“Am I welcome here?”
Just as he finished pulling on his pajamas, there was a knock at the door. He opened it to find Helena standing there with her suitcase in her hand.
“Aren’t you going to ask me in?” she said.
“Sure,” he said, recovering his wits enough to step aside.
Walking past him, she set the suitcase on a chair. Her husky but flat voice said, “I’m frightened all alone over there. Am I welcome here?”
RICHARD DEMING
HIT
AND
RUN
a division of F+W Media, Inc.
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
Fall Girl
Also Available
Copyright
For
The Bureau of Internal Revenue
1
By two thirty A.M. the custom at the Haufbrau had been reduced to three patrons at the bar and four couples in booths. The bartender, a lean, angular man with narrow cheekbones and a high forehead, surveyed the house, decided no one would want drinks during the next few moments, and relaxed with his elbows on the bar across from the big man seated at its end.
“Nightcap, Barney?” he asked. “On the house, I mean.”
Barney Calhoun shook his head. He was a powerfully built man in his early thirties, with square features and thick, dusty-blond hair. Despite his size there was a suggestion of litheness about him, as though he could move with amazing speed if he had to. There was an aura of recklessness about him, too, only partly tempered by the deep cynicism that showed in his eyes. He was the sort of man all women would give at least a second glance, and many couldn’t take their eyes off. At the moment his expression was morose as he stared at the nearly empty glass with which he was making circles on the bar.
“What’s your trouble, buddy boy?” the barkeep asked. “Women?”
“Money,” the big man said. “Always money, Joe.”
“Need a fin or two?”
Calhoun gave him a brief smile. “It’s not that bad, pal. No pressing bills. It’s just the whole goddam bleak future. I can’t see anything but hamburgers in the next ten years.”
Joe poured a shot of bourbon in the big man’s glass despite the previous refusal, added ice and soda. “Maybe you shouldn’t have left the force,” he suggested.
Barney Calhoun snorted. “How many cops you see eating steak? I’m no worse off.”
Joe leaned his elbows on the bar again. “Maybe you play it too straight, Barney. Some private eyes clean up. If they’re willing to shoot angles.”
Barney took a sip of his drink. “Don’t fret about my ethics, Joe,” he said cynically. “Show me an angle and I’ll shoot it.”
“Yeah?” Joe said. He eyed the big man speculatively. “How far will you go?”
Calhoun’s eyes narrowed. He said dryly, “I should have suspected a drink on the house. What’s on your mind?”
“Nothing in particular. Just occurred to me, I see a lot of stuff going on on the other side of the bar. You got a license, know how to investigate things and so on. We might make a team.”
“Doing what?”
Joe shrugged. “Different stuff. I give you a steer. You follow it up. We split the take.”
Calhoun circled his glass a time or two. “Give me a for instance,” he said finally.
The bartender dropped his voice to a confidential whisper. “See the couple in the corner booth?”
The big man didn’t turn. He searched out the reflection of the indicated couple in the bar mirror. The man was about forty, tall and sleek and handsome, with prematurely gray hair and a small gray mustache. The woman was ten years his junior, a slim, lovely, perfectly groomed brunette. Raven-black hair outlined a pale, delicate face whose skin was so clear it was nearly translucent.
“Uh huh,” Barney said.
“Harry Cushman,” Joe said.
Calhoun looked thoughtful. “The café society Harry Cushman?”
“Yeah. Two million dollars, two ex-wives. The doll with him isn’t either ex.”
“Sor?”
“She’s wearing a wedding ring.”
Calhoun took a sip of his drink. “Maybe she’s number three.”
The barkeep shook his head. “It would have been in the gossip columns. The saloon-beat boys stick to his tail like hounds after a fox. She’s somebody else’s ever-loving.”
The big man shrugged. “About half of them stray, according to Kinsey.”
“Look at her again,” Joe suggested.
Calhoun studied the woman’s reflection in the mirror. Aside from her wedding band and an engagement ring that looked like a small emerald, she wore no jewelry. Her plain blue dress was of conservative cut. Yet she somehow managed to convey an impression of wealth. A certain poise, and the unconscious grace of her movements in doing so simple a thing as picking up her drink or leaning across the table for a cigarette light, stamped her as a woman of breeding as well as wealth.
“Ummm,” Calhoun said. “Expensive.”
“You’re not fooling,” Joe said. “That’s no chorus cutie. I’ve looked across this bar at too many phonies not to know the real thing when I see it. That’s class. There’s as much money behind that dame as there is behind Cushman.”
“Maybe,” Calhoun conceded, and gave the barkeep an inquiring look.
“Do I have to spell it out for you?” Joe asked. “There’s a guy who’s loaded, out with a married gal who’s probably loaded. Find out who she is. Somebody ought to be willing to pay off for something—Cushman to protect the gal, the gal to protect her happy home, or her husband for a tip that she’s straying.”
The big man wrinkled his nose. “I haven’t sunk to blackmail yet. I might nudge the cue ball to get a better shot, but I don’t batten on people’s troubles.”
Joe straightened up and poured another shot. “Well, you asked for an angle.”
“Try another one.”
Joe shrugged. “Mostly what I had in mind was stuff like that. You’d be surprised how many guys I spot in here playing footsies with other guys’ wives. Think it over.”
He moved up the bar to tend to one of the two other remaining bar customers. Calhoun thoughtfully studied the corner-booth couple in the bar mirror.
Cushman and the woman rose from the booth as he watched them; the man dropped a bill on the table and helped the woman into a light coat that had been hanging on a hook next to the booth. They headed toward the rear door of the barroom, which gave onto a parking lot in back of the building.
Calhoun glanced sidewise as they passed the end of the bar, within two feet of him. The woman’s figure was as beautiful as her face, he noted. But there was no warmth to her beauty. Her lovely features were absolutely expressionless. The absence of any lines of any sort in her smooth face-even the tiny laughter lines that the most well-preserved woman of thirty is likely to have developed at the corners of her eyes—suggested that if she ever felt an emotion, she wasn’t accustomed to showing it by facial expression.
Her gaze briefly touched Calhoun as she passed, but there was no reaction. He was used to women noticing him, but she showed about as much interest in him as she might in a piece of cooked salami. On impulse he deliberately looked her up and down.
Again there was no reactio
n. She looked neither pleased nor offended by his obvious admiration. She merely ignored him.
As the couple passed through the rear door, Calhoun rose from his bar stool, scooped up his change, leaving a quarter tip, and raised one hand in a casual salute of good-by to the bartender. Joe glanced at the door by which the couple had left, then raised his eyebrows questioningly. With a slight shake of his head, Calhoun went out the street door.
Outside, he turned right without hurry. But as soon as he was beyond the range of Joe’s vision through the plate-glass front window, he increased his pace to a rapid walk. A half block up the street he slid under the wheel of a four-year-old Plymouth club coupe and settled back to wait.
He knew the car containing Cushman and his woman companion would have to pass where he was waiting. The exit from the Haufbrau’s parking lot came out on Court Street, which was one-way here. They would have to turn right, pass the barroom’s front door, and drive past Calhoun’s parked car and at least as far as the next intersection.
In the rear-view mirror he saw headlights swing from the parking-lot exit and turn toward him. Apparently the driver believed in a fast getaway, for the motor began to roar as soon as the car reached the street. Calhoun had barely had time to switch on his engine when a green Buick convertible swished by him at a speed of at least fifty miles an hour.
At two thirty in the morning there are usually few people on the streets of Buffalo. With only a half hour left until curfew, most people don’t want to waste drinking time walking from one bar to another, even when a bar is crowded. And tonight was a quiet night. The only person in sight was an elderly and rather shabbily dressed man who was just starting to cross the street a few yards beyond Calhoun. And the only moving vehicle in sight was the green Buick convertible, which streaked past Calhoun down the left lane of the one-way street, just in time to catch the elderly man with its left front fender as he stepped from between two parked cars.
The old man flew back between the cars he had just walked between to land in a heap on the sidewalk. With a screech of brakes, the green convertible swerved right clear across the street and sideswiped two parked cars.
The crash was more terrific than the damage. Metal screamed in agony as a front fender was torn from the first parked car and a rear fender half ripped from the second. The convertible caromed to the center of the street, hesitated, then gunned off as though it were on the Indianapolis Speedway.
But not before Calhoun had seen all he needed to see. The neon signs of taverns along Court Street, combined with the regular street lighting, made the street as bright as day. With the convertible’s top down, he could see the occupants clearly.
The woman was driving, her shoulder-length raven-black hair flowing behind her. If there were any doubt as to the couple’s identity, her companion dispelled it by turning in the seat to stare back over his shoulder at the motionless figure on the sidewalk, giving Calhoun a full-face view of him. It was Harry Cushman.
Automatically Calhoun noted the license number of the Buick convertible was 9I-3836. It was a New York State plate.
The crash brought people pouring from doorways all along the block. A yell of rage from up the street, followed by a steady stream of swearing, told Calhoun that at least one of the damaged cars’ owners had arrived at the scene.
“Anybody see it?” he heard someone nearby ask.
Then somebody discovered the old man lying on the sidewalk. Calhoun waited until the crowd began to gather around the injured man, then unobtrusively slipped from his car. Instead of crossing the street to join the crowd, he walked up to look over the two damaged cars.
Beyond a ruined fender on each, neither seemed particularly harmed. One was a new Dodge and the other a two-year-old Ford. He filed the license numbers of each in his mind, along with the Buick’s.
Apparently someone in the crowd had thought to call an ambulance and the police, for a few minutes later they arrived simultaneously. Calhoun crossed the street and stood on the edge of the crowd as the police cleared a path for the Emergency Hospital interne who had come in the ambulance. The interne bent over the injured man.
The man wasn’t dead. Calhoun could hear him answering the interne’s questions in a weak voice. He couldn’t make out what they said, but after a few moments the interne rose and spoke in a louder voice to one of the police officers.
“He may have a fractured hip. Can’t tell for sure without X rays. I don’t think anything else is broken.”
Under the interne’s instructions, two attendants got the old man on a stretcher and put him in the ambulance.
“I didn’t get the guy’s name,” one of the policemen complained.
“John Lischer,” the interne said. “You can get his address later. His address for a while will be Emergency Hospital.”
When the ambulance pulled away, Calhoun faded back from the crowd to stand in the light of a neon sign. He took an envelope from his pocket, wrote down the three license numbers and the name John Lischer.
He stood musing, then recrossed the street and returned to the Haufbrau. It was five minutes of three when he entered the bar. The place was now deserted except for Joe, the bartender, who was cleaning up.
“Thought you called it a night,” Joe greeted him.
“Got sidetracked by an accident up the street,” Calhoun said. He laid a half dollar on the bar. “How about a nightcap?”
Joe leaned his broom against the bar, then went behind it and mixed a bourbon and soda. “I heard the crash and looked out,” he said. “Couldn’t see much from here. Anybody hurt?”
“One guy, I guess.”
“You see it happen?”
The big man shook his head. “Just heard it and wandered up to rubberneck.”
Joe rang up the half dollar. “Couple of cars, huh?”
“I don’t know,” Calhoun said. “Couple of banged-up cars were there, but they were parked at the curb. And the injured guy was on the opposite side of the street. Looked to me like maybe a hit-and-runner clipped a pedestrian and then sides wiped the two cars.”
“Oh? Too bad you didn’t see it.”
“Yeah,” Calhoun said.
Without seeming to, he studied Joe’s expression carefully. There was no indication on the bartender’s face that he suspected Calhoun of holding anything back.
Calhoun was satisfied. He had returned to the bar solely to fix it in Joe’s mind that he hadn’t taken his tip and followed Harry Cushman and his companion.
There was no point in cutting Joe in if he didn’t have to.
2
By noon the next day Calhoun had learned from the Bureau of Motor Vehicles records that license 9I-3836 was registered to a Mrs. Lawrence Powers of an upper Delaware Avenue address. The address pleased him, because most of the residents of that section weren’t merely well off, they were in the top financial bracket.
He also checked the licenses of the Dodge and the Ford, learning their respective owners were a James Talmadge on Fillmore and a Henry Taft on Ferry. Then he called Emergency Hospital and asked about the condition of John Lischer.
The switchboard operator informed him that it was listed as fair.
Calhoun waited another twenty-four hours before calling on Mrs. Lawrence Powers. He picked two P.M. as the best time to arrive.
The Powers home was a huge rose-granite affair of at least fourteen rooms, surrounded by fifty feet of perfect lawn in all four directions. A colored maid came to the door.
“Mrs. Powers, please,” Calhoun said, handing the maid a card reading, Bernard Calhoun, Confidential Investigations.
She let him into a small foyer, left him standing there while she went off with the card. In a few minutes, she came back with a dubious expression on her face.
“Mrs. Powers is right filled up with appointments this afternoon, Mr. Calhoun. She wants to know have you got some particular business?”
He said, “Tell her it’s about an auto accident.”
The colored
maid disappeared again, but returned almost immediately.
“Just follow me, please, sir,” she said.
She led him through a living room about thirty feet long, whose furnishings probably had cost a year of the average man’s income, through an equally expensive dining room, and onto a large, sunflooded sun porch at the side of the house.
Mrs. Lawrence Powers reclined at full length in a canvas deck chair, wearing brief red shorts and a similarly colored scarf. She wasn’t exactly wearing the scarf. It was draped loosely across her full bosom. She wore nothing else, not even shoes. Obviously she had been sun bathing in the shorts only, and had covered her bosom but a moment before Calhoun and the maid entered.
The maid left them alone, and Calhoun examined Mrs. Powers at the same time she was studying him. She was the same woman who had been with Harry Cushman at the Haufbrau. Under bright sunlight and nearly unclothed, she was even lovelier than she had been under artificial lighting. Not only was her body perfectly contoured, but her flesh was a smooth cream so satiny in texture that Calhoun had to control an impulse to reach out and test if it were real. She was beautiful clear from the tip of her delicately shaped little nose to the tips of her small toes. Even her feet were lovely.
But her face didn’t have any more expression than a billiard ball.
She calmly rose from her deck chair, turned her back, and said, “Tie me up, please.” Her voice was pleasantly husky, but there was a curious flatness to it.
She had folded the scarf into a triangle and now held the two ends behind her for Calhoun to tie together. Taking them, he crossed them in the middle of her back. The touch of her bare back against his knuckles sent an unexpected tremor up his arms, and he had an idiotic impulse to lean down and press his mouth against the smooth shoulder immediately in front of him.
Killing the impulse, he asked, “Tight enough?”
“It’ll do.”
He tied a square knot.
She turned around right where she was, which put her face an inch in front of his and about six inches below. She was a tall woman, about five feet eight, because Calhoun stood six feet two.
Hit and Run Page 1
