The Shadowers

IX

IT TOOK a bit of doing, of course. No man really likes to be used as a punching bag in front of a woman, even if she isn't quite Sophia Loren. There was even a certain risk, but an attacker who really means business seldom wastes his time and effort with the fists. You get so you can sense when there is real danger, and when the worst that can happen is getting your block knocked off in an amateurish way.

A moment after I'd hit the hail carpet, Olivia was kneeling beside me. Her hand touched my face, but her words weren't addressed to me.

"That was brave!" I heard her cry. "To attack a man from behind, without warning! That's just what I would have expected from you, Harold!"

"You were going into his room!" Harold, whoever he was, had a fine baritone, with indignant overtones.

"And why not? It wouldn't be the first time I'd gone into a man's room, would it? Not quite the first!"

"Look at you!" he cried, ignoring this. "Letting a cynical reporter-oh, I asked about him at the desk- ply you with liquor until you can hardly stand and bring you up here! He was laughing at you, Olivia, couldn't you see? He just thought it was an amusing way to spend an evening. It meant nothing to him, nothing at all."

She said fiercely, "That's right, nothing! No more than it meant to you. You're a fine one to criticize other men's motives!"

"Olivia-"

"Do you think I didn't know what he was doing?" she demanded. "All right, so it amused him to be charming to the mousy lady scientist. Maybe it amused me to play up to him! Maybe I thought it would be entertaining to deliberately let a slick, experienced character like that get me drunk and… and lure me to his room for immoral purposes. After all, I seem to be susceptible to slick characters, and what does it matter now? At least he was honest, Harold. At least he said nothing about love!"

I would have liked to listen to them longer, but they were being pretty loud and somebody in a neighboring room might get tired of the noise and call the manager. I'd learned about as much as I could hope for. I stirred, therefore, groaned, and opened my eyes. I sat up dazedly. Olivia helped me. I looked up at the man who had slugged me.

He was in his late twenties or early thirties with a roughhewn touch of Lincoln or Gregory Peck about the physiognomy, carefully cultivated. It was obvious that regardless of what might have come between them lately, he and Olivia were born to be soulmates. His tweeds were every bit as tweedy as hers, and his glasses were no less thick and black in the rims. They gave him a sincere and earnest look.

"If you'd only let me explain!" he was saying.

She wasn't looking at him any more. "Are you all right, Paul?" she asked.

"You're making a terrible mistake," Harold protested. "If you'd only listen, darling! You completely misunderstood what you heard in the office that day. Miss Darden and I were only-"

She didn't turn her head. "Haven't you done enough? Do you have to wake the whole hotel, too? You can't persuade me there was any misunderstanding. You and your nurse made it all perfectly plain. I could hear you clear out m the waiting room, every word. You should really close the door before you indulge in private jokes with your employees, Harold!"

"It wasn't what you thought-"

"I heard my name quite plainly." Her voice was harsh. "The GLP complex, you called it, meaning grateful lady patient. Apparently it's a recognized syndrome and one of which unscrupulous medical practitioners sometimes take advantage, as you did. Well, this lady patient is no longer grateful, Dr. Mooney. Goodbye!"

She helped me to my feet. The guy was still standing there, still protesting, but she never looked at him. She just led me into my room and closed the door behind us. Then she turned and locked it carefully. Finally she faced me again and raised both hands to her hair, smoothing it back from her temples wearily.

"Phew!" she said softly. "Well, there you have my private reason for not receiving telephone calls, Mr. Corcoran. I hope you approve of the performance I put on for him."

"A little more practice and we'll have you in the movies," I said.

I stepped up to the door and listened. There was no sound outside. Presently I heard the elevator doors clang shut far down the hall. I turned back to Olivia to find that she'd gone over to sit in the big chair with which my room, like hers, was provided.

"Dr. Harold Mooney," I said. "Doctor of what?"

"Obstetrics and gynecology," she said. "He's a specialist in women's diseases. Also, I'm afraid, in women. He's quite a specimen, isn't he? Genus Casanova, species phony. He's come all the way from Pensacola to plead for forgiveness, he says, but what he's really frightened of is that I'll make a scandal and ruin his profitable practice. As if I'd want to let people know what a fool I've been!"

She drew a long, uneven breath, fished for her glasses in her pocket, and put them back on. After a moment, she unbuttoned her jacket, unfastened the snug round collar of her silk blouse, sighed with relief, leaned back comfortably, and stuck her legs out in front of her, a little apart. Her attitude was mildly defiant as if she was aware that this pose was neither graceful nor ladylike and to hell with it. She looked up and saw me rubbing my jaw.

"I thought you people were supposed to be able to take care of yourselves," she murmured with a touch of malice. I said, "What did you want me to do, pitch him out of a fifth-floor window with a judo throw, or crack a couple of vertebrae with a karate chop to the neck? Besides leaving us the problem of disposing of a body, those are hardly techniques you'd attribute to a dissipated lecherous Denver reporter. Besides, there's the possibility that we may want the guy alive."

She frowned quickly. "What do you mean?"

I looked down at her. Her relaxed posture allowed a lot of leg to show. There was even some lingerie on display, a nice bit of cream-colored slip with darker, coffee-colored lace, pretty and provocative and completely out of character-but then, so was a love affair with a handsome doctor. Somebody had obviously slipped, digging out her background; she'd managed to keep some things well concealed. There was obviously more to Dr. Olivia Mariassy than her plain, tweedy, unpromising exterior had seemed to indicate.

"Where did you meet this guy?" I asked.

"In his office. Although we're kind of attached to the Naval Air Station and use their facilities, we don't officially rate attention from the Navy doctors, and being a doctor myself I detest people who try to scrounge free medical service they're not entitled to. Later, I met Dr. Mooney at a cocktail party in town. He remembered me, which was flattering. Most men don't, as a person, although they may remember me as a scientist." She spoke in a dry, detached voice. "We talked about medicine and other things. We had dinner together that night and other nights. You can guess the rest."

"Sure." I crossed the room to the phone, and activated the New Orleans-Denver-Washington circuits for the second time that night. "Never mind switching me upstairs," I said to the girl when I got the number. "Just have them run a fast check on Mooney, Harold-M.D. in obstetrics and gynecology and don't ask me how to spell it. Home base, Pensacola, Florida. Let me have it here in the morning, whatever you can get at once; in the meantime tell them to put somebody to really digging for dirt. Check his home, his office, everything. Any word on Karl Kroch yet?"

There wasn't, which was odd. Generally they can run down a man with a record in the business pretty fast, and I was willing to bet Kroch's record was long and gaudy. I hung up. Olivia hadn't moved.

"Karl Kroch?" she said. "Is that the man-"

"The one who was watching us in the bar downstairs, earlier this evening. The one who was so mean to the little girl in pink. The one we wanted, I thought. Now I'm not so sure."

"Because of Harold?" Her eyes followed me as I came back across the room. "You're wrong, Mr. Corcoran. I can see your line of reasoning, of course, but you're wrong."

I said, "We put on an act, Doc. We met cute, we got drunk cute, we indicated we were going to make love cute, just to see who'd be interested. Well, there were distractions, but a fish finally took the bait, didn't he? Your friend Mooney had obviously been watching us off and on. He admits he even checked on me at the desk."

She was still lying back in the big chair, relaxed and surprisingly careless about what showed and what didn't, considering where she was and what she was. I reminded myself that I was no longer quite sure what she was. The longer this night went on, it seemed, the less sure I was about anything.

"It's plausible," she said thoughtfully, "it's plausible, but it's wrong. The man who's watching me is supposed to be a trained professional killer, isn't he? Well, Harold couldn't commit that kind of crime if his life depended on it. He hasn't got the nerve, Mr. Corcoran. Swinging a fist at a man who isn't looking is just about his limit. He's a… a handsome phony. I know." She grimaced. "Now I know."

I said, "Still, he apparently made a point of getting acquainted with you in Pensacola. He followed you here. We can't ignore him just because you think he's a lightweight. It's standard procedure, Doc, for an agent to act dumber and more scared than he is."

"Well, I'm sure you're mistaken." She sighed, giving up the argument, and surveyed the room lazily. "Only one bed? Do we toss for it? I suppose I have to spend the night here, what's left of it, and slip back to my room about dawn looking suitably mussed and made-love-to. Oh, dear, and when I think of the way I sneaked around trying to keep people from knowing about Harold and me!" She laughed. "Well, it's going to be a refreshing change, being brazen about it. What happens afterward?"

I said, "In the morning, true love having blossomed during the wee hours, we head for Alabama on our way to Pensacola and home. Your home."

"Why Alabama?"

"There's no waiting period in Alabama. You just take a blood test and see the judge."

She looked quickly but didn't speak at once. Then she said, "I suppose that's still necessary."

"More than ever, I'd say. Now we have to see which one of them comes after you; and we've got to keep up the act for Mooney's sake, if not for Kroch's."

"Harold lives in Pensacola, don't forget. It will prove nothing if he follows us there."

"The roundabout way we'll drive, it'll prove something," I said. "Here are two things for you to keep in mind, Doc. One, like Orpheus and Eurydice, you don't look back." I grinned at her expression. "Don't act so surprised. It isn't polite. Us undercover types often read the classics to improve our minds when we're not dealing with murder and mayhem. Some of us do, anyway. Don't be an intellectual snob."

She flushed slightly. "I didn't mean… Well, maybe I did. Sorry."

"You don't look back," I went on. "I'll do the looking. You have no doubts, no suspicions. You're just a lady in love, bringing home a brand-new husband-one you married on the rebound, true, but that just makes you more determined to show people it's all perfectly lovely."

"Well, I'll try to look blissfully ignorant and… and appropriately amorous." She hesitated. "You said two things. What's the other."

I reached down deliberately and gave a jerk to the hem of her skirt. "Number two," I said, "is, you keep your damn skirt down where it belongs."

It brought a gasp from her. It brought her upright in the chair. "Really…!"

I said, "I'm not an impressionable kid, but I'm not so damn ancient I don't react to normal stimuli, Doc. Now we both know you have attractive legs, nice nylons, and a pretty slip. We both know, too, that you're no longer quite the prim spinster lady you've been pretending to be. Well, whatever you learned from Mooney, please don't try it on me, doll. In public, we'll carry the lovey-dovey routine as far as necessary, but in private, like this, nix. You keep a reasonable amount of clothes on the body, and you keep them where they count." I stared at her in a hard way. "That is, of course, assuming that you want to keep it strictly business between us."

She was on her feet now, tugging her suit straight and buttoning her blouse with hands that weren't quite steady. "I'm sorry…!" Anger choked her briefly. "I'm very sorry if I've… disturbed you, Mr. Corcoran! It's late and I'm tired and just a bit tight; I didn't realize I was straining your self-control. It wasn't deliberate, I assure you!"

"Maybe it wasn't," I said. "And then again, maybe it was. You don't look to me like a dame who shows a guy the view past the tops of her stockings without knowing it, drunk or sober. I don't quite follow the reasoning behind the tempting display, but it doesn't look like any gambit I read in the copy of Capablanca you so kindly lent me." I drew a long breath. "What I'm saying, Doc, is that if you want me to keep this love-and-marriage stuff on a business basis, you keep it that way, too. If you want to play, we'll play, and you'll find yourself flat on your back with your dress up and your girdle down so fast it'll make your head swim. Do I make myself perfectly clear?"

It was pretty crude; but the whole unbuttoned, inviting, leggy bit had been too far out of character for me to let it pass unchallenged. A woman who, alone, would read about infinity fully dressed without a hair out of place wasn't going to lounge untidily and suggestively about a man's room without some purpose. The notion that came to mind was so crazy I had to check it out, even at the cost of being rude.

She stared at me for a moment, her eyes furious, her pale lips tightly compressed; then she laughed. It was a surprising laugh, for her, a real laugh, a woman's laugh, soft and throaty and triumphant.

"Corcoran," she murmured, "you're bluffing like hell!"

I looked at her sharply, and everything changed, as it does. It had been a long, complicated night, but everything was suddenly very plain and simple and I realized at last who-behind all the doubletalk and drinking and fancy acting-had actually been seducing whom.

"You're bluffing!" she breathed.

"Don't count on it," I said stiffly.

"You're bluffing!" she whispered. "You talk big but you won't… won't touch me. You don't dare!"

It had been a long time since I'd done anything because somebody dared me, but I'd already been strong-minded once that night, and I could see no good reason for it here. To be sure, Mac had warned me to be diplomatic, but under the circumstances it was a little hard to say where true diplomacy lay.

I reached out and took her glasses off for the second time that night. This time I really looked at her. The face was all right, once you started looking at it as the face of a woman instead of a genius and made allowance for the lack of lipstick. The eyes were fine without the glasses, a little bold but also, I was glad to see, a little scared, as if she didn't quite know what she was getting herself into besides a bed. Well, that made two of us.

I said, "The reception was poor at first, Doc, but now I read you loud and clear. Brief me. Do we lead up to the subject with a little breathless talk about love, or do we simply adjourn to the bed, approximately five feet away."

She licked her lips. "Let's not be hypocritical. You've probably gathered I've heard quite enough talk about love. I vote… I vote the meeting be adjourned as specified, before…" There was a shaky little pause. "… before the lady loses her nerve!"