Dead on the Level (2 page)

“What did you just say?” he asked numbly.

“Five thousand,” the girl answered.

Five thousand. Add a dollar sign and it was as lovely a phrase as Casey had ever heard. He was trying desperately to make something coherent out of it when an inward-bound customer came through the street door bringing a gust of lake wind with him. It was that raw, cold wind that puts the edge on a cloudy Monday in Chicago when November has her teeth in, and it helped a lot. Casey shook his head, knowing he’d have to cover a lot of ground to catch up with the conversation, but now the girl had stopped talking and was waiting. Waiting, he finally realized, for him.

“We’ll have to get started if we’re going to get there before dark,” she said.

Apparently they were going somewhere. He hated admitting that he’d missed anything and faked comprehension all through the struggle of getting to his feet and inside of his raincoat, but he couldn’t fake forever. “Look,” he said, as they started for that street door together, “I want to get this straight. Just what kind of a job did you say this was?”

He’d been right about her smile. It materialized, and it was very special. And it was downright fantastic what crazy, cockeyed dreams could come out of a bottle.

“You must have been woolgathering,” she chided. “You might at least pay a little attention when a girl asks you to marry her.”

THAT WAS the dream. Casey came out of it slowly, stretched out the kinks in his legs, and opened his eyes. And then the world didn’t make any sense at all. He was lying face down on some kind of cot, narrow and apparently devoid of springs, and the first thing to meet his eyes as he raised himself up was a nude woman sitting on a kitchen chair at the opposite side of the room. She wasn’t a particularly attractive nude, mostly thighs, but it did occur to Casey that this was a somewhat peculiar visitation for so early in the morning—or whatever that gray light was. He propped himself up on his elbows and took another look, and then gradually became aware of a few more peculiarities, a dead fish and a bottle of wine, for instance, and what appeared to be a sky full of flying disks with one warped ukelele. Casey grinned. They were all paintings. The room was filled with paintings that were stacked in layers against the walls.

On second thought, very careful thought this time, the canvases didn’t make any more sense than his first impression. Despite a formidable pressure centered somewhere above his eyebrows, Casey managed to attain a sitting position on the cot and began to size up the room. It was small, square, and lighted only by a skylight about a half mile overhead, and with his usual morning-after brilliance Casey deduced that he was in an artist’s studio, cracked plaster, peeling paint, and all. The fact that he couldn’t remember knowing any artists didn’t shed much light on the situation, nor, for that matter, explain what kind soul had loosened his tie, removed his shoes, and tucked him in with an army surplus blanket. The same kind soul, no doubt, who was responsible for the heartening aroma of hot coffee now coming from somewhere beyond a cloth-draped easel. Casey eased into his shoes and went to investigate. He didn’t know what to expect, but certainly not what he found.

“I beg your pardon,” he said, as soon as his vocal chords consented to operate. “I don’t think we’ve been introduced.”

This time the woman wasn’t a painting. She was at least as tall as Casey, who was a long way from being a giant; she had mahogany-hued hair cut in a short, bushy cap, and wore a paint-stained smock over her pajamas, sheep-lined slippers on her feet, and an expression of tolerant amusement in her button-bright eyes. Furthermore, she looked to be the kind of woman who would admit being thirty even if she was only thirty-one.

“Just call me Maggie,” she said. “Do you mind drinking from a cup without a handle?”

“Is this your place?”

“As long as I pay the rent.”

The kitchen wasn’t much larger than a phone booth, but Maggie seemed to have everything under control. She turned away from the gas plate for a moment, turned on the water in a doll-sized sink, and came up with a bicarb. “All things considered,” she remarked dryly, “this probably won’t help much, but at least it’s a gesture.”

“Thanks,” Casey said. “By the way, what am I doing here?”

“I was hoping that you could tell me.”

“You don’t know?”

“Only that you’re a hard man with a doorbell. I don’t know what you’re selling, chum, but I rarely buy from bell pushers after two a.m.”

Casey grinned. Now that his eyes were getting used to being open, he could see Maggie’s face a lot better. It wasn’t exactly a pretty face, kind of pie-shaped with a nose that tilted up on the end and creased across the middle when she smiled. But it was a face that could say a great deal without opening its mouth.

“Was that why you took me in and bedded me down?” he asked.

“It was raining out.”

That wasn’t reason enough and Casey knew it, but he didn’t get a chance to track it down. “There’s a bathroom down the hall,” Maggie added quickly. “The water warms up some after it runs ten or fifteen minutes. By that time I’ll have the eggs scorched and the toast burned.”

A man of Casey Morrow’s varied experience was accustomed to meeting the cold gray dawn in strange and unexpected places, but voluptuous mermaids on the bathroom ceiling and Dali-like vistas on the walls didn’t exactly assist in his recomposure. The building was old, dark, and barnlike; something, he mused, that might have been left over from the Great Fire. And then it occurred to him that maybe this wasn’t Chicago at all. A sizable chunk of time was missing from among his souvenirs. Yesterday morning (or was it yesterday?) he had checked in at an expensive hotel overlooking Grant Park, paid a full day’s rate in advance, and set out to celebrate his home-coming in a manner befitting a man who’s just gone bankrupt. A sizable chunk was missing, all right, with nothing in between but a crazy dream of a girl with purple-smoke eyes. On the way back down the hall to Maggie’s studio he mulled over the dream again and decided not to bring it up. In a case such as this, the only acceptable procedure was to apologize, thank the lady, and blow. Maggie, however, didn’t seem to know that.

“You can at least drink some coffee,” she insisted. “I don’t mind the other occupants of this firetrap seeing a man leave my place so early in the morning, but I hate to have them thinking I’m so bad off I have to take in ghouls.”

Casey sighed and tackled the coffee—which wasn’t so bad as it should have been under the circumstances. “I suppose you’re waiting for an explanation. Sorry, but there isn’t any. Last night’s a complete washout. Whatever happened, well, I just don’t remember.”

She was looking at him in a peculiar sort of way, or maybe she just had a peculiar face. “I’m sorry,” Casey said again.

“Forget it,” Maggie said. “Haven’t you heard? Chicago is the city of the welcoming hand. We like our distinguished guests to have a good time.”

For a minute Casey didn’t get it, and then he remembered the labels in his suit and raincoat, both from a much too expensive shop in Beverly Hills. This, being Chicago, there must be a few conventions in town. Maggie was simply adding two and two under that curly cap and coming up with the wrong answer.

“That’s not me you’re talking about,” he corrected. “I’m just a local boy come home to roost.”

“Don’t tell me you tired of the land of sunshine and eternal youth.”

“It’s all right to live in,” Casey said, “but I’d sure hate to go there for a visit.”

“You’ve been away long?”

In her own, left-handed way, Maggie was pumping; but Casey didn’t mind. She was entitled to that much. “I’ve always been away,” he said. “Even when I lived here, even when I was a kid. Do you know what I mean?”

“I think so.”

“That’s good, because I’m not so sure.”

“And where was ‘away’?”

It was easy to talk to Maggie. Almost too easy. “Any place, every place,” Casey answered. “Somewhere where things were smooth. You know, chrome, plate glass, and nice, expensive upholstery. Smooth and clean. No alleys full of garbage, no sweltering walk-ups, nobody jumping down anybody’s throat all the time just because their nerves were worried thin—” It was terrible the way the yesterdays could gang up, crowding back time until the old hates and dreads were as large as life and twice as empty. “It made nice dreaming for the future. It doesn’t stack up so good when it’s all over.”

“That’s the spirit,” Maggie agreed dryly. “Now that you’re old and gray there’s nothing left in life but to sit around the coffeepot on cold, damp mornings and mull over your faded youth.”

Casey couldn’t help grinning again. With Maggie it was like that. “You don’t sound very sympathetic,” he chided.

“Why should I? All God’s chillun got troubles, including me. And, as one peasant to another, how did you get such fancy memories, anyway?”

“Knowing the right people.”

“Influential?”

“Hollow-headed. A couple of characters like myself, fresh out of Uncle Sam’s prep school with not enough cash and too many ideas.”

Yes, it was too easy to talk to Maggie. A man could work up a lot of regret that way, and regret was something Casey could no longer afford. He pushed back his chair, the same chair, so far as he could tell, that had been so interestingly occupied in that awakening vision, and began to look around for his coat. “I’m not crying,” he added, as if talking to himself. “That’s just the way things break. One day you’ve got the world in your own little yellow basket, and the next day you’re learning that a two-hundred-dollar suit still looks like thirty-seven fifty after it’s been slept in.”

But the suit coat Maggie was bringing out of a tiny closet didn’t look that way at all. It obviously had been recently sponged and pressed. “I gave it a lick and a promise,” she said vaguely. “It was a little soiled.”

She was almost shy about it, and Casey found himself feeling warm and not entirely brotherly toward this strange Maggie with the paint-stained smock and the wrinkled nose. And then, as abruptly as if she’d been reading his mind, Maggie handed him his raincoat and opened the door.

“Better buy yourself a hat if you’re staying in these parts,” she advised. “Your sun-kissed days are over!”

Casey needed a few moments to get his bearings when he stepped out of the building. It was still early. The sky was like a stretch of dirty flannel and the wind coming in off the lake had been sharpened on both edges. He didn’t feel quite up to facing that wind, so he turned left and walked up to the first corner. There, at the signpost, he learned that he was on Erie Street, a long, long way from home.

At least the wind was clearing his head. He weighed the matter of distance against the fumes of a bus or the swaying bedlam of a streetcar and decided in favor of walking. After all, he had until noon to get his bag out of the hotel and the rest of his life to figure out where to go after that. He thought about the northwest side and his mother’s place, a drab five-room flat above Big John’s saloon, and then he thought of his stepfather, Big John, and of the smell of stale beer and greasy sausage. And then, just as he’d known he would do, he began to wonder why he had ever come back.

The sun was hot and bright in the San Fernando Valley, steaming down through the skylights of the saw-toothed roof. With the world so promising, it was easy to get lost in a rosy dream of production lines rolling out a sensational new video set that looked so sweet on paper and cost so much to develop. The tiny factory building was padlocked now, but Casey wasn’t crying. What was one more post-war casualty in the brave new world?

It was a different kind of dream he’d had when the moon was a glutton over the Pacific and a very special redhead shared the front seat of his sleek convertible; but that venture had failed, too, and for an identical reason—insufficient funds. Even so, he didn’t have to come home. For eight years, ever since the day he enlisted, Casey had avoided that extremity, and yet, here he was. The big bubble burst and home he ran, like a kid with a bloody nose.

(Yes, and he could remember how it was to come home from school with a bloody nose. No chance to explain, no excuses accepted for a torn shirt or ripped trousers. Just that terrible look on Ma’s face as she reached for the cat-o’-nine.)

By this time Casey was walking south, heading toward the river where the morning was getting noisier and lights were beginning to challenge the gray day from behind layers of rain-stained windows. When he reached the river he had to wait for the bridge to jack-knife down in the wake of a freighter bound on some lakeborne mission, and this part of the city Casey liked. This part and the railroad stations. Anything that moved, anything that was going places. As he waited, he became aware of fellow travelers on the street—businessmen with briefcases under their arms and shop girls who glanced nervously at the clock on a giant billboard across the river. A newsboy piling the latest editions on his stand—

The bridge came down again and traffic started rolling, but Casey didn’t move. He was staring at the photo on the front page of one of the newspapers, and he couldn’t move at all. It was a large cut of a girl’s face, and he could remember exactly how the taffy-colored hair had smelled when it brushed against his face, and how those tilted eyes were that peculiar hue of purple smoke. It was the dream that he saw there, only she wasn’t a dream at all; she was a face on the front page under a banner headline.

Financier Slain: Heiress Missing

“Wouldja like for me to turn tha page, mister?”

The newsboy’s jeer routed Casey’s trance and backed him up a few steps. He had to have that paper, more than anything else in the world he had to have that paper, but now he was remembering those last two dollar bills spread out on the glass-topped table and his fingers went groping through his raincoat pockets in the scant hope of mustering out a few stray coins. And then he found it. It was folded nice and neat and thrust deep into his pocket. He drew it out slowly, running a curious thumb over the thickness of crisp, new hundreds, but even without counting he knew what it had to be. Five thousand, the dream had said. Five thousand dollars.