Murder for Two (9 page)

That was her first shocking thought. It had never occurred to her that it could be anyone else and for a moment panic struck at her and her throat closed.

“Oh,” she gasped, and wondered if she should try to slam the door.

As though he sensed this, the man moved up, and then it was too late and suddenly she realized that something about that shadowy face seemed familiar.

“Miss Harding?” He took off his hat and then she knew.

This man was Russell Gifford.

Not the Russell Gifford she had seen before. That man had mild blue eyes and a round, pinkish face. This man's features were strained and stiff and the eyes, in shadow, were narrowed and fixed. One hand was deep in the pocket of his topcoat and there was a bulge there, bigger than a hand should have been. Something protruded against the fabric. She found herself backing slowly into the room, her gaze held by this protrusion.

Gifford came in. “I was afraid you might have gone to bed,” he said.

Karen Harding backed into the table. She waited, trapped now, seeing Gifford catch the edge of the door with his elbow and close it by leaning against it. Quickly his eyes took in all the room; then they came back to her.

Chapter Eight

A M
INOR
S
HAMBLES

I
T WAS TWENTY MINUTES AFTER TWO
when Lieutenant Logan braked the police car in front of the
Express
Building and it was Logan's fault that it was so late. On the way up from the Club 17 he had decided he was hungry and he had talked Casey into keeping him company while he consumed a sandwich and a glass of milk. Now, watching the big photographer get out, he said:

“Why don't you go home?”

“Why didn't you take me home from the Club 17?” Casey said. “Go ahead. I'll take a look around first.”

It was a nightly habit of Casey's. There wasn't any particular reason for it—unless he was on assignment; the paper would get put to bed all right whether he was there or not, but he liked to stop by just to see what had been going on. After a dozen disillusioning years he still had enthusiasm for a tough assignment or the chance for an exclusive shot and he felt a certain proprietory interest in the
Express
, which probably was one of the reasons why he was the best camera man in town and the best paid.

He went through the foyer, illumined only by the night-lights in the adjoining classified offices, and woke up Al, the elevator operator.

“Why don't you got to bed nights?” he asked.

“I get paid not to,” Al yawned. “Why don't you?”

“I sometimes wonder,” Casey said.

He went down the corridor, humming softly. The anteroom was dark and he snapped on the light. Instantly he stiffened and the humming stopped, and for a moment after that all he could do was stare. Then an outraged growl rose in his throat that sharpened to a curse and his rugged face got dark and stormy.

Stiff-legged and jut-jawed, he strode to his desk. It was a minor shambles now. Drawers stood open. Films had been scattered about and plates were broken in the wastebasket and his extra plate-case had the top off, its equipment a tangled mess.

He knelt beside this first, shaking with rage as he sorted his paraphernalia and put it back properly. He began to take exposed plates from the wastebasket and inspect them against the light. Some were broken, some were not, as though the intruder had taken them from the desk drawers and tossed them there one after another as they were examined.

Casey recovered what he could. There were not more than thirty or forty of them, but to him they represented something that could not be replaced. Of the thousands of pictures he had taken over the years, these were the ones he had thought worth saving, spot-news shots mostly, that told a documented story, a historical story really, of his profession. He had collected them as a connoisseur of paintings collects old masters, though with Casey there was a stronger attachment, since these were his own creations and the result of luck, enthusiasm, and hard work.

When he had finished gathering them together, he found that only five were damaged, but this did not mitigate the enormity of the crime. If Casey had been a family man, if he had a couple of youngsters at home and some person broke in and gave them a thrashing the parallel would have been roughly the same. These were his babies and they had been broken needlessly, almost deliberately.

“They could have searched the desk without doing this,” he said half aloud and then, through a chink in his armor of rage, a new thought filtered.

Why?

What could anyone be looking for? He had taken no pictures. He had been out since nine o'clock and heard a murder story and chased around with Logan and he didn't have a single plate to show for it except—

“Byrkman,” he said.

He opened the plate-case he had brought with him. He removed a film-holder and stared morosely at it as he turned it over in his big hands. He put it down on the desk and, still staring, took off his hat and ran his fingers through thick brown hair peppered with gray at the sides.

For perhaps a full minute he stood there, his rugged face twisted in thought, his dark eyes sultry. Somehow it didn't make sense and yet, it had to. There was nothing else. He thought again of the mousy little man with the rimless glasses and grunted softly. A guy like that wouldn't take this chance and if he had he wouldn't break things, he'd search quickly and run.

That damn Logan
, he thought.
If it hadn't been for him I would have been here
.

Then he thought of something else and strode from the room, annoyed that he hadn't thought of it before. At the elevators he pushed the button, held it with his thumb, pushed it twice more.

“I heard you the first time,” Al said, and yawned in Casey's face.

“Who's been up in the studio?”

“What do you mean, who's been up?” Al said. “Wade was here until—”

“Who else? Who that you know didn't belong?”

“Oh,” Al said, eyes brightening at last, “a dame was up. She asked for you and—”

“A blonde? Young, with a camel's-hair coat.”

“Yeah.”

Casey took a breath. Things were slightly mixed up inside his head and he wanted to get them straight.

“When? What did she say?”

“She asked were you here—that was around a quarter of one or so, I guess—and I said you weren't and she said could she go in the studio and wait.”

“When did she leave?”

“She left with Wade. About a half hour ago.”

For a second or two Casey felt better. The first quick thrust of apprehension went away. If Karen Harding was with Wade she'd be all right.

“There must've been somebody else,” he said. “Think, damn it!”

“I don't have to think,” Al said and yawned again. “Two guys.”

Casey said, “Oh,” slowly, ominously.

Two men had tied up Helen MacKay and searched Rosalind Taylor's apartment. One of those was probably a murderer. If Lawson had anything to do with it, and if there was some good reason why Henry Byrkman did not want to have his picture taken, he could have phoned Lawson. That much could be figured. And that scene in Lawson's office—

“Was one of them a big blond guy?” he asked.

“One of 'em was big,” Al said. “Seems like he could've been blond. He had his hat on but—yeah, maybe he was.”

“When?”

“About twenty minutes ago.”

“When'd they leave?”

“Just a little bit ago. You couldn't have missed them by more'n three or four minutes.”

“Did they ask for me?”

“Yeah. I told 'em you weren't in. I told them there was nobody in the studio but they said they'd wait. And then they didn't.”

Casey went back down the corridor, his head bent and brow corrugated. He sat down at his desk, his rage at the desecration of his property still smoldering, but tempered now with doubt. There was, he saw, a reason for the searching of his desk since there were two pictures—the one of Byrkman and the one of the blond bruiser—that might be wanted. He could not, however, find any reason why Karen Harding should have come here at that hour.

Presently he gave up trying to find a reason and looked once more through his desk. He found nothing missing. He glanced at the wastebasket and the fragments of his ruined plates. There was a crumpled piece of paper on the floor near by and he retrieved this and opened it idly, seeing the writing on it, turning it around so he could read it. When he saw it started
Mr. Casey
, he sat up fast.

I waited until one-forty but you didn't come, so I put a picture in the center drawer. If it's not too late, will you phone me at Center 9862—Kay Harding
.

Casey spread the paper on the desk and read it again, knowing now that this had been left for him. In a prominent place, probably, and that meant the two men who had come later had read it.

So what?
he thought.

Suppose they had. They didn't know who Kay Harding was, did they? Only—he opened the drawer—where the hell was the picture she'd left? What picture? She hadn't taken any pictures except the one of him out in front of John Perry's place.

He searched the drawer, closed it, for the moment thinking he had the answer. She'd developed her film—with Wade, maybe—and she'd left this print of him. Only why would those two guys have taken it, if that's what it was?

There was no answer to this and it bothered him strangely, even when he told himself he was imagining things. He took the film-holder which he had exposed on Henry Byrkman and shoved it far back in the center drawer. He glanced about, picked up his plate-case, and started for the door only to stop halfway there and come back. At the desk he got out the telephone book and was glad when he saw Karen Harding was listed. He jotted down the address; when he saw that it was but a five-minute drive, he decided to go that way on his ride home.

Al was still yawning when the elevator door clanged back. “Everything okay?”

“Everything is dandy,” Casey said. “Those two guys you let in turned my desk upside down and broke a half a dozen of my best plates, but other than that everything is fine.”

“They did?” Al's mouth gaped. “Jeeze. Who were they, do you think? What'd they want?”

“The time to have asked that, my friend,” Casey said sourly, “was when they came in.”

He got out and went through the foyer, slapping his way through the revolving door and stopping on the sidewalk to hitch his plate-case more securely on his shoulder and button his coat. He looked up at the star-studded sky and filled his lungs, realizing now that he was tired, listening for a moment to the faint monotonous rumble of the presses in the background. Off to the right, waiting trucks were backed up to the loading-platform, and farther along the narrow street others waited to take their turn. Casey swung left.

It was perhaps a hundred feet to the corner. A car was parked just ahead of him directly opposite a no-parking sign, and a man who had been standing across the street now came toward it. Casey glanced at him and kept moving. He came alongside the car. The sidewalk was narrow here so that he had to pass within two feet of the lowered front window, and he lacked a step of being even with this window when the man inside leaned out and pointed something at his head.

“Stand still, pal!”

Casey froze. Even in the darkness he saw the glint of blue steel and the ugly round muzzle of the gun. He pulled his gaze away with an effort and looked past it. The man behind it was the blond bruiser he'd seen in Lawson's office.

“That's it,” Blondie said. “You're doing all right. Got him, Harry?”

The man who had crossed the street came round the back of the car and pushed something hard against Casey's spine.

“Got him,” he said.

Blondie reached backward and opened the rear door of the sedan. “Inside, pal,” he said.

Casey hesitated, measuring distances and his chances, something telling him that whatever these two had come for, they hadn't got it. Dimly he heard the rumble of the presses. Not fifty feet behind him two truck drivers were arguing and he could hear a motor throbbing as a truck got ready to leave. Then the gun hit him again in the spine. He could feel his back muscles tighten and he half turned, talking over his shoulder.

“Take it easy with that thing.”

“Sure,” Harry said. “Climb in.”

“Why the hell should I?”

“A fair question,” Blondie said. “Tell him, Harry.”

“On account it's easier than bending your skull and having to lift you. Also we're in a hurry. Move.”

Casey's gaze came back to the gun leveled at his head. He got in the car, pushing his plate-case ahead of him on the floor. He sat down, aware that Blondie had covered him all the way with the gun.

“Where we going?” Casey said. “Or aren't you supposed to tell?”

“By-by,” Blondie said. “Relax. In the corner.”

Casey wasn't scared, but neither was he fool enough to argue with two guns, now that he saw it wouldn't do any good. He shoved over on the seat, watching Harry follow him in and sit in the opposite corner. He couldn't tell much about Harry except that he was about averagesized, with a dark coat and hat, an unpleasant voice, and a big automatic in his hand.

“Put your hands on the back of the front seat,” Harry said, “and leave 'em there. Do you move 'em, you get it.”

Blondie closed the door, stepped on the starter, and shifted. The car swung right at the corner and then left on Tremont. Casey kept his hands on the seat back and the rage and resentment that had first struck when he found his smashed plates welled up inside him in ever-widening waves.

“You're the guys that searched my desk, huh?”

“The same,” Blondie said and Harry said, “Why?”