“I didn’t say, but you can put me down for Carol Miller.”
“So you know a guy named Gadsby, do you? Tell me, sister, you been over to see him lately?”
Carol said with crafty negligence; “Yeah, I just came from there now.”
The Beacon woman was tautening up inwardly. You could tell it on the outside quite easily, though. Her eyes strayed to some point over and beyond Carol’s shoulder, as if in desperate search of further guidance. Carol carefully avoided following them with her own.
“How’d you find him?”
“Dead,” said Carol quietly.
The Beacon woman didn’t show the right type of surprise; it was surprise, all right, but it was a malevolent surprise, not a startled one. She didn’t answer right away. She evidently wanted to confer with the recent shadow on the wall. Or it did with her. A brief spurt of water from a faucet behind the closed door, turned on, then off again, was the signal to this effect.
“ ’Scuse me a sec,” she said, getting up. “I musta forgotten to tighten the tap in there.”
She slipped in without opening the door very widely. She closed it for a moment after her, so the visitor couldn’t look in.
She had given Carol her chance. Her chance to find whatever there was to find, if there was anything. It was only good for thirty seconds. And it wouldn’t come again.
She only had time to go for one thing. She made it the open handbag on the dresser. It was the obvious place. More than that, it was the only accessible one. The bureau drawers were presumably empty by now. The Gladstone bag was almost certainly locked.
She reared from her chair, darted across the intervening space, put her hand in. Outright evidence she knew she couldn’t expect. That would be asking too much. But something — anything.
And there was nothing. Lipstick, powder, the usual junk. Paper crackled against her probing fingers from one of the side pockets. She drew it hastily out, opened, scanned it. An unpaid hotel bill for $17.89. A man would have left it there. It had no connection with what she was here after.
Some inexplicable instinct cried out to her: Hang onto it. It might come in handy. She flung herself back into her original seat again, did something to one of her stockings, and it was gone.
An instant later the door reopened and the Beacon woman came out again, her instructions set. She sat down, locked her glance with Carol’s, evidently to keep Carol’s attention from wandering. “What’d you do, go there to Gadsby’s alone?”
Carol gave her a knowing look. “Sure, you don’t suppose I brought my grandmother, do you?”
“Well, uh, was there a big mob, lots of cops and excitement? That how you knew he was dead?”
Carol was answering these questions on instinct alone. Until they came out, she didn’t know herself how they were going to come. It was like walking a tightrope — without a balancing pole and with no net under you.
“No, no one knew it yet. I was the first one found him, I guess. See, I had a key to the house. I went in and all the lights were out. I thought maybe he hadn’t got home yet, so I’d wait for him. I went up, and there he was, plugged.”
Rose Beacon moistened her lips. “So then I suppose you beat it out and hollered blue murder?”
“I beat it out, all right, but I didn’t tell a soul. Think I wanted to get mixed up in it? I put the lights out, locked the doors, and left the place just the way it was.”
She had a slight sense of motion behind her. The air may have stirred a little. Or something creaked. There was no time to turn her head. She just had time to think: The door has opened behind me! That shows they did it. I’ve hit the right spot!
That wasn’t going to do her any good now.
Rose Beacon had just asked her one more question; a question she really no longer needed to have answered. “How does your coming here tie into it?”
There was no need for her to worry about the answer; it wasn’t expected of her. Something thick and muffling whipped around her face from behind — a Turkish towel folded into a bandage. She reared up, and one hand was seized by the wrist, drawn behind her. The Beacon women jumped in, secured the other. They were brought together, tied cruelly with long, knotted strips of something, perhaps another towel.
She couldn’t breathe for a moment; the towel covered her whole face. The horrible thought that she was to be smothered to death then and there occurred to her — but she realized dimly they wouldn’t have tied her hands if that had been their purpose. A rough hand fumbled with the towel, lowered it a little, freeing her eyes and nostrils, tied it tightly at the back of her head.
The Beacon woman was still in front of her, talking to someone unseen behind her. “Keep it quiet now; you can hear everything through these walls.” She went over to the phone.
A man’s voice growled from across Carol’s shoulder: “Be careful what you’re doing.”
“I just want to find out what we’re up against. She may be some kind of a stooge, for all we know.” She picked up the phone. “Hello, desk? Tell the party that came with my girl-friend he don’t need to wait any more. She’s staying up here a while. You’ll probably find him hanging around outside on the sidewalk.” She waited a while, spoke again. “No one out there, eh? Well, he probably got tired waiting and left.”
She hung up, turned with a leer to the unseen man holding the writhing girl in his grasp. “It’s okay, Joe. She came here alone, the little fool!”
The man’s voice said: “Get her feet — them high heels are barking my shins.”
The Beacon woman brought out additional lengths of toweling knotted in strips — he’d evidently been occupied in producing them while he was confined in the bath room — knelt down, whipped them dexterously in and around Carol’s ankles. Carol became a helpless sheaf, tied at both ends.
“What’s the play now?” Rose asked.
Her accomplice said: “Don’t you figure we ought to—” He didn’t finish it. Carol’s blood ran cold. He said it as calmly as though they were talking about closing a window or putting out a light.
The Beacon woman answered ruefully: “That’s begging for it, Joe. They are gonna know we were in this room.” She got a sudden inspiration. “Hey, how about the window? Four floors ought to be enough. The three of us get drinking, see, and she had a little acci—”
“No good. We gotta move fast. We’d get hooked here for hours, answering all kinds of police questions. We don’t wanta make their acquaintance that familiarly.”
Rose Beacon raked a distracted hand through her hair. “Why the hell did you have to give him the one-two, anyway? I only went down to the front door and let you in so you could throw a scare into him, get him to pay off. And then you sign off on him!”
“I couldn’t help it. I only pointed it at him to keep him from calling the police like he was threatening to. He grabbed at it. You saw what happened. What should I do, let him take it away from me? What’s the good of talking about it now? The damage is done. It’s this twist we gotta think about now.”
He moved out from behind Carol for the first time, crossed the room, flung open a closet door. She got her first good look at him. He looked like the kind of sewer rat who would frame up a gin marriage between his partner in crime and a wealthy young scion, in hopes of collecting blackmail for years afterwards.
“All right,” he was saying. “We’ll truss her up in here. At least we’ll get a head-start out of it. And if she chirps and we get hauled in, they got nothing on us. We can always say she did it.”