Judge Me Not

Chapter Thirteen

After the motor sound faded, the countryside silence was like a blanket across the stars. Wind skittered through the dry grass. Dried leaves rustled. A distant rooster crowed in sleepy protest.

“How do we stand on time?” Teed asked.

“She’s been gone three minutes. At twenty of four her time will be up.”

“And then what?”

“Then we can try a bluff.”

“A good idea?”

“Frankly, Morrow, it stinks. But the alternative is heading back for town on foot and trying to talk somebody into sticking Uncle Sam’s neck out for the sake of one of our local call girls. That stinks too.”

They crossed the ditch and walked beside the fence. “Lights coming from town,” Armando said tersely. “Flatten out.”

They stretched out beside a rusty wire fence. The car boomed by. It dropped over the crest and reappeared later, twin red taillights sliding up a far slope. Teed got up. Something pricked his knee. He picked a cluster of burrs out of his trouser leg.

“This the Castle Ann fence?” Teed asked.

“No. They really have a fence. See where it starts up at the crest there?”

At the top of the crest there was a place where they could see over the high wall. It was a four-story oblong — a frame building that sat on the top of a small knoll about two hundred feet from the road. Some windows were lighted on the two top floors. Lights were visible in all the windows of the far end of the main floor.

“See those ground-floor lights? The bar is in that end.”

There were no trees around the structure. It had a curiously naked look. “Why four stories out in the middle of nowhere?” Teed asked.

“A farmer built it in the early twenties. The kindest thing you could say about him was that he was slightly eccentric. He made dough in the first war. Always wanted to live in a hotel. So he had one built. A few salesmen stopped there until the old guy decided he didn’t like guests in his hotel. He lived there alone, getting screwier every year. When he decided people were laughing at him he had the big stone fence built, with barbed wire on the top. Had all the trees cut down. He’d sit up in a fourth-floor room and fire a shotgun in the air whenever anybody stopped by the gate. When he died, in the thirties, a couple bought it cheap, and went broke trying to run it as a restaurant. Later, one of Raval’s front men bought it. It’s ideal for them. No interruptions. It’s outside the city, and the county cops don’t bother with it. It has been raided a couple of times by narcotics people. But they didn’t find a thing. Take a good look and memorize as much of it as you can, Teed. This is the last look we’ll get at it until we get inside the wall. Better whisper from here on.”

They moved cautiously down toward the gate, staying close to the wall.

Armando stopped, his back against the wall. He put his lips close to Teed’s ear. “We’re thirty feet from the gate. Time is three-thirty-two. Can you spot the guard?”

As Teed watched there was a puzzling glow that lasted a few seconds, and then a click, clearly audible.

“Cigarette lighter,” Armando whispered.

The smell of tobacco drifted down the night wind, verifying the guess. Teed wanted a cigarette badly. He took the automatic out of his coat pocket, shoved it inside his belt.

“Four more minutes,” Armando whispered.

Teed’s nerves were drawn tight. There was a hollow feeling in his middle. It had been easy enough to think of taking on Castle Ann singlehanded when he had been back in the city. But now it was a place where you could go behind a high wall and be suddenly taken dead. Both the girls were in there. And from the hilltop he had seen the shiny cars flanked near the bar.

Armando put his mouth close to Teed’s ear again. “Rumor has it that several people who became objectionable to Raval are planted behind that wall. Look, stay right where you are.”

“But...”

“Shut up. You’ll be able to hear how it goes.”

Armando walked silently up the hill, away from the gate. Teed waited, puzzled. Armando crossed the ditch, reversed his direction, and came noisily down the road, heels clacking loudly.

He walked right up to the gate. Teed saw the flashlight catch Armando full in the face.

“Get the light out of my eyes,” Armando demanded in an irritated tone.

“Where do you think you’re going, friend?” a deep voice asked.

“I’m trying to get a phone. My car ran out of gas about a mile back.”

“I seen you some place.”

“Get the light out of my eyes!”

The light shifted down to the ground at Armando’s feet. “What do you want a phone for?”

“I want to call up the Vassar field hockey squad. We’re all going to dance barefoot on your dewy grass.”

“Wise, eh? This is private property. Where did I see you before?”

“Maybe you want my birth certificate. What kind of a place is this? Just let me go phone, will you?”

“Say, aren’t you Rogale?” the guard asked.

“So skip it,” Armando said. “I’ll try the next place.” He started to move back. The light caught him in the face again.

“You just stand nice and still, Mr. Rogale. People are going to be glad to see you. They’re going to want to know why you’re nosing around. Now stand still while I get the gate open.”

Teed moved slowly, quietly down toward the gate. The gun was going to be no good. A shot would ruin what feeble chances they had. Teed heard a metallic clack, a creak of hinges. The man moved out into view, gun and flashlight pointed at Armando.

Teed fumbled in the grass, found a pebble. He flipped it over the guard’s head so that it landed in the grass beyond the gate. As the guard’s head turned, Teed tried to reach him in four running strides. But the moment that he had turned, Armando had kicked the man lustily in the pit of the stomach. As the guard bent forward from the waist, Armando laced his fingers around the back of the man’s neck, yanked down hard as he raised his knee. The guard fell with a thud that drove the air out of him.

“Quick and efficient,” Teed said.

“I grew up in a rough neighborhood. Haven’t hit anybody in six years. Thought I’d forgotten how.”

Armando found the flashlight, swept the beam around until he located the gun. He searched the man. “Gun and a sap. Which do you want?”

“Take them both. I’ve got Weiss’ automatic.”

“Are we thinking along the same lines?” Armando said in a low tone.

There was unsteadiness in Teed’s voice as he answered “There isn’t much else to do, is there? I’m scared.”

“And you are not alone. Help me drag him inside. We’ll leave him in the brush. First let me give him this.” The sap made a small dull sound as Armando swung it.

They dragged him through the gate, off to one side. Armando opened the gate wide, said, “We’ll leave the gate like this. I don’t know how much time we’ll have. I think another guard patrols the fence line. Any ideas?”

“Just move fast, see if we can find both girls, and try to get out. Go ahead. You know the layout.”

The drive was of coarse gravel. They walked on the grass beside the drive. A hundred feet from the gate Armando veered sharply to the left. They circled the lighted windows. They could not see in.

“Eight cars, not counting mine,” Armando said in a low tone. “How do you like those odds? If the Bar Association could only see me now. Let’s hope for an unlocked back door. I’m trying to pretend I’m Humphrey Bogart. Who are you?”

Teed laughed softly, nervously. “Henry Aldrich.”

“You a good shot?”

“At a target. I’ve never tried people.”

At the rear of the building Armando risked using the flashlight. He narrowed the beam by shielding part of it off with his hand. He swept the narrow beam across a battered row of garbage cans. They were overflowing and the stench was rancid, nauseous. There was a secondary odor of faulty plumbing. The light touched the bottom step of a short flight that led up to a back stoop, a narrow door. Armando tiptoed up the steps and tried the door. He came back down.

“Not that way,” he said softly.

It was the only door in the rear of the building. As they reached the back corner on the end opposite the bar music blasted out into the night, freezing them in their tracks for a moment. An old Armstrong that Teed knew well. Gravel-voice, sweet and true.

“That means people in the bar,” Armando said tautly.

“A window?” Teed asked, above the music sound.

“Too high, and too risky.”

Armando stepped around the corner of the building and then tried to dodge back, treading so heavily on Teed’s instep that he made an involuntary gasp of pain. Armando stared, then let out a long sigh. “It’s O.K.”

A man stood, face to the building, spread-legged, one arm flat against the wall, forehead against his forearm. He made a dry retching sound.

As they watched he fell to his knees, struggled up again. He moaned.

He paid no attention to them as they walked around him. Armando paused after they were by him. “I wonder,” he said.

“What’s the matter?”

“Sometimes those people get in the way. They get well too quick.” He shrugged, took two quick steps and swung the sap. The man slid down the wall, face first, and rolled over onto his side.

“Who is he?”

“Belongs to Stratter. Drives for him sometimes. Come on.”

The front door was on ground level. Armando raised his head cautiously and looked through the glass. He beckoned to Teed. Teed stood beside him and looked in. Three wide wooden steps six feet inside the door led up to the lobby. Directly opposite the lobby a stairway went to the floors above. The lobby was dark, but the bar lights shone through an open door.

The music was louder.

The bar lights made a bright wide streak through the lobby, ending at the deserted desk.

“Maybe nobody is looking into the lobby,” Armando said. “But we got to figure they are. If we sneak, somebody will investigate. Can you walk across like you owned the place?”

“I can try.”

A man’s heavy laugh came from the bar. The music ended. Armando, his hand on the door, paused. There was silence in which Teed could hear conversation, a woman’s voice taking part, rising high and shrill. And the music started again. The same piece. Somebody liked it.

“Like you owned the place,” Armando said, pushing the door open.

The board floor was bare. They walked across the light path. Out of the corner of his eye Teed saw a smoky room, the corner of a dark-stained bar, a big round table with a group sitting at it, a shirt-sleeved man with a cigar carrying a tin tray of drinks to the table.

They passed the light. They were almost to the stairs when somebody in the bar yelled, “Hey! Who’s that out there?”

Armando yelled back, in whining falsetto, “It’s Greta Garbo, you stupid jerk.”

“Wise guy,” the man bellowed. The others laughed at him. The man didn’t come out to investigate.

Halfway up the stairs to the wide landing, Armando whispered, “Stratter is in there. And that is not good.”

“Where do we go from here?”

“Eyes and ears open. I can’t think of anything else.”

The second-floor hallway stretched the long way of the building, with a window at each end, doors opening off both sides of the hall. Teed counted nine doors on a side. Eighteen rooms. Three floors. Fifty-four rooms to wonder about, to search.

The hall was carpeted. Armando started in one direction. He held his ear close to the first door, motioned Teed to head the other way and do the same. The first two rooms were silent. In the third he heard a woman saying, “... so I told Joe that if that was the way he was going to act about it, he could damn well kiss...”

He tiptoed around the door. At the last door he listened and heard a girl’s muted, helpless crying, pillow-muffled. His heart gave a great leap. He tried the knob. The door was locked. He looked back and motioned to Armando. Armando came quickly and silently down the hall. He listened for a moment. He tapped cautiously on the door.

There was a creak of bed springs and a ribbon of light appeared under the door. Steps came close to the door.

“Whaddya want?” a tear-dulled voice asked beyond the thin panel.

Armando looked at Teed and raised one eyebrow. Teed shook his head regretfully.

“Let me in a minute, baby,” Armando said.

“You go tell her I’m not going to do it. You go tell her I’m not going to let nobody else in here no matter what she says she’ll do to me.”

“Not so loud, baby,” Armando said. “This isn’t what you think. There’s two of us here. We want to help you. No kidding.”

“Oh, sure,” she said bitterly.

“I want to find out about another girl who might be here,” Teed said. The door panel was so thin that they could hear the thick catch in her breathing, the aftermath of sobs.

A key turned in the lock and the door swung open a crack. She looked at them, prepared to slam it again. She seemed reassured.

“O.K., so come in,” she said.

The room was drab and unpleasant. A metal bed frame painted white. A round hooked rug so ancient and soiled that it was all of a color — a fetid brown. A stand with a cracked marble top. A white pitcher, tin wash basin, scabbed soap dish. A pile of clean threadbare towels on the lower shelf of the wash stand. There was no other furniture in the room except for the flimsy unpainted chest of drawers, a round bleary mirror fastened over it.

The girl had a ripe sturdy body, a long pale Mediterranean face, enormous dark eyes. She wore a too-tight cerise house coat that zipped from throat to ankles. Her dark hair was an unpleasant tangle and there was a bruise under her right eye.

Armando spoke to her in rapid Italian. She answered in kind, and then, as she continued to answer, the phrases grew more broken, disjointed. Tears spilled out of the huge dark eyes. She sat on the edge of the bed, put her face in her hands, continued to talk, her voice muffled, torn.

Armando asked soft questions. She answered them, some with anger, some apathetically.

Armando turned to Teed. His eyes were angry. “I know of her people. Laboring people. It’s a tired old story. A very ordinary story. The boy she was going to marry married somebody else. She dated a man who came often to the restaurant where she worked. She didn’t care what happened to her any more. He took her on a business trip to Buffalo with him. Then he brought her out here and turned her over to Maria. She’s ashamed to go home and she’s lost her job. She expects to be taken away with another girl in the morning. A man is going to drive them to another city. Scranton, she thinks. I know the man who left her here. She was drunk when he left her here. His name is Kissler and he’s been indicted for small things, and never convicted. She’s been here three nights. The only girl she knows is the Polish girl who is being taken away with her in the morning. And, of course, Maria.”

The girl lifted a tortured face. She touched her fingertips to the bruise on her cheek. There was hate in her face, mingled with fear.

“Won’t her family notify the police?”

“She wrote them a letter. Maria dictated it. They won’t make a fuss.”

“We better try the next floor.”

Armando spoke to her again, this time in English. “Keep your door locked. I think if we’re lucky we can get you out of here. And no one will have to know where you’ve been.”

“Skip it,” she said. “I’m all right here. Maybe I like it.”

Teed pulled the door shut. She sat on the bed staring after them as if she hated them. He wondered if she did.

They made the next floor without incident. The juke music was fainter. The tune had been changed. Boogie-woogie dirge. Lament for a fallen lady. A room door was open. Two girls in house coats sat on the bed. Their eyes were vacant with liquor, heavy glass tumblers in their hands.

“Go ’way, palsies. We’re busy. We’re on vacation,” a puffy blonde said.

“We’re looking for a tall dark girl who came in tonight, early.”

“Go ask Duchess Maria, palsy. You got a special choice, go ask the old bag.”

They both giggled. Their mouths looked smashed. Their eyes were as empty as tunnels on an abandoned railroad.

“Where’s the Duchess?” Armando asked.

The blonde pointed at the ceiling. “You new or something? Upstairs, brother. Your friend’s kinda cute. You go look for the Duchess and leave him here. We’ll buy him a drink.”

They listened at the other rooms on the third floor. They were all dark, silent.

Teed whispered, “She could be in any one of these. Drugged or something.”

“I know it. Come on. We need a break.”

Halfway up the stairs they heard a sound like the snap of a distant twig. Armando paused. “That come from up above?”

“It sounded that way. Come on.”

They went up to the top floor. The floor plan was different than on the two floors below. Evidently there had been a halfhearted attempt to make a ballroom out of the open space at the head of the stairs. Overhead was a cartwheel chandelier with three lighted bulbs in it. The corners of the room were in shadow. Two walls, the front and back of the building, were windows. There were two doors in each of the end walls. Light shone under both doors at one end.

Though they tried to walk quietly, their footsteps resounded in the big room. Overhead hand-hewn beams slanted up to the roof peak.

When they were twenty feet from the doors, the one on the left opened and a tall woman stepped out. She stopped abruptly. The chandelier light was full on her face. Her mature body was tightly sheathed in a silver gown that left her shoulders bare. Her hair, shining black, was pulled tightly back, so tightly that it gave her eyes an almost oriental tilt. The bone structure of her face made Teed think of a Dolores del Rio, but the mouth was not right. It was large and ripe and brutal and harsh. She held a handkerchief in her left hand, held her left fist tightly against her side, under her heart. Her right hand was lost in the folds of the silver skirt.

“What... what do you want?”

“You are Maria Gonzales, I believe,” Armando said.

“The light is behind you, I do not...”

“I think you know me. I’m Armando Rogale. And this is Teed Morrow. Where is the Dennison girl?”

After a few moments she laughed. Her voice was a girl’s voice when she laughed.

“You are too late. She has been taken back to her father. She was a silly child to come out here.”

“You won’t mind if we look around, then?”

“You don’t belong here. Go back downstairs.”

Teed watched her closely as they moved nearer. She pulled the corners of her brutal mouth down in an odd grimace and shut her eyes for a moment, then opened them wide. Her voice grew stronger.

“Get out of here! Both of you!”

Armando was the closest. She backed up, swayed a bit, her back striking the door jamb.

“Get out of the way, Maria,” Armando said softly.

Teed looked at her left hand. Since they had begun to talk, a dark stain had begun to spread below her hand.

“Look, she’s hurt,” Teed said.

Armando reached out and grasped her left wrist. As he pulled it free of her body, she spun toward him and struck with the incredible explosive fury of a great cat. She struck with the right hand that she had been holding at her side. Teed saw the glint of metal and he was too late to cry out a warning. Armando took three slow steps backward, his face vacant with surprise. He reached his right hand up and tentatively fingered the dark hilt of the switch knife that protruded from his chest on the left side. The handle pointed down toward the floor. Maria stood silent, her eyes smoking.

Armando reached around the hilt and touched his shoulder, slid his hand back. He said calmly, “The bitch missed. I think it went up under the collar bone. The point is sticking right out through my coat.”

“Don’t try to pull it out. Leave it there.”

They looked at Maria. She still held her side, and her eyes were shut. Her face twisted for a moment and then cleared. She pushed herself away from the doorframe and walked between them, taking careful steps. Her heavy hips swayed under the silver gown. She left the door open behind her. She wavered once and regained her balance.

They could sense the extent of the effort she was making. It was hypnotic, to watch that hard, unemotional determination. She planted her foot on the first step, took another step. She stood motionless for a frozen breath of time, then slowly lowered her head until her chin was on her chest. She bent forward from the waist, as though seeking to examine something hidden on the stair below her. And she followed the direction of the slow bow, pitching down, falling with slack weight on the splinter-rough edges of the uncarpeted stairs, falling with a sound of wooden hammers. Her head and shoulders caught somehow, and they saw her legs go over, the silver skirt falling away, the dim light shining on the puffed white flesh of calf and thigh, and then she was below the floor level, out of sight. The sound went on, endlessly, flesh-thud and bone-hammer. There was a stillness, a pad of running feet in the third floor hallway, a phlegm-throated gargling scream.

“I’ll get you out of here,” Teed said to Armando.

“Not yet. Can’t move my left arm without crying, but I’m O.K.”

They went quickly through the door Maria had left open. Armando turned and covered the stairs. “Take a look around,” he said.

It was not an apartment. It was merely two very well-furnished rooms. Off-white rugs and eggplant draperies and driftwood finish on the furniture, with here and there a touch of Chinese red to kill the deadness of gray and off-white. A dozen floor lamps and table lamps with opaque shades threw light downward, so that the reflection from the off-white rugs had an indirect lighting effect.

It looked like what it undoubtedly was — the private pleasure palace of a stone-hard ruthless woman — the one place where she could unbend, where she could forget she had the soul of a comptometer and remember that she had the flesh and body of a woman.

“Hurry it up!” Armando called huskily, the ripe edge of his baritone softened by pain.

In each of the two rooms there was a huge pillowed couch-bed. Teed went into the second room and saw, beyond the edge of the couch-bed, the woman’s hand, endlessly opening and shutting, palm down, fingernails making a soft scrabbling in the pile of the pale rug.

He ran to her and stopped when he saw the bloody mask of face. The hair, the long body belonged to Barbara. The face was ruin. She rolled hips and shoulders slowly from side to side and scrabbled at the rug with both hands in the aimless metronome of pain. There was a thin burned taste in the air and he identified it when he saw the small gun a yard away. The gun had been the snapping of the stick. The gun had been the long stairway tumble.

He knelt beside her. “Barbara! Barbara, it’s Teed.”

A long wedge of flesh folded down from the left cheek, exposing the white molars. He saw what had happened. The bleeding was not profuse. The girl had been slashed across the face twice, possibly three times.

The open cheek gave her voice a flat whistling quality. “Missed her, Teed. Shot and missed her and she... had the knife...”

“You didn’t miss her.”

“Teed, my face. I can’t see, Teed.”

“That’s all right,” he said gently. “We’ll get you to a hospital. It’s just the blood that... keeps you from seeing.”

“Teed, I hurt. I hurt so bad.”

“Don’t worry about it, honey.”

“They’re coming!” Armando called.

Barbara seemed to hear him. “Teed, the girl! I found where she is, Teed. The other side of the big room. Locked in over there, Teed. I... I almost got away with it. Maria was too smart. Be careful, Teed. There’s someone with her, I think.”

“I’ll get her and come back for you, darling.”

But once again she was beyond hearing or caring. She rolled slowly from side to side, moving her body but not her head.

There was a shot that made a vast hollow boom and the echoes rolled for seconds from raftered ceiling to high walls of the big room. A man yelled hoarsely and there was the sound of another fall on the stairs.