Quinn answered for me. “Catherine Robinson, the blonde who works in the D.A.’s office.”
“It might be worth a chance...” he said slowly.
I tried to object, but neither of them would pay any attention to me. I tried to tell them that Kit looked nothing like Anna Garron. The lieutenant got hold of Captain Jameson, and with his approval and his authority, after Kit had agreed by phone, the managing editor of the only morning paper was awakened and persuaded to kill the death story which had already been locked in the press.
Between them, they gave it a new look. Anna Garron had not died; she had been pulled practically from under the wheels of the locomotive; she suffered a superficial head injury and had been taken to Mercy Hospital for treatment and would be probably released early the following day. She was not yet recovered sufficiently to talk about her experience.
I was in “protective custody.”
But the front page space on the morning paper didn’t go to waste. There was another story to fill it. Replace a murder with a murder. Brock Sentano. Dead in an empty house. Gambling ring killing. Principals sought.
I walked back and forth in the small basement room at headquarters and cursed myself for having mentioned Kit’s name. This was nothing for her to be mixed up in, even as blonde bait. Sometimes the bait gets snatched off the hook while the fisherman takes time off to yawn.
It was two o’clock in the morning. The trap wouldn’t be set until the morning papers hit the street at six. Even if the cot in the corner had been the most comfortable bed in the world, I couldn’t have slept.
Quinn had dropped in to tell me the progress. Yes, Kit has agreed. They had checked with the D. A. She hadn’t wanted her family to know, had told them that it was special stenographic work. They had smuggled her into the Mercy Hospital.
“Clothes?” I asked.
A dress had been found which was a close match to the one that had been ripped and cut by the steel shoes. No, a change in hair style wasn’t necessary. The bandage would take care of that. Miss Garron’s face hadn’t been damaged, and the greatest similarity was around the mouth and nose.
So it was intended that the bandage would cover one eye. And then they decided, at least the lieutenant decided that I was needed. Quinn took me out to the black sedan and I was rushed to the side door of the Mercy Hospital taken up to a room on the second floor.
Kit stood there, the bandage covering her fair hair, one of her grey eyes. They had told her about me.
“The plan is this,” the lieutenant said. “The paper hits the street at six. At eight thirty, Miss Robinson leaves by the out patient door. She walks to the curb, stands there a moment, then turns and heads up the street toward the taxi stand. She walks slow. We have the block covered with everything we’ve got.”
She didn’t look at me. The lieutenant had her walk and asked me if it was okay. “No. Kit carried her head too high and her shoulders too straight. Slump a little and take shorter steps.”
Finally she got it right. She held a big red purse similar to the one half-destroyed by the fire in the shack
“Good luck, Kit,” I said.
She didn’t answer me.
I stuck close to the lieutenant and he seemed to forget that I was someone in ‘protective custody’. In his mind I had become a part of the home team, and it made me feel warm and good to be so considered.
Before daylight, the lieutenant, Quinn, Captain Jameson and I entered the small florist shop across the street from the out patient door. We moved some potted ferns into the window which would conceal us. In high windows across from the hospital men from the department checked the bolts of high-powered rifles.
At eight a car stopped near the door and two men leisurely began to change a soft rear tire. At either end of the block, department men loitered.
And at eight thirty on the dot, Kit came out of the door across the street, out into the morning sunshine. At one hundred feet, the illusion was perfect. It was as though Anna Garron walked out toward the street. It gave me a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach.
At that moment the plan seemed futile, the trap empty, the whole idea childish and absurd. If Fletcher was still in town, he would try to grab her. Before the unknown backer tried to kill her, to kill the woman he had already killed...
She stood for a moment at the curb. I could see that her face was very white, her lips tight under the dark lipstick in Anna’s shade.
She was a clay pigeon, fragile and yet priceless. She was all the days of my future, standing alone and unprotected.
Suddenly another figure came out of the hospital door. The lieutenant cursed softly. In explanation he said, “Wallace Rome, the legal eagle. He’ll foul things up. He knew Garron and he knows Miss Robinson.”
Suddenly my mind was working with speed and desperation. Wallace Rome. Something was wrong, horribly wrong. What had I said to him over the phone? Something was missing in that conversation. Of course! I had mentioned the raid. He should have immediately said, “What raid?” But he hadn’t said it. He should have said it, but he didn’t.
Kit had not heard him. She turned to walk slowly down the street.
“Maybe he won’t notice her,” the lieutenant whispered.
As I looked, Wallace Rome casually slipped his hand into his jacket pocket. I grabbed a potted fern and threw it through the plate glass window of the shop. Kit turned startled eyes toward the direction of the crash.
As the lieutenant reached for me, I shook his arm off and hurried toward the door. Wallace Rome had crouched; he pulled his hand half out of the pocket and I saw the gleam of metal.
A rifle spoke with an authoritative crack, and Rome staggered back. His white teeth shone. Kit, as she had been instructed, dropped flat. Rome aimed the weapon at her and car brakes screamed as I ran directly across the road.
There was only one thought in my mind, and that was to somehow get between Kit and the muzzle of that gun.
But two rifles spoke together and he coughed, dropped to his knees, and folded slowly over onto his face. Men ran toward us from all directions. Kit got up and I grabbed her in my arms. She was shivering and I was saying silly and sentimental words over and over...
And then she pushed me away.
You can’t live on the wrong side of the fence without paying. And I am paying. Oh, the other deal is all washed up. Fletcher was picked up, along with Cowlfax, in Miami. I turned state’s evidence and saved my own hide.
But the months go by and I keep paying. I live with Quinn and Molly now, and I’m a brakeman in the yards. The big-shot dreams are gone. I’m just an average, beaten-down guy.
Quinn is working to get me back on the cops, but it is an uphill fight. He may never make it.
He keeps telling them that I, in effect, supplied the trap, and I was the only one who caught on fast enough to save Kit. Rome was the money boy, and the one Anna had phoned. Yes, he was going to shoot, and take his chances. Maybe he had some out figured; he didn’t live to tell it.
But Kit distrusts me. She may never forgive me for the way I lied to her. That is my payment. Quinn has lost that expression of contempt, all there is left is pity.
Pity for a guy who got too big for his pants and tried to buy the world. I can keep going because I hope that some day she will forgive and relent. Now I can afford to wait. Some girls have to have hill-crest houses. All Kit has to have is trust and love. And that’s all I’ll have to give her.