Long Live the Dead (33 page)

That was a dead give-away. This was not the season for outdoor spooning, and any machine climbing the hill could have only one destination—the home of Edgar Standish. Sure enough, the fellow emerged from the shadows a few minutes later, on foot, and furtively approached the gate.

The little door under the sun-deck opened, and out came Grace Marvin in a hurry.

They met at the gate and began talking. It was a sin and a shame, the way I eavesdropped.

“It’s no damn use,” the fellow said.

“She won’t come back. Says this town is too hot for her.”

“She’s got to come back! She’s got to! I need those letters!”

“You know Josie,” the fellow said, shrugging. “Nothing short of dynamite can change her mind, once she gets it made up. You’ll get the letters, though. She—”

“I tell you I’ve
got
to have them! Some of them, anyway—to show him I’m not bluffing. He’s no fool, Nick. He can’t be bluffed forever. You don’t seem to realize what I’m up against in this place.”

“You’ll get the letters,” he said. “She’s mailing them. I’ll bring them out tomorrow. Is he seeing you tomorrow?”

“I don’t know. He as much as told me he was through fooling around. I’m scared, Nick. Those damned letters!”

“Keep your chin up.”

“You’ll come again tomorrow, sure?”

“I’ll be there.”

She kissed him. It wasn’t much of a kiss, just a quick, desperate peck, aimed haphazardly at his face. Then she turned and ran back to the house.

The fellow faded into the shadows.

The rest of it was easy. I knew just about where his car was parked, from listening to the sound of its approach. I cut around the house, over the stone wall, and got there before he did. When he opened the door I stepped up behind him from the rear of the car and nudged him with a gun.

He all but screamed.

“Get in, brother,” I said, “and we’ll go for a ride.”

H
e was a big fellow, with long, beefy legs to balance an oversized head. First impressions are generally worthless, but he looked like a college athlete with about three years of professional wrestling under his belt. Battle-scarred, I mean, but not old. Hardened but not hard.

I frisked him and acquired a .45 that looked as battle-scarred as he did. Also, and more important, I acquired a couple of letters.

“What’s your name?” I asked him. Not exactly frightened he glared at me and countered with: “What’s yours?”

I had an idea he knew my name, and that it might be some time before I learned his. We were wasting time. “We’ll stop at my apartment,” I told him. “Try any tricks and you’ll arrive there feet-first.”

Nothing much else was said until we got there. He tried no tricks, and after pulling the car to the curb in front of my apartment, he got out without protest, preceded me up the stairs, and entered my humble suite of rooms, without balking.

I waved him to the divan, took a pair of handcuffs out of the table drawer and tossed them to him. “Put them on,” I ordered.

“You can’t get away with this,” he said. “You’re not a cop any longer.”

I laughed and said: “Neither are you.”

He snapped the cuffs over his wrists. I produced a second pair and linked him to a floor-lamp, which would give him a heap of trouble if any bright notions happened to occur to him. Then I read those letters.

The first was in a ten-cent-store envelope. It was addressed to Mr. J. C. Smith, 10 Flodin Street, and was merely a typewritten note:

THANKS FOR THE TIP, PAL. I HAD NO INTENTION OP SHOWING UP IN THAT HORNET’S NEST AGAIN, NOT AFTER JOSIE’S BRAINSTORM. LUCK TO YOU. SEE YOU WHEN I SEE YOU.

It was unsigned and bore no return address. The postmark was Chicago, dated a week ago.

“Who,” I said, “is J. C. Smith?”

“I wouldn’t know. I got the letter by mistake.”

“Do tell,” I said.

“Is your name Smith, too?”

He hesitated, shrugged his shoulders. “Yeah. They put that in my post office box, by mistake. It’s Greek to me.”

“You never lived at 10 Flodin Street?”

“No.” I looked at the other letter. This one had been mailed yesterday, from Boston, and was addressed in feminine handwriting to Mr. Richard Andrews, P. O. Box—but no number—White Street Station, our city:

NICK:

I CAN’T COME BACK THERE. THE TOWN IS TOO HOT. I’LL MAIL YOU THE LETTERS AND BE DAMNED GLAD TO GET RID OF THEM. MAYBE I DID GO TOO FAR WITH THAT PESKY DICK BUT YOU’RE NO ONE TO TALK, NOT AFTER THE MESS YOU AND MARGE DOVE INTO. GOOD LUCK TO THE TWO OF YOU, BUT COUNT ME OUT OF THIS. WAY OUT.

REGARDS, JOSIE.

I stared at this letter for some time. It was more than just a letter—it was a voice out of my past.

Remember my telling you about sweet Mary Anderson, who accused me of conduct unbecoming an officer? Remember that scarf in Miss Marvin’s room? Ha!

Scowling at Mr. Smith, I said pointedly: “You’re in a hell of a mess, aren’t you?”

“Am I?” he growled.

“You and Josie,” I said, “who called herself Mary Anderson the time she went riding with me out to the Four Corners.”

He must have known the letter would tell me that much. All he did was shrug his shoulders.

“You know,” I said conversationally, “this is beginning to take an interesting shape. I didn’t know what to make of it when Josie pulled that gag. I had a hunch, of course, she was part of the blackmail business that I was investigating, but it was only a hunch. Now we’re really getting somewhere.”

“Are we?”

I nodded. “You’re quite a guy,” I said. He really was. While living on Flodin Street be had called himself Smith. At the White Street Post Office he was known as Richard Andrews. Josie and Miss Marvin, whose other name was Marge, called him Nick. Quite a guy.

“Just what,” I asked him, “are these letters Miss Marvin is so anxious to acquire?”

“That’s for you to find out.”

“More blackmail?”

“Look,” he said. “I’m deaf and dumb.”

“Must I work on you?”

“Go right ahead.”

“I lose my temper real easy,” I said.

“Lose it,” he said. “You’re no sap, Cardin. The law took away your license to get rough. Kick me around and you’ll pay for it.” He smiled at the ceiling. “For all you know, I may have a bum heart. One little poke might kill me. Then where would you be?” He was smarter than he looked.

I
thought it over. Apparently this lad was Grace Marvin’s boy-friend. For all I knew, he might be married to her. Josie, the charming young lady who had skipped town after blackening my reputation, was evidently a friend of theirs, as was the author of the note from Chicago.

Judging from the tone of those two letters, the four of them had worked together until Josie’s joust with the law had made the town too hot for them. Josie had fled to Boston. The other lad had skipped to Chicago. But Nick and Miss Marvin were still here and up to their necks in trouble.

The trouble involved some letters. These Josie had taken with her, much to Miss Marvin’s apparent perturbation, when she hit the highroad. The letters were being sent to Nick by mail.

“You know what?” I said.

“What?”

“You’re going to spend the night with me.”

“Suits me,” he said. “I sleep good anywhere.”

“And in the morning,” I informed him, “we’re going down to the White Street Post Office, just you and I—just a couple of chums—to pick up those letters.”

He shrugged.

That was a long, weary night. Twice, for the sheer hell of it, I waked him and told him for Pete’s sake to stop snoring. By nine
A.M.
I resented him intensely.

We went down to White Street. The post office there is not exactly gigantic, neither is it a mere niche in the wall. One entire side of it was pigeonholed with boxes.

I kept a hand in my pocket, but the threat I held over Smith’s head was not a threat of gun-play, and he knew it. What held him in line was the knowledge that if he made a break I’d grab him, yell my head off, and turn him over to the police.

I steered him toward the boxes and said gently: “Open it up, chum.”

He drew back, staring.

“None of that,” I said, putting a hand on his arm.

He fooled me. He began to shake. A look of concern widened his eyes.

“We’re too late,” he muttered. “That fat guy—he’s a dick. He’s at my box!”

I bit. The stout gentleman had his back to us and was down in a crouch, fumbling with the combination of a box on the lowest tier. I took a step toward him, for which even now I offer no apologies, and Nick slammed into me. What it looked like to the few other customers, I don’t know. I lost my feet and ploughed into the fat fellow face first, arms and legs flying, and we wound up on the floor like a pair of drunks wallowing in someone’s gutter.

I didn’t see Nick dive for the exit but he was gone when I got to my feet again, and a demure little lady with an armful of bundles was doing her best to restrain a giggle.

I felt foolish. The fat boy shot up like an erupting volcano and began sputtering at me. I tried to get past him to the door, but he climbed all over me, calling me names, demanding an explanation. By that time, Nick was no doubt half way to Little America.

I said petulantly to Fatso: “Who are you, anyway?”

Prepare yourself for a chuckle. He had a name six syllables long and played the piccolo in a symphony orchestra!

I got rid of him and walked over to General Delivery. Nick may have slipped through my fingers, but the letters hadn’t—not yet, anyway—and I was still determined to possess them.

“The lad who pushed me,” I said to the clerk, “is a phoney named Richard Andrews. That’s just one of his names. He has a box here. I don’t know the number, but I want what’s in it!”

He frowned, shaking his head. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but—”

“I’m a detective.”

“You’d have to see the postmaster.”

“What’s the number of Andrews’ box?”

He looked it up. “One seventeen,” he said.

I looked through the little glass door of one seventeen, and the box was empty. I walked back to the window again. “Before I see the postmaster,” I said, “find out if there’s any mail for Andrews, will you? There should be a package. If there isn’t, I’m wasting my time here.”

He was a good egg. He spent ten minutes prowling around, but was shaking his head when he came back. “Not a thing.”

So she hadn’t mailed the letters after all, and I had sat up all night, listening to Nick’s snores, for nothing.

Sore as a bunion, I hiked across the street to Nick’s car, which still stood where we had parked it. Half an hour later I was back in Green Hill, at the home of Edgar Standish.

Something had happened. Three cars were parked there in the road, and two of them were scout cars.

T
he center of interest was Miss Grace Marvin, whose other and perhaps more authentic name was Marge. She didn’t know she was the object of all that attention. She lay on the divan in the living-room. No one had yet thought to cover her with a sheet.

The room was full of cops. Dr. Truett was talking to them, his face at least ten years older than when I had last seen it. Edgar Standish stood by the door and told me brokenly what had happened.

She had fallen, he said, over the edge of the cliff, out back of the house. No one had seen her fall, but Mrs. Meade, while cleaning one of the bedrooms, had looked out of the window and seen her standing there at the cliff’s edge, just a short while ago.

“Doctor Truett arrived about twenty minutes ago,” Standish said mechanically, “to see her. We couldn’t find her. Mrs. Meade remembered having seen her outside, so I went out there to look around. I just happened to look down …” His voice trailed off, then came back again, tinged with bitterness. “I blame you for this, Cardin. You were hired to keep an eye on her! Why weren’t you on the job?”

I blamed myself. I walked over to get a closer look at the girl, and one of the cops gave me a queer stare of recognition but made no comment.

She wasn’t something you’d want to look at for too long. From the top of Green Hill cliff to the rocks at the bottom is a sizeable piece of distance, and the rocks are jagged. Her sweater and slacks were soaked with sea-water and blood. One of her sneakers had lost a heel. I scowled at her and thought queerly: “You’ll never again write meaningless letters and put them in the bird-houses to fool Jeff Cardin.” Then I went outside. I thought it wouldn’t do any harm to have a look around.

A city dick named Grayson was out there, prowling along the edge of the cliff. He glared at me as I approached He was an apple-for-the-teacher lad, one of the commissioner’s pets, and he said unpleasantly: “So you finally landed a job, did you?”

“I finally did,” I said, looking for footprints.

“You’ll answer for this, Cardin. Standish says he hired you to watch the girl.”

I ignored him. The ground there at the brink of the bluff was soft, and Grayson, despite his ugly disposition, had been smart enough not to tramp on the girl’s sneaker-prints. You could see where she had walked along the edge. You couldn’t see where she had gone over, because the prints led to a cowlick of grass and ended there.

I turned to Grayson.

“How do you figure it?” I said. “She slipped on the grass?”

He gave me the broad of his back and walked away.

I toed closer to the edge and looked over, and got a nasty sensation in the region of my stomach. I backed up and examined the grass again. Then I measured the distance roughly. The stone wall was about ten feet away.

Bare ground separated that narrow peninsula of grass from the wall. From the wall to the road, which lay a hundred feet away, the lawn was thick. I studied that patch of bare ground.

Grayson had gone back into the house.

I hopped the wall, went out to the road, and walked along to where the cars were parked. It began to rain. I opened a car door and snooped around inside, opened the door of the glove-compartment and took out a pair of expensive suede gloves. They were smeared with dirt.