Jail Bait

Chapter Five

Jane began to climb again, her heart thudding heavily, painfully. She risked a glance down the shaft. The hand was sliding upward again. She looked up. There were three more floors above her. That was all. She wished there were dozens. She felt as though they were driving her into an ever-narrowing space.

She tried to estimate how many of the hunters there were. There was at least one at the desk. One in the stair well. And probably two who had come up to her room. They had been in her room when she sent the call down from ten. And one of them had gone immediately to the elevator to check ten and the other one had alerted the man on the landing.

She hoped that beyond that last lighted landing there would be a dark flight that would lead to the roof. She kept climbing. The stairs ended right there, at the landing. A bulb hung from a cord and there was a skylight above it.

The sound of falling rain was clear up here. She tried the door cautiously at first, and then with greater effort. It would not open. She pulled so desperately that her hand and shoulders hurt. She had lost track of the number of floors. This could be twelve, or thirteen. If it was twelve, it meant that she would have to return to the landing directly over his head in order to get out onto the eleventh floor. She looked down. She could not see the hand. She waited.

Then the lighter made its scratching noise, then clinked loudly, and she saw the smoke, two floors below. She looked across the shaft at the stairs she would have to go down in order to get to the eleventh floor. She computed the man’s angle of vision. In order to get to the landing directly over him, she would have to pass where he might see her.

She sat down, trembling violently. She was sitting on the top step. This was a nightmare variation of hide and seek. She wanted to get up and hammer on the locked door and scream until there was no breath left in her.

She looked at her purse. She knew they would find some quick way to silence her once they caught her, and then they would take her quietly down the concrete stairs and away. And if she was taken this way, all the rest of his life Howard would never know exactly what had happened to her. Nor would she ever have the chance to tell him that she had changed her mind. He was enough for her now. He was all the mystery, all the glamour, all the excitement she wanted from life. It was suddenly important to find some way of leaving word for him.

She dug into her purse and found the stub of a yellow pencil, laid it aside and began to look for something to write on. She found a reddish piece of cardboard that was blank on one side. She had to write small.

“Please see that the police get this note. It is to be shown to Howard Saddler. Darling, they’ve found me here in the Farrington. I guess they are the same ones. I’m hiding but they’ll find me soon. I love you. I talked nonsense. Please forget it. I didn’t mean it. Jane.”

She hitched herself closer to the fire door. She glanced at the other side of the piece of reddish cardboard.

It was a parking-lot claim check, the Safety Parking Lot, just around the corner from her apartment, and the date stamp was for Monday afternoon.

She stared at it, and several things began to make sense to her for the first time. Howard had given her the right ticket. She had given the wrong one — the pawn ticket — to Dave. But the main question was: How had a pawn ticket gotten into her purse? Someone must have hidden it there. The lean, dark man who had been marched out of the night club with a knife in his back? Her purse had been lying on the bench beside her that night. The lean man had evidently anticipated violence, and had slipped the pawn ticket in her purse and snapped it shut. He had obviously intended to regain the ticket later. But he had been stopped from doing that.

Then his murderers, finding he was not carrying the ticket, had broken into the Taffeta Room to hunt for it, reasoning that the lean man had perhaps hidden it there.

With the ridiculous story of Jane in the paper, the killers had reconstructed their theory a bit. The ticket might have been slipped into her purse. The newspaper article had made it easy for them to locate her. They had broken into her apartment and searched thoroughly. Howard had walked in on them, and had been sapped. Jane remembered now that Howard’s pockets were turned inside out as he lay unconscious.

How they had located her at the hotel, she could not guess. They may have followed Dave back, after picking up his trail at the hospital. Anyway, however it had been done, here she sat, huddled on concrete stairs with no escape. She pushed the note she had written on the parking ticket under the fire door, until it was entirely out of sight.

All of a sudden she passed from the bottom level of despair to the beginnings of indignation. After all, this was a civilized country. And here she was practically in the middle of the city, in terrible danger, and unable to find any way out.

Then, sitting there trapped and waiting, she did a thing which is like the donning of armor, or the sharpening of a lance. She took out her lipstick and unscrewed the cap, and held her mirror and made for herself a new red mouth, smooth and brave and almost bold. Though her hands were shaking, she applied the lipstick neatly. And as she recapped it, the top slipped from her fingers.

She made a frantic grab for it, but couldn’t reach it. It hit and bounced with a small musical note, a little shiny golden cylinder, and hit again and rolled with painful slowness out along one last step and then tumbled to the landing. With the uncanny perverseness of all inanimate things it rolled diagonally along the landing, choosing the shortest distance to the next short flight of stairs, and disappeared from Jane’s view, bounding, clinking, falling.

When all was still she sat with her fists pressed tightly to her cheeks, waiting in breathless tension. There wasn’t long to wait. Just a few moments of silence. Then the slow trudge of feet on the steel treads of the concrete stairs. She could picture the thick hand sliding up the bannister railing.

The sound stopped. It began again, higher, coming close. In a final gesture of defiance, she opened her purse and found the pawn ticket and shoved it under the door beside her, pushing it all the way out of sight.

She looked back and saw him then, below her and diagonally across the airshaft. He was looking up toward her. He wore a dark hat. The light shining down from above made a shadow across his face.

Jane got quickly to her feet and backed into the corner beyond the door. She could see him no longer. She didn’t see him until he rounded the last turn and came up the final short flight. She saw the dark hat first and then the hard jaw, the thick dark-clad shoulders, then the hand sliding upward on the rail.

She took her shoe by the toe and hurled it with all her strength directly at his face. He moved his head to one side. It was a quick, practiced motion. He didn’t move it any further than necessary. The shoe hurtled by him and struck the wall and fell to the landing below. She had seen other men move like that, on the television screen, tiny figures who danced and tried to hit each other and seldom dodged more than was necessary.

He stopped at the landing level, five feet from her, facing her. He held his hand out. The golden cylinder lay on the white palm, glinting in the light.

“You drop this?” The voice was husky.

“Don’t come near me!”

“You come on down quiet.”

“Don’t come near me!”

As he reached for her she screamed. It rasped and hurt her throat. The airshaft enclosed the scream, dampening it, muting it, smothering it. It died quickly into echoes. A man draw breath to scream again the thick hand closed on hers in a deft, practiced way, shifted quickly and found position, then seemed to squeeze ever so gently. The gentleness sent a barbed shock of pain through her, a pain so clean and pure and distilled that it was as though someone had driven an icicle through the back of her hand. It turned the impending scream into a shocked whimper. It made her knees sag and the light waver.

“You come along nice,” he said.

He stood beside her, his arm under hers, his hand holding hers in a mockery of affection. He tried the door. They went together down the stairs, side by side. As they passed the door to the eleventh floor she wondered if she could twist away from him and get through it. Even as she thought of it and knew she couldn’t, some tension must have warned him. He pressed her hand again.

They started down to ten, circling the shaft, going down from landing to landing. He pushed the door open a few inches and put his eye close to the crack. He pushed it open the rest of the way and walked down the hail with her. A man stood by the elevator. He was tall. The elderly bellhop stood inside the elevator. A short, thick man stood in the hallway and watched them approach.

The short man stepped forward and took her purse. He started to look through it and the tall one took it away from him. They all got into the elevator. The man who held her moved her back against the wall. The tall one went carefully through her purse. The short one had said, “All the way down, pops.”

Jane said, “You can’t—” and stopped and bit her lip as the gentle pressure started again. Evidently they could and they would.

The short, thick one said, “Better-looking than in the papers, eh?”

“Shut up,” the tall one said.

The hand enclosed hers. It was a special indignity, this indignity of pain; peculiar humiliation. She realized that she should be looking at them closely, remembering things about them so she could identify them later if need be — or if she was lucky. But she could see nothing about them to remember. Just their, general sizes and their subdued clothes. They all had hard, closed faces. They could have been, each one of them, twenty-five or forty.

They moved out into the lobby. The tall one turned back to the operator. “Pops, shut yourself in that thing and go up and park it between floors for fifteen minutes. Move!”

“Yes sir,” the old man said. He banged the door shut hurriedly and the arrow pointed steadily upward.

They moved across to the desk. A fourth man was behind the desk, standing next to the old clerk. The clerk’s face was ghastly. It looked like oiled chalk. The man turned the clerk around roughly and shoved him into the small room behind the desk, pulled the door shut and locked it. He came out and the five of them walked the remaining steps to the outside door. Jane walked with two ahead of her, one beside her and one behind her.

“She have it?” asked the one who had been behind the desk.

“Shut up,” the tall one said. “Take a look outside, Boats.” The short, thick one went out first. He looked in each direction up and down the dark road, ducking his head instinctively against the driving rain. He looked back and nodded.

They moved out quickly. The wet sidewalk soaked Jane’s stocking feet. Rain cut at her legs. The car was across the street. They hurried to it. She was as shocked as the ones with her seemed to be when the bright headlights behind them and ahead of them went on suddenly, pinning them there in the glare, and a monstrous and demoralizing voice, boosted by amplification to gigantic authority, said out of the darkness, “Don’t move. Don’t move a muscle.”

The tall one cursed softly and turned and dived toward the protecting darkness. A shot kicked his legs out from under him. Jane heard the sick sound as his head hit the pavement. He lay there on his face, still in the lights, rolling his head back and forth and saying, “Aaaah!” Quite softly.

“Want to try for two?” the great voice roared. “Both ends of this street are blocked and the alleys are blocked and there are twenty-five armed men watching you. Now, hands high, children.”

For a moment the heavy hand still encased hers. Then it relaxed and went away and she stood apart from him. She saw him put his hands up. She felt as if she should, too. There was that much authority in the voice.

“Miss Bayliss, please walk toward the curb and turn to your left on the sidewalk. Thank you.”

She walked as she was told. She felt small, wet-footed and humiliated. She felt as if half a world watched her. She walked into darkness and into arms that were at once familiar, that held her there in the rain in a dear and remembered way, walked into lips that pressed against damp hair and said things she had never listened to closely enough before all this, and would listen to much more closely from now on.

“What are you doing up?” she demanded.

“Hush, honey. Tilt your head up to be kissed. Lord, you’ve shrunk!”

“No shoes,” she sighed happily and presented lips to be kissed, curling her wet toes against the dark sidewalk.