Knocked for a Loop

by Craig Rice

  “And all the time that I was half crazy,” she scolded, “and the police and the newspapers and Heaven knows who else were trying to find you—and that poor little Marty Budlicek trying to find you—and Mrs. Estapoole—all that time, you were somewhere with some blonde?”

  He grinned at her. “Blond,” he said, “and with violet eyes. Did you say Mrs. Estapoole?”

  “I did. And she’s probably half crazy with worry herself. After all, you were supposed to meet Leonard Estapoole here for one definite reason, remember?”

  “You don’t need to remind me,” Malone said, wincing. He rose, put on his hat and coat, and started for the door.

  “At least,” she said, with unexpected softness in her voice, “I hope you’re going to go home and get some sleep, now that everything’s settled.”

  “Eventually,” he told her. Eventually, when everything did get settled, sometime in the next twenty-odd hours.

  “Well, anyway,” Jake said encouragingly, as they waited for the elevator, “you don’t have an unsolved murder on your hands to worry about. You can just concentrate on finding Helene.”

  Malone had no answer to that.

  The relief night elevator man was still a little shaky, and his eyes still popped slightly. “Thank goodness,” he said explosively, “the police found out who did it, right away. I was real worried there for a while.”

  In Joe the Angel’s, they were greeted effusively and with congratulations. “Too bad it had to happen in your office, Malone,” Joe the Angel said happily, “but good the police found who it was right away. Now maybe you have a client, too, Malone?” He reached for glasses.

  “Gin-and-beer,” Malone said briefly.

  Joe the Angel looked at him anxiously. “You don’t feel good? Something goes wrong?”

  “Spoiled my rug,” Malone said, still briefly.

  Joe the Angel looked at Jake. “He sulks,” he announced.

  “He broods,” Jake said, nodding his head.

  Malone wished they would both go away and let him sulk and brood in decent privacy. Then he remembered that Joe the Angel owned the place, and that Jake had problems on his mind too.

  “Tell me,” he asked, “do you have any ideas about where Helene might be?”

  Jake shook his head. “If I had...” he began.

  “I know,” Malone said. “You’d be beside the swimming pool on the silly dude ranch in outlandish Wyoming, talking to Nelle Brown.” He thought about Helene. About Helene missing. He scowled. “There’s probably some perfectly simple little explanation.”

  Jake said, “With Helene, it’s the perfectly simple little explanations that worry me.”

  Malone nodded. He knew exactly what Jake meant. In his personal knowledge of Helene she’d turned up in a surprising number of places, the majority of them perilous, and always with some perfectly simple little explanation. He gave a deep sigh, finished his drink, and said, “Obviously the place to start looking for a person is the place from which they disappeared from.” He paused, wondering if just one more word might make that into complete sense, decided not, and said, “In other words, I’d better start at the Estapooles’. I’d better start at the Estapooles’ anyway.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Jake said promptly.

  “You will not,” Malone said, just as promptly. “I’m going specifically to see Mrs. Estapoole. Can’t a man have any privacy? And besides, you need sleep.”

  Jake grumbled about that. He did not in the least need sleep. And it was his wife that was missing.

  “Take my word for it,” Malone told him, “this time, you’d only be in the way.” He’d especially be in the way while another pressing little problem was attended to. “Tell me more about these Estapooles.”

  Jake said slowly, “I don’t know very much. I’ve met the nephew. Quite a boy. And he’s got a sister. Or a cousin. Her name’s Jane. And there’s Mrs. Estapoole, of course, and the little girl. And there’s another stepdaughter, too. I don’t know whose or from what marriage.” He paused and frowned. “It’s a sort of complicated family.”

  “It must be,” Malone said in a tired voice. That was just what he needed right now to make everything complete. A complicated family. He looked at his watch and said, “I’ll be on my way, and I hope they haven’t all gone to bed.”

  Jake rose too, still protesting weakly at not going along.

  “Go home,” Malone said firmly.

  “Home? Back to the apartment? And stick around there? With Helene missing?”

  “Don’t burst into tears about it,” Malone said. “If she’s still in Chicago, and she probably is, she’s bound to go there sooner or later. Especially if she finds out you’ve come back.”

  Jake brightened noticeably. He said, “Call me there. Every little while. Every fifteen minutes.” He fairly bounded toward a taxicab.

  Malone watched him worriedly. He could count on Jake’s staying put for a while. Or at least, so he hoped. He hoped too that he would find Helene, and in a hurry. But meantime—

  He wished there was a word for “unkidnap.” Because that was what he was going to do to Alberta Commanday. If it took the last breath in his body.

  CHAPTER 9

  In the taxi on the way to Ma Blodgett’s, Malone tried to sort things out in his mind. Frank McGinnis had done a fine job, an outstanding job, and he admired it. Von Flanagan had taken it all in enthusiastically. Little Marty Budlicek’s bit had helped considerably, too.

  Now, the only remaining problem was to find out what had really happened, and dig up the proof of it.

  But something bothered him. There was some one thing that he had overlooked, and it bothered him. Somewhere along the line there was just one little detail, one little item, and he couldn’t think what it was, only that it was important, incalculably important.

  He tried to relax, and went over the whole thing again from its very beginning, from the telephone call from Leonard Estapoole making the appointment, right up to the present moment. The something still eluded him. He only knew it was important, and that it had to do with the murder itself, and that to save his life, he couldn’t think what it was.

  Then there was the problem of Tommy Storm. One of Hammond Estapoole’s girls, Max Hook had said. Just how important a girl, he had no idea as yet. But somehow she had known that there was going to be trouble, that he was going to be in some kind of a jam, and for some unknown reason she’d gone along to lend him a helping hand. Some reason far more important than old friendship with an unemployed chorus girl Malone had once indirectly helped.

  The big question was how much more she knew and, even more important, how she happened to know it.

  Well, unless something unforeseen happened, he would be having a few casual words with Hammond Estapoole any hour now. Furthermore, unless something downright earth-shaking intervened, he was going to have a lot more words with Tommy Storm, and they weren’t all going to be casual ones. What was more, they weren’t all going to be about murder, either.

  Ma Blodgett looked tired and harassed. She also looked unmistakably relieved at the sight of Malone, and turned over to him an ominously silent Alberta Commanday without ceremony, and with no unnecessary comment.

  “Say ‘thank you’ to the nice lady for a very pleasant visit,” Malone said.

  Alberta made a particularly rude noise.

  “Go on, say it,” Malone told her, through clenched teeth. “I warn you.”

  Something in the look on his face also warned her. She said, “Thank-you-for-a-very-pleasant-visit-good-by.” She stuck out her tongue and climbed into the waiting taxicab. “Where are we going?”

  “Maybe I won’t tell you,” Malone said. “Because wherever we’re going, you’re going to say you don’t like it.” He leaned forward and said to the driver, “Lake Forest, and I’ll look up the address when we get there.”

  “I don’t want to go home,” she said.

  “That’s too bad,” Malone said.

  “I don�
��t like it there,” Alberta said.

  “That’s too bad too,” Malone said. He added, conversationally, “How about Chicago?”

  “No,” she stated flatly. “I don’t like it.”

  Malone lit his cigar. “Is there any place you do like?”

  “No.”

  That seemed to take care of that subject. She sat in an infuriated and brooding silence for a few dozen blocks.

  “Why do I have to go home?”

  “Because you’re not kidnaped any more,” Malone told her. “That’s why.”

  She thought that over for a few minutes. “Did they pay a great big ransom?” she asked hopefully.

  “No,” Malone said. “They didn’t pay any ransom at all.” “Then I’m still kidnaped.”

  “No,” Malone said. “You’re not. That’s the reason you’re going home.”

  “Why?”

  “Because,” Malone told her brutally, “the kidnapers don’t want you any more, and Ma Blodgett doesn’t want you any more, and I don’t want you any more.”

  She took that in her stride and said, “Well anyway, my mama still wants me.”

  “I suppose she does,” Malone said. “There’s no accounting for things like that.”

  She thought that over too, couldn’t come up with an answer, and finally said, “I don’t like you.”

  “That’s good,” Malone said. “That’s fine. That simplifies everything. Now shut up.”

  She stayed shut up as far as Wilson Avenue. “If you take me home, I won’t tell who kidnaped me.”

  “I don’t care,” Malone said airily. “I didn’t kidnap you, and Ma Blodgett didn’t kidnap you. We rescued you.”

  She sniffed at that and said, “Don’t be silly. I know you didn’t.”

  Malone looked at her thoughtfully. She was small and owleyed and cross-looking in the dim light. “Anyway,” he hazarded, “I don’t imagine you know who kidnaped you.” Alberta made another very rude noise and said, “Of course I know who.”

  The little lawyer’s eyes narrowed. “Who was it?”

  “I won’t tell you,” she said. “I don’t like you.”

  “Go on,” Malone said. “I don’t believe you know anyway.” The look on her small face told him very plainly that she wasn’t going to fall into that kind of a trap.

  “In fact,” she said a few blocks later, “I’m not going to tell anybody.”

  “Don’t, then,” he said, with elaborate unconcern. “I don’t care.”

  She didn’t fall into that trap either.

  From then on, with the exception of a few minutes in a corner cigar store looking up Leonard Estapoole’s Lake Forest address, he worked on her steadily, all the way from Howard Street to the massive gateposts that stood on either side of a wide, curving driveway.

  He tried bribery, starting with ice cream, and steadily working his way up to cold, hard cash. She simply wasn’t interested.

  He appealed to her better nature and good citizenship, pointing out that kidnapers were reprehensible people who ought to be behind bars. That struck her as terribly funny.

  With a great deal of will power and self-control, he resisted an impulse to shake her.

  He threatened her with great bodily harm, and she pointed out to him that it was against the law to strike helpless little children, so there!

  And by that time, they had turned in through the massive gateway and arrived.

  Malone paid off the driver and stood looking at the Estapoole house for a few minutes. It was too dark to make out anything definite about its details or its style, but there seemed to be a great deal of it, and what he could see looked elaborate and, at the same time, forbidding, like a highly ornamented jail. What garden he could see looked far more formal than any public park, and almost as large. In his heart, he agreed with Alberta. He didn’t like it either.

  A rakish foreign convertible was parked in the driveway, and a short, stocky man in a chauffeur’s uniform stood beside it, giving it what was evidently the last polishing of the day. He stopped what he was doing at the sound of their footsteps on the loose gravel, looked up, and started for Malone on a dead run.

  “Hey, you!” he yelped, and dived at Malone.

  Malone had looked too, and instinctively he dived at the same moment, lowering his head and butting the chauffeur squarely in the stomach. The chauffeur grunted and sat down hard on the driveway, a surprised look on his face. He started to get up again, and was met with a hard right to the jaw. This time he stayed put.

  Alberta took Malone’s hand and said, “I do like you.”

  “That,” Malone said, “is tough on both of us.”

  The encounter, he thought grimly, was either highly auspicious or highly inauspicious for the interviews ahead of him, and right now he wasn’t sure which. Because whatever it had been, it hadn’t been a case of mistaken identity on either side.

  A fat-faced butler, with eyes like two fried eggs, opened the door. He didn’t seem particularly surprised or pleased to see either Alberta or Malone. In fact, he didn’t look as though he would be particularly surprised or pleased at anything.

  He ushered Malone impassively into an enormous room off the hall and led Alberta toward another one. Left alone, Malone settled down to wait, and looked around him. It was a pleasant room, but with just a little more of everything than anybody could possibly need. More chairs, more little tables with ash trays, more vases, more lamps, more large, gloomy oil paintings on the walls. There was a carved library table that was big enough to dwarf the large and elaborate bouquet of hothouse flowers that stood on its exact center, and the carved marble fireplace at the far end of the room was big enough to barbecue a medium-sized steer.

  It was a room that would have made the average person look and feel small, but when Carmena Estapoole came in, Alberta clinging to her hand, she dominated it.

  She was tall and graceful and built like a sultan’s dream of paradise. Her hair was very dark and caught up loosely at her neck, as though it might break loose at any moment and go streaming gloriously down her lovely back. Her eyes were just as dark, just slightly tilted at the corners, and with long, thick eyelashes. Her full lips were like cherries that have been left on the tree just a little bit too long.

  Her rustling hostess coat was so deep a purple as to seem almost black, and fitted her invitingly. It seemed to Malone that she should have been holding a huge cornucopia overflowing with ripe fruit.

  “That’s him,” Alberta said, pointing. “He rescued me. He fought with people. He almost got killed. But he rescued me. His name is Malone. I like him.”

  There was a small hint of a smile at the comers of Carmena Estapoole’s abundant mouth. “We thank you, Mr. Malone.”

  “Think nothing of it,” Malone said, wondering if his face had really reddened or if it was just his imagination. He began unwrapping a cigar and wondering what on earth he was going to say to her.

  “Now, Alberta, say good night to the gentleman and run upstairs to bed.”

  “No,” Alberta said.

  Carmena Estapoole said everything to her in one quick, silent look.

  “Yes, Mama,” Alberta said, with an expression of pure adoration.

  She gave her mother a good-night salute that almost undid the long glowing black hair, advanced on Malone, and threw her thin arms around his neck. To his amazement, he kissed her back.

  “I’m greatly flattered,” he said, after she had gone.

  “You should be,” she said. “Alberta doesn’t like everybody.”

  “So she says,” Malone said.

  He looked at her admiringly. Within the past two days her only child had been kidnaped and then, without advance notice or warning, returned to her. Her husband had been murdered. But she remained as composed and unruffled as though this had been just another day.

  She said, “Hammond will be here in a moment,” sat.down in a deep green chair near Malone’s, took out a cigarette and fitted it expertly into a slender ivory holder
. “I hope Alberta didn’t give you too much trouble.”

  “None at all,” Malone said truthfully. “We got along just fine.”

  He wondered if this would be the time to tell her that the chauffeur outside was one of the kidnapers of Alberta Com-manday. Or if she knew it already.

  CHAPTER 10

  Hammond Estapoole came in, a tall, solidly built man who just missed being handsome. He greeted Malone cordially and said, “Hear you brought the baby back. Very nice going.”

  He didn’t say it as though Malone had done anything spectacular, or as if he had been particularly worried. He sat down beside Carmena Estapoole, patted her hand, and assumed an air that was considerably more than protective.

  Malone studied them thoughtfully. Hammond Estapoole was a good-natured, amiable man, the kind that was equally well liked by men and by women, as well as by dogs, horses, small children, and old ladies. While Carmena was definitely the type of woman to be adored, but not at a distance. Taken together, they made a very nice couple indeed.

  He wondered if he ought to start in by saying that, according to every indication, and following the line of every popular plot, they had guiltily conspired to do away with the late Leonard Estapoole and to throw the blame on Malone.

  He wondered if he ought to remark to Carmena Estapoole that her probable boy-friend was on very excellent terms with a cuddly little blonde by the name of Tommy Storm.

  He wondered if he ought to offer something rather casual but still conventional in the way of condolences.

  While he was still wondering what to do or say next, Carmena Estapoole said unexpectedly, “I know you’re thinking that I’m taking all this very calmly, Mr. Malone. But I’m a very calm person by nature. And you have absolutely no idea what it was like, being married to Leonard Estapoole.”

  “Frankly, no,” Malone said. “I haven’t.” He finally got his cigar lighted. “Did he beat you?”

  She smiled, a little wearily. “I don’t think Leonard Estapoole ever beat anybody in his life, or could have. Or even thought of it. He was always exquisitely kind.” She paused. “I don’t mean that just like it sounds. I mean—sincerely, warmly, genuinely kind.”