Assignment — Stella Marni (8 page)

The faint murmuring of a man's voice inside stopped abruptly.

He rang again.

Someone started to cry out and there came the sharp sound of a blow, then silence again; and then footsteps approached as Durell considered trying to break the door lock. The double-leafed, old-fashioned door with frosted-glass panes was suddenly yanked inward. Light streamed around Harry Blossom's gaunt figure. He was in his shirt sleeves; his long yellow hair looped down over his forehead, and there was no surprise on his thin, bony face.

"Come in, Durell." He grinned suddenly. "I've been expecting you."

"You might have left a note and saved my time," Durell said.

"I knew you'd be here. Come in. It's cold out."

Durell moved inside with a feeling of wariness. Blossom's regulation gun was in an underarm holster, and the agent looked capable of using it despite his words and manner. He looked curiously around the wide central hallway. Blossom was a bachelor, and the place was kept as tidy and as meticulously as if his mother were still alive. There was a smell of mildew in the house, but the place was free of dust, comfortably furnished in the Victorian style his parents had chosen.

"Is Stella Marni here?" Durell asked.

"Straight ahead. Second door to your left."

Durell looked at Blossom's pale yellow eyes. The man breathed heavily, as if he had just finished a sudden sprint. "Go on," Blossom said. "She's all right. You don't think I'd be fool enough to hurt her, do you?"

The room Durell entered was furnished as a small sitting room, with Queen Anne chairs, a Victorian love seat, a small Sarouk rug, heavy plush draperies on the tall windows. Sight and sound of the marsh wilderness outside were abruptly cut off. A small fire burned in a fireplace with an arched marble mantel above it. There was a smell of fear in the room.

"Hello, Stella," he said quietly.

She sat stiffly in one of the Queen Anne chairs near the draped windows. Her hair had ruddy glints, stolen from the crackling fire. She looked briefly at him and then at Blossom and then considered her hands, folded in her lap. There was a mark on her left cheek, as if Blossom had slapped her. Durell had no doubt that he had. Yet he was conscious of deep relief at finding her here, seeing she was safe, with nothing drastic having happened to her. He heard a small gilt and cloisonné clock ticking busily on the mantel in its mounting between two bronze cupids. It was two-thirty in the morning and there were faint violet shadows under the girl's eyes. Her green skirt and sweater modeled her long, perfect figure in classic lines as she sat on the chair.

"Go on, Stella," Blossom urged. "Say hello to your friend."

"I shouldn't have believed you," she said to Durell "You tricked me. You're all — alike, aren't you?"

"Tricked you?"

"You asked me to wait in your room so Blossom could pick me up," she said.

"That isn't true."

"He said he wanted to ask a few more questions," she went on in a flat, expressionless voice. Her fingers, trembling slightly, betrayed her. "I've grown accustomed to his persecution. He said he had a lead as to where my father might be, and that's why I went with him, even when we didn't go downtown to the office where he questioned me before, even when we drove all the way out here. He gave me hope. I actually began to believe he was taking me to my father. But we came here instead."

"Are you all right?" Durell asked. "You're not hurt?"

She shook her head. "How could I be all right? I trusted you. I thought at last — foolishly — that someone was really going to help me."

Durell swung back to Blossom. "If she's under arrest, she doesn't belong here. What are you up to, Harry?"

"My own game. And I told you to stay out of it."

"You dealt the hand and I'm in. If you think Miss Marni had anything to do with the Greenwald murder, you should have taken her downtown, not here."

"I have my own methods." Blossom was undisturbed. "Sit down, Sam. I have no beef with you any more. I've got you boxed now, you know. You're in trouble. I warned you. You can't say I didn't give you a chance to step aside, but no, you had to keep meddling. Stella was at that studio tonight. I'm not a fool, I know she was there. Either she killed Frank Greenwald herself or she knows who did it."

"Do you think she could slug two grown men, killing one and almost killing the other?" Durell asked.

"She could, if they trusted her."

"Art didn't trust her," Durell pointed out.

"Well, she was there. She hasn't admitted it yet, but she will. When she does, then we go downtown. She's not leaving this country. She's going to be tried for murder and conspiracy." Blossom spoke with glistening eyes, as if the girl weren't there. "We're going to make a deal, Sam, because you're not a fool, either. You know what you've done, getting this girl out of the studio, sending her to hide out in your hotel room so you could have her to yourself. But I jumped ahead of you, eh? I knew it was just the kind of thing you might try to do, and I was right." Blossom's thin voice rasped and he took the gun from his holster and held it negligently. "I thought I asked you to sit down. Twice."

"Don't throw a gun on me," Durell said.

"Then do as I say. I mean it You're in no position to argue. You could be held on this, too — concealing a murder suspect, withholding vital evidence, misleading the law. You're out in left field, boy. You're on your own, and you're alone and in my hands."

Durell ignored the gun and walked across the room to Stella Marni. Her hands were twisted tightly together in her lap. He drew them gently apart. "Come on, get up. Were leaving here. Blossom has no right to detain you in his own house like this. He's in trouble himself."

The girl looked up, her green eyes enormous. Something glimmered in their wide depths, hope rising through despair at what she had thought was his betrayal of her. Her lips parted softly and she stood up fluidly, gracefully, looking beyond Durell to Blossom.

"Hold it," Blossom said.

His gun was pointed at them. His thin face shone with sweat. His eyes were crazy. "This girl is an important witness. She's my witness, and she stays here until she tells me the truth."

"Do you like her company?" Durell asked quietly.

"Maybe I do. She's a bitch, but maybe I like bitches. She thinks I'm dirt. She talks about me as if I was a member of her own damned secret police. She hates my guts, but I still like to have her around." Blossom's grin was more of a grimace. "So move away from her, Sam, or I'll have to kill you."

"You don't mean that."

"Try me.
Move~"

The girl trembled. "Please... don't do anything foolish. Blossom cannot hurt me any more. There isn't anything I can tell him. I haven't said anything at all to him. Don't get into trouble because of me."

Blossom said contemptuously, "Durell is already in trouble over you, baby. Like me. I don't know what it is..." He paused and drew a deep breath. "Last chance, Sam. You're duck soup. You can't argue about it You went off the deep end, hiding her. and now you're dead meat."

"All right," Durell said. He moved away from the girl toward the fireplace, toward Blossom, his tall figure resigned until, with a movement too fast for Blossom to check, he suddenly struck for the gun. His hand caught it, twisted it, forced the muzzle down. It went off with a shattering blast in the small, plushy room. The girl made a small screaming sound. Blossom sucked air, tried to wrench the gun up again. His eyes flicked to the girl, and there was nothing rational in his pale, flaring gaze. Durell drove his right band into the man's hard stomach, twisted the gun lower. Blossom was like a tough, triple-ply strand of cable. He bent but he did not break. He tramped on Durell's foot with his heel, and Durell smashed at his face, shouldered him back off balance. Blossom's heel caught on an ornate hassock and he stumbled back, still clinging to the gun, and pulled Durell with him when he fell to the floor.

Blossom's right arm and gun hand were pinned flat to the Sarouk rug by Durell's weight. The gun crashed. And crashed again. Blossom was triggering it deliberately, heedless of where the slugs went. Glass broke across the room, the shards tinkling on a marble-topped table. Blossom's breath hissed. His face was white, lips skinned back, teeth glistening. He might have been grinning.

"This is an order," he gasped. "My case, my right — stop resisting — or I'll make — charges."

Durell suddenly snapped Blossom's wrist back and the gun shot from Blossom's fingers. At the same moment, Blossom succeeded in flexing a knee and kicking Durell across the room. He caught at the marble-topped table, his eyes seeking the gun, and he rolled toward it. Blossom came on him in a wild leap, arms outstretched. He was wide open for that instant. Durell checked his jump for the gun, spun, and swung hard. Blossom's momentum doubled the impact of the blow, and he dropped as if he had been poleaxed.

Durell straightened, breathing deeply. Blossom did not move. He walked to the table, aware of the girl pressed against the nearby wall, her eyes big with fear, and picked up the gun. Then he returned to Blossom and rolled him over so his face was not pressed into the rug. No serious damage had been done. The house was isolated, and the shots Blossom had fired hadn't alarmed anyone, if indeed they had been heard at all outside.

The fire on the marble hearth crackled quietly. It made copper highlights in Stella Marni's blonde hair, glistened in the shine of her eyes, made her parted lips look wet and soft.

"Is he all right?" she whispered.

"He'll come to in about ten minutes."

"He will be wild. He will never forgive you. Hell make you pay and pay. You will lose your job. Why did you do it?" "

"I want to talk to you," Durell said.

"Yes. Oh. yes. But not here."

"Let's go, then," he said.

He found her coat hanging on a walnut clothes tree in the center hallway and held it for her when she shrugged into it. She was shivering. The marks on her face where Blossom had slapped her were more clearly defined. He looked back at Blossom on the floor of the little sitting room. Blossom's fingers were scratching feebly at the silky rug. He emptied Blossom's gun, pocketing the cartridges, and left the gun on a small table in the hallway before he followed the girl outside.

He drove east in the rented car, skirting a wide expanse of desolate salt-water marsh. A few lights from developments to his left winked feebly in the early-morning gloom, but they were more than a mile away, beyond the swamp and slough that had so far discouraged even the swarming, antlike contractors who had checkered this area of the island with their monstrous rows of impersonal, identical, assembly-line houses.

He was acutely conscious of the girl huddled on the seat beside him. He sensed her delicate perfume, the quiet perfection of her face and body, and he understood Blossom a little better.

"Where are we going now?" she asked in a small voice.

"I don't know yet."

"You took a terrible risk for me, didn't you? After all, Blossom is an important law officer. I understand you are, too, but his orders are to be obeyed. Will you be in trouble now, because of me?"

"Yes," he said. "Some trouble. A barrel of it."

"I'm sorry. I mean, I know what trouble is," she said quietly, "and I keep thinking about poor Frank, and why he died. Because he was in love with me, I mean." Her Budapest accent was just a lacing of huskiness in her carefully chosen words. "I don't want to bring unhappiness to anyone. That is why I must go back home. If I stay here against their orders, others will suffer, too. I thought it would be best and simplest if I just said I wanted to go home, when the Senator asked me. But it doesn't work out that way, and now I do not know what to do. I feel as if you have taken matters out of my hands."

"Yes."

"Will Blossom set the police after you?" she asked.

Durell considered it for a moment. "I don't think so. He stepped out of bounds himself, taking you to his own house instead of to the office, as he should have done. Of course, he can claim reasons for it, but he might find his explanation embarrassing. However, he might hunt for us on his own account. He's sure to do that."

She shivered. "He frightens me. I have never met such a man as he. In some ways, Mr. Durell, he is a little like you. He is so efficient. I mean, he knows precisely what he is doing, and he does not waste a single word or movement. But the way he feels about me, it is as if I were unclean, as if I should bathe every time he touches me. And he always touches me. She paused. "I suppose X explain all this very badly."

"Has he ever said he's in love with you?"

"Yes, many times. He offers to take care of all my problems, if I... if I should marry him."

"Marry?"

She turned her pale face toward Durell; her smile was rueful. "Is that so incredible? Other men have asked me, before."

"Perhaps too many men. Frank Greenwald, Harry Blossom — you have a talent for turning men's heads, Stella, and changing them."

He had meant to be blunt, but her reaction startled him. She turned very pale: she drew a deep breath, started to speak, clasped her hands before her, and shook her head. "You are unkind," she whispered. "But it is true, I suppose. I cannot help it. It is — a long story. Some day I may tell it to you, but it is not a — not a nice story, at all. I am ashamed of it. I don't want to attract men as I do. It is wrong, but..."

She was silent. Durell waited a moment, wondering why she had become so disturbed, and then he said, "It's just that I don't think Harry Blossom had any intention of going as far as marriage with you, Stella."

"I know. It is part of his effort to convince me that I should tell him everything I know. He says that if I marry him I will automatically become an American citizen and nobody can harm me. But that would not help my father, would it? They will kill him, or take him back to Budapest, which would be worse than death for him."