Loot for the Unlucky Lady

Chapter One Ninety-Grand Doll

She walked slowly, because walking is easier than standing, and attracts less attention. Slowly from the Astor Bar entrance up the few short blocks to Lindy’s and back. In the heart of the tourist crush. In the granular slush of December, by the corners where the lean scarecrow Santas warmed their fingers in their armpits and jangled the tired bells while the change dropped into the wire-covered pots. She was jostled and buffeted about, hearing the torn bits of conversation around her, fixing her mind on those overheard bits to keep from thinking of Al: “...So I tells him there’s holes in his head and...”

“She ought to pay more attention to...”

“It’s a lousy show and why it don’t close is more...”

“Okay, okay, so it was five drinks...”

“And this other one, the blonde, says...”

“Get off my feet, stupid...”

It was a crosstown wind and at the corners it whipped her thin, worn coat, and chilled her ankles where the taxi wheels had spattered her stockings.

There was nothing spectacular about her. She attracted little attention. She was a frail girl, almost thin, with a grave face and level eyes. She had quiet beauty, and sometimes a man in the crowd would glance at her and be faintly troubled as he walked on, because she started him thinking of the things that might have been...

Her pale hair had a soft wave, and her coat was two years old and it was the third set of heels on her black pumps.

Al had called her at the office on Monday morning, and the documents for file had been piled high and Mr. Scharry had frowned and said, “There is a personal call for you on my line, Miss Gerald.”

Al’s voice had been a tight, harsh sound, full of fear. “Bad trouble, Glory. I need you. Listen and get this the first time. I got to give you something. Quit your job and every day from now on, go to the Times Square section. Be somewhere around the Raglan Bar. Don’t speak to me when I show up.”

The line went dead. Mr. Scharry was glaring at her. She made her voice light and gay and said, “Thanks for calling, Marian.”

She had been paid on Friday. She left the office at lunch time and didn’t return. It wasn’t that she wanted to be thoughtless about not giving notice. It was just that Al Barnard was more important than anything else in her life, and the fear she had heard in his voice filled her mind so that there was no room for the common courtesies.

She walked slowly, and the crowd was such protective coloration, no one noticed that the same frail blonde girl never left those few short blocks.

In her small, dim scrupulously clean room on Eighty-eighth, there was a glossy eight by ten print of Al Bernard on her bureau. When she was in her room, she spent a great deal of her time looking at his picture. He was good looking in a conventional way. Clean lines of brow, temple, nose. But she failed to see that the mouth had an uncertain softness about it, that the eyes were perhaps a shade too small, a bit too close together.

The main thing was that Al was in trouble. She spent from eight in the morning until one the following morning on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. She ate only when she became faint with hunger, and then hurriedly. Al had asked her to be there. She would have walked those few blocks barefoot if the sidewalk had been made of crushed glass, and the pain would have been good, because it would have been for Al.

Always everything had been for Al. For the past year. Anything that happened before that time didn’t count.

In all of the great city the only reality for her was the sound of his voice, his arms around her.

He had always been evasive about his work. His hours were odd. Some weeks he didn’t work at all. She wanted to have a home and have his children, and yet she had learned that the vaguest reference to marriage brought that stubborn look onto his face, and she had learned to take the golden days as they came to her.

When he was drunk he was abusive. She had learned how to best avoid the blunt lash of his tongue, how to discount the contempt in his eyes.

Her legs ached and her feet were blistered and there were fine lines of fatigue around her mouth, puffy patches under the clear blue of her eyes. And yet she did not feel that he had asked too much of her, that what she was doing was particularly difficult. She was annoyed that it was necessary for her to eat and sleep.

On Friday the shrill alarm awakened her at seven. She dressed quickly, ate a large breakfast at the corner cafeteria, and took the subway down to the place where Al wanted her to be.

She had no idea what his trouble might be.

The crowd was slim at first, but by eleven o’clock the sidewalks were thick with people. She was rudely jostled in the crowd, and something was thrust under her arm. She recognized him as he passed her, and her cry was stifled on her lips. The parcel under her arm was a shoe box, neatly wrapped, and quite heavy.

The thud of her heart was rapid. She angled out of the crowd, crossed over to the island in the middle and went down the stairs into the chill dampness of the subway.

She sat very straight on the worn fiber seat and the shoe box, neatly tied up in brown wrapping paper rested on her lap, her hands in the worn black gloves holding it tightly.

Back at the rooming house, she walked slowly up the stairs, locked herself in her small room, curbed her impatience as she took off her coat and hat, carefully hung up the coat in the shallow closet.

Only then did she sit on the bed and untie the string, unwrap the paper and lift the lid.

It was as though she had stopped breathing and her heart had stopped beating. The shoe box was packed neatly and solidly with currency. Worn, darkened bills, fastened in inch thick wads with rubber bands.

With trembling hands she unfolded the white note on top.

The box slipped off her lap, fell to the floor and spilled the packets of currency across the cheap, rose-colored rug.

She sat very still and looked at the far wall. The Candor Club job! There must be a mistake. Al wouldn’t...

Yet all the little half-understood things during the past year became clear in the light of his note. She suddenly knew that she would have to find out about the Candor Club and what had happened.

She knelt on the floor and picked up the currency and put it back in the box. Then she stood in indecision, the box in her hands, staring around at the four walls of her room. The money — an incredible amount to her — was an overpowering responsibility.

She bit hard on her underlip as she considered various hiding places. She kept her own room clean and so there was no reason for anyone to enter her room. Yet the door was frail and the lock was cheap.

In the back of her closet was a pile of newspapers a good ten inches high. She took off the top inch or so of newspapers and, with a razor blade, clumsily hacked a hole deep enough for the shoebox. From the box she extracted ten five-dollar bills.

She replaced the top layer of newspapers. The pile seemed to be intact. She felt a bit more confident. Using the brown paper, she wrapped up the wad of newspaper she had cut from the middle of the pile.

At the corner, she dropped the paper into a refuse barrel. She went immediately to the Public Library to see what the papers of the past week had to say about the Candor Club. She was particularly interested in the Monday papers. Since Al had called on Monday morning, it would seem likely that whatever had happened had happened on Sunday.

Had she not been so thorough, she would have missed the item. It was not a news story. It was a sly remark by one of the evening columnists.

She went away from the library with a purely mechanical walk. At the corner of 42nd a man grabbed her shoulder and pulled her back or she would have walked in front of a bus.

Al Barnard — a thief and a murderer!

Had he been merely a thief, she would have considered seriously turning the cash over to the police, knowing that no matter how long he was in prison, she would wait for him and work for him.

But a murderer!

She could not turn him in. She could not trap him. Because once they caught him they would kill him with all the careful, ponderous machinery of the courts, and then there would be no point in life itself, because she would be alone in the world.

Though she was still weary from the long hours spent waiting for him, she walked blindly, trying to make the necessary adjustments in her heart. Because he was a murderer and a thief, did that lessen her love for him? Was love the result of a character survey?

She went back to her room and fell immediately into a heavy, dreamless sleep. From the bureau the glossy photograph watched her with smiling eyes and weak mouth...

Be careful, he had said.

Saturday noon she registered at a midtown hotel, wearing the new dark gabardine suit and the new coat, the silly hat, the heels that were too high. She registered as Gloria Quinn. Gloria Gerald was dying. Quickly. She told the desk clerk that her luggage would arrive later in the day. She gave a fictitious address in Albany.

One large suitcase and one overnight case. Matching. Dark leather. G.A.Q. in small gold letters. The bellhop carried them up to her room and she smiled faintly and tipped him a dollar.

After he had gone, she locked the door, opened the new luggage. They had the smell of newness. The clothes in them were new. Sun clothes. Halters. Slacks. Print dresses. Seersucker. Linen. New cosmetics.

Her old clothes were all in the battered fiber suitcase she had checked at the railroad baggage room. She had destroyed everything bearing her name. She stood in the pleasant room on the twelfth floor and carefully disposed of the baggage check.

Three things that were not new remained with her. The glossy picture, a cheap ring he had given her, in silver with a flawed Burmese ruby, and the shoebox. Four hundred dollars had been spent. But Al had said to be careful. Part of being careful was in destroying the past. Almost completely — except for the ring, the picture and the box.

She was not the quiet, almost drab girl who had walked through the endless hours, remembering the fear in Al’s voice. The new clothes were becoming. Her color was heightened by the excitement. There was a tautness, an urgency about her that had not been there before.

In the early hours of the evening, she left her room, after taking two hundred dollars from the shoebox, and took a taxi to the airlines terminal.

The taxi dropped her off at the terminal at seven fifteen on Monday morning, fifteen minutes ahead of the appointed time. She went up on the escalator, bought several magazines, found an attendant who promised to see that her luggage arrived at the plane.

He also told her that the limousine to take her to the field along with the others would be announced over the public-address system.

She sat down on one of the long benches and began to leaf through one of the magazines. She felt that someone was watching her, and she made each gesture casual. She glanced up and saw him. She let her eyes float across him as though she was completely unconscious of his presence.

Then she looked back at the magazine. But not to read. Al had written that she was to be careful. And the man had been looking at her with frank curiosity. She knew that he was still looking at her.

He was a dark young man, with the type of pale-sallow skin which made his freshly shaven jaw look bluish. He was sitting across from her. She decided that he was probably tall. His legs looked long. He seemed to be well dressed. A small suitcase stood near his crossed legs. His expression was one of dark and sardonic good humor. Wryness. And competence. His overcoat was beside him, neatly folded. He held his cigarette so that the smoke curled up through the fingers of his brown, strong-looking hand.

She wondered if he could be the enemy. That is how she had come to think of anyone who threatened Al’s life. And the columnist had said that there would be two groups after Al. The police and the gangsters that the gambling house might hire. His constant gaze made her nervous.

At last, to her relief, it was announced that the car was in front. She stood up, slipped into her coat and went down to the front exit. The airport name was on the small neat sign on the window of the black car.

The door was held for her, and she got in, sat back in the corner. Two men got in next. They were portly, red-faced, loud, and smelled abundantly of alcohol. One of them sat much too close to her. She moved away. They gave each other meaningful looks.

One of them stuck a fat red hand toward her. “I’m Charlie Grable. No relation to Clark. Ha, ha! Guess you’re going our way, Miss. Might as well get acquainted.”

She looked down at his hand, then at his blood-shot eyes and looked cooly away.

“Guess she froze you out, Charlie,” the other one said. “Wipe those icicles off your chin, Charlie boy.”

Charlie looked sulky. He mumbled something under his breath. An old man with abundant white hair and no hat got in next, followed by a couple in their thirties with two small children. The voices of the children were shrill and excited. The last person to get in was the young man who had stared at her in the terminal.

The door slammed and the car started off through the crowded midtown traffic.

At the airport the list of passengers was checked against the manifest. Other passengers were already at the field. They were permitted to walk out across the apron and up the steps into the big ship. It was the first time Gloria had ever flown. She tried to seem nonchalant about it.

The pretty uniformed stewardess checked them off on a second list as they entered the ship. Gloria walked up toward the front of the ship and sat down. Almost immediately the second of the two red-faced men sat beside her.

“I wanna apologize for my fren, Charlie,” he said, slurring his words. “Now me, I’m a gennamun. I don’t go for none of this crude stuff. The hell with Charlie. You and I, we’ll ignore the punk, hey?”

“On your horse, friend,” a cool voice said. Gloria turned away from the circular window, looked up into the face of the young man who had watched her in the terminal.

“What d’you want?” Red-face demanded, growing even redder in the face.

“You happen to be annoying Miss Quinn. Also, you happen to be occupying my seat.”

Red-face thought it over, heaved himself to his feet. “Sorry,” he mumbled, lurching off to find Charlie.

Gloria demanded. “How did you know my name?”

“Listened when the manifest was checked. Thought he might bother you. I won’t.” He dug a paper-bound book out of his pocket and began to read.

“Thank you,” she said in a small voice.

He looked at her, raising one eyebrow. “Perfectly okay.” He went back to his reading. “I’m Steve Harris,” he said, without looking up.

When the signal was given, Steve Harris groped for and found the loose ends of his seat belt, strapped it tight across his thighs. She watched him out of the corner of her eye, learning how to do it herself.

The four motors, one at a time, bucked, kicked, spat and settled into a steady roar. The steps were being rolled away across the apron. She stared out the window at the busy airport.

Steve continued to read. Her heart gave a lurch when the plane began to move, began to trundle awkwardly down the strip. She bit her lips. The ship went a great distance, then wheeled around in a sharp semicircle. It stopped and the song of the motors rose to a high roaring whine, and the great airplane trembled and vibrated.

Suddenly they were rolling, and the acceleration pushed her back in the seat. Faster and faster, and then the ground was dropping away, spinning away into the distance, and she saw roads and tiny cars and the roofs of squat buildings speed swiftly by.

She let out breath long pent up and suddenly felt very tired. She leaned her head back, turning so she could watch the ground. The big wing stretched out into the horribly empty air. She saw the tip of it bend alarmingly and caught her breath.

“It’s supposed to do that,” Steve said quietly. “It’s built to bend like that in the air.”

“Oh, I... I didn’t know.”

“First time?”

Gloria nodded.

He said: “Dullest way to travel there is. But the quickest. Can’t see anything or do anything and the vibration gives you a headache.”

She was about to answer and then she saw that he had gone back to his book. She watched the morning sky for a time and then heard his heavy breathing. The book had fallen to the floor. His mouth sagged open a fraction of an inch. She saw that his eyelashes were very long, and very black.