Nets to Catch the Wind

by Dolores Hitchens

  She listened, examining his words craftily. He was building a story out of all of this, a dramatic and arresting tale for his editor to gloat on. Now, for an astringent touch, he wanted the inner workings of the cop’s widow who had taken in the murderer’s kid. She felt the nails dig into her palms.

  He gave her a quick look. “I’ve put away the dictagraph.” He was trying to win her over with sly patience, a crooked smile covering something else, perhaps: compassion, or trickery, or a real interest that he didn’t want to show because it didn’t fit the hard, tough person he wanted to be. “To start with, I’m on your side. You can be damned sure I’m not on the cops’ side. They wouldn’t touch me with a ten-foot pole. I skewered the bejasus out of them by getting Cunninghan’s story to the papers before they made an official document out of it.”

  She said carefully, “I’m getting a new idea. You’re after Tzegeti’s book.”

  His eyes lit up; he couldn’t stop that. But he said, “Isn’t the kid more important right now?”

  “The book is in the trade. It’s my bargaining point.”

  “You’ve got a deal on?”

  She nodded. “If Neece can find the right contact.”

  He thought about it. “You’ve gone over to the gang theory, after all?”

  “No. But the book has value, somehow.”

  “And you can produce?” He was leaning forward, the cigarette burning forgotten in his hand. “You found it?”

  “While you were putting Cunninghan over the jumps in the kitchen.”

  A faint uneasiness stirred in his face. “You’ve read it?”

  “I can’t read it.”

  “Well, that’s one point to the good,” he commented. “You brought it here for the kid to look at. That’s when you missed her.”

  “Yes. She’d been taken away. There were signs, a few here and there, that she hadn’t gone without trouble.” Into Amy’s mind burst the thing she had managed to keep out, like a prowling tiger: the inexorable tick of time, the fading empty minutes, hours, since that discovery . . . and with each a diminishing of hope.

  Perhaps some of this showed in her face. Fogarty began to be busy with his cigarette, and brushing ashes off his trouser leg, and shifting about in the straight hard chair. “No definite clues?” he said at last.

  “Just one.”

  His glance was sharp, a little puzzled. “Something useful?”

  “No. You know. The rope.”

  He jumped off the chair and ran into the hall, turned wrong the first time, came out of Amy’s room and went into the room Elizabeth had occupied. After some minutes he came back with the short coiled rope in his hands. “The cops see this?”

  “Oh yes. They came right away and went over the room, two technicians and a detective. There wasn’t anything but the rope, and since I had to admit that it had been around for a while, it didn’t impress them.”

  “It should have.”

  She looked at it dully.

  “I’m going to try to do something with this. Mind?”

  “No, I don’t mind.”

  He sat down, the rope twined in his hands. “This was a warning.”

  “Yes, I see that it was.”

  “Someone has been keeping track of you.”

  “The man with the silk face,” she agreed.

  “He might have bought this locally. It’s possible.” He waited as if for her to agree. He put the rope into his pocket. “I don’t suppose you’d let me see Tzegeti’s journal.”

  “You can’t read it anyway. It’s just as you said. He wrote it in Polack—or whatever.”

  “I’ve been thinking.” Fogarty rubbed the edge of his jaw, the familiar gesture while he let his mind rove. “In all languages there are words that don’t transfer over, that are left as is, adopted if you wish—— Also proper names. I think Tzegeti might have adopted an English term or two, something he couldn’t duplicate in his mother tongue.”

  She nodded warily. “Yes, I guess that’s possible.”

  He waited, bright-eyed; she said nothing.

  After a moment he got up to pace around the room. Then he went into the kitchen and had a look at the pup. He came back, stood rocking on his toes. Amy felt the tight check he kept on himself, the bitter things he wanted to say and did not. . . . She steeled herself. She had one thing to trade for Elizabeth; it must remain as it was, or its value would vanish. Only a secret could buy Elizabeth’s freedom.

  She put away the other thought, the prowling tiger that circled her mind, the tiger made of dark and death.

  “You know that I can’t risk your writing up for the newspaper——”

  “To hell with the newspaper! Do you think I’m risking a kid’s life for a goddamned newspaper story?” He was beating the back of the straight chair he’d been sitting in; his eyes were squinted up, his mouth snarling. “What do you think I am?”

  “I can’t let you see the book.”

  He licked his lips. “And—and suppose——”

  “Then it can be translated. Not before.”

  “If they’re clever, they’ll have both the kid—to destroy, of course—and the book.”

  She wouldn’t argue with him. If she defended herself, qualified what she must do, he’d end up having things his way. “No.”

  He walked around some more. The pup jumped around in the box, and the cracks made in it before gaped for him, and he came in to tag at Fogarty’s ankles. Fogarty picked him up without seeming to think about it; his mind was elsewhere. “By the way, a minor madness came up while I was at police headquarters. Mrs. Schneider has a housemaid and a cook who come in by the day. They claim that when they arrived this morning—Mrs. Schneider being already in the hospital, of course—her house had been burglarized. Torn up. One of the dogs shot in the shoulder, the other terrorized and digging himself a tunnel under the back fence.”

  Amy didn’t lift her eyes.

  “That was you, I guess,” Fogarty went on.

  She shrugged.

  “Yes, I thought you might operate that way. First, frenzy. Then, trusting a guy like Neece. Cunninghan’s bright boy, and God knows what else. Nobody knows anything about that pigeon. He could be anything.”

  “He looked okay to me.”

  “A bunch of beautiful bright babies—Wyse and Cunninghan and Mrs. Schneider and Neece. Look at the record. Wyse pinning a blackmail rap on a dead man. Cunninghan stealing dough from a dying client. Mrs. Schneider quite ready to ease off the deep end rather than face the music she has coming to her. And Neece telling you he’ll make a deal for Elizabeth.”

  “I might point out,” Amy said, “that a man who keeps his kind of company is much more apt to know where Elizabeth is.”

  Fogarty sat down, the pup in his arms, and said conversationally, “What do you think? Still alive, or not?”

  The tiger’s eyes came in over the wall in her mind; she saw them, the yellow eyes of death. “Of course she is.”

  “You know, the FBI has some sort of chart or table—gives the probabilities. They drop sharply after a few hours.”

  She felt her face stretch into an expression of loathing. “What are you trying to force me to do?”

  “To let me help.”

  “You want to see Tzegeti’s book.”

  “To start with,” he agreed.

  The telephone rang; she jumped for it. Neece’s voice was smooth, oily. “Are you going to be there for a little while? I’d like to see you in about ten minutes. Alone.”

  “Yes, I’ll be here.” Amy felt her knees shake, the sudden dizzy relief, the pounding pulse in her ears that almost hid Neece’s words.

  She put down the telephone. Fogarty was looking at her with cynical enjoyment. “If you trust him you’re crazy.”

  She straightened her back stiffly. “Please go now, Mr. Fogarty.”

  In the hall she got down on her knees and explored under the chest of drawers. The book was there against the wall, somewhat dusty. She hadn’t done much house
keeping recently.

  She brought it out. It was the sort of diary, day-to-day journal, you’d find in any cheap stationery department or even a dime store. The binding was loose, weak, as if worn that way by Tzegeti’s long handling. The pages rippled in her hands. She wouldn’t read it; she commanded herself not to examine the close, dark-written script. Even if, as Fogarty had guessed, there might be here and there an untranslatable English word or a proper name among the Polish gibberish.

  Then, as if she had no control, her eyes settled on the center of a page and she began to read. The script was foreign, cramped, taught by some whiskered professor in a small school far away.

  But this was English!

  She tried to stop the sudden rush of excitement that set her hands trembling. She rippled through the book and the truth became clear. As he had learned English, Tzegeti had begun to write in it. At first just a few words, a common phrase, sometimes ludicrous and inappropriate slang. But the English progressed, grew smoother, drew out into sentences, paragraphs. The last few pages were entirely in the new tongue and perfectly understandable.

  . . . I am afraid that tonight there may be trouble. Mr. Schneider has discovered something which is not to his liking. Last night a man came to see him. This man is the head of the police here. I heard voices raised in Schneider’s office, and there were threats——

  Amy stopped short and went back again to read incredulously the cramped, dark script. The chief of police . . . the man in charge of all the investigation of Schneider’s murder, the man who professed to be hunting the murderer on the train. The man who now had charge of the search for Elizabeth!

  Blood pounded in her ears, behind her eyes. Now she had the truth, the whole incredible story!

  It was useless to wait here for Neece, for any dealings in Lomena would be fruitless. She started for the front door, escape uppermost in her mind. If Neece arrived now, she’d simply brush by him. She had to reach some other branch of the law, the police of some other city, or the FBI, and lay this incredible exposure before them.

  The pup tangled himself with her hurrying feet, whined at the bump she tried not to give, then cried out sharply in pain and scrubbed with a paw at his wounded ear. She knelt, comforted him, stopped the whimpering at last. She had put the book down on the floor.

  Her eyes rested on its cover and she stroked the soft black fur. It seemed to her that an avalanche had swept across her life, cutting off all familiar trails, leaving the landscape strange and barren. She was truly alone, and Elizabeth’s fate was much more hopeless than she had dreamed.

  The clean little town, the town that kept its gutters swept—it had the dirtiest sore of all!

  She needed advice, help, the weight of experience. She thought of Pop Bronson then.

  She ran for her coat in the bedroom, threw it on, picked up the pup, the diary, and her handbag, hurried for the car. It was while she was on the steps that it struck her—Tzegeti’s perfect English, meticulous phrasing . . . and one word wrong.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  POP BRONSON’S small white house looked neat as a satin bandbox in the midst of its garden of flaming bloom. Amy parked at the curb and got out, the pup and the book and her purse in her arms. She went up the steps to Pop’s gate, studying the place and seeing things about it that she had never noticed before. It sat low against the hill, gaining some shade in the afternoon when the sun lowered, and behind it the brown hummocks that led by dips and ridges to the true heights of Palos Verdes, facing the western sea. A lot of work had gone into the yard; she wondered if Pop had done it all himself or merely put in the trimmings. He was there now with a short-handled spading fork, digging among some iris.

  She turned left at the house and took the little graveled path to the spot where he stood waiting.

  “Hello, Amy.”

  “Hello.”

  He thrust the fork into the soil and pulled off the heavy canvas gloves. He took her hand in his. “I heard about the girl.”

  She had put the pup down. The pup ran over to Pop’s boot, chewed the shoestring happily for a moment, then thrust an inquisitive nose into the flowers. “I’m at the end of my rope,” Amy said. “Really at the end. If no one helps me, I’m going to fold.”

  “Something will turn up,” he said heartily. “Whose dog? Yours?”

  “Yes.” She stepped past Pop so that she could keep an eye on the pup, and found him sniffing at the edge of a spaded patch, a bare spot without flowers. Amy looked at the fresh-turned earth for a moment. “What are you going to put here?”

  “Ummmm . . . zinnias. I’ve some young plants’ll bloom late in fall, provided we don’t have a heavy frost.”

  She regarded the earth with weary half-interest, as though there was a certain relief in thinking about something not connected with the missing girl. “The soil’s all prepared?”

  He took a pipe from his sweater pocket, began to fill it from a leather pouch. He moved deliberately and his face was calm, almost determinedly so, as if to discourage any tendency toward hysterics on Amy’s part. “All ready to go. Those babies will shoot right up.”

  She put out a toe to test the spongy turf. “Feels as if you’d dug pretty deep. I guess you needed to.”

  He drew on the pipe, a match poised, his eyes on the flame. “Yes, you have to, Amy. That yard of yours, now—I’ve noticed it’s hard as a board. You ought to pull out that puny stuff you’ve got growing and start all over again, have the place turned over by plow, then harrowed down fine, maybe some light sand worked in. You find a heavy adobe, usually, where you are.”

  She knelt, feeling his eyes on her now, and ran her fingers into the damp earth. “I didn’t know you’d been over recently, Pop.”

  “Went by one day—you weren’t at home. It was that day you went to Ensenada, I guess.” There was a shade of reproof under the words.

  Without moving or looking up, her hand still in the soil, Amy said, “You shouldn’t have told Mrs. Schneider I was going.”

  “I didn’t think you’d be foolish enough to go alone.”

  There had been a subtle change in the conversation, Amy felt. It was as if two good friends, still friendly, had begun to tell each other the little grievances that had grown up through years of friendship. Like the chill of evening, she thought, that comes while the sun is still in the sky. “I didn’t find Raoul Schneider at all like Mrs. Schneider said he’d be.”

  “Well, she’s careless with the truth, anyhow, that woman.”

  “Yes, and chickenhearted, fundamentally.” Amy still knelt, letting the soil drift through her hand. “How much do you suppose she really knows about the kidnaping?”

  “Oh, nothing,” he said gruffly, abruptly. “No one in his right mind—no clever crook—would trust such a woman with that information.”

  She let his words run through her mind again. “How much do the police know about the blackmail scheme she and Wyse were working on?”

  He puffed at the pipe. “You forget, Amy. I’m not chief any more.”

  “You’re more than chief, better than chief,” she told him, turning now to glance upward. “You run things better from here than you ever did in an office at headquarters. They rely on you in a thousand ways, because though you’re not with them, you’re of them—someone gone back into ordinary society who can still be trusted to think like a cop.” She shifted the book under her arm. It slid out past the purse and the slanting sunlight, low behind the hill, struck the gilt lettering that said Daily Journal. “When the chips are down, a cop will trust another cop in a way he wouldn’t anyone else.”

  “What is it you have there?” Pop asked, his buffalo head bent a little, the eyes under the wire-wool brows still and sharp.

  “Tzegeti’s book.”

  He went on smoking. He had folded the canvas gloves and laid them across the handle of the spading fork. His hands were free, and a hint of nervousness came into his manner, in the way he seemed unsure of just what to do with them. “Should you
be carrying it about like that?”

  “Why not?” Amy said bitterly. “It’s all in Polish. You’d have to have a translator to read it.”

  He walked away for a few feet, short abrupt steps, then paused, threw her a sidewise glance. “May I see it?”

  “Sorry,” said Amy. “It’s in the trade, you see.” She poked the book into place again. The pup came over, scampering, his paws full of loose dirt, his nose caked. “I have promised Mr. Neece that if he can locate a contact, he’s to offer Tzegeti’s book for the child’s life.”

  “Oh? You mean you’re keeping the contents a secret—that’s part of it?”

  “The main part,” Amy told him. “I haven’t read any of it, nor tried to.”

  Their eyes met. She wondered what he could see in her face, beyond the tiredness and defeat she’d willed to be there.

  “You’d play honest with a kidnaper?”

  “I want Elizabeth back. I have no choice.”

  Pop moved his pipe between his lips, clamped his teeth on a new spot. The smoke was thin and blue, drifting away on the summer air. “The little girl . . . you expect to have her back safe? You think she’s still alive?”

  Amy’s hand paused a moment over the soft loose soil. “Perhaps.”

  Pop cleared his throat. “Did you come here now with the idea that if Neece failed, if he couldn’t find anyone who might be able to listen, that I could help you?”

  “You’re my last hope, Pop.”

  He began to walk again, circling the plot where the soil lay dark and loose, his work shoes crunching the gravel. “Had you thought much about the—the motive behind this business?”

  “Someone wants Tzegeti’s diary.” Again Amy shifted the book with an air of near carelessness. “The little girl doesn’t know where her father left the book, but the murderer may have thought she did.”