Hard as Nails

Chapter Three Alias Ellen Hanley

Evelyn Rane, with a look of suffering innocence on her wide, black eyes, stared at the frosted glass of the door for a moment, standing in such a position that her indecision would be apparent to anyone in the office who might be glancing at the ground glass panel on the door.

After a moment she knocked timidly with her gloved knuckles.

A typewriter ceased clacking. There was a period of silence during which Evelyn Rane knocked again.

There was the sound of steps back of the door. It opened, and a woman of about thirty-five surveyed Evelyn Rane with skeptical eyes.

“What is it?” she asked.

“This is Five Hundred and Three, Transportation Building?” asked Evelyn Rane.

“Yes.”

“I’m Ellen Hanley.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I sent a questionnaire here,” Evelyn Rane said. “It was an application for employment. I didn’t hear anything about it, so I thought I’d call in person.”

The older woman frowned. “I see,” she said at length. There was pity in her glance.

“I don’t think you’ll get any employment here,” she said in a low voice.

“Oh, but I’ve got to see the person who received the questionnaire,” Evelyn Rane said. “I can’t leave a stone unturned. I thought I had answered the questions very well indeed. I must see the man who has charge of the employment, and—”

A door from an inner office jerked open. A man who wore spectacles as though they were in some way a badge of scholarship, whose face held a cherubic look of beaming good-fellowship, said: “What is it, Gertie?”

The older woman sighed, made a gesture of resignation, indicated Evelyn Rane with a wave of her hand.

“Ellen Hanley,” she said.

The man in the doorway frowned. “Hanley?” he said. “Hanley... Ellen Hanley? It seems to me that—”

The woman interrupted quickly. “Ellen Hanley,” she said, “submitted a questionnaire, Mr. Wigmore. You may remember sending out a questionnaire in response to Miss Hanley’s application for employment.”

The man in the doorway still looked blank.

“It was a questionnaire,” his secretary prompted, “to determine the qualifications of applicants for a position, and in particular, their state of health.”

Sudden light dawned upon Wigmore’s face. His manner became fairly beaming. He rubbed his hands together, bowed and smiled.

“Yes, yes, yes,” he said. “Yes, indeed. Come right in, Miss Hanley. I remember you perfectly now. Come right into my office. Now let’s see, Miss Hanley, you said, as I remember it, that you were in excellent health, did you not?”

Evelyn Rane nodded.

Wigmore’s hand rested on her shoulder, slid down her arm to her elbow. With a gentle pressure he guided her toward the inner office.

“Yes, yes, yes,” he said with the purring satisfaction of a cat that has just chanced upon a saucer of thick cream. “I remember you perfectly. I was very much impressed by the answers you gave me in the questionnaire. Very much impressed, indeed. Do come right in.”

The tired-eyed secretary returned to the typewriter at which she had been working. Her eyes watched the door of the private office as it slammed shut. It was a good two minutes before she sighed and returned to the task of pounding the typewriter.

In the inner office, Sam Wigmore fairly oozed solicitious hospitality. He placed Evelyn Rane in a chair, nodded his head in beaming satisfaction.

“I am so glad you called,” he said. “I was going to write you and ask you to call, but I kept putting it off. Now tell me, Miss Hanley, you were in an accident I believe you said. I am, of course, very much concerned about the personal health of the applicants for employment. I am afraid that an accident would incapacitate you from the rather exacting work that I require.”

“I’m strong enough to stand up to anything,” said Evelyn Rane.

The beaming eyes of the chief — counsel for the Airline Stageways surveyed her approvingly.

“I’m quite sure you are, my dear, but would you mind standing up, flexing the elbows and knees... Ah, that’s it... that’s fine. No inhibition of motion whatever. Complete use of the limbs. And how about the lungs, my dear? Can you take a deep breath? Let’s see the chest expansion... Ah, yes, very fine, but by the way, Miss Hanley, suppose we make a good job of this while we’re at it. Just be seated again, please.”

Wigmore’s finger jabbed down on a pearl push-button. The door to the outer office opened and his secretary surveyed the pair with eyes that held no expression, a face that was a mask.

“Ask Doctor Carr to step in here, please,” said Wigmore. “Tell him that it’s very important.”

The secretary nodded. The door slammed.

Wigmore went on with purring complacency: “You understand that our most important positions,” he said, “require women who are in good health. Of course, we wouldn’t submit you to a detailed examination, my dear Miss Hanley, unless we felt that your other qualifications were quite satisfactory. In fact, I may go so far as to say that the question of your health is all that stands between you and a very remunerative situation. As I said, I was on the point of asking you to drop in, and—”

The door to the private office opened, a tall, bald-headed individual in a white coat, from the pocket of which protruded the ear pieces of a stethoscope, stepped into the office.

Wigmore got to his feet. “Bob,” he said, “this is Ellen Hanley. You may remember the name. Ellen Hanley. I need only to call your attention to the fact that Miss Hanley signed a questionnaire and submitted it to us for the purpose of securing employment.

“And Miss Hanley, this is Doctor Bob Carr, one of my associates. He would like to ask you a few questions, would like to look you over. Would you mind stepping into his office with him? It will be just a superficial examination, nothing that will cause you the slightest embarrassment.”

Evelyn Rane looked a trifle dazed, permitted herself to be escorted from the office. Ten minutes later the telephone rang and Bob Carr’s cautious voice came over the wire to Wigmore’s receptive ear.

“Listen, Sam, there’s something phony about this.”

“How do you mean?”

“That girl’s as sound as a nut. She’s too good. Are you sure she’s the one?”

“Sure,” said Wigmore enthusiastically. “We had an operative contact the woman who had been in the smash, talk it over with her and all that stuff, and the operative saw her write the letter asking for the questionnaire.”

“Well, if this woman’s ever been in an accident, she doesn’t show it.”

“Sure she doesn’t, just another one of those cases, although we figured there were some pretty serious injuries. A rib punctured a lung, and the results have been pretty bad.”

“Well,” Doctor Carr said, “this woman’s rib never punctured her lung.”

Wigmore frowned thoughtfully. “Just in order to make sure,” he said, “I’ll send in that questionnaire. You get her to sign her name and see if the signatures check up. Find out where she’s living now and I’ll check back on her to make sure she’s not a phony.”

Wigmore hung up the telephone, pressed the buzzer for his secretary, and said: “Get that Ellen Hanley questionnaire into Doctor Carr’s office right away.”

Evelyn Rane, attired in the most filmy of negligees, lounged in the Ninety-first Street apartment smoking a cigarette. From time to time she looked at the watch on her left wrist, and frowned. Once she stood up, examined herself approvingly in front of the mirror, stood between the mirror and the window so that the light from the window, filtering through the thin silk, showed in frank outline the curved contours of her body.

She was smoking her third cigarette when the buzzer exploded into sound.

She promptly pressed the electric door release, gave herself one last look in the mirror, pinched out the cigarette, and when she heard a tap on the panels of the door, opened it a bare three inches.

“Why, Gil Best!” she exclaimed, “you’re not due here for half an hour. I wasn’t expecting you until I got some clothes on.”

“I’m half an hour late,” the detective said.

“Why it can’t be. My watch must have stopped.”

He frowned. “Come on, Bright Eyes, quit stalling and let me in.”

“But I’m not dressed.”

“You’ve got something on, haven’t you?”

“Yes, but I wasn’t exactly dressed to receive company.”

Best muttered an exclamation, pushed the door open, walked in and sat down.

“I just this minute got out of a bath,” Evelyn Rane said.

Best walked across to the davenport, sat down, stared approvingly at Evelyn Rane, then shifted his eyes from the steady insistence of her frank gaze.

“How did you come out?” he asked.

“Like I told you over the telephone. O.K.”

“Did they fall for it?”

“Hook, line and sinker.”

“What happened?”

“I met the guy who looks like a motion-picture parson.”

“What’s Wigmore.”

“Yes.”

“What did he do?”

“Had me kick and stretch and flex my joints. Then he called a doctor.”

“A guy named Carr?”

“Yes.”

“He’s their regular stand-by. What did Carr do?”

She tittered and said: “He led up to it by degrees. He was interested. I was just an unsophisticated little girl. He and his office nurse went over me with a fine tooth comb, then he got suspicious and telephoned Wigmore. Wigmore sent in the questionnaire. They asked me to sign my name and write some stuff about my history, then finally the doctor came out and asked me if I’d been in an automobile accident. I told him no, that the only accident I’d referred to in the questionnaire was a street car accident where I’d received a slight strain to the ankle, but no broken bones. That was what you told me to say, wasn’t it?”

“Yes. Did they fall for it?”

“It made a commotion.”

“What happened?”

“The office was turned upside down. They were as busy as bees in a hive. They made me sign my name at least a dozen times, and watched me to see that I wasn’t slipping anything over on them. I sold them on the idea that they’d got the questionnaire from the wrong woman. Wigmore was so mad that he damn near died. I heard him get on the telephone and fire the woman investigator who had tricked Ellen Hanley into submitting the questionnaire.”

“So then what?”

“So then after the commotion had died down, I pretended to become very indignant and threatened to sue the whole outfit for damages because they had tricked me and trifled with me. I told them I saw it all now, that it was all a plant, and I accused Doctor Carr of faking the whole examination so that he could get my clothes off and paw me over. You should have seen his face when I pulled that one. It was as red as a boiled beet.”

“So then what?”

“So then they offered me a job at a hundred dollars a month. I laughed at them. They offered me a job at a hundred and fifty.

“I demanded five hundred for a cash settlement, and then I pulled a fast one.”

“What was it?”

Evelyn Rane glanced coyly at the eager detective as she continued. “I reached out and picked up the questionnaire off Doctor Carr’s desk and stuck it in my purse. I told them I was going to save it for evidence.”

“Good girl.”

“I could see,” she went on, “that the thing that bothered the doctor the most, was the talk about professional intimacies. I spread it on thick.”

“Did they make a settlement?”

“No, they wouldn’t make a cash settlement. They offered me a job.”

Best held out his hand. “Where’s the questionnaire?” he said.

She crossed to the table, opened her purse, took out a folded paper, handed it to the detective.

Best read it over. As he read, he shook his head lugibriously.

“The damn little fool,” he said.

He shoved the questionnaire into his pocket. “They got your address?”

“Yes.”

“They’ll be checking up on you.”

“I know it”

“Think you can bluff it out all right?”

“Sure.”

“Don’t let them get your fingerprints.”

“Think I was born yesterday? They’re frightened now — afraid that they’re going to run into a damage suit.”

“They may have been for awhile,” Best said, and grinned, “but when Wigmore gets to figuring out that the net result of all this business was that he lost the questionnaire which was his biggest piece of evidence against Ellen Hanley, he’ll smell a pretty big rat. They’ll come around and check you up. If they find you’re not Ellen Hanley, they’ll probably talk about arresting you for larceny of the paper.”

“Larceny my eye,” she said, “I folded it up right in front of their noses, and I’ve still got that charge of unprofessional conduct against Doctor Carr.”

“That bothered them?” Best asked.

“That bothers them.”

Best got to his feet, reached for his hat.

“Aw stick around awhile, Gil, you’re not going.”

Gil Best pointed to the ashtray with the two cigarette stubs, the third half-smoked cigarette. “Next time,” he said, “that you just get out of a bath, don’t smoke two and a half cigarettes while you’re waiting for the bell to ring.”

He moved toward the door.

Evelyn Rane came after him like a tiger. The silk negligee flowed out behind her, her face white, her eyes dark with rage.

“Damn you, Gil Best,” she said, “what are you insinuating? What kind of a girl do you think I am? I don’t have to put up with your dirty cracks just because—”

He opened the door, turned back to look at her, and smiled approvingly. “A damn good line,” he said. “Save it for the boys from the Airline Stageways.”

When he had closed the door, she stood staring at it for several seconds, then ran to the davenport, flung herself down on her face and sobbed, long-drawn, convulsive sobs that shook every inch of her frame.