She didn’t take her feet off the desk. She just spoke after about five seconds. Or ten. “Well, is it still there? I haven’t looked lately.”
“You haven’t? You don’t know what you’re missing...” That wasn’t what I’d meant to say at all. I rubbed my eyes, walked to the same chair I’d sat in last night.
“What do you want, Scott?” Flo knew me from my visits here before, but we’d never really hit it off, maybe because she was a gal who found Ragen jolly.
“Looking for Ragen,” I said.
“I don’t know where he is, Scott. But I talked to him on the phone last night. He gave me a message for you. I guess he figured you’d be in today.”
She paused. I said, “So deliver it.”
“It wasn’t much. Just to tell you he’d keep his promise. That’s all. You know what he was talking about?”
“Uh-huh. He, uh, promised me something last night.”
“What would he promise you, Scott?”
“Oh ... a surprise. Tell me to shut up if you want to, Flo. But what does a sharp tomato like you see in a sour apple like Ragen?”
“He’s all right, Scott. All right to me, anyway. He’s a pretty big man in the union, you know. And he’s going to be bigger. National President, maybe.”
“Is that what he told you?”
Flo frowned slightly, as though wondering if she could be saying too much, decided she was on safe ground. “Sure. He says six months from now he’ll be in. He’s already got a lot of the boys, friends, delegates, lined up.”
“He just might make it,” I said. “If Mike Sand gets pushed out. Or pushed. And if Ragen lives.”
“Why wouldn’t he live?”
“A number of guys would like to kill him. You know he’s knocked off half a dozen people himself, don’t you?”
“I never saw him.” I guess that was enough for her; he was nice to her, and she’d never seen him kill anybody. There are gals like that. She added, “I’m getting a crick in my neck, looking round at you like this.”
She was sitting as she’d been when I came in, relaxed, head turned to the left now so she could talk to me. So she swung around to face me, and plopped her feet on the desk again. It was just like before. Worse, maybe. It was either a crick in her neck, or a crick in my neck, but I didn’t want to be indelicate and say anything about it.
Instead I said one of the things I’d come back here to say. “What about Townsend?”
“Holt? What about him?”
“Where is he now? Still in the same place?”
“Sure. Why would he leave D.C.?”
Silently, I thanked Flo. Townsend was Townsend Holt. I remembered he was some kind of bigshot in the Truckers head office in Washington—and very close to president Mike Sand. So he was the guy Ragen had been talking to by phone last night, and that did not seem a happy development for Sand.
I said, “Drum fouled up the play last night, Flo. Ragen tell you about it?”
“Drum? What are you talking about? What do you mean he fouled up the play?”
She had a worried look on her face now—I also looked at her face—and right then she clammed. Either she’d merely decided she’d said too much, or else the mention of Drum had jarred her into silence.
Another minute’s conversation with Flo developed nothing except further strain on my eye muscles. She had clammed. I thought peaceful, empty thoughts for a while and got up, walked to the door.
“Thanks, Flo,” I said.
“For what?”
I grinned at her. “What do you think?”
Tootsie waved at me when I stopped by the front desk. I said, “Honey, the Townsend I asked you about is Townsend Holt. Now does it mean anything.”
“Townsend Holt? Of course. He’s the top P.R. man in the head office.” She made a face. “I shouldn’t have missed that one—but I thought you meant it was somebody in the local. Shell. I didn’t even think of the D.C. people.”
“What are he and Ragen up to?”
“Are they up to something?”
“You can bet on it, but I don’t know what it is. If it were routine, though, on the level, I figured you’d know what was going on.”
“Probably I would, unless Ragen didn’t want me to know. But I haven’t heard a thing.” She paused. “I wonder if it could have anything to do with Marker.”
Marker was Rex Marker, a vice-president of the local, another one of the boys. He’d been pretty close to Ragen for a while, virtually his second-in-command, but from what I’d picked up here and there, I gathered they were a bit wider apart these days than formerly.
“What’s with Marker?” I asked Tootsie.
“I don’t know. He hasn’t been around for a few days is all. Ragen isn’t happy about it, has some of the men trying to locate him. One of them asked me if I knew where he was.”
That reminded me. “Ragen’s got his disorganizers looking for a safe-cracker, too. I don’t suppose that would have hit your ears, though.”
“First I’ve heard.” She frowned. “A safe-cracker?”
“Yeah. Thanks, Tootsie. If you get anything, call the Spartan and leave word, huh? And I’ll give you a ring or two here.”
“You’re on. If it’s late, phone me at home. I’m in the book. The only one.” She grinned. “I’ll keep my ears open.” Then she smiled one of those wide smiles and added, “If I hear something good ... what’s in it for me?”
It was a gag. She wouldn’t have done it for money. So I said, “What else? I’ll take you to see The Dying Gladiator.”
“Oh, would you?” She leaned forward, a pleased look on her face. Suddenly I realized she was serious.
I hesitated only a moment, then I said, “I sure will, Tootsie.” And it sort of surprised me, but I was serious, too.
I had reached the Cad and was opening the door when it happened.
I had walked out through the wide glass entrance of the Truckers Building and down the tan cement walk to the lot, and I had been thinking of that story about Flo wearing lace pants, slit up the sides. I had been thinking it was a lot of baloney.
So, in a way, it was understandable that I didn’t notice the car, or the guys in it, or the gun.
I heard the gun, though. And I reacted the way I always react when I hear a gun go off. I moved. I moved fast. I let go of the Cad’s door handle, leaped to my right, turning, hand slapping the .38 under my coat. It was broad daylight, with dozens of people nearby, and surprise mingled with shock in my brain. I snapped my head around toward the street. The shot had come from behind me, across Olympic, somewhere, and in a kind of blur as my head swung around I saw them.
At least I saw the car, got a quick flash of a dark sedan and two men inside it, movement in the car and the glint of light on metal in one man’s hand. My fingers clamped on the butt of the Colt and I flipped it out, thumbing back the hammer. My Colt steadied on the car. I saw the faint blaze of fire from the gun across the street, faint in the sunlight, and then the sun exploded.
With that tremendous flare of light something slammed the top of my head like a hammer. There was the blinding light, and then darkness that somehow got darker and darker. I knew I was falling. But I never knew when I stopped.
Time is warped at a moment like that. It was only a moment. But between the light and the blackness I had time to know I had been shot, and time for one other thought.
It was that this was a hell of a time to be thinking about Flo’s lace pants.
CHESTER DRUM IS HOODWINKED
Washington, D.C., 2:15 P.M., Tuesday, December 15
You come out of it slowly, a little at a time.
You come out of it like Time fashioning the long hard years out of seconds and minutes, like lights going on one by one in a city at dusk to alter the fear and loneliness of night.
I felt cold all over. I heard a voice, no particular voice as yet, just a voice echoing broken strings of words. “Come on, come on ... please ... heavy ... can’t move you...”
And then the cold centered on my face and what it was was snow, and I felt hands rubbing the snow against my face. The voice went on pleading. It belonged to Hope Derleth, and she was saying, “You’ve got to come out of it. I can’t move you. You weigh a ton.”
I told her to go away. The snow she was rubbing against my face began to sting. My legs tingled, and then I could move them. The pain had not started yet. It would come later. I showed what a very tough guy I was by standing up without help, brushing off the shoulder she offered me for support. She opened the door of the car for me. I fell in. That put my head in the driver’s seat. The sleeve of her camel’s hair coat brushed it and she helped me into a sitting position. A moment later she started driving.
“Where are we, Florence Nightinghood?” I said, inordinately proud of the double allusion.
“Six or seven miles from nowhere on a service road along Shirley Memorial. They left you there. Glasses and Rover.” Surprise and indignation made her voice hoarse. “To freeze to death, I guess. I followed them.”
It was a dream car gliding smoothly over a dream world. She turned on the windshield wipers and they metronomed me into drowsiness. “Here comes the snow. Don’t get any wrong ideas, mister. I want to find out about my brother Charlie. He didn’t come home this morning. That’s why I went after you.”
“What happened to Marie Cambria?”
“Who?”
“Girl who took a shot at Abbamonte.”
“Some rank-and-filers heard the commotion, came upstairs. Morty took her gun away and they let her go. They can’t stand any kind of publicity now. What was the matter with her, anyway?”
“Nothing much,” I said, because she sounded exasperated with Marie Cambria. “Glasses and Rover beat her husband to death last night.”
There was a silence. I said, “How come the rank-and-filers didn’t keep me from going for a ride?”
“They didn’t see you. Glasses and Rover dragged you into Mr. Abbamonte’s office, then out the back way. What’s your name?”
“Chet Drum.”
That finished the conversation. I began to ache—my jaw, the side of my neck, my entire torso, my thigh where I’d turned it into Glasses’ brass knucks. The snow flying against the windshield like smoke and the swish-thump of the wipers made me drowsy again. It seemed a very short time later when Hope Derleth said, “Here we are.”
We got out of the car. She watched me move and decided she didn’t have to support me. The cold air made me feel better. I took a few deep breaths, then we went into the small, dim lobby of the walk-up apartment house where she lived with her brother Charlie. Finally she opened their door and called hopefully, “Charlie?”
There was no answer. We went inside and shut the door. This put us in a surprisingly large living room furnished in maple colonial. The wood of the chairs had a well-rubbed, lustrous, cared-for look. It was very warm in there. I took off my coat and looked at my watch. Two-thirty of a dim, snowy afternoon, Tuesday the fifteenth of December, and apparently no bones broken.
Hope Derleth brought me a large drink. It was almost all Scotch, as hairy as a tarantula and with not quite enough water to float one. I drank it so fast her eyes widened. She brought me another and I sat down with it.
“Just a minute,” she said. With her back to me she dialed a phone. The tight blue jacket of her suit hour-glassed her waist and hips. When I decided they would be very nice to hold in your hands, I suspected I was beginning to feel all right.
“Hello, is Charlie Derleth there? This is his sister. Oh. Oh, I see. No, I just thought he might have been working day-shift today. Thanks.” She hung up. “He isn’t there, Mr. Drum. Would you know where he is?”
“Not me.”
“What were you snooping around for? If Charlie’s in trouble, I want to know.”
“Your brother ought to be able to take care of himself. He’s old enough to be your father.”
“That’s just it,” she said, surprising me. “He is old enough to be my father. Or almost. All my life he’s taken care of me, given me the things he could never have. If he’s in trouble now, I want to help him.”
“Last night Glasses and Rover beat a cabbie named Hank Cambria to death. Either your brother was an accessory-after-the-fact or did what they asked him to without asking questions.”
“Oh, no. What did he do?”
“They used Cambria’s taxi-radio to get a tow-truck. Their car was disabled. The call went through the Veterans’ Cab switchboard. Charlie must have taken it.”
She just stared at me.
“Where was Townsend Holt after five o’clock yesterday afternoon?” I asked.
“How should I know? I only work for the guy.”
“And then of course,” I said, “there is the Brotherhood of Truckers.”
“I told you I know the heat’s on,” she said crossly. “They’re even going to call a strategy conference pretty soon, because all the answers better jibe when the Hartsell Committee starts its public hearings. Why, I’ve even put through a few calls to the Coast. They’re really getting together on this.”
“Calls for who? Mike Sand?”
“No. For Mr. Holt.”
I took a stab. “Does Charlie owe Abacus Abbamonte any money?”
She looked alarmed. She knew what it meant to be in debt to Abbamonte. “I don’t know.”
I backed off a little. “Whom did Holt call on the Coast?”
“John Ragen, the Brotherhood Local president in Southern California. I ... I guess you’d call Mr. Holt the coordinator of strategy. He’s Mike Sand’s right-hand man. So what about it?”
But Holt, I thought, had set up a phony snatch on Mike Sand’s wife. To win her confidence—for Sand or opposed to him? “You usually log calls?” I asked.
She lit a cigarette. Either the smoke or dawning suspicion narrowed her dark eyes. “Yes. Yes I do.”
“What about Holt’s calls to Ragen?”
She shook her head. “Not those. Mr. Holt asked me not to.”
For a while she was silent, smoking thoughtfully. Then she unbuttoned her blue jacket and folded it neatly across the arm of a chair. Under it she wore a very pale blue blouse, the kind you could see the shoulder straps of her bra through. My eyes were drawn to what the straps held up.
She said coldly, “Will you please stop staring at me? I don’t like being stared at like that.” She came lithely to her feet.
“You saved my life,” I said lightly. “Now you’ve got to make the rest of it happy.”
“I know the joke,” she said. “I guess I know them all. Charlie’s a great one for jokes.” She jabbed her cigarette out. “If you’re wondering why I took the jacket off—”
“I’m not complaining,” I said, and stood up too.—"I wanted to take you inside and see what I could do about the damage. They really gave you a pounding, didn’t they?”
I followed her through an archway and into a bedroom and beyond it to the bathroom. She talked with a sudden nervous compulsion, as if she realized for the first time that we were alone together in the apartment. “That was very stupid of me, talking and talking like that with you probably aching all over.” She switched on the light and opened the medicine cabinet over the sink. “Will you please strip to the waist,” she said nervously, self-consciously. Or maybe, I thought suddenly, she wanted me to think she was nervous and self-conscious.
It hadn’t started until I’d given her natural endowments that inadvertent stare, and she still wanted to know what I knew about Charlie. How was she to know I’d already told her everything I knew about him, which wasn’t much? So maybe, from her point of view, a subtle use of the weapons at hand was in order.
I removed my jacket, tie, shirt and undershirt, watching her watch me in the mirror. She winced when the skin below my ribs was exposed. It was as blue as a Monday after a hard week end.
“Oh my,” she said. “Does it hurt?”
“I’ll live. And you ought to see the colors a cou
ple of days from now.”
“All purple and yellow,” she said, making a face. “I know.”
She took a tube of ointment out of the medicine cabinet and unscrewed the cap. “Don’t worry, it’s the new, non-sticky kind,” she said, and touched me tentatively with a gob of the ointment on her fingertips. “Hurt?”
It was just cold, and I said so. She began to rub it in gently. Her fingers moved in a smooth, round, soothing motion. Then she looked up at me. “You’ve got quite a build.”
“Okay,” I said. I took her blue-bowed glasses off and placed them on the edge of the sink. Then I leaned forward and kissed her lightly on the lips.
She slapped my face, not hard and not really in anger. “When I put up the signal for passes,” she said coldly, “I use capital letters.” She could go hot and cold as fast and as thoroughly as any girl I have ever known. Then she asked, not quite ingenuously, “What did you mean by ‘okay’?”
So I kissed her again. Her arms remained at her sides, but she didn’t fight me. She just wasn’t there. She stepped back, a smile as meretricious as a hooker’s parted her lips, and she looked up at me. The smile left her lips slowly. She was a small girl, but very lovely. She looked like a girl who had just tasted an exotic food and couldn’t make up her mind whether she liked it or not. Then she took a step toward me. Her arms went up over my shoulders and she got up on tiptoes. If her two-steps-forward-and-one-step-back was supposed to get me erotic, it succeeded.
I kissed her a third time, hard. This time her lips had their own idea about what ought to be done. It was a delightful idea. Her fingers wandered up the back of my neck into my hair. Finally she broke away from me. Her smile was different. Her eyes were narrow gleams and her full lips looked thicker and redder. Either she belonged in Hollywood or the situation had got out of hand. “Now hold on, Hope girl,” she said softly. “You’re supposed to use it, not lose control of it.” The second smile, not at all meretricious, also went away. “Which the man ought to thank you for telling him. Or maybe you just ought to shut off the talk-faucet.”
Double in Trouble (The Shell Scott Mysteries) Page 9
