I thought he looked at me kind of funny. He got it down from the shelf, done up flat in brown paper. “Two dolla’ fi’ cents,” he said. He kept looking at me funny even after I paid him. The other two had quit pounding their flat-irons, were acting funny too. Not looking at me, but sort of waiting for something to happen. I had an idea they were dying to tell me something, but didn’t have the nerve.
I started to pick up the flat package to walk out with it, and it wouldn’t move, stayed on the counter. A hand was holding it down. The string popped, the brown paper rattled open. I didn’t bother turning my head. Like the three monkeys: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. I kept watching the sidewalk level outside the shop, murmuring “Thank God!” over and over.
Behind me, a voice said quietly, “Tie the lady’s bundle up again, John.”
I breathed, “Don’t take too long, will you?” I didn’t mean it for the laundryman, I hoped he knew that.
Temple knew everything. “Want to stay out?” he said softly. “I’ll cover you.”
“You’ll cover me with a rubber bib at the morgue. Sure I want to stay out — out of it.”
“I’ve got a look-out posted.”
“Can he beat a slug’s time into my girlish waist?” I wanted to know.
“If you need help before the lab checks this collar, lower one of the window shades.”
“That’d be about right. Lower one of the window shades, like when there’s been a death in the house.”
Somebody wedged the retied bundle under my arm, the laundryman I guess, and I walked on out and up the steps. Ostrich-like, I hadn’t seen Temple from first to last. I could be beaten to death, but I couldn’t truthfully say I’d seen him.
It gave me a funny feeling when I got back outside our place again. There should have been a sign over the door, “Abandon hope all ye who enter here.”
That had been my last chance to lam, when I was sent out for that laundry. But I knew enough not to. It would have been a dead give-away, and meant certain death. When they want to get you, not all the protection of all the dicks in town is any good to you. The only way for me to play it was this: They mustn’t find out anything that would make them want to get me. So in I went.
He was pacing up and down the room a mile a minute. He turned on me and grabbed the package and slapped me back away from it. “What took you so long?” he griped.
“I hadda wait for them to show up and lemme in.”
He busted it wide open, rummaged through it, scattering it all over the place. Not a collar turned up. “Whew!” he said, and slid his finger across his forehead and flicked it off in the air. Then he thought it over. “But just the same he was after something in here. Let’s see if it coulda been anything else.”
He turned the wrapping paper over and before my glazing eyes yanked a bright green price list out from under it. You get one back with every package, a check list of what they’re charging you for. I’d seen too many of them before, I knew just what was going to be on it: 1 collar — 5c. With no collar present to match it. We’d both overlooked that, me and that voice back at the laundry.
“Eight shirts,” he mumbled, “all here. Six shorts.”
I could feel my cheeks puffing in and out like bellows. I reached down and hung onto the nearest piece of furniture, to brace myself for it when it came. He’d hit it in about a second more.
The phone rang. He dropped the laundry bill and went out to get it. I kind of swayed where I was. I couldn’t move fast, my knees were all watery. But luckily the party seemed to have a lot to say, held him out there long enough for me to pull myself together.
I got over to where his coat was hanging, across the back of a chair, and unclasped a pencil with a rubber on it. Then I staggered to where the laundry slip was, and rubbed out the pencilled “I” in front of the printed word collars and the pencilled “5¢” after it. Then I floundered into a chair, and finally got my stomach down where it belonged again.
He came in and finished up what he’d been doing. The list was badly wrinkled and that had covered the erasure. “Everything accounted for,” he said. “He overcharged me five cents, but the hell with that.” He wasn’t a tightwad. Just a killer. “Whatever that dirty name was after, he didn’t get.”
He hauled a cowhide valise out into the middle of the room. He thumbed it, and then me. “Start packing,” he said. “We’re getting out of here. I don’t like the way that dope sounded just now.”
So that had been Louie who’d called just now. Well, I didn’t like it either, any more than he did, but not for the same reasons. The lab would never kick back with its report on that collar in time to keep them from hauling me off out of reach with them. Temple would never be able to get to me once they took me out of here with them. And it was no good trying to stall either.
“Come on, yuh paralyzed?” he said, and gave me a shove. “Get a move on.”
Damn it, if I’d only emptied the closet first, while we were still alone in the place, and the bureau drawers later! But he kept cracking the whip over my head and I didn’t have time to think straight. I emptied out the drawers first, and before I’d got around to the clothes closet, Louie was already in the place. Even then, I was so busy listening to the two of them while I hauled things back and forth that I forgot for a minute what was in that closet. Didn’t realize what I was going to be in for, in just one more round trip.
“What’d you mean just now, it’s gone sour?” Buck was demanding.
“The gun turned up clean.”
Pokk!
“Don’t sock me!” Louie shrilled. “I done my part! Rogers wrapped his mitts around it right under my own eyes! Picked it up and handed it back to me. Somebody musta tampered with it after I planted it.”
I unslung a half-dozen dresses from the rack, and suddenly black and white checks were glaring malevolently at me from the depths of the closet! A chair creaked, and Louie had slumped down in one right on a line with the closet door, rubbing the side of his face where Buck had caught him. I knew I’d never be able to get it out of there without him seeing it, not even if I tried to cover it over with the dresses. It was such a big bulky thing.
“It’s got to stay in there where it is,” I heaved terrifiedly to myself. “That’s my only chance.”
I sidled out with the dresses, and gave the closet door a little nudge behind me with the point of my elbow, to close it more than it was so he couldn’t see in. I didn’t bend over the bags, I toppled over them from fright and weakness when I got to them.
I should have got away with it, the way they were barking at each other.
“You blundering fool! No wonder they never brought Rogers back! Mendes’ll have to go to bat for me now!”
“She ratted on you herself!” Louie protested. For a minute I thought he meant me and a drop of twenty degrees ran down my spine. “I heard she left some kind of a high-sign, but I couldn’t find out what it was; they’re keeping it to themselves. They found her with something in her hand. They put the kibosh on it, wouldn’t let the papers tell it. One story I heard was they’re out after some guy that poses for ads in magazines, but I think it’s just a bum steer they threw out on purpose. Anyway, one thing’s sure, she didn’t die right away like you thought.”
“She was dead when I left her!” Buck growled ferociously. “I oughta know, I tried hard enough to bring her back! Somebody’s framed me! C’mon, let’s get out of here fast. Hurry up, you, y’got everything?”
Louie’s face was working like he was trying to connect something up. “Y’know, I forgot to tell you,” he started to say, “Tuesday morning early, when you sent me over there—”