Dead on the Level

by Nielsen, Helen

  “You can at least drink some coffee,” she insisted. “I don’t mind the other occupants of this firetrap seeing a man leave my place so early in the morning, but I hate to have them thinking I’m so bad off I have to take in ghouls.”

  Casey sighed and tackled the coffee—which wasn’t so bad as it should have been under the circumstances. “I suppose you’re waiting for an explanation. Sorry, but there isn’t any. Last night’s a complete washout. Whatever happened, well, I just don’t remember.”

  She was looking at him in a peculiar sort of way, or maybe she just had a peculiar face. “I’m sorry,” Casey said again.

  “Forget it,” Maggie said. “Haven’t you heard? Chicago is the city of the welcoming hand. We like our distinguished guests to have a good time.”

  For a minute Casey didn’t get it, and then he remembered the labels in his suit and raincoat, both from a much too expensive shop in Beverly Hills. This, being Chicago, there must be a few conventions in town. Maggie was simply adding two and two under that curly cap and coming up with the wrong answer.

  “That’s not me you’re talking about,” he corrected. “I’m just a local boy come home to roost.”

  “Don’t tell me you tired of the land of sunshine and eternal youth.”

  “It’s all right to live in,” Casey said, “but I’d sure hate to go there for a visit.”

  “You’ve been away long?”

  In her own, left-handed way, Maggie was pumping; but Casey didn’t mind. She was entitled to that much. “I’ve always been away,” he said. “Even when I lived here, even when I was a kid. Do you know what I mean?”

  “I think so.”

  “That’s good, because I’m not so sure.”

  “And where was ‘away’?”

  It was easy to talk to Maggie. Almost too easy. “Any place, every place,” Casey answered. “Somewhere where things were smooth. You know, chrome, plate glass, and nice, expensive upholstery. Smooth and clean. No alleys full of garbage, no sweltering walk-ups, nobody jumping down anybody’s throat all the time just because their nerves were worried thin—” It was terrible the way the yesterdays could gang up, crowding back time until the old hates and dreads were as large as life and twice as empty. “It made nice dreaming for the future. It doesn’t stack up so good when it’s all over.”

  “That’s the spirit,” Maggie agreed dryly. “Now that you’re old and gray there’s nothing left in life but to sit around the coffeepot on cold, damp mornings and mull over your faded youth.”

  Casey couldn’t help grinning again. With Maggie it was like that. “You don’t sound very sympathetic,” he chided.

  “Why should I? All God’s chillun got troubles, including me. And, as one peasant to another, how did you get such fancy memories, anyway?”

  “Knowing the right people.”

  “Influential?”

  “Hollow-headed. A couple of characters like myself, fresh out of Uncle Sam’s prep school with not enough cash and too many ideas.”

  Yes, it was too easy to talk to Maggie. A man could work up a lot of regret that way, and regret was something Casey could no longer afford. He pushed back his chair, the same chair, so far as he could tell, that had been so interestingly occupied in that awakening vision, and began to look around for his coat. “I’m not crying,” he added, as if talking to himself. “That’s just the way things break. One day you’ve got the world in your own little yellow basket, and the next day you’re learning that a two-hundred-dollar suit still looks like thirty-seven fifty after it’s been slept in.”

  But the suit coat Maggie was bringing out of a tiny closet didn’t look that way at all. It obviously had been recently sponged and pressed. “I gave it a lick and a promise,” she said vaguely. “It was a little soiled.”

  She was almost shy about it, and Casey found himself feeling warm and not entirely brotherly toward this strange Maggie with the paint-stained smock and the wrinkled nose. And then, as abruptly as if she’d been reading his mind, Maggie handed him his raincoat and opened the door.

  “Better buy yourself a hat if you’re staying in these parts,” she advised. “Your sun-kissed days are over!”

  Casey needed a few moments to get his bearings when he stepped out of the building. It was still early. The sky was like a stretch of dirty flannel and the wind coming in off the lake had been sharpened on both edges. He didn’t feel quite up to facing that wind, so he turned left and walked up to the first corner. There, at the signpost, he learned that he was on Erie Street, a long, long way from home.

  At least the wind was clearing his head. He weighed the matter of distance against the fumes of a bus or the swaying bedlam of a streetcar and decided in favor of walking. After all, he had until noon to get his bag out of the hotel and the rest of his life to figure out where to go after that. He thought about the northwest side and his mother’s place, a drab five-room flat above Big John’s saloon, and then he thought of his stepfather, Big John, and of the smell of stale beer and greasy sausage. And then, just as he’d known he would do, he began to wonder why he had ever come back.

  The sun was hot and bright in the San Fernando Valley, steaming down through the skylights of the saw-toothed roof. With the world so promising, it was easy to get lost in a rosy dream of production lines rolling out a sensational new video set that looked so sweet on paper and cost so much to develop. The tiny factory building was padlocked now, but Casey wasn’t crying. What was one more post-war casualty in the brave new world?

  It was a different kind of dream he’d had when the moon was a glutton over the Pacific and a very special redhead shared the front seat of his sleek convertible; but that venture had failed, too, and for an identical reason—insufficient funds. Even so, he didn’t have to come home. For eight years, ever since the day he enlisted, Casey had avoided that extremity, and yet, here he was. The big bubble burst and home he ran, like a kid with a bloody nose.

  (Yes, and he could remember how it was to come home from school with a bloody nose. No chance to explain, no excuses accepted for a torn shirt or ripped trousers. Just that terrible look on Ma’s face as she reached for the cat-o’-nine.)

  By this time Casey was walking south, heading toward the river where the morning was getting noisier and lights were beginning to challenge the gray day from behind layers of rain-stained windows. When he reached the river he had to wait for the bridge to jack-knife down in the wake of a freighter bound on some lakeborne mission, and this part of the city Casey liked. This part and the railroad stations. Anything that moved, anything that was going places. As he waited, he became aware of fellow travelers on the street—businessmen with briefcases under their arms and shop girls who glanced nervously at the clock on a giant billboard across the river. A newsboy piling the latest editions on his stand—

  The bridge came down again and traffic started rolling, but Casey didn’t move. He was staring at the photo on the front page of one of the newspapers, and he couldn’t move at all. It was a large cut of a girl’s face, and he could remember exactly how the taffy-colored hair had smelled when it brushed against his face, and how those tilted eyes were that peculiar hue of purple smoke. It was the dream that he saw there, only she wasn’t a dream at all; she was a face on the front page under a banner headline.

  Financier Slain: Heiress Missing

  “Wouldja like for me to turn tha page, mister?”

  The newsboy’s jeer routed Casey’s trance and backed him up a few steps. He had to have that paper, more than anything else in the world he had to have that paper, but now he was remembering those last two dollar bills spread out on the glass-topped table and his fingers went groping through his raincoat pockets in the scant hope of mustering out a few stray coins. And then he found it. It was folded nice and neat and thrust deep into his pocket. He drew it out slowly, running a curious thumb over the thickness of crisp, new hundreds, but even without counting he knew what it had to be. Five thousand, the dream had said. Five thousan
d dollars.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE DREAM’S NAME was Phyllis Brunner—that’s what the photo caption said. She was young, she was rich, and also, since last night, she was missing. But the big story was her father. Darius Brunner II was dead, his handsome, graying head considerably battered by the violent application of a fireplace poker and the study of his fashionable lakeshore apartment thereby transformed into a chamber of death. The latter fact was fully attested by on-the-spot pictures. Time of death had not been established, but it was known that he had shared an informal dinner with his comely secretary, Miss Leta Huntly, twenty-eight, shortly after eight p.m.

  “We had worked later than usual at the office,” Miss Huntly explained when questioned by the police, “and Mr. Brunner insisted on taking me to dinner and then driving me home. It was about nine-thirty when he dropped me at my apartment, and I assumed that he was going straight home. I can’t imagine who could have done such a terrible thing to Mr. Brunner! He was a wonderful man!”

  At this point, Miss Huntly gave way to tears, artfully preserved by an alert cameraman.

  Casey was getting the story at last, the newspaper spread across the bed he had so thoroughly unmade before the bellboy brought it. He’d had a bit of luck getting back to his hotel room, and at this point luck wasn’t hard to take. Along with the five thousand dollars, he had raked up a room key out of his pocket. What must have happened, he decided, was a simple case of getting sidetracked in the cocktail lounge before turning the key in at the desk. Later, of course, he wasn’t in much of a shape to remember anything, especially a key. But the important thing now was how much the hotel staff remembered, or, to be specific, the waiter in the lounge. A recollection of the Stygian gloom of the Cloud Room (Casey noted its chrome-plated name as he slipped unobtrusively through the lobby) was of some comfort, but not much. If Casey could see the girl’s face in that dim light so could the waiter. And it wasn’t a face that any man would be likely to forget.

  Casey’s room was on the sixth floor, but he hadn’t dared risk an elevator. The whole idea was to appear as if he had spent the night enjoying the hostelry’s much vaunted comforts, and it wasn’t until he had phoned for the morning paper that he realized his timetable was a little off. Next came the whirlwind transformation of the room, the unmaking of the bed, opening of his saddle-tan bag and, to give things a homey touch, the draping of his suit coat over a convenient chair. Casey was in the bathroom shaving when the knock came at his door.

  He answered, opened the door wide, and then went back into the bathroom to dry his hands. Give the bellboy time to get a good look at the room, that was the idea. Just in case you find yourself needing an alibi, Casey Morrow, give him time.

  “You’ll have to get this changed,” he said, coming back with one of the hundred-dollar notes in his hand, “it’s the smallest I’ve got. And don’t be all day about it. I’ve got a train to catch.”

  The moment the door closed, Casey ripped open the paper.

  Brunner’s body had been discovered by Arvid Petersen, the houseman, when he returned from an evening of bowling.

  “It wasn’t my regular night out but Mr. Brunner phoned in the afternoon and said he wouldn’t be home for dinner, so I should take the evening off. I came in about eleven-thirty and found him like that. It was awful. He was a fine man, too. I worked for him twenty years now.”

  Reached at the Brunner country estate near Arlington Heights, Mrs. Brunner was in a state of near collapse and unavailable to the press. Her photographs, however, were amply available…. prominent society matron, noted for her many charities …

  Casey pushed the paper aside in disgust. He didn’t care about Mrs. Brunner’s charities; all he cared about was the brief reference to Phyllis Brunner’s disappearance. The paper didn’t have a thing on it really. Just an intimation that the girl and her high-powered convertible were still unaccounted for at press time. Sensing sensation, they had played it up big. Big and hollow, with nothing but a headline, a picture, and a couple of inconclusive lines. At least the thing Casey feared most wasn’t there. There was no mention of an unknown man escorting her from the Cloud Room.

  He felt considerably better by the time the bellboy returned with his change. He could even make small talk. “That’s what I call service,” he said, peeling off a ten from the roll of bills.

  But the bellboy hardly seemed to notice. He was staring at the photo on the front page with an intensity that made Casey regret not having turned to the sport section.

  “Quite a dish,” he murmured. “I sure hate to think of a dish like that being stuffed into some garbage can.”

  He was an ageless creature, maybe twenty, maybe thirty, with a twisted, contemptuous face and a voice to match. What he had just said was like a blow in the stomach, but Casey had to make some answer.

  “I don’t get you. The paper just says that she’s missing.”

  “The paper says! The papers don’t know everything yet, and even when they do they’ll have to clean it up. What could be said about this girl, mister, you just don’t say when it’s social register. Now do you get me?”

  Casey hesitated. It could be just gossip, but the bellboy seemed awfully sure of himself. Besides, at this stage misinformation was no worse than no information at all. “You seem to know something,” he suggested, and was rewarded by what might have passed for a smile.

  “I know she was here yesterday afternoon, mister. She was downstairs getting tanked up. The bartender saw her. After a while she picked up a drunk at one of the booths and walked out with him. It’s easy to figure the rest.”

  Casey couldn’t very well comment with his mouth open, a sight that seemed to fill the bellboy with inner delight. “She must have taken the boy friend home to Papa and they didn’t get along so well,” he added, grinning. “They’ll find her in some garbage can. It was bound to happen sooner or later.”

  Now he was interested in the ten dollars, but Casey wasn’t. “She doesn’t look like the sort of girl who would go around picking up drunks,” he said tightly. “Maybe your barkeep friend is headline-happy. Maybe he just thinks he saw Phyllis Brunner.”

  “Ernie?” Behind that one word was a look reserved for idiots and very small children. “If Ernie says it was the Brunner girl, it was the Brunner girl! Look, I’ll show you.”

  The room wasn’t on the lake side of the hotel; the windows faced the tall, gray spike of an office building across the street, and it was that structure toward which the bellboy waved his hand. “The Brunner Building,” he explained, “home of Brunner Enterprises. Phyllis Brunner was in and out of the place all the time, and usually she’d come over to the Cloud Room afterward and kill a few hours. I’ve seen her there myself, lots of times. I always wondered what a girl with all she had could find to be so unhappy about.”

  “Unhappy?”

  “Well, that’s how she seemed. Nervous, jumpy. And if she took a notion to pick up a guy, she’d pick him up, believe me! But it’s a risky business.”

  For a moment Casey wanted to heave this leering know-it-all through the window, but he also wanted to know whatever else there was to his story. And it wasn’t so much what the bellboy had said that made him go hollow inside; it was the awful knowledge that he didn’t know any more about what really had occurred than this sordid-minded character or any other theorist. Of course, that wasn’t quite true. He knew about the five thousand dollars, and a man doesn’t pick up that kind of money overnight just by sitting at home with his Boy Scout Manual.

  “And what about the pickup?” he suggested. “Do they ever find him?”

  “That’s an interesting point,” the boy answered, his brow furrowing thoughtfully. “They claim you can’t get away with murder, but it’s done all the time. Of course, if they do get him he can always plead insanity—but it won’t do him any good. You can’t buck that kind of dough. Anything else, mister?”

  Maybe Casey’s imagination was on edge, but it seemed that he was being
scrutinized a little too carefully. Or it could be just the ten dollars. “Sorry,” he muttered, handing over the bill. “I’m not so sharp this morning. Met an old buddy down the hall last night and we lifted a few.” (Maybe that would cover for what must be showing on his face. It would cover, too, in the unlikely event of the desk having tried to ring him during the night.)

  “I could get you something for that. Ernie has a concoction guaranteed to kill or cure.”

  The barkeeper again. Casey was learning to hate him already.

  “Of course, he’s kind of tied up with the homicide squad right now, but in case of an emergency—”

  “Homicide?” Casey choked. “Here?”

  “They were here when I got your bill changed, getting Ernie’s statement. But I’ll ask him—”

  Casey almost shouted his refusal. “I’ve still got that train to catch,” he reminded, only this time he meant it. And then, when the bellboy finally cleared out, he sank back down on the bed and listened to the hammers pounding a tattoo inside his head.

  So that’s the score, they told him. Of all the places to go, you would walk straight into a pack of bloodhounds getting the scent! Casey doubted strongly that the bellboy’s theorizing was original. In all probability he was merely echoing some of what he had heard. But it really didn’t matter. It was nobody else’s conjecturing that had him this scared; it was his own. Mentally, he was running even before he heard that grisly tale, even before he read the papers, and the instinct that had told him to run was screaming louder by the minute. If Ernie, the devil take him, was talking to the police now, there was still a chance of getting out of the hotel before a general alarm. A cigarette he couldn’t remember lighting began to burn his fingers, and Casey stood up. This was no time for meditation; he had work to do.