Fall Girl Page 12

  Unfortunately the bartender didn’t possess the colonel’s skill at getting people to make bets with him. None of the customers seemed willing to bite. Horton listened for some minutes as the man explained the bet over and over, without getting any takers. Apparently no one was able to figure out the catch, but their reluctance suggested that they knew there must be a catch somewhere, and none of them wanted to be shown up as suckers.

  “The devil with all of you,” the bartender finally said in a disgusted tone. “Too cheap to risk two bits on a sure thing.” Then he called, “Hey, Charlie. Watch the bar for me a minute, will you? I got to tap one.”

  He moved to the basement door and was clattering down the stairs before Horton could start back for his refuge behind the furnace. It happened so quickly, Horton could do nothing but flatten himself against the wall beneath the stairs and hope he wouldn’t be seen.

  He was safe enough from observation while the man was on the way to the cooler, for when he turned toward it at the bottom of the stairs, his back was to Horton. But when he came out of the cooler to return upstairs, Horton would be right in front of him.

  Horton waited until he entered the cooler and bent over the empty barrel with his back to the door. Then, on tiptoe, he headed toward the furnace. He had to pass the cooler’s open door to get there.

  He thought he was going to make it. He was almost past the door when the bartender completed drawing the tap hose from the empty and started to roll the barrel out of the way. The movement turned him sidewise enough to glimpse Horton’s figure from the corner of his eye.

  With a startled exclamation he came erect and stared at Horton. Horton came to a halt.

  “You!” the bartender said.

  There was only one thing to do, and Horton did it. Stepping into the cooler, he brought around a fast right hook with all the power of his shoulder behind it. It caught the man squarely on the point of the jaw. His eyes crossed and he pitched forward into Horton’s arms.

  Backing out of the cooler, Horton gently lowered the unconscious man to the floor. He pushed shut the cooler door and moved to the stairs. Taking a deep breath, he started up.

  Every seat at the bar was filled, and most of the booths were occupied. As Horton stepped from the cellar door, a man at the end of the bar glanced at him casually, then examined him more sharply.

  When Horton gave him a sunny smile and moved on past, the man relaxed, nodded and returned his attention to his drink. No one else seemed to notice Horton.

  Without hurry he opened the door and stepped outside. The rented Ford was parked a quarter block up the street. Momentarily, he expected either the hue and cry of pursuit from the barroom, or for police to descend on him from concealment. Neither happened, however.

  He pulled away from the curb slowly, drove at moderate speed to the first intersection, and turned right. After driving six blocks at the same speed without encountering a police barricade, he began to relax. He turned south and drove toward the center of town. At the first chain drugstore he spotted in the downtown area, he stopped to make a phone call.

  Belle didn’t answer her phone. He dropped another dime, called the Lawford again and asked for room 786.

  Helen was in.

  When she recognized his voice, she said in a tone of relief, “I’ve been so worried, Jim. How did you make out at Velda’s?”

  Before answering, he took his usual precaution of calling to the switchboard operator. When she failed to respond, he said, “Fine. But I’m in a bit of a jam now. I was recognized by somebody.”

  “Oh, goodness,” she said. “What happened?”

  “Tell you when I see you. The point is, they have the description of the clothes I’m wearing now. Probably there’s a bulletin out to every cop in town. I have to hole up somewhere fast.”

  “You know you’re welcome here,” she said.

  “Yeah. I also know I’d be risking your neck. Hiding out a wanted man is a criminal offense.”

  “Why do you even mention that?” she asked softly. “Don’t you know I’d do anything for you?”

  “Would you, Helen?”

  “Of course. Besides, I know you’re innocent.”

  “Maybe everybody will know it by tomorrow,” he said. “How can I get up there?”

  “The same way as before. Use the side entrance and come to the freight elevator. I’ll bring it down to the lower hall and hold it there until you arrive. How soon will you be?”

  “Fifteen minutes,” he told her.

  It took him only ten minutes to drive to the hotel. He parked on the street alongside it and carefully looked up and down before getting out of the car. A few pedestrians were on the street, but he saw no police uniforms.

  Locking the car, he quickly moved to the side entrance and stepped into the entryway. Instead of going straight ahead into the lobby, he took the hall leading off the entryway to the right. This led to the rear hall where the freight elevator was.

  At the corner where the two hallways joined, he paused and drew back out of sight while a waiter with a tray of food on his shoulder crossed the hall from the kitchen into the dining room. As soon as the swinging doors into the dining room closed after the waiter, he hurried past to the freight elevator.

  It was on the ground floor and Helen was waiting in the car as she had promised. The instant he stepped inside, the door closed and they began to rise.

  Neither said anything. At the seventh floor Helen checked the hallway before motioning him out of the car. She checked again at both turns of the corridor on the way to her room. They encountered no one.

  Safely inside the room, both of them heaved sighs of relief. Horton sailed his hat onto the bed, shrugged out of his sport coat and loosened his tie.

  “Sure good to be home,” he said.

  “It’s good to have you,” Helen said with a smile.

  She moved against him and slid her arms about his neck. After he had kissed her, she drew back to look up into his face.

  “It’s been awful,” she said. “All day I’ve been imagining you in the hands of the police. Or worse, in the hands of Manzetti. Why can’t you just stay here now until this is all over?”

  “It’s a pleasant thought,” Horton said dryly. “But I doubt that it’d ever be over if I just sat and waited for it to end. I’ll have to go out again tomorrow.”

  “Why?” she asked.

  “I had to take the gun away from Velda’s. It’s in the glove compartment of a rented car I have downstairs. A friend of mine’s having a test slug from it checked against the murder bullet. If they match, I’ll have to plant the gun back at Velda’s again.”

  “And then it will be over?” she asked.

  “It ought to convince the police I didn’t kill your stepfather. It’ll be up to Velda to explain the gun.”

  She moved out of his arms with a thoughtful little frown on her face. “What if you got caught before you could put it back? With the murder gun in your possession?”

  “We haven’t established it as the murder gun yet,” he said. “We’re just hoping.”

  “But suppose it really is, and you got caught with it?”

  “That would cook me good,” he said. “Let’s not think about it. How about mixing up a couple of drinks?”

  CHAPTER XXIII

  HELEN HAD the next morning off in order to attend her step-father’s funeral at ten. As Velda would presumably attend it too, this would be a good opportunity for Horton to replace the forty-five automatic.

  They had breakfast in Helen’s room again, then Helen left for the funeral parlor at nine-thirty. Horton rang Belle’s room, found her in and said he would be right over.

  This time Belle was fully dressed when he got there. She made no mention of his presence at the hotel again, and its obvious implication that he had spent the night with Helen. Her manner was subdued and she seemed to be on guard against saying anything to offend Horton. He got the impression that she was determined not to show any further jealou
sy, nor to give him any other excuse to accuse her of dramatics.

  He should have felt relieved, but her stoic attitude only increased his feeling of guilt about the whole matter.

  A little brusquely he asked permission to use her phone, and called the Rafferty House. When he got hold of the colonel, he asked if there had been a report from Lieutenant Grady on the bullet comparison as yet. The colonel said he hadn’t heard from Grady, but would phone police headquarters immediately and then call Horton back.

  He phoned back ten minutes later.

  “Jackpot,” he told Horton. “It was the murder gun, all right. I promised to let Grady know the minute my anonymous informer called to tell me where the gun could be found.”

  “Better wait till I give you the go-ahead,” Horton said. “I plan to put it back while Velda’s at the funeral this morning. But hold off till you hear from me, in case there’s a slip-up.”

  “Right-o,” the colonel said, slipping into one of his rare Briticisms.

  When he hung up, Belle said, “Is there anything I can do, Jim?”

  “You could act as lookout on the way to the car,” Horton said. “I’d hate to be spotted by someone on the way out of the hotel, now that it’s so close to over.”

  “All right,” Belle agreed.

  She checked the hallway to make sure it was empty, then crossed it and pushed the freight elevator button. Horton waited in her room with the door cracked open until the elevator door slid open and he saw that the car was unoccupied. Then he quickly crossed the hall and entered the elevator behind her.

  Horton had observed Helen’s manipulation of the controls enough to know how to work them. The contraption had bastard controls. Originally designed to be run by an operator, it had been rewired so that it could be called to any floor by pressing a call button. The original lever control hadn’t been replaced by a panel of buttons, however, so that once inside the car it had to be operated in the old-fashioned way. Horton pushed down on the lever, watched the painted floor numbers as they flashed by, and slowly began to raise the lever again as they passed the second floor. He brought the car to a jerky stop a foot too high, lowered it to the proper level in two jolting drops of six inches each, and the doors slid open.

  He stayed in the car until Belle gave him the all-clear, then followed her rapid pace past the kitchen to the turn in the hall and on into the side entryway. Before stepping outdoors, he checked the street through the glass. There were no police uniforms in sight and no one was near the parked Ford.

  “I can make it from here,” he said. “Thanks, Belle.”

  “Want me to go with you?” she asked. “I have nothing else to do.”

  He looked at her contemplatively. “If I get picked up, you’d be in a jam.”

  “Why?” she inquired. “I met you at a bar, and had no idea you were wanted by the police. I’ve talked my way out of worse spots.”

  Horton shrugged. “Come along, if you want.”

  He gave another quick glance at the street, then took her elbow and led her to the car.

  It was past ten thirty when he parked a half block away from 223 River Road. Horton figured the funeral would keep Velda away until at least noon, so he was in no particular hurry. Unlocking the glove compartment, he lifted out the automatic and thrust it into his belt under his sport jacket.

  “You’d better wait in the car,” he told Belle.

  Horton came to an abrupt halt when he reached the walk leading up to the house. Through the open doors of the garage he could see both the Chrysler convertible and the Ford station wagon. Doing an about-face, he went back to the car.

  “What’s the matter?” Belle asked.

  Climbing behind the wheel, Horton pushed up his hat to give the back of his head a puzzled scratch. “Both cars are in the garage.”

  Belle stared at him for a moment, then shook her head wonderingly. “And I called you a genius.”

  He glanced at her. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Widows don’t drive themselves to their husbands’ funerals alone, mastermind. They ride in one of the mourners’ cars. Someone picked her up and took her to the funeral.”

  “Oh,” Horton said a little blankly. He got out of the car again, gave Belle a shamefaced look, and walked up the street a second time.

  As on his previous visit, he took the precaution of ringing the doorbell. When there was no answer, he unlocked the door and started to push it open.

  A burglar chain stopped its movement after it opened only a few inches.

  Clicking the door shut again, he stood considering what this meant. After a moment he decided that probably all it meant was that Velda had left by the rear door, and therefore quite naturally had not released the chain on the front. A glance at the driveway running alongside the house convinced him the chain had no more serious implications. He saw that if the car calling for her had pulled clear back to the garage to turn around, it would be closer to the rear door than to the front. It would be logical for Velda to have gone out that way.

  Circling the house, he tried the rear door and found it locked. All the first-floor windows were locked too. He made another circle of the house, checking the basement windows and door, with equal lack of success.

  He returned to the car again and leaned in the front window.

  “Finally finished?” Belle asked. “I was beginning to worry. You’ve been gone twenty minutes.”

  “I’m not even started,” he told her. “She left a chain on the front door. Got a rubber band?”

  She raised her eyebrows, then opened her purse and searched through it. Horton waited patiently as she laid out a multitude of items on the seat next to her. As one after another there appeared a cigarette case, a lighter, a compact, lipstick, comb, handkerchief, wallet, change purse, address book, pen, pencil and, finally, a small packet of snapshots, it struck him that watching a woman empty her purse was similar to watching a certain circus act: the one in which an unending number of dwarf clowns tumbled from the interior of a miniature truck.

  Belle slipped a rubber band from around the packet of snapshots and handed it to him.

  “What’s it for?” she asked.

  “An old burglar’s stunt my mother once taught me,” he said. “I shouldn’t be long now.”

  Returning to the house again, he glanced at the homes on either side, then keyed open the door a second time. Inserting his left hand in the crack, he slipped one end of the rubber band over the small knob of the chain catch, doubled it around the knob until there was only a short piece of the rubber band left, and stretched it to hook over the far end of the slotted bar in which the chain catch rode.

  Then he withdrew his hand and pulled the door nearly shut.

  He could hear the chain catch slide along its slot as the tension of the rubber band drew it away from the edge of the door. His hope was that when the catch reached the insertion hole at the end of the slot, the rubber band would become loose enough to slip from the end of the bar. If it didn’t, the catch couldn’t fall free, he would have to release a little of the rubber band’s tension by unwinding one of its turns around the knob, and try over.

  He had guessed the proper tension the first time. The chain rattled as the catch tumbled from the insertion hole.

  Horton pushed open the door and went in.

  Glancing at his watch, he saw that it was now eleven o’clock. His trying of windows and doors, his two trips back to the car and the rubber-band trick had consumed nearly a half hour. He decided he had better get his business completed in a hurry and get out of the place.

  Upstairs he carefully wiped the automatic free of fingerprints and concealed it under the handkerchiefs in the dead man’s top dresser drawer. After wiping the knobs of the drawer, he heaved a sigh of relief.

  There was an extension phone on a table next to the bed. Horton saw no point in delaying his call to Colonel Bob until he could reach a drugstore. Lifting the phone, he dialed the Rafferty House.


  When he got the colonel on the phone, he said, “You can call your friend, Grady, now. It’s all set.”

  “Fine,” the colonel said with satisfaction. “Where are you?”

  “At Velda’s house. I’m just leaving. I’ll stay out of sight for the rest of the day, and call you about six to find out what the police did about the gun. As soon as they arrest Velda, I’ll turn myself in.”

  “Fine,” the colonel said again. “I’ll expect to hear from you at six then.”

  Horton wiped his prints from the phone and started toward the bedroom door. In the doorway he came to a sudden halt. Downstairs he heard the sound of the back door opening.

  Then he heard Velda’s soft drawl saying, “Thanks very much, Mrs. Corby. No, I’ll be all right, really. I think I prefer to be alone.”

  A woman’s voice said something Horton didn’t catch, and the door clicked shut. A moment later there was the sound of a car leaving the driveway. Velda’s footsteps moved to the front of the house. He heard the front door open, and for a moment had the wild hope that she was immediately going out again.

  But apparently she had only checked the mailbox. When the front door closed again, he heard her shuffling through envelopes in the lower hall. Tiptoeing to the top of the stairs, he peeked over the railing in time to see her toss several unopened letters onto a small table in the hall.

  He retreated back into Quincy’s bedroom as she started up the stairs. Flattening himself against the wall alongside the door, he waited for her to go past to her own room. Once she entered that, he might be able to slip out and down the stairs without being heard.

  She didn’t go to her own room. She turned into her deceased husband’s, walked right past Horton without seeing him and over to the dresser. Opening the top dresser drawer, she probed beneath the handkerchiefs and brought out the automatic Horton had just replaced there. She stared down at it in astonishment.

  “It’s back!” she said aloud in an amazed tone.

  Then she saw Horton’s reflection in the mirror over the dresser.