The Devil's Stronghold

by Leslie Ford

  She’d have done well in the jungle. I saw that by the way she moved in and shut the door swiftly and noiselessly behind her. A leopard skin would have been more suitable for her at the moment than the short, white butcher’s jacket she had on. Below it was a narrow strip of white bathing-suit printed with brown and green flowers, and below that a pair of slim, straight brown legs. Her whole body was quivering. The little lady was more than in a rage. And at me.

  “You!”

  It came out as I put my hat up on the closet shelf and turned back into the room.

  “You!”

  She blazed it out a second time.

  “You listen to me. You thought you could sneak in here and nobody know it. Don’t fool yourself! We knew you were coming. We knew you’d show up, and don’t think we aren’t ready for you! I’m not to let you talk to me, but that doesn’t keep me from talking to you, and I’m going to, plenty!”

  There seemed to be no doubt of it. And to say I was astonished is not enough. I stood there like an oaf.

  She made a sound that I suppose could be called a laugh.

  “You don’t even recognize me. Well, I’m Molly McShane. Not Doreen. I’ve dropped that. It’s Molly now. And you’re not going to come out here and mess up my life! You’re going back where you came from and stay there! You’re not going to wreck us—”

  There’s no use going on saying I was in a daze. Somewhere in the course of it I managed to get my voice, at least.

  “Stop it!” I said. “Stop it at once. Who— How did you know I was here?”

  “How did I know?”

  She thrust one brown hand into the pocket of her jacket and pulled out an oblong card. She gave it a defiant flip. It landed on the carpet midway between us—written side up, fortunately. If I’d had to bend down to pick it up, what dignity I’d kept would have been badly impaired.

  Molly, it said. She’s come. She’s in 102. Better get set. Sheep.

  I said, “Oh.” I couldn’t think of anything else. It seemed to be me. My room number was 102, and I’d certainly come. Who “Sheep” could be I had no idea at all.

  “Listen,” the girl said. “I’m not fooling.”

  It hadn’t occurred to me, not remotely, that she was.

  “We don’t owe you anything. You’ve never done a thing for us.”

  That was a little startling, even if I don’t belong to the Sergeant Buck school, which holds that mothers are a special and holy breed. It was not as startling as what she flayed me with next.

  “You! You’d never have known I was alive if I hadn’t begun to get somewhere on my own! You didn’t help me. You didn’t give a damn what happened to me! You’re not going to step in and use me now. You don’t get one cent out of me and not one line of publicity, or anything else. We’ll see you in hell first! We know your game and we’re giving you till noon tomorrow. Get that! Packed and out by noon tomorrow! Gee—you make me laugh!”

  That was her exit line, and it didn’t make me laugh. The scorn and contempt in it, the toss she gave her tawny head, left me staring at the door, wondering if I was in normal possession of my senses.

  I looked down to the rug at my feet. The card was still there. I bent down and picked it up. Sheep’s message was still on it—or I could still have thought I’d dreamed up the whole thing. I turned it over. On the other side, in the same neat print, it said:

  1 chicken sandwich (no mayonnaise)

  1 coffee (no cream)

  It was a waiter’s check. The room number was 102. It was my order. Sheep was my lanky, sandy-haired waiter.

  Out in the hall I could hear footsteps, then a tap on the door. I slipped the check under the desk blotter and said, “Come in.” He came, cheerful and debonair as if he had never in all the world written the message that had unleashed the baby hellcat.

  “Sorry I was so long,” he said. “We’ve had more late lunches than usual. Where would you like this? Here by the windows?”

  He couldn’t have been more cordial if I’d been an honored guest in his own home.

  “I hope you’ll like it here. This is one of the nicest hotels in town. Are you going to stay with us awhile?”

  It sounded innocent, I thought—or was he just checking up for the little lady?

  “I’m not sure how long I’ll be here,” I said.

  “I’ll take your breakfast order tonight, if you like. We work a staggered shift. I’m on this evening and tomorrow morning, until noon.”

  I thought there was a short pause before my ominous deadline. I looked around at him involuntarily. He was certainly not my idea of a hatchet man. Still, stranger things have happened in less strange parts of the world.

  “Well, I hope you enjoy your lunch, madam.”

  I dare say my ears had begun by now to detect sinister implications where none existed. At any rate, I think I was on the point of examining my sandwich for a few snowy flakes of arsenic when the phone ringing at the head of the green-and-yellow day bed interrupted me. It was Bill—he’d finally got my telegram. I was so sure of it, and so sure everything would be fine now, that I dashed across the room.

  “Hello,” I said. “Hello.” I waited a moment, and spoke again. It was an open connection, and someone was at the other end. I could hear him breathing—a heavy breath, drawn, released, drawn again—a strange rasping sound coming at measured intervals in my ear.

  “Hello!” I said, sharply this time. “Who is this?”

  There was no answer, only the regular wheezing breath, drawn and released into my ear. Then I heard a soft click, and the phone went dead. I stood holding it in my hand, a chilly pricking sensation crawling up and down my spine. It was extremely unpleasant. Then the hotel operator switched in.

  “Were you cut off, Mrs. Latham?”

  “Yes, I think so,” I said. “Where did the call come from?”

  “I’m sorry, it was from outside. They’ll call again, I expect.”

  She was right. They called four times within the next hour, in the same way each time—a formless, invisible figure breathing into my ear, silently ringing off each time I started to speak. The third and fourth time I was increasingly reluctant to answer, but I didn’t dare not, in case it was my wretched first-born.

  But it was the rock that was the most disquieting. It came between the second and third phone call. I was in the bathroom unpacking my toilet case when I thought I heard a sound in the room. I came out, not quickly but with the deliberate caution befitting a woman with a decent sense of the importance of her own preservation. There was no one there. The door into the hall was still closed, and the mirrored door beside my fireplace, which led into the next apartment, was firmly locked. The room it led into had an occupant who was in residence, and also in what sounded like an acute stage of bronchial pneumonia, but the sound of coughing I heard then wasn’t what had disturbed me. I went to the coffee table where my tray still was and looked out the long, open window, and then I saw it.

  It was a jagged rock, lying on a flagstone at the foot of the chaise longue. A paper was tied around it with a piece of ordinary brown string. I glanced at the flower-screened walls, and at the filigreed iron railing connecting them across the end of the patio. The rock could have come from any of the three directions—from either of the adjoining patios or from the terraced porch below. Wherever it came from, however, I didn’t much like it.

  I went out, reluctantly, to get it, and it was when I bent down to pick it up that the telephone rang for the third time. For the third time I answered it, to hear nothing but the asthmatic breathing, and the soft click when I started to speak. The only other sound was my neighbor coughing in her room. I picked the rock up again, untied the string, and took the paper off. It was a piece of Casa del Rosal stationery, slightly soiled. The message on it was printed too, but not neatly as the one signed “Sheep” had been. It was short and to the point:

  Go home. We mean what we say.

  Chapter Three: Dame trouble

  THERE WA
S NO DOUBT ABOUT THAT in my mind, not by this time. They’d entirely convinced me. I say “they,” because the rock from inside the hotel or its grounds, and the phone calls from outside, plus Miss McShane in person, seemed to indicate at least three people, not counting “Sheep,” each with a singularly one-track mind. They wanted somebody to go home. They thought it was me. How long before they would adopt more determined tactics, how long it would take them to find out they were making a fundamental mistake in identification, I had no grounds to work on. I only hoped the latter would occur before the former—and before noon the next day. Of course, it was a purely personal point of view.

  I tried to explain it the fourth time the phone rang. “Look—you’re making a very stupid mis—”

  The receiver clicked quietly down at the other end. Before I had time to put the phone down there was a rap at my door. Outside I heard a man’s voice.

  “Hey, Sheep—pick up the table in Mrs. Ansell’s room, will you, boy? She wants to work and I’m loaded up.”

  “Okay, will do, soon as I get my tray.”

  My waiter came on in. “May I take your tray now?” His happy grin was unchanged. Hatchet man or no hatchet man, he certainly seemed to bear me no personal malice. If he noticed the rock, or thought it an odd thing to be lying on the glass table top, he gave no sign of it. He put the napkin over the tray, picked it up, and started back to the door. As he opened it, my next door neighbor went into another paroxysm of coughing.

  “Gee, poor Mrs. Ansell,” he said soberly. “She’s sure got it, hasn’t she? Had it ever since she came out… She’s a writer,” he added by way of explanation.

  If she was a writer, she could certainly think up something better than the note thrown into my patio, so I dismissed the idea I’d had that it could have come from her side of the wall. I further dismissed it when I heard her laughing a moment later. In fact, if it hadn’t been for the private background acquired in the hour and a quarter I’d been there, I would have thought the Casa del Rosal was the most charming and friendly hotel I’d ever been in. It certainly was the quietest—at that time of day and when Mrs. Ansell wasn’t coughing.

  The quiet had a curious eeriness for me, however, as I waited for the phone to ring again. I looked at my watch. It was a quarter to five—a little late for me to set out to go to my son’s boarding-house, even if there was any chance of finding him there—as, according to Lucille Gannon’s letter, there wouldn’t be. I took the letter out of my bag and read it again. Reduced to its specific terms, the grounds on which my first-born was making the complete and absolute ass of himself were night spots, gambling hells, and bad company, of which Doreen—now Molly—McShane was first and chief. I read over the part that called her the worst little trollop that ever hit Hollywood and Vine, and wondered. Somehow it didn’t seem quite the term for her. And what grounds Lucille Gannon had for calling her that, or saying she wanted to marry Bill Latham, weren’t stated. What she did state was that Bill was drinking, gambling, throwing money hand over fist down various and assorted nightspot drains, cutting classes, and doing no work of any kind. So much I’d told Lilac and Colonel Primrose. I hadn’t told either of them that Lucille Gannon also said he had a hot rod and was bound and determined to kill himself. And if all that wasn’t disturbing enough, there was something else. What, Lucille didn’t say. It was so disgraceful, I’d be so upset, that she didn’t feel she could tell me; I had to come and see for myself. So, considering what she did feel free to tell me, and considering each day’s crop of new horrors committed by the young and by the returned veterans, I was a lot more worried than I cared to admit even to myself. And nothing had happened since I’d arrived at the Casa del Rosal to reassure me. What he was doing now, where he was—what drain, what gambling hell my wandering child was at—it seemed to me the less I thought about it, the better off I’d be. The thing for me to do was wait till he showed up, or until he didn’t show up. Or until Lucille Gannon showed up. And while I waited, to bolt my doors until Molly McShane, Sheep, and their two friends found out who it was they were really looking for. That was immediate and pressing.

  I bolted the door. At least I locked it, and I locked the screen at the French window onto the patio. Then I went back into the bathroom to continue my interrupted packing. I was almost through when the phone rang again. This time I decided I’d let it ring. I could hear that evil breathing in my ear without moving from where I was. It rang a long time, and when I came out to get another bag to unpack it rang again. I had to answer it this time—the rasping breath was better than the persistent jangle going on and on. But it wasn’t the asthmatic breather, it was the switchboard operator.

  “Oh, Mrs. Latham,” she said pleasantly. “Bill called just now. He said to call till I got you, and tell you he’s on his way over from Pasadena. He wants you to have dinner with him.”

  I was so relieved I could have wept—relieved that it was finally Bill, relieved not to hear that ghastly silence.

  “How long will it take him to get here?”

  “Oh, about half an hour. He’s got his hot rod.”

  I had a horrible picture of him, shooting his way through traffic, arriving, like Pretty-Boy Floyd, bleeding but triumphant, at his mother’s doorstep—or of myself identifying him, in case he didn’t get there, at the local morgue. That, of course, was before I knew what a hot rod was, and if I’d known it was a hopped-up jalopy that could make a hundred miles an hour I’d have been even more out of my mind. And it was only after I’d put the phone down that it occurred to me the switchboard girl had called him “Bill,” and seemed to know him quite as well as I did. But sufficient to the day are the evils thereof, and I finished unpacking and hanging up my clothes.

  I hadn’t, until I heard running footsteps in the hall and a bang-bang on my door, really realized what it was I’d built up from Lucille Gannon’s letter. It was a sort of Picture of Dorian Gray, I saw now. I put my hand on the doorknob and paused. On the other side of the door was my first-born. Heaven only knew what it was I expected him to look like, trailing his robes of dissipation and sin. I opened the door, and there he was.

  “Ma! Oh, gee, Ma! This is swell!”

  “Oh, Bill!” And when he’d let go of me I pushed him back. “Let me look at you! You rat—what have you been doing?”

  He stood off, grinning at me. “Gee, we didn’t think you’d come, Ma! My letter was just a flier we took. Thanks, Ma! Gee, you’re swell!”

  I looked blankly at my son. “Letter? What letter?” Not that it mattered. What mattered was that Bill was still Bill. There were no baggy pouches under his hazel eyes, no loose, sagging corners to his wide, grinning mouth, no smell of the grogshop or the gin mill—just the same straight-forward, not handsome but for my money pretty attractive young guy who stood six feet, clear-skinned, sun browned and lean, clean-cut and clear-eyed, his lightish brown hair bleached and crisp, looking as if he combed it with a rotary egg beater, and not a delinquent or psychopathic bone in his body so far as I could see.

  “What letter, angel?” I asked again. “All the letters I’ve got from you lately—”

  I stopped. He was looking at me, as blank as I was. “Didn’t you get my letter, Mother?”

  When he calls me “Mother” it’s a matter of some importance.

  “Then what— I mean, what’s the idea? What made you come out here when— I mean, look, Mother!”

  His seriousness pulled itself in another notch. “Did somebody tell you to come out? Was it—it wasn’t Eustace, was it, by any chance?”

  I could tell from the way he asked it that he didn’t really believe it was Eustace, whoever Eustace was.

  “I don’t know Eustace. I’ve never heard of him,” I said.

  “Sure you do. Eustace Sype.”

  I shook my head.

  “Are you sure, Mother? Because he says he knows you. That’s how we got to know him so well. He said he was an old friend of yours, in Washington.”

  “Oh,” I said.
“Oh, yes, of course.”

  “No likee heem, Eustace Sype?”

  He was watching me intently.

  “I haven’t seen him for a thousand years, sweetie,” I said. I could have said that another thousand would be perfectly agreeable to me and that it was the “Eustace” that threw me off. We never called him “Eustace.” We called him Stinky—Stinky Sype. So far as I know, none of his contemporaries ever called him anything else. After he wrote his autobiographical first novel, called The Coming of Age of E.P.S., we never called him anything. It was a picture of him and his friends in the roaring Twenties, all of them thinly disguised except Eustace, who was completely disguised as hero. We were all a loathsome lot, except Stinky. He was fine, sensitive, and cruelly put upon—a lonely spirit struggling for the purer dew of the mountaintops. It was sweet of him to remember me now.

  “Is he a friend of yours?” I asked.

  “Sure,” Bill said. “He’s been swell to us. We ran into him in the Pacific. He was the V.I.P. with a road show Special Services brought around. He told us to be sure and look him up. He’s got a honey of a place here—we use his swimming-pool.”