She’ll Hate Me Tomorrow

Chapter II

Fifteen minutes later Stella re-entered the private office and laid the affidavit and an addressed envelope on Vegas’ desk. After reading it over, he signed it and pushed it back to her. He watched as she signed the notary form and affixed her seal. Then he took the document back from her, folded it, placed it in the addressed envelope and sealed it.

“Do you want me to mail it on my way home?” Stella inquired.

He gave her an amused grin. “Hardly.”

Rising from his desk, he knelt before the office safe, twisted the dial several times and swung open the heavy door. Placing the envelope on the top shelf, he closed the door again and spun the dial.

“Now, for the time being I want you to forget everything that’s happened this afternoon,” he said. “Under certain circumstances you’ll have to recall that this envelope is in the safe, but we’ll hope they never develop. Have you destroyed your shorthand notes?”

“Not yet,” she said faintly. “I will immediately.”

“I don’t think you’ve ever had occasion to open the safe since I gave you the combination your first day here, have you? Do you still remember it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. In the event of my death, I want you to mail the affidavit. Otherwise just forget it’s there.”

She looked at him, white-faced. “In the event of your death, Mr. Vegas?”

“People die all the time,” he growled. “I’m really not planning to in the immediate future. I just like to cover all possible contingencies.”

“Yes, sir,” she said.

A trifle unsteadily she turned and left the office. At her desk she tore several sheets of shorthand notes from her pad, crumpled them in an ash tray and set a match to them. As she watched them burn, she became conscious that Carl Vegas was also watching from the door of his office.

“Good girl,” he said. “You can unlock the outer door now. We don’t want to prevent any legitimate clients from getting in.”

Stella spent a sleepless night wrestling with her conscience. Since Carl Vegas obviously never intended to mail the affidavit, and had made it out only as a means of revenge in case Whitey Cord had him killed, wouldn’t her knowledge of what was in it possibly make her an accessory to murder unless she reported what she knew to the police? Or was what a lawyer told his secretary in confidence a privileged communication, just as in the case of a client? The point was beyond her limited legal knowledge.

She finally dozed off wondering if she ought to contact another lawyer for legal advice.

The next morning she was still undecided about what to do. She considered tendering her resignation, for while she had been able to rationalize her employer’s dealings with racketeers so long as she didn’t know what the dealings involved, she couldn’t in good conscience continue to work for a man she now regarded as a criminal.

At the same time she was wary of what Vegas’ reaction might be if she quit. He would instantly know why, and might conclude she intended to go to the police. Suppose he decided to play it safe by having one of his criminal clients kill her?

By the time she arrived at work she had decided that for the present, at least, it was wisest to do nothing.

The door from the public hall was unlocked, she was surprised to discover. Vegas must have arrived early, which was unusual, as he ordinarily didn’t appear until about nine-thirty. Then, as she started to close the door behind her, she noticed the jimmy marks on the frame.

Testing the lock, she discovered it had been sprung. She glanced about the office, saw nothing disturbed, and moved to the door of the private office. She stopped in the doorway in consternation. The safe door gaped open and the combination dial lay on the floor, clear across the room, where it had been blown by the blast which had opened the safe.

A quick check of the safe’s contents showed that the envelope addressed to the district attorney was missing. Nothing else seemed disturbed, though she couldn’t be sure because she didn’t know just what Vegas kept in the safe. A stack of about a hundred dollars in currency remained in plain sight, suggesting that the envelope had been the safecracker’s sole interest.

Lifting the phone from her employer’s desk, she dialed his home number. There was no answer. Glancing at her wrist watch, she saw it was five after nine. Probably he was en route to work.

She contemplated phoning the police, then decided that because of the nature of the theft, Vegas probably wouldn’t want her to do that. She decided to wait until he arrived.

Returning to the outer office, she seated herself at her desk and picked up her steno pad, which contained notes of several letters which had to be typed. The burglary had unnerved her too much for routine work, though. Setting the pad down again, she switched on the portable radio on her desk and simply waited for her employer’s arrival.

At nine-fifteen the phone rang.

Picking it up, she said into it, “Office of Carl Vegas, attorney.”

A rather pleasant feminine voice asked, “Is this Miss Stella Parsons speaking?”

“Yes.”

“I have here a certain document addressed to the district attorney,” the woman said. “It has your signature on it as a notary, and the stenographer’s initials at the bottom of the last page indicate you also typed it. Is that correct?”

Was the woman phoning from the district attorney’s office, Stella wondered? She had the incredible thought that perhaps the D.A. had burglarized the safe.

“Yes,” she said. “To whom am I speaking?”

The woman ignored the question. “Then you know the contents of the document?”

“Of course. Who is this?”

“Thank you, dear,” the woman said, and hung up.

Puzzled and a bit frightened, Stella slowly cradled the phone. Nervously she stared at the door, willing it to open and admit Carl Vegas. Fifteen minutes dragged by, punctuated at five-minute intervals by commercials from her desk radio.

At nine-thirty the news came on. The first item brought her bolt upright in her chair.

“Three gang-style killings took place in the county last night,” the announcer said. “A local attorney, a carpenter, and a part-time laborer were all shot down in similar manner in widely varying places. Criminal Lawyer Carl Vegas, forty-eight, had four bullets in his body when found lying in a ditch at the south edge of town, according to police. Truck driver Marvin Holtz of Peoria spotted the body about six a. m. and reported it to the state police. The coroner’s office estimates time of death at around midnight last night. Police believe Vegas was murdered elsewhere and thrown from a moving car at the place his body was found.

“Carpenter Rodney Stewart, fifty-seven, was shot down by an assassin as he left the rear door of Tony’s Tavern on State Street about eleven p.m. to enter his car parked in the lot out back. Like Vegas, he was shot four times. Tony’s Tavern was the scene of another unsolved gang-style killing last October in which the victim was also shot four times.

“Laborer Henry Norse, thirty-two, died, again from four bullet wounds, in this case shot from a moving car as he mounted the steps of his rooming house on Carlton Street. The shooting occurred at two a.m. and Norse died en route to the hospital.

“Police say there are no known motives for the similar but geographically widely separated crimes, and as yet they have no suspects.”

Shaken, Stella rose from her chair and moved unsteadily into the private office. She made directly for a small concealed bar next to the window, swung it open and selected a liter of imported brandy from the racked assortment of bottles. She had never before in her life had a drink at that hour of the morning, but suddenly she felt an urgent need of one.

She was pouring liquid into a pony glass, face to the window, when she saw a car pull up and park at the curb immediately below her. As the office was only on the second floor, she got a clear view of the men who climbed out of the car. The driver was a stranger to her, but the other man was the tall, thin individual who always accompanied Whitey Cord on his visits to the office. The two men entered the buiding.

All at once the reason for the mysterious phone call from the woman struck her. In fact, all the odd events of that morning suddenly made sense. It seemed apparent that Whitey Cord had instigated the safecracking, no doubt spurred to action by Carl Vegas’ threat to arrange for a deposition to be mailed to the district attorney in the event anything happened to him.

As soon as the document was safely in Cord’s hands and he had read the contents, he had moved swiftly to eliminate not only Vegas, but the two witnesses to the murder of Otis Taylor. Apparently he still considered Tony Marzulla “safe” enough to leave alive.

The phone call had been to determine if Stella knew the contents of the affidavit. Obviously Whitey Cord had been behind it and, as he couldn’t afford to leave anyone alive who knew what Stella knew, he had sent his hired killers to dispose of her.

Setting down her drink without touching it, Stella ran to the outer office, grabbed her bag from her desk and raced to the door. Her high heels clattered along the tile hallway as she hurried toward the fire exit. She had just rounded the corner leading to the exit when she heard the doors of the elevator open. Stepping back out of sight, she pressed her back against the wall and waited, fearful that the sound of her footsteps might bring the killers to her.

She heard two sets of footsteps cross the hall and heard the office door open, so violently that it banged back against the wall. With pounding heart she stopped and slipped off both shoes. Carrying them, she continued on tiptoe to the fire exit, eased open the door and let it shut silently behind her again.

She ran down the stairs at full speed, replaced her shoes only when she reached the alley into which the fire exit spilled her, click-clicked up the alley at a jiggling trot and luckily caught a cab which was cruising along the cross street just as she emerged from the alley.

Jumping into the back seat, she gasped out her home address.

“What’re you running from?” the cabbie asked. With effort Stella brought herself under control. “I’m not running from, I’m running to,” she said. “I have to catch a bus, and first I have to make a couple of stops. Please hurry.”

“Sure,” the driver said cheerfully, and took off as though he were heading down the stretch at the Indianapolis Speedway.

Within minutes the cab pulled up in front of the brown-stone rooming house where Stella lived. Ordering the driver to wait, she ran up the steps and moments later was keying open her door.

Pulling a suitcase from her closet, she opened it and began flinging in clothes. She must have established some sort of a record for packing, for she carried the suitcase out to the cab five minutes after entering the rooming house. Most of her clothing remained in the room, but the suitcase contained all the items necessary for quick flight.

Her next stop was her bank, where she had the cabbie wait again. Her account stood at four hundred and eighteen dollars. She drew out four hundred.

Back in the cab again, she said to the driver, “The Greyhound Bus Terminal.”

It didn’t even occur to her to go to the police. Not after what had happened to Carl Vegas and the two innocent witnesses to Otis Taylor’s murder. And she had often read news items about witnesses against racketeers either disappearing or being shot down on the street. She didn’t have much faith in the efficacy of police protection.

At the bus terminal she noted by the call board that the first bus left in five minutes. She wasn’t concerned about direction; only about distance. Studying the stops the bus made, she noted that it reached the City of St. Stephen in twelve hours. That should make it somewhere between four and six hundred miles, she thought; a nice safe distance.

Approaching the ticket window, she said, “One way to St. Stephen.”