Manhattan Heat

by Alice Orr

  “You’d better keep up with traffic,” she said, speaking loudly as if to be heard above the car horns. “They’ll run straight over the top of us if you don’t.”

  She had heard the buzz of the dial tone very faintly through the din, but that was because she was deliberately listening for it. She glanced over at Modine. He didn’t appear to have heard the noise. In the meantime, she had moved her finger quickly to the top memory button, for the first number programmed into Royce’s system, and said another prayer that he had actually done such programming. She had to look down again to locate the send button. She couldn’t afford to make a mistake and give the wrong command. An opportunity like this one might not arise again. A second later, she heard just enough of the initial ringing tone to know she had pressed the right button, but she didn’t take time for a sigh of relief. She began talking again immediately, more loudly still this time.

  “They say this traffic circle is one of the worst in the world to negotiate, almost as bad as the one in Rome around the Colosseum.”

  She had actually never heard that at all. She’d made it up for something to say and maybe also to rattle him even more than he was already rattled if she could. She was coming up with another whopper to follow that one when she heard the phone being answered. She could tell at once that the faint voice on the other end was coming from a machine. She had hoped for a brief response, preferably a quick hello. Modine was almost bound to hear anything longer than that. Then one of those strokes of good luck happened, the kind that made your heart sing. A sudden break in traffic left a space available in the lane beside them, and Modine yanked the steering wheel and tromped on the accelerator, making the powerful Jaguar engine roar to nearly deafening decibels. Bennett pretended to be shocked by the noise.

  “You’re breaking my eardrums,” she shouted. “Can’t you quiet this thing down?”

  That loud lament had the exact effect she’d hoped for. “No, I can’t,” he shouted back, as he sped around the rest of the circle to Broadway and took a right toward downtown, the only direction open to him. “You’ll just have to cover your pampered little ears and put up with it.”

  That exchange had been long enough to cover the message on whatever answering machine Bennett had managed to reach. She would have much preferred a real live person to receive her pleas for help. There was no telling how long it would be before this person picked up his or her messages. Still this was Bennett’s single opportunity, at least at the present, to do something about getting out of her predicament. She had to grab at that chance no matter how slim it might be. She also had to make sure she said what needed to be said without alerting Modine to what she was doing.

  “We’re headed south on Broadway,” she said.

  “I can see that. I’m not totally lost in this town, you know.”

  “I’m your hostage. You can’t blame me for being concerned about whether or not you know what you’re doing. I’m also Dilys St. Simon’s daughter, and she taught me to be careful whose judgment I trust. She especially wouldn’t want me to trust you, because you’re a murderer and a kidnapper.”

  “I haven’t kidnapped you.”

  “You dragged me out of the Stuyvesant Club against my will. You forced me to go with you through Central Park. Then you stole this car that belongs to Royce Boudreaux, his beautiful Jaguar XKE that he absolutely cherishes.” She’d wanted to stick in the color of the car as well but thought that would sound too suspicious to Modine. “Now you’re driving way too fast trying to get to the west side of town where you don’t know your way around any more than I do.”

  “Is this were I turn?” he asked. They reached the corner of Fifty-seventh Street, where traffic ran in both directions.

  “You’re asking me whether you should take Fifty-seventh Street? You actually think I would give you that information?”

  Modine had turned right without waiting for her answer. “I was talking to myself, not you,” he said.

  She longed to tweak his already irritated temper by asking if he talked to himself often, but sarcasm at this point wouldn’t serve her more important purpose. It wouldn’t send any significant data over the cellular line to the machine that was out there somewhere and could cut off recording at any time.

  “Which avenue are you going to take downtown?” she asked.

  “What makes you think I want to go downtown?”

  Bennett’s heart skipped a beat. Had she said too much and made him suspicious? “I thought you said a moment ago that you were headed downtown. We’re moving in that general direction now.”

  “I don’t know which avenue I’ll take. The first one I come to, I guess.”

  He was streaking along, finding the most empty lane and roaring down it. He had already passed Eighth Avenue. Ninth Avenue, southbound, was coming up. He clicked on the turn signal. He was having good luck with traffic lights. This one was also green.

  “You’re taking Ninth Avenue,” she said.

  “Is that what you’d do?” he asked as he took the turn.

  “It’s one possible choice for getting downtown.”

  He glanced over at her. “Why would you want to tell me that? Unless it’s a bum steer, of course.”

  If it weren’t for the phone that was, she hoped, transmitting her every word, she would have tried to mislead him just as he suspected.

  She shrugged. “I assume you would figure that out on your own anyway. It’s where you’re taking me from here that I wonder about.”

  “To a hotel.”

  “What?” She was so shocked to hear that, she forgot about the phone for a moment.

  “We’re going somewhere to hole up for a while.”

  “I don’t want to hole up with you,” she shouted so loudly they might have heard her in the surrounding cars if it hadn’t been for the noise of the Jaguar’s engine.

  “You don’t have any choice. I need some time to think things out. I also need to lose this car. It’s too easy to spot. Those buddies of yours will have run to the cops by now with a description. I’d say we’ve got about ten more minutes on the road at best before we get pulled over.”

  He was making good time down the wide avenue, weaving in and out among the several lanes. Bennett remembered the phone. She wasn’t sure the other end would still be recording. Some machines will continue until the tape ends as long as there’s no period of silence on the line. Hers was like that. She had to keep talking as if the recording were still activated.

  “We’re headed out of the Fifties into the Forties,” she said, referring to the cross streets they were passing. “This area isn’t exactly known for its prime accommodations.”

  “Prime isn’t what I’m looking for,” he said. “Seedy will do just fine, and I know exactly where to find it.”

  “Where would that be?”

  “Forty-second Street,” he said with some satisfaction in his tone. “Even I know enough about this burg to have heard there are lots of transient digs around there.”

  Bennett gasped. He was actually planning to take her to a flophouse on Forty-second Street. She had, of course, never been anywhere near such a place, but she had an idea what they must be like. She was reminded of her runaway days in Mexico and the place they were staying at the time she’d hit the bottom of her barrel there. She’d survived that, but she was a lot younger and more reckless then. She had put such escapades to the underside of the world behind her long ago. Now here she was, about to take that downward slide again.

  “We’re coming up to Forty-second Street now,” she said, hoping the sound of the car had kept the phantom phone machine going during her brief lapse into silence. “Where do you think you’re going to stop around here?”

  The corner of Forty-second and Ninth was not as busy at this hour as it would have been earlier, but there were still people in the street. Unfortunately, a fair number of them didn’t look like they would be a much safer bet than Modine as companion for a woman in a silk cocktail dress and fami
ly heirloom pearl earrings.

  “There’s a hotel right over there,” Modine said, pointing toward a narrow, five-story building just off the corner.

  “You mean that place above the print shop next to the deli?” Again she had to keep herself from adding that it was one building over from the southeast corner. That was too specific to get away with. There was no name on the building, only a vertical sign that spelled out hotel in flickering red neon.

  “That’s exactly where I mean.”

  “I was afraid so.” He’d said he was looking for seedy, and that was just what he had found.

  “Now, all I have to do is ditch this car,” he said.

  “If you do that in this neighborhood, it’s sure to get stolen.”

  “The quicker somebody boosts it, the better. Then the cops will be on the chase for somebody else for a while.”

  Bennett hit the Off button on the phone console. She couldn’t take a chance that, if the tape was still running on the other end, it would switch off suddenly and start up the dial tone again. Modine was sure to hear it this time. Besides, she’d passed on all the information she was likely to have for a while. Her bottle with the message in it was out there on the electronic ocean. All she could do was hope it didn’t have to travel far before somebody retrieved it. In the meantime, she knew she should probably be more concerned than she was with what would happen to Royce’s beloved car. She just couldn’t think about the Jaguar right now. Her own chassis was in too much jeopardy for that.

  Chapter Nine

  Memphis couldn’t help feeling bad about bringing Bennett to a place like this. A Forty-second Street fleabag hotel was definitely not her speed. She had to be used to classier digs. He told himself it would do her good to see how the other half lived, but he didn’t really believe that. Nobody gets much good out of spending time in the gutter. He’d been close to this far down before, and he’d never gained any benefit from it that he could think of. Down and out was down and out. There was nothing better than that to say about it.

  She’d been cooperative enough about getting past the desk clerk without making a fuss. A fuss probably wouldn’t do her much good in a dump like this one anyway. The night clerk gave her the once-over all the same. He was probably thinking she was a top-dollar hooker and wondering why she hadn’t taken her john farther uptown. Memphis paid cash up front for the room and hustled Bennett into the elevator as fast as he could manage it.

  The room was what he expected it to be, shabby and dimly lit. People stayed in places like this because they were down on their luck, and places like this made sure they never forgot that. There was a bare light bulb hanging in the middle of the room with an extension cord tacked up along the ceiling from the light to the wall then down the wall to an outlet. Memphis was tempted to tell her this wasn’t the way he usually lived. He reminded himself that he didn’t owe her any explanations and the less she knew about his personal life and history the better off he would be.

  “Tell me. What is your story anyway?” she asked, as if she’d heard his thoughts and was hell-bent to challenge them.

  “What do you mean by my story?”

  “You say you’re not guilty. Well, if you’re not guilty, what are you?”

  She’d taken a seat on the only chair in the room, a rickety thing that didn’t look any too comfortable. It occurred to Memphis that maybe she had avoided the bed because she was worried about what his plans might be now that he had her alone in a hotel room. He should reassure her that she had nothing to fear in that sense, but he knew it was better to keep her as scared as he could. She’d be more likely to do what he told her to do that way. Still, he didn’t feel good about it. Besides, under other circumstances, if he didn’t have keeping himself out of jail on his mind, she might not have been safe with him at all. She was a beautiful woman, more beautiful than she realized, he would guess. The way she stood up to him, hunting knife and all, was something of a turn-on, too. He liked a woman who could hold her own with a man, even when the odds were high against her.

  “My story is that I was looking to get paid for a job I did, and that’s what I was doing at the Stuyvesant Club.”

  “Was the job you’re talking about killing that girl?”

  Memphis plopped down onto the bed. “No, it was not.”

  “Then what was it?”

  He had just told himself that the less she knew about him, the better. Now he found that he wanted her to hear the truth. Most of all, he wanted her to believe him. He understood how foolish that was. She was nothing to him. He was less than nothing to her. What difference did it make what she thought of him? It did make a difference, maybe because of how she had stood up to him and the way that made him respect her. He wanted her to respect him, too.

  “I run sailboat crews,” he said, “mostly out of the Caribbean in the winter and around Nantucket in the summer. Sometimes I crew a boat up the East Coast from the Islands. That’s what I just did for one of your buddies at the Stuyvesant.”

  “Why do you say it was one of my buddies?” she asked, sounding as if he’d accused her of something.

  “Because all you society types are thick as thieves as far as I can see. That’s been my experience anyway, and I’ve crewed a lot of highbrow sails in my day.” That was true, all right. Enough to be getting pretty sick of it, too. That’s why he’d taken this long-haul job. The pay was better than usual, and he could put by some cash to lay off for a while and think about whether maybe, at thirty-five, he was getting a little long in the tooth to be a shipboard bum. “Aren’t most of the guys you know from the Stuyvesant into sailing?”

  “I suppose they are,” she said.

  “See what I mean? That’s why I assumed this guy who hired me could be somebody you know.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “He calls himself Falcone.”

  She looked skeptical. “I’ve never heard of anybody by that name at the Stuyvesant.”

  “That could be true. I had a feeling the guy was using an alias. He could be anybody.”

  “What does he look like?”

  “I don’t know. I never actually met him face-to-face. We did all our dealings by messenger or phone or fax. I was hoping to meet him in person for the first time tonight.”

  “I see.”

  He could tell she wasn’t buying this. He could understand why. He’d already wondered himself how he’d gotten hooked up with an invisible employer. He’d guessed there might be something shady about the deal. He’d decided that if he didn’t see anything underhanded going on with his own eyes, he’d let it pass. Falcone, whoever he might be, was paying good money. Memphis needed that money to manage the layoff he’d been thinking about. So he didn’t ask many questions. In fact, he didn’t ask any questions at all. Now he wished he had.

  “I know how fishy this all sounds,” he said, “but it’s the truth. Every word of it. This guy owed me money. He was overdue paying it. He sent me a message that if I came to the Stuyvesant Club tonight he’d make everything square. I sneaked in the back door and up the stairs like he said to do. That’s when I found that girl dead, just a few minutes before you came along.”

  “So, you never met the man who hired you. You still haven’t seen his face. Is that right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I see,” she said again, just as skeptically.

  Memphis shrugged. What’s the use? he thought. She’d never believe him. He found it hard to believe himself. “You asked for my story,” he said. “This is it.”

  “That’s too bad,” she said. “The only thing you’ve got going for you is that it’s hard to believe anybody would be stupid enough to tell a story like that one unless it was true.”

  “Is it that bad?”

  “It’s that bad.”

  Memphis sighed and looked out the window. The flickering red neon of the hotel sign made moving patterns on the grimy glass. His goose was cooked unless he could get himself some help fast. The c
ops were even less likely to believe him than she was.

  “It reminds me of something I’ve heard called ‘the this- other-dude-did-it defense,’” she said. “No matter what he’s being accused of, the accused says, ‘This other dude did it.’”

  Memphis shook his head. Unfortunately, she had a point there. He didn’t even know what his other dude looked like or what his real name was.

  “What is your plan?” she asked. “You must have a plan.”

  Actually he did. He debated what he might have to lose by telling her. Letting her know what he had in mind probably couldn’t do any harm, as long as he left out the specific details.

  “I plan on getting to some friends of mine. Then I plan on getting as far away from this town as I can, as fast as I can go.”

  “Where are these friends of yours, and who are they exactly?”

  “I don’t think it would be good for me to have you know that just yet.”

  “They must be here in New York because you said you were going to see them before leaving the city.”

  He didn’t say anything. She was smart, all right. Maybe too smart.

  Finally, he said, “Look, lady, I’ve got to go out for a while. Then I’ll be back.”

  “I told you my name is Bennett, not Lady,” she said, sounding cool. “You’re going to leave me here in this place by myself?” she asked, sounding less cool.

  “I won’t be gone long. You’ll be okay.”

  “Why do you have to go at all?”

  So she did prefer him to the company of street punks. He didn’t know why that made him feel so good. She was his ace in the hole, nothing more.

  “I have to go because of you,” he said. “If you’re going to be trailing around with me through the parts of town I’m headed for, you have to fit into the scene. You’ll stand out too much the way you look now.”