Trainor just looked at me and I looked at him, and the three of us went back to 42nd Street and 7th Avenue. Somebody’s death warrant had been signed. Just barely possibly that avaricious crooked barman’s. More likely Casey’s. Most likely still, somebody we hadn’t even set eyes on so far, walking unsuspectingly along the midnight streets at this very moment to his doom. It gave me the creeps. I hated Fredericks — and I almost hated Trainor too. Too stubborn to back down. Playing the gods of the machine. Thinking they’d be able to stop it in time.
We were in a cab again, almost over the same spot as the night before. It happened quicker this time. For one thing, it was drizzling lightly and there were far fewer people passing. There were no trials and errors like the night before. Trainor hided his time, made his choice carefully. He had to be careful whom he pitted against Casey, for his own sake, and he knew it. He’d gone a little wrong on Casey. His answer to the man that had asked him if he’d lost anything, and what had occurred in the barroom, showed Casey had a well-developed streak of stubbornness in him, that might easily turn into pugnacity. Trainor had to be careful whom he matched against him now.
Presently a reedy-looking individual, coat collar turned up against the rain, came shambling along. Probably the weather and the turned-up collar and his soggy hat-brim made him look more dejected than he was. A single glance, as they come walking down a street, is no way to judge character, anyway. But his face was wan, and whatever his inner disposition, he looked frail enough to be harmless.
“Drop it,” signalled Trainor under his breath. The second half-bill fell on the gleaming sidewalk.
I couldn’t help feeling I was looking at a dead man, as he came on toward us, so unaware. Almost wanted to veil out to him in frantic warning, “Don’t pick anything up from the sidewalk, whatever you do, or you’re a goner!”
He saw it and he stopped in his tracks. He brought it up to face-level. His mouth dropped open. We were so close we could even hear what he muttered. “Holy smoke!” he ejaculated hoarsely, and pushed his water-waved hat to the back of his head.
He stood there a long time, looking stunned. He went on uncertainly after awhile, and the mist started to veil his figure.
“Hurry up, before you lose him,” Fredericks said, and unlatched the door for me.
“Why do I have to do all the dirty work in this?” I grunted, stepping out.
“Because you have no stake in it. Not to put too fine a point on it, Trainor doesn’t altogether trust me, and I’m not sure I altogether trust him. We both trust you implicitly. You’re the contact-man in this.”
“Malarkey!” I growled, and belted up my waterproof. The taxi went one way, I went the other way after my quarry.
This time instead of beer I had to sit drinking vile coffee in a cheap cafeteria, while he took the bill out from time to time and studied it surreptitiously below table-level, across the room from me.
“Planning what you’d like to get with it, if it was only whole,” I thought pityingly. “Little knowing what you’re likely to get, because of it.”
I could see him day-dreaming there under the lights. I could almost see the girl and the bungalow and the frigidaire — or maybe it was a radio — in his eyes.
“Damn Trainor!” I seethed. “Damn Fredericks!” Why didn’t they drop a whole bill with no murder-strings attached, and make someone happy! One thing was sure, if there was going to be any killing in this, it wouldn’t be through him. You could read goodness in his face. Trainor had shown good judgment in his choice this time.
I followed him home through the rain at two that morning, and if his thoughts hadn’t been so preoccupied with what he’d found, I’m sure he would have caught on easily enough. The jaunty cut of the waterproof, and the rustling noise it made, were too damn easy to identify. But he was walking on air. A troop of elephants could have followed him and he wouldn’t have known it.
He went to a little hole-in-the-wall flat in the Chelsea part of town, and me twenty yards behind him. And then I was in for a bad jolt! He had his own key, so I couldn’t get his name from the mailboxes in the grubby little foyer. To avoid having to come around the next day and ask questions of the janitor, I deliberately went up the inner stairs after him (the street-door was unlocked) to ascertain what his flat number was in that way, if I could. I heard a door on the third floor close after him, and when I got up to the landing it was 25, since that was the only one had voices coming from inside it. You could hear everything out there where I was.
I heard a kiss, and a sweetly solicitous voice asked: “Tired, dear?” Then he told her about what he’d found, and they stood there just the other side of the door, planning what they could have done with it if it had only been intact.
“Maybe,” she suggested wistfully, “if you take it around to the bank, they’d give you something on it in partial redemption, a hundred or even fifty. Even that would be a Godsend!”
Then an infant started whimpering somewhere in the back of the flat, and I crept downstairs again all choked up. Married, and with a young baby! It was inhuman to torture people like that. And to place them in danger of being murdered was bestial.
25, the mailbox said, was rented by Noble Dreyer.
I jotted the name and address down. I said, as I girded my waterproof up and went out into the wet again, “Well, Dreyer, you don’t know it, but I’m your guardian angel from now on.”
I met Fredericks and Trainor by appointment at the former’s club, at cocktail time next afternoon. I had very little to say, only “The guy’s name is Noble Dreyer.” And I gave them the address. I didn’t mention the wife, I didn’t mention the kid, I didn’t mention the guardian angel.
Fredericks said, with about as much emotion as an oyster, “Good. Now all that remains is to inform the two parties of one another’s existence and whereabouts, and the test is under way.”
We followed him into the club’s writing room, and he sat down and addressed two envelopes, one to Casey, 99th Street, the other to Dreyer, 24th Street. Then he put them aside and wrote two identical notes, on club stationery.
THE OTHER HALF OF WHAT YOU PICKED UP AT 7TH AVENUE, 42ND STREET, IS AT THIS MOMENT IN THE POSSESSION OF (HE INSERTED CASEY’S NAME AND ADDRESS ON ONE, DREYER’S ON THE OTHER), HE FOUND IT IN THE SAME WAY YOU DID YOURS. YOU HAVE AS MUCH RIGHT TO THE WHOLE BILL AS HE HAS!
The come-on, of course, was that last sentence. It was an invitation to murder if there ever was one. But Trainor made no objection. “The average, decent, normal man,” he said, “will not be incited to murder even by getting information like this. He’ll envy maybe, or even try to strike a bargain with his co-holder, but he won’t kill.”
Was Trainor right?
Fredericks left the notes unsigned, of course. He blotted, folded each one over. I was holding the two addressed envelopes in my hand. “I’ll seal them for you,” I said quietly and took them from him before he could object. I put each one in an envelope, moistened and closed the flap and sent the steward for stamps. “Mail these for Mr. Fredericks,” I said.
Then I took a good long drink, and I felt better than I’d felt yet since the devilish bet had been made.
“That’s that,” Fredericks said, gleefully rubbing his hands. “Now, of course, we must be ready with some sort of preventive measure, or at least some form of supervision, to keep them from going whole hog. Although I don’t suppose you two’ll give me credit for it, I don’t want either of them to lose their lives — if I can help it.”