Deadline at Dawn

Chapter 14

That was the last thing she saw. She closed her eyes on it and waited, like a prisoner facing a firing squad.

The roar of the gun jarred them open again. She thought it was the loudest thing she’d ever heard. Louder than the loudest backfire, louder than a tire blowing out right in front of your face. She wondered why it didn’t hurt her more. She wondered if that was what death was always like, just that stunned, deafened feeling—

Griff was lumbering erratically around just in front of her, two or three feet in front of her. Was it he doing that, or was it she? He had too many arms, he had too many legs, there was too much of him—

The gun, still streaking its sputum of smoke after it, was vibrating jaggedly, tilted upward in his hand. Another hand had his collared by the wrist, made a bulge there. The crook of an arm was wrapped around his neck, elbow pointed toward her. Above it, his face was contorted, suffused with dammed-up blood. And behind it, another face peered, equally contorted, equally blood-heavy. But not too much so to be unrecognizable.

The boy next door, fighting for her. Fighting for her — the way the boy next door should.

Suddenly there was a floor-shaking collapse. No more Griff, no more double arms and legs and heads in front of her, no more anything else. Two bodies threshing around on the floor.

Joan Bristol flashed past her, coming from the recesses of the room, an andiron snatched up from before the fireplace raised high above her head.

Bricky’s hands were tied; she couldn’t reach for her and grab her. But if the boy next door could launch himself against a gun with his bare hands, then she could launch herself against an andiron with no hands at all.

She slithered one leg out until it was almost calf-low to the floor, deftly spoked it between Bristol’s two scampering feet.

Joan Bristol went down face-first in a rocking-horse fall, and the andiron went looping futilely through the air, clanged against a wall somewhere.

Bricky flung herself down on her before she could get up again, knelt on her bodily with both knees at once, pinning her flat. Every time Bristol tried to squirm free and unsaddle her, she raised one knee slightly, slammed it down into her again with redoubled force.

She didn’t have time to glance at the men. An arm was swinging over there, pounding into the side of a head like a mallet. Twice, three times. Suddenly they broke into two, one of them staggered upright, one of them stayed flat. The one coming up was bringing the gun up with him.

“I’ll be right with you, Bricky,” a winded voice gasped from over there.

She looked then. Griff was face-down to the floor. He twitched a little, raised a dazed hand to the side of his head, but he stayed flat the way he was. Quinn was standing watchfully over him for a second. He was the one had the gun.

“I can’t hold her down—” she panted.

He went over to Graves’ desk, picked something up, came around in back of her, and sawed her hands apart. Both of them were still breathing too fast to be able to talk much.

He took the same bonds he had just removed from her, reknitted them, and fastened them around Joan Bristol’s hands, behind her back.

“Do that, uh, to him too,” she heaved.

“You bet.” He went into the bedroom, came out with linen stripped from Graves’ bed, ripped it and went to work.

“I saw them coming in with you, outside on the street. I was watching from one of the front windows on this floor. Something about the way you were walking between them, sort of stiff, told me they had a gun on you. I backed up into the bathroom and laid low—”

“They did it, Quinn. We got the right ones at last.”

“I know it wasn’t Holmes. Gee, I had a narrow escape, though—” He stood up, surveyed his own handiwork. “That’ll hold them for a few minutes anyway, if not for long. No need to gag them; let them attract all the attention they can. In fact, we want them to, we’ll do it for them.”

“Quinn, what good is it to us now? There they are, but what’s the difference? Look.” She pointed. “Two past six.”

“Let’s try for it anyway. Let’s go down there. If it isn’t that one, there may be another later in the day—”

“It’s no use, Quinn. We talked that over. We won’t be strong enough to take the later one. You’ll see. The city’s awake now.”

“The cops’re awake too. We will be stuck if we just stand here— Come on, Bricky, try, try!” He caught her by the hand, pulled her out of the room after him, down the stairs.

“Pick up your valise. Open the door and stand there by it. I’ll use the phone down here, it’ll only take a minute.”

He picked up the phone. “Ready?” She was standing there out in the vestibule, valise in hand, poised for instant flight. “Get on your mark, get set, here goes.”

He said into the phone: “Give me the police.” Then he said to her, “Hold that door out of the way for me.” She pushed it back with her arm and held it wide.

“Hello, is this the police? I want to report a murder. At—” He gave the house-number. “—East Seventieth Street. You’ll find Stephen Graves lying dead on the second floor of his house there. In the same room with him you’ll find the two people who did it. You’ll find them tied up and waiting for you, if you don’t take too long getting there. In the desk, also in that same room, you’ll find a special delivery letter. That’ll give you the reason. Oh, and one other thing — you’ll find the gun that they did it with, downstairs in the vestibule, under the doormat, waiting for you. Hunh? No, this isn’t a rib. I only wish it was. Me? Oh, just a — just a fellow who happened to be passing by.”

He flung the instrument down without even bothering to rehook it.

“Go!” he shouted to her, and came scurrying after her.

He dipped down for a minute, shoved the gun under the doormat, and then went floundering outside and down the stoop-steps after her.

“Their car!” she called back, pointing as she led the way. “He left his keys in it.”

He slammed into it after her, swerved it out away from the curb. They’d hardly rounded the corner than they could already hear the keen of some approaching radio patrol-car, still invisible, racing up from the opposite direction.

“Gee, they’re fast,” he said. “If we’d had to stay on foot, they would have already grabbed us by now.”

They went tearing down Madison, almost empty of traffic at that hour. Twice Quinn took a chance, drove through a red light slackening speed but not stopping.

“We’ll never make it, Quinn,” she shouted above the hiss of wind.

“We can try, at least.”

The sky kept getting lighter over in the east. Another day, another New York day was on the way. Look at it. Even dawn in this town was no good.

You’ve won, she kept thinking bitterly. Are you happy? Does it do you good to know you’ve got us, you’ve wrecked us, a little fellow and a little girl like us? The odds were fair and square, weren’t they? Like they always are when you’re involved, you topheavy, bone-crushing bully. Some odds. Some fight. You rotten place, trying to look pretty in the early morning; you — you New York.

A tear whipped straight across her temple, from the corner of her eye toward her ear, carried that way by the backthrow of the wind they were making.

His hand stole a moment from the wheel, squeezed hers tight, so tight the skin wrinkled, then beat it back again fast to the throbbing rim to keep the life from being crushed out of them. “Don’t cry, Bricky,” he said looking down the avenue ahead, and swallowed hard.

“I’m not,” she said smoulderingly. “I wouldn’t give it that much satisfaction. Let it dish it out all it wants to, I can take it.”

The buildings kept shooting up taller ahead of them all the time. With every block they seemed to put on additional inches, though it was just the over-all aspect of the skyline and not individual rooftops that altered. From eight and ten stories to fifteen, from fifteen to twenty, from twenty to thirty and more. Higher, higher all the time, encroaching on the sky, leaving less and less of it, until sometimes it was just like a jagged irregular manhole-opening over them, with the cover left off. Bright blue up there. And below dimness, perpetual dimness and labyrinths of concrete from which there was no egress.

They’d shifted over now, they were going down Seventh on their way toward the Thirties. Broadway, on their right, kept edging closer through each successive side-street opening. Then suddenly, just as the Forties were ending, it sheared straight across their path, forming the X, the double triangle, that everyone calls Times Square but that’s really two other squares, Duffy above the waist, Longacre below.

The most famous patch of asphalt on the face of the earth, this is, and yet so commonplace, so like nothing at all, when you’re on it. The Palace and the State Building on the left, the wedge-shaped Times skyscraper straight ahead, and on the right, as the building-line suddenly veered way out and left a gap, that odd-shaped tower-cube abruptly struck up into the paling-blue morning light—

She grabbed at his arm so unexpectedly, so fiercely, the whole wheel came around with it, and they were nearly flung up against the statue of Father Duffy. Their front wheel on that side took a bite out of the sidewalk, then came down off it again as he swerved crazily the opposite way. It took him another half-block to straighten them out, get the machine under control again.

She was up on her knees, facing backward on the seat, her hand still riveted to his shoulder, pummelling it with joy and babbling into the wind racing backward.

“Quinn, look! Oh, Quinn, look! The clock on the Paramount says five-to! It’s only five-to six now! That one back there in the room must have been fast—”

“Maybe this one’s slow— Don’t, you’ll fall out.”

She was blowing kisses to it, she was almost beside herself with ecstatic gratitude. “No, it’s right, it’s right! It’s the only friend I ever had in this whole town. I knew it wouldn’t let me down. That means we can still make it, we still have a chance—”

The Times monolith clipped it, and it was gone now. She’d never see it again. If her heart had its way, she’d never be here where it was. But with her chin resting low on the top of the seat, she peered backward to where it had been, in grateful, misty-eyed goodbye.

“Get down on the seat, I’m going to make a turn.”

The razor-edged sharpness of it lifted two wheels clear, and they were in Thirty-fourth. And there, on the second block over, between Eighth and Ninth — there it was ahead of them, under way already, the big cross-country bus... It had just finished clearing the terminal ramp as they got there, turned and straightened itself out, and now it was beginning to pick up speed, point westward, headed for the river tunnel, the Jersey side — and home.

So close, and yet so out of reach. A minute sooner and they would have been on it. She made a little whimpering noise in her throat, then choked it down. She didn’t ask him what they were to do, nor he her; instead he went ahead and did it.

He wouldn’t give up. He sent the lighter, more maneuverable thing that they were in winging after it. They gained, they closed, they caught up. It slowed ponderously as it neared Tenth to make its turn for the tunnel approaches, and they coasted deftly up alongside of it. A friendly red light did the rest, stopping the big and the little alike with overawing impartiality.

It came to a shuddering elephantine stop, and they to a skittish grasshopper-like one.

They were already out and on the ground before it had quite finished, and pounding pleadingly on the glass inset of its pneumatically-controlled door. And she, at any rate, bobbing up and down in frenzied supplication.

“Open up, let us in! Take us with you! We’re going your way! Ah, let us in! Don’t leave us here, don’t make us stay behind— Show him the money, Quinn; quick, take it out—”

The driver shook his head and scowled and swore at them in pantomime through the glass. And the red light lasted and lasted, and he couldn’t shove off, had to sit there looking at their agonized faces. Anyone with a heart would have had to give in. And he evidently had some such thing inside him that he used to pump his blood with. He gave them a final black look, and he glanced around to see if anyone was noticing, and then he grudgingly pulled the control lever and the door swung hissingly open.

“Why don’t chuz get on where you’re supposed to?” he bellowed. “Whaddya think this is, a crosstown trolley stopping at every corner?” And things like that that drivers say when they’re afraid of being thought soft-hearted.

She went reeling down the aisle, found a vacant double near the back. A moment later Quinn had dropped down beside her, their borrowed car jockeyed over to the curb and left behind, their tickets jealously clutched in his hand. Tickets for all the way, tickets for home.

The bus got started again.

They were well out in the Jersey meadows, the tunnel behind them, New York behind them, before she’d gotten enough breath back to talk at all.

“Quinn,” she said in an undertone, so she wouldn’t be overheard by those around them, “I wonder if we’ll be able to make it stick? What we did back there just now. Do you think those two will be able to talk their way out of it? After all, we won’t be there to give our side of it.”

“We won’t have to. There’ll be others who can put the finger on them so effectively they’ll never be able to wriggle out of it.”

“Others? You mean there are witnesses?”

“Not witnesses to the murder. No one saw that. But there’s one member of his own family, in particular, whose testimony will be enough to convict them.”

“How do you know?”

“There’s a letter from the younger brother, Roger, back there in Graves’ desk, where I told them to look for it. The one I told you was away at college somewhere. It was sent special delivery, he must have gotten it sometime yesterday. I came across it while I was waiting for you to show up. In it the kid tried to tip off the elder Graves, so he wouldn’t come across if the Bristol woman tried to put her hooks into him.”

“How’d he know?”

“He was married to her.”

She held her lips parted for a moment. “Then that explains what had us so stumped in that note from her to Graves. ‘You don’t know me, but I feel like a member of the family.’ ”

“That’s it. One of these undergraduate gin-marriages. Only it wasn’t even a real one at that; it was spiked, phony. She still has a husband at large somewhere, so in order to steer clear of a bigamy rap, she went through a mock ceremony with him. It’s the dirtiest thing I’ve heard of in years.”

“How’d he come to get tangled up with such a bum?”

“She was entertaining at a roadhouse near his college, and he used to go there Saturday nights with his pals, that’s how he first met her. He’s just a kid, what do you expect? The kid fell for her, the kid got high, and the kid proposed marriage. She and this former vaudeville partner of hers looked him up, and they found out he came from a prominent family and meant dough. That made it different. So they rigged this thing up and they took him.”

“But that’s pure corn, that goes back to about 1900.”

“They got away with it. Sometimes the oldest things work the best. Just listen to this. The partner used to do a vaudeville act in which he impersonated a rube justice of the peace. So all he did was do the act over again, for the kid’s benefit, and the kid believed he was really married to her. He planted himself somewhere nearby, she and the kid drove out with their witnesses one Saturday night, and a counterfeit ceremony was performed. I suppose the gin helped a lot.”

“And you mean he didn’t tumble—?”

“Not for two months after, according to his own letter. It was kept secret by mutual consent. The kid went ahead with his courses and she went ahead with her entertaining. The partner came back to town here and laid low, naturally. Those were a couple of very profitable months for the two of them.”

“What lice there are in this world.”

“They were on a part-time man-and-wife basis, the kid and her, and week-ends, which was the only time he could see her, was when the touch used to go on him. They bled the kid white, took him for all they could.”

“And then, I suppose, the pitcher went to the well once too often.”

“That’s about it. All the dough was coming from Stephen Graves in the first place, not the kid, naturally. So when the take started to climb up a little too high, he cut off the kid’s funds.”

“That blew the lid off.”

“They didn’t trust each other, she and the partner. When the easy money stopped short, he must’ve thought she was trying to double-cross him, hold out on him or something. Anyway, he did the last thing he should have done; rushes back up there and shows himself around, trying to find out what’s what. The rest you can piece out for yourself.”

“Just about.”

“The kid caught sight of him hanging around her dressing-room, recognized him, and at long last tumbled to the frame that they’d worked on him. I guess he would have killed the two of them if he could have got his hands on them, but they lit out just one jump ahead of him.”

“I bet they did.”

“Only they weren’t satisfied even yet. Success must have gone to their heads or something. They figured the stunt might be good for one more lump payment at this end, before Roger could get to his older brother and warn him what was what. After all, there was a debutante-age sister to be considered, and all that stuff doesn’t do anyone any good, even when they’re innocent parties. And that’s where the shooting came in. The special delivery from the kid beat them to Stephen by just a couple of hours’ time; he was ready for them by the time they showed up.”

“I can fill in the rest of it myself; I overheard that part of it from them. Instead of bluffing easy and getting frightened, he turned the tables on them. The woman went in first to cinch the deal, leaving the man waiting for her outside the house. Graves told her to go to hell, and told her he was going to bring police action against her. She lost her head, ran down to the door, and let her accomplice in. He pulled a gun on Graves. Graves grabbed for it, and Graves lost his life.”

“And I nearly lost mine. And you nearly lost yours.”

“You mean when you jumped them back there?”

“No. Holmes. Before then.”

“Why? What happened?”

“Holmes. He wasn’t the right one. But he was so scared stiff about that check, that when he found out Graves was dead and he might be accused of having done it, he lost his head and nearly turned himself into the very thing that he was trying so hard not to be suspected of. Murder, with me the object.”

“He tried to—?”

“He did more than try. He practically had the thing finished. He put something into my whiskey, and he was going to roll me over into the river. I think he already had me out of the car; I don’t know, I was only half-conscious by then. Your name saved me. I happened to mumble that you’d know he did it anyway, that it wouldn’t save him to get rid of me. That threw him into reverse. It doubled his fright, but at least it snapped him out of it. Instead of shoving me in, he spent the next quarter of an hour dashing cold water into my face and walking me around and around the car, so the sedative would wear off. Then he rushed me back to his place and filled me full of pitch-black coffee.

“By the time that was over — I dunno — we sort of believed each other. Don’t ask me why. I guess we were both too worn out to be suspicious any more. I believed he hadn’t done it, and he believed I wasn’t just trying to shake him down on the strength of the check.

“He told me he hadn’t meant to do it. For that matter, I guess they never do. He’d simply been caught short, and to cover himself up he’d palmed the check off on Graves. But then he’d already raised the money to make it good even by the time he went over to see Graves last night. Then he found he couldn’t square it because Graves couldn’t find the blamed thing any more when he went to look for it. It had fluttered out of the cash-box when I broke into the safe the first time, you remember.

“He was uneasy, of course, in fact highly agitated about it; but he realized that Graves was a gentleman, would be above holding it out on him purposely for the sake of forcing him to pay ransom for it or anything like that. Graves was cold to him, after such a thing having happened, but they had no outright row or anything. He left with the understanding that Graves wouldn’t prosecute, and that he was to call back again today, when Graves had had more time to look for it. He was expecting the Bristol woman at the time; Holmes’ unannounced visit had taken place just before hers.

“Anyway, I let him have the check back. It would only have enmeshed him in the murder if it popped up afterwards — and I was dead sure by that time he hadn’t been guilty of that. He made out a new one right under my eyes, predated it to match the old and mailed it back to Graves in an envelope; the estate can cash it.”

He took something out of his pocket and showed it to her.

Her face paled a little at the sight of so much money; for a minute she thought—

“No, don’t be frightened,” he reassured her. “It’s honest this time. Holmes gave it to me. He insisted on my taking it, after he’d heard our story, yours and mine. I’d told him about us, how badly we wanted to get back home. He said he had a fellow-feeling for me; we’d both been guilty of mistakes, on one and the same night, that might have led to serious consequences — me by breaking into that safe and he with his bad check — but that we’d both been given another chance, and we’d both probably learned our lessons. And he was so grateful and relieved at getting out of the mess, he made me a present of this. This two hundred cash. He said it would come in handy for a nest-egg, for us to start off with back home. He said later on, if I feel I’d like to, I can send it back to him a little at a time.

“It’s enough for us to get a new start on. You can do a lot with two hundred dollars in our town. We could make a first payment on a little place of our own and—”

She didn’t hear him. She wasn’t listening any more. Her head had dropped to his shoulder, was rocking there gently in time with the motion of the bus. Her eyes drooped blissfully closed. “We’re going home,” she thought drowsily. “Me and the boy next door, we’re going home at last.”