“I thought of that. It isn’t unlikely that a private detective would be known. I should think you’d know him yourself, being in the same business.”
“It’s a big city. Private detectives aren’t like millionaires. They get lost in the crowd.”
“All right. What’s more important, does he know you?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“There’s a chance he might, but we’ll have to take it.” The old man paused, his chin sinking onto his chest, lids lowering over his smoldering eyes. He remained that way so long that Jeff wondered if he had sunk suddenly into a coma, but after a while, eyes still shut, he began to speak again. “Fifty thousand is a lot of money. To a lot of people, it’s a fortune. It might be quite a temptation to a private detective.”
“I can testify to that,” Jeff said, and he sat quietly, waiting for the old man to continue, thinking that they had come to the point at last.
“You read the note,” Roman said. “Constance is to get on the seven-thirty bus for Darrowville tomorrow night. He’s to have the fifty thousand with him in unmarked bills. It’s a local bus. One of these little lines that hang on for peanuts. It’s about seventy-five miles to Darrowville, and the bus makes a couple of stops between here and there. Somewhere along the way, the contact will be made. I want you to be sure the money is handed over.”
“You mean be sure that Constance doesn’t take a powder with it?”
The old man lifter his shoulders very slightly. “As I said, fifty thousand’s a lot of money.”
“What does Constance look like?”
“He’s tall. Broad shoulders and a thin, handsome face. There’s a feeling of coldness about him. Dresses like a banker. Homburg. Blues and grays. Good stuff, cut by a tailor who knows how. You’d never pick him for a detective.”
Jeff grinned. “Thanks,” he said. “You haven’t told how it happened. The kidnapping.”
The old man was slumped in his chair. Weariness covered him like a powdering of gray dust. He lifted his lids briefly and let them fall again of their own weight.
“Who knows? She left here two nights ago, going God knows where. She never told anyone where she was going, what she was doing. Never a damn word. She left here in a taxi, I’m told. The note is the only word I’ve had of her since she left.”
“Did she usually go out in a taxi? Why didn’t she drive?”
“Sometimes she drove. Sometimes she used a taxi. I guess it depended on where she was going. It doesn’t matter. All I want you to do is to see that the ransom is paid.”
“That may be a large order. The kidnapper’s no fool. You think he’ll approach your contact openly?”
The eyes flicked open again. Open and shut. “That’s your business, Pitt. You’ve done other jobs for me. You did them well, or you wouldn’t be here now. Do this one.”
The effrontery of wealth, Jeff thought. The damned bland presumption of millions. He stood up, waiting for the lids to lift again, waiting for an overt sign that he was free to walk away. When the sign failed to come, he left without it, letting himself out into the unperverted air. Breathing deeply, he stood for a moment in the drive beside his jalopy to think of a beautiful girl whose life depended on the delivery of fifty grand, and of a man in a homburg who was the delivery boy.
While Jeff stood beside his jalopy and thought about Brenda Roman and Cleo Constance, Cleo Constance drove across the city limit and thought about Brenda Roman and fifty grand. It was logical that he thought of Brenda and the fifty grand in association, since they came together. Either would have been a piece of loot a man would sweat for. Together they were almost incredible. Once-in-a-lifetime stuff.
He sat behind the wheel of his Olds with an odd, military stiffness that never left him. His gray homburg sat with conservative tilt the proper distance above his level brows. The eyes beneath the brows were pale blue, cold, and seemed to be covered by a thin film of ice. The nose and mouth were thin, rather patrician, conforming to the narrow oval face. As Reed Roman had said, handsome. A banker, he’d said. Actually, the face would have been more appropriate under a klieg light.
On the highway, out of traffic, he held the needle of the speedometer at fifty. Restraint was difficult to maintain. He felt a wracking inner compulsion to let himself go, to send the Olds booming down the highway as a symbol of the wild soaring of his imagination.
I knew it would come, he thought. The big break. The time that requires only guts and action to make it the beginning of the big life. Caesar crossing the Rubicon. Napoleon firing his cannon down a Paris street. It’s been worth waiting for, and I always knew it would come in time. I knew it even as a kid back home — that long ago — and even then it was a kind of compensation for an old man who was a pickled bum and an old woman who was a whining slattern. I’ve never lost sight of the big break. Not in reform school. Not during all the dreary, slimy leg-work for petty fees that goes with being a private eye. And now it’s here, and it’s only the beginning. With fifty grand to ride on and a sleek charmer like Brenda Roman to go along for the ride, the lid’s off for Cleo Constance. The sky’s the limit for Cleo.
Funny, how things begin. Just another caper, you think; a few grand in stolen jewels, and a servant begging for mercy. Just a few days to crack it. Then the note from Brenda asking me to call for my fee. I knew then that something was funny, because it would have been the normal thing just to mail it to the office. I knew the caper was taking a turn. Not that I objected. I was burning to see her again. Ever since the first interview, when she sat there in that suit with a skirt so tight that it showed all the long lines of her legs. Ever since I looked into that strange, beautiful face that makes you think of a fallen angel who has no regrets.
I’ll never forget the day I called for the fee. She had me come up to her room in that gloomy stack of old Roman’s, and the room was like another place entirely, with soft light coming out of nowhere and all the thick rugs and sleek furniture and the big bed in black silk. And there she was, in black silk like the bed, with her hair like a cloud of white fire.
“You’re a handsome guy, Constance,” she said. “You’re the handsomest, most aggravating species of male I’ve ever seen. What makes you nothing but a lousy private cop?”
And there it was, asking for nothing but guts and action to make something of it, and that was not the end at all, but only the beginning, and now it won’t ever end until we’re old, or burned out, or dead, and by that time we’ll have had all, the full, strong flavor of life, and it won’t matter.
Fifteen miles out the highway, he turned off in a northerly direction, following the course of a narrow gravel road. The tilt of the earth was generally upward, rising to the foothills of a sprawling range worn low by the action of geologic ages. Rock outcroppings and scrub oak were everywhere. The oaks, stripped of leaves, presented a gnarled and twisted hardiness, grim yet somehow exhilarating, that reinforced his soaring mood.
There was hunting here. Hunting and good fishing, with speckled and rainbow trout fighting the currents of clear streams. He had a cabin in the low hills, a two-room thing of logs, where he came now and again. It was a good place to come, he’d found, when the city closed in and the big dream seemed buried forever in steel and asphalt. It was a good place to come, too, when one had a girl to hide for the little while it would take to make the dream come alive at last.
Turning again, steering the Olds along hard ruts that ascended precipitately, he felt the automatic transmission shift down for its increased labor and saw ahead of him among the scrub oaks the brown bulk of the cabin against its side of hill. He pulled around the cabin and into a rough shed. Retracing his way afoot around the cabin, he crossed the small front porch and pushed open the door.