She leaned her solid hips against the toilet basin and smiled at me: it wasn’t a nice smile, and it made her look as hard as if her face had been hacked out of stone.
‘Yes, I mean how much in money. Chester Scott—of course. I know who you are now. You’re the man Oscar is blackmailing.’
‘What makes you think that?’ I asked, keeping my face expressionless.
‘I hear things,’ she said. ‘I don’t approve of blackmail. I need money, Mr. Scott. I can give you information that can take you off Oscar’s hook, but it’ll cost you. I won’t rob you. I’ll put you wise for five hundred. It’s cheap. I know what Oscar’s asking. Five hundred is nothing.’
‘What information?’
‘Have you five hundred dollars, Mr. Scott?’
‘Not on me.’
‘Can you get it tonight?’
‘I might.’ I thought of the eight hundred dollars we kept in the safe at the office. I could borrow that and pay it back when the bank opened on Monday. ‘What makes you imagine the information you have would be worth all that to me?’
‘Give me another cigarette.’
I crossed over to her, gave her a cigarette and lit it. As she dipped the cigarette end into the flame of my lighter, she put her hand on mine. Her flesh felt hot and dry against mine.
I moved away from her, watching her draw in smoke, then let it out slowly down her nostrils.
‘I can get you off Oscar’s hook,’ she said. ‘I know the whole set-up. You can have it for five hundred. I’ve got to get out of this town and I want a get-away stake.’
‘How do you get me off the hook?’ I asked, wondering if she were taking me for a ride.
‘I’ll tell you when you produce the money and not before. When you get bitten by a snake, you use an antidote. I can give you the antidote to Oscar’s bite. If you don’t want to spend five hundred to save thirty thousand, then you’re a fool. Can you give me the money tonight?’
If she really knew how I could fix Oscar, five hundred would be a give-away price.
‘Yes, I can get it.’
‘I’ll be home just after two,’ she said. ‘You’ll find me at apartment 10 Maddox Arms. So you know where it is?’
I said I knew where it was.
‘Bring the money with you, Mr. Scott, and I’ll give you the antidote. Be there sharp at two. I have a train to catch.’ She went over to the door and opened it. ‘I’ve got to sing to those lousy drunks again. See you later.’
I moved past her into the passage, then turned and looked at her. Her face was tense and her eyes were glittering in the hard, ceiling light just above her head. I had an idea she was frightened.
We stared at each other for a long, steady moment, then she gently closed the door in my face.
II
As I drove out of the parking lot, I noticed a black Clipper edge out of the second row of cars and move after me.
I thought nothing of it at the time even though it kept behind me all the way back to town and only passed me when I pulled up outside my office block, but I was to remember it later.
The time was now a quarter to one. I had a key to the main door, but I knew if I opened the door I’d set the alarm off, so I rang for the janitor, hoping he hadn’t gone to bed.
He came eventually and peered through the plate-glass door at me. Then he turned off the alarm and let me in.
‘I hope I didn’t get you out of bed,’ I said. ‘I forgot some papers I want to work on over Sunday.’
‘That’s okay, Mr. Scott,’ he said cheerfully, ‘I was just about to turn in, but I wasn’t in. Will you be long?’
‘Five minutes,’ I said.
‘Then I’ll wait for you here and shut you out. You certainly work late hours.’
I made a non-committal remark and crossed over to the elevator.
It took me only a few minutes to unlock my office and open the safe. I exchanged an I.O.U. slip for the five hundred dollars I took from the cash box.
During the run down from Mount Cresta I had been doing some thinking. Dolores had said she would give me an antidote to Ross’s bite. That could only mean she was going to give me information that I could threaten him with so he wouldn’t dare use the information he had against me.
As I stowed the five hundred dollars away in my hip pocket, I wondered what the information was and just how far I could trust Dolores. Going down the elevator I recalled that Ross had said he had to leave town. Dolores had said she needed money to leave town. Could these two have been hooked up in some racket that had gone sour now that O’Brien was dead?
Obviously O’Brien was a character worth investigating. A speed cop who can promise a mink coat and who owned a bungalow with a glass floor must have a pretty handsome private income, so why had he remained a cop?
The janitor was patiently waiting for me as I crossed the lobby. I said good night to him and he let me out.
As I walked to where I had parked the Buick I saw a man standing in a shop doorway on the opposite side of the road. As I looked at him, wondering what he was doing there, he drew back into the shadows.
By the time I had reached the Buick and was driving towards the residential quarter of Palm City, I had forgotten him, but, like the black Clipper, I was to remember him later.
Maddox Arms was a block of apartments on Maddox Avenue in the less fashionable quarter: a brown stone building that had been put up some fifty years ago, and looked as if nothing had been done to the outside since then.
I climbed fifteen steep steps to the front entrance and walked into a dimly lit lobby with a line of mail boxes on the right, an ancient elevator facing me and a door marked Janitor on my left.
I learned from the wall indicator that apartment 10 was on the third floor. As I got into the elevator, I glanced at my wrist watch. The time was three minutes to two o’clock.
The elevator dragged me up to the third floor in a way that made me feel that any moment the cage might part from its cable and plunge me down into the basement. I was glad when it came to a creaking standstill and I got out.
I stepped into a narrow passage: at either end were doors. The one on the left was the door to apartment 10.
I went down the passage and paused outside the door. There was a card fixed to the door panel with a thumb tack which read: Miss Dolores Lane.
I pressed the bell push and heard a bell ring sharply somewhere inside the apartment.
There was a pause while I stood there, pretty tense and wondering if within the next ten minutes I would be in a position to fix Oscar Ross.
Then I heard the sound of movement behind the door, which opened an inch or so and came to rest on a chain lock.
‘Who is it?’ Dolores asked, not showing herself.
‘Scott,’ I said. ‘Who did you think it was?’
The door closed for a moment while she slid off the chain, then she opened up.
She was wearing a lightweight travelling coat over a grey dress. Her expression was tense, but she managed to give me a small, meaningless smile.
‘Come in. When you live alone in a dump like this, you have to be careful who you open the door to at two o’clock in the morning.’
I stepped past her into a fair-sized room, sparsely furnished with the kind of furniture you will see only in furnished apartments: junk that no one in their right minds would buy for themselves. It told me that she was living the hard way, and had probably been living like that for some time.
‘Don’t take any notice of this,’ she said, seeing me look around. ‘Thank goodness I’m leaving it. The only thing in its favour is it’s cheap.’
I moved away from her.
There was a door standing half open near me. Through the open doorway the room beyond appeared to be a bedroom. At the foot of the bed was a fair-sized suitcase. It looked to me as if she were ready to go.