Rex Stout (26 page)

The floorman, approaching, said, “Hello.”

Chick nodded. “Telephone company.” He opened the front right door of the sedan and pulled out a little black box by its handle. “Where’s that phone up here?” He was hoping that would work. It appeared that there was no one else on the floor, and the man did not look formidable, but it would be a trick to knock him out without a chance of an outcry.

The man asked, “What do you want to do with it?”

Chick was abrupt. “My boss told me to say that we have orders on that phone from the Department of Justice.”

“Yeah.” The man looked sour. “I suppose so. Come along.”

He led the way. They squeezed between cars where there was little light, crossed a space, and the man fumbled at a door and opened it. Chick waited, hearing him shuffling inside in the dark, then an electric light went on. Chick entered.

“It’s there on the table.”

“Okay.”

The man stood a moment, watching Chick open the box and take out a screwdriver, then turned and went out, leaving the door open. Chick looked at the telephone, the wires running along the ceiling, the connection-box fastened to the wall. Then he ran his eyes around the room, the cork-lined walls, the chairs, the table, the coat-hooks along one side. It was as he had pictured it, from a description given him by one of his friends who had participated in the Wednesday morning raid on the garage. He surveyed it, and nodded. He put the black box on the table, lifted out the tray of tools and looked inside; there were pieces of stout cord, neatly coiled, and a little bundle of white cloth. Chick put the tray back and tiptoed to the door of the room. There he stood to listen; there was no sound. He went out, crossed the space, found an alley between the cars, and went to the sedan and opened the rear door. He leaned inside and whispered:

“If you can hear me nod your head.”

There was a movement beneath his eyes; he continued, “When I stop speaking begin to count. In ten seconds, go. Take it easy but don’t waste any time. The light’s on and the door’s open.”

He turned and started down the lane, briskly. The floor-man was nowhere in sight; but when nearly to the ramp Chick spied him between a couple of cars, rubbing a fender, Chick went over to him:

“Has that phone got any connection with your garage phones, or just outside?”

The man didn’t trouble to look up. “Can’t you tell from the wires?”

“I’m asking you.”

“Yeah. I heard you. So far as I know, it’s just outside.”

“Much obliged.” Chick turned and went back down the lane; through the alley again, across the space, and into the cork-lined room. He was moving fast now, as he closed the door and wedged a chair against it with the top of the chair-back firm beneath the knob.

At twenty minutes past eleven Chick, in the sedan, rolled out of the garage and turned left. He went out Maryland Avenue at decent speed. At Tenth Street he turned right, and right again into Massachusetts Avenue. Two blocks down he stopped in front of a drug store and went in and entered a phone booth. He gave the operator a number, and he felt that his hand holding the receiver was trembling violently. He made no effort to stop it.

“Hello.”

“Hello, is this the Maryland Avenue Garage?—This is the telephone man. Telephone man. I was just there for a phone on the top floor—get that, the cork-lined room on the top floor—and I forgot to turn the light off. Well, the man up there will explain. I thought you might want to turn the light off.”

Ed Grier, manager and part owner of the Maryland Avenue Garage, sat at his desk in the office, ground floor front, trying to check over some repair sheets. Ordinarily he was fast and accurate at that; today he was fussy and laborious. The fact that he was there at all was a tribute to his toughness, for any common man would have been in bed with the hundred bruises, the aching bandaged back, the wrenched shoulder-blade, the ribs that protested against every breath, which were mementoes of the six hours he had spent Tuesday night in a basement room of the Department of Justice building. Added to these purely physical difficulties and to his worriment over the calamitous loss of patronage the garage had suffered through the publicity of the past two days, was a slighter but more recent irritation. Five minutes ago someone had called on the phone to say that he had just been upstairs to the cork-lined room to take the phone out, and had left the light turned on. Grier had thought sarcastically, damned polite of him, and had called on the inside house phone to tell the floorman to attend to the light. Anything that happened to remind him of the cork-lined room was certainly irritating enough to impair his efficiency at checking repair sheets. He moved to pull over another file of sheets, and groaned.

Behind him, he heard the door of the office opening, and footsteps. It took too much twisting to glance around; he waited for the newcomer to announce himself. But the voice made him twist:

“Grier.”

Grier, incredulous, shoved his chair back and got around. He rose to his feet, gaping. “My God … you … Good God.”

The voice snapped, “Well, Grier?”

Grier said, “Union.”

“Union.” Lincoln Lee nodded. “Why shouldn’t you? I expected it. You’re a man, Grier. I knew it.”

Grier flushed with pleasure. In view of everything, that was unbelievable, and it was a considerable tribute to the force and fascination of Lincoln Lee. He flushed with pleasure,
and said, “I’m only one. There’s plenty of us. But, Chief, you shouldn’t be here. You mustn’t. It’s your own order: any risk that has meaning, none without. Bennett told me this morning you had gone north.”

“I’m leaving in an hour. There’s nothing I can do in Washington at present.” Lee’s eyes were clear and dominating; he stood straight and alert; he was freshly shaven; drops of rainwater gathered and fell from the brim of his felt hat; where his slicker flapped open it could be seen that he had not relinquished his gray shirt. He continued: “This city, which should be the greatest capital in the world, is now nothing but a stinking nuisance. Wardell’s terriers are yapping at my heels; I will not waste my time eluding them. One of them has followed me here. Why not? I came to tell you I am going, that Bennett has the lists, and that Fallon is your captain as before. I was with Fallon yesterday—”

At the sound of the door opening behind him, and at the look on Grier’s face, Lee stopped. He did not turn. He heard the shutting of the door, but no footsteps. Grier, looking beyond Lee, said sharply:

“Well?”

There was no answer. Grier spoke again:

“Well? What’s the matter with you?”

Lee wheeled around. A man stood there with his back against the closed door, his face white, his lips working. Grier said:

“What the hell’s the matter with you? Do you see the Leader? Well?”

But the man, the floorman from the top floor, was apparently in no condition to furnish the prescribed “Union.” He did at length get out:

“Up in the room. Come up and see.”

Grier was exasperated. “For God’s sake, what is it now? What’s the matter?”

The floorman did not reply. Instead, to the amazement of the two watching him, all at once he turned, flung the door open and dashed out, flew across the concrete and through the wide entrance, and started off down the sidewalk in the rain as if running for his life.

Lee raised his brows at Grier. Grier said, “That’s funny. Joe’s no coward, he must be crazy. I’ll go up and see what it is.”

“I’ll come along.”

“You’d better not lose the time. You’d better go.”

“I’ll come along. Through here?”

Grier led the way, outside the office and around to the corner where the stairs were. They had three flights to go, with turns, and dark and narrow. They winded up, Grier clumping and compressing his lips not to groan, Lincoln Lee light on the balls of his feet. At the top it brought them out at the edge of the open space behind the alley through the cars, not twenty feet from the door of the cork-lined room. The door was open and light was flooding out. Grier went in ahead, with Lee right behind him.

Grier stopped dead. There was silence. Grier stared at the man gagged and tied to the chair at the end of the table. Silence. Grier said:

“God bless me.”

Lincoln Lee said nothing. Grier took a step toward the table, then stopped and turned square around with his back to it, facing Lee. He said:

“Its him. You see it’s him?”

Lee nodded. Grier saw the tightening of the muscles of his face, the terrible concentration gathering in his eyes. Grier said:

“By God, it’s him. Listen. We’d better turn off the light and go outside and shut the door and do some deciding.” He started toward the table, to reach the light; Lee’s voice stopped him:

“No. We can’t leave here. Who’s the man that ran away?”

“Joe Danners. He’s one of us, but that don’t mean anything now.” Grier, again facing Lee, had himself become quite awful to look at, with his pumping blood swelling and empurpling his bruises. “Listen. If we only had time we might do something. We haven’t. We’ve got to think fast and act fast. The guy that came to take the phone, he brought him. He called me up. Who else did he call up? God knows. They’ll be here any minute. And Joe’s run out on us. We’re stuck, Chief. We can’t move. We’re stuck. Listen. There’s only one thing we can do, phone Secret Service and tell them he’s here, and we’d better do it damn quick. They’ll try to hang it on us anyway, they’ll say we got cold feet—Chief! No! Good God, no!”

No doubt Lincoln Lee’s quicker and fiercer mind had darted through the situation a dozen times before Grier had finished with it once; and Grier’s frantic exclamation of dismay was caused as much by the blazing lunatic fury he saw in Lee’s eyes as by the slow precise deliberate action that was
its culmination. Lee had raised his right hand and inserted it inside the slicker, inside his coat; it had come out again, still slowly and inexorably, grasping the butt of a blued steel automatic.

Grier yelled now, “Drop it!”

Lee was bringing the pistol up, carefully and deliberately, to its aim at the breast of the man in the chair.

Grier, getting what spring he could from his bruised and battered muscles, leaped for him.

Chick Moffat phoned nowhere but the Maryland Avenue Garage. At a couple of minutes after eleven-thirty he was back at his apartment. After parking his car in front he entered and ran upstairs, unlocked the door with his key, and went in, closing the door behind him.

Alma Cronin had jumped up from the red leather chair over near the desk and the telephone. She had been dreading to hear that telephone. She cried, not loud:

“Chick! Well?”

“He’s there. Tied and gagged. The telephone is still connected. There was a cord binding the receiver down. I cut it loose and put the phone close to him, thinking he could at least knock the receiver off with his head for a contingency. I’d give my hope of happiness if I could call the phone company and tell them if there is a signal from that number to send the army.”

“Chick, you shouldn’t have taken him there. You shouldn’t have left him. You shouldn’t have let him persuade—”

“Shut up. You know what I mean, just shut up.” Chick had taken off his hat and raincoat and put them on a chair; he went across to Alma and stood in front of her. “Listen, Alma. At this exact moment, and in view of what I’ve been through the past three days, including socking you in the jaw, I’m in no mood to deal with criticism like a gentleman. I’m not a gentleman anyway. I argued against taking him there. You heard me. I suggested a dozen other possibilities, some of which might have worked, and you heard him turn them down. Finally I gave in to him, for two reasons: because he
was being a good sport and deserved a little coöperation, and because his plan was the best and soundest of the lot.”

“And the most dangerous.”

“Sure. Has Sam Carr telephoned?”

“No. I’ve been praying the phone wouldn’t ring, for fear it might be you … an accident or something … discovered …”

“Not this trip. And, Alma—” Chick grinned at her, but it could have been a better one. “It’s not as dangerous as it sounds. That man Grier is essentially what he thinks he is, a good citizen. He’s just got confused about things. The floor-man will go in to turn out the light, and he’ll run down and tell Grier, and Grier will run up and take a look, and his first move will be to phone the Department. You’ll see. It’ll all be over thirty minutes from now.”

“Then what are you sweating about?”

Chick put his fingers to his forehead and felt the moisture. “That’s not sweat, it’s rain.”

“It doesn’t look like it to me.” Alma glanced around, saw her handkerchief on the desk, got it and returned to Chick.

“May I?”

“I don’t see why not.”

She reached up and passed the handkerchief across his forehead, back and forth, and over his eyes. He said, “It smells good.” He tried grinning at her again, gave it up, jerked away and went to the window and looked out: gray streaks of rain, a deserted street, his sedan right below. He looked at his watch: it was eleven-thirty-eight. He turned and started back towards Alma. “God, it was all right as long as I was doing something—”

He jumped as if shot. The telephone was ringing. He leaped to it and grabbed the receiver.

It was only Sam Carr.

“Chick? I’ve still got him. Hope I didn’t wake you up. He’s on to me again, but he don’t seem to mind. I thought what the hell and got on the same street car.”

“Why not?” Chick tried to bring himself, and his voice, to the subject. “Play backgammon with him if you want to. Listen Sam, will you do something for me? How about hanging on for another hour and phone me again? Would you mind?”

“Sure. Anything you say. I don’t ever run down. You can eat first, huh? I’ll wait till you take him over. I’m sitting pretty here now, in a cigar store right across the street from
the garage entrance where he went in. Unless he decides to cache himself in a truck coming out—”

“What! What garage?”

“Maryland Avenue.”

“Good—” Chick caught himself, steadied himself. “I see. He’s got a nerve. How long ago did he get there?”