“So I went back to the yacht and got the purse. It had the usual assortment of lipstick, powder, a little money, a handkerchief, and some of that sort of stuff. There were a couple of keys and an envelope addressed to Ann Hartwell, at Saxonville.”
“Just the envelope?” Natalie Rice asked.
“Just the envelope. There wasn’t any letter in it.”
“Rather strange that she’d have saved the envelope without saving the letter. One would think it would naturally be the other way around. She might have saved the letter but not the envelope.”
He nodded slowly, and took from his pocket a card and handed it to her.
It was the card of a taxicab company. On the back of the card, written in pencil, was “Sam # 13.”
“It was in her purse?” she asked.
“In the purse,” Moraine told her.
“Do you suppose it’s hers?”
“I don’t know. There’s a fair picture of her in the paper. You could build up a description from it. I thought perhaps you could locate the driver noted on the card, and pump him a little. But it wouldn’t be advisable to use the newspaper picture because then he might get wise and spill some information to the officers.”
“You don’t want the officers to know about this?”
“Not just yet.”
“Why, may I ask?”
“I’m darned if I know,” he told her, grinning, “unless it’s just because I feel someone played me for a sucker, and I want to convince him he picked a wrong fall guy.”
“But,” she pointed out, “if there’s something fishy about that kidnapping, the authorities are almost certain to find it out. I think they must have suspected, even if the newspapers aren’t writing it up that way. And you’re under suspicion already. If you get mixed up in it again and they cross your back trail when they start investigating, they’ll put you in a very uncomfortable position. That is, if you don’t mind my talking about something which doesn’t concern me.”
“Not in the least,” he told her. “In fact, that’s the fascination of the thing — the thought that I’ve got to keep one jump ahead of the authorities. You know, I love to play poker. I don’t care anything at all about winning money. In fact, we play for such low stakes that no one can win or lose very much, no matter how the cards run. Usually, I win. I know that Phil Duncan gets a kick out of playing. He does it as a relaxation. I know that Barney Morden isn’t particularly fond of me. He’s a hard one to figure. He may be hostile to me down underneath. At any rate, he is, in a poker game. He tries to figure out my system. He doesn’t pay much attention to Duncan. He concentrates on me. He tries to get money from me, tries to figure when I’m bluffing so he can call me. I get a lack out of it.
“Now, this thing is just like the poker games, only I get a bigger kick out it. I’m playing for bigger stakes. I have to match my knowledge of psychology and of human nature against a certain element of personal risk. I think Tom Wickes played me for a sucker, or the Hartwell woman did. I’m not certain which. I can’t figure it out exactly. They started to play Phil Duncan for a sucker, but he and Barney Morden were a little too formidable for them to buck. I entered the picture. I was apparently soft-boiled, so they decided to pick on me.
“Probably it’s simply a question of hurt vanity, coupled with getting a thrill out of the thing. But I want most awfully to find out the whole low-down on this situation before the police do, or before the federal men do, and then see if I can’t spring it in such a way that it will make those people sorry they ever picked me as a live one.”
“Is there anything else?” she asked noncommittally.
He looked at her shrewdly.
“In case you don’t approve of what I’m going to do,” he said, “you’re making a determined effort to keep your feelings to yourself.”
“I intend,” she told him, her hand on the doorknob, “to continue to do so. Thank you very much, Mr. Moraine, for giving me the chance to get out of the office. And thank you for... for... understanding.”
She slipped quickly through the door and closed it behind her.
Moraine sat for several seconds, staring musingly at the door through which she had vanished.
His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of a buzzer. Moraine frowned, looked at his watch, clicked a switch, and said, “Yes, what is it?”
Natalie Rice’s voice came from the loud-speaking inter-office telephone system on his desk. Her voice was quavering with excitement and nervousness.
“A Doctor Richard Hartwell is out here,” she said. “He won’t tell me the nature of his business. He says he’s going to smash the door down if I don’t let him in, and...”
The voice broke off. There was the sound of a quick struggle. The door to Sam Moraine’s private office was thrown open explosively.
A tall man, with a haggard face, glittering eyes, and nervously twitching lips stood on the threshold, staring at Moraine.
Holding to his arm, her face white and determined, Natalie Rice tugged at his coat sleeve.
Moraine got to his feet.
“I presume,” he said, “I have the pleasure of addressing?...”
“Doctor Richard Hartwell,” the man said.
Natalie Rice continued to hang to his coat sleeve.
“Look out!” she screamed. “He has a gun!”
Chapter Five
Dr. Hartwell turned savagely on Natalie Rice. Sam Moraine covered space in swift strides. His left hand caught Hartwell by the knot of his necktie. Natalie Rice, her hold shaken loose, reeled toward the door, braced herself with her hands pressed against the side of the wall.
Hartwell stared into Moraine’s eyes, saw Moraine’s bunched knuckles.
“I’m not shooting,” he said.
“You’re damn right you’re not,” Moraine told him, still holding him by the necktie. “What the devil do you mean by hitting that girl?”
“I didn’t hit her,” Hartwell said. “Let go my neck. You’re choking me.”
“Where’s that gun?”
Hartwell said nothing.
Moraine spun him around, clapped a hand to the dentist’s hip-pocket, pulled out a gun, then pushed Hartwell from him.
Hartwell’s face was livid.
“You give me back that gun!” he said. “You’re not the one I’m after. I wanted to get information from you, that’s all. But that little spitfire grabbed me and started tugging at my coat, and then you manhandled me. Who the hell do you think you are, anyway?”
Moraine, puffing slightly from his exertions, said, “I’ll show you a trick and see if you know where I learned it.”
He broke open the gun, slipped the shells out of the cylinder into his palm, tossed them into a wastebasket, snapped the gun closed and handed it to Hartwell.
Hartwell grabbed at the gun, hesitated for a minute, then pushed it back into his hip-pocket.
Moraine glanced over at Natalie Rice.
“Hurt?” he asked, sympathy in his voice.
She shook her head.
“Shaken up?”
Again, she shook her head. She made motions with her mouth for a moment before sounds came.
“I was just f-f-f-frightened,” she said. “I thought he was going to shoot you.”
“I didn’t pull that gun,” Hartwell said. “How did you know I had it?”
“I felt it through your coat when I grabbed at you as you were trying to go through the door.”
“What’s the idea, busting in here?” Moraine wanted to know.
“I haven’t got time to stand on a lot of red tape. You know who I am and you know what I want.”
Moraine nodded to Natalie Rice.