Ralph took the handkerchief away from his mouth and examined it with horrified astonishment. “He tried his best to knock me out, too. But I thought it was only a newspaper he had in his hand, so when I saw him attack Miss Bayard, I tried to grab him. He hit me with a perfectly terrific blow right in the mouth.” The credit man felt of his teeth. “It felt like a mule kick.”
Don saw a rolled newspaper lying against the wall halfway to the turn of the corridor. “Why’d you say ‘he’? It was a girl, wasn’t it?” The newspaper had been rolled around a footlong piece of heavy iron pipe.
Ralph’s forehead crinkled into a puzzled scowl. “There was a girl, but I thought that man was about to strike her, too, Don. She ran right past me before I tried to grab the big brute.”
“What’d he look like?”
Ralph snuffled blood back into his nose. “Like a butcher. Big fellow, face like ground hamburger. Six feet, heavy-shouldered. Had on one of those Army trench coats. Couldn’t see what he was wearing. But I could spot him out of a thousand. Had little rolls of fat under his eyes — like pouches that’d bloated out. Did he get away from you?”
Don said, “I never saw him, Ralph. The girl got away from me.”
“What the devil was he doing up here on the executive floor? How’d he get up here?”
“Might have come up to see what we were going to do about the girl.”
Ralph groaned, touching his swollen upper lip. “Was just coming back from the washroom and heard a girl scream. When I poked my head around the corner there I saw this big lunk flailing away at Miss Bayard. He had his back to me so I couldn’t see his face, and for a minute I thought possibly he was one of your men having trouble helping Miss Bayard with a shoplifter. So I didn’t holler for help. Then he spun around and came right for me like a crazy man. Good Lord, I hope he didn’t hurt Miss Bayard seriously.”
A starchy-uniformed nurse hurried along the corridor.
Don was on the telephone to his main entrance guard when Cora touched his arm.
“The nurse says it looks like a fractured skull and might be critical. She wants to get Mary to a hospital right away.”
Don’s eyes clouded. “You go in the ambulance with her, Cora. I’II ring Doc Towbin at the clinic and see to it everything’s ready soon’s she gets there.”
He thought a lot of Mary Bayard. If things went wrong up there on the operating table at the clinic, he would be partly to blame. Because he’d thought he might talk that blond into making a confession, and hadn’t considered the possibility she might have an accomplice here with her.
He’d had his fingers on something important and had let it get away from him!
Perhaps not entirely away, though. He picked up the rest of the stuff that had tumbled out of the girl’s bag, arranged it on his blotter.
The last thing he recovered from beneath his desk, where it had fluttered, was a newspaper clipping with large black type flaunting the name Deshla.
Chapter IV
Dated the ninth of March, twelve days past, the clipping read:
Georgetown, Md. AP : Volunteer firemen from the Sassafras River V.F.D discovered a body in the blackened wreckage of the old Deshla mansion, destroyed by fire following a severe electrical storm here today. Coroner Joseph G. Ashford stated that the remains were those of a young woman, but could give no estimate of the time of death since buzzards or rodents had stripped the bones of flesh. The skeleton was not noticed by members of the Volunteer Fire Brigade until the square portion of the roof collapsed and fell through the burned-out floors to the ground. Police have so far been unable to find anyone who could identify the woman or suggest how she had obtained entrance to the historic old homestead which had been unoccupied by the Deshla family for several months.
Don lifted his blotter, took from beneath it the furniture section’s report on the Deshla mess. He knew it pretty well by heart, but he wanted to verify the dates.
On the fifth of March a young woman representing herself to be Mrs. Cephas Deshla of Georgetown, Maryland, ordered and had charged to the Deshla account furniture and floor coverings to the amount of $17,822.94. She had presented a credit token stamped with Mrs. Deshla’s name and had submitted a list of items prepared for her by the firm of Yates & Gordon. Interior Decorators of Chestertown, Maryland. The furniture section had been unable to locate any such concern.
He juggled the Betterson credit coin on his palm gloomily. The girl in the Deshla fraud couldn’t have been the blonde who had just escaped. The furniture buyer had described the other woman as being tall, statuesque, patrician in appearance and manner. But the points of similarity in the gyp scheme were too noticeable to leave any doubt that Mary Bayard had managed to nip another tricky theft in the bud — and might pay for it with her life.
Don Marko examined the Betterson credit coin with a magnifying glass. It bore every mark of being genuine, including the small speck of darker metal on the reverse side, put there to confound possible counterfeiters. Every Nimbletts section manager and assistant had been trained to watch for that apparent defect on the coin. If some clever duplicator was at work turning out imitations of the Nimbletts charge coin he had been well posted by someone on the store’s staff.
The things that had dropped out of the blonde’s handbag were such as might be found in the possession of any girl of the upper brackets. The compact was studded with a scroll pattern in chip diamonds. The key case was engraved “S.C.” Maybe her name really was Sally Collins.
The phone book, however, listed no S. Collins at the East Seventy-ninth Street address. He dialed the Regent number, got a “What numbah are you calling, puhlease?” in answer. A query to Information brought the reply that no Sally or Sarah Collins was listed in the Manhattan, Bronx, Queens or Richmond directories, or in any of the exchanges in those boroughs.
He thumbed through the stubs of the girl’s pocket checkbook. It bore the imprint of the Traders Exchange Bank and most of the scribbled entries on the stubs were for small sums:
$27.50 — to Dabney’s, shoes
$31.00 — Martha Lewis, lingerie
$14.65 — Chez Moisson, n’tgown
Only one entry was for more than fifty dollars — $200 — C. He thought about that for a while, got up, pulled on his topcoat.
He called up Maxie, his pickpocket specialist covering the escalator at the second floor.
“Sit in for me here, couple hours, Maxie. Get Chet to double for your spot. I’m going out. Just keep things nice and quiet.”
The main building of the Traders Exchange Bank was ten blocks north, but there were branches all over town. It might be a tough job to run down one blonde by means of a few stubs on a relatively small account. Yet it seemed the best chance. The G.M. had been vehement about not calling in the police on any of this credit coin fraud, lest word get around and other confidence operators be tempted to use the same method.
One of the vice-presidents at the bank had been sympathetic but not too helpful. He had showed the stubs to his paying tellers and given them Don’s description of the good-looking blonde, but no one seemed to recognize the writing or the description. All Don got was a list of the thirty-one branches.