Fall Girl

by Deming, Richard

  Belle said, “I like you better as the executive type than I do as a truck driver.”

  Horton transferred the thirty-eight revolver from his jacket pocket to the right pocket of the sport coat, then doubtfully studied the bulge it made.

  “It’s pretty obvious,” Belle told him.

  He removed the gun and tossed it on the bed. “Hide it away somewhere, will you, Belle? I don’t think I could shoot anyone anyway.”

  She picked it up and put it under some underthings in a dresser drawer.

  A few minutes later the colonel phoned. Belle answered, then passed the phone to Horton.

  “No trouble at all, my good fellow,” the colonel boomed. “When she heard my deep, masculine voice, she literally cooed. We’re to meet at a place called the River-glade Inn at one. You should have a clear field from then until at least two-thirty.”

  “Thanks,” Horton told him.

  When he hung up, he glanced at his watch and saw that it was nearly eleven.

  “I need a car,” he said to Belle. “Want to do me another favor?”

  “Of course.”

  “There’s a car-rental agency just up the sreet. Harrod’s U-Drive Service. Could you rent me something in your name?”

  “All right.”

  “I’ll have to owe you. My money’s all at the Palais Royal.”

  “Why didn’t you say so?” she asked. “Want some extra money?”

  He shook his head. “The car’s all I need.”

  Belle left him alone again. It was nearly noon when she finally came back. She handed him a set of car keys.

  “It’s parked on the north side of the hotel,” she said. “A 1958 Ford sedan. Blue and white.”

  “Thanks a million, Belle. You’ve been wonderful. When this is all over, I’ll make it up to you.” He glanced at his watch again. “I have to go now.”

  At the door she clung to him for a moment. “Be careful,” she said. “When will I see you again?”

  “I’ll phone you,” he told her.

  Out in the hall, he turned in the direction of Helen’s room with the intention of calling her from there in order to keep his promise to inform her if he decided to leave the hotel. He found her door locked. Apparently the cleaning maid had been there and had locked it when she left.

  As he stood there undecided as to what to do, one of the elevator doors up the hall opened. Horton was turning to walk unobtrusively back the way he had come when he saw Helen step from the car alone. Halting his movement, he waited for her.

  Helen regarded his new outfit with astonishment. Horton waited until she had keyed open the door and they were inside the room before offering any explanation.

  Then he said, “I had a friend here at the hotel storing some of my clothes.”

  “A woman friend?” she asked quickly.

  Horton felt a little hemmed in. He was beginning to get tired of female jealousy.

  “Yes,” he said flatly, and let it lie there.

  After a moment, when it became apparent he had no intention of elaborating, she said a trifle lamely, “I see. Shall I order some lunch sent up?”

  “I won’t have time to wait,” he said. “I have to be out to Velda’s home shortly after one. I’ll catch a sandwich somewhere en route.”

  “You’re going to see her?” Helen asked, wide-eyed.

  “She won’t be there. I’ve arranged for a friend to lure her away for a time. I just want a look at your step-father’s gun, if it’s still in the house.”

  “You intend to break in?”

  “Yes.”

  Crossing to the dresser, she opened the top drawer and took out a pair of keys on a chain. She removed one key and handed it to him.

  “I never gave back my keys when I moved out,” she said. “This will save you some trouble. It’s to the front door.”

  “Thanks,” he said, pocketing it. “I’ll get it back to you.”

  “Do be careful, will you, Jim?”

  He grinned at her. “Do I worry you?”

  “You know you do.” She moved against him and laid her head on his chest. “I don’t want anything to happen to you.”

  “I’ll try to stay out of the clutches of both the police and Manzetti,” he said, giving her back a comforting pat.

  Turning up her face, she offered her lips. He touched them gently with his, then drew her to him when he felt them part. Her arms flew about his neck and tightened.

  After a moment he reluctantly pushed her away. “Any more of that and I won’t leave.”

  She stood with her hands clasped in front of her like a little girl, her expression a trifle lost. “Will you call me?” she asked.

  “Of course.”

  He was opening the door when she said, “How are you going to get out of the hotel? One of the elevator operators might recognize you.”

  “Walk down.”

  “Seven floors? Let me take you down in the freight elevator. From the lower hall you can get to the side entrance without being seen from the lobby.”

  “All right,” he agreed.

  They passed no one on the way to the freight elevator. The indicator showed that it was on first, and Horton felt a trifle uneasy as they waited for it to rise. The closed door to Belle’s room was right behind them.

  He breathed a sigh of relief when the elevator door finally opened. Then, as they stepped into the car, Belle’s door suddenly opened. Belle was dressed for the street, wearing a hat and carrying a purse. She halted in the doorway and her eyes moved from Horton to Helen.

  Helen touched the controls and the door slid shut. Horton’s last view of Belle was of her staring at Helen with an air of deliberate appraisal.

  Helen was unconscious of the appraisal, or even of Belle’s presence. Her attention was centered on the elevator controls.

  CHAPTER XIX

  HORTON HAD no difficulty locating the Ford Belle had rented. He drove a few blocks north, then stopped at a busy hamburger stand for a sandwich and a cup of coffee.

  This was his first test of his new “disguise” in public, and he was a little nervous about it. None of the other customers at the counter paid the slightest attention to him, though.

  He arrived at 223 River Road a few minutes after one. The Quincy home was in the far north section of town, in the most exclusive beach area. It was a year-round beach home of two stories, perched at the edge of the river bluff over a stretch of spotless sand beach.

  Parking a few doors away, he approached the house on foot. It was set well back from the road, as were all homes along here, and was separated from the places either side of it by a good hundred feet. A double garage with open doors contained a Ford station wagon. Presumably the vacant stall next to it ordinarily housed the red Chrysler convertible Velda had been driving on the sole occasion Horton had seen her.

  Just before he left her, Helen had told him that the only servant was a cleaning woman who came twice a week, on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Nevertheless he took the precaution of ringing the doorbell.

  When no one answered, he opened the door with the key Helen had given him and stepped inside. He found himself in a small entry hall. To his left an archway led into a living room. To his right a similar archway led into a dining room. Straight ahead was the stairway to the second floor. Beyond the stairway, at the end of the hall, was the open door to the kitchen.

  As he paused to listen for some sound indicating that someone might be home after all, the distinct click of the back door closing came from the kitchen. Quickly but quietly, he reopened the front door, stepped outside, and closed it again.

  Had the sound been made by someone entering or someone leaving, he wondered? If the latter, whoever it was must have heard his ring, and it seemed peculiar that it hadn’t been answered. If it had been someone leaving, he should soon know. As there was nothing behind the house but the beach and the river, the person should appear around the corner at any moment.

  Several seconds passed without anyone appear
ing. Then he was surprised to hear a car engine start from the direction of the river. The sound of the car driving away to the south came to him.

  Stepping off the porch, he rounded the house to the edge of the bluff. On the smooth strip of sand beach twenty-five feet below were the distinct marks of tire treads. The tracks led south for the distance of about half a city block, then turned left onto a narrow road which ended at the beach.

  Puzzled, he returned to the front door and pushed the doorbell again. Inside he heard musical chimes, but no one answered. He keyed open the door and entered for a second time. A cautious check of the whole downstairs disclosed no one there.

  It must have been either the cleaning woman coming by for some forgotten item, or a friend of Velda’s who had access to the house, he decided. But why had whoever it was gone to the trouble of driving around onto the beach? There was a railed stairway leading from the top of the bluff to the beach, but it would have been much more convenient for the mysterious visitor to come by the front way and park in the drive. And why hadn’t the doorbell been answered?

  A possible solution was that the visitor had no more authority to be there than he had.

  Shrugging it off, he mounted the stairs and looked into each of the four rooms on the second floor. This floor was as deserted as the first.

  Apparently, Honest John Quincy and his wife had maintained separate bedrooms, for one of the rooms was distinctly masculine and another was daintily feminine. The lack of any personal items in the remaining two tabbed them as guest rooms.

  Horton opened the top dresser drawer in the masculine bedroom. The pistol was just where Helen had said it would be: beneath a pile of handkerchiefs.

  It was a forty-five Colt automatic with hard-rubber grips. He ejected the clip, drew back the slide until it locked open to make sure no shell was in the chamber, then sniffed at the muzzle. He thought he could detect the faint smell of cordite, but it was too slight to be certain. Carrying the gun to the window, he inserted his little finger into the ejection slot so that the nail would act as a reflector, and peered down the barrel.

  The gun had not been cleaned since it was last fired. How long that was, there was no way to determine.

  Returning to the dresser, he picked up the clip and thumbed out the cartridges one at a time. There were only six, instead of a full load of seven. He reloaded the clip, snapped the slide forward, and shoved the clip back into the butt of the gun.

  If he could locate something in the house soft enough to fire the gun into without distorting the slug, he preferred to make his test fire right there, so that he wouldn’t have to make a return trip to plant the gun back where he had found it. A pillow to muffle the shot and a bucket of sand to catch the slug would serve fine, he decided. There was plenty of sand on the beach, probably some extra pillows which wouldn’t be missed immediately in one of the closets, so the only problem was the bucket.

  Carrying the gun downstairs, he located a mop bucket in a cabinet under the kitchen sink.

  At the back door he paused with his hand on the knob. Through the glass pane in the top of the door he could see a whole party of people in bathing suits filing toward the river from the rear of the house next door. Though the house was a hundred feet away, he would be in full view of the party if he went down to the beach. And a stranger immaculately dressed in a sport coat, slacks and a snap-brim hat could hardly fail to excite curiosity when he began to collect sand in a bucket.

  Horton reluctantly came to the conclusion that he had no choice but to take the gun away with him and return it later. Putting the bucket back where he had found it, he thrust the gun in his hip pocket and let himself out the front door.

  He had to drive a mile back in the direction of downtown before he found a dime store. He spent two dollars of his dwindling supply of cash for a scrub bucket and a cheap pillow. Then he drove north again, clear beyond the edge of town, until he found a side road leading down to a strip of deserted beach.

  The beach wasn’t sand here, which was probably why it was deserted. It was a cindery type of dirt, too poor to grow anything but a few sparse weeds. However, it was loose enough soil so that he had no difficulty scooping the bucket full of it.

  Glancing both ways along the beach, he saw no one. He laid the pillow on top of the bucket, threw a shell into the chamber of the automatic and pressed the muzzle deeply into the pillow. After one more quick look around, he fired.

  The sound of the shot was only a muffled pop. Tossing the pillow aside, he dumped out the dirt and probed in the pile for the slug. When he unearthed it, he examined it carefully. It was a perfect specimen, not in the least misshapen.

  Horton dropped it in his pocket along with the ejected brass cartridge case. Then he cleared the gun’s chamber of the shell which had automatically replaced the ejected one when he fired, thumbed it back into the clip and shoved the clip back into the gun.

  He left the pillow and the bucket lying on the beach. The gun he locked in the glove compartment of the car.

  It was past two-thirty when he again drove by Velda’s home. This time the red convertible was parked in the garage next to the station wagon, which meant she was now home.

  Horton was a little surprised. Although the colonel had only guaranteed to keep her busy until two-thirty, it wasn’t like him to let such a beautiful young woman escape him without a struggle after so short a time. Then, as he drove slowly past the house, he spotted the colonel’s erect, portly figure standing in a front-room window. He had a glass in his hand.

  Apparently, despite his sixty years, Velda had found him charming enough to bring home with her.

  There was nothing further Horton could do until he could get in touch with the colonel. From a drugstore phone booth he dialed the Hotel Lawford and asked for Belle’s room. Several rings sounded before she answered.

  When she recognized his voice, she said, “You just barely caught me. The phone was ringing as I came in.”

  “I was afraid you might still be out,” he said. “I saw you leaving.”

  “And I saw you. Very attractive redhead. What does she use?”

  “Use?” he asked.

  “To get that natural-looking hair color. Her skin practically screams that she’s really a dishwater blonde, you know.”

  Horton said, “Don’t be such a cat.”

  “She’s the girl on the desk, isn’t she? I might have known. She’d be the first woman you spoke to after you got in town. When you registered. What does she think of you after this morning’s news write-up? Have you seen it?”

  “No.”

  “She must have. It describes your past in colorful detail.”

  “She already knew about that,” Horton told her.

  “Oh?” Belle said on a rising note. “It’s gotten to the point of confessing your sins to each other, has it? Doesn’t she have any moral objection to your way of life?”

  “Well, she wants me to reform.”

  “How touching. Are you going to?”

  “I’ve been thinking about it,” Horton said.

  There was a moment of silence. Then Belle said in a different tone, “You mean it, don’t you? You really like this girl.”

  “Yes, I do,” he admitted.

  “Enough to marry her?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t even think about that until I’ve cleared myself of this mess.”

  After another short silence, Belle said, “Which means you have thought about it. I didn’t realize, Jim. I was just being bitchy about her as a sort of a gag. I’m sorry. Her hair is really a natural red.”

  “For God’s sake, don’t play the understanding woman with me,” he said in exasperation. “I feel enough like a heel now.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said again. “How do you want me to act?”

  “Like yourself. The way we’ve always been.”

  “Good friends, you mean? All right, Jim. We’re good friends. What were you calling about?”

  “I want to get i
n touch with the colonel. At the moment he’s with Velda at her house. There’s no telling how long he’ll be there, but I suppose he’ll phone you when he finally tears himself away, won’t he?”

  “If he has the strength. Isn’t the woman supposed to be a nympho?” Her tone was very gay and brittle.

  He said sourly, “That’s the gossip.”

  “Poor Colonel Bob. At his age she may be fatal. What shall I tell him if he calls?”

  “Arrange a meeting for this evening. I’ll call you back about six to find out when and where. He should phone by then, shouldn’t he?”

  “Probably. Did you find what you were looking for?”

  “Yeah. But I can’t tell you about it over the phone. That’s what I want to see the colonel about.”

  “I’ll tell him,” she said. “I’ll expect your call back at six, then.”

  CHAPTER XX

  THE REST of the afternoon Horton idled away the time by taking a drive along the river. At five-thirty he stopped for dinner at a roadhouse a few miles north of town. Here he could hardly eat in his hat without exciting attention, so he removed it. For the first time since his description had been broadcast, he was exposing his close-cropped, sandy hair.

  Neither his waiter nor any of the other diners exhibited any undue interest in his appearance.

  It was six by the time he finished eating. He phoned Belle from the roadhouse.

  “Colonel Bob phoned not ten minutes ago,” she said. “From a bar on the north side. He said he’d wait for you there.”

  “What bar?”

  “A place called Henry’s Grill. 4220 North Reardon. He says it’s a very quiet place.”

  “Okay,” Horton said. “Thanks.”

  “Will I see you again?” Belle inquired in a suddenly diffident tone.

  “Of course. What do you mean?”

  “Well, I want to tell you good-by and good luck in person. Not just end it over the phone.”

  “Please, Belle,” he said in a pained voice. “Why do you keep acting as though I’ve jilted you?”