Next day at the library, between book returns, Prudence took out the reference card on Manuela and placed a neat red check next to Mrs. Trasker’s name and Lucille Baumgarten’s, to mark the progress of her investigation so far. But she didn’t need this; it was easy enough to remember whom she had been to see and whom she hadn’t, but she had the precise type of mind that liked everything neatly docketed and in order. Next to Florence Turner’s name, she placed a small red question mark.
She was strongly tempted to call up Murphy on her way home that evening, and tell him she already felt she was on the trail of something. But for one thing, nothing definite enough had developed yet. If he’d laughed at her about the original message itself, imagine how he’d roar if she told him the sum total of her suspicions was based on the fact that a certain party had two different-sized dresses in her clothes closet. And secondly, even in her new state of emancipation, it still seemed awfully forward to call a man up, even a detective. She would track down this Florence Turner first, and then she’d call Murphy up if her findings warranted it. “And if he says I’m good, and asks me to go to the movies with him,” she threatened, “I’ll...I’ll make him ask two or three times before I do!”
She met the manager on her way in. “Did anyone come yet?” she asked in an undertone.
“No. I’ll keep my promise. I’ll let you know; don’t worry.”
A lot of the strangeness had already worn off her new surroundings, even after sleeping there just one night, and it occurred to her that maybe she had been in a rut, should have changed living quarters more often in the past. She went to bed shortly after ten, and even the Chinese restaurant sign had no power to keep her awake tonight; she fell asleep almost at once, tired from the night before.
About an hour or so later, she had no way of telling how long afterward it was, a surreptitious tapping outside her door woke her.
“Yes?” she called out forgetfully, in a loud voice.
The manager stuck her tousled head in. “Shh!” she warned. “Somebody’s come for her things. You asked me to tell you, and I’ve been coughing out there in the hall, trying to attract your attention. He just went down with the first armful; he’ll be up again in a minute. You’d better hurry if you want to catch him before he goes; he’s working fast.”
“Don’t say anything to him,” Prudence whispered back. “See if you can delay him a minute or two, give me time to get downstairs.”
“Are you sure it’s just a liberry book this is all about?” the manager asked searchingly. “Here he comes up again.” She pulled her head back and swiftly closed the door.
Prudence had never dressed so fast in her life before. Even so, she managed to find time to dart a glance down at the street from her window. There was a black sedan drawn up in front of the house. “How am I ever going to—” she thought in dismay. She didn’t let that hold her up any. She made sure she had shoes on and a coat over her and let the rest go hang. There was no time to phone Murphy, even if she had wanted to, but the thought didn’t occur to her.
She eased her room door open, flitted out into the hall and down the stairs, glimpsing the open door of Florence Turner’s room as she sneaked by. She couldn’t see the man, whoever he was, but she could hear the landlady saying, “Wait a minute, until I make sure you haven’t left anything behind.”
Prudence slipped out of the street door downstairs, looked hopelessly up and down the street. He had evidently come alone in the car; there was no one else in it. He had piled the clothing on the back seat. For a moment she even thought of smuggling herself in and hiding under it, but that was too harebrained to be seriously considered. Then, just as she heard his tread start down the inside stairs behind her, the much-maligned chop-suey joint came to her aid. A cab drove up to it, stopped directly behind the first machine, and a young couple got out.
Prudence darted over, climbed in almost before they were out of the way.
“Where to, lady?” asked the driver.
She found it hard to come out with it, it sounded so unrespectable and fly-by-nightish. Detectives, she supposed, didn’t think twice about giving an order like that, but with her it was different. “Er...would you mind just waiting a minute until that car in front of us leaves?” she said constrainedly. “Then take me wherever it goes.”
He shot her a glance in his rear-sight mirror, but didn’t say anything. He was probably used to getting stranger orders than that.
A man came out of the same doorway she had just left herself. She couldn’t get a very good look at his face, but he had a batch of clothing slung over his arm. He dumped the apparel in the back of the sedan, got in, slammed the door closed, and started off. A moment later, the cab was in motion as well.
“Moving out on ya, huh?” said the driver knowingly. “I don’t blame ya for follying him.”
“That will do,” she said primly. This night life got you into more embarrassing situations! “Do you think you can manage it so he won’t notice you coming after him?” she asked after a block or two.
“Leave it to me, lady,” he promised, waving his hand at her. “I know this game backwards.”
Presently they had turned into one of the circumferential express highways leading out of the city. “Now it’s gonna be pie!” he exulted. “He won’t be able to tell us from anyone else on here. Everyone going the same direction and no turning off.”
The stream of traffic was fairly heavy for that hour of the night, homeward-bound suburbanites for the most part. But then, as the city limits were passed and branch road after branch road drained it off, it thinned to a mere trickle. The lead car finally turned off itself, and onto a practically deserted secondary highway.
“Now it’s gonna be ticklish,” the cabman admitted. “I’m gonna have to hang back as far as I can from him, or he’ll tumble to us.”
He let the other car pull away until it was merely a red dot in the distance. “You sure must be carryin’ some torch,” he said presently with a baffled shake of his head, “to come all the way out this far after him.”
“Please confine yourself to your driving,” was the haughty reproof.
The distant red pinpoint had suddenly snuffed out. “He must’ve turned off up ahead someplace,” said the driver, alarmed. “I better step it up!”
When they had reached the approximate place, minutes later, an even less-traveled bypass than the one they were on was revealed, not only lightless but even unsurfaced. It obviously didn’t lead anywhere that the general public would have wanted to go, or it would have been better maintained. They braked forthwith.
“What a lonely-looking road.” Prudence shuddered involuntarily.
“Y’wanna chuck it and turn back?” he suggested, as though he would have been only too willing to himself.
She probably would have if she’d been alone, but she hated to admit defeat in his presence. He’d probably laugh at her all the way back. “No, now that I’ve come this far, I’m not going back until I find out exactly where he went. Don’t stand here like this: you won’t be able to catch up with him again!”
The driver gave his cap a defiant hitch. “The time has come to tell you I’ve got you clocked at seven bucks and eighty-five cents, and I didn’t notice any pocketbook in your hand when you got in. Where’s it coming from?” He tapped his fingers sardonically on the rim of his wheel.
Prudence froze. Her handbag was exactly twenty or thirty miles away, back in her room at the residence club. She didn’t have to answer; the driver was an old experienced hand at this sort of thing; he could read the signs.
“I thought so,” he said, almost resignedly. He got down, opened the door: “Outside,” he said. “If you was a man, I’d take it out of your jaw. Or if there was a cop anywhere within five miles, I’d have you run in. Take off that coat.” He looked it over, slung it over his arm. “It’ll have to do. Now if you want it back, you know what to do; just look me up with seven-eighty-five in your mitt. And for being so smart, you’r
e gonna walk all the way back from here on your two little puppies.”
“Don’t leave me all alone, in the dark, in this God-forsaken place! I don’t even know where I am!” she wailed after him.
“I’ll tell you where you are,” he called back remorselessly. “You’re on your own!” The cab’s taillight went streaking obliviously back the way they had just come.
She held the side of her head and looked helplessly all around her. Real detectives didn’t run into these predicaments, she felt sure. It only happened to her! “Oh, why didn’t I just mind my own business back at the library!” she lamented.
It was too cool out here in the wilds to stand still without a coat on, even though it was June. She might stand waiting here all night and no other car would come along. The only thing to do was to keep walking until she came to a house, and then ask to use the telephone. There must be a house somewhere around here.
She started in along the bypath the first car had taken, gloomy and forbidding as it was, because it seemed more likely there was a house someplace farther along it than out on this other one. They hadn’t passed a single dwelling the whole time the cab was on the road, and she didn’t want to walk still farther out along it; no telling where it led to. The man she’d been following must have had some destination. Even if she struck the very house he had gone to, there wouldn’t really be much harm to it, because he didn’t know who she was, he’d never seen her before. Neither had this Florence Turner, if she was there with him. She could just say she’d lost her way or something. Anyone would have looked good to her just then, out here alone in the dark the way she was.
If she’d been skittish of shadows on the city streets, there was reason enough for her to have St. Vitus’ dance here; it was nothing but shadows. Once she came in sight of a little clearing, with a scarecrow fluttering at the far side of it, and nearly had heart failure for a minute. Another time an owl went “Who-o-o” up in a tree over her, and she ran about twenty yards before she could pull herself together and stop again. “Oh, if I ever get back to the nice safe library after tonight, I’ll never—” she sobbed nervously.
The only reason she kept going on now was because she was afraid to turn back any more. Maybe that hadn’t been a scarecrow after all—
The place was so set back from the road, so half hidden amidst the shrubbery that she had almost passed it by before she even saw it there. She happened to glance to her right as she came to a break in the trees, and there was the unmistakable shadowy outline of a decrepit house. Not a chink of light showed from it, at least from where she was. Wheel ruts unmistakably led in toward it over the grass and weeds, but she wasn’t much of a hand at this sort of lore, couldn’t tell if they’d been made recently or long ago. The whole place had an appearance of not being lived in.
It took nearly as much courage to turn aside and start over toward it as it would have to continue on the road. It was anything but what she’d been hoping for, and she knew already it was useless to expect to find a telephone in such a ramshackle wreck.
The closer she got to it, the less inviting it became. True, it was two or three in the morning by now, and even if anyone had been living in it, they probably would have been fast asleep by this time, but it didn’t seem possible such a forlorn, neglected-looking place could be inhabited.
Going up onto that ink-black porch and knocking for admittance took more nerve than she could muster. Heaven knows what she was liable to bring out on her; bats or rats or maybe some horrible hobos.
She decided she’d walk all around the outside of it just once, and if it didn’t look any better from the sides and rear than it did from the front, she’d go back to the road and take her own chances on that some more.
The side was no better than the front when she picked her way cautiously along it. Twigs snapped under her feet and little stones shifted, and made her heart miss a beat each time. But when she got around to the back, she saw two things at once that showed her she had been mistaken, there was someone in there after all. One was the car, the same car that had driven away in front of the residence club, standing at a little distance behind the house, under some kind of warped toolshed or something. The other was a slit of light showing around three sides of a ground-floor window. It wasn’t a brightly lighted pane by any means; the whole window still showed black under some kind of sacking or heavy covering; there was just this telltale yellow seam outlining three sides of it if you looked closely enough.
Before she could decide what to do about it, if anything, her gaze traveled a little higher up the side of the house and she saw something else that brought her heart up into her throat. She choked back an inadvertent scream just in time. It was a face. A round white face staring down at her from one of the upper windows, dimly visible behind the dusty pane.
Prudence Roberts started to back away apprehensively a step at a time, staring up at it spellbound as she did so, and ready at any moment to turn and run for her life, away from whoever or whatever that was up there. But before she could carry out the impulse, she saw something else that changed her mind, rooted her to the spot. Two wavering white hands had appeared, just under the ghost-like face. They were making signs to her, desperate, pleading signs. They beckoned her nearer, then they clasped together imploringly, as if trying to say, “Don’t go away, don’t leave me.”
Prudence drew a little nearer again. The hands were warning her to silence now, one pointing downward toward the floor below, the other holding a cautioning finger to their owner’s mouth.
It was a young girl; Prudence could make out that much, but most of the pantomime was lost through the blurred, dust-caked pane. She gestured back to her with upcurved fingers, meaning, “Open the window so I can hear you.”
It took the girl a long time. The window was either fastened in some way or warped from lack of use, or else it stuck just because she was trying to do it without making any noise. The sash finally jarred up a short distance, with an alarming creaking and grating in spite of her best efforts. Or at least it seemed so in the preternatural stillness that reigned about the place. They both held their breaths for a wary moment, as if by mutual understanding.
Then as Prudence moved in still closer under the window, a faint sibilance came down to her from the narrow opening.
“Please take me away from here. Oh, please help me to get away from here.”
“What’s the matter?” Prudence whispered back.
Both alike were afraid to use too much breath even to whisper, it was so quiet outside the house. It was hard for them to make themselves understood. She missed most of the other’s answer, all but:
“They won’t let me go. I think they’re going to kill me. They haven’t given me anything to eat in two whole days now.”
Prudence inhaled fearfully. “Can you climb out through there and let yourself drop from the sill? I’ll get a seat cover from that car and put it under you.”
“I’m chained to the bed up here. I’ve pulled it over little by little to the window. Oh, please hurry and bring someone back with you; that’s the only way—”
Prudence nodded in agreement, made hasty encouraging signs as she started to draw away. “I’ll run all the way back to where the two roads meet, and stop the first car that comes al—”
Suddenly she froze, and at the same instant seemed to light up yellowly from head to foot, like a sort of living torch. A great fan of light spread out from the doorway before her, and in the middle of it a wavering shadow began to lengthen toward her along the ground.
“Come in, sweetheart, and stay a while,” a man’s voice said slurringly. He sauntered out toward her with lithe, springy determination. Behind him in the doorway were another man and a woman.
“Naw, don’t be bashful,” he went on, moving around in back of her and prodding her toward the house with his gun. “You ain’t going nowheres else from here. You’ve reached your final destination.”
A well-dressed, middle-aged man was sitt
ing beside the lieutenant’s desk, forearm supporting his head, shading his eyes with outstretched fingers, when Murphy and every other man jack available came piling in, responding to the urgent summons.
The lieutenant had three desk phones going at once, and still found time to say, “Close that door, I don’t want a word of this to get out,” to the last man in. He hung up—click, click, clack—speared a shaking finger at the operatives forming into line before him.
“This is Mr. Martin Rapf, men,” he said tensely. “I won’t ask him to repeat what he’s just said to me; he’s not in any condition to talk right now. His young daughter, Virginia, left home on the night of May seventeenth, and she hasn’t been seen since. He and Mrs. Rapf received an anonymous telephone call that same night, before they’d even had time to become alarmed at her absence, informing them not to expect her back and warning them above all not to report her missing to us. Late the next day Mr. Rapf received a ransom note demanding fifty thousand dollars. This is it here.”
Everyone in the room fastened their eyes on it as he spun it around on his desk to face them. At first sight it seemed to be a telegram. It was an actual telegraph blank form, taken from some office pad, with strips of paper containing printed words pasted on it.
“It wasn’t filed, of course; it was slipped under the front door in an unaddressed envelope,” the lieutenant went on. “The instructions didn’t come for two more days, by telephone again. Mr. Rapf had raised the amount and was waiting for them. They were rather amateurish, to say the least. And amateurs are more to be dreaded than professionals at this sort of thing, as you men well know. He was to bring the money along in a cigar box, he was to go all the way out to a certain seldom-used suburban crossroads and wait there. Then when a closed car with its rear windows down drove slowly by and sounded its horn three times, two short ones and a long one, he was to pitch the cigar box in the back of it through the open window and go home.
Women's Wiles Page 29
