I was within twenty feet when the curbward door of the taxicab banged open. A woman bounced out. She landed on her knees on the sidewalk, jumped to her feet, and darted up the street.
Putting the coupé closer to the curb, I let the door swing open. My side windows were spattered with rain. I wanted to get a look at the woman when she passed. If she should take the open door for an invitation, I didn’t mind talking to her.
She accepted the invitation, hurrying as directly to the car as if she had expected me to be waiting for her. Her face was a small oval above a fur collar.
“Help me!” she gasped. “Take me from here — quickly.”
There was a suggestion of foreignness too slight to be called an accent.
“How about—?”
I shut my mouth. The thing she was jabbing me in the body with was a snub-nosed automatic.
“Sure! Get in,” I urged her.
She bent her head to enter. I looped an arm over her neck, throwing her down across my lap. She squirmed and twisted — a small-boned, hard-fleshed body with strength in it.
I wrenched the gun out of her hand and pushed her back on the seat beside me.
Her fingers dug into my arms.
“Quick! Quick! Ah, please, quickly! Take me—”
“What about your friend?” I asked.
“Not him! He is of the others! Please, quickly!”
A man filled the open coupé door — the big-chinned man who had driven the Cadillac.
His hand seized the fur at the woman’s throat.
She tried to scream — made the gurgling sound of a man with a slit throat. I smacked his chin with the gun I had taken from her.
He tried to fall into the coupé. I pushed him out.
Before his head had hit the sidewalk, I had the door closed, and was twisting the coupé around in the street.
We rode away. Two shots sounded just as we turned the first corner. I don’t know whether they were fired at us or not. I turned other corners. The Cadillac did not appear again.
So far, so good. I had started with the Whosis Kid, dropped him to take Maurois, and now let him go to see who this woman was. I didn’t know what this confusion was all about, but I seemed to be learning who it was all about.
“Where to?” I asked presently.
“To home,” she said, and gave me an address.
I pointed the coupé at it with no reluctance at all. It was the McAllister street apartments the Whosis Kid had visited earlier in the evening.
We didn’t waste any time getting there. My companion might know it or might not, but I knew that all the other players in this game knew that address. I wanted to get there before the Frenchman and Big Chin.
Neither of us said anything during the ride. She crouched close to me, shivering. I was looking ahead, planning how I was to land an invitation into her apartment. I was sorry I hadn’t held on to her gun. I had let it fall when I pushed Big Chin out of the car. It would have been an excuse for a later call if she didn’t invite me in.
I needn’t have worried. She didn’t invite me. She insisted that I go in with her. She was scared stiff.
“You will not leave me?” she pleaded as we drove up McAllister street. “I am in complete terror. You cannot go from me! If you will not come in, I will stay with you.”
I was willing enough to go in, but I didn’t want to leave the coupé where it would advertise me.
“We’ll ride around the corner and park the car,” I told her, “and then I’ll go in with you.”
I drove around the block, with an eye in each direction for the Cadillac. Neither eye found it. I left the coupé on Franklin street and we returned to the McAllister street building.
She had me almost running through the rain that had lightened now to a drizzle.
The hand with which she tried to fit a key to the front door was a shaky, inaccurate hand. I took the key and opened the door. We rode to the third floor in an automatic elevator, seeing no one. I unlocked the door to which she led me, near the rear of the building.
Holding my arm, with one hand, she reached inside and snapped on the lights in the passageway.
I didn’t know what she was waiting for, until she cried:
“Frana! Frana! Ah, Frana!”
The muffled yapping of a small dog replied. The dog did not appear.
She grabbed me with both arms, trying to crawl up my damp coat-front.
“They are here!” she cried in the thin dry voice of utter terror. “They are here!”
V
“Is anybody supposed to be here?” I asked, putting her around to one side, where she wouldn’t be between me and the two doors across the passageway.
“No! Just my little dog Frana, but—”
I slid my gun half out of my pocket and back again, to make sure it wouldn’t catch if I needed it, and used my other hand to get rid of the woman’s arms.
“You stay here. I’ll see if you’ve got company.”
Moving to the nearest door, I heard a seven-year-old voice — Lew Maher’s — saying: “He can shoot and he’s plain crazy. He ain’t hampered by nothing like imagination or fear of consequences.”
With my left hand I turned the first door’s knob. With my left foot I kicked it open.
Nothing happened.
I put a hand around the frame, found the button, switched on the lights.
A sitting-room, all orderly.
Through an open door on the far side of the room came the muffled yapping of Frana. It was louder now and more excited. I moved to the doorway. What I could see of the next room, in the light from this, seemed peaceful and unoccupied enough. I went into it and switched on the lights.
The dog’s voice came through a closed door. I crossed to it, pulled it open. A dark fluffy dog jumped snapping at my leg. I grabbed it where its fur was thickest and lifted it squirming and snarling. The light hit it. It was purple — purple as a grape! Dyed purple!
Carrying this yapping, yelping artificial hound a little away from my body with my left hand, I moved on to the next room — a bedroom. It was vacant. Its closet hid nobody. I found the kitchen and bathroom. Empty. No one was in the apartment. The purple pup had been imprisoned by the Whosis Kid earlier in the day.
Passing through the second room on my way back to the woman with her dog and my report, I saw a slitted envelope lying face-down on a table. I turned it over. The stationery of a fashionable store, it was addressed to Mrs. Inés Almad, here.
The party seemed to be getting international. Maurois was French; the Whosis Kid was Boston American; the dog had a Bohemian name (at least I remember nabbing a Czech forger a few months before whose first name was Frana); and Inés, I imagine, was either Spanish or Portuguese. I didn’t know what Almad was, but she was undoubtedly foreign, and not, I thought, French.
I returned to her. She hadn’t moved an inch.
“Everything seems to be all right,” I told her. “The dog got himself caught in a closet.”
“There is no one here?”
“No one.”
She took the dog in both hands, kissing its fluffy stained head, crooning affectionate words to it in a language that made no sense to me.
“Do your friends — the people you had your row with tonight — know where you live?” I asked.
I knew they did. I wanted to see what she knew.
She dropped the dog as if she had forgotten it, and her brows puckered.
“I do not know that,” she said slowly. “Yet it may be. If they do—”
She shuddered, spun on her heel, and pushed the hall door violently shut.
“They may have been here this afternoon,” she went on. “Frana has made himself prisoner in closets before, but I fear everything. I am coward-like. But there is none here now?”