Say Yes to Murder - Todhunter Ballard (book club recommendations .TXT) 📗

several times before the door was opened by a sleepy Swede.

“What you want?”

“We want,” said Strong, “the key for the apartment of the girl who never goes out. The one that they brought back this evening.”

The Swede’s unhappy expression increased. “I ain’t supposed to give it to no one. I ain’t supposed to even know that she’s here.”

The Swede was thoroughly cowed. He passed it over without a murmur, and Strong handed it to Lennox. “You go get her,” he said. “If they should see you in the elevator, you can say that you came to see the Jeffries girl, and you’ll be telling the truth at that.” He grinned a little. “And keep your gun ready. I’ll watch Sylvester here. There might just be a signal from upstairs. If we tied him so he wouldn’t answer it, they’d get suspicious.”

Lennox did not answer. He stepped out into the quiet basement passage and used the freight elevator to ride upward. The upper hall was deserted and he moved along it quickly to the door of the apartment. The key fitted and after a moment he was inside.

He paused to listen before he turned on the light. When he did, little things told him that the place was being occupied, and he had a moment’s worry. Maybe the janitor had given them the wrong key. If he walked in on a woman tenant, he’d have some trouble explaining his presence.

But it was the right apartment. The girl in the bed was the one who had vanished from Nancy Hobbs’ house. She stirred as he turned on the bedroom light, protesting a little in her sleep.

Lennox crossed to the bedside and stood for a long moment staring down at her. She was better looking than he remembered. The doped expression was gone and he saw that the resemblance to the girl he knew as Jean Jeffries was noticeable. > If you saw them together you would never have mistaken one for the other, but their coloring was very similar, the contours of the face the same. He bent forward and put a hand on her bare shoulder, shaking her gently.

“Wake up.”

She opened her eyes, and her mouth parted. He was afraid she was going to scream, and he couldn’t have that. They had to be quiet—very, very quiet. He put a hand over her mouth.

She stared up at him over the edge of his fingers, her eyes wide and dark and terrified. He said: “It’s all right. I’m Bill Lennox from the studio. You probably don’t remember seeing me before.”

She didn’t remember. He could tell by the expression of her eyes. “Come,” he said, “I’m going to take you out of here. It’s all right. There’s nothing to be afraid of, but we’ll have to hurry.” With his free hand he pulled back the covers, and then he stopped.

She was completely naked. Her gesture to grab for the protection of the sheet was purely instinctive. Lennox was red-faced with embarrassment for her.

“Get some clothes on,” he said brusquely and turned away.

“I can’t,” she said, sitting up in bed and pulling a blanket over her shoulders. “They took them all.”

He came back. “Took them…” Then he understood. That was one effective way of holding her. There were others; the windows were fastened and the door had been locked. He swore under his breath, stripped off the topcoat and pulled it around her.

“This will have to do. We can’t wait any longer.”

She got to her feet. “You’re Mr. Lennox. My grandmother mentioned you in her letters. How is she? Have you seen her? How did you find me?”

He said: “No time now. We’ve got to get out of here. I’ll tell you all about it in a little while.” He grabbed her arm and started toward the door.

She was so short that the topcoat almost dragged on the floor. Her bare feet peeped out from beneath the edge, and he noticed subconsciously that the nails were natural, free of paint. He had always objected to colored toenails for no particular reason. He sensed that this kid at his side was nice and sensible, and he had a fleeting feeling of regret that her grandmother had never known her. Then he forgot all about the girl at his side, for they entered the living room, and Jean Jeffries was standing there watching them.

Lennox had a moment of mental confusion. The girl across the room wasn’t Jean Jeffries, but he had thought of her by that name for so long that it was hard to change.

All motion in the room ceased. No one moved. It was the girl in his overcoat who broke the spell. She made a little whimpering sound of fear and tried to crouch behind Lennox like a frightened child.

The other girl’s lips twisted into an unpleasant smile. “Hello, Bill. You get around, don’t you?”

He didn’t say anything. He just kept hold of the topcoat-covered arm and started walking forward.

“You won’t get away with it. You can’t get out.”

He said: “Are you going to murder me the way you did Heyworth?”

She seemed to be considering his words. “Perhaps not.” There was no sign of a weapon in her hands. “Perhaps I have a better plan. Perhaps I’ll buy you off. How would you like to have a share of Mary Morris’ money?”

He shook his head. “You wouldn’t dare trust me, honey.”

Her words were slow, as if she were trying to consider the problem from all angles and make a careful decision. “I think I would—if you were my husband.”

3.

Lennox had never been more surprised in his life. He stared at the girl facing him, knowing that his face had turned brick-red. “You…”

She said: “So I’m a sucker. I probably am, but I went overboard for you. That little act we put on for Captain Spellman wasn’t all an act. You get the chance to live, me, and a chunk of Mary’s dough.”

He didn’t answer, and she went on to tell him: “Three people are dead. We’ve spent a lot of money and a lot of time. As far as the world is concerned, I’m Jean Jeffries—I’m Mary Morris’ granddaughter. I’ll inherit the four million that she worked so hard to pile up. It’s a stake worth playing for, Bill, and we play the game to the limit. You’re either a part of it, or you can’t be around.”

He understood the significance of her threat, and he knew the threat was no idle one. All the time she had been talking he had been moving slowly forward. Now he moved with startling swiftness.

He dropped the real Jean Jeffries’ arm and jumped forward, catching the other girl by the shoulders. He spun her around and clamped one hand across her mouth, pulling her right arm up between her shoulders tightly.

“You’ll get it broken, honey, if you struggle.”

Her answer was to sink her teeth into his center finger. The pain shot up his arm, and it was all he could do to keep his hold. He managed to put the heel of his hand under her chin so she couldn’t bite him again and twisted the arm up a little to show her that he meant business.

Her struggles ceased and she was very quiet, but it was the quietness of a coiled spring ready to expand. He swung her around and walked her toward the couch, saying over his shoulder to the other girl:

“Get one of the sheets from the bed and tear it into strips.”

She obeyed, and he forced his prisoner face-down upon the divan. The cushion served as a gag, and he withdrew his hand. Blood was dribbling down from his middle finger, and he scowled at the back of the prostrate girl’s head.

“You’re quite a she-wolf, aren’t you? It might be worth the price of being married to you for the privilege of taming you.”

Her answer sounded like a string of gulps. He knew it was because of the cushion; her vocabulary was much more lurid than that.

There was the sound of tearing cloth, and he accepted the strips of sheeting thankfully. He looped the first one around his prisoner’s wrists, keeping his knee in the center of her back. She tried to kick and only succeeded in exposing a sizable portion of well-rounded leg. He got the wrists fastened and wadded a piece of the cloth into a gag, but he never got it into place.

A voice from the doorway said: “I wouldn’t, Lennox. I think you’ve done enough already.”

Bill turned. Boren was standing in the entrance, and there was a small, flat, wicked-looking automatic in his hand.

Slowly Lennox raised his hands until they were shoulder-high. His first reaction had been to reach for his gun, but he remembered that it was still in the side pocket of his topcoat and that the coat was around the naked girl. His gun seemed always to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and he concluded that he wasn’t very much of a gunman. The chances were that if he had had it he couldn’t have hit Boren at the distance.

The apartment-house owner said, “Untie her hands,” and Lennox obeyed. When he finished, he helped her off the divan, expecting her to be raging. She wasn’t. She straightened her dress with a little unconscious gesture.

“It took you long enough to get here,” she told Boren. “If I hadn’t heard the freight elevator and come up to see that our little friend was O.K., Lennox would have had her out of here and been long gone.”

Boren nodded. “I was undressed when you called. I wonder where Lennox got the key?”

No one said anything, and Boren looked at Bill. “Did you keep the passport or destroy it?”

“Passport?” Lennox was genuinely surprised. “What passport?” Boren stared at him unblinkingly. “Just how much does he know, Delia?”

The girl who had posed as Jean Jeffries shrugged. “He’s a good guesser. Do you have the passport, Bill?”

Lennox said: “So help me, I haven’t.”

Boren was impatient. “Come on, we’re wasting time. If Kreach’s men had been on their toes they’d have gotten him up on Lookout Mountain and we wouldn’t have had to do the job here.”

Delia was regretful. “I hate to kill him…. There aren’t many guys like him in the world, Hal.”

Boren snorted. “Four million dollars, and you have to fall for a mugg. I picked you because I thought you wouldn’t go soft. Don’t try it on me now.”

“And don’t threaten me,” she retorted, her voice rising also. “You’d stand a hell of a fine chance collecting any of that four million without me, wouldn’t you?”

Boren swore. “You talk so much that I forget things. Turn around, Lennox.”

Bill turned around, and the man came up behind him, stabbing the blunt-nosed gun into the center of his back. He pulled out all Lennox’ papers and tossed them to the girl.

“No gun,” he reported, and stepped back.

“And no passport.” She ran through the papers quickly. “Maybe Kingstone hid it some place else. There’s no use arguing about it now. Let’s finish this.” She shuddered a little. “Why didn’t you leave me where I was? I’m all dirtied up. I’ll be dirty for the rest of my life. I haven’t slept since Heyworth was killed.”

The knuckles of her small hands showed white as she clenched her fists. “Go ahead, shoot him! What are you waiting for?”

Lennox said: “One moment—just one. I’m not stupid enough to think I can live, but I’d like to say good-by to this kid.” He turned around to the girl who was still clutching his topcoat about her. “Do you mind?”

No