An Occasional Rat

3

I regained consciousness with a peculiar, bitter taste in my mouth. I sat up dizzily and as my senses cleared realized I had passed out with my mouth open and my face pressed against the grass. I spat out flecks of grass, which doesn’t taste nearly so nice as it looks, and grimaced.

One massive ache rode my shoulders in the spot my head should have been. I stood, getting faintly sick with the motion. It was still night, deeper night, and the moon had risen, a huge silver orb such as Florida alone can know.

I made my way quietly around the side of the house. I had other things on my mind at the moment besides Rayfield. In my present condition I didn’t want to argue with him, anyway.

Half an hour later I entered the sort of place for which I was looking, Bayside Tavern, crowded to the rafters with its lights very low. A cop would have had to rub shoulders with me to have seen me in there.

The fat, bald bartender served me three generous slugs of rye. They had no effect on my keyed-up nervous system except to put a spark of pain-free life in my throbbing, expiring head. I turned from the bar, and from a booth in back put in a call to a pal in New York. I was remembering Millie Morge’s statement that she had worked with the Peterson Detective Agency in New York five years back. The call was almost an hour getting through. Two more ryes saved me from being a nervous wreck under the black tension of waiting.

I came out of the booth finally, and something inside me had died. She was a very beautiful blonde bundle; and a very convincing little liar. No Peterson agency had been operating at the time she had claimed. She was a fraud, having worked her way into the Conklin and Frazee agency for some ulterior reason. She was neck deep in murder, and I knew I was going to hate to say the things I must say to her.

Her apartment was in a three-story, six apartment, stucco building facing the drive that ringed in Mirror Lake. I was fifty feet from the place when a woman came down the white stone steps, turned down the sidewalk. She paused to cross the street, turning her head, and the light from a street lamp fell full on her face. It was Millie. She started toward the taxi stand on the next corner.

My cab was running with darkened headlights when hers, a block ahead, stopped before a white, non-imposing bungalow on Tangerine Avenue, eighteen blocks south of Central avenue, the main stem. The house was set well back from the street with two bedraggled palms in the sandy front yard.

As I alighted from my cab I saw her, in the moonlight, glance about and hurry up the walk. I cut across the vacant lot next to the house, plunging through waist high weeds. She was fumbling in her handbag when I reached the edge of the porch.

She whirled, a small cry bubbling up in her throat.

I said, “Peterson didn’t give you such a hot recommendation.”

She was almost buried in shadows, but I could see her sag, as if with fatigue. She said nothing as I stepped close to her. The house hadn’t been occupied in some time, evidently. Sand lay in tiny ridges on the porch, gritting softly but harshly under my feet.

“You were going to unlock the door,” I said.

I could feel her gaze on my face. She started to say something, laid her hand gently on my arm, and I shook it off. “Find your key.”

Her trembling hand rattled the key in the lock. The door opened with a scrape of rusty hinges.

“You first,” I said in a whisper. “I’ll be right behind you. Carry on as if I weren’t here.”

She hesitated until I thought she was going to refuse. Then she took a step forward; I held her arm, straining my eyes in the darkness. We came to a door and she tapped on it lightly. She said aloud, “It’s Millicent.”

She stiffened as a key grated in the lock. Light spilled out as the door opened, outlining a tall gaunt, elderly man, powerful in a rawboned, seasoned way. He jerked back at sight of me and I had a glimpse of a lean, deeply-line face, eyes that had known misery, and cotton white hair.

Millie said, “It’s... that is, be followed me. This is Frazee.”

I gave her a little push, closed the door behind us. The man moved away from me as I pulled Bailey’s gun. The blinds were drawn in the room, taped tightly at the edges to the window sills to allow not a pin-point of light to escape outside. It was a makeshift domicile at best, a narrow cot, a small table littered with magazines, another table cluttered with wax wrappings from sandwiches, coffee cup and electric perculator.

I said, “You should have been more careful and taken the gun from me when you clouted me one on Rayfield’s lawn.”

“We didn’t know it was you, Ham,” Millie said brokenly, “until we had already... already clouted you one.”

I looked at the man. “How does it feel to come to life after being washed off your boat five years ago, Morgan?”

He looked at Millie; she caught his gaze and said, “All right, Frazee, he is Burt Morgan.”

“And you’re his daughter?”

She nodded. “I... I’m Millicent Morgan.”

“Sit down, Morgan,” I motioned with the gun and he obeyed, “and we’ll talk about Howard Conklin’s murder!”

Morgan whitened, half rose. “Conklin... murdered...”

“That’s right,” I said. “And maybe I should tell you I can be unpleasant as hell when I want to.”

Gray-faced, he slumped back in his chair, suddenly becoming a drooping tired old man. “I guess you could be,” he said thickly. “But there’ll be no need for that.”

Millie began to smoke nervously. I said, “That’s good. I want it from the very beginning, from the time you and John Rayfield were business partners. All the answers, Morgan, beginning with your first bankruptcy,”

“You seem to know a good bit about it already.” He twined his fingers, looked at them, up at me. “But you know only what you’ve learned from Rayfield. He didn’t tell you, naturally, why I went bankrupt — that he stole me blind, while I trusted him. Our partnership dissolved; I tried one last gamble; and the crash hit me.”

“Than came the deal with Roxlin Hotels,” I said.

“You have been learning things,” Millie said. She rose and faced me. “Ham, I feel terrible about Conk, honestly. And I feel awful that dad struck you on Rayfield’s lawn. But we didn’t know who you were, creeping up on us like that. But you can put the gun up now. I... I guess we did wrong in not taking you in our confidence in the very beginning.”

She watched as I dropped the gun in my pocket. Maybe I was playing the fool, letting my head be turned by the vision of her face, the nearness of her, but neither she nor her father made a move toward me.

She eased back in her chair. “Yes, Roxlin Hotels. Dad sold them a piece of beach property.”

“It was the thing, I hoped,” Morgan said, as if he were recalling a nightmare, “to set me back on my feet.”

“But where’d you get the money to buy the beach property?”

His face like a statue sculptured out of ashes, he looked at me unflinchingly. “The beach property was stolen.” The way he faced me like that raised my estimation of him a few notches.

“It isn’t as bad as it sounds, Ham,” Millie said. “But it was wrong, yes, and we’ve paid plenty.”

Morgan laughed harshly. “Paid isn’t the word!” He looked up at me. “When Roxlin wanted to buy the property, Frazee, they contacted me to act as agent — I had a couple of friends in the Roxlin company. I had trouble locating the owner of the strip of property they wanted to buy, but from Bailey, who lived near, I discovered that the owner was a recluse, an old miser named Blodgett. Blodgett was seriously ill when I saw hint and wouldn’t talk business. Roxlin’s offer had a time limit. I went back couple days later to see Blodgett. Later that night. Blodgett died without a single relative or heir...” He choked off.

“I can understand,” I said, “how you felt. It was the chance of a lifetime to recoup. You forged a bill of sale to the property, dating it the last night you saw Blodgett. There was no heirs or relatives to contest it.”

“Yes,” Morgan said hollowly. “Early the next morning I went back to Blodgett’s. At that moment not a soul knew the old man was dead. The doctor drove up on a routine call just as I arrived. We went in, discovered Blodgett dead.” He rose, nervously beat his fist in his palm. “The plan hit me in that moment. Can you imagine anything crashing into your brain, Frazee? That’s the way it was. From the moment I saw Blodgett lying dead I knew that I hadn’t the strength to resist it. I got a letter from the dresser with Blodgett’s signature on it as the doctor worked. Later in the day I forged the hill of sale with the signature.”

“Then,” I said, “somebody found out.”

“John Rayfield!” he breathed harshly. “Somehow Rayfield found out, plunged me light into hell. I paid. And paid. York, John’s son, must have known of the hold his father had over me. He — York, that is — began to force his attentions on Millicent. But rather than have her marry him, sacrifice herself for ray mistake, I faked the accident in Boca Ceiga five years ago.”

Millie touched my forearm. “We slipped away from St. Pete then. Ham, and my father, under another name, has slaved for the past five years, wanting to have money to make amends somehow. He intended to come back here and tell people he’d been suffering from amnesia from a head wound in the boating accident five years ago.”

“Then why this?” I asked. “Why go in hiding?”

“I wanted to get Rayfield,” Morgan’s face twisted, “and get him good. I intended to stay under cover, work quietly, until I did get him. But Howard Conklin saw me one night. Conklin was in St. Petersburg before you came here, Frazee. Conklin knew of the affair, recognized me. He knew it would be worth plenty to me if he got the full dope on the blackmailer.”

“And Conklin got it,” I said. I looked at Millie. “Conk’s actions caused you to start working for him?”

She nodded. “We weren’t sure — until I had worked with him awhile and got to know him — that Conk wouldn’t try a few years of blackmail himself. I wanted to be near him, know what he was doing and finding out.”

“Your father, then, was the prowler in John’s Rayfield’s house?”

Morgan said heavily, “Yes. I wanted to see his files, his account books. If I was going to have to fight fire with fire to live decently again, I wanted enough dirt on Rayfield to keep him off my neck.”

That made sense. And it would also explain why Rayfield had tried to buy me from any interest in the case. If Morgan had found anything, Rayfield hadn’t wanted me digging around and finding it out. But still, there was a lot unanswered. I wanted to know... My thoughts broke abruptly as, simultaneously, footsteps sounded on both the front and back porches. The front door crashed open. Feet echoed in the darkened living room. Millie clutched my arm, Morgan clenched his fists.

Then Lieutenant George Bailey’s voice came through the thin partition. “I’ve got a flashlight in one hand, a gun in the other. This is the cops! Open up!”

I doused the light. There was a short moment of silence; then the house shuddered as Bailey’s weight struck the door. The second time he struck the door panels I was ready for him. I jerked the door open. He lurched in, a bulky shadow in the dark room. From my pocket, I had taken the gun. Bailey made a gagging sound as I swiped him across the side of the head. He hit the floor with a thud. Bailey’s man in back was yelling.

We ran down the front walk as the cop in the rear crashed through the back door. At the police car at the curb, I stabbed through the open window with my hand. The keys were not in the ignition. We were afoot.

“As they say in the movies, scatter men! And the first one caught is a rotten egg. I hate like hell to leave you, Millie, but...”

“Where are you going?”

We were already fading in the darkness. “To throttle the truth out of a Rayfield!”

We burrowed into the cloak of night in different directions in the vacant lots as the cop and Bailey, staggering, reached the front porch of the bungalow. Personally, I stayed away from open lawns, where I would be starkly outlined in moonlight. I knew Millie and Burt Morgan were doing likewise.