The Loner: Crossfire

Chapter 4

Conrad went straight to his hotel, where the desk clerk handed him a city directory. It took only a moment to look up the address of Carl Monroe’s office. Wallace had said the authorities would question Monroe, but Conrad wanted to get to him first.

The clerk gave him directions to the address. The building was only about four blocks away. Monroe’s office was on the second floor, above a bank. The building had one of those newfangled elevators, but Conrad took the stairs.

Gilt letters on the pebbled glass upper half of a door in the hallway read CARL MONROE, ATTORNEY AT LAW. Conrad didn’t knock. He grasped the knob with his left hand while his right hovered near the butt of his Colt. He didn’t expect to walk into another ambush in the lawyer’s office, but it didn’t pay to take too many chances. He turned the knob and shoved the door open.

An attractive woman with blond hair swept into an elaborate pile of curls on top of her head looked up from a typewriter on her desk. “Yes? May I help you?”

He glanced around the room. It was a typical outer office, with the desk, a coat rack and hat tree, and a couple filing cabinets. A portrait of President McKinley hung on the wall, looking down in solemn dignity. For all that, the rug on the floor was a little threadbare, and the walls could have used a fresh coat of paint.

“I need to see Mr. Monroe,” Conrad said.

“I’m not aware of any appointments he has at this time,” the blonde said. “Is this concerning a legal matter?” She looked at him a little dubiously, probably because he hadn’t taken the time to change his clothes and still wore the mud-stained suit.

Conrad nodded. “You could say that. It involves a couple associates of his named Gillespie and Farley.”

The blonde frowned and shook her head. “I’m not familiar with those names.” Even as she spoke, Conrad saw her shift slightly in her chair, and his keen ears picked up the faint sound of a buzzer from behind the door leading to Monroe’s private office. He knew the woman had used her foot to press an alarm button. Monroe probably had another way out of his office.

Conrad didn’t wait. He moved past the blonde’s desk in a hurry. She leaped up from her chair and tried to grab his coat. “You can’t—”, but she was too late. He was already ramming his shoulder against the door of Monroe’s office. It slammed open, and he saw movement from the corner of his eye. A bulky figure was halfway through another door, on his way out.

Conrad drew his Colt and eared back the hammer, even though that wasn’t necessary since the revolver was a double-action model. He figured the sound of the gun being cocked might be enough to stop the fleeing figure in his tracks.

It worked. The man froze in the doorway. “Don’t shoot!”

“Turn around,” Conrad told him. “Slowly.”

The man did as he was ordered. He was short, heavyset, had a florid face, and hair that looked like it had been slicked down with black shoe polish. His suit, like his offices, appeared to be of good quality at first glance, but another look revealed its worn, shabby nature.

“I don’t know who you are, friend, but you don’t have to bust in here with a gun,” Monroe said. “I’m always glad to talk to anyone, especially a potential client.”

“I’m not a client. I’m Conrad Browning.”

The look of alarm that flashed in Monroe’s eyes told Conrad the lawyer recognized his name. Monroe controlled the reaction quickly, and said, “If you’ll put that gun away, Mr. Browning, I’ll be happy to discuss whatever it is that’s bothering you.”

“What’s bothering me is that you paid Ed Gillespie and Walt Farley to kill me.”

“My God!” Monroe exclaimed. “I never did such a thing! I don’t even know who you’re talking about.”

Conrad went on as if Monroe hadn’t said anything. “What I want to know now is who paid you to hire them. Tell me that and our business is done.”

“It’s impossible. I can’t tell you something I don’t know anything about!”

“Mr. Monroe?” the blond secretary said from behind Conrad. “Do you want me to summon the authorities?”

Monroe’s eyes flicked toward her over Conrad’s shoulder. “No, no, I’m sure that’s not necessary—”

Something in Monroe’s expression warned Conrad. He turned around in time to see the blonde had picked up the freestanding hat tree and was swinging it at his head. He twisted quickly, and the base crashed against his shoulder instead of his skull.

The impact was enough to make him stagger and drop his gun. The blonde drew the hat tree back and tried to ram it into his belly. Conrad caught hold of it and wrenched it out of her hands as he heard the rapid slap of shoe leather behind him. A glance over his shoulder told him Monroe was running again.

Conrad turned to go after him, but the blonde leaped on his back. The unexpected weight sent him to his knees. She wrapped one arm around his neck and clawed at his face with the fingernails of her other hand. He jerked his head away from her and reached back to grab the pile of blond curls. Leaning forward he pulled, and the woman cried out as she slid over his back and went crashing to the floor. The chivalrous part of him hated to treat a female that way, but he ignored it for the moment as he sprang to his feet and leaped over her.

The struggle had delayed him long enough that Monroe had gotten away. The door into the corridor stood open. Conrad snatched up his Colt, then raced through the door and looked along the hall. The door of the elevator cage was just sliding shut. As it did, Conrad caught a glimpse of Monroe’s frightened face through the narrow opening.

Conrad made a dash for the same stairs that had taken him to the second floor. He bounded down them two and three steps at a time and got to the lobby just as the door of the elevator cage opened a few yards away.

The look of fright on the face of the elderly black elevator operator warned him. The man flinched aside as Carl Monroe thrust a small pistol at Conrad and pulled the trigger.

As the little gun cracked spitefully, Conrad threw himself forward and down. The bullet went over his head and ricocheted off the marble floor of the bank occupying the ground level of the building. While he was scrambling back to his feet, Monroe bolted from the elevator and made a run for the front doors with surprising speed for a short, fat lawyer.

He clutched the pistol in his hand, and with pandemonium breaking out in the bank because of the shot, it was an unlucky break for Monroe that he was armed. The guard at the doors drew his own weapon, a .38 caliber Smith & Wesson double-action revolver, and yelled at Monroe, “Hold it right there!”

The lawyer didn’t slow down. It was impossible to tell whether he brandished his gun at the guard on purpose or if the muzzle just swung in that direction because Monroe was pumping his arms as he ran. Either way, as the barrel of Monroe’s gun rose toward the guard, he fired.

And not just one shot. Thinking a bank robbery was taking place, the guard kept squeezing the trigger and emptied all five rounds in the Smith & Wesson’s cylinder into the lawyer’s chest. Monroe’s momentum kept him going forward even though his body jerked violently under the impact of each slug. His feet went out from under him as his nerves and muscles stopped working, and he pitched forward to land on his face with a soggy thud and slide across the slick marble floor until he came to a stop almost at the stunned guard’s feet.

The guard slowly lowered his gun and stared at the dead lawyer with horrified eyes. “Holy cats!” he yelped. “That’s no bank robber! That’s Mr. Monroe!”

As Conrad came to his feet, he felt sorry for the guard. The man had heard the shot, seen somebody rushing toward him with a gun, and hadn’t paid any attention to who it was. Thinking he was about to be gunned down by a fleeing robber, the guard had opened fire. Nobody could blame him.

But they might blame Conrad for starting the ruckus. He long legged it back to the nearby stairs and went up them in a hurry, heading toward the still-open rear door of Monroe’s office. He could plainly hear the commotion downstairs and knew it wouldn’t be long before the law showed up.

He went into the office warily, just in case that homicidal blonde was still there and might try to brain him again. He didn’t see any sign of her in either office. Clearly, she had realized a lot of trouble was about to come crashing down and had taken off for the tall and uncut while she had the chance.

Conrad went straight to Monroe’s desk and started pawing through the papers on top. He was looking for a name he might recognize or any sort of communication with a San Francisco address on it. All across the country as he searched for his missing children, Conrad had run into traps set for him by Pamela years earlier. She had hired men to try to kill him, and he was convinced the latest attempt on his life was one more instance of that. Maybe Pamela had made the arrangements with Monroe directly when she passed through Carson City with the twins, but she might have used an intermediary in San Francisco to set it up. That was the name Conrad was looking for.

Not finding anything among the papers on the desk, he jerked open the drawers and pawed through them. That proved just as fruitless, leaving only the filing cabinets in the outer office.

He hurried in there and yanked open a drawer. He pulled out a handful of papers and started skimming through them, discarding them when he didn’t find any helpful information. The sheets of correspondence, bills, and legal documents drifted down and soon covered the floor around his feet.

He was working on the third drawer when he found a stack of memorandums dated almost three years earlier. One of them bore the scribbled notation D.L. Golden Gate $5000 C.B. Below that, written in a slightly different colored ink, probably at a different time, were the initials E.G. and W.F., followed by $300.

Ed Gillespie and Walt Farley, Conrad thought. Someone had paid Monroe $5000 to set up the ambush, and he had turned around and paid Gillespie and Farley the princely sum of $300 to carry out the killing. You get what you pay for, Conrad told himself, and Monroe hadn’t gotten much out of Gillespie and Farley except spectacular failure.

And a final payment of five .38 caliber bullets in the chest from the guard downstairs in the bank.

Conrad had no doubt the C.B. on the note meant him. And Golden Gate could certainly refer to San Francisco. The Golden Gate was the opening between the Pacific Ocean and San Francisco Bay, and it was also a popular name for businesses in the city.

But who or what was D.L.? Conrad had no idea. Claudius Turnbuckle might be able to find out. Conrad would wire him with the information immediately, so Turnbuckle could start working on the problem while Conrad was on his way to San Francisco.

He stuffed the memorandum in his pocket and turned away from the filing cabinets, the papers on the floor crackling and crinkling under his boots as he did so. When he came around to face the door, he stopped short and didn’t move except to raise his hands slightly.

He was staring down the barrel of a gun.