Jail Bait

Chapter Three

Locatta and Dolan left. Jane replaced the chain on the door. She was hungry. She managed some sandwiches in the ruin of the kitchen. Then she changed to old clothes and started in on the apartment. She saved the kitchen until last. She got to that by eleven-thirty. At quarter of one she straightened up by painful degrees, digging herself in the back with her fist. She looked at the gleaming little room.

“Adventure,” she said sourly. “Romance, excitement, suspense. Phooey!”

Just before climbing into bed, she went over to the front windows. She pulled the edge of the drapery away from the window frame and looked down at the street. A taxi, roof light glowing, hurried by and turned down the next street with the faint complaint of tires. She looked up. She could see stars beyond the city mist. She looked down again, ready to shrug off her fears.

And felt as if she were about to scream.

It was a darkness across the way, a pocket in the night; you could not see into it. But something moved. A tiny red coal that came up in a slow arc and stopped, flared brighter for a moment, and descended in the same slow arc. It was a cigarette held in someone’s hand, lifted slowly to unknown lips.

She worked in darkness. She built a high precarious tower of most of the pots and pans from the kitchen. She built it in the sweating darkness, built it so that it touched the front door. If the front door should open, even an inch, the tower would fall thunderously into the dishpan. Someone had once brought her a Samoan war club. She found it in the back of the closet and took it to bed with her. She lay and strained her ears for an interminable time before exhaustion overtook her.

A great banging, clattering, tinny sound brought her out of her sleep. She jumped from the bed, blinking at the morning sunlight, clutching the war club.

“Who is it?”

“Me, Dolan,” came the answer. “For God’s sake, what’s going on in there?”

“Just a minute.”

She got her robe and put it on, and released the chain and opened the door.

Dolan looked at the litter of pots and pans. “Got something cooking?”

She knew she was blushing. “I got nervous in the night. I made a pile of them. So they’d fall over if anybody tried to come in.”

“I didn’t even try. I just knocked. A thing like that can upset a man.”

“I’m sorry, but there was someone standing across the street last night, watching this place.”

Dolan stared at the object on the bed. “What’s that thing?”

“It’s a Samoan war club. What are you doing here, Mr. Dolan?”

“Thought I’d check up on you on my way to the mines. And show you a copy of this morning’s Journal.”

She gave a quick look and sat down hurriedly. “But this is awful. He gave it back.”

“And kept the negative.”

“That’s stealing!”

“I like the caption: ‘Beauty sought by killer. Apartment rifled. Boy friend struck down. Today the slayer of Walter Fredmans, international jewel thief, roams the streets of—’ ”

“I’d really like to get dressed, if you don’t mind,” she said frigidly, and he left, grinning.

She was at the hospital early, to see Howard. He was in a six-bed ward on the second floor in the east wing. Two of the beds were empty. The head of his bed was cranked high and he was reading a magazine. He put it aside and grinned at her as she appeared.

“Howard, what a little bit of a bandage thing that is! I thought you would be swathed in stuff. Like a fortune teller.”

“I know it’s there, all right.”

She pulled the chair closer to his bed so she could hold his hand. “What happened?”

“There isn’t much to tell, really. You sounded sore over the phone when I called you yesterday morning. I wanted to be sure you’d wait for me, so I phoned again later. They told me you had left for the day. I was upset. All I could think of was somebody phoning you and pretending to be somebody else, just to get you out of there.”

“But I didn’t leave! I had to tell the switchboard to say that because I couldn’t get any work done.”

“I worried about you.”

“You remember everything now?”

“Oh, sure. I went to your place and got there a little after two. I pushed your button but I didn’t get any answer. I hung around, wondering what to do. I pushed a bunch of other buttons and pretty soon the door buzzed and I went on in. I took the elevator up and went down to your door and knocked on it. The second time I knocked, the door swung open. That puzzled me, so I walked right in. Then I was looking up at you. No memory of being hit or of falling. That’s still gone. I just remember walking through that door.”

“When can you leave here, Howard, and go back to work?”

“I can leave tomorrow and go to work Thursday if I feel okay.”

The nurse came rustling up. “You’re Miss Bayliss?”

“Yes, I am,” said Jane.

“There’s a phone call for you in the phone booth in the lobby, Miss Bayliss.”

“Thanks. Howard, I’ll be back this evening. Okay?”

“You don’t have to. Suppose I give you a ring when I’m ready to leave. Maybe you could bring my car around. I put it in that lot around the corner from your place. The claim check is here in this drawer.”

“All right. See you later, Howard.”

She hurried down the corridor, down the wide stairs and along the main-floor corridor to the lobby. There were two booths. In the second one the receiver stood on the little shelf by the phone. She closed herself inside the booth.

“Hello. This is Jane Bayliss... Hello?... Hello?”

A silence, yet somehow not the silence there is when someone has hung up. It was a listening silence. She could hear no breathing. The impression was vivid. Her hand felt cold and shaky as she hung up. She looked across the tan tile of the lobby and saw a familiar figure standing at the desk, porkpie hat at the remembered jaunty angle. She turned and took the receiver from the hook and dialed without putting a coin in the slot, pretended to carry on a conversation. When she risked another glance, Locatta was no longer at the desk. She saw him go through the far archway that divided the lobby from the main-floor corridor.

Jane walked in the other direction, out the main doors and into an afternoon that was turning colder. She kept thinking about the phone call. If it was not her imagination, then it meant that someone knew she had come to the hospital.

She wondered if she should go into a drugstore and phone Dolan and tell him. She remembered his skeptical attitude, his comment about its being some kind of burglar who slugged Howard. She was a girl with a strong will, well accustomed to taking care of herself, with no inclination to yell for help or have attacks of the vapors.

She began to window-shop. She made no effort to look behind her, or find a window that would reflect what was in back of her. After she passed West Adams Street, she walked more slowly, spending more time on each window, trying to remember the exact location of the shoe shop she liked over on Walden, the avenue that paralleled the boulevard. It was very close to the middle of the block. Clarissa’s was the name of the shop. She found a small dress store on the boulevard which, she hoped, was practically back to back with Clarissa’s. She studied the window for some time and then went in slowly.

The clerk came from the rear of the store. “May I help you?”

“I thought Clarissa’s shoe store was right along here somewhere.”

“Oh, no, miss. That’s right over on West Adams, just about opposite here,” the clerk told her.

Jane made a rueful face. “All the way around the block. I don’t suppose there’s any way I could cut through, is there?”

“You could go out through our rear door and across the alley and in through their rear door, but—”

“Oh, thank you so much. Right out through here?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

The rear entrance to Clarissa’s was a narrow door that opened into a passageway piled high with cartons and littered with scraps of paper. She passed a storeroom and pushed open a swinging door and went into the shop proper. The clerk she liked saw her and said, “Hi, Miss Bayliss! New way to come in. Say, you’ve really been in the papers, haven’t you?”

“Margaret, how would you like to be a dear and forget you saw me in here? I’m in a terrible rush and I’m trying to duck someone. I’ll be back and tell you all about this business later on.”

“Sure. You run on, Miss Bayliss. And come back soon. We’ve got some new things in your size.”

Jane went out the front door and turned right on Walden, going back in the direction she had come. She remembered the old hotel on the corner of West Adams and Walden and hoped there would be a cab stand there. There was a stand with one cab waiting. She got in quickly and sat well back in the corner of the seat and told the driver to take her to the center of the city. She paid off the driver, and walked rapidly east. She knew the place she wanted to go. It was a quiet apartment hotel with a limited number of transient rooms. It was not far from the airlines terminal, the place to which the limousines brought passengers from the airport.

The sky was now much darker. The wind had increased. The first chill, hard-driven drops of rain began to fall when she was thirty feet from the entrance. She ran the rest of the way, went into the small, dark, sedate lobby flicking droplets of rain from the shoulders of her coat. An elderly man serviced the desk. He said mildly that he had a room. She signed, in an abnormal backhand, “Mrs. Howard S. Alford” and gave Betty’s family’s address in Wilmington.

She said, with a show of indignation, that there had been a mixup about her luggage, that it seemed to have gone on the wrong flight. The elderly man was sympathetic. She said she would be happy to pay in advance. He told her that would hardly be necessary. She said she was tired and would like to take her meals in her room, if that was possible. The clerk rang the desk bell and another man who looked like his twin came out of the shadows. He took the key and they clattered upward.

The room had high ceilings, a gilt radiator, a tasseled lampshade, a tiled bath, a Gideon Bible, and some hand towels as soft and absorbent as roofing paper, stamped in faded blue with the name of the place — The Farrington.

The room was gloomy. Jane turned on the tasseled lamp. The bulb seemed dim; it merely accentuated the gloom. She sat on the bed and felt small and forlorn and forgotten. Rain made a thin, wet sound across all the world. This was a crying time. She wanted to cry and could think of no special reason.

It was certainly impossible to sit on the edge of this bed indefinitely. She thought about the office, and wondered what they thought about the fact she hadn’t even phoned in to tell them she was ill or something. She wished Betty Alford was back from Wilmington. That would make it so much simpler. She sat, mentally listing friends and acquaintances, discarding them one after the other. One was too nosy, another too careless, another too busy. Suddenly she thought of someone she could trust. She’d been thinking of her own friends rather than of Howard’s. Howard’s friend, Dave Miles, would be perfect. They had often double-dated with Dave and his girl, Connie Evis. Dave worked at, and owned a small piece of, an automobile agency. With luck she could catch him in before he left for the evening.

She looked up the number and phoned.

In a few minutes Dave came on the line. Jane was worrying about the elderly clerk downstairs listening in on the conversation. She took a chance by saying, “Dave, you know who this is, don’t you?”

“Hi, Jane! What’s the word about Howard? I phoned the—”

“Dave, I wonder if you could drop over and see me right away, no questions asked, please. I’m at the Farrington. Room 818. Just come right up, Dave.”

“Sure, but—”

“Thanks a lot,” she said and hung up quickly.

The knock on the door came twenty minutes after she had phoned. Dave came in and stared around the room curiously and said, “What goes on?” He was a thin, dark man with nervous mannerisms, a ready grin, a co-ordinated way of handling himself.

“Did you read about me? About us?”

“Sure did. I tried to get you at the apartment. Most of the time the line was busy and when it wasn’t, nobody answered. I phoned the hospital and they said Howard was okay. What in the world are you doing in this old creep factory?”

“I’m pretty sure I was being followed. And somebody did break into my apartment. I got scared, so I found a way of getting away from them and I registered here under the name of Mrs. Howard Alford of Wilmington. I want to just sit tight for awhile.”

“If you can identify a murderer, I don’t see why they haven’t given you police protection,” he said.

“They haven’t. I guess they don’t believe in it or something. I wondered if you would do an errand for me?”

“Sure, Jane.”

“Howard thinks I’m going to visit him at seven-thirty tonight and he also thinks I’m going to meet him with his car in the morning when they let him out. I want to stay right here. I want him to come to me. I’ll be more comfortable that way. So I want you to take this parking-lot claim check to the hospital and give it back to Howard and tell him where I am and why, and so forth. Otherwise he’s going to worry. Tell him to come here tomorrow. Any time. I’ll be here. But before you go, Dave, could you please go down to the corner and get me a toothbrush and something to read?”

“Sure.”

She gave him a detailed order, added other items, forced the money on him when he tried to refuse it. He was back in fifteen minutes. He reassured Jane that he would do just as she said.