Blonde Bait for the Murder Master

Chapter Five

I drove aimlessly through the night streets of Murrisberg. On a hunch, I called my room at the hotel. Where would Anna Garron go?

Maybe she’d hide under the wing of the law. Legal talent. From a diner I phoned Wallace Rome’s apartment. After a long pause, he answered the phone. Charmingly.

“This is Brian Gage.”

“Oh.”

“Has Anna Garron contacted you?”

“Should she have?”

“Don’t fence with me, friend. The whole deal has blown up.”

“Indeed?” he said politely.

“Brock is dead, and the out-of-towners know about the raid, and if they can get Anna, they’ll cut her heart out to find out who’s backing a big doublecross.”

I heard his gasp distinctly.

“Now will you tell me if she’s contacted you?”

“Not yet, Gage. Keep in touch. Let me know if you find her.” He hung up.

A cool article, Wallace Rome. Very cool. He might turn out to be a friend in court. And then again... Well, they hadn’t taken my money. Over a thousand dollars on me; that might buy his services.

Trusting the speed of my car, I went back to the vicinity of Cramer Street, and began to hunt around that area. I parked in the shadows by a neighborhood theater and, on a hunch, paid my way in and made a careful search. No dice.

In a telephone book I found the home address of Homer Windo. I went there. I parked down the street, walked across the soft grass and peering in their windows. The two of them were in the living room. The old man had his eyes shut and Homer, Jr., was reading to him, out of a confession magazine. Anna wasn’t there.

I began to wonder about Billy. Maybe he had an idea. I drove out to the store where Billy had queered the Gulbie payoff, parked and went in. An old guy with a white stubble on his cheeks and chin was nearsightedly checking the cash register tape.

He looked up as I strolled over. I dug out a ten, folded it the long way and perched it, like a little tent, on top of his meat case.

“What you want?” he asked.

“Nothing. That’s a present.”

He reached over and took it, snapped it between his fingers and put it in the cash register. “Been getting free money all day. Got a ten from another fella real early tonight.”

A ten. And Billy had said fifty. “You remember him?”

“Sure. Face like a pantry rat and a little yella bow tie.”

“That’s him. He been back in?”

“Nope. Haven’t seen him since.”

“I thought he might have come in to call a cab or something.”

“Nope. Say, old Gulbie's pretty popular tonight. First that ratty looking one come out to see him and then a woman.”

“What!”

“Sure. Damn fine looking woman too. Got off the bus right across the street there and come in here and asked me how to find him. Told her it was about a mile up the road and she’d have to watch sharp or she’d miss the path.”

“How long ago was that?”

“Hour and a half, maybe two hours. Yes, she made a phone call first and talked so low I couldn’t hear a thing and then she asked me about Gulbie and away she went. Told me not to tell anybody she’d been here. Then she gave me five dollars. You gave me ten.” He chuckled. “Been a good day, all right. I figured you wanted to know about her.”

“What made you think that?”

“Well now, don’t get sore. But you and that ratty fella and that girl. You all got the same look. Kind of shifty look.”

I glanced at my watch. Ten fifteen. I slammed the door as I left. Behind me he pulled down the door shade and clicked out some of the overhead lights.

Looking up the road toward Gulbie’s, I saw headlights which seemed to pull away from the shoulder on his side. They came booming down on me, taking up more than their half of the road. I jolted over onto the shoulder, with a smack of shocks against frame and was so busy that I couldn’t even try to look into the other car. Maybe it had been my imagination that it had seemed to leave Gulbie’s place.

It was then that I seemed to hear Anna’s voice, cool in my ear. “If this thing goes sour, I might as well move right in with your friend Gulbie.”

Of course! That’s what she had said. And things had gone sour, and, hoping I’d remember she’d gone there. A good place to wait for protection — better than going directly to one of the unknown backers — if there were more than one.

Cautiously I drove by Gulbie’s, parked two hundred yards beyond, finding the ground firm enough to get it well off the road and over behind a line of brush.

No cars were coming from either direction.

I got out onto the asphalt and ran. As I neared the shack I saw the first tongues of flame shoot up into the night air. I scrambled down the bank. Spreading from the broken lantern, the flames had crept up one wall and had burst through the flimsy roof.

Gulbie was sprawled awkwardly on the floor, his pebbled red face cradled on one arm. The black rubber overshoes were bubbling near the flames and smoke was rising from them. The room was empty except for Gulbie. Shielding my eyes from the heat with my forearm, I ran in, got hold of Gulbie’s limp wrist and dragged him out. As soon as he was outside the door, I got under the armpits and hauled him a good twenty-five feet from the roaring, crackling flames.

His body felt warm, but I thought that it might be from the flames. I believed him to be dead until he moaned. Then I saw the welt over his ear, the fresh blood on his cheek. I slapped his face and shook him.

He opened his eyes then, squinted at the flames and cursed weakly.

“What the hell happened?” I demanded.

“I don’t know. I can’t remember.”

I shook him again. “Remember, damn you!”

He sat up and moaned. “I came back here... let me see. You brung me back. Then some young fella comes in and talks and he hit me, right here on the chin. I think that’s right. When I come to, the whole inside of the place is tore up and what’s left of the money is gone.” He covered his eyes. “I can’t think. I can’t remember.”

“Try hard, Gulbie.”

“Well I’m cleaning up the mess he made, he comes back and asks me where I hid the money. He has a stick and he’s going to hit me again. He’s a mean one. Then the woman comes, I think.”

“What did she look like?”

“Yellow hair. Black dress, I think. She yelled at the young fellow and he yelled at her. They talk about things I can’t understand. He says something about a double-crossing woman. Then he hits her.”

“What!”

“He hits her a good one, right across the temple. She falls down hard and he laughs and runs out. I sat there and looked at her and all of a sudden it come over me what happen to me if anybody comes and finds her there. You know what they’d think and suppose she should die or something. She doesn’t seem to be breathing so good. I’m remembering it better now, Jake.”

“Keep going.”

“It’s going to be a bad thing if anybody finds a pretty woman like that in my shack, and I don’t know what to do with her. Then I remember a place across the tracks where I can take her and she’ll be hid behind the bushes. The ground is wet, but it ain’t a cold night. So I grabbed her by the arm and started to drag her across the tracks and put her over there. Nobody goes over there; then they won’t connect me up with it if she maybe dies.”

“And then what?”

“I can’t remember any more. Just a noise behind me, I think.”

The whole roof had gone, and the flames jumped high. If Anna was across the way, I had to find her. The tracks were brighter than just the firelight could have made them. I didn’t see the Cyclops eye of the freight engine picking up speed on the far track as it came out of the yard; the noise of the fire had obscured the sound of the engine.

Gulbie’s hard fingers bit into my arm. “Look!” he gasped.

I looked where he pointed. One slim leg across the shining steel rail, the slim body face down, the far rail under her chest.

I pulled loose and started to run. The loose stones of the roadbed turned under my feet and I fell heavily. I got up, dazed, and ran two more steps before I saw that it was too late.

The engineer had seen her. The brakes grabbed and the big steel wheels locked and the sparks showered back.

I screamed with all the power of my lungs, and turned my back. The thundering locomotive went on, interminably. The next half hour was disjointed... unreal. The world was like a room reflected in the broken bits of a mirror, and I walked blindly.

There was the screaming siren... floodlights on the destroyed shack... men in fireman’s hats... a train over on the fourth set of tracks... halted... men standing quietly, shining lights on something wet and horrible midway between the trucks of the third freight car. Gulbie’s twisted red face appeared in front of me, and then seemed to spin away to one side. Rain touched my face as I walked down the road, and then I was sitting in my car, foolishly holding the steering wheel, and I couldn’t think whether it was Kit or Anna who had been out there, sprawled across the hard and shining rails. Kit or Anna. Kit or Anna.

Someone shouted as I went back by the fire engine. They hadn’t bothered wasting chemicals on the insignificant shack.

The tires of my car made a wet and sticky noise on the asphalt, and the lights of the city grew more frequent around me. The fizz and sputter of cheap neon.

Something deep inside of me was sour, old, tired. Something broken and something blue.

Maybe there was a white house on a hill for somebody. Not for me. Brian Gage, the sharpie, the angle-boy, the rough man with the hard fists. Something had happened to him. It had happened in the grind of steel on steel...

Then, without knowing how I had come to be there, I was standing and facing a door that was oddly familiar. I looked numbly at it, and then realized that I would have to ring the bell. I pressed my thumb hard against the bell, heard the distant sound of its ringing.

Alight went on and the door opened. I staggered forward and Quinn’s hand was warm and strong on my arm. “Kid, are you tight?”

“No... I... Let me talk to you.”

The bright kitchen lights stung my eyes, I shook my head slowly. Quinn was wearing the old grey robe that I remembered. My voice sounded like the voice of a stranger, and it told of things that seemed already vague in my mind. I finished and there was nothing more to say.

Quinn looked at me, and his eyes were doubtful, questioning.

“Is this another of your bright angles, kid? Is this another power play?”

I looked him in the eyes and shook my head slowly. “That part is all over, Quinn. All done. I’m... I’m going away, I guess.”

They became cop’s eyes; firm and hard and cold. “You’ll come up and stand where I can watch you while I put my clothes on. Then we’ll go to headquarters.”

His hard hands slapped me, looking for a gun. I leaned against the bedroom wall while he dressed. Molly held the covers up around her chin and looked at me with wide and frightened eyes.

Quinn drove my car. I walked beside him into the familiar building. The lieutenant had grey pouches under his eyes, and he sipped his coffee as Quinn put my disjointed remarks in some sort of formal order.

The lieutenant was brisk. He asked me a few simple questions. Then he clattered the cup into the saucer and said, “Okay. That gives us enough to go on in the case of Sentano. You’ve given us the name and the description.”

“He’ll be gone,” I said.

“Maybe. And maybe Fletcher will be dumb enough to keep him around for another job before sending him on his way. But you heard Fletcher give the order?”

“Yes.”

He pushed down the switch on the communications box on his desk and spoke to the radio room.

“Send everything loose to 1012 Cramer. Homicide. A. and D. Pick up four men.” He gave the names and descriptions. Fletcher, Whitey, Oley, and Jimmy Cowlfax. Then he put Billy on the tape for immediate pickup and asked for another car to pick up Joyce Kitnik.

The call on the death of Anna had already come in, and a detail had been sent out there.

“What’s your angle?” the lieutenant asked me.

Once again, I shook my head. “No angle. It just... made me sick.”

The lieutenant grinned up at Quinn. “I’m surprised more of these boys don’t develop weak stomachs.” Quinn gave me a hard, unreadable look.

“Who killed Anna Garron?” the lieutenant asked.

“I don’t know.”

“And maybe you do know. Maybe you knew she could queer you and you got there in time to see this Sherman character dragging her across the tracks. You sapped him, saw the freight coming, left her on the tracks and dragged Sherman back and set fire to his place and claim to have dragged him out.”

Once again, the lieutenant looked at Quinn. He emptied out my pockets and put all my stuff on the lieutenant’s desk. He poked at the money with a lean finger, yellowed with nicotine, and whistled softly. “That’s enough for a garden variety murder in your league.”

“I didn’t do it,” I said dully.

“Then who did?”

I shook my head to clear it. It was hard to think clearly. Slowly I said, “Maybe Billy.”

“No,” the lieutenant said. “We’ve had him in here plenty of times. I know the kid. He’s rotten all the way through, but without the guts to kill.”

“Anna called somebody from that grocery store.”

The lieutenant smirked. “The mysterious moneyed man who was going to back the pool? I give up. Who is he and why would he knock her off?”

I began to grow excited. “Sure. Can’t you see. Whoever he is, he was afraid that Fletcher would get to Anna and make her talk. Then somebody like Cowlfax would be sent after him. Anna was his only link; if she were killed as soon as the whole plan blew up, nobody would ever be the wiser.”

The lieutenant pursed his lips. “Maybe — and maybe not. Anyway, it gives him a better motive than you, and we can assume he has more killer instinct than Billy.”

A uniformed man I didn’t know with rain on his blue shoulders came to the office door and said, “The Doc says she was alive until the train hit her. He figures it from the way the blood spurted.” He made a grimace. “A hell of a waste of a good-looking woman.”

The lieutenant put his lean fingertips together and looked up at the ceiling and said, “Too bad we can’t paste her together and use her as bait. If this man here is leveling with us, the killer drove off in a car after putting Sherman back in the shack and busting the lantern, Then, until the killer reads the paper in the morning, he can’t be sure she’s dead, although he’s almost sure — that is, if he saw the freight train getting up steam down in the yards on that track.”

Something about his use of words made me feel ill. Bait. Plaster her together. If I had not happened along Gulbie would have been pegged as the murderer...

Half to myself I said, “She looked like Kit.”

“Who’s Kit?” the lieutenant asked, frowning.

Quinn answered for me. “Catherine Robinson, the blonde who works in the D.A.’s office.”

“It might be worth a chance...” he said slowly.

I tried to object, but neither of them would pay any attention to me. I tried to tell them that Kit looked nothing like Anna Garron. The lieutenant got hold of Captain Jameson, and with his approval and his authority, after Kit had agreed by phone, the managing editor of the only morning paper was awakened and persuaded to kill the death story which had already been locked in the press.

Between them, they gave it a new look. Anna Garron had not died; she had been pulled practically from under the wheels of the locomotive; she suffered a superficial head injury and had been taken to Mercy Hospital for treatment and would be probably released early the following day. She was not yet recovered sufficiently to talk about her experience.

I was in “protective custody.”

But the front page space on the morning paper didn’t go to waste. There was another story to fill it. Replace a murder with a murder. Brock Sentano. Dead in an empty house. Gambling ring killing. Principals sought.

I walked back and forth in the small basement room at headquarters and cursed myself for having mentioned Kit’s name. This was nothing for her to be mixed up in, even as blonde bait. Sometimes the bait gets snatched off the hook while the fisherman takes time off to yawn.

It was two o’clock in the morning. The trap wouldn’t be set until the morning papers hit the street at six. Even if the cot in the corner had been the most comfortable bed in the world, I couldn’t have slept.

Quinn had dropped in to tell me the progress. Yes, Kit has agreed. They had checked with the D. A. She hadn’t wanted her family to know, had told them that it was special stenographic work. They had smuggled her into the Mercy Hospital.

“Clothes?” I asked.

A dress had been found which was a close match to the one that had been ripped and cut by the steel shoes. No, a change in hair style wasn’t necessary. The bandage would take care of that. Miss Garron’s face hadn’t been damaged, and the greatest similarity was around the mouth and nose.

So it was intended that the bandage would cover one eye. And then they decided, at least the lieutenant decided that I was needed. Quinn took me out to the black sedan and I was rushed to the side door of the Mercy Hospital taken up to a room on the second floor.

Kit stood there, the bandage covering her fair hair, one of her grey eyes. They had told her about me.

“The plan is this,” the lieutenant said. “The paper hits the street at six. At eight thirty, Miss Robinson leaves by the out patient door. She walks to the curb, stands there a moment, then turns and heads up the street toward the taxi stand. She walks slow. We have the block covered with everything we’ve got.”

She didn’t look at me. The lieutenant had her walk and asked me if it was okay. “No. Kit carried her head too high and her shoulders too straight. Slump a little and take shorter steps.”

Finally she got it right. She held a big red purse similar to the one half-destroyed by the fire in the shack

“Good luck, Kit,” I said.

She didn’t answer me.

I stuck close to the lieutenant and he seemed to forget that I was someone in ‘protective custody’. In his mind I had become a part of the home team, and it made me feel warm and good to be so considered.

Before daylight, the lieutenant, Quinn, Captain Jameson and I entered the small florist shop across the street from the out patient door. We moved some potted ferns into the window which would conceal us. In high windows across from the hospital men from the department checked the bolts of high-powered rifles.

At eight a car stopped near the door and two men leisurely began to change a soft rear tire. At either end of the block, department men loitered.

And at eight thirty on the dot, Kit came out of the door across the street, out into the morning sunshine. At one hundred feet, the illusion was perfect. It was as though Anna Garron walked out toward the street. It gave me a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach.

At that moment the plan seemed futile, the trap empty, the whole idea childish and absurd. If Fletcher was still in town, he would try to grab her. Before the unknown backer tried to kill her, to kill the woman he had already killed...

She stood for a moment at the curb. I could see that her face was very white, her lips tight under the dark lipstick in Anna’s shade.

She was a clay pigeon, fragile and yet priceless. She was all the days of my future, standing alone and unprotected.

Suddenly another figure came out of the hospital door. The lieutenant cursed softly. In explanation he said, “Wallace Rome, the legal eagle. He’ll foul things up. He knew Garron and he knows Miss Robinson.”

Suddenly my mind was working with speed and desperation. Wallace Rome. Something was wrong, horribly wrong. What had I said to him over the phone? Something was missing in that conversation. Of course! I had mentioned the raid. He should have immediately said, “What raid?” But he hadn’t said it. He should have said it, but he didn’t.

Kit had not heard him. She turned to walk slowly down the street.

“Maybe he won’t notice her,” the lieutenant whispered.

As I looked, Wallace Rome casually slipped his hand into his jacket pocket. I grabbed a potted fern and threw it through the plate glass window of the shop. Kit turned startled eyes toward the direction of the crash.

As the lieutenant reached for me, I shook his arm off and hurried toward the door. Wallace Rome had crouched; he pulled his hand half out of the pocket and I saw the gleam of metal.

A rifle spoke with an authoritative crack, and Rome staggered back. His white teeth shone. Kit, as she had been instructed, dropped flat. Rome aimed the weapon at her and car brakes screamed as I ran directly across the road.

There was only one thought in my mind, and that was to somehow get between Kit and the muzzle of that gun.

But two rifles spoke together and he coughed, dropped to his knees, and folded slowly over onto his face. Men ran toward us from all directions. Kit got up and I grabbed her in my arms. She was shivering and I was saying silly and sentimental words over and over...

And then she pushed me away.

You can’t live on the wrong side of the fence without paying. And I am paying. Oh, the other deal is all washed up. Fletcher was picked up, along with Cowlfax, in Miami. I turned state’s evidence and saved my own hide.

But the months go by and I keep paying. I live with Quinn and Molly now, and I’m a brakeman in the yards. The big-shot dreams are gone. I’m just an average, beaten-down guy.

Quinn is working to get me back on the cops, but it is an uphill fight. He may never make it.

He keeps telling them that I, in effect, supplied the trap, and I was the only one who caught on fast enough to save Kit. Rome was the money boy, and the one Anna had phoned. Yes, he was going to shoot, and take his chances. Maybe he had some out figured; he didn’t live to tell it.

But Kit distrusts me. She may never forgive me for the way I lied to her. That is my payment. Quinn has lost that expression of contempt, all there is left is pity.

Pity for a guy who got too big for his pants and tried to buy the world. I can keep going because I hope that some day she will forgive and relent. Now I can afford to wait. Some girls have to have hill-crest houses. All Kit has to have is trust and love. And that’s all I’ll have to give her.