“We only have an hour. One of us is sure to be on a wild-goose chase, but the other one won’t be. You take the man. I’ll take the woman. If he turns out to be the guilty one, you’ve got to find some way of getting him back here with you, to face the music. If she does, then I’ll have to.”
“An unarmed girl like you, with just your bare hands? You don’t know what you’re likely to come up against!”
“We haven’t any time to be afraid; we’ll simply have to use our wits. We’ll meet back here no later than a quarter to six. We’ll have to, if we want to make that six o’clock bus.”
As they parted in the darkness just inside the front door, to slip out into the street one at a time, the last thing she said, in a pleading whisper, was: “Frank, if you should get back first, before I do — wait for me. Don’t leave me behind. I want to go home tonight!”
Chapter Four
The hotel, when she had finally located it, had every earmark of one of those shady places catering to card sharps, confidence men, and other fly-by-nights. It held no terrors for her, though; she had met its type of denizen on the dance floor nearly every night for years past. She went up to the desk with the assurance of one who doesn’t expect to be turned away, asked breezily: “What room is Rose in? You know, Rose Beacon?”
The drink-sodden clerk regarded her doubtfully. “Is she expecting you?”
She flung the back of her hand at him familiarly. “Never mind the company manners. She only just left me a little while ago. I dropped by to tell her something I just remembered I forgot to tell her. What’s the matter, is it a secret?”
He grinned, relaxed. “Four-oh-nine, sugar.”
A Cleveland-administration elevator took her up four floors. The sleepy boy wanted to wait, evidently to see if she was admitted or not at this ungodly hour.
“That’s all right,” she assured him breezily as she stepped off the car, “I’ll be there quite some time.”
The power of suggestion is a great thing. Just because she had said so, he closed the door and took the car down again.
She didn’t feel breezy as she walked along the dusty, poorly lighted corridor. Her thoughts were churning while her feet carried her toward the imminent showdown.
“How am I going to get in? Even if I do, how am I going to know; how am I going to find out if she did it? And if she did, how am I going to get her back there, all the way up to East Seventieth, without causing a big commotion, dragging the police into it, involving Frank worse than he is already, getting the two of us held on suspicion for days and weeks on end?”
She didn’t know any of those things. She only knew she was going ahead.
The door numbers were stepping up on her — 07, 08, 09. This was it, facing the corridor at right angles, forming a dead end. It looked so harmless, so impersonal — and yet behind it lurked her whole future destiny, in a shape unseen.
Suddenly, just as she came to a stop, a voice spoke on the other side of it. A woman’s voice.
“He says my girl-friend’s on her way up.” The treacherous clerk must have phoned up, anyway, after she’d left the desk. “There’s no friends of mine in town. I ain’t even told nobody where I’m stopping. I’m gonna see what this is.”
The door swept open before Carol had time to do anything, or even to think what to do, and they stood looking at each other eye to eye, this unknown woman and she. She got a snapshot of a hard, enameled face, a breath of alcohol on the lips, hostile wariness in the remorseless eyes. The wariness became a challenge.
“Wait a minute, who are you? Did you tell them you know me, downstairs? What’s the angle?”
She must have taken a puff of a cigarette just before she opened the door, and had been holding it until now. Smoke suddenly appeared in two malevolent columns. She looked like Satan. She looked like some one it was good to stay away from. She was still willing to have it that way herself — so far. Her arm flexed, to swing the door closed in the girl’s face.
Carol only knew she had to get in, even if it was to her own destruction. She knew she didn’t have a chance. She knew this woman wasn’t even alone in there; she’d just overheard her addressing some one as she neared the door. A crushing sense of failure, of having bungled the thing up, came over her. But that door had to stay open.
“We don’t know each other personally,” she said, borrowing her husky dance-hall voice, “but we’ve got a friend in common, so that makes it even. I’m talking about Mr. Stephen Gadsby.”
A white flash of consternation came over the Beacon woman’s face. But she might have reacted that same way, Carol realized, even if she’d just been up there trying to blackmail him and then walked out again.
Until now, on a strip of wall visible just behind her, there had been a vague outline-shadow discernible. It now moved very subtly, slipped off, disappeared — as though whatever was causing it had withdrawn, was secreting itself.
The woman’s eyes flicked briefly in that offside direction, came back again, as though she had just received some signal. She said tautly, and with an undertone of menace: “Suppose you come in a minute, and let’s hear what’s on your mind.” She widened the door. It wasn’t done hospitably, but commandingly, as though she were saying: Either come in yourself or I’ll reach out and haul you in.
Carol Warren thought: Here I go! Hope I get out of here alive.
She walked slowly past the woman into a tawdry, smoke-stenched room. Behind her the door clamped back into its frame with an air of ominous finality; a key ticked off once against the lock, a second time as it was extracted from the keyhole.
A battle had begun, in which her only weapons were her wits, her nerve, and the feminine intuition that even a little chain-dancer is never without. She knew that every veiled glance she cast around her, every slightest move she made, must be made to count, because there would be no quarter given, no second chances.
The room was empty, apparently. A door, presumably to a bath, was already firmly closed when her eyes first found it, but the knob had just stopped turning, hadn’t quite fallen still yet. If it appeared that she didn’t know too much, the door would stay that way, wouldn’t open again. But if she turned out to know too much— Therein lay her cue — how to find out just what there was to know here, and what too much of it was. That door would tell her.
For the rest, drawers in the shabby bureau were out at narrow, uneven lengths, as though they had recently been emptied. A Gladstone bag stood on the floor at the foot of the bed. The bag was full, ready for removal. A number of objects were strewn about on top of the bureau, as though one or both of the occupants had returned in some turmoil, flung them down on entering. There was a woman’s handbag, a pair of gloves, a crumpled handkerchief. The handbag had been left yawning open, as though the agitated hand that had plunged into it in search of something had been too nervous to close it again.
The Beacon woman sidled in after her, surreptitiously ground something out under her toe; then a moment later, as she turned to face Carol, was holding a half-consumed cigarette in her hand again. Carol pretended she hadn’t noticed it smoking away on the edge of the table; the way a man will often leave a cigarette, a woman never. It really was superfluous. That flexing of the doorknob just now had been enough to tell her all she needed to know.
The woman drew out a chair, so that its back was to the closed door. “Help yourself to a seat.” Even if Carol had wanted to sit somewhere else, she made it the only one available by taking the other one herself. She lowered herself into it as though she were on coiled springs ready to be released at any moment. “What’d you say your name was again?”