His companion was of an entirely different type. The man was a giant. He had a square, lumpy face and heavy, sloping shoulders from which swung arms that seemed abnormally long. His clothes were several sizes too small for him, not to mention the fact that a Borneo bushman might have shown more taste in their color scheme.
Stacey forced a smile to his lips and shook his head. “The name’s Johnson. You probably have me confused with someone else.”
“I’m more than positive I haven’t.” the man in the black Homburg said evenly. “You look too much like Ben Stacey for there to be any mistake.”
Stacey said nothing. He didn’t intend to commit himself. The fact that this foppish stranger knew his father didn’t necessarily mean he was a friend.
The other’s even white teeth gleamed in a faintly mocking smile. “Your silence, I presume, is an admission that you’re actually Gregg Stacey. Let’s stop beating around the bush. You have part of a certain map, Mr. Stacey. I want to buy it.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Come, come, Mr. Stacey, I’m sure we have more important things to do than play games. I happen to know you have the map.”
Stacey’s mildly quizzical expression vanished. “Then you must be connected with the two men who came to me in Los Angeles. You’re here to get Norma Reddick’s half of the map, and the Los Angeles boys contacted you after I gave them the slip. Somehow, you knew I was coming to Seattle, to see the girl.”
“It pays to be informed, Mr. Stacey,” the other returned coolly. “At any rate, I’m sure this knowledge doesn’t affect my offer to buy your half of the map.”
Grimly Stacey pointed out: “Those Los Angeles boys tried to steal my half. That’s no way to do business. You’ve practically admitted being connected with them.”
“Allow me to apologize for the boys, then. They’re just a bit too impulsive sometimes.” The dapper stranger lifted slim shoulders in a shrug. “Suppose we return to the subject of the map, Mr. Stacey. As I said, I want to buy it. Name your price.”
“I haven’t anything to sell.”
“Is that a refusal?”
“You might put it that way.”
The other thoughtfully fingered his thin black mustache. He said finally, “Your words suggest that you’re in no position to sell the map, Mr. Stacey—even though you might like to. Is it because you don’t have the map with you?”
The question rang an alarm bell inside Stacey. It seemed abruptly clear to him that the stranger’s talk about buying the map was merely a subterfuge to determine whether or not Stacey had it in his possession. The two men in Los Angeles had searched his room after employing the same trick. There was little doubt in his mind about what the pair before him would do if he were to admit that he had the map on his person.
“You guessed it,” Stacey said. “After that stunt your friends tried to pull in Los Angeles, I decided I’d better be careful. So I mailed the map on ahead. Since you’re interested only in buying it, I’m sure it won’t be necessary for me to tell you where. The information wouldn’t do you any good anyway, since I’m the only one who can claim the letter.”
“Clever—but you hesitated just a bit too long, Mr. Stacey.” The man in the black Homburg smiled thinly and nodded at his hulking, clumsily dressed companion. “All right, Buck.”
The giant started forward, thick lips stretching in an eager grin. Stacey glanced quickly up and down the street. Nobody was in sight for the moment. He would have no help in what was shortly to take place.
But there was no time to worry over odds. Stacey moved into action. He ducked under Buck’s first swing and heaved his shoulder violently into the giant’s midriff. Buck staggered back, crashing into his dapper chief.
Whirling, Stacey darted for the entrance to the apartment hotel. He found the door handle and pulled. Nothing happened. The door seemed to be locked. Then he saw the small metal plate fixed to the frame. The door was to be pushed, not pulled against. But the information came too late to do Stacey any good. Before he could correct his mistake, Buck reached him again.
A great hand closed like a trap on Stacey’s shoulder. He felt himself swung around as easily as though he were a child. An enormous fist leaped out, exploding against his chin. All the lights went out.
* * * *
Stacey regained consciousness to find himself on a wheeltable in a small, white-painted room that smelled strongly of disinfectant. Pain beat a wild anvil chorus inside his skull.
After a while he sat up. The effort sent waves of white hot agony through him. He groaned. Raising his hands to his temples, he discovered that his head had been bandaged. Another discovery came a moment later. His clothes had been soaked with whiskey. Traces of it still lingered in his mouth.
“Awake, eh?” a voice asked cheerfully.
Stacey turned. A short, slender man in white trousers and tunic had entered the room. An intern, Stacey decided. He said:
“This is a hospital?”
The intern nodded. “A motorist found you draped over the tracks at a railroad crossing and brought you in. You were lucky, mister. A train was due in another ten minutes. And you were out cold. Probably stumbled and hit your head on the tracks.” He grinned. “That must have been some party!”
Stacey opened his mouth, then closed it. To explain what had actually happened to him would accomplish nothing useful. Going over the events which had lead to his awakening in the hospital, he thought suddenly of the map. Anxiety flaming through him, he reached quickly into the inner breast pocket of his coat.
The map was gone.
CHAPTER II
This time Stacey pushed. The door swung smoothly open, and he strode into the lobby of the apartment hotel where Norma Reddick lived.
There had been no difficulty about leaving the hospital. The intern had obligingly called a cab, and after tidying himself up as best he could in a washroom, Stacey had left. Luckily enough, the contents of his billfold had been left intact. The map had been the only thing taken from him. His luggage, amazingly, had not been lost.
To the left of the lobby, opposite a self-service elevator, was a small office. A woman night clerk set at a telephone switchboard, reading a magazine. She glanced up sharply as Stacey appeared. Her bespectacled eyes widened at sight of his bruised face and bandaged head.
“I’d like to see Norma Reddick,” Stacey requested. He gave his name.
The woman glanced disapprovingly at a clock on an adjacent wall before she turned to the switchboard. It was almost midnight, Stacey saw, hardly the time to be calling on anyone—a young lady, least of all.
The woman clerk’s ring was answered quickly enough. She spoke into the mouthpiece a moment, then turned back to Stacey.
“You may go up. The room number is 506.”
Stacey’s thoughts were grim as he ascended in the elevator. It had been ten years since he had last seen Norma Reddick. She was very much an unknown quantity. He couldn’t be entirely certain that she wasn’t connected with the two men who, earlier in the evening, had waylaid him and robbed him of his half of the map.
Stacey already knew that the map led to something valuable enough to make robbery and attempted murder worthwhile. He didn’t know exactly what it was, but Norma Reddick apparently did, if she were able to explain everything to him, as Chinook Vervain had written. The girl might have decided to get Stacey’s half. Vervain might have given her Stacey’s Los Angeles address, as Stacey had been given her’s in Seattle. Thus the girl could very well be the person behind the Los Angeles attempt. And when that failed, she could have prepared the trap at this end, knowing, through Vervain again, that Stacey was coming to Seattle to see her.
It explained very nicely the knowledge of the map and of Stacey’s whereabouts possessed by the man in the black Homburg and his companions. Stacey couldn’t see how
else the others fitted into the picture and knew as much as they did.
The elevator stopped. Stacey emerged with his bags into a long hall. Locating room 506, he knocked. The door opened after a moment, revealing a girl.
Despite himself, Stacey stared. He had seen lovely women before, but he hadn’t expected Norma Reddick to fall into that category. For some inexplicable reason, he felt suddenly awkward and foolish.
The girl surveyed him coolly from large, long-lashed brown eyes. Their expression didn’t quite match the tense set of her piquant, oval features. She wore a maroon satin robe about her slender figure, and her small feet had been thrust into furry white mules. Blonde hair the color of ripe wheat was piled in thick coils atop her head. Her skin was delicately tanned, and the freckles Stacey remembered lay like the faintest of bronze shadows over her cheeks and the bridge of her small nose. She had been preparing for bed, Stacey decided, or had already been asleep when he arrived.
Finally Norma Reddick stood aside. “Won’t you come in?” Her voice was soft and cool, like her eyes.
The living room Stacey entered was small, simply but comfortably and tastefully furnished. It showed none of the usual frills of feminine occupancy. Stacey sat down stiffly, not quite sure of himself, as the girl closed the door and nodded at the sofa.
She leaned against the wall near the door and looked at him, hands buried in the pockets of her robe. The tension which Stacey had earlier noted had deepened in her face, and now wariness was apparent, too. Her eyes moved over his clothes, and then from his bruised jaw to his bandaged head. Stacey was abruptly, painfully conscious of the whiskey odor that still hung about him. The girl said:
“You claim to be Gregg Stacey. It’s quite possible that you’re trying to trick me. The last time I saw Gregg Stacey was ten years ago—and in ten years people can change so much that it isn’t too hard for other people to impersonate them.” She paused a moment, as though to note the effect of her words. “If you’re actually Gregg Stacey, suppose you prove it?”
“Suppose you tell me how?” Stacey said. “You started the game.”
“Well…you might have half of a certain map, for one thing.”
“You’ve got me there.” Stacey indicated his bandaged head, and explained what had happened, beginning with his receipt of the map half from Chinook Vervain, and ending with its loss in the encounter with the man in the black Homburg and his giant companion, Buck.
Norma Reddick moved her slim shoulders indifferently. “An interesting story. It could be just a little too pat.”
Stacey felt a surge of anger. “You don’t believe me?”
“Why should I? You still haven’t proved anything one way or another.”
“Neither have you, for that matter,” Stacey pointed out grimly. “There’s no reason why you should be considered entirely above suspicion. I don’t know what the whole map leads to—something valuable, evidently—but you do. You could have decided to steal my half. Chinook Vervain probably gave you my address, just as he gave me yours. So you could be the person behind the two men who searched my room in Los Angeles. And when that failed, you could have had the other two waiting for me outside, knowing I was coming here to see you.”
“But I didn’t have anything to do with it,” Norma Reddick insisted, with a trace of indignation. “Why, Mark Devore—the one in the black hat—is after my half of the map, too!”
“Too pat,” Stacey said. “Doesn’t prove anything one way or another.”
The girl’s face tightened angrily, but in another moment she grinned. “Some of my own medicine, is that it? All right, let’s settle this once and for all. If you’re actually Gregg Stacey, tell me what happened in the movie our fathers took us to the last time we saw each other.”
Stacey scowled. “You put a wad of chewing gum on my seat, and I sat on it. I was wearing my best pair of pants, too.”
“You sound as though you were still mad,” Norma Reddick said. She tried to look serious, though her brown eyes showed a betraying twinkle. “If it’s not too late to apologize, I’d like to do so.”
Stacey watched her unsmilingly from beneath the overhang of his heavy brows. “You may be satisfied about me, but I’m afraid I can’t say the same for you. You haven’t proved that you aren’t the person behind the men who stole my half of the map.”
Red lips tightening, the girl reached into the neck of her robe and pulled out an envelope. She tossed it into Stacey’s lap.
The envelope contained half of a map—the girl’s half, Stacey discovered. He looked up at her, puzzled. She said:
“If you think I had anything to do with the theft of your part of the map, then here’s mine to make up for it. I don’t know any other way of proving my innocence.”
Stacey handed the envelope back hastily. “I wouldn’t think of doing anything like that. Anyway, your part wouldn’t be any good without mine to go with it.”
Norma Reddick thoughtfully restored the envelope to its hiding place. “You took that last hurdle nicely. So I guess I won’t be needing this.” She pulled a small revolver from a pocket of her robe and placed it on a bookcase near the door.
Stacey was staring in dismay. “You mean if I hadn’t given you back the envelope…?”
“Something like that.” The girl took in Stacey’s expression and grinned.
Stacey sputtered wrathfully. But in another moment, meeting the dancing impishness in Norma Reddick’s brown eyes, he grinned, too.
The girl went to a nearby chair and sat down. Stacey produced his pipe and began to fill it, frowning meditatively. He said:
“But the fellow in the black hat—the one you called Mark Devore. How does he figure in this? If he’s an outsider, how does he happen to know so much about everything that has happened here?”
“Adding what you’ve told me to what I already know, it seems easy to guess,” Norma answered. “Mark Devore came to me two days ago and explained that he was a friend of my father. He said he had flown here from Grubstake, the tiny mining town near Fairbanks where my father…and yours”—her voice faltered strangely—“operated their mines. Devore told me father was being held prisoner by a gang, and unless I gave my half of the map as ransom, father would be killed. Devore even had a note from father, verifying his story. Father wrote he was being held prisoner, and that I was to give my half of the map to Devore, a friend who had been chosen by the gang to act as go-between.”
“Devore lied!” Stacey growled. “After what happened to me a while ago, it’s clear that Devore wasn’t acting as go-between for anybody but Devore. He’s most likely the leader of this gang, and forced your father to write the note.”
“I didn’t suspect anything like that at the time,” Norma went on. “But I decided to stall him off until you arrived. I realized that my half of the map was valueless unless your half went with it. I wanted to compare notes with you, to see if any demands had been made upon you, and what sort.
“I knew you were to visit me, because I, too, received a note from Chinook Vervain with my half of the map. But enclosed was also a letter from my father, which explained what the affair was all about. The letter had been written not long previously. Father was afraid that something might happen to him, and he arranged with Chinook Vervain for the letter to be sent to me in case anything did. Chinook also had the map, with orders to send a half to each of us. Father took this precaution, since he suspected, without actually knowing who they were at the time, that unscrupulous men were after the map—men who would stop at nothing to get it.”
Stacey emitted a cloud of pipe smoke and leaned forward. “There’s one thing I don’t understand. Where was my father while all this was going on?”
Norma hesitated, glancing away. “You’ll have to prepare yourself for a shock, Gregg.”
“Why…what do you mean?”
“Your father is dead.”
Stacey rose slowly from the sofa.
“…Murdered?”
“No, Gregg, he was sick.” Norma paused a moment, as though groping for continuity. “Perhaps I’d better explain everything in order.”
Stacey nodded mechanically. He stared at the floor, not seeing anything. The lines in his face had deepened.
Norma resumed, “I learned about Ben Stacey’s death in my father’s letter. It’s tied in with the explanation for the map. You see, several years ago an old prospector came into Grubstake with the story that he had discovered a fabulously rich vein of gold, which he called the Golden Dream. The prospector drank himself to death in a wild orgy of celebration before he got around to doing so much as filing a claim, but he was only person who knew the Golden Dream’s location, and the secret died with him. Hundreds of men later searched for the vein, but none ever found it—that is, until Ben Stacey did.
“He and my father had a theory about the location of the vein, and planned to set out together on a prospecting trip. But a few days before they were to start, my father had an accident at one of the mines and broke his ankle. Ben Stacey and Chinook set out alone. They found the vein, all right, and Ben Stacey made a map of the location. Then, as he and Chinook were on their way back, Ben Stacey took sick. By the time Chinook got him to the hospital in Grubstake, it was too late to do anything.
“Before he died, however, Ben Stacey was delirious and revealed not only that he had rediscovered the Golden Dream, but had drawn a map leading to it. The news spread. Father had the map by this time, and decided to take the precautions I’ve already mentioned. He ordered Chinook to go into hiding, since Chinook had been with Ben Stacey and could have been forced to tell where the vein was. Chinook thus had the letter and the map, and was free to send them on to us in the event that something happened to father.”
“Why didn’t your father file a claim?” Stacey demanded. “He would have been safe, then.”
“Things evidently happened too fast,” Norma said. “Father’s ankle hadn’t entirely healed yet, and he didn’t have time to do even so much as wire you about Ben Stacey’s death. If it hadn’t been for his ankle, he could have gone into hiding with Chinook. Anyway, no information could have been forced from him, since, without the map, he didn’t know where the Golden Dream was located.”
The 38th Golden Age of Science Fiction MEGAPACK Page 39
