Lady Afraid

by Lester Dent

  And she touched the sleeping boy’s cheek with the gentlest of kisses. His smile, returned in sleep, was as satisfied as a small flower in the sun.

  The electric clock whispering on the chest of drawers read ten-thirty and her train left at midnight. But the train was made up in Miami, she knew. Since she had a compartment, it would be available perhaps as much as an hour ahead of departure time. She could leave the apartment now. There was no good reason why she should not board the train at once, and probably she should do so.

  Sarah lifted the suitcases she had packed and swung with them into the living room. And then something happened.

  It was the kitchen door. It began to move slowly and—unbelievably, when it was half open—a man came through. A dark man in a seersucker suit, thin through the shoulders but with a heavy stomach which he carried as if it troubled him with its weight.

  The man, the stranger, walked toward Sarah. His right hand drifted out and made patting motions in the air.

  “Don’t try anything wild, Mrs. Lineyack,” he said. “You just didn’t get away with it, is all.”

  Chapter Five

  IT WAS VERY QUIET in the living room except that the man kept coming toward Sarah and his feet brushed the carpet in a series of harsh sounds like crusty bread being cut. His shoes were lemon yellow with sharp-pointed toes.

  “In a deal like this you got to plan it careful,” the man continued. “That was where you fell down, Mrs. Lineyack. You weren’t careful enough.”

  Sarah began breathing again. She had been stunned. This was like an explosion, a sheet of flame in her face, having this strange man appear.

  “Where—where did you come from?” she gasped.

  “How’d I get in, you mean?” The man stood close to her now and she saw that his seersucker suit was untidy. The suit was soiled in a few spots and his necktie knot was gnarled and vaguely greasy-looking; he must be one of those men who never untied his ties.

  “Get in? That was easy, Mrs. Lineyack,” he told her. “The janitor’s got a key to all the apartments. How else would I get in?”

  Sarah stiffened. “Mr. Cline wouldn’t let anyone into my apartment!”

  Mr. Cline was the building superintendent. Janitor.

  “Wouldn’t he? That’s only what you think, Mrs. Lineyack.” The man stared at her. “A deal like you pulled? And the janitor wouldn’t let me in? Don’t be silly.”

  Then his hand came toward her, reaching for her arm. Sarah jerked away, wrenched back from the man’s hand as from a snake; the hand, unsuccessful in its purpose, remained poised in mid-air, the man scowling.

  “Hey, now! You can make it easy or you can make it hard,” he said.

  Sarah had dropped the suitcases she was carrying and they were on the floor close to and on either side of her legs. She felt trapped between them. Trapped, charged with terror. She began to retreat, putting one foot behind the other stiffly.

  The man’s eyes watched her.

  “Like I say, Mrs. Lineyack, make it easy or make it tough for yourself,” he told her. “Want to scream? Go ahead. Sure, you can scream. Then all your neighbors will see a cop dragging you out of here. I could even slap the cuffs on you, you know.”

  “You’re—the police?”

  “Good God! Would I be here if I wasn’t?”

  “But—”

  “But how did I happen to be here?” His thin mouth twisted. “Lady, you weren’t so clever. You just didn’t get away with it. That’s all.” Then he jerked a thumb at the door. “I got no time to kill, Mrs. Lineyack. Let’s get going.”

  Sarah took a frantic step away from him. She clutched at her scattered composure, trying to take a sane plan out of the shocked, frightened, bunched herd that her thoughts had become.

  “Am I under arrest?”

  He shrugged. “Wouldn’t you think so?”

  “Then I’m going to make a telephone call!” Sarah gasped.

  A thing that was ugly spread over the man’s face. “You think you are? And who would you call?”

  “My attorney!”

  “Oh! Lawyer, huh?… I thought maybe you had a boyfriend.”

  “No, I—”

  “What, no boyfriend?” He was getting nasty. “A babe as pretty as you, Mrs. Lineyack, and you don’t have some fellow you can call on in a little emergency like this? What’s wrong with the men around this town?”

  “I’ve a right to telephone my lawyer!” Sarah said tensely.

  The man’s head gave a sharp negative jerk. “Afraid you don’t know the law, Mrs. Lineyack. The law sets a time we can hold you before you can call anybody.” Again his hand stabbed toward the door. “You heard me say let’s get going, didn’t you? That’s what you’d better do. Right now.”

  Sarah wheeled toward the bedroom. But the man jumped forward, his hands clamping on her wrists. He wrenched her arms together, crossing them. His strength was hard and animal-like and he hurt her.

  “What’re you trying to pull?”

  “I want to tell my son good-by!”

  “Yeah? Skip it. You got other worries now, Mrs. Lineyack. You forget the kid.”

  Sarah struggled against his hard hands, gasping, “Let me see Jonnie again! Please! Oh, dear God, let me say good-by to Jonnie.”

  His old eyes were sardonic, unsympathetic. “I ain’t God,” he said. “And I don’t like the way you’re acting, lady. Am I going to have to slap bracelets on you?”

  “You’re a beast! A cruel beast!”

  “Yeah, and you’re in a jam, lady.”

  The will to resist fell out of Sarah then, and she turned and stumbled to the door. The man stayed beside her, a hand on her arm. They went into the hall and he yanked her to a brief stop while he pulled the door shut behind them.

  “The kid will be okay. We’ll send a matron up here for him,” he said. He pushed her toward the elevator.

  No more was said until they were on the street. Then the man pointed at Sarah’s automobile, demanding, “That the car you used, eh?”

  “Yes,” Sarah admitted dully

  “We’ll take it. I’ll drive. You’re doing fine now, Mrs. Lineyack.”

  He was not a good driver. He let the motor labor to death twice before he thought of releasing the hand brake, and afterward he handled the turns awkwardly. He did not roll the windows down, and soon the inside of the coupe was sour with the odor of old cigar smoke that came from him.

  Sarah rode numbly, as distantly from him as she could crowd on the seat. The man repelled her, but this seemed a minor matter. What I must do, she thought wildly, is get order out of this chaos, take a stand, pick an attitude for myself. She must take from confusion something to cling to while clubbing away the worst of discouragement.

  Slowly the car made its way. Such puddles of water as it passed through—the driver avoided some with what seemed a rather puzzling display of fear of trivialities—were negotiated with long sobbings. The sky now stood less than a fourth skullcapped by clouds, but no moonlight spilled down, although the stars were pin-pointed against the blackness beyond palm tops like clenched upheld fists. But only in half the sky.

  The man spoke sourly.

  “I’m taking you to the new precinct station. It’s out in the suburb a ways.”

  Sarah was silent. She needed silence. Her effort, the grasping for composure, seemed to be paying a slight dividend in calm. She had always supposed that she possessed slightly more than the usual amount of self-sufficiency, but for a while back there the bottom had gone out of everything. Her thinking had frozen. But now the barrier broke and her mind sprang into action—too jerkily, though; one thought chased another in headlong fashion. The worst was on her. That was sure. Ivan Spellman Lineyack, her father-in-law, would personally, and with his attorneys, strive to crucify her. But she knew she could face the old man’s vindictiveness far easier than the loss of the boy. She was Jonnie’s mother. She would fight for her son. The old man’s vengeance would be a grim thing, and she would need everyth
ing she could gather against it. She would need her friends. Thinking of those on whom she could call for support, she listed a number—Mr. Collins, owner of the yard, would stand by her. And others. Oh, many. And Captain Most, too. The latter stood specially in her thoughts. Captain Most, a strong man, would be an asset. And such was her opinion of the man that it did not occur to her that Most might not want to involve himself….

  Unexpectedly the driver wheeled the car to the curb, stopped it. He began pulling gadgets on the instrument panel, waiting in each case to learn what happened—until finally, when he had drawn the choke, he seemed to have succeeded. He held the choke out until the engine flooded and died.

  “You wait here awhile, Mrs. Lineyack.” His words had an evil sound. “The engine’s flooded. But you wait, and later it’ll start for you.”

  Sarah stared. She was confused. And inexplicably frightened.

  “You’re not a policeman!”

  He knocked the door open on his side. He got out. “Figure it out for yourself, Mrs. Lineyack.” He slammed the door.

  Another automobile was overtaking them. This second car had been following them, Sarah suddenly knew. She hadn’t realized this before.

  Facing the oncoming machine, plastered by its headlights, the man shot up an arm, jerked it down. The horn of the other car grunted briefly in response. The man hesitated, then turned back and yanked the door open and leaned in again to address Sarah. “You’re not the crybaby sort, Mrs. Lineyack,” he said. “I’m kind of glad of that. It don’t make me feel so bad about doing this to you.”

  He was, Sarah understood numbly, showing the first and only true emotion he had displayed.

  The man slammed the door and ran to the other car. It had stopped. Sarah could hear him splattering through a puddle of water, and the only thing she could think of was a triviality: He’s getting those shiny yellow shoes wet. Nothing else made sense.

  The man dived into the other machine and it left at once. It chased away after the fast-moving milky smear its headlights made.

  Chapter Six

  SARAH MADE AN INSTINCTIVE move. She switched on the headlights. She stared after the other machine. But she was not able to distinguish the license numerals, not even whether it was a Florida plate. Thwarted, she turned off the lights again, just as the fugitive car took a turn and was gone.

  The need for action came at her and, hard-driven by it, she turned the ignition switch and jammed a thumb against the starter button. But the engine groaned and groaned and stayed dead. She threw open the door and leaped out on the pavement. For lack of a plan, she found herself making false starts, first ahead on the street, then back to the car, and then toward one of the houses, before she drew more to composure.

  This seemed to be a residential area, middle-class, staid. The houses were all dark, no lighted windows anywhere.

  Sarah stumbled toward the nearest residence. But it came into her mind—not a bit too soon, either, because she was racing up a cement walk to a porch—that the police must not know of this. Not yet. She stopped cold. Perhaps she might still take her son away. That hope, wild and primitive, transcended all else, even the black mystery of what had happened. Sarah wheeled and ran back to the rented automobile.

  She made the engine go. She had thrown off some excitement and she could blame darkly her failure to remember how to start a flooded engine. Never one patient with her own shortcomings, forgetting how to start a flooded engine seemed particularly stupid. The way you did it was to step hard on the accelerator so that the throttle was wide open and turn the engine over a number of times with the starter, thus clearing out the too-rich gasoline mixture. Flooding was a frequent occurrence with boat engines, and she should have known.

  Puzzled now, namelessly afraid, unable to fit sense to what had happened, she drove a few blocks in a direction the other machine might have gone. She found no trace of it. She sent the car wildly toward her apartment.

  Leaving the car in front of her apartment house, she remembered she didn’t have her key. This came to her as she laid her hand against the lobby door. The key was in her purse, which she had left on the living-room table. The door resisted her, for it was locked.

  Her finger was hard and aching for an age against the call button before Mr. Cline came. Mr. Cline flapped in nightshirt and robe.

  “Gee whiz, Mrs. Lineyack!” The old janitor’s rheumy eyes blamed her for disturbing his sleep. “I heard you first time you rang.”

  “You were asleep?”

  “Course I was!” the old man said grumpily.

  “But—then no police—have been to see you?”

  “Huh?” Surprise whipped the old janitor erect, widened his eyes, tugged his jaw downward. “Cops?” he said. “What cops do you mean?”

  Wordless with the hard weight of new fears, Sarah pushed past him and to the elevator. Mr. Cline pattered along after her, carpet slippers slapping against his feet. He cried excitedly, “What’s this? What’s wrong, Mrs. Lineyack? Something wrong?”

  “I don’t know,” Sarah said in a not at all solid voice. “I think so. Will you come up, please, and let me into my apartment.”

  The old man’s moist eyes followed her into the elevator; reluctantly, timidly, he got in himself. The years had carried him past any liking for excitement, and also his life had not been successful, so that he was a man easily filled with apprehensions.

  Sarah strode out on the fourth floor, and the janitor hung back and his plaintive, “Mrs. Lineyack, what’s the matter?” was a plea that he have none of this. Sarah came back and gripped his arm. “Please open my door, Mr. Cline!”

  He unlocked the door. Sarah flew past him with arms down tight at her sides. Already she had a sick sense of what she would find. And it was so. It was as she expected. Jonnie was not in the bedroom. Jonnie was not in the apartment anywhere. Her son was gone. Jonnie was gone.

  Hardly any of Mr. Cline’s timidity left him, but, head extended turtle-fashion, he ventured into the apartment. His eyes watched Sarah as she fell in a frenzy upon the places that a two-and-a-half-year-old boy might have gotten by himself.

  On the bedroom chest of drawers the electric clock purred so gently that it could not be heard more than a few inches away, and in the kitchen the refrigerator was but a trifle more noisy. Elsewhere there was stillness, except inside Sarah, for her pulse was hammering in an erratic way, like an animal coughing. The old man giggled. “Looks all right to me, Mrs. Lineyack!” he said shrilly.

  Sarah came woodenly toward him and past him and on to the elevator. A silly grin rode the janitor’s face; he swiveled to watch her. He tittered. “Nothin’s wrong as I can see. Whassa matter? You just get scared?”

  But in a moment his grin lost its reasons for being—relief, inane glee—it was only a shape on his tired, sleep-dulled old face. For Sarah had gone into the elevator and the elevator descended, leaving Mr. Cline behind.

  In the street there were small foxtails of darkish smoke drifting from the exhaust pipe of her rented car to remind Sarah that she had not shut off the engine. She got behind the wheel and pulled the shift lever toward her and down for low gear. But before the machine had gone more than a few feet she caught a sound, an alarming whimper, eerie in the night-gripped city. She stopped the car and listened…. The sound was a police siren. Approaching.

  Here, suddenly, was dilemma. She stood confronted with the need for a decision. Take her chances with the police now? I am the victim of a strange thing. A dark plan had closed on her. And it seemed logical that, since there was a plot, it would have foreseen—planned on—the logical fact of the police arresting her. Ergo, to confute the enemy, she must avoid arrest. She would talk to her lawyer before she did anything. She drove on.

  The police car came into the street three blocks behind Sarah. Two white eyes and a single red one, its lights reeled into view. Sarah made sure that it was going to curb itself at her apartment building. After that she turned the first corner and drove carefully a lit
tle under the speed limit.

  Attorney Calvin Brandeis Brill had his office in the Biscayne Center Building, a few blocks from Miami’s impressive skyscraper county offices building. Sarah had been there twice. In all, she’d had seven personal interviews with Brill. The two at his office, three at her apartment, two on what might be called dinner dates. That seemed a lot for the few days since Mr. Arbogast’s employee, Lida Dunlap, had introduced her to Brill.

  The Biscayne Center Building, encased in gaudy brick that was just a shade less white than it had once been, seemed empty of life. The cigar stand stood hooded; wall-cases were shuttered and padlocked. Chipped and scarred floor tiles had that slippery air of having been recently scrubbed.

  Sarah’s footsteps, driven in haste, made quick whetting sounds in the sour cavity of the lobby. She reached the elevators. There were four. One waited, holding open a large empty dark mouth. She began ringing, a finger on the call button hard and continuously. A fitful clucking began in the shaft behind the wired-glass doors, and by fits and starts another cage came and the doors opened awkwardly. A crone face peered out at her suspiciously.

  “Attorney Brill’s office,” Sarah requested, stepping into the elevator.

  The woman was about fifty, sloppy-fat, with hair like the mane of a gray mule. She peered owlishly. “Ain’t nobody here.”

  “Please take me to the fifth floor!” Sarah said impatiently.

  Sullenness touched the woman and she used a large dusting rag for gesturing. “Ain’t a soul around, I tell you.”

  Sarah shook her head. “No… I’m sure Mr. Brill would return to his office. He would be expecting—well—he is surely here.”

  “Brill, huh? And what floor you say, dearie? Fifth?” The charwoman snuffled and scrubbed her nose with the back of a hand. She complained, “I tell you there ain’t no use—”

  Sarah’s tension drove an angry edge against the woman’s disgruntlement.

  “Take me to the fifth floor, please. And hurry,” she commanded.