Joe muttered in an ancient tongue, native to boot camps and locker rooms.
“I told you not to trust that man,” Prudence said.
Joe looked up at Prudence and, for one ghastly instant, he had a wild desire to slug her.
Never could Joe have done what he did then, if he hadn’t been so angry. Nobody, but an exceedingly angry man, could pull a car out of a lot that fast, miss tearing off anybody’s fenders, ignore the protests of a bewildered brunette clinging to the edge of the seat, and make it to the street just as the little sedan was pulling away from the boulevard stop at the corner.
“Keep your eye on him!” Joe ordered. “Don’t let him out your sight!”
“Joe, are you hurt?”
“A guy tries to do a guy a favor! A maniac like that shouldn’t run loose!”
“Joe, the light—”
Joe didn’t have times for lights. The only red he could see was in his own eyes, and the boulevard was nearly empty at this hour anyway. Up ahead, the tail-lights of the little sedan were bobbing over the pavement like a pair of skipping fireflies. Joe ground his foot against the gas pedal and the fireflies were a lot nearer.
“That motorized kiddy-car! I’ll run it clear up on the sidewalk! I’ll put it in the trash can!”
“Joe, there’s another light — I mean, there was another light!”
It was a fine time for Prudence to be getting cautious. This was all her fault anyway. Joe hadn’t forgotten that for a minute.
“Damn the lights!” he said. “I’ve got to get that idiot before he reaches the Freeway.”
“But the police—”
“I told you, I don’t want the police. I’m going to give Leona her $28,000 if I have to stuff it down her husband’s throat!”
“I still say they aren’t married,” Prudence said.
Prudence didn’t say any more. She never had a chance. By this time they had come alongside the little sedan, and Joe wasn’t kidding about running it up the curb. He veered his car toward the midget; the midget veered toward the sidewalk. The man with the sneaky face yelled something out of the window and Joe yelled something back; and then, as Joe swung toward the little car again, it leaped the curbing, shuddered, and came to a stop in the doorway of a florist’s shop.
The driver’s door was open by the time Joe reached the sidewalk.
“You stay away from me!” the man yelled. “Stay away or I’ll let you have it!”
Joe heard the words, but they didn’t register. As far as he was concerned, he’d already had it. He had to slug somebody, and Prudence was too small. The man backed toward the shop window, one hand stuck out in front of him. The lights from the little car glinted off the object in his hand, but Joe was too far gone for caution. His fists began to whirl in front of him like a pair of crazy propellers. The gun clattered to the sidewalk as useless as a toy. Somebody screamed. There was a loud thudding sound, and the window shattered as if it had been struck by a heavy body — because it had been.
When the glass stopped tinkling, there was a moment of awful silence; then brakes screeched and a blinding light stabbed through the darkness. Joe whirled about, blinking.
“The police—” he gasped.
Prudence picked her way toward him across the broken glass.
“That’s what I was trying to tell you in the car,” she said, “when you ran the lights—”
Joe didn’t say anything. He groaned.
It was nearly two o’clock when they got back to the hotel. The police were very understanding after Prudence explained everything. That was after they’d pulled the sneaky faced man out of the potted Camelias and throttled Leona Muller’s wails when they took away her mink coat.
“Tha’s my wedding present! We’re goin’ to Las Vegas to get married, an’ tha’s my wedding present!”
“You see!” Prudence said. “I knew they weren’t married.”
And then the policeman who was in charge of the sneaky faced man turned his flashlight on his sneaky face and said, “Well, if it isn’t Duke McGinnis! Getting married again, Duke? Where did you steal the bait this time? And how much is the lady’s dowry?”
“$28,000,” Prudence said. “My husband has the check which I found in the powder room and we were only trying to return—”
“My house money!” Leona Muller exclaimed. “Tha’s my house money!”
It was very confusing for awhile, especially after Leona finally realized that McGinnis had given her a hot mink and was only trying to marry her for the $28,000 check she’d just received for the sale of her old, run-down bungalow at the edge of Beverly Hills. It all had to be straightened out at the police station with the owner of the florist shop bawling about his broken window and uprooted Camelias, and the police looking at Joe and shaking their heads.
“Your husband is an excitable man, Mrs. Buckram,” the desk sergeant said.
“He’s really very sweet, but tonight he’s a little nervous. You see, we were only married this morning.”
After that the police were very understanding.
Back in the hotel — in their own room at last — Joe had a few words to say.
“I’m not angry any more,” he said. “I’m willing to forget the whole thing and never mention it again. I won’t even ask if you knew that piece of pink paper was a check when you lifted it from the purse.”
“No woman should carry anything that valuable around with her when she’s out with a man who’s deliberately trying to get her drunk,” Prudence said.
“I won’t,” Joe added, “even ask if you knew that mink was stolen—”
“It didn’t have any labels in it,” Prudence explained. “I looked when I was in the powder room. If I had a real mink coat I’d have the furrier’s label and my name embroidered in gold.”
“—stolen,” Joe repeated, “and given to Leona to lure her into a phoney marriage long enough for McGinnis to get her check cashed—”
“Imagine a flashy looking man like Mr. McGinnis going for a fat old woman like Leona Muller. They don’t match!”
“Like the mink coat and the cheap handbag?”
“Exactly the handbag McGinnis couldn’t keep his hands off because all he was really interested in the check tucked away inside. Joe—”
Prudence didn’t have $28,000, but Joe had her in his arms. And he didn’t want to hear any more explanations, or to be told how brave he was for knocking an armed man into the Camelias even if he had been too angry to recognize that it was a gun McGinnis had stuck in front of him, or to engage in any kind of conversation at all — because it was two o’clock in the morning, and he had an early appointment at Aero-Dynamics, and some people did match — perfectly.
Joe, finally, made this all clear to Prudence. And they were just getting cozy when a shrill, female voice drifted up from the parking lot below.
“You called me a bar-fly! You take your hands off me! You called me a bar-fly!”
Prudence raised up.
“Joe... listen!”
Joe was on his feet in an instant. He made it to the window in one leap and slammed down the sash.
“But, Joe, it’ll get warm in here—”
Joe came back toward Prudence with a determined glint in his eye.
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” he said.
89
Somebody on the Phone
Cornell Woolrich
“I hear it! Let it ring!” she snapped back at me. We were always snapping at each other. That’s how you could tell we were brother and sister. But this snap had teeth in it. There was something frightened, tense, about it. And her face matched it — white, drawn, straining forward.
She was right in the room with it, sitting facing it in a big chair. She didn’t make a move to go over and answer it. She just sat there listening to it, as if she’d never heard one before, as if she wanted to see how long it would keep up.