The air on the porch was almost cold after the time I had spent in that hothouse of a room. Rain pattered through the sycamore leaves and gurgled along the eaves and bounced in puddles on the walk.
Riley leaned negligently against one of the pillars and lighted a cigarette, his nose seeming even more crooked in the match's brief flare, while Miss North and I were buttoning buttons and turning up collars. He said, "See, shamus. It wasn't too bad, hunh ?"
"It's been a long day," I said, "and I've listened to too
HALO FOR SATAN 99
many people talk about too many things I don't understand. Good night to you. Ready, Miss North?"
"Yes." A small word, spoken by a small voice.
We left Riley standing there breathing smoke through a crooked smile and went quickly along the curving walk to where the Plymouth huddled at the curb. I helped her into the front seat and went around and slid in behind the wheel.
I looked back as we drove away. The heavy shadows of the porch hid everything but the bright end of Riley's cigarette.
"You didn't waste a lot of time moving out of the Stevens," I said. "You must have thrown your stuff in a suitcase, leaving a brassiere strap hanging out like they do in the funny papers, had them send a bellhop up with the bill, then slid out the back way."
She didn't say anything.
"You know all my secrets now," I went on. "If I had had any idea at all what that old man back there was going to throw in my lap, I'd have let them take you out the way he wanted."
She didn't say anything again. I looked at her briefly from the corners of my eyes. She was over about as near the car door as she could get, slumped there as if somebody had dropped her from a great height. In the faint light from the dash I could see her mouth hanging open slightly as though she lacked enough strength to keep her lips together. Her eyes were closed and her golden head bobbed with the car motion. Alone and helpless, worried and afraid. Needing a strong masculine arm about her waist and a shoulder in a rough tweed jacket impregnated with the smell of pipe tobacco to put her head against.
I swerved around a Ford coupe driven by an elderly party who had read too many safety posters about the dangers of driving on wet pavements. Thunder prowled the sky, using lightning flashes to find its way. Slow anger began to rise in me—vague and impotent and without meaning.
100
I set my teeth and said gently, "I'll have to know, Miss North. You can understand why, can't you?"
She stirred slightly and the hands lying loosely in her lap twisted tightly together, came up slowly about halfway, then fell limply back. It was a gesture of despair, almost theatrical in its intensity. But no words, no change in the slack lines of her face. I took a deep breath and got ready to make another try. . . .
"I can't tell you." A quiet voice, clear enough, but with panic seething under its surface.
I watched the road ahead, the raindrops bouncing in the silver path of my headlights, my hands tight on the wheel, "Why not?" I said.
"You're against him, too. You and that evil old man and the police. I won't tell you a thing!" Her voice began to rise. "None of you! Not ever!"
There was a side street directly ahead. I spun the wheel into it and braked to a halt fifteen or twenty feet from the intersection, letting the motor die. I turned toward her then, seeing the white, startled oval of her face and the dark depths of eyes that were now wide-open and filled with alarm.
I said, "I'm glad you feel up to discussing this, Miss North, and I'd rather not divide my attention by driving at the same time. Will you have a cigarette ?"
"Please."
I got them out, lighted hers and one for myself, and pushed the vent open a crack for air. She turned to face me, bringing her knees up on the seat for comfort, giving me a long and defiant glance while exhaling a white fan of smoke.
I said, "First things first, Miss North. This 'him' everybody's supposed to be against is Raymond Wirtz. Is that right?"
Silence as defiant as her eyes.
"What's he to you, Miss North ?"
The Hnc of her jaw hardened and she shook her head. Not a word. Not ever, she had said.
I sighed. "The last time we met you pulled my fangs for me and walked out. Not this time. You tell it to me, all of it, or down to the Homicide Bureau you go and right into the lap of a sergeant named Tinney. I'm not fooling, Miss North."
This time I got a curled lip thrown in my face. It peeled away the helpless child veneer and made her the competent, self-possessed young woman I had run up against on Erie Street. But I got a few words too.
"You wouldn't dare turn me over to the police. I'd tell them about everything: what that manuscript really is and about Antuni and the Bishop. Once those things came out you'd never get what you're after."
She had me there, although not for the reason she seemed to think. Bishop McManus was my client and his interests wouldn't be protected by having this story spread in headlines.
I sat there and dragged on my cigarette and let her wallow in a pool of triumph. When I figured she was about as self-satisfied as she could get, I let her have the other barrel— the loaded one.
"You're so right, Miss North. You've heard some things tonight that mustn't get out. So we'll keep away from the police. Instead we're going back to Antuni's place. I'll tell him where I ran into you this morning and I'll tell him about this little talk. Then I'll leave you to him and walk out."
For a second, there, I thought she was going to topple over in a dead faint. The cigarette rolled out of her fingers to the fioor boards, terror poured into her face and she swayed
on the seat. I put out a hand to steady her and the touch of my fingers against her arm seemed to close a circuit. The next thing I knew she had her head against my chest and her fingers digging into my arms and she was crying: great long tearing sobs that shook us both.
I let her go to it while I snaked out one foot and set it down on the ember of her cigarette. I blew the soft strands of gold away from my nose and mouth and breathed in the subtle odors left by her last shampoo. I listened to the rain and the whisper of tires from the cross street behind us and the sounds of a girl crying out her heart. I wondered what kind of reception private detectives got from St. Peter.
Finally she sat up and tried wiping her eyes with her fingers, ending up by taking the handkerchief out of my breast pocket to finish the job. She blew her nose delicately into it and sniffled a time or two and pushed her hair out of her eyes. I felt like a man who spends his days kicking kittens off the sidewalk.
"That was silly of me," she whispered. "I'm sorry about your handkerchief. I came away in such a hurry I forgot my bag."
"Think nothing of it."
She blew her nose again, not so delicately this time, and asked for another cigarette. I held a match for her, saw that beyond needing a touch of face powder, which I couldn't furnish, she was pretty much her old self again.
She stared straight into my eyes over the match flame. "You wouldn't do that, Mr. Pine? What you said?"
I waved out the match and dropped it into the dashboard tray. "I'm hoping you won't force my hand. But a man hired me to do a job, Miss North, and I intend doing that job, if it's at all possible."
"Even if it hurts an innocent person?"
"You've got to convince me that innocence has something to do with it."
She rested an elbow against the seat back and dragged deeply on her cigarette. Words came out behind the smoke— words that tumbled over each other in their rush to get out.
"I need help, Mr. Pine. Desperately. I don't know which way to turn. I'm in a strange city and I don't have a great deal of money. I know you're working for somebody else, but by helping me you'll be helping him too."
The flow of words stopped abruptly and she turned her head away from me. When I was sure that was all I was going to get, I said, "What's your interest in Raymond Wirtz, Miss North?"
Her head came around quickly. "Then you'll help me?"
/> "How do I know whether I'll help you ? I've got to know who I'm supposed to be helping and why. Let's wind this up, for Chrisakes. I've been hit over the head and pointed at with a gun and buried in words. Right now I want to know one thing: What's your interest in Raymond Wirtz?"
"...He's my husband."
I breathed in and out. "Un-hunh. All right. That lifts the fog a little. Go on from there."
It took her a long time to assemble the next sentence. "It's a not uncommon story, Mr. Pine. I thought I was in love with him."
"But you're not now ?"
"No. I—don't think so."
"Which is it: no or maybe ?"
She sighed. "I'm all mixed up inside. I met Raymond twos years ago, Mr. Pine, at the university. He was very mucm like my father—as well as I can remember my father. Charm-" ing, intelligent, handsome and with a wonderful sense of
' humor. And yet like a child in many ways: absentminded and helpless . . . it's hard to put into words. A month after I
I met him we were married. It lasted less than a year. He . . . was too old for me."
She bent forward and put a cylinder of ash into the tray, straightened again and made a vague movement with one slender hand. "It's all rather pathetic, and I'm afraid it
I doesn't put me in a very nice light. But I'm young and
I human. ..."
I Her words trailed off and a long moment dragged by be-
[fore she spoke again. Then: *T used to see him occasion-
' ally—afterward. He aged a lot in that year, and there was a bitterness in him that had never been there before—a cynical attitude where once had been that gentle, wonderful sense of humor. Each time we met he'd ask the same question: when was I going to divorce him and get myself a rich husband?" "Why a question like that?"
Her eyes were on something beyond the car, beyond the street, back into two years that belonged to the past. "That's the horrible part, Mr. Pine. He thought my reason for leav-
;ing him was because there was so little money. Raymond's earnings, both as a faculty member and a paleographer—even a. world-famous paleographer—were small. I couldn't tell him the real reason I was leaving him; I couldn't be that :ruel. And so I blamed it onto his inability to give me the material things I wanted, or claimed I wanted. As if money would have made that much difference!"
"But in spite of all this," I said, "you come running to Chicago after him."
She turned her head to give me a long level stare. "In one vay or another," she said tightly, "I feel it's largely my fault hat my husband's in trouble. I'm trying to make amends by getting him out of it. That's why I followed him to Chicago."
I pushed what was left of my cigarette through the air vent and stretched as much of my frame as the Hniited space would allow. "Go ahead," I said wearily, "and tell me. Pour out the words. My spirits are low and my ears are numb, but I'll listen. Other people read books or go to the fights or walk in the sun or make love. But not poor old Pine. He just sits and listens."
She said stiffly, "This was your idea. You wanted to know these things."
"Yeah. Go ahead and tell them to me."
Her fingers gave a sudden convulsive jerk to the handkerchief she was holding. My handkerchief. She drew in on her cigarette and blew out a cloud of smoke that hung writhing in the air between us until a damp breeze from outside tore it apart. By the time all that was over with she was through seething and able to trust her voice.
"He called me three weeks ago, while we were both in Los Angeles. He was so excited and incoherent I could barely understand him. He said he had got hold of something that was worth millions of dollars, that it was his alone and that he was leaving for Chicago immediately to sell it."
I said, "Why tell you about it ?"
"He was getting even with me for leaving him, gloating over what he called my 'mistake.' Frankly I thought he'd brooded himself into a nervous breakdown and might do i something desperate. The minute he hung up I hurried over there but he was already gone. One of the neighbors said he'd seen Raymond load suitcases into his car and drive away not more than an hour before."
I took off my hat and rubbed the tender spot on the backt of my head and listened to the rain while I thought about Raymond Wirtz as this girl had sketched him for me. A gentle, scholarly man who had spent his years digging among i
ii
HALO FOR SATAN 107
musty papers, until one day he ran headlong into sex and had it bash his character and personality out of shape. Not a nice picture but one that, with variations, has been painted too many times.
I said, "Let's see if I can guess the rest of it. Out of the depths of compassion and a feeling of guilt you came on to Chicago to iron out the kinks in your husband's battered ego. Is that it ?"
That stiffened her spine, and while the lack of light hid the anger in her eyes it was there just the same. 'T can't say I care for the way you've expressed it, Mr, Pine." Very cool, very controlled, very phony.
"Is that important? How did you locate him here?"
Her sigh said that I was impossible but that she would forgive me. *T telephoned a private detective agency in Chicago and hired it to pick up his trail when he drove into town. I was notified where he was staying, then I came on to join him. You walked in on me while I was in his room."
"You certainly carry compassion to great lengths," I said. "It's a lovely story, Mrs. Wirtz, but I'd like it even better if you would include a few words about how all his talk about millions of dollars had something to do with your decision to come out here."
"Is that what you think of me?"
"Yes. Did I do wrong?"
She watched me out of a face filled with shadows. "You may be right, Mr. Pine. Actually I didn't spend a great deal of time weighing motives. But the fact remains that Raymond's in serious trouble, both because of the body found in his room and because there are persons who want that manuscript badly enough to kill him for it."
"That's right," I said. "What do you want me to do about it?"
"I want you to find him—for mc. I want you to help me get him out of Illinois and l)ack where he helongs. I want his life spared, Mr. Pine, for if anything happens to him, I'll always blame myself!"
"And what about the twenty-five million dollars?"
She gasped. "Twenty-fi "
"Yeah. That's the price he quoted the Bishop."
"Good heavens, I didn't realize it amounted to anything like that! Let's worry about that after we find him. I want him to be s-safe."
"There's still this business of a corpse being found in his room. The boys down at Homicide will want that straightened out."
She shivered slightly and rubbed her arms with unsteady fingers. *T—^know. But they're looking for a man named Raymond Walsh whom nobody knows anything about. If Raymond can get out of the state, they'll never discover his true identity. Unless you tell them."
I got out another cigarette, lighted it and started the car motor. I said, "1 work for my clients and my conscience, Mrs. Wirtz. I co-operate with the police but I don't do their laundry or haul their garbage. But there are three other people who know Wirtz and Walsh are the same man: Louie Antuni, Bishop McManus and a man named Myles Ben-brook, a friend of your husband. If I find Wirtz I am not going to turn him in. But if you're as intelligent as you seem you'll sell him on surrendering voluntarily to the police. If he put Post out of the way it was most likely self-defense—if your husband is the kind of man you tell me he is.
"But all this is jumping the gun. First, he's got to be found—alive."
While she was chewing that over, I shifted gears, turned the car around and drove the few feet back to the boulevard, turning east there.
HALO FOR SATAN 109
After four or five blocks, she came out of a silence to say, "Are you going to help me find Raymond, Mr. Pine?"
"Two people have already hired me to find him, both for I the same reason. You might as well be number three, par-I ticularly since yo
u're his wife. I'll keep you informed—within I reason. Where can I drop you off ?"
She told me, naming a fairly expensive apartment hotel near the lake front and well out on the North Side, adding that she had no idea how long she would have to remain in town and an apartment would be a lot more convenient and no more costly than a good hotel room. It seemed a lot of information for such a small question.
Twice during the ride back she tried to make conversation, but my response was too brief to be misunderstood, and the last couple of miles held nothing but silence, j At Estes Avenue east of Sheridan Road stood a gray • : monolith with the words Lake Towers in neon on its roof. i[ I pulled into the curb in front of the entrance and reached past [: her to open the car door. "Good night, Mrs. Wirtz. It's been quite an evening."
She started to slip out, stopped and looked back at me.
' [ What I could see of her face told me nothing of what was
going on behind it. "Good night, Mr. Pine. It certainly has."
She bent suddenly, kissed me full on the mouth, whispered,
M "Good night, Paul," and was gone in a rustle of cloth and the
flash of nylons, running lightly across the walk and through
one of the two revolving doors.
I drove on east another fifty feet until I found a driveway, used it to turn around in the narrow street and pulled in next to the curb at a point where I could watch the Lake Towers' . entrance.
I waited twenty minutes but she never came out again. It appeared Lola North had been truthful about one thing, at least.
I WAS working as an elevator operator in a coal mine—anthracite, probably—and the cage was down about four thousand feet with its controls stuck. Up on the surface some guy was leaning a heavy thumb against the bell button, filling the shaft with a high keening sound. . . .
I woke up in the middle of swinging one hand. It hit against the telephone on the nightstand next to me and knocked the receiver out of its cradle. That stopped the bells, but as far as light was concerned I was still in a coal mine.
The Long escape Page 9
