Lady Afraid

by Lester Dent

  Most wheeled on him. “Driscoll, I told you to shut up!”

  “Murder!” Driscoll yelled in alarm. “I know nothing about a murder!” He leveled an arm at Alice Mildred. “I hardly know this old woman! I met her only once before tonight. Only once. She’s cracked. She’s been under a doctor’s care. She’s not responsible. I don’t know why the hell she came here. Get her out of here.” His voice shot up and rang pugnaciously as he warned, “Watch out, brother! Don’t you touch me!”

  For Most was going at Driscoll with a hard springy stride. Driscoll jumped backward and away from Most, and his hand swept up a bottle that stood beside the cigar humidor. He held the bottle by its neck and broke the bottom from it with a smash against the table. He struck a stance with his weapon ready.

  “Stop it!” Sarah cried.

  Alice Mildred gathered herself with infinite effort, gained her feet, trembling, and began, “Mr. Driscoll, I am so sorry—”

  “Get off this boat!” Driscoll bellowed at her. “I don’t know what you came after, and I don’t want to know.”

  The old lady stared at him steadily. “Mr. Driscoll, you can forget it. I have learned what I came here to learn.”

  Driscoll snorted. “I haven’t told you a thing! And I don’t need old Ivan’s truck line bad enough to get involved with his crazy wife and murder. You can just tell him that!”

  “Cut it out, Driscoll,” Most said. And he added, almost as if it would be a pleasure, “Maybe you have never seen what a chair will do to a man who puts as much trust in a broken bottle as you’re putting in that one.”

  Sarah threw Most a glance. “Captain, you’re making a fool of yourself.”

  Most grinned a little fiercely but loosened the set of his shoulders and deliberately erased the hardness from his face.

  “I guess so,” he said.

  Alice Mildred held out a veined hand the hue of skim milk. “Sarah,” she said shakily, “Sarah, we Lineyacks have given you nothing but evil. But will you help me? Will you? I need your help.”

  “Do you know where Jonnie is?”

  The old lady shook her head. “I only know why this was made to happen—only why.”

  “Then how—”

  “We will talk to Ivan,” Alice Mildred said. “We will tell Ivan what I know. Ivan will want to get our little boy back. He will want him back very badly. Ivan always gets what he wants. My husband is a terribly capable man.” The old lady had spoken this succession of sentences, which were of about the same length, in about the same unmodulated voice, unvarying, without inflection, without—quite—life. “Come,” she added, and moved toward the door.

  Most swung to the scowling and uneasy Driscoll, asking, “Have you a car we can use to take Mrs. Lineyack home?” It was a hopeless request, Sarah thought. But Driscoll surprised her; he dropped his eyes and his solid face grew ashamed. His hands carried the broken bottle out of sight behind his back, as if ashamed of that too. “I’ve got a blue roadster parked next to the gangplank. Use that.” He dipped a hand into a pocket. “Here are the keys.”

  “Okay to leave the car at the Lineyacks?” Most asked.

  “Yes. I’ll send Jim for it.”

  “What did she come here to ask you?”

  “I don’t know,” Driscoll said gloomily. “I haven’t the least idea. I tell you the fact, I only saw her once before in my life.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  UNREST LOOSENED ITS GRIP on Sarah when she was sure that Most was not going to have any final trouble with Driscoll. She went out of the houseboat and down the gangplank. She had now a warm moment in which she appreciated Most greatly. He was proving as firm a man as she had supposed he was. A quiet man, gentle. True, he had been neither quiet nor gentle a moment ago, but this did not fool her. It merely meant that Most was able to raise his own tempo to meet a need.

  Sarah overtook Alice Mildred. “You won’t need to walk, Mother Lineyack. Mr. Driscoll is letting us use his car.”

  The tired eyes rested on Sarah wonderingly. “Mother Lineyack…. You have always addressed me that way when you were being hurt, haven’t you, Sarah?”

  “I—suppose so.”

  “Do you hate me now, Sarah?”

  Sarah shook her head slowly. “No. I don’t believe I do.”

  “Why not, my dear?”

  “I don’t know, Mother Lineyack. Perhaps I have no room left for anything but anxiety about my son,” Sarah said wearily. “And also… well, I was never able somehow to get close to you. But tonight—tonight it hasn’t been that way.” Sarah hesitated, frowning, wondering just what it was she was feeling and trying to put into words. “I don’t really know what the difference is tonight,” she said.

  “Perhaps,” said the old lady, “the difference lies in me, Sarah.”

  Sarah nodded. “I think it does.”

  The old lady’s chin lifted. “You’re a direct woman, Sarah.”

  “I suppose so,” Sarah admitted briefly. “You never liked that, did you? It always stood as a sort of fence between us.”

  Alice Mildred quickly touched her breast with a thin hand. “Any fences that were in here, Sarah, were built by myself,” she said bitterly.

  Here stands, Sarah thought painfully, an old woman who has been led through a completely unhappy life. This hypersensitive woman should never have married a man of Ivan’s sort, who was a physiological extreme. Ivan was too completely her opposite: he had every excess of boldness, energy, assertiveness, moral callousness. It must have been inevitable that there could be no mating of their temperaments. Alice Mildred was the one certain to be spiritually demolished.

  Most came now, tossing the car keys thoughtfully in his hand, and they went to Driscoll’s roadster. It was really a convertible coupe, a long, flashy car which, with its air, a bit too much of expensiveness and gaudiness, fitted Driscoll’s personality. Most opened the door. Alice Mildred sat in the middle, Sarah on the right, and Most got behind the wheel and fitted the key in the ignition switch. The engine caught powerfully, and they moved at once.

  Driscoll was standing on the houseboat deck, watching them leave; he lifted a hand in farewell. Most brought up his own hand in answer. Sarah looked back at Driscoll’s figure, outlined substantially in the light that spilled from the houseboat cabin. He isn’t a mean man, she thought. He is a man who has made himself, and he values the possessions he now has, and we frightened him greatly.

  The convertible top was down. The wind touched their faces. Most threw a glance at the sky, as if vaguely surprised that it was still night, as if he felt that night should be gone. But there was darkness. Not exactly warm, a little mucid, one of Miami’s less pleasant winter nights.

  “I think it’s going to rain again,” Most remarked.

  Sarah, suddenly with her face in her hands, gasped, “Oh, hurry!”

  Most jumped as if struck.

  Alice Mildred clung to Sarah wildly. “My dear, my poor dear!” she said in a thin, aching voice. “How awful this is for you! How awful!”

  “Please! Please don’t bother about me, Mother Lineyack! I’m just—”

  Most, his long face suddenly lying in planes of anger, said to the old lady, “If you know where the boy is, why not say so? And if you know who killed Brill, why not say that too? Why not—”

  “I must talk to Ivan,” the tired old voice told him.

  “Talk to Ivan!” he said violently. “I heard you. And Sarah heard you, and it’s driving her out of her mind. Sarah has been through a lot tonight, Mother Lineyack. I don’t see how she goes on taking it.”

  The old lady looked away woodenly.

  “No, no, I must tell Ivan,” she said dully. “When Ivan hears what I know—then Ivan will find our little boy.”

  “But if you would tell us first—”

  “You will see, once we face Ivan. Then you will understand.”

  Most breathed a fervent “Damn!” that came from very deep in his heart. Then he tried again, demanding, “Does Ivan know whe
re Jonnie is?”

  “Ivan know?… No, I don’t suppose he does,” the old lady said vaguely.

  “Then how in God’s name—”

  Sarah leaned across, touched Most’s arm, and said, “Please, Captain…. Mother Lineyack must know what she’s doing.”

  The old lady turned slowly to Sarah and said, “I hope I do know, Sarah,” and burst into tears. The sobs were hard and painful, like stones in her throat for a time, and then she began whimpering about the child. “Such a wonderful little boy…. He is beginning to color with crayons in his play books. He does it so seriously, so desperately. He holds the colored crayon with both hands and makes the marks so firmly, with such a funny expression on his little face, his tongue stuck out, his eyes shining…”

  Most drove with an alarmed air. He saw himself with a good chance of having two hysterical women on his hands. The old lady had already come apart; Sarah was showing signs of it. There was something primitive, intense, about women concerned over a child, with which he couldn’t cope.

  The distance to the Lineyack home was short, and Most was probably relieved that it was. He did not drive directly to the house, but stopped the car on the street about a hundred yards from the place. He stared dubiously toward the house—its upper floor and lighted windows a crown sitting on the darker, flatter shrubbery.

  “You two better wait here,” he said. “I’ll take a look and see how much excitement there is. No need of getting grabbed by the cops before we even see Ivan.”

  He had opened the door and had a leg out when Sarah said, “I’m going to give myself up anyway.”

  He swung his long solid body around in surprise. “We’ve been over that before, haven’t we? Once the police have you, they will feel they have the one who took the boy and—”

  Sarah told him wearily, “Maybe it is unwise—I don’t know. But I do know that I simply cannot go through any more of this futile hunting in the night. This helpless groping! All the while not knowing whether my son is safe!”

  Most lowered his eyes and his hand touched the steering wheel, gripped it with a thwarted force. “I don’t blame you much. I guess I’m a washout as a fixer-upper.”

  “I don’t mean that at all,” Sarah said.

  Sarah watched him walk away, be swallowed by the shadows, and was sorry for him. But her intention was in no way altered. Her dilemma was quite simply put: She’d had all of this she could take. Perhaps surrendering to the police would not help find the boy. But the police were a great force; they were an army. They were equipped with wiles and experience for dealing with venality. She would convince them she had taken her son, then lost him. She would. The police would have to believe her. Still, it was not easy to face the chance of taking a wrong course. Most, she had seen, took a cloudy view of it; she strongly felt his disapproval. But what else was there to do? Were they getting anywhere? She could not see that they were—they had not found a trace of Jonnie. Distraught, gored by uncertainty, Sarah laid a temple against the cold edge of the door and stared at the damp cropped grass between the car and the sidewalk and the black-packed shrubbery beyond. She waited, listening to Alice Mildred’s quiet sobbing.

  A man came out of the shrubbery and she supposed Most had returned. She did not lift her face from the cooling metal of the car door or raise her eyes, and then she noticed the yellow shoes there on the dew-jeweled grass.

  Chapter Seventeen

  YELLOW-SHOES WORE FEAR like a coat. It overspread his gray-ridden face; it even seemed manifest in the shapeless way the seersucker suit avoided fitting his body, and in the cant of the slightly greasy-looking knot of his necktie, which hung a little loose, like a hangman’s knot not yet in its proper place, under his left ear.

  “Don’t yell. I ain’t gonna hurt you,” he said hoarsely. But then his right hand lied; it came out of a pocket and there was a gun in it. He added, “Stay in the car. I’m gonna drive.”

  He went around to the other side of the car and slid stiffly behind the wheel. He started the engine. He U-turned the convertible in the street.

  Alice Mildred whimpered now and twisted, clutching Sarah, pressing against Sarah. The old lady was terrified. And she had moved so suddenly that Sarah thought the man would shoot. But he only looked a little sick. Over Alice Mildred’s thin white hair Sarah watched Yellow-shoes.

  He asked, “Is she old Lineyack’s wife?”

  Sarah nodded wordlessly.

  “Listen, I don’t plan to hurt you. I ain’t going to harm her either,” he said.

  “Then put away that—that gun!” Sarah told him grimly. “She’s probably afraid of it. I’m afraid of them too. They scare me to death.”

  He shook his head. “Huh-uh. I may need to use it.” His tongue made a quick pass at his lips, then he added, “But not on you two.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Lady, I’m quitting the deal. I didn’t bargain for no killing. I figure there’s a way out right now, and I’m going to take it.”

  Sarah watched his dark, terror-marked face wonderingly. There had been nothing behind them to indicate that Most had discovered what had happened. The car moved through the streets quietly, making a palliating hum with its engine. Its flashy blue color and the sharp fashionable lines seemed subdued.

  Yellow-shoes needed to talk. Sarah could almost see the words gather in him and expand, like heat that had to escape.

  And suddenly the words burst out of him. “Brandy Brill—dead! I saw him! As dead as a doornail!” This came like coughing.

  “Did you see him killed?” Sarah asked sharply.

  “No, no! I seen you find the body.”

  “Oh!”

  “I hear you let out that squall, see. I ain’t standing quite where I can see you, so I don’t know for sure what gives. But I take a look, naturally, and I see you run. But I still don’t make what’s in the station wagon. Only I don’t dare go close—no point in getting the cops interested in me, I figure. I watch some neighbor guy rush up, and from him I learn it’s a body, because that’s what he yells it is. But then I don’t know whose body. I don’t think of Brill—that don’t enter my head. If I woulda been told it’s Brandy Brill, a knife stuck in his ear, I wouldn’t believe it…. I take a walk for a coupla blocks and turn back and join up with some tourists who couldn’t sleep, have heard the noise, and are coming to see what’s the excitement.”

  Sarah, watching him, noticed how his sentences grew longer and less like yappings as he talked it out of his mind. He was a man, clearly, who needed to talk out emotional tension the way some walk it off.

  He continued: “Ain’t that like a tourist, get up in middle of the night to see what’s going on? They come from a small town, I guess…. Anyway, I walk back to the station wagon with them, and who is to know I didn’t just arrive on the scene? Cops are there now. They ain’t moved the body, because they ain’t got around to taking their pictures and that other stuff they do. But they got a spotlight on one of their cars turned on the body. And I see it is Brill.”

  Here he broke his story; it snapped off in his throat like an icicle. He gave Sarah a glazed look. Such a stare, she could imagine, had come into his eyes when he saw who the dead man was. He was no friend of murder, this fellow.

  “Who killed him?” Sarah asked.

  “Why, Brill got—” He hesitated, grew wary; he gave his attention intently to the dark streets through which they moved.

  Sarah thought: He isn’t going to talk any more. He has it out of his system.

  Alice Mildred seemed to have her eyes closed. Her thin body lay tightly against Sarah, unmoving, a sheath of bones without animation. The sobbing had ended. But the old lady’s breathing was heavy, irregularly spaced, and sometimes there were tiny mewing sounds with the indrawn breaths.

  “Brill got what?” Sarah asked the man desperately.

  “Got killed,” the man said finally, and shuddered. “Look, lady, we didn’t kill him. He was a friend of mine. I used to know Brandy Br
ill in Chicago, and I’d throw stuff his way now and then, and he did me a couple of little favors. You see what I mean—not close friends, but not enemies either. And down here in Miami, during the last year, I been able to put him on to a couple of things, and he tossed a buck to me a time or two when I needed it bad.”

  I was wrong, Sarah thought. He’s going to keep on talking. But why?

  “We?” Sarah prompted. She watched his face closely. “By we you mean Brill and yourself? Who else? Cokerham—Dewey Cokerham? Who else do you mean?”

  He threw her a disgusted look and said, “You don’t need to put the pump on me, lady. If I didn’t have reasons for telling you this, you wouldn’t get a word. You’re not making me talk—I’m telling you voluntarily. Get that straight, will you?”

  “Yes, I see.”

  “I’ll tell you why, too,” he said grimly. “The cops are going to get you, lady. Maybe they won’t get you in five minutes from now, or in an hour, but they’ll get you, because you can’t be lucky forever. And when they do, I want you to have a straight story to tell them. You tell them the truth, see. And the truth is that we didn’t kill Brill. He was our pal. We were working with him on a side deal. We had no reason to knock him off.”

  “How many of you?” Sarah asked.

  “You named them a minute ago.”

  “You-Brill-Cokerham?”

  “Uh-huh. And one other.”

  “Who else?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Four of you?”

  “Yeah, four. Just four of us in on the side deal.”

  “What do you mean by a side deal?”

  The man hesitated, fell to chewing his lower lip doubtfully. He repeated, “I’m giving you facts, lady. And you understand why, don’t you? It’s so that the cops will know we didn’t kill Brill. So they won’t try to rap us with murder.”

  “Yes, I understand,” Sarah assured him.

  He nodded. “Here’s what I mean by side deal. The big deal was Brill being hired to trick you into taking the little boy.” He turned his mouth corners down, added, “And the side deal was this: Brill got together with us on the idea of taking him away from you. That was a twist we thought up to make some extra money. Let you take the kid, let the thing get far enough along that nobody could back out, then demand a nice piece of change of the people who hired Brill for letting it go ahead.” He stared gloomily beyond the gun at the street. He still carried the gun in the hand that he was steering with. “So we tried that,” he said. “So Brill got that knife in his ear. So will I and so will my two friends—if we stand still for it.”