from Mrs. Schneider’s house. Out in back, by the pool. She’s taken something—sleeping pills, probably—and you’d better get an ambulance over here. Give me a break, Doctor. Don’t say who telephoned.”

  Dr. Sprague muttered something about its being irregular. Amy didn’t argue. She hung up the telephone and left.

  It was daylight by the time she reached town again. A couple of janitors were washing off the sidewalks in front of the two biggest stores, and a truck full of boxes had paused to take on some more discarded cartons. The corner lunchroom held a waitress and a counterman, just putting on aprons. A phone was tinkling hopefully in the drugstore.

  Amy went up the stairs quickly but without sound. She opened Cunninghan’s outer door, looked into the reception room. The light, filtered through the yellow gauze, looked ill, dismal, and the formality of the room gave it the deadness of a window display. Across the room the other door stood an inch or so ajar. She heard Vernon Wyse said, “She ought to be here any minute, dammit. We’ll settle all this.”

  Another voice—Neece’s—answered, “I’m not with you. We can’t fool him a second time. He wouldn’t believe it. I don’t want to try it.”

  Wyse said roughly, “I can’t see that he has much choice. He kept the money. He won’t want that exposed.”

  “When your sister comes, she’d better understand——”

  There was a wail of a siren from some blocks away—the ambulance going for Mrs. Schneider, probably—and both men were silent until the noise died out.

  Neece went on, “She’d better understand what the score is. We’ll hold them off on the Tzegeti deal, keep the documents out of their hands as long as possible; but when the chips are down, we’ll have to produce.”

  “You’d better think of yourself,” Wyse flung out. “You won’t be a fair-haired boy around here if Cunninghan knows you helped put it over.”

  “I don’t think he’ll find that out.”

  “There’s just one thing that can save any of us. That damned diary.”

  “Yes, but it won’t turn up now.”

  Amy leaned against the door lintel and thought about Tzegeti’s journal. In the last moments at home, running for the cab, she’d kicked it under a chest of drawers in the hall, a chest where towels were stored. It still must be there, providing Fogarty hadn’t been too quick to miss her, too accurate with a conclusion, and curious enough at her house to look at more than the surface evidence of what had happened there.

  The conversation in the other room—Neece’s side of it, at least—betrayed that Cunninghan must have called to let him know the current score. They were shoring up the dikes around what threatened to be disaster. Then Amy recalled the extension telephone in the cabana beside the pool—of course they’d relayed the news to Mrs. Schneider, with no knowledge of the state she was in, the ragged edge of worn nerves, the fear that had reached the jumping-off spot.

  How perfect the mask, the façade, had been, Amy thought; she’d never seen such cold control, such sureness, such disdainful calm as Mrs. Schneider’s. And inside had been the quivering coward, the timid thief——

  Neece said, “He isn’t mad yet. He hasn’t gotten over the shock he had, and whatever he went through with that reporter. When he does come out of it, I’m going to have my hands full. He might see through it all; he might get the idea I helped with it. He wouldn’t like that.”

  “If we could get our hands on the diary,” Wyse put in stubbornly, with a hint of fright, “we’d find something to blow it all up with.”

  Amy stepped in through the door. The two men swung together, catching the sudden movement, and she saw that Wyse was pale and strained and that Neece was black and angry. Amy looked at Wyse. “I just came from your sister. She’s taken a drug of some sort in an effort to kill herself. She was talking, too, about the blackmail business. I presume that’s what’s under discussion here now. All that careful work to prove the blackmail isn’t going to stand up. You were the ones who were doing it, actually, since it proved a profitable side line and must have yielded more than what Schneider was paying you or allowing her for personal expenses.”

  “Now look here——” Wyse stammered.

  “Shut up,” Amy said. “I’m offering you a deal. You give me back Elizabeth and I’ll hand over Tzegeti’s diary. Then you can destroy it and quit pretending you think it might prove Tzegeti’s guilt about anything. You can burn up whatever he put into it about your shakedown of the Picardy’s gambling patrons. You can relax. Providing you hand over the girl.”

  “Don’t listen to her!” Neece commanded. “It’s a trap, Vernon!”

  “You don’t have to worry that he’ll read it before he burns it,” Amy said to Neece. “Nor risk letting another person translate it. It’s all in Polack—or whatever.”

  Neece’s face worked; his glance settled on her purse. As if the cold, oiled gun were visible through the leather, he seemed suddenly chilled, wary. “What did you mean—about Mrs. Schneider?”

  “She’s checking out on you—the hard way. And forgetting not to talk. Of course she knows she hasn’t anything to lose.”

  Wyse rubbed a hand along his jaw to cover what could have been a shaking mouth. “She’s . . . dying?”

  “It must have been tough for her for a long time,” Amy pointed out. “First there was the danger that her husband would find out your private game with his steady customers, and then the frantic hope that the blackmail could all be put off upon Tzegeti, a dead man. Only the people who knew the truth and might object kept dying off, violently—Mrs. Tzegeti, Raoul Schneider’s wife. Murder isn’t healthy. It’s even less healthy than blackmail. I guess that’s what finally worried her to death.” Amy jerked her purse open, took out the gun. “My deal’s got a time limit. The diary for Elizabeth. Only you’ll trade quick or not at all. I’m in a hurry.”

  “She’s crazy,” Neece said, trying to put humor and disdain into it.

  “No she isn’t,” Wyse argued. He quit trying to cover his shaking mouth. “She keeps talking about
the Tzegeti kid. Some deal she wants——”

  “You know what I mean,” Amy ground out.

  “It’s kidnaping!” Wyse wailed. “It’s a snatch! And you promised that if Sis and I would play ball with you, there wouldn’t be any danger! Don’t you know kidnaping’s a federal offense?” He screamed the last words at Neece; Neece quit trying to be smooth or elegant or winning. He walked over to Wyse and slapped him in the face. Wyse fell back into Cunninghan’s chair.

  “Shut your damned mouth!” Neece leaned over him, fists balled.

  Amy said, “Keep right on talking, Mr. Wyse.”

  “I don’t know anything.” The pallor was greenish, his cheekbones sticking out as though the flesh had crept away to some inner part of his skull. “I haven’t taken any child!”

  “I’ll outline things for you,” Amy said with wily patience. Neece flung her a look. “You had the blackmail going and Schneider found out about it—just as he was supposed to have found out about Tzegeti. You murdered Schneider; then you scrammed to establish an alibi, or for some other purpose, and you forgot poor old Tzegeti with his broom.”

  Wyse was shaking his head as if his neck had a broken swivel in it.

  “Later you got to thinking. He could be shut up. So you threatened his wife and kid, unless he took the rap; and that settled the dust for a while. Then the governor’s crime inquiry decided to have a look down here. A gambling czar had been murdered, and while there didn’t seem to be any underworld workings in the affair, it had a smell. They decided to talk to Tzegeti on his way to San Quentin. Well, that might have broken it. He was just an ignorant foreigner; he might have had an exaggerated idea of the power and prestige of a governor’s committee. It would be better all around if he were to die on the train.”

  Neece tried to break in. “Look, Mrs. Luttrell, you might just listen——”

  Amy moved the gun on him, and his voice died. She went on, “It was safer to murder Tzegeti and my husband than it was to let the thing alone, let Tzegeti be a pretended murderer—because away from Lomena, safe in prison, he might eventually tell the truth. Especially if his wife died or moved away or he figured somehow you no longer had the power to work evil on them. So you killed Tzegeti, and my husband, and walked off the train as soon as it stopped, and were scot free and without any worries at all.”

  Wyse was sitting still now, his eyes fixed on her face, his lips parted—not as if he wanted to say anything, to interrupt, but as if he needed air, more air than simple breathing could give him.

  “Only there were tag ends that had to be taken care of. Like the book, Tzegeti’s diary. You wanted that, and when you couldn’t get it you figured Mrs. Tzegeti was the only one who knew its whereabouts anyway, so you killed her. That was the same as destroying the journal, in a way. Mrs. Tzegeti kept her mouth shut, in spite of the agonizing pain, because there was still Elizabeth, who would be left alone.”

  Neece drew back to the window, a gliding uneasy motion; but Wyse didn’t move. He seemed to shrink a little. The silver frames gleamed on his eyeglasses, and the lenses sparkled cleanly, but the rest of his face had a dusty look, a dull pallor like a sick man’s.

  “Elizabeth left the house and came to me, after a detour through the halls of the Juvenile Department, and you could search in peace. You looked and looked, always hoping, and then when you found Cunninghan’s secretary there digging at the floor behind the bed you were sure you were undone, and you killed her.”

  The thing that looked out of Wyse’s eyes was old, as old and bitter as the taste of pain.

  “And now you have the little girl, Tzegeti’s child that he died for, and for whose safety I’m perfectly willing and able to make a trade with you or to kill you—either one, whichever you choose.”

  She thought that he was looking into the black barrel of the gun, but couldn’t be sure. He had folded his hands on Cunninghan’s desk, or rather one hand had faltered over and clung to the other as if they were two separate organisms and afraid. The dusty whiteness had increased in his face. Even his eyes and the silver hair seemed dead. He reminded her very much of Mrs. Schneider, there at the end just before she had fallen on her face; and Amy saw that the common denominator was fright, fright that had grown unendurable, for these two had fooled the world with a cool front while terror gnawed them inwardly. Love of money might be the root of all evil; it had certainly driven this pair, Wyse and his sister, into deeps where they were lost.

  “Don’t kill me,” Wyse whimpered. Then he began to weep.

  Neece made a face of sudden disgust and turned, ramming his hands into his pockets, looking out of the window where the gray dawn was turning yellow, where trucks were lining up, delivering goods to feed Lomena’s markets, and where the street inspectors kept watch to make sure that when the trucks were gone the streets would be left clean and spruce.

  Amy looked down at the gun. She felt empty and defeated, and it was a tool she couldn’t use. You can’t shoot a man who is crying. She asked Neece, “Do you think he stole Elizabeth?”

  “I don’t think he has the guts for kidnaping,” Neece said shortly, not looking back at her.

  “Someone did.”

  Neece, with an air of decision, walked over to the desk and seized the telephone. He dialed a number. “I want to report a missing person.” He waited while he was put through on an extension, then held the phone out to Amy. “Here. This is the way to do it.”

  The words as she spoke them seemed dry and meaningless, almost foreign, and her tongue was wool. While she answered questions mechanically, a long corridor appeared to open in her mind, a path backward through all of the things she had done wrong: she shouldn’t have had Elizabeth in her house to begin with, since there was danger in any aspect of the case as far as the child was concerned, and the widow and the orphan of those who had been murdered were a common enemy to be watched, to be destroyed if necessary; and she shouldn’t have left her alone in the place—even Fogarty had warned her about that; and most of all there should never have been any curiosity, any hint of wanting to know, about Tzegeti’s book.

  She put down the telephone, slid the gun into her purse, snapped the purse, turned to go.

  Neece said, “You look done in. May I see you home, Mrs. Luttrell?”

  “No, thank you,” Amy said.

  “Do you really have Tzegeti’s journal?”

  “Yes, I have it.”

  She waited, but he didn’t say anything further, though there was thought behind his eyes.

  “I’ll call you later in the day,” Amy decided.

  He nodded in agreement.

  “You’ll see what you can do?”

  “I’ll use what contacts I have. They aren’t many.”

  “Because Lomena is so clean.”

  He looked out of the window. “They’re brushing out the gutters now.”

  Tears bit at her eyes. She walked away before the two men should see them.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  AMY SAT on the couch and looked at the wall where the picture would have hung had she bought it, the desert scene full of long tawny reaches of sand and faraway hills like a mirage. She felt dry, empty, and burned-out, run down like a forgotten clock, so that it was easier to remain still and to look at things that might have been. The silence in the room seemed brittle, precarious; even the sound of her breathing was an intrusion.

  When she had first come home she had been active. She had fed the pup and taken him out and brought him back and examined his ear again, then played with him gently until he was ready for sleep. He was bigger now, in these few days, harder under the fur, the fat disappearing, and he no longer nipped at your hands, though he was still quite willing to have a go at a shoe.

  Then the pup had gone away into his private world of slumber and the house had grown quiet. Amy had watched the sunny patches creep across the floor.

  The room smelled now of the afternoon, a warm breezy smell made up of vacant earth dried out, weeds full of dust, a t
ouch of sea air from the beach beyond Palos Verdes, and very new, new furniture.

  The police were working on the disappearance of Elizabeth Tzegeti. The fact of her being gone had been dropped into an official hopper where it turned up again in different hues: she could have run away; she could have decided to go to her parents’ delayed funeral, though it was a day away and she’d have to be confused somewhat as far as time went; and then she might be hiding from a sense of mischief or injury. And, too, as the rather determined Mrs. Luttrell had insisted, she could have been kidnaped. . . .

  After a while Amy heard a car in the street, then footsteps on the porch, and she reached quickly and automatically for the purse—but it was only Fogarty.

  He looked tired, grim, unpressed, uncaring. Amy saw that the white Irish skin, when it is fine-drawn, makes freckles look as big as the moon. He stood just inside the door, the door still open behind him, and said, “Hello. Do you want me to come in?”

  She didn’t answer, so he came in. He sat down on the straight chair he apparently still liked and began to light a cigarette.

  Amy spoke out of a parched throat. “Say it.”

  He glanced at her, a quick look that tried to take in everything: her mood, the amount of strain she felt, even the fact that she’d forgotten her lipstick all day. “What about?”

  “You know what about.”

  He got the cigarette going, then coughed over it—a tired, hacking cough. “Let’s put away the hammers, huh? I’ll put away mine and you put away yours.”

  “That’s asking quite a bit of someone you called inhuman.”

  “Good God!” Fogarty exploded. Then he took time to reorganize himself. “No, I won’t do it. I’ve been thinking things over. Looking around, too. Lots of frightened people in town. The stores are empty. There’s a little knot of people praying in one of the churches. A Protestant church, by the way, though I guess the crowd could be mixed. A gang of men are beating the bulrushes down by the slough. Some of them are off the oil derricks down that way. The rest drove down from town. It’s funny; the people got going so much quicker than the cops.” He blew smoke into the air, cautiously, as if she might command him to hold it in his lungs. “It occurred to me then, seeing all this, that you and I have something very much in common, something a lot of the others haven’t got. I won’t brag it up by calling it courage. I’ll just say we’re not easy to scare.”