She'll Hate Me Tomorrow Page 14

  Behind him Sam Black growled to himself, “He just got some silly idea that’s going to get both of us in trouble.”

  Except when crossing streets, they stuck to alleys, working their way toward Fourth and Main. Black began to suspect that they were headed for police headquarters, but a block from it Ross led the way into another alley and parked.

  “What now?” Black called from behind him.

  Climbing from the Buick, Ross said, “We transfer all four to this car.”

  He had Black help him lift the men in the back seat to sitting positions, propping one in each corner. Then they propped the pair from Black’s car erect in the front seat, leaving room enough for Ross to get back behind the wheel.

  The pale-faced youth in back emitted a groan and weakly raised a hand to his head. Looking surprised, Ross opened the back door, tilted up his chin and threw a straight jab into it. It hadn’t traveled more than six inches, but still landed with the popping sound of a cork spurting from a champagne bottle. The youth collapsed, his head thrown back against the seat and his face turned straight upward.

  “Wouldn’t do to have anyone wake up too soon,” Ross said in explanation.

  Opening the trunk, he wrapped a handkerchief around his hand to lift out one of the shotguns, carried it around to the rear car door, and set it, butt down, between the pale youth’s knees. He clamped the lad’s fingers about the barrel.

  With an expression denoting total lack of understanding, but willingness to co-operate, Black wrapped a handkerchief about his own hand and moved to help with the other shotguns. When all four unconscious men held cut-down shotguns between their knees, Ross returned their pistols to their holsters.

  Climbing back under the Buick’s wheel and adjusting one of the slumping figures next to him to a more erect position, the gambler said, “Follow me and double park next to me when I park.”

  Black said dubiously, “I hope we’re not going far. If one of these baboons wakes us, you’ll get your head blown off.”

  “Only a block,” Ross said.

  They exited from the alley into the heavy traffic of Main Street. But none of the occupants of the cars speeding by so much as glanced at the Buick. Turning right when he emerged from the alley, Ross drove only half a block before being halted by a signal light.

  In the rear-view mirror he could see the Cadillac right behind him. He surveyed the situation ahead. In the center of the next block was police headquarters, and while a few pedestrians were walking past it, no one was entering or leaving the building at the moment.

  Ross wiped the steering wheel with his handkerchief and kept the handkerchief wrapped around the wheel.

  The light changed and the Buick moved forward, its right-turn directional light winking in signal of its intention to park. Smoothly it drifted into the no-parking zone directly in front of police headquarters. The Cadillac came to a halt alongside it. Ross whipped his handkerchief to the door handle of the car, stepped out, and gave the outer handle a quick swipe as he slammed the door.

  As he stepped into the waiting Cadillac, two uniformed policemen came from the building and paused at the top of the steps to chat. Neither glanced toward the curb.

  Sam Black stepped on the accelerator, squealed his tires around the next corner, and didn’t slow again until two blocks farther on.

  Then he said, “Your sense of humor kills me, Clancy. Why’d you change your mind about the hospital?”

  “There, they might not have been found for hours,” Ross said. “The guy with the broken jaw needs medical attention. There may be a couple of cracked skulls, too. I thought it was more humane to leave them where they’d be noticed quickly.”

  “Yeah. In a probably stolen car, loaded down with illegally cut-down weapons. Bix’s lawyer is going to be a busy little boy.”

  “I doubt it,” Ross said with a grin. “Bix doesn’t like inefficiency, and he won’t want any part of explaining to the cops how four of his boys got in that spot. He’ll tell the cops he doesn’t even know them. And they can’t explain things without admitting attempted murder. That quartet should be out of action for a while.”

  Looking at his watch, he saw it was five after nine. He told Black to pull up in front of a drugstore he spotted in the next block. From the drugstore booth he phoned the Stowe Point cottage.

  When Christine answered in the middle of the first ring, he said, “Hi. Sitting by the phone?”

  “Now you know how eager I am,” she said. “Where are you?”

  “Phoning from a drugstore. Some business I couldn’t avoid came up. I’m going to be a little late.”

  “You’re already a little late,” she said petulantly. “How much longer?”

  “It’ll be over an hour. I’m way downtown and I haven’t had a chance to shower and dress yet.”

  “An hour? You can shower here. And why do you need to dress? You’re not planning to keep your clothes on after you get here, are you?”

  He emitted a chuckle. “I also have to go home to pick up some booze. Expect me about ten or ten-thirty.”

  “All right,” she said resignedly. “I’ll wait.”

  Back in the car he said to Black, “Were you checking in for the night when you pulled into your garage, or were you planning to go out again?”

  “I was through for the evening. After years of working nights, I don’t know where to go when I have an evening off.”

  “Then you won’t be needing your car. I had a little accident with mine earlier, and I didn’t have time to check the damage. By now, all the gas may have leaked out of the tank.”

  Black looked at him. “It was that kind of accident?”

  “Uh-huh. May I use your heap?”

  “Sure, if you take me home first.”

  Black drove back to the Vista Arms, climbed out and Ross shifted over under the wheel.

  “I’ll bring it back in the morning, Sam. Thanks.”

  “Sure. If she has a friend, give me a ring.”

  “She has a friend, but you wouldn’t like him,” Ross said. “His name’s Whitey Cord.”

  He drove off, leaving Black staring after him.

  When Ross reached the neighborhood of Club Rotunda, he turned down the street behind the club where he had parked the Lincoln. It was still there, but a police radio car was parked behind it. The gambler drove on without slowing, turned the corner, drove down the alley behind the club and parked on the lot.

  He half expected to find police waiting there, too, but none were in evidence. Letting himself in the back door, he took the elevator up to his third-floor apartment.

  As soon as he got inside, he phoned the police.

  CHAPTER XXI

  “POLICE HEADQUARTERS,” a gruff voice said in his ear. “Sergeant O’Brien.”

  “This is Clancy Ross,” the gambler said. “I want to report my car stolen.”

  “Oh, hello, Clancy. We already got something on that. Hold on. Lieutenant Redfern has been trying to reach you for a couple of hours.”

  There was a wait, then Niles Redfern’s voice said, “Clancy? Where are you?”

  “Home.”

  “You haven’t been. I’ve been phoning there since before eight.”

  “I pull the plug out of the jack when I take a nap,” the gambler said smoothly.

  “Yeah? Well, I don’t think you’ve been napping. What’s been going on over there?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “A little after seven we got a report of heavy gunfire coming from the alley behind your place. When a squad car got there, there wasn’t a sign of anything. But in cruising the area they found a Lincoln all shot to hell parked on the next street. A check with DMV turned up that it’s yours.”

  “Parked on what next street?” Ross asked.

  “Elm. Just behind your club. What’s the story?”

  “You know as much as I do, Lieutenant. I just called in to report the car stolen.”

  There was silence for a moment. Then Redfern said
, “That’s a pretty old gag, reporting a car stolen after it’s been in an accident.”

  “Oh, was it in an accident? When you said it was all shot to hell, I thought you meant by bullets.”

  “You know damn well what happened to it,” the lieutenant growled. “But I can see you aren’t going to confide in me. I can’t offhand think of any charges to bring against you. Want us to tow in the car?”

  “I’ll phone a garage to come get it. But you can call off your stakeout.”

  “How’d you know it was staked out?” Redfern inquired quickly.

  “I know how you operate,” Ross said, and hung up.

  After phoning a garage and making arrangements for the Lincoln to be picked up, he stripped and took a shower.

  Ross prepared carefully for his date, but his preparations were a little odd. Before putting on his shirt, he buckled around his right arm, just below the elbow, the three-inch-wide leather strap the shoemaker had made for him. Threading the shoestring at the end of the elastic tape through the small metal ring at the base of the derringer’s butt, he tied it with a fisherman’s knot. When he held his hand to his side, the muzzle of the derringer hung about three inches above his wrist.

  He chose a shirt with wide French cuffs and clasped the cuffs together with gold cufflinks. When he had slipped it on, buttoned it, and had slipped the tails into his trousers, he looked in the mirror. Even when he examined the reflection of his right arm closely, he could detect no evidence of the contrivance strapped under the sleeve.

  For a moment he stood with his arms hanging loose at his sides. Then, suddenly, he snapped up his hand as though pointing a gun. He felt the elastic stretch and, as if by sleight of hand, the derringer was gripped in his palm.

  Breaking the gun, he slipped a shell into each chamber and let it slide back up his sleeve again. He counted out four extra shells from the cartridge box and dropped them in the left side pocket of his trousers.

  He unloaded his thirty-eight before slipping into his regular gun harness and dropped the shells into his right-hand trouser pocket. Then he pulled his suit coat over the harness and was ready for his date.

  In the kitchen he found a paper bag, carried it into the front room, and loaded it with a fifth of Scotch, a quart of bourbon and a fifth of soda from the bar. He took the elevator downstairs and let himself out the back way.

  The light over the back door was still out. Ross doubted that there would be any more moves by Bix Lawson that night, but his habit of anticipating possibilities made him decide he wanted the rear to be lighted when he returned later that night. Pulling a covered trash can over to the doorway, he stood on it and turned the bulb. As he suspected, it had merely been loosened. The light went on.

  Jumping down off the trash can, he pushed it back to its former place.

  He exercised another bit of caution before climbing into the Cadillac. Though he had been inside no more than a half-hour, and he really didn’t expect the car to have been tampered with, he lifted the hood and carefully examined the wiring system with a pencil flashlight. Finding no bombs connected to the starter, he slammed the hood and slipped behind the wheel.

  Both acts were examples of what the gambler considered his habitual carefulness, but what was really no more than chronic alertness. His unloading of his thirty-eight before strapping it on had been another instinctive preparation for a rather remote possibility. Since he expected to be parted from the gun at some time during the evening, he saw no point in furnishing his enemies with an additional weapon which might be turned against him.

  Nobody but the gambler himself would have considered any of these actions cautious, though. A truly cautious man wouldn’t have been heading into what he was certain could be nothing but a trap. He would have stayed home and gone to bed.

  Ross took Lakeview Drive to Halfway Junction, just as he had the night he drove the woman who called herself Christine Franklin to the cottage, but when he turned off on the gravel road which circled the lake, he headed north instead of south. Muskie Lake was only about a half mile wide at its broadest point and about two miles long. He drove clear around it in order to approach Stowe Point from a direction opposite to the one by which he would be expected.

  The gravel road hugged the shoreline of the lake at a distance varying from a dozen feet to not more than fifty. When he reached the tip of Stowe Point, he drove alongside a boarded-up cottage and cut his engine and lights. Christine Franklin-Vanita Bell’s cottage was only about a hundred yards beyond the tip of the point.

  The overcast sky made it difficult even to see the road, but he could make out the cottage in the distance by the subdued light glowing from its front windows. He groped his way along the road, probing the darkness alongside each cottage he passed.

  At the third cottage this side of Christine-Vanita’s he found what he was looking for. As the building’s windows were boarded up, it obviously was unoccupied, but a new Ford was parked next to it on the side away from her cottage.

  He risked his pencil flashlight to examine the windshield. As he had expected, it bore the sticker of a car-rental service.

  He had been reasonably certain that Bix Lawson knew nothing about this trap, but now he was sure. Local hoods would have used their own car. Only gunmen flying in from out of town would find it necessary to rent a car.

  He moved on to check the remaining two cottages this side of Christine’s, but found no more concealed cars. Satisfied that whatever force he had to face couldn’t be larger than a single carload, he retraced his way to the parked Cadillac and drove back around the lake the way he had come.

  When he approached the cottage from the other direction and pulled up alongside it to park, he saw, even before he got inside, that the woman had set the scene for romance. The only light was a subdued glow from the front windows, indicating that only the low-watt bulb she used as a night light was on.

  Hearing the car drive up, Christine-Vanita opened the door as he was lifting the paper sack from the front seat.

  “I’d almost given you up,” she called. “It’s a quarter to eleven.”

  “I’m only fifteen minutes late,” he said as he neared the door. “I said ten or ten-thirty.”

  She wore the same filmy blue negligée she had donned on his previous visit. She remained standing squarely in the doorway as he approached, so that the dimly lighted lamp behind her would silhouette her body and let him see that she wore nothing beneath it. At the last instant she stepped aside to let him enter.

  Like the lazy flick of a whip, his gaze swept the room in one comprehensive glance. As before, the bedroom door was closed and the darkened kitchen door stood open.

  “Supplies,” he said, hefting the sack and heading immediately for the kitchen.

  He knew by the way she turned her back to him to shoot home the door bolt that nothing was going to happen immediately. Nevertheless he cradled the sack in his left arm in order to leave his right hand free when he entered the kitchen and flicked on the overhead light.

  The kitchen was empty, unless someone was concealed in the pantry. As he opened the bottles and began to mix drinks, he kept one eye on the pantry door.

  The woman had come to the kitchen doorway and stood watching him mix drinks. Under the bright overhead light her dark blue negligée became almost transparent and he could clearly see the whiteness of her body beneath it. The plump roundness of her bosom and the darker circles of her nipples beneath the filmy material would have heated his blood under normal circumstances, but as things were the sight of her near nakedness did nothing to him.

  He had no intention of letting her suspect his coldness, however. When he finished making the drinks, he carried both glasses over, handed her one and deliberately ran his gaze up and down her body.

  “That outfit becomes you,” he said admiringly.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Taking his free hand, she led him over to the rustic sofa. When he seated himself next to her, she shifted closer to p
ress her thigh intimately against his. She smiled at him over the top of her glass.

  “Bumps,” she said.

  He clinked his glass against hers and took a sip. Raising hers to her lips, she tilted it and let the liquid flow steadily down her throat until the glass was empty.

  When she set it down on the cocktail table before them, he said, “My, you must have been thirsty.”

  “Just shamelessly eager to get past the preliminaries,” she said, rubbing her shoulder against his and looking up at him invitingly.

  He took another sip of his drink and set it down. Instantly her arms crept about his neck and her lips raised to his.

  He knew it wasn’t a very romantic thing to do, but he didn’t close his eyes for the kiss. He kept one on the bedroom door and the other on the open door to the kitchen. But after a few moments, because he knew it would be expected of him, he began to let one hand roam. Slipping it into the opening of the negligée, he cupped a plump breast and gently massaged its tip with his thumb and forefinger.

  “O-o-h,” she breathed against his lips. “If you only knew what that does to me.”

  He doubted that, this time, it did anything, for her flesh remained cool to his touch and the nipple remained soft between his fingers. On his previous visit, with no gunmen lurking in the other room to distract her attention, he was sure her passion had been genuine even though at the time she was deliberately setting him up for a subsequent trap.

  But tonight there was no convulsive pressing of her body against his, no squirming as though she couldn’t stand what he was doing to her. Even the long drawn out “O-o-h” had a theatrical ring to it.

  Slipping from his arms, she stood up. “You’re too formally dressed, Clancy. Let me hang up your coat.”

  Obediently he came to his feet, slipped off the coat and handed it to her.

  “Get comfortable by taking off your tie, too,” she suggested.

  Loosening the tie, he stripped it off, handed it to her and unbuttoned his collar.

  “Be right back,” she said, carrying the garments into the bedroom and closing the door behind her.