“It's because youare a small firm with a long and honorable reputation that you are the target,” said Morgan Wayne grimly. “Durtol is exactly what they need for a front. If you haven't realized what I'm getting at yet, you're a trio of fools,” he went on. “You say your net profits are less than a hundred thousand. What do you suppose they would amount to if your firm turned, say, twenty per cent of the morphine and similar drugs you use in legitimate manufacturing processes each year into illegitimate channels? Think it over a moment. As business manager, you should have a rough idea, Hendrixon. Keep in mind the findings of the Kefauver Committee that there's something like a thousand-per-cent profit between the legitimate wholesale price of heroin and the sum paid by the consumer. Is that enough motive?”
“But how could they accomplish much even if they did get control?” protested young Durtol. “We'd still go on as before, and—” “On the surface, Durtol Drugs would still go on as before,” agreed Wayne. “But don't you see what control would do? In the first place, there'd be a new chairman of the board—a new business manager, unless Hendrixon is a fool who could be used by them or a knave who would go along. Then changes in personnel all along the line. Old and trusted employees disappearing from the scene and new ones coming in to key positions.”
“It's unbelievable,” protested the attorney in a shocked tone. “This is 1952, Wayne. Such things aren't possible in a modern world.”
“Such thingsare happening in the modern world and all about you,” snapped Wayne. “Do any of you ever read a newspaper? Entire police departments corrupted and purchased by racketeers. City governments and even large segments of the federal government honeycombed with crooks and thieves. It's people like you who allow such things to happen by closing your eyes and blinding yourselves to the truth. Read the Kefauver report, for God's sake. Get some idea of the nastiness and horror that are creeping up on this country of ours. Unbelievable, hell! It's part of the pattern.”
He thrust both hands deep into his pockets and looked from one face to another of the three men before him. After a moment, he said in a quiet voice:
“I killed a man this afternoon. I liked killing him. Think that over, gentlemen. And think over what I've told you. I'll be in touch with you tomorrow.” He turned as though to go, but Hendrixon put out a hand to stop him.
“You... killed a man?” His heavy face expressed horror and distrust. “Once more, I demand to know: Who are you? How do you fit in this? How do we know we can trust you?”
Wayne smiled bleakly. “You don't, do you?” He shrugged off the other's restraining hand and started out, tossing over his shoulder, “I hope you'll pay some attention tothis warning before it's too late.”
“Warning ofwhat?” The voice of John Durtol III was high-pitched and panicky. “Having failed in the kidnaping, what can they possibly try next?”
Morgan Wayne stopped in the doorway and shrugged. He said over his shoulder, “If you and your sister remain stubborn about not selling, if I were you I'd begin thinking about who will inherit your blocks of stock after your death. If either of you have heirs who might not be so scrupulous...” He paused to shrug again. “Well, if I were an insurance man I'd hesitate to issue a policy on either of your lives. And now,” he went on easily, “I really must go. I have a date with a charming young lady who will be getting quite impatient, I'm afraid.”
There was silence in the library behind him as he turned down the corridor to the outer door.
Chapter Nine
It was characteristic of Morgan Wayne that he pushed every other thought out of his mind when he left the Hendrixon house behind him and headed toward the parkway and his date with Lois Elling. In more than thirty years of living, Wayne had learned a great many lessons, not the least important of which was that it behooves a man to appreciate any gifts of love offered by the capricious gods and to make as much of each such gift as is humanly possible.
He was wild with impatience now to see Lois. It seemed eons since the moment he had stood beside her typewriter reading the words typed by her hands and feeling an answering surge of emotion to her passion-ridden words that was equal to anything he had experienced before.
His brief encounter with Priscilla Endicott and with Letty had done nothing to make Lois seem less desirable. On the contrary, they had added fuel to his fierce wanting by arousing him to unsatisfied heights and by providing him with a basis for comparison from which Lois emerged as definitely more appealing.
She was a woman a man could talk to, he told himself, as he hit the parkway without seeing any officers and headed toward the city. A woman, by God, whom a man could listen to while lying beside her in the darkness and not be bored. Long ago, Morgan Wayne had learned how important this was to his real enjoyment of any romantic adventure. The only really worth-while experiences, those that were unforgettable and unregretted, were with women who were his intellectual equals and as charming companions at the breakfast table as in bed. A mingling of the minds as well as a fusing of the bodies, a condition of mental as well as physical rapport.
Although Wayne had met many men who denied similar feelings, he shrewdly suspected that the vast majority of men felt much as he did. Witness the famous courtesans of the ages who had not only attracted the leaders of their day by their physical charms, but had held them bound in happiness and affection for years on end. No mere sexy strumpets, they, but women of intellect and sophistication. That's what holds men after the first wild fervor is exhausted, and as he drove along swiftly Wayne allowed himself to hope that was what he would discover this night with Lois Elling.
Cold sweat stood on his forehead and his foot went down heavily on the throttle as he thought about what she had written. He grimaced and laughed shakily at himself and lifted his foot when he noticed the speedometer needle flickering past eighty. Getting picked up on the parkway for speeding wasn't the way to reach Lois fast. Besides, he was acting like a callow young fool. Sure, he was late. Probably much later than Lois had anticipated, but she would wait. She knew he was coming tonight. Those other nights, she had known he wasn't coming.
But he made no effort to turn his thoughts away from Lois. He concentrated fiercely on visualizing her as she must be waiting for him now. That was the only drawback to this affair. There hadn't been enough build-up. Not enough expectation. Nothing at all of the slow and delicious burning that gradually takes complete possession of a man during the period of delightful dalliance that generally precedes the consummation of a civilized love affair. He had to make up for that lack during this brief period while he hurtled through the night toward Lois' apartment.
Then he realized suddenly that he didn't even know where her apartment was located. He assumed it was in Manhattan, and fervently prayed that it was as he slowed at the last toll gate to pass over his dime and then speed on toward the blaze of city lights ahead. There was a gas station ahead, and if the Manhattan phone book didn't yield her address he would be in one hell of a mess, he told himself disgustedly. Lord, he couldn't even go back to his own apartment tonight. Not that he wanted to or intended to, of course, not if he found Lois. But if he had to search for her name through all the other borough directories...
He slowed for the filling station, pulled in, and glanced at the gas gauge on the Hudson. It showed less than a quarter full, so he stopped at a pump and told the attendant to fill the tank with high test. Then he hurried inside to the telephone booths, flipped open the directory, and ran his gaze down the E's.
It was there. Elling, Lois. A West End Avenue address. He sighed with relief and was tempted for a moment to step into the booth and phone her.
He rejected the temptation and trotted back to the Hudson instead. He would be there in ten minutes. It wouldn't do to phone ahead now. It would sound like an apology for his lateness, or as though he questioned whether she would have waited for him so long.
He had no apology to make, and no real question about her being there when he arrived. She would under
stand that he had come to her as swiftly as was humanly possible. Without any explanations, she would know that. It was part of what was between them.
He tossed the attendant a bill and slid beneath the wheel again. It was a short run to the exit nearest Lois' address, and he rolled down the ramp smoothly, made the few blocks to West End in minutes, swung left, and hit three green lights before pulling in to the curb just beyond the modern brick apartment building.
There was a quiet and pleasant lobby that had about it a discreet look of minding its own business and allowing the tenants to mind theirs without interference from the management. The desk and switchboard, for instance, were off in one corner and sheltered by potted plants so visitors could enter and go directly to the self-service elevator without announcing themselves or being seen by curious eyes if they wished.
Wayne nodded with gratification when he noted the layout. It was so exactly what a successful career woman, “moderately chaste but not a prude,” would select for herself. Tonight, Wayne turned aside to ask the switch board operator the number of Miss Elling's apartment, but it was pleasant to know there would be no one to check on the time of his departure, and that in the future he would be able to come and go unnoticed.
Indeed, the girl on the switchboard displayed the acme of well-bred disinterest in Miss Elling's male visitor. She sat with her back to the small desk where Wayne paused, and did not turn her head when he said, “Miss Lois Elling, please?”
“Do you wish me to ring her, or would you prefer to go right up?” Her voice was pleasant and friendly, though impersonal.
“I'd like to go up, please.”
“Number Six B. At the end of the corridor on your right as you leave the elevator.”
Wayne thanked her and went to the elevator. It was large and modern, and ascended smoothly when he pressed the button marked 6.
At the end of the corridor to the right, there was a large silver B on the closed wooden door. Wayne put his finger on the bell and pressed it lightly. He heard a faint ringing inside, and waited with fast-beating heart for the door to open. Would she be already dressed in the black negligee that a man named Bill Johnson had given her for Christmas five years ago and which she had never yet worn? Or would she be saving that for...?
When there was no answer to his ring after a full minute, Wayne smiled wryly and put his finger on the bell again and held it for a long time. Perhaps he had interrupted her in the middle of one of her nightly hot baths. He hoped so. What was it she had said in her “letter” about jumping out of the tub and running in and dripping water on the white rug?
That would be a nice way to discover her this first night. Damned nice. It would do away with any formalities. The slender body dewy-fresh, pink and glowing from the hot water...
The smile faded into a frown as another minute went by without response. He didn't really mean the frown. Lois was exacting a small compensation, he surmised, for her rashness in throwing herself at him with that typewritten declaration in the office. She had blushed and burned when he read the words. Now she was making him burn a little, taking her own sweet time about coming to the door. After all, it must seem to her that he hadn't been overly impetuous about keeping the date.
Unthinkingly, as almost anyone will, he dropped his hand to the doorknob and turned it. He was surprised when the door swung open to his touch. Then the surprise faded and was replaced by amusement. That was like her, he thought. To leave the way open for him to come to her. To tantalize him a trifle and even, perhaps, to allow him to walk away disappointed if he didn't have the initiative to try the door and discover it unlocked.
Wayne closed the door quietly behind him and looked about the clean, bright, low-ceilinged living room with eager interest. Nothing particularly remarkable about the furnishing or decor—unlike the Gingham Girl's place in that respect, and infinitely more appealing and charming because of its unassuming simplicity. A wholly feminine room that somehow managed to reflect Lois' own honest eagerness for life. There were frilly butter-yellow curtains at the windows that gave just the needed touch of brightness to the moss-rose petit point of an heirloom sofa, and—Wayne smiled appreciatively as he recognized it—a shaggy white rug in front of a small table holding her telephone.
There were three closed doors leading off the room, and there was silence. Morgan Wayne called, “Lois,” not too loudly, and she did not reply.
He crossed the room in four strides and opened the door to her bathroom. His throat tightened queerly when he discovered it still steamy and fragrant from her recent use. A pale green floor mat lay damp and wrinkled beside the tub. A woolly bath towel hung limply damp over the edge of the tub. A huge round box of expensive dusting powder stood open, the big dusting puff inside.
Wayne stepped back and set his teeth together tightly as he observed faint powdery touches left by Lois' bare feet on the polished floor from the bathroom and leading to the closed door a few feet to the right.
He followed them to the door, thinking to himself happily, Like an eagle scout winning a merit badge, by God. Old Tracker Wayne on the scent. You can't elude me, woman!
He opened the door blithely.
Lois Elling lay on the bed. The spread had Been turned back to a white linen sheet, and the filmy negligee was starkly black against the whiteness. She had taken it from its tissue wrappings as she had promised. She had bathed and powdered and dabbed herself with just a touch of perfume, and arrayed herself in the never-before-worn negligee and carefully arranged her supple body on the white sheet to wait for Morgan Wayne to come to her.
But she no longer waited for him.
Her face was framed in the soft fluffy nest of her chestnut hair. Her mouth was a red, grinning slash from ear to ear.
Chapter Ten
There are shocks so sudden and deep that the human mind is unable to encompass them in the first instant of revelation. As in certain instances of intense physical pain, there is a merciful self-anesthesia that operates on the mind as well as on the body to carry one along for a few moments of adjustment before one accepts what is seen or felt.
The sight of Lois Elling slain on her bed had this effect on Morgan Wayne. His reactions were stunned into complete numbness. He saw her lying there, yet did not accept what he saw. His subconscious mind knew it was so, but his conscious mind rejected the knowledge.
It was some sort of grotesque masquerade. In a moment Lois would smile at him and sit up and beckon to him. There was blackness in front of his eyes and retching nausea in his belly as he stood rooted to the threshold in the cold rigidity of shock that would not allow his muscles to move. His teeth were set together so hard that his jaws began to ache, and when he shuddered into complete consciousness and forced his eyes to look at Lois again he discovered that his nails had gouged into his palms.
He moved then. He placed one foot before the other and crossed the short distance to the bed. He was cold now, as inhumanly aware and calculating as a machine, his frozen blue eyes probing down at the silent flesh that had so lately been pulsing with warmth and desire—for him.
It had been done recently. Very recently. Not more than ten or fifteen minutes had elapsed since death, Wayne's trained mind told him. Blood still oozed from the twin cruel gashes that extended from the sides of her mouth outward and downward. It was the most senseless and brutal job of mutilation Wayne had ever witnessed. No human hand could have held the knife that inflicted those slashes. It was the work of a monster. One who had enjoyed his work, had reveled in the sureness and nicety of his touch.
It would have been a horribly slow and painful death because the jugular vein had been carefully left untouched. Yet she lay so quietly and serene upon the white sheet. There was no contortion of limbs or features.
Wayne dropped to his knees and his fingertips gently explored the scalp beneath the mass of fluffy brown hair arranged so carefully about her face. He nodded grimly when he found a large swelling near the left ear. This explained the method of kil
ling. He could see it all so clearly now, and a great racking sob came up into his throat as he visualized the scene.
Lois had taken her bath as usual, and tonight had carefully arrayed herself in the black negligee to wait for his coming. There had been the unexpected ring of her bell, her eager hurry to open the door and admit Morgan Wayne. But another man had confronted her there. A murderer with a sap ready and one sharp blow to be struck. Not a killing blow. No. The man who had done this was not disposed to kill mercifully or swiftly. A blow strong enough to halt any outcry and to render her unconscious so she could safely be carried into the bedroom and arranged in this dreadful mockery of anticipation for the careful wielding of a knife that she would not feel.
At least there had been that. She had died without knowing the mutilation inflicted.
Morgan Wayne's features tightened again and his eyes closed to slits when he noted a round spot of pink scalp showing through the fluffy hair near the back of her head. He bent closer to examine the spot and his senses reeled again at this further evidence of insensate brutality. A tuft of her silky brown hair had been torn out by the roots. There could be no doubt of it.
And Wayne saw why almost immediately.
Under the filmy blackness of the negligee covering her breasts there was discernible a dark stain of crimson. Wayne ripped the garment apart and stared down unbelievingly at the small wad of brown hair soaked with Lois' own blood and placed carefully in the deep valley between the creamy breasts that were now growing cold.
It had been used as a crude paintbrush to daub two words across her smooth abdomen:
“LAY OFF.”
Morgan Wayne rocked back on his heels and an animal grunt of sheer rage welled up from inside him.
He knew now.
Of course, he had known from the beginning. From the first awful moment when he saw her lying there. This could be the work of only one man. A man whom Priscilla Endicott had said wasn't human. A man who loved death for the sake of killing. Ugly and lingering death.
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