"Oh!"
She seemed to come awake at last, and she looked guiltily over at Penny, who was beginning to stir. Jenny hurried over, suddenly full of remorse and concern. I went to the bathroom for water. I couldn't help thinking bitterly that I'd finally made it. Now that it was too late, I'd made it: at last I had the woman fully believing in Dave Clevenger, the susceptible private eye with the ready trigger finger.
I heard the kid speak out there, and I called, "Is she okay?"
"Her glasses are broken and she's got a bruise on her chin," Jenny called back. "Otherwise I think she's all right. Aren't you, darling?"
Penny said something inaudible, in a fuzzy voice. I let the water run a bit to cool it. I heard the kid speak again, and something moved in my mind, and I remembered something I should have thought of before. I remembered the same young voice, in my room, asking if it was all right to tell. Jenny had said yes, and Penny had said that Hans-Mr. Ruyter, she'd called him primly-had told her certain things, just before Larry Fenton barged in. Some instructions had been passed along to the kid. It was a slim hope, but it was better than no hope at all.
But there was no time to go into it now, and this butcher shop was not the place for it. I had to get us space and time. I walked in with the glass of water and held it for the kid to drink.
"We've got to get out of here," I said. "We've got to get out without attracting attention. We won't check out. No luggage, no nothing. We just up and walk out. Understand?"
She hesitated, and started to look toward the two dead bodies, and restrained herself. "All right," she said stiffly. "All right, Dave. What do I do?"
"Well," I said, "you get the kid dressed just the way she was earlier this evening, hairdo and all. The assumption is she hasn't had her clothes off. And you fix that bird's nest on your head and put on a pair of nylons that don't look quite as much as if they'd been through a briarpatch. You can stick an extra pair in your purse if you like and a toothbrush for each of you, and that's all. When you come downstairs, you'll both look as if you were just continuing a long and pleasant evening by having your gentleman escort drive you around the lovely old city of Montreal."
"Where will you be?"
"I'll pick up a couple of things from my room, and go down and get the car from the garage and bring it around front. It will probably take me a quarter of an hour, but let's say thirty minutes to be sure." I glanced at my watch. "In exactly thirty minutes, you two come out the front door of the hotel, laughing and happy. I'll be waiting. You climb in merrily, and we'll be off. Okay?"
I went out, leaving them with the two dead men for company. Outside, I checked my watch again: twelve thirty-seven. I had some notion of hunting up a pay phone from which I could safely confess my sins to Washington, but it seemed more diplomatic to wait until I had more than a faint hope to report along with the blatant errors. Besides, I wasn't sure I could afford the time.
Maybe I was doing a lovely person a grave injustice, but I was fresh out of sentiment for the night, and I wasn't about to trust a woman just because I'd killed a man for her, or she thought I had. I went quickly to my room and used the phone there to order the Volkswagen made available. I looked around the room, stuck a couple of things in my pockets, grabbed my hat, and went out again, closing the door firmly enough to be heard by anybody listening nearby. I walked briskly past Jenny's door, turned the corner by the elevators, and pushed the button. The elevator came, opened with a metallic rumble, closed again, and went back down. I waited.
They were quick, I'll hand them that. I didn't know there was a lady alive who could change stockings and reconstruct a fancy modern hairdo in four minutes flat, nor had my boyhood experiences indicated that a fifteen-year-old maiden could even get a dress off the hanger, let alone put it on, in that length of time-but four minutes after the elevator doors had clanged shut, they were coming around the corner.
Jenny was in good shape. No one, looking at her, would guess that she'd seen love and death since dinner time. The kid wasn't fully assembled yet, but they were working on her. She was fixing her own hair while her mother zipped and buttoned her. They were so busy with the under-way grooming job that they didn't see me at once. Then they came to a sudden stop. I was on again, as they say in the theater. I walked up to Jenny, looked at her for a moment in what I hoped was a bleak and disillusioned manner, and deliberately slapped her across the face.
"You cheap slut!" I said. "You lousy, teasing bitch! So you were going to run out and leave me holding the baby. The dead babies."
She glanced helplessly at the kid and back to me. "Dave, I-"
I reached into my pocket and took out my little knife, and flicked it open one-handed. There are easier ways of opening it, but that one impresses people.
I said, "I tried to do it nice, Irish. I didn't blame you for anything, did I? I didn't complain about the way you got me into this mess and then tried to weasel out of the responsibility when it came up murder. All I asked was that we stick together, work together, to get all of us clear together if it could be done-and the minute I step out the door, you're on your way without me, or trying!"
"Dave," she said. "Dave, please, I didn't mean-"
"You never mean," I said. "Who do you think you're playing games with, Irish, some little CPA or professor of home economics? Mrs. Clevenger's boy David isn't about to face this rap alone. And if he's got to die for it, he isn't going to die alone. The next time you step out of line, I'll kill you. I hope I make myself clear, ma'am. Now we'll all go down to the car together, smiling and gay, and if anybody makes a wrong step or a wrong sound there'll be a lot more blood on the hotel's rugs than there is already. I don't like guns but I'm real sharp with knives. That's a pun. Get moving, both of you."
It was, I thought, a pretty good speech for an off-the-cuff effort. It seemed to go over well. They moved into the elevator when it came, and they smiled and laughed when I told them to, and we got out at the garage level, and my car was waiting for us. Things were breaking my way for a change.
Montreal is a big city, and it took me a while to work my way out of it. I tried to get news on the Volkswagen's radio, but all that came through on the local stations was Canadian hillbilly music and rapid-fire announcing in French, which is not my favorite language. This came too fast and too accented for me to understand it. Once out of town, however, the little Telefunken radio reached out and got hold of some English I could follow, and I learned that I wasn't the only one with troubles.
The world was still in a sad state, and airplanes were still falling out of the sky like rain or hail, ships were sinking, cars were crashing, trains were leaving the tracks wholesale, and the U.S. Navy was still investigating the recently announced loss of one of its pet atom subs. There was some discussion of the fate of the Thresher, a similar vessel that had met a similar fate some years earlier. At least it had gone down and never come up, and I got the impression this was what had happened to the Sculpin, as the latest casualty was called. The weasel-worded reporting made it hard to be sure of even this word.
I drove along, listening and wondering. You're never told everything a job involves; and sometimes, as in this case, you're hardly told anything, but you can't help trying to connect it up with stuff you read in the papers and hear on the radio. I couldn't see what I could have to do with a missing submarine, but I didn't dismiss the possibility that there was a connection. Well, for the time being the admirals would have to worry about their sick tin fish alone; I had other things to think about.
The newscast ended without a mention of a double killing with international implications in a Montreal hotel. It was early yet, I reflected, but if Johnston should come looking for his missing partner we wouldn't have much of a lead, certainly not enough to do any driving in the wrong direction. I glimpsed an empty picnic area along the dark roadside ahead, and pulled in and stopped.