Lady Afraid

by Lester Dent

  “Never mind. It’s done,” Arbogast said.

  Chapter Twelve

  ABEL MAURICE HAD A heavy body and a broad tired face that appeared to have been molded by fifty-five years of completely dull existence. He lived in a stucco bungalow. It was on Eighteenth Terrace, well out, a tiny house so imitation Spanish that it was sad and a little ridiculous.

  Abel Maurice opened the door for them wearing a washed-out and faded-out blanket bathrobe over, Sarah suspected, nothing but underwear. He looked tousled, had a sleep-dulled expression, and he complained, “I thought the doorbell was the telephone. Kept tryin’ to answer the phone…. What’s on your mind?”

  Captain Most asked, “You are Mr. Maurice, of Maurice and Black, private detectives? This is the address we found in a telephone directory.”

  “That’s right.”

  “You’ve been handling a job for an attorney named Calvin Brandeis Brill. We’d like to discuss it,”

  Mr. Maurice jerked a thumb vaguely at regions behind him. “The girl’s asleep. No need of waking her up.” He stepped out, closed the door, and indicated the steps. “We can sit out here, can’t we? You people won’t mind?” He yawned and scratched himself and sat on the steps, which were of concrete with an edging of bricks.

  Sarah had been fighting her fears all during the ride from Arbogast’s apartment house and had not been very successful. She sat on one of the lower steps, hands clasping her knees, half turned so that she could watch the private detective’s face.

  Abel Maurice looked at her thoughtfully, then he looked at Most, and he asked Most, “Chance of mooching a cigarette, pal?”

  “Pipe,” Most said, tapping his pocket.

  Sarah, with steady enough hand, gave the sleuth a cigarette and a light. Mr. Maurice drew fire into the cigarette, took it from his lips, and lifted it by way of thanks. Then he examined his bare feet for a while. “So you want to discuss an attorney named Calvin Brandeis Brill?” he said.

  “Yes,” Sarah nodded. “You see, Brill—”

  “Let me,” interrupted Mr. Maurice, “say one thing before we start. It’s this: I don’t know no such guy.”

  “You—” Sarah stared at him unbelievingly.

  The private detective shifted the cigarette to the other corner of his mouth. “Never heard of him.”

  “Oh!” Sarah was flattened by this. She threw Most a helpless look. Most had his lower lip pushed out and his eyes narrowed, and he was watching Mr. Maurice. With no friendliness Most said to the detective, “As it happens, the lady was told by Brill that you wouldn’t know anything about the case if you were asked.”

  “That so?” Mr. Maurice matched Most’s unveiled suspicion. “Meaning what?”

  “Just a point,” Most said.

  “I see. A point, eh? Well, well!” The detective’s face seemed to get more tired. “Look, pal, it’s past three o’clock in the morning. I am up to nearly one, playing bridge, with the girl jawing at me all evening because I play bridge like a cub bear. We come home, and the girl jaws another hour or so before I get started sleeping…. Oh well, skip it. I’ve got a point too. It’s this: I’m tired and my feelings hurt easy when I’m tired.”

  Most, not impressed, said, “This happens to be a serious matter.”

  “Oh, I can see that. I read it on your faces. I see much the same thing on the faces of most of my clients, but you’ll probably not be interested in that.”

  “What about Black?” Most asked.

  “Black?”

  “Your partner in the detective agency.”

  Mr. Maurice threw the cigarette away. A short coughing laugh expanded his cheeks momentarily. There was no humor in it. “Wait a sec,” he said. And he stood up and opened the door and called, “Hon, will you come out here a minute?”

  Presently a tall, bony, hatchet-faced woman of about the sleuth’s age came and stood in the doorway. Her hair was tangled, she wore a heliotrope robe, and two ostrich-trimmed mules were on her feet crookedly.

  Mr. Maurice said, “Sweet, these people want to know what about Cy Black.”

  “He’s been dead four years. What could be about him?” The woman had a too-deep, too-melodious voice, a powerful one that Sarah felt could easily become very tiresome.

  “Honey, what did Cy Black die of?” asked Mr. Maurice.

  The woman began to look disgruntled. “Cancer,” she said.

  “Sugar, what about Brill?”

  “Brill? Brill who?” The woman frowned at her husband.

  “Do we have or have we had a client by such a name? Calvin Brandeis Brill.”

  “Not that I’ve heard of.”

  “Thank you, peach,” Mr. Maurice said.

  The woman hesitated, then shrugged and withdrew into the house, closing the door. They heard her, in a moment, stumble over an article of furniture in the darkened house, and then they heard her curse two awful oaths. Mr. Maurice smiled tiredly.

  “The girl runs my office. She’d know if I had a client named Brill.” The sleuth eyed his bare toes, turning them up as far as they would go and then turning them down. “She never tells a lie, not that you would know about that,” he added.

  A heavy futility on her, Sarah sat with eyes lifted, staring blankly at the night sky. How much longer was each of her steps to be taken into empty space? She was becoming very weary of emptiness.

  “I’m sorry.” Mr. Maurice was looking at Sarah. “I was a little corny, I guess. But the fact is that I don’t know any Brill and my partner Black has been buried four years. Nice guy, too. So nice I never changed the firm name.” He stood and tightened the cord of his robe. He laid a hand on the door to re-enter the house, then hesitated, frowning at Sarah. He asked, “Am I right in understanding this Brill told you I was doing a job for him?”

  Sarah nodded bitterly. “So he said.”

  “I don’t like that much,” the private detective stated.

  “If I described Brill, Mr. Maurice, maybe you would know him.”

  “Well, you can try that.”

  But when Sarah had given him the clearest word picture of Brill she could form, Mr. Maurice shook his head. “That doesn’t hook up to anybody I know.”

  Sarah described Yellow-shoes.

  Another headshake. “Him neither,” Mr. Maurice said.

  Ides was next. Sarah clearly remembered what Ides looked like. She had been so frightened when Ides confronted her on the bugeye that the man had cut a sharp image into her mind.

  Mr. Maurice fiddled with his bathrobe cord. “I think we got a bite,” he said. “You say a pale skin, eh? Kind of dry-looking, wasn’t it? Did he have asthma?”

  Sarah leaped to her feet. “Yes! Why, yes! I believe he did! The heavy, labored breathing when he stood there on the bugeye listening—he hadn’t been hurrying. Asthma would explain that, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yeah, but the sand-throated voice you mentioned tipped me off,” said the private detective. “Only I didn’t meet him as Ides. Name then was Cokerham, or something like that. Dewey Cokerham, I think it was. I met him in a bookie place three or four times, and he got to trying to tell me how to pick horses and I remember giving him my business card, figuring a guy that nuts about playing the races is likely to have girl-friend or wife trouble and need a snooping job.”

  “Where does Cokerham, or Ides, live?” Sarah asked excitedly.

  “Search me.”

  “Could you find out?”

  Mr. Maurice scratched his head, then he looked at Captain Most, and it was to Most that he spoke, saying, “Well, now we’ve come to what I usually call professional services.”

  Most nodded. “I’ll hire you.”

  “Cost five bucks.”

  “That isn’t much,” Most said.

  “It is for the job—if I’m lucky,” Mr. Maurice said dryly. “A guy who follows the nags the way this Ides or Cokerham does would have his address with the bookie so the bookie’s runners could call on him to take or leave dough. All I gotta do is phone the bookie, T
ed Roan—if I’m lucky.”

  Frowning, understanding that he had been sucked in, Most burned over it in silence; then he smiled a thin smile. “What was it the automobile mechanic said? For tightening the bolt, ten cents; for knowing what bolt to tighten, five dollars.” He extended a greenback.

  Mr. Maurice chuckled. “You’re okay, pal.” He pocketed the bill and opened the door. “Take me a couple or three minutes. You folks like to wait inside?”

  They stepped into an imitation-Spanish front room filled with the sort of stuff that comes all in one truckload from a furniture store that has a Spanish-room display. Sarah sat on a straight-backed chair under an imitation-tapestry banner that hung from a make-believe iron spear. Most perched dubiously on a stool. The stool had iron legs.

  Mr. Maurice shuffled through a plaster arch into a hall, then into a bedroom, and closed the bedroom door. Instantly there were voices. His voice, the woman’s. Excitement quickly came into both voices. The private detective jumped back into the room.

  “The girl’s called the cops!” he said shrilly. He looked at Sarah and explained, “She recognized you from a description she heard over the radio earlier.” He grimaced and spread his hands and added, “When I called her out and asked funny questions about Brill and Black, she concluded I wanted the cops called. You better scram.”

  Most said sharply, “What about Cokerham or Ides’s address?”

  “I tell you what—you call me. Half an hour. Telephone. If I’ve got it, I’ll give it to you.”

  Nodding, Most said, “It would help a lot if you meant that.”

  Mr. Maurice suddenly seemed older and a little pale. He said, “Lover!”

  His wife appeared behind him in the bedroom door and she was holding a twelve-gauge repeating shotgun horizontally at the level of her hips. She said, “It’s all right, Abel.”

  They stood there, a frightened man and wife, wanting only to be clear of this thing; certainly they now had no wish to help, and this was understandable, if self-centered, harsh.

  A film of moisture appeared on Mr. Maurice’s forehead, like a frying pan that had been greased. He said, “Get out of here! You been going to the movies and seeing the shamus play tricks on the cops. In real life it don’t go that way. Get out. I don’t want no shooting scrape in my house. Get out!” His voice, climbing, ended on a note flutelike and hysterical.

  Sarah watched the woman with the shotgun—she knew the woman was frightened, as apt to shoot as not. Then Sarah felt Most’s hand on her arm. He drew her to the door; they went out into the night. They walked to the station wagon. Most started the engine, and they drove away. They were silent.

  Sarah presently commenced to tremble, beginning with her knees. The shaking was not bad, but there was nothing she seemed to be able to do that would stop it; nothing that her thoughts could seize would help; she simply could not end the trembling.

  She sat dry-eyed, vibrating foolishly, and thinking of Jonnie, remembering the boy close to her; the child in her arms as he had been when she had left the Lineyack house with him. She remembered how she had carried him, how it had felt.

  “My son? Where is he?” Sarah sank her anguished face into both hands. “I’m afraid, Captain Most! I’m so afraid for Jonnie that I think it is going to paralyze me!”

  Most muttered, “Yes, I know,” in a bothered tone. And he drove on in silence, baffled by the impossibility of performing a transfusion of his own calmness to her.

  Most had, since leaving the private detective’s home, driven south, then west, and now the station wagon moved on a boulevard that, considering the lateness, had a reassuring amount of traffic. There was still evidence of the rain the day before, pools of water that now looked old, and Most avoided these. Glancing often at Sarah, his eyes seemed to be trying to find her composed. But while her thoughts were forlornly with the little boy, she was as hopeless as she had been at any time.

  “You’d better have some coffee,” Most said abruptly.

  Sighting a curb-service place ahead, he studied it as it drew near, concluded it was free of police, and turned in. He had seen that there were no waitresses serving cars; at this hour you parked and went inside for whatever you wanted. There were several other cars already in the place and two trucks. Most stopped the station wagon conveniently in black shadow beside one of the trucks. He switched off the engine, punched out the headlights.

  “I’ll bring something,” he offered. Then he added, “But it won’t be right away. I’m going to make a phone call.” He sat still for a few seconds before explaining, “I figure we should start the police hunting for Lida Dunlap and for Cokerham-Ides. I’ll call the night city editor I talked to before—Wilson—and tell him this is Cohen, the retired newspaperman, again. I’ll give him enough to get him excited about Cokerham and the Dunlap woman.”

  Sarah nodded. “There is another thing we might try.”

  He had opened the door. He turned and waited expectantly. “What?”

  Sarah said, “The private detective mentioned the name of a man who might have Cokerham-Ides’s address—a bookmaker named Ted Roan. Do you suppose Ted Roan would give you the address?”

  Most looked at her with satisfaction. “I was going to surprise you with that,” he said. He got out and walked, into the lunchroom, a tall angular man who clearly was pleased that she had thought of asking the bookie.

  When he was no longer in sight, Sarah settled back with the certainty that her anxieties would make another onslaught. They did. She defended herself against them. The end can be worth all this, she thought. If in the end she possessed the child she had created. It had been worth so much to have possessed him the little time she had. To hear his voice… Paul’s voice, she decided. He had Paul’s voice. Paul, had he been alive, would have been delighted, because Paul had fancied himself as a singer, and he had been good. Paul, whose weaknesses had been thrust irresistibly upon him by Ivan Lineyack, had been worthy of fathering her child. She remembered, with bitter sweetness, how they had enjoyed Jonnie when he was a small baby. A tiny child had been such a wonder; everything had seemed so different. Sarah had lived all her life on or around boats, and there is a kind of salt-pork reality about boats and the sea—a man’s world.

  Paul’s life had been softer than hers, so he may not have felt the wonder of a baby as much. Each thing about Sarah’s tiny baby had been deeply, heart-clutchingly exciting to her. What powder to buy, his formula, the proper softness of blanket—these became adventures greater than any she had known. The discovery that little babies shouldn’t sleep with pillows in their cribs, lest they smother, had been a greater thunderclap than having a sloop dismasted and sinking under her ever had been. Nothing had touched her so much before; nor had she dreamed anything could. With her baby in her arms warmly alive and excruciatingly a part of her, she had felt blindly surprised and the luckiest person there ever was.

  Sarah was sobbing quietly out of bottomless despair when Most returned. Most had come briskly. Sight of her tears blunted the excitement that was at him. He merely slid in behind the wheel and sat there in silence, a tray holding coffee and sandwiches balanced uncomfortably on his knees. “A woman’s best relief valve is her tears,” Sarah blurted finally.

  He cleared his throat, said, “I phoned the editor. He will see that the police put Cokerham and Lida Dunlap on their hunted list.”

  His fingers closed tentatively on a tall paper cup containing coffee as black as midnight.

  He added, “And Ted Roan, the bookie, came through with Cokerham’s address.”

  “You found out where Cokerham, or Ides, lives?” Sarah gasped.

  “Yes…. This may surprise you. It did me. He—Remember how he called out ‘Ahoy!’ as if he had been around boats?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s a boat hand. He’s the paid skipper on the Lineyacks’ cabin cruiser, Jonnie II.”

  Sarah’s throat whipped tight with surprise. “Ides works for Ivan Spellman Lineyack?”

&n
bsp; “Cokerham is his name. The Ides was just something he thought of.”

  A kind of wooden composure laid hold of Sarah. There was implication here, or interpretation, which could not be ignored.

  She said, “This involves the Lineyacks directly.”

  “It sure does.”

  Sarah made a decision. “I want to talk to Ivan.”

  Most agreed at once. “Maybe you should. But it might not be an easy thing to manage.” He lifted the coffee and held it out to her. “Drink your coffee. We’ll see what can be done. I got you hamburgers. That all right?”

  Chapter Thirteen

  FROM THE LUNCHROOM THEY drove back to Miami Beach and to the Lineyack home. Time, it seemed to Sarah, was walking on very slow feet; she could not believe her own wrist watch until Most showed her his. The hour was really not yet five, still full night. Most tugged his coat sleeve back over the watch and returned his hand to the steering wheel, with a forefinger outstretched toward the Lineyack place.

  “That it?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  He slackened speed, but not enough to seem to be loitering, as he drove past the Lineyack home. The house was on Most’s side of the street, and as Sarah watched the house she could also see the play of feeling, his reaction to the mansion, on Most’s angular, taciturn features. He was impressed. Surprise jerked his eyebrows into crutch arches. The tanned buckram composure of his face was momentarily unsettled. He had clearly expected a less pretentious place.

  In a few moments, with the Lineyack home now dropping behind them, he said, “Somebody misplaced the Kansas City Union Station, didn’t they?”

  She waited. She knew he was awed. He had seen startling evidence of wealth and power. Perhaps it had come to him for the first time that she was pitted against great power. And he, aiding her, could expect to feel its violence.

  If Most had thought of all this as an adventure for adventure’s sake, he saw differently now. Sarah waited for a sign that he had wavered. She recalled how, when the police car had fallen in behind them as they were en route to Arbogast’s apartment, she had wondered if Most carried it too well. Did he like excitement overmuch? This was still unanswered. Why, she thought, it’s becoming awfully important to me to know what stuff this man is made of. She had already seen that he was not afraid of other men. But why should he be? He was a man of overaverage muscularity; he would know by now that few men could best him. But how would he react, confronted with power in the hands of a foe? Real power—he couldn’t hope to match money power. How would he stand up to that sort of opponent?