“Positive.”
“Then we’d better get her out of there, Robby.”
“And then go down and heist some gold from Fort Knox.”
“Don’t be a defeatist. Anyway, you know the score now.”
“Sure. The badger game on a mass-production basis. The well-to-do strangers are screened first at the hotel, then out here. If they pass both inspections, they are funneled to Roger’s
Place. There the trained gals take over. With a good screening job they can make a killing on every sucker. The rooms and apartments may be wired for sound. James P. Garver was going to be a routine sucker. They had time to check on him after he registered in and found they had a widower of close to fifty with a half a million bucks. So they put their best talent on him — one Allana Montrose.”
“And,” he said softly, “it was a change of assignment for her. The blue dress I took comes off in four different ways. She was part of the show here. They had a way to put the pressure on her.”
“But what are they planning to do?”
“I have a faint, disturbing idea,” he said gently. “And so we go collect Mrs. Garver. If I can park under that window, do you think you could reach the sill?”
“I might. But how do we turn invisible? There’s floodlights around here.”
“Invisibility is a question of degree.”
With the motor barely turning over, he slid the big car ahead. The gravel popped under the tires. He put the car under the window and left the motor running. The lights of the car went out.
“Get out of the car,” he said, “and count ten after I go through the door. Then scramble up as fast as you can go. Bust the window if you have to. And get that girl. I have a hunch she’ll want to come along. Lower her onto the car top and drop down yourself. Get her in the back on the floor and get behind the wheel and open the other door. Have that motor already turning over and give it one blast on the horn as soon as you’ve moved it up opposite the door.”
He took a last drag on his cigarette, flipped it away, tugged on his belt, and walked to the door. He went inside.
I counted to ten. On the count of nine there was a sound from inside as if a tubful of steel washers and bolts had been thrown through a plate-glass window. The music faltered, lost the beat, and faded off. The window sill came even with my eyes. I broke the window with my elbow and yelled, “Allie Garver! The window! Let’s go!”
I found the catch and slid the window up. The shade was in my way. I tore it off, wiggled through, my stomach across the sill. Her mouth was wide open, and she held the blanket up against the front of her.
“Move!” I said. “We’ve got about ten seconds!” There was a blue robe on the chair. I threw it at her.
She shrugged into it as I heard the steps pounding up the stairs.
“Unlock the door, Allie!” yelled the voice of Rogah’s brother. I unlocked it. It swung inward. He took one step into the room. I jumped full into his chest with both feet. He shot backwards across the narrow hall and down the mouth of the stairway. She was at the window. I swung her up, slid her out feet first, and lowered her by the wrists until her feet touched the car top. She was on the ground by the time I dropped. I felt the metal dent under my heel.
Voices were roaring in anger. She fell full length on the floor as I shoved her into the back. I gunned the motor, yanked the car forward twenty feet until it was opposite the door, reached over, and opened the far door at the same moment as I blew on the horn.
I could see inside. The crinkle-eared gentleman lay on his back on the floor. His mouth looked like a tomato that had fallen on the sidewalk. Shay, his face alight with a vast, animal glee, yanked a man toward him, lifted him by throat and crotch, and hurled him at the others. He staggered as a bottle hit him over the eye, plunged toward the door. They caught him from behind. He ducked forward and threw one of them over his head, turned sideways to avoid a vicious kick in the middle, spun, and punched twice with precision. The last man between him and the door lost heart and stepped aside at the last moment. I had the car thirty feet away before Shay could pull the door shut. He glanced down into the back.
“Nice work, Robby. Nice!”
“Have fun?”
He was breathing heavily. He gingerly touched his forehead. One arm was gone completely from his jacket and his shirt was buttonless. His knuckles were gashed.
“Nothing to clear the head like a good brawl. She was glad to come along, wasn’t she?”
“Hurry,” Allie said, plaintively. “Please hurry!”
He turned so he could smile at her.
“Why, kitten?”
“They’re killing him tonight!”
Shay made the phone calls while I waited in the car with Allie. There was, as I had expected, an unidentified lipstick in the glove compartment. She used the dome light and the rear-vision mirror. She had fallen from the car roof. The right hip of her blue robe was gritty and torn, and her elbow was skinned. She winced as I used the antiseptic in the first-aid kit on it.
Shay came out of the all-night drugstore at a half trot. “Make time, Robby,” he said.
As I held the speedometer at ninety and the big car swayed and roared through the night, Allie spoke over the sound of the rush of the wind.
“I’ve always been a sucker for a pair of dice or a wheel,” she said. “I wouldn’t have sold my act to Jeff Maydo at Club Three if I’d known it was a bust-out house on the side. I don’t know how it happened. They let me keep playing and they took my notes, and all at once I was eleven thousand in hock. That’s when things got rough. Jeff’s brother, Roger, runs Roger’s Place in town, but they work close together. The two of them had what they called a heart-to-heart talk with me. They wanted to put me on the list down at Roger’s Place and let me work my way out of the hole with the extra income. I think they knew I’d blow up at that. I’m no prude, but I’m no hooker either. I said no and then Roger, the creepier one, he said that he’d have to have a friend of his operate on my face, just as a lesson to the other deadbeats. I knew he meant it. He said I’d have a hard time getting my new face into any kind of an act except the circus.”
“Lovely people,” Shay said.
“Oh, the best. We compromised. They said that they’d save me until a prize sucker came along and then, if I did my part, they’d cancel out the debt and give me a five-thousand-dollar bonus. I–I said okay.”
“And the sucker turned out to be Jim Garver.”
“That’s right. Believe me, when I saw him, it wasn’t an act when I did my crying at the bar at Roger’s Place. Then I took on so many drinks that I don’t remember much. Anyway, the next day I got my instructions, and the idea was that I had to marry him. They put the pressure on until I had to say I would. I didn’t understand what they wanted to do. They had me in the bag. I married him. You’d never know he had any dough at all. They must have really checked on him, because a month after we were married, I found out about the half million. I used to call Jeff. He’d keep telling me to sit tight, sit tight. So I did. It wasn’t bad. I got to like old Jim. He’s kind of a sweet guy, and he’s a wonderful cook. And I liked it nice and quiet in the country. Then the letter came for me to come in here. I had to leave without anything, and keep anybody from seeing me leave. I guess I managed it all right. I went to the Club Three. It was... like a nightmare. I didn’t know they were going to kill him until then.”
“When did you find out?”
“Yesterday. I guess I haven’t got much... courage. They made me sign the papers.”
“A confession?”
“Sort of. It gives all the details. I can buy it back from them for four hundred thousand dollars, and if I don’t they can give it to the cops. They won’t be implicated in any way. I haven’t any proof against them. I came downstairs tonight hoping I could sneak out and stop it. But they made me go back up again.”