John D. MacDonald

Jail Bait

Chapter One

They sat side by side on an upholstered bench that ran the length of the crowded room. The small tables were close together. The lighting was very subdued. There was a raised stage at one end of the room. They had sat through three floor shows. The floor shows were a bit too clever, too brittle, too self-consciously smart. And they had talked too much and too intently. She know he had brought her here in the forlorn hope that it would please her.

Jane looked furtively at his face. He was staring down at the red plastic swizzle stick, bending it between his fingers. He glanced at her quickly. “Recapitulation?” he asked sourly. “Over it once again? Maybe I’m being dull about this. I just don’t see it.”

“I’m not good with words the way you are,” she said, feeling the quick anger come. “I go by feelings, Howard, I can’t just add up and find totals. I don’t think about this with a lot of plus and minus signs. Here I am. Jane Bayliss. I was horn here. I’ve been as far away as Cleveland in one direction and New York in the other. I’m twenty-four and I’ve worked for five years. There was a notice in the paper when I was born. There’ll be one there when I get married, if I do. And a final one when I die.” She put her hand on his arm, digging her fingers in, looking intently at him, living to make him understand. “Howard, there’s got to be more than that. Life has to have some glamour and excitement and danger. I just get up and plow through the day and go to bed. You say let’s get married now. Sure. It takes me out of one trap and puts me in another home, babies and all that. There hasn’t been enough happened to me, Howard. I haven’t lived at all!”

The swizzle stick broke between his fingers and he put the two halves in the ash tray. “If you feel like that, it’s not much use then, is it?”

“Not much, I’m afraid.”

“I wish I could think of some way of giving you a taste of this glamour and danger stuff you talk about, Jane. Just one time the feeling that somebody is doing his damnedest to kill you. I’ve had that happen to me, and it wasn’t pleasant. I want nothing to happen. I want a home and love and you.”

She touched his hand. “I could lie. I could pretend. Honestly, Howard, isn’t it better to say what I think?”

He looked beyond her at the people at the next table. He stared for a moment and took her wrist and said in a lower tone, “Don’t look around.”

It took a great effort for her to keep from turning around. “What is it?”

The table next to theirs was pushed out of the way. A man bumped clumsily against her shoulder as he got up and went out, a second man close behind him.

“What was it, Howard? What was happening?”

“Did you notice those two men at that table?”

“Just when they went out.”

“The one furthest from you was holding a knife on the one nearest you. The light happened to catch the blade just right. It was below the table level. The one near you had his hands flat on the table and the other one was going through his pockets with his free hand.”

The two men were just going out, walking close together, the smaller one to the rear. The man in the lead looked back over his shoulder expressionlessly — yet. Jane thought she detected despair in the glance. The light from above slanted against his white face, accentuating the fragile bone structure.

“Could we follow along and see what kind of car they have?”

“Darling, I’m not Mike Hammer, and people who use knives are not pleasant people. I’m going to wait about twenty seconds and then tell the management, who can then call the police. If you want a man who is going to bust up a private disagreement between a pair of rough characters, then you’d better get yourself another boy.”

“But if one man was being robbed?”

“Don’t look at me with such haughty scorn, honey. They knew each other. They came in together. They talked a long time. They ignored the last floor show. You stay right here.”

She was ten feet behind him when he went out into the bar. She was beside him when he asked for the manager. He glanced at her with disapproval.

The manager came out of some hidden recess. He was a short, bald man with bored eyes and a hairy sports jacket. “Having trouble, folks?”

“No trouble. I wanted to report something. Two men just left. They had the table next to us. One was holding a knife on the other.”

The bored look was gone. “Are you positive?”

“I saw the knife. He searched him first. He held the knife below table level.”

“Where were you?”

“At one of the tables along the side.”

“Barney, get me Jake on the double.” Their waiter came hurrying up. “You had these people?”

“Yes, sir. I gave them good service—”

“Two men at a table next to them. Just left. Know them?”

“I never saw them in here before, sir.”

“Did they seem to be quarreling?”

“They were doing a lot of talking. I came up to change the ash tray and heard one of them call the other a dirty name.”

The manager said, “Suppose you give me your names, folks, in case anything comes up.” He waved the waiter away and wrote down their names and addresses. He thanked them again and left.

In the parking lot Howard said dryly, “Was that enough excitement for a dull evening?”

“Howard, it isn’t that it’s dull being with you.”

“It’s just that nothing ever happens. I know.”

“We can’t talk about it, I guess.”

“I guess we can’t.”

He drove her back to her apartment in moody silence. She sat as far from him as she could. He parked in front and walked her to the outside door, took her key and opened it for her, held it open.

“Thank you, Howard.”

“Be a hypocrite and say it was a lovely evening.”

“Please don’t say things like that.”

“When will I see you again?”

She looked up at him. “Let me have a month, Howard.”

His mouth hardened. “Take a month. Take two.” He grabbed her roughly there under the lights and forced his mouth down on hers. It took her breath away. He released her. She opened her eyes. She stood on trembling legs and watched him walk quickly to the car, slam himself in and roar away.

The small elevator climbed sadly up through the sleeping building. She tiptoed down the hall and let herself in. Usually the small apartment felt crowded. Her roommate was a rawboned brunette named Betty Alford. Betty had been away for a week and would be gone for at least another three. Her kid sister was having a second baby and Betty had gone down to Wilmington to keep house for her. And somehow with her gone, the place seemed dreadfully big.

Sunday was a dreary day of rain, low clouds, traffic hissing on wet streets, lights on in the apartment. She did her hair and her nails, altered a skirt, wrote two letters, paced restlessly, and finally curled up in the big chair in her lime-green corduroy robe, cigarettes at hand, Sunday paper discarded, looking through a haze of boredom at the frantic efforts of a television comedian.

She was half asleep when the buzzer sounded. She pushed the button that unlocked the inner front door, hooked the night chain with automatic caution and stood, leaning against the wall, yawning.

When there was an authoritative knock on the door she opened it a few inches and looked out at the two men who stood there. The older one, dumpy, with a face like putty, stared at her out of dull, colorless little eyes. The younger one was tall. He had a weather-reddened face, flame-orange hair. He was almost grotesquely ugly. A sharp snowplow chin jutted up, and a beaked nose curved down. Both men were drably dressed.

“Miss Bayliss?” the redhead said. “We’re police officers, miss. I’m Detective Sergeant Sam Dolan. Can we see you a minute?”

She closed the door, unhooked the chain and let them in. The redhead beamed. “Take off your hat, Moe. Joe Friday always takes off his hat.”

“Funny man,” Moe said. He sat down in the big chair and put his hat on his knee and watched the television show.

“What’s this all about?” Jane asked.

The banter was gone. The blue eyes were quick. “A woman phoned in at daylight this morning and said as how there was a body in her yard, that she found it when she was setting out for early Mass. We went over there. She lives practically under the new Expressway Bridge. You know, it’s got those places where you can pull over out of traffic if your car quits. If they’d tossed him over the railing a hundred feet further along, he’d be floating down the river right now. But instead he lands in her yard and some fancy knife work has been done on him. He’s wearing clothes from the West Coast. His wallet is gone. No keys, no address. Nothing. In the side pocket of his coat we find a book of matches. Fingers are stained and two matches gone. They’re from the Taffeta Room.”

“That’s where we—”

“I know. You and your boy friend, Saddler, last night. We got the manager out of the sack and he went down and opened up and got your addresses for us. He gave us the waiter’s address and the doorman’s, too. By then we had glossy prints of the body. The manager didn’t recognize the picture. The waiter thinks the picture is of one of the two men. He gave us a meager description of the other one.”

“One was taller and—”

“Take a look at these.” Dolan took out two glossy prints. They were of the man’s head. Death had ironed the face to a ritual blankness. She shut her eyes and saw in memory the man’s quick backward look at the roomful of people. She shivered and handed the pictures back.

“That was the man.”

“Would you mind coming along to look at the body to make doubly certain?”

She swallowed hard. “I guess I wouldn’t mind.”

“Now try to remember as clearly as you can. Take your time. What did the other man look like?”

“Shorter. Heavier through the shoulders. Broader. He made the tall one look frail. They both wore dark suits. They both had dark hair.”

“Would you recognize the other one?”

“I never did look directly at him.”

“Your boy friend is going to be the best bet.”

“Yes, Howard looked right at them.”

Dolan said that if it was convenient, they would wait down in the car for her while she dressed. She did so, hurriedly, looked out at the rain and put on a transparent raincoat.

The police car was a black sedan. Dolan started up, and it shambled around corners, bounced violently over slight irregularities in the pavement. It took fifteen minutes to get to City General, where the body lay. Jane spent three minutes in the basement and came out on unsteady legs. She felt gray-green.

“Okay now?” Dolan asked solicitously.

“I guess so.”

A tall boy walked over toward them. He had a sideways gait, like a puppy. He wore a porkpie hat with a feather, damp raglan topcoat in a herringbone tweed reaching almost to his knees, and soiled white buckskin shoes.

“This on the John Doe knifing, Red?” he asked Dolan, jerking his head toward Jane.

“Don’t call me Red. Yes, this is on it. Miss Bayliss, this is Walker Locatta of the Journal. Don’t tell him a thing — yet.”

Locatta gave Dolan a sour look and turned and gave Jane a smile of searching approval. She realized at once that the boyish look was a cover; the face was hard. The lean throat was wattled. Fifty perhaps. He could be sixty.

“Know who he was, Miss Bayliss?”

“She won’t talk until I say she can talk,” Dolan said. “And I’m off on Friday and I like the card at the Arena.”

“Venality, Miss Bayliss,” Locatta said softly. “Degenerate minions of the law. Will ringside be good enough, Red? Or do you want me to get you a bout?”

“Two ringside.”

“I hope she identified him.”

“She doesn’t know him, but there could be a nice little story in it, Loco. She and her boy friend sat next to the deceased and saw the murderer hold a knife on him and walk him out of a joint last night. No one else saw it but this lady and her guy. Worth the tickets?”

Locatta pursed his lips and looked at the far gray sky over the city. “It will have to do, Red.”

He took a stenographer’s notebook out of the side pocket of the topcoat and wrote down the details. Her name and address and where she worked. The same with Howard Saddler. What time it had happened. Then he crossed the street, unlocked the trunk compartment of a gray coupe and brought back a cumber-some-looking camera. He smiled his aged smile at Jane.

“Never could find a photographer when I wanted one. So I had to learn how to do it myself. Now just relax. Pretty girls sell papers.”

He focused on her and then said casually, “Red, I don’t know why I waste my good time giving these publicity hounds a break. I’ve taken more pictures of featherheaded, stupid young females lately.”

Jane gasped and stared at him and the bulb popped. He lowered the camera.

“Just what do you mean?” she demanded.

“Sorry, Miss Bayliss. I wasn’t getting enough expression. Now I’ve got it. Outrage, indignation, incredulity. Thanks.”

She relaxed. “That’s a rough game.”

“I guess. This used to be a rough business. Too many rules now. Stop around, Red. I’ll leave the tickets at the desk in an envelope.”

As they drove back, Dolan talked about Locatta. “Loco mispelled Moe’s name once and Moe is still sore at him.”

“What is your name?” Jane asked.

Moe spelled it. “W-a-s-t-a-j-i-v-e-t-s-i.”

“He put in an extra ‘s’,” Dolan said.

“Right after the ‘v’,” Moe said. “It’s in the book. He could have looked it up.”

“It was important to Moe,” Dolan said. “His first citation.”

“For what? Is that like a medal?”

“Sort of. Moe went into a hotel to bring out a D and D. There were three of them and three guns and a bowling-ball bag full of dough. They shot him and he lost his temper.”

“Oh.” said Jane.

“Imagine putting dough in a bowling-ball bag,” Dolan mused. “Here you are, Miss Bayliss. Thanks a lot. Look, maybe you want to go with me to the fights Friday?”

“Well, I—”

“I’ll give you a ring.”

Chapter Two

On Monday morning Jane bought a Journal at the newsstand near her bus stop. She found herself on the first page of the second section. She was gazing light into the camera, frowning in an ugly way and looking mad as a hornet. It was hideous.

Beside her picture was a picture of the Expressway Bridge with the usual dotted line extending from the parapet down into the front yard of a rather grubby-looking house. There was a fat woman in the yard of the house, a tiny figure pointing at the big maltese cross at the end of the dotted line.

GIRL SPOTS KILLER, the headline said. She felt indignant. That wasn’t fair. Howard spotted the killer, if anybody did. She’d had one good look at the victim. The article hardly mentioned Howard.

She read with interest that the victim had a real name now. Walter Fredmans. Age, thirty-six. Resident of Los Angeles. He had served two terms in prison, one for auto theft and one for burglary. He had left the small apartment hotel where he lived about two weeks ago, checking out for good. He was driving a blue Kaiser sedan. Occupation, unknown.

Jane got to her office at nine. She worked as one of the secretaries in the claims department of an insurance company. Mr. Stoller, her boss, arrived at five after. He gave her his usual grave good morning.

She was hard at work on the bi-monthly summary when the phone rang. It was Howard.

“Oh, hi,” she said.

“Jane, did you see the headline in the paper? GIRL SPOTS KILLER. You know what it sounds like? It sounds as though you could give a positive identification. There’s a pretty good chance there’s a man in this town who would dearly love to see you as dead as Fredmans!”

“No!” she whispered, realizing in horror that it was true.

“I don’t know how you go about getting anybody put in protective custody, but I’m going to try. In the meantime, use every precaution, hear? Don’t go to lunch. That guy, if he can read, knows where you work. Wait for me tonight inside the building. I’ll be around as soon as I can make it.”

“I can get home.”

“You do as I tell you!”

“Now you’re roaring at me!” she said icily and banged the phone down. As soon as she did, it rang again. This time it was a long-distance call from a magazine. The editor said he wanted to send a staff writer and photographer to write up her experience with the murderer — and he wondered if she had any objection to being photographed in a bathing suit. She told him she wasn’t interested. Another man phoned and said he owned a place west of the city and he wanted to know if she could sing. She hung up on him. A woman called and said they were equipped to make a professional screen test of her at a nominal cost. A young man phoned and asked for a date. Jane phoned the switchboard and told them to please tell everyone that she had taken the rest of the day off.

After that she finished the report without difficulty, eating lunch at her desk.

At thirty seconds before five she swept her desk clear, centered the roller on the typewriter, thumped it down into its well, snatched her purse, and, at the stroke of five, put her hand on the doorknob and said good night to Mr. Stoller.

The elevators were crowded going down. When she got down to the lobby floor she looked anxiously around for Howard, but could not see him. She moved over into a far corner beyond the directory board and stood with her back against glossy, artificial marble and watched the elevators emptying the building. She looked so long and so anxiously for Howard that she kept imagining she could see him as he came sideways through the people hurrying in the opposite direction.

At five-thirty there was a less determined flurry of exits. Jane began to bite her lip. She began to feel conspicuous.

The October dusk came quickly. The lobby seemed bigger than before, gloomier. Jane was glad of the presence of the girl operator. There was a buzz and the girl pulled the doors shut and worked the lever that sent her upward. Jane hunched her shoulders, purse tucked under her arm, elbows in the palms of her hands. She shivered. Car headlights went by in the street. It was the time of day when traffic thinned.

A stocky figure appeared outside the glass doors, silhouetted by the street lights. Jane dropped her purse. It made a great crashing sound in the marble stillness. The figure shoved the door open and came in and it became a strong-looking old woman who turned and waited for a companion. Cleaning women, Jane guessed. She picked up her purse.

The women went through a heavy door that, said “Fire Exit.” Once they were gone, Jane hauled the door open cautiously. It was far too dark and creepy in there. Dim lights on the landings. Concrete stairs with metal treads. She let the door swing shut.

The elevator came down and a portly gentleman glanced at Jane and walked toward the night. The glass door swung shut behind him. The elevator operator looked at Jane.

“Face it, honey. You been stood up,” she said.

“I guess I have,” Jane said. “Do you know where I could phone?”

“Right down on the corner, honey, in the drugstore.”

“I mean, inside the building.”

“Get in, honey. There’s a phone in that crummy little dressing room they give us girls.”

The girl ran her up to the second floor. “Go all the way down there just as far as you can go and it’s the last door.”

Jane came to the door at the end of the hall and opened it. She found the light switch and turned it on — and let out her pent-up breath. Two sides of the windowless room were lined with gray steel lockers. The rest of the space was used for plumbing. The phone was on the right, with numbers scrawled on the wall on all sides of it — hundreds of numbers and comments. The dreary phone book hung in dejected tatters. The room seemed haunted by broken slip straps, worn girdles, and cheap perfume.

She phoned the cab company that advertised radio cabs, remembering that it was supposed to be safer because the driver could always call in case of trouble and his dispatcher could call the police. She gave the address and a voice told her the cab would be right along.

Jane turned out the light, shut the door, clacked back down the echoing hall. The elevator girl ran her down to the main floor. It wasn’t long before her cab pulled up in front of the building. “There it is,” the elevator girl said.

Jane paused with her fingertips on the door. The driver had reached back and opened the back door. She took a deep breath and shoved the door open violently and scuttled across the sidewalk, feeling far too conspicuous. She pulled the door shut behind her as she plunged into the cab and dropped with a sigh into the back seat. She gave her address and, as the cab started up, she looked through the rear window. The street seemed empty. Two women walked together. But she could not be certain. There were too many patches of darkness.

As they were approaching the apartment house she said, “Would you please drive around the block once? It’s that place on the left.”

“Anything you say,” the driver said. She was pleased not to have to invent an explanation.

He went by the apartment house slowly. Most of the rooms were lighted. A woman was coming out, leading a small black dog. Jane had seen her before. There was no one else. The driver went two blocks further and swung around so that he could let her off directly in front of the door. She stayed in the cab while she paid him and tipped him, and had her key in her hand when she hurried for the inner lobby door.

When she was inside with the door shut behind her, she was tempted to lean against it and close her eyes. She walked back to the self-service elevator, closed herself in, and, for the first time, sat on the little bench in the corner while the elevator crept upward, sighing as it reached its assigned floor.

She went down the corridor, sorting out her apartment key, and heard the dim sound of her phone ringing. She jabbed the key in the lock. The stubborn lock didn’t seem to work properly; it felt loose and made a grating noise. She made it work and pushed the door open and swung it shut and trotted toward the telephone in the dark room.

Halfway across the small room she kicked against something bulky and soft, and fell clumsily across it. She rolled quickly into a sitting position facing the unknown horror, and scuttled backward until her back was against the wall just beside the kitchen door.

The phone rang three more times and stopped. She felt as if something had her by the throat. She stared toward the warm softness until her eyes felt swollen.

She held her breath and listened. She could hear the horror breathing. She tilted her head a little and distended her nostrils. There was a faint something in the air. She could almost identify it. The odor did not seem to have bad associations. There was a certain astringent tartness about it... Shaving lotion that...

She gasped and scrambled awkwardly to her feet and turned on the kitchen light. She ran to him and turned him over. It was Howard. His underlip sagged. On top of his head, right in the middle, just forward of the crown, was an angry lump the size of a plum.

She remembered the young doctor on the third floor, the thin one who worked in a private clinic and made occasional broad passes at her. Began with an H. That was it. Halstead. She looked in the book, hands trembling. He answered on the first ring.

“This is Jane Bayliss, Doctor. Upstairs. I’ve seen you in—”

“Ho! The Rita Hayworth type. I memorized your apartment number off the mailbox in case you ever came down with—”

“Please, could you come up right away? Someone is hurt.”

“Right away,” he said in an entirely different voice.

He came in and gave her a casual glance and got down on his knees beside Howard. He took the pulse first, then thumbed up Howard’s eyelid and shone a light into the pupil. He gingerly fingered the skull around the area of the angry lump, then appeared to feel the temperature of Howard’s hands.

He sat back on his heels and looked up at Jane. “A lusty thump on the noggin. And don’t try to tell me he tripped. Were you being unsocial?”

“I found him here. I just got home.”

“From the look of that lump, and the amount of discoloration, I’d say he’s had a nice long sleep.” He got to his feet and headed for the phone. “An ambulance for this boy.”

“Is it bad?”

“He’ll have a thorough headache. I don’t suspect a fracture. Concussion and shock. A little bed rest is indicated.”

Howard moaned and opened his eyes and stared dully at the ceiling. Jane knelt beside him and took his hand in hers. “Darling! How do you feel?”

He turned his head slowly and looked at her. “What are you doing here?”

“I live here!”

“What am I doing here then?”

“What’s the last thing you remember?” the doctor asked.

“I was supposed to pick you up and take you to dinner, honey. I thought we might go to the Taffeta Room later and—”

“That was Saturday!” she cried. “This is Monday.” She looked up at the doctor. “What’s wrong with him?”

The doctor grinned. “Don’t scare the patient. A bump like that often results in temporary amnesia. It will probably go away in a few days. Hey, don’t get up.”

“I got to,” Howard said earnestly and doggedly. “I’m going to be sick.”

They helped him up and the doctor led him away to the bathroom. When they came out Howard looked a luminous blue. He sat in the big chair and shut his eyes.

“I think I can walk him down to my car,” the doctor said. “Come on, pal. Let’s see if we can make it. What’s his name, Miss Bayliss?”

“Howard Saddler.”

“Okay, you notify the police and whoever else Howard here would want you to tell. Come on, now. Upsy-daisy. And I wouldn’t touch anything, Miss Bayliss. Somebody gave this place a good going over.”

She walked them to the elevator. As soon as it started down she raced back to the apartment, shut the door and put the night chain on it. Then she saw the apartment more clearly. The bureau drawers, the cosmetics, the medicine cabinet was bad enough. The final straw was in the kitchen, where flour, sugar, coffee, rice and less identifiable substances had all been dumped out on the counter top and had spilled over onto the floor. She wanted to cry.

She phoned and asked for Detective Sergeant Sam Dolan.

“This is Jane Bayliss. Could you... could you come over?”

“What’s wrong?”

“Somebody hit Howard on the head and turned my apartment upside down.”

“Don’t touch anything. Be right there.”

Dolan arrived in eight minutes, accompanied by a uniformed officer, two lab men and the Journal reporter named Locatta.

Dolan listened patiently while she told what had happened. The lab men took her fingerprints. They began to go over the apartment. After the first five minutes one of them came over to Dolan and said, “Waste of time. Doorknobs, catches either smeared or clean. The joker wore gloves. Two strangers off the outside knob is as good as we’ll do, but odds it wasn’t him or them. Knock off?”

“Jerry, take these boys back. Loco here will give me a lift if I ask him nice.” He turned to Jane. “You have anything valuable here?”

“No.”

“Who is the other girl? Tell me everything you know about her.”

Jane gave him a complete report on Betty Alford. Halfway through he began to look bored. Before she had finished he was roaming around again, whistling tunelessly. He stopped and scratched his red head. “These things have a smell. If you can find where they left off, then the odds are they found what they wanted. This guy didn’t leave off. He kept looking.”

“There’s nothing here to find, that’s why.”

“Fill her in on developments, Red,” Locatta said in his thin, boyish voice. “Maybe she can make things fit by remembering something.”

“A couple of other things have happened. We don’t know if they’re related or unrelated. Somebody broke into the Taffeta Room last night. It was a professional job of breaking and entering, but it stopped being professional right there. They wore gloves. They stood at the bar and had a drink of the best scotch in the house and went out the way they got in. The only thing they didn’t do was leave a tip.”

“That sounds crazy.”

“Like drunk college kids doing it on a dare,” Locatta said.

“Item number two. This will be on local news tonight and in the paper in the morning. The Los Angeles Police tried to find out who Fredmans was running around with. They got a line on a girl friend. They shook down her place and didn’t find anything that meant anything except a ring. That ring disappeared along with a bunch of unmounted stones in Savannah about eight months ago. A salesman for a diamond wholesale house was slugged. He had his locked case chained to his wrist. They cut the chain with what was believed to be a heavy pair of snips. It was well planned.

“The girl was scared, and she talked. She told them Fredmans was in on the robbery. She didn’t know who else was. He gave her the ring. It was a common type of setting and a pretty fair half-carat stone. Apparently Fredmans never noticed the initials inside the band. The girl did, but she didn’t realize those initials could be dangerous, and so she didn’t throw it away. She said she hadn’t seen Fredmans for two weeks. But she said some men she didn’t know had been asking her about him. She said they acted sore. She couldn’t give an adequate description.”

Jane looked at Dolan and then at Locatta. She shook her head. “I don’t know why you should think all that should mean anything to me. It just confuses me.”

Locatta held up a snapshot Betty Alford had taken of Jane at the beach the previous summer. She had on the bathing suit that always made her obscurely uncomfortable when she wore it. “Do I have your permission to use this delectable thing in our miserable newspaper?”

“You do not! Where did you get it?”

“There’s a lot of them in that drawer, and some on the floor under the table.”

“Give it here!”

Locatta handed it over reluctantly and shrugged.

“Who hit Howard, Mr. Dolan?” Jane asked.

“Some burglar, I guess.”

Chapter Three

Locatta and Dolan left. Jane replaced the chain on the door. She was hungry. She managed some sandwiches in the ruin of the kitchen. Then she changed to old clothes and started in on the apartment. She saved the kitchen until last. She got to that by eleven-thirty. At quarter of one she straightened up by painful degrees, digging herself in the back with her fist. She looked at the gleaming little room.

“Adventure,” she said sourly. “Romance, excitement, suspense. Phooey!”

Just before climbing into bed, she went over to the front windows. She pulled the edge of the drapery away from the window frame and looked down at the street. A taxi, roof light glowing, hurried by and turned down the next street with the faint complaint of tires. She looked up. She could see stars beyond the city mist. She looked down again, ready to shrug off her fears.

And felt as if she were about to scream.

It was a darkness across the way, a pocket in the night; you could not see into it. But something moved. A tiny red coal that came up in a slow arc and stopped, flared brighter for a moment, and descended in the same slow arc. It was a cigarette held in someone’s hand, lifted slowly to unknown lips.

She worked in darkness. She built a high precarious tower of most of the pots and pans from the kitchen. She built it in the sweating darkness, built it so that it touched the front door. If the front door should open, even an inch, the tower would fall thunderously into the dishpan. Someone had once brought her a Samoan war club. She found it in the back of the closet and took it to bed with her. She lay and strained her ears for an interminable time before exhaustion overtook her.

A great banging, clattering, tinny sound brought her out of her sleep. She jumped from the bed, blinking at the morning sunlight, clutching the war club.

“Who is it?”

“Me, Dolan,” came the answer. “For God’s sake, what’s going on in there?”

“Just a minute.”

She got her robe and put it on, and released the chain and opened the door.

Dolan looked at the litter of pots and pans. “Got something cooking?”

She knew she was blushing. “I got nervous in the night. I made a pile of them. So they’d fall over if anybody tried to come in.”

“I didn’t even try. I just knocked. A thing like that can upset a man.”

“I’m sorry, but there was someone standing across the street last night, watching this place.”

Dolan stared at the object on the bed. “What’s that thing?”

“It’s a Samoan war club. What are you doing here, Mr. Dolan?”

“Thought I’d check up on you on my way to the mines. And show you a copy of this morning’s Journal.”

She gave a quick look and sat down hurriedly. “But this is awful. He gave it back.”

“And kept the negative.”

“That’s stealing!”

“I like the caption: ‘Beauty sought by killer. Apartment rifled. Boy friend struck down. Today the slayer of Walter Fredmans, international jewel thief, roams the streets of—’ ”

“I’d really like to get dressed, if you don’t mind,” she said frigidly, and he left, grinning.

She was at the hospital early, to see Howard. He was in a six-bed ward on the second floor in the east wing. Two of the beds were empty. The head of his bed was cranked high and he was reading a magazine. He put it aside and grinned at her as she appeared.

“Howard, what a little bit of a bandage thing that is! I thought you would be swathed in stuff. Like a fortune teller.”

“I know it’s there, all right.”

She pulled the chair closer to his bed so she could hold his hand. “What happened?”

“There isn’t much to tell, really. You sounded sore over the phone when I called you yesterday morning. I wanted to be sure you’d wait for me, so I phoned again later. They told me you had left for the day. I was upset. All I could think of was somebody phoning you and pretending to be somebody else, just to get you out of there.”

“But I didn’t leave! I had to tell the switchboard to say that because I couldn’t get any work done.”

“I worried about you.”

“You remember everything now?”

“Oh, sure. I went to your place and got there a little after two. I pushed your button but I didn’t get any answer. I hung around, wondering what to do. I pushed a bunch of other buttons and pretty soon the door buzzed and I went on in. I took the elevator up and went down to your door and knocked on it. The second time I knocked, the door swung open. That puzzled me, so I walked right in. Then I was looking up at you. No memory of being hit or of falling. That’s still gone. I just remember walking through that door.”

“When can you leave here, Howard, and go back to work?”

“I can leave tomorrow and go to work Thursday if I feel okay.”

The nurse came rustling up. “You’re Miss Bayliss?”

“Yes, I am,” said Jane.

“There’s a phone call for you in the phone booth in the lobby, Miss Bayliss.”

“Thanks. Howard, I’ll be back this evening. Okay?”

“You don’t have to. Suppose I give you a ring when I’m ready to leave. Maybe you could bring my car around. I put it in that lot around the corner from your place. The claim check is here in this drawer.”

“All right. See you later, Howard.”

She hurried down the corridor, down the wide stairs and along the main-floor corridor to the lobby. There were two booths. In the second one the receiver stood on the little shelf by the phone. She closed herself inside the booth.

“Hello. This is Jane Bayliss... Hello?... Hello?”

A silence, yet somehow not the silence there is when someone has hung up. It was a listening silence. She could hear no breathing. The impression was vivid. Her hand felt cold and shaky as she hung up. She looked across the tan tile of the lobby and saw a familiar figure standing at the desk, porkpie hat at the remembered jaunty angle. She turned and took the receiver from the hook and dialed without putting a coin in the slot, pretended to carry on a conversation. When she risked another glance, Locatta was no longer at the desk. She saw him go through the far archway that divided the lobby from the main-floor corridor.

Jane walked in the other direction, out the main doors and into an afternoon that was turning colder. She kept thinking about the phone call. If it was not her imagination, then it meant that someone knew she had come to the hospital.

She wondered if she should go into a drugstore and phone Dolan and tell him. She remembered his skeptical attitude, his comment about its being some kind of burglar who slugged Howard. She was a girl with a strong will, well accustomed to taking care of herself, with no inclination to yell for help or have attacks of the vapors.

She began to window-shop. She made no effort to look behind her, or find a window that would reflect what was in back of her. After she passed West Adams Street, she walked more slowly, spending more time on each window, trying to remember the exact location of the shoe shop she liked over on Walden, the avenue that paralleled the boulevard. It was very close to the middle of the block. Clarissa’s was the name of the shop. She found a small dress store on the boulevard which, she hoped, was practically back to back with Clarissa’s. She studied the window for some time and then went in slowly.

The clerk came from the rear of the store. “May I help you?”

“I thought Clarissa’s shoe store was right along here somewhere.”

“Oh, no, miss. That’s right over on West Adams, just about opposite here,” the clerk told her.

Jane made a rueful face. “All the way around the block. I don’t suppose there’s any way I could cut through, is there?”

“You could go out through our rear door and across the alley and in through their rear door, but—”

“Oh, thank you so much. Right out through here?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

The rear entrance to Clarissa’s was a narrow door that opened into a passageway piled high with cartons and littered with scraps of paper. She passed a storeroom and pushed open a swinging door and went into the shop proper. The clerk she liked saw her and said, “Hi, Miss Bayliss! New way to come in. Say, you’ve really been in the papers, haven’t you?”

“Margaret, how would you like to be a dear and forget you saw me in here? I’m in a terrible rush and I’m trying to duck someone. I’ll be back and tell you all about this business later on.”

“Sure. You run on, Miss Bayliss. And come back soon. We’ve got some new things in your size.”

Jane went out the front door and turned right on Walden, going back in the direction she had come. She remembered the old hotel on the corner of West Adams and Walden and hoped there would be a cab stand there. There was a stand with one cab waiting. She got in quickly and sat well back in the corner of the seat and told the driver to take her to the center of the city. She paid off the driver, and walked rapidly east. She knew the place she wanted to go. It was a quiet apartment hotel with a limited number of transient rooms. It was not far from the airlines terminal, the place to which the limousines brought passengers from the airport.

The sky was now much darker. The wind had increased. The first chill, hard-driven drops of rain began to fall when she was thirty feet from the entrance. She ran the rest of the way, went into the small, dark, sedate lobby flicking droplets of rain from the shoulders of her coat. An elderly man serviced the desk. He said mildly that he had a room. She signed, in an abnormal backhand, “Mrs. Howard S. Alford” and gave Betty’s family’s address in Wilmington.

She said, with a show of indignation, that there had been a mixup about her luggage, that it seemed to have gone on the wrong flight. The elderly man was sympathetic. She said she would be happy to pay in advance. He told her that would hardly be necessary. She said she was tired and would like to take her meals in her room, if that was possible. The clerk rang the desk bell and another man who looked like his twin came out of the shadows. He took the key and they clattered upward.

The room had high ceilings, a gilt radiator, a tasseled lampshade, a tiled bath, a Gideon Bible, and some hand towels as soft and absorbent as roofing paper, stamped in faded blue with the name of the place — The Farrington.

The room was gloomy. Jane turned on the tasseled lamp. The bulb seemed dim; it merely accentuated the gloom. She sat on the bed and felt small and forlorn and forgotten. Rain made a thin, wet sound across all the world. This was a crying time. She wanted to cry and could think of no special reason.

It was certainly impossible to sit on the edge of this bed indefinitely. She thought about the office, and wondered what they thought about the fact she hadn’t even phoned in to tell them she was ill or something. She wished Betty Alford was back from Wilmington. That would make it so much simpler. She sat, mentally listing friends and acquaintances, discarding them one after the other. One was too nosy, another too careless, another too busy. Suddenly she thought of someone she could trust. She’d been thinking of her own friends rather than of Howard’s. Howard’s friend, Dave Miles, would be perfect. They had often double-dated with Dave and his girl, Connie Evis. Dave worked at, and owned a small piece of, an automobile agency. With luck she could catch him in before he left for the evening.

She looked up the number and phoned.

In a few minutes Dave came on the line. Jane was worrying about the elderly clerk downstairs listening in on the conversation. She took a chance by saying, “Dave, you know who this is, don’t you?”

“Hi, Jane! What’s the word about Howard? I phoned the—”

“Dave, I wonder if you could drop over and see me right away, no questions asked, please. I’m at the Farrington. Room 818. Just come right up, Dave.”

“Sure, but—”

“Thanks a lot,” she said and hung up quickly.

The knock on the door came twenty minutes after she had phoned. Dave came in and stared around the room curiously and said, “What goes on?” He was a thin, dark man with nervous mannerisms, a ready grin, a co-ordinated way of handling himself.

“Did you read about me? About us?”

“Sure did. I tried to get you at the apartment. Most of the time the line was busy and when it wasn’t, nobody answered. I phoned the hospital and they said Howard was okay. What in the world are you doing in this old creep factory?”

“I’m pretty sure I was being followed. And somebody did break into my apartment. I got scared, so I found a way of getting away from them and I registered here under the name of Mrs. Howard Alford of Wilmington. I want to just sit tight for awhile.”

“If you can identify a murderer, I don’t see why they haven’t given you police protection,” he said.

“They haven’t. I guess they don’t believe in it or something. I wondered if you would do an errand for me?”

“Sure, Jane.”

“Howard thinks I’m going to visit him at seven-thirty tonight and he also thinks I’m going to meet him with his car in the morning when they let him out. I want to stay right here. I want him to come to me. I’ll be more comfortable that way. So I want you to take this parking-lot claim check to the hospital and give it back to Howard and tell him where I am and why, and so forth. Otherwise he’s going to worry. Tell him to come here tomorrow. Any time. I’ll be here. But before you go, Dave, could you please go down to the corner and get me a toothbrush and something to read?”

“Sure.”

She gave him a detailed order, added other items, forced the money on him when he tried to refuse it. He was back in fifteen minutes. He reassured Jane that he would do just as she said.

Chapter Four

After Dave had gone Jane summoned the elderly bellhop and gave her dinner order. It was a full fifty minutes before the meal arrived. It was tepid food, indifferently served. When the man came to take the cart away, she asked if she could have a radio.

Ten minutes later when she opened the door he came staggering in under the weight of a mammoth and venerable table model, a thing of aged walnut, with mysterious lights and bands and tuning eyes. He plugged it in and turned it on. Many portions of it lit up. They watched it anxiously. Nothing happened. The bellhop turned dials at random and finally located a faint voice. He turned up the volume. The voice could almost be heard across the room. It was quarter to eight and the station identification announced that it was one of the major local stations, the one with the greatest power. The rest of the dial was silent. The old man asked if one station would be enough. She said it would have to be.

She listened with part of her mind to the news broadcast while she leafed through one of the magazines Dave had brought up. She came to abrupt focus and gave the program her full attention when she suddenly heard her own name.

“...Jane Bayliss by authorities for further questioning in the knife slaying of Walter Fredmans last Saturday night. Miss Bayliss visited her fiancé at City General Hospital this afternoon and has not yet returned to her apartment. This situation became known when Deputy Chief of Police Vernon Patricks requested station WBBO, seven-forty on your dial, to broadcast hourly appeals to Miss Bayliss to get in touch with police headquarters. A city-wide search is being conducted. Though there has been no official statement of alarm over the safety of Miss Bayliss, John Aarons, Fusion candidate for mayor in the coming elections, interrupted a formal speech given by him earlier this evening to the Galton County Women’s Club to ask why the present Commissioner of Public Safety had not made certain that Miss Bayliss had a police guard or that she had been taken into protective custody. Miss Bayliss, if you are listening to this program, you will be performing a public service by going to the nearest phone and calling police headquarters immediately.

“Today the residents of...”

Jane turned the dial quickly. Just as she reached out and started to lift the phone there was a knock at the door. She froze, replaced the phone with great caution, tiptoed toward the room door.

“Who is it, please?”

“Jane, it’s Dave again.”

She unlocked the door and he came in, looking apologetic. He had his hat in his hand and he turned it around and around as he talked. “I got there just a few minutes after seven-thirty, Jane. There were a couple of policemen by the desk. I went up and asked if I could see Howard. The policemen moved in on me and wanted to know what for. I got sore and told them I was a friend and I’d been a friend for years. They made me show my driver’s license and identification. They asked me if I knew where you were. I said no. Then they let me go see him. There was a cop in his room, too. Howard was worried sick about you. He wanted to get out of there and go look for you. They wouldn’t let him. I tried to catch his eye and calm him down. I couldn’t talk to him with the policemen there; you said not to let anybody know. I thought I could get the idea across by winking at him, but he didn’t tumble. He just said. ‘This is no time for corny jokes, Dave. See if you can make them give me my clothes.’ Then I took a look at the parking check. Here it is.”

Jane took it from him. She stared at it, turned it over, studied it. It was on heavy stock, orange-colored, roughly the size of a dollar bill, and folded once. She opened it up, read what had been written on the dotted lines.

She stared at Dave, her mouth open. “Why, it’s a pawn ticket for a mandolin! Why in the world would Howard give me that? He can’t even play a mandolin!”

“Look, I don’t know where he got it. All I know is, you aren’t going to get a car out of a parking lot with it.”

“I’m awfully sorry, Dave. I’ve put you to a lot of trouble.”

“That’s okay. Any other errands, girl? I’m a little late for a date with Connie.”

“No. Good night, Dave. And thanks.”

After he left she studied the pawn ticket again. It was from the Ace Loan Company on lower Harrison. It was date-stamped for the previous Thursday. The mandolin had been pawned for four dollars. She wondered how that ticket could have gotten into the drawer of the night stand beside Howard’s hospital bed.

Again she went to the phone. As she touched it, it rang. She smiled. There seemed to be a sort of conspiracy to keep her from phoning the police.

“Hello?... Hello!... Hello!”

There was no answering voice, but she heard a soft click as a phone was replaced on the cradle.

She hung up, trembling. She was sure that, by now, the elevator was clattering slowly upward to her floor.

The wind, which had died for a time, returned with refreshed fury, and through the sound of it she thought she could hear the creak and grinding of the old elevator. The high old door looked frail to her. She reached for the phone again, snatched her hand back. She picked up her purse and went to the door.

She unlocked the door and opened it and looked out at the shabby, empty hall. She eased her way out. Looking down the hall, she could see the elevator doors, the tarnished bronze arrow above them. The arrow was climbing. She watched it move. It looked as though it were at about five. Down the hallway in the other direction was the red bulb that meant temporary safety. She ran to it, strained to pull the heavy fire door open. It hissed as it closed softly behind her. She stood on a concrete landing. Concrete stairs spiraled angularly down, encircling a square airshaft. There was a steel hand rail, and steel treads on the steps. The fire escape seemed to be much newer than the rest of the Farrington.

She started down the steps, sliding her hand along the railing. The shaft had a damp, chill flavor about it. Her heel caught on the steel tread and the sound was loud in the echoing shaft. Above that sound she heard other sounds. She stopped suddenly. The other sounds came from below her — a measured tread that seemed to be coming closer.

Jane looked cautiously down the air shaft. She saw it there, about three floors below, illuminated by the bulb at each landing, moving through the deceptive shadows between the landings — a thick hand that slid slowly up the guard railing, moving as though by itself, as though it were some small, pale, thick animal, tufted with black hair, that climbed methodically.

Jane lifted her foot and snatched off one shoe and then the other. She held them tightly by the straps and went swiftly up, passing the eighth floor and the next and stopping at the tenth to peer down. The small creature still moved up the railing. She fought to breathe quietly after her burst of effort. She tightened her hold on the railing as the sliding hand approached the landing for the eighth floor. There it disappeared. She felt faint with relief. The next step would be easy: wait until the eighth-floor fire door had swung shut behind the stealthy climber, and then go down the ten floors as fast as ever she could.

She strained to hear the sound of the fire door, but none came. Then an odd little scratching sound began. It came at regular intervals. It seemed familiar. Suddenly she identified it as the noise the wheel of a lighter makes. The sound stopped. Then there was a sharp clink as the lighter was snapped shut, and she saw a huff of pale gray smoke come out into the airshaft from the eighth-floor landing. Then a man’s pale gray felt hat and thick dark shoulders appeared as he bent forward to look down the shaft.

She moved sharply back — and one of her shoes hit against the railing, pulling the strap free from her fingers. The shoe fell down the shaft. She barely managed to quell the instinctive reaction to lean over and look down after it. It fell through a vast silence, and startled her when she heard it hit far below.

The man below her called out. Converging echoes blurred his deep words. Jane turned and pushed the fire door open, eased through it and let it shut.

She did not know if the man two floors below has seen the shoe fall by him or not. She hoped he had merely heard the noise and seen nothing.

The tenth floor was a dismal replica of her own. She hurried to the elevator. The arrow was frozen at eight. She reached toward the button and hesitated. The elevator might come up. But it might come bearing more than a harmless elderly bellhop-elevator operator.

She turned and looked at the silent doors along the corridor. There would be a phone in each room. She went quickly to the nearest door and knocked. A tall, hollow-chested man looked out.

“Yes?”

“I’m sorry to bother you. I wonder if I might use your phone.”

“There are public phones in the lobby.”

“I realize that, but I’m in trouble. I don’t want to go down there. If you won’t let me use the phone, will you please use it to call the police and tell them where I am? I’m Jane Bayliss?”

“Are you someone the police are after?”

A sharp feminine voice called, “Who is it at the door, Joseph?”

“It’s a girl who wants to use the phone, dear.”

“Then let her use the phone, Joseph, instead of standing there bleating at her. Come in, dear, whoever you are. Show her the phone, Joseph. It will cost you fifteen cents, dear. It goes on our bill. We’ve been meaning to get a private phone in here for years, but we’ve just never gotten around to it.”

Jane followed Joseph into the apartment. He pointed silently to the telephone table. The voice had apparently come from a dark bedroom. The door was ajar. Joseph sat in a chair and picked up a newspaper and held it in front of his face. Jane put her purse and shoe down and lifted the phone.

A dry, familiar voice — the desk clerk’s — said, “Yes, please?”

“Give me the police, please. Immediately.”

“The police? Yes, ma’am. Right away. Hold on, please.”

Jane frowned. The clerk had sounded nervous. She tapped her stockinged foot impatiently. She rattled the lever. The silence on the line was oppressive. Far too oppressive, she realized suddenly. And the clerk had been too nervous. A picture came into her mind, a picture of a faceless man leaning over the desk clerk’s shoulder, listening in on the conversation, then demanding to know what floor the call had come from.

She banged the phone down, scooped up her bag and shoe and scampered for the door. She pulled it open. She heard the crackling of the newspaper behind her as Joseph lowered it to stare at her.

The hall was empty. She banged the door shut behind her. The bronze arrow had begun to move upward. She turned back and tried the door she had just closed. It had latched behind her. She ran for the fire escape, put her hand on the cold door handle, turned and looked behind her.

She could hear the elevator. The arrow was almost at ten. She yanked the door open and went out onto the concrete landing. She held her breath and listened. There was no sound. Inch by inch she moved forward until she could look down the shaft. For a moment she saw nothing. Then a familiar wisp of blue smoke drifted out into the shaft two stories below her.

As she turned to climb higher she heard a fire door open below her. She heard a man’s low voice. Echoes blurred it so she heard but a few words. “Phone... up to ten... got past you.” She heard the mumbled response. Then door swung shut down there.

Chapter Five

Jane began to climb again, her heart thudding heavily, painfully. She risked a glance down the shaft. The hand was sliding upward again. She looked up. There were three more floors above her. That was all. She wished there were dozens. She felt as though they were driving her into an ever-narrowing space.

She tried to estimate how many of the hunters there were. There was at least one at the desk. One in the stair well. And probably two who had come up to her room. They had been in her room when she sent the call down from ten. And one of them had gone immediately to the elevator to check ten and the other one had alerted the man on the landing.

She hoped that beyond that last lighted landing there would be a dark flight that would lead to the roof. She kept climbing. The stairs ended right there, at the landing. A bulb hung from a cord and there was a skylight above it.

The sound of falling rain was clear up here. She tried the door cautiously at first, and then with greater effort. It would not open. She pulled so desperately that her hand and shoulders hurt. She had lost track of the number of floors. This could be twelve, or thirteen. If it was twelve, it meant that she would have to return to the landing directly over his head in order to get out onto the eleventh floor. She looked down. She could not see the hand. She waited.

Then the lighter made its scratching noise, then clinked loudly, and she saw the smoke, two floors below. She looked across the shaft at the stairs she would have to go down in order to get to the eleventh floor. She computed the man’s angle of vision. In order to get to the landing directly over him, she would have to pass where he might see her.

She sat down, trembling violently. She was sitting on the top step. This was a nightmare variation of hide and seek. She wanted to get up and hammer on the locked door and scream until there was no breath left in her.

She looked at her purse. She knew they would find some quick way to silence her once they caught her, and then they would take her quietly down the concrete stairs and away. And if she was taken this way, all the rest of his life Howard would never know exactly what had happened to her. Nor would she ever have the chance to tell him that she had changed her mind. He was enough for her now. He was all the mystery, all the glamour, all the excitement she wanted from life. It was suddenly important to find some way of leaving word for him.

She dug into her purse and found the stub of a yellow pencil, laid it aside and began to look for something to write on. She found a reddish piece of cardboard that was blank on one side. She had to write small.

“Please see that the police get this note. It is to be shown to Howard Saddler. Darling, they’ve found me here in the Farrington. I guess they are the same ones. I’m hiding but they’ll find me soon. I love you. I talked nonsense. Please forget it. I didn’t mean it. Jane.”

She hitched herself closer to the fire door. She glanced at the other side of the piece of reddish cardboard.

It was a parking-lot claim check, the Safety Parking Lot, just around the corner from her apartment, and the date stamp was for Monday afternoon.

She stared at it, and several things began to make sense to her for the first time. Howard had given her the right ticket. She had given the wrong one — the pawn ticket — to Dave. But the main question was: How had a pawn ticket gotten into her purse? Someone must have hidden it there. The lean, dark man who had been marched out of the night club with a knife in his back? Her purse had been lying on the bench beside her that night. The lean man had evidently anticipated violence, and had slipped the pawn ticket in her purse and snapped it shut. He had obviously intended to regain the ticket later. But he had been stopped from doing that.

Then his murderers, finding he was not carrying the ticket, had broken into the Taffeta Room to hunt for it, reasoning that the lean man had perhaps hidden it there.

With the ridiculous story of Jane in the paper, the killers had reconstructed their theory a bit. The ticket might have been slipped into her purse. The newspaper article had made it easy for them to locate her. They had broken into her apartment and searched thoroughly. Howard had walked in on them, and had been sapped. Jane remembered now that Howard’s pockets were turned inside out as he lay unconscious.

How they had located her at the hotel, she could not guess. They may have followed Dave back, after picking up his trail at the hospital. Anyway, however it had been done, here she sat, huddled on concrete stairs with no escape. She pushed the note she had written on the parking ticket under the fire door, until it was entirely out of sight.

All of a sudden she passed from the bottom level of despair to the beginnings of indignation. After all, this was a civilized country. And here she was practically in the middle of the city, in terrible danger, and unable to find any way out.

Then, sitting there trapped and waiting, she did a thing which is like the donning of armor, or the sharpening of a lance. She took out her lipstick and unscrewed the cap, and held her mirror and made for herself a new red mouth, smooth and brave and almost bold. Though her hands were shaking, she applied the lipstick neatly. And as she recapped it, the top slipped from her fingers.

She made a frantic grab for it, but couldn’t reach it. It hit and bounced with a small musical note, a little shiny golden cylinder, and hit again and rolled with painful slowness out along one last step and then tumbled to the landing. With the uncanny perverseness of all inanimate things it rolled diagonally along the landing, choosing the shortest distance to the next short flight of stairs, and disappeared from Jane’s view, bounding, clinking, falling.

When all was still she sat with her fists pressed tightly to her cheeks, waiting in breathless tension. There wasn’t long to wait. Just a few moments of silence. Then the slow trudge of feet on the steel treads of the concrete stairs. She could picture the thick hand sliding up the bannister railing.

The sound stopped. It began again, higher, coming close. In a final gesture of defiance, she opened her purse and found the pawn ticket and shoved it under the door beside her, pushing it all the way out of sight.

She looked back and saw him then, below her and diagonally across the airshaft. He was looking up toward her. He wore a dark hat. The light shining down from above made a shadow across his face.

Jane got quickly to her feet and backed into the corner beyond the door. She could see him no longer. She didn’t see him until he rounded the last turn and came up the final short flight. She saw the dark hat first and then the hard jaw, the thick dark-clad shoulders, then the hand sliding upward on the rail.

She took her shoe by the toe and hurled it with all her strength directly at his face. He moved his head to one side. It was a quick, practiced motion. He didn’t move it any further than necessary. The shoe hurtled by him and struck the wall and fell to the landing below. She had seen other men move like that, on the television screen, tiny figures who danced and tried to hit each other and seldom dodged more than was necessary.

He stopped at the landing level, five feet from her, facing her. He held his hand out. The golden cylinder lay on the white palm, glinting in the light.

“You drop this?” The voice was husky.

“Don’t come near me!”

“You come on down quiet.”

“Don’t come near me!”

As he reached for her she screamed. It rasped and hurt her throat. The airshaft enclosed the scream, dampening it, muting it, smothering it. It died quickly into echoes. A man draw breath to scream again the thick hand closed on hers in a deft, practiced way, shifted quickly and found position, then seemed to squeeze ever so gently. The gentleness sent a barbed shock of pain through her, a pain so clean and pure and distilled that it was as though someone had driven an icicle through the back of her hand. It turned the impending scream into a shocked whimper. It made her knees sag and the light waver.

“You come along nice,” he said.

He stood beside her, his arm under hers, his hand holding hers in a mockery of affection. He tried the door. They went together down the stairs, side by side. As they passed the door to the eleventh floor she wondered if she could twist away from him and get through it. Even as she thought of it and knew she couldn’t, some tension must have warned him. He pressed her hand again.

They started down to ten, circling the shaft, going down from landing to landing. He pushed the door open a few inches and put his eye close to the crack. He pushed it open the rest of the way and walked down the hail with her. A man stood by the elevator. He was tall. The elderly bellhop stood inside the elevator. A short, thick man stood in the hallway and watched them approach.

The short man stepped forward and took her purse. He started to look through it and the tall one took it away from him. They all got into the elevator. The man who held her moved her back against the wall. The tall one went carefully through her purse. The short one had said, “All the way down, pops.”

Jane said, “You can’t—” and stopped and bit her lip as the gentle pressure started again. Evidently they could and they would.

The short, thick one said, “Better-looking than in the papers, eh?”

“Shut up,” the tall one said.

The hand enclosed hers. It was a special indignity, this indignity of pain; peculiar humiliation. She realized that she should be looking at them closely, remembering things about them so she could identify them later if need be — or if she was lucky. But she could see nothing about them to remember. Just their, general sizes and their subdued clothes. They all had hard, closed faces. They could have been, each one of them, twenty-five or forty.

They moved out into the lobby. The tall one turned back to the operator. “Pops, shut yourself in that thing and go up and park it between floors for fifteen minutes. Move!”

“Yes sir,” the old man said. He banged the door shut hurriedly and the arrow pointed steadily upward.

They moved across to the desk. A fourth man was behind the desk, standing next to the old clerk. The clerk’s face was ghastly. It looked like oiled chalk. The man turned the clerk around roughly and shoved him into the small room behind the desk, pulled the door shut and locked it. He came out and the five of them walked the remaining steps to the outside door. Jane walked with two ahead of her, one beside her and one behind her.

“She have it?” asked the one who had been behind the desk.

“Shut up,” the tall one said. “Take a look outside, Boats.” The short, thick one went out first. He looked in each direction up and down the dark road, ducking his head instinctively against the driving rain. He looked back and nodded.

They moved out quickly. The wet sidewalk soaked Jane’s stocking feet. Rain cut at her legs. The car was across the street. They hurried to it. She was as shocked as the ones with her seemed to be when the bright headlights behind them and ahead of them went on suddenly, pinning them there in the glare, and a monstrous and demoralizing voice, boosted by amplification to gigantic authority, said out of the darkness, “Don’t move. Don’t move a muscle.”

The tall one cursed softly and turned and dived toward the protecting darkness. A shot kicked his legs out from under him. Jane heard the sick sound as his head hit the pavement. He lay there on his face, still in the lights, rolling his head back and forth and saying, “Aaaah!” Quite softly.

“Want to try for two?” the great voice roared. “Both ends of this street are blocked and the alleys are blocked and there are twenty-five armed men watching you. Now, hands high, children.”

For a moment the heavy hand still encased hers. Then it relaxed and went away and she stood apart from him. She saw him put his hands up. She felt as if she should, too. There was that much authority in the voice.

“Miss Bayliss, please walk toward the curb and turn to your left on the sidewalk. Thank you.”

She walked as she was told. She felt small, wet-footed and humiliated. She felt as if half a world watched her. She walked into darkness and into arms that were at once familiar, that held her there in the rain in a dear and remembered way, walked into lips that pressed against damp hair and said things she had never listened to closely enough before all this, and would listen to much more closely from now on.

“What are you doing up?” she demanded.

“Hush, honey. Tilt your head up to be kissed. Lord, you’ve shrunk!”

“No shoes,” she sighed happily and presented lips to be kissed, curling her wet toes against the dark sidewalk.

Chapter Six

This was no traditional morning office of the law, with its scarred golden oak, its yellowed pictures of the pistol team. This was a big room, done in pale, efficient green with many gray steel desks in military array, with banks of gray filing cabinets, with men who worked at the desks and used the telephone a great deal, with girls who walked briskly and found things in files.

Jane and Howard had to wait nearly an hour in the small fenced-off waiting room until a girl came and got them and took them to Sergeant Dolan’s desk somewhere in the middle of the big room. Two chairs had been placed near his desk. They sat down at Dolan’s terse invitation. Jane felt humble and a bit silly.

Dolan hung up the phone and smiled at them. “How is it going, kids? Tired of making statements?”

“Do you need more!” Jane exclaimed.

“No. We got all we need now. I could be official and mysterious and tell you to read all about it in the papers.”

“Please don’t!” she said.

“Well, it goes this way. We knew the killing was clean and professional, and we suspected that the body was that of a known criminal. We had that hunch. We didn’t know him, so he was from out of town. I talked to Locatta and got him to agree to go along with playing it stupid. Girl can identify killer. All that. I felt I could do it because I’ve got good men and I knew I could cover you every minute of the day. You were bait. You even spotted one of them outside your apartment. So imagine how I felt when you wiggled off the hook. That was a neat trick, that shoe-store stunt, and on account of you, three good men took a peeling they’ll never forget.”

“But how did they find me? Not your men. Those others.”

“They had a man at the hospital to pick you up if you came back. You lost them the same time you lost my people. After Dave Miles saw Howard here, the man wondered if Dave came from you. So he followed him back to the Farrington and asked some casual questions at the desk and got the right answers. Then they moved in on you.”

“And then you showed up.”

“Only because your friend Dave is a nice guy and has some confidence in us. On the way to his date he took the time to stop and phone us and tell us where you were. He was afraid you wouldn’t phone. Fortunately we sent a man in first to look around. He spotted something funny going on. He came out and gave me the word and I put in the call and got help. We were about to come in after you.”

“I guess I was pretty stupid,” Jane said.

“You got your name in the papers,” Howard said.

“Please! Sergeant, what about that mandolin?”

Dolan grinned. “It’s just a real good mandolin.”

“Please.”

“Fredmans had the entire loot from the robbery in Savannah. Quarter of a million dollars’ worth of flawless blue-white diamonds in the right sizes to peddle — from one-half to two carats. He didn’t like the size of his cut. He knew he couldn’t hope to get away with the whole thing. He wanted to bargain. So he bought a used mandolin, poured hot melted wax through that hole under the strings where it would run down and solidify around the diamonds he had dropped in there, so they wouldn’t rattle. Then he hocked the mandolin. Safest place he could think of. Then he got hold of his group and told them where he was and asked them to come around and talk business. He knew all of a sudden they were going to be too tough. He planted the pawn ticket in your purse. Look, kids, I got things to do. Thanks for your co-operation.”

Howard touched the top of his head gingerly. “You’re welcome.”

They said good-bye to Dolan. They walked on out through the big room and down the long corridor. This was a well-washed day, bright and new and promising. She held his arm tight as they walked down the corridor.

“Sure,” she said, “I had my name in the paper.”

“Want it in again?”

“Mmmmm. When I get married.”

“Figuring on getting married soon?”

“Mmmm.”

“I hear it’s kind of like a trap. You know — kids, cleaning, drudgery. A real trap.”

“You know something?”

“What, darling?”

“I could be trapped.”

They walked toward the sunshine at the end of the corridor. She smiled up at him. They walked in step.

“Howard,” she said, making a serious mouth, “honestly that’s all I want. Really and truly.”

“I believe you. No more headlines.”

“No thanks.”

They started down the steps. She looked ahead and gasped and stopped and grabbed his arm.

“What’s wrong, dear? What’s the matter?”

She relaxed and sighed heavily. “Come on. You’ll soon find out.”

They walked toward his car parked diagonally at the curb, toward the oddly boyish-looking Locatta who leaned against the car, and smiled as he watched them approach.

Content

John D. MacDonald
Jail Bait

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six