Tough as Nails: The Complete Cases of Donahue From the Pages of Black Mask (69 page)

“But they insinuate Mr. Loftman is a murderer! I can’t, I can’t believe it!”

He said: “You can’t blame the police. They find the house dick dead in Loftman’s apartment. They don’t find Loftman. So naturally they draw conclusions. It’s human nature.”

She stood up. She stood very straight, like an athlete, though you felt she was not athletically inclined. “Tomorrow,” she said, “if nothing turns up, will you work for me?”

He looked at her.

“I mean,” she explained, “as a detective. I haven’t much money but I imagine I can pay you. Will you try to find out where Mr. Loftman is?” And then she asked immediately, “Does a private detective have to reveal everything to the police, if he works for a client?”

“It’s about like a lawyer and his client. Only we’ve got to use a little more discretion and we like to have faith in the client.”

“Have you sufficient faith in me?”

He stood spread-legged, gazing down at the floor. He felt a sharp personal angle creeping into things. He could not help liking the girl, she was so deadly in earnest. And yet more than anything he wished to keep his hands off this case, he wanted to know as little as possible about it, for he felt that somehow, sometime, he might have to tell the police that she was acquainted with Loftman. And he had already burned a couple of bridges.

“Well, I’m sorry,” she said, in a slightly injured voice, and started towards the door.

“No. Wait a minute. I was just thinking.” He paused and looked at the back of her head. “Suppose we wait until tomorrow. I guess we can do something about it.”

She turned and said gravely, “But you’ve got to have faith in me first.”

“I have,” he said.

There were male voices in the hall and an instant later a knock on the door. Donahue raised a finger to his lips. He took hold of the girl’s hand and walked her swiftly, silently into the kitchenette, and pointed to a door about two feet square in the lower part of a white cupboard.

“That’s for service delivery,” he explained. He opened the door, revealing a square compartment whose back was another door. “That one leads to the hall. Wait about a minute, then move that snaplock back and crawl out. Close the door again.”

She was anxious. “What’s the matter?”

“Police, I think.”

He turned, stepped back into the living-room and closed the kitchenette door. They were knocking again. He rumpled his hair and then walked noisily to the corridor door. It was Kelly McPard. Lankford was with him.

“Wake you up, Donny?” McPard asked with polite concern.

Donahue was rubbing his eyes. “I guess I fell asleep. Come in.”

As they walked in, Lankford craned his long neck and said in his loud, foghorn voice, “Nice place you got here, Donny.”

“Sit down,” Donahue said. “Drinking? I’ve got nothing but bourbon.”

McPard held up thumb and forefinger, close together, and sighted between them. “Just a wee drappy.”

“Same here,” Lankford said.

“Straight?”

They nodded and sat down and Donahue brought in the bottle, glasses and some ginger ale for a chaser. Both detectives took full measure and Donahue took a short one. Kelly McPard said: “Well, happy days,” and they all downed the drinks neat and then McPard dabbed at his lips with a large, snowy handkerchief.

Lankford turned to him and said with hoarse approval, “Donny always did have swell liquor.”

McPard nodded towards Lankford in polite agreement, while the expression on his face suggested that his thoughts were up another alley.

“Well, we haven’t got anywhere, Donny,” he said, leaning sidewise and thrusting his handkerchief back into his hip pocket. “Looks as if it’s going to be a nut to crack and we haven’t a ghost of a chance of cracking it. We had all trains, buses and planes covered and we even checked up in these drive-a-car-yourself places. Not a peep. This Loftman was down on the Coronet register as from Greenwich, Connecticut, but we checked through and there’s no Henry W. Loftman in the Greenwich directory. That in itself is a swell beginning, I don’t think so.”

McPard sighed. “A few days ago Bickford got McCartney to toss out a couple of con men by the name of O’Fallon and Fauls. It was under the hat, of course, though when this murder happened Mac told me all about it and said it was the same apartment.”

“Bickford told me about it,” Donahue said. “He saw me coming out of 545 and asked me if I thought Loftman was a square guy. I said I thought he was.”

McPard said: “I don’t for a minute think there’s any connection between those two con men and Loftman, because Mac ran them smack out of town. I think it’s just coincidence that this 545 figures twice in a row. To my way of thinking, Bickford was still up in the air about the O’Fallon and Fauls scare, and when he saw you come out of Loftman’s suite, why, he began to wonder.

“Maybe he sneaked in there while Loftman was out and was rooting around in Loftman’s baggage when Loftman came back in. He wouldn’t know right offhand Bickford was the house dick and maybe he pasted him right off the bat. Then maybe he found out who Bickford really was, got panicky and ran out. If he had something to conceal, this would be natural. And the fact that we can’t locate his name in Greenwich seems to show it was an alias, and if it was an alias then you’ve got to conclude that he had something to conceal. Don’t you think so, Donny?”

“It sounds reasonable.”

McPard leaned forward, elbows on knees, and regarded the polished tips of his pointed black shoes. “Red thinks maybe there was a blonde mixed up in it after all. He thought at first you were kidding.”

Donahue went around the room looking for a cigarette. He found one and stood in the center of the floor, lighting it.

McPard stood up, kicking the creases free of his knees. “Red says he thinks there was a blonde at the apartment door the time I asked you if someone knocked and you said no.” He took his hand out of his pocket. “Red found this woman’s handkerchief outside the door a couple of minutes afterwards.”

Donahue nodded. “He tried to sell it to me first, for a beat. When I told him he was screwy, he ran it over to you.”

Lankford looked indignantly at McPard. “Red didn’t tell us that, Kel.”

McPard slipped the handkerchief back into his pocket, smiled ruefully to himself. “But Red’s pretty certain—”

Donahue whipped his cigarette into an empty metal waste basket. Sparks showered upward and he blurted out, “Red seems to be your prize stool!”

Lankford raised a hand. “Now don’t get sore, Donny. Kel was just remarking—”

“Kel’s remarks are beginning to annoy me like hell!”

Lankford looked with long-faced regret from one to the other.

Dull red color had seeped into Donahue’s cheeks and a dark, sultry look was in his eyes.

“Well, now we done it, Kel,” Lankford sighed hoarsely. “When he gets sore, he gets stubborn as a mule.”

Kelly McPard nodded regretfully.

Donahue pointed in the general direction of downtown. “That legman thinks every crime has to have a chemise in it and you guys play along with him like a couple of half-baked potatoes!”

McPard made gentle, placatory gestures. “Sh, now, Donny; sh!”

Donahue swiveled, said: “I’m going to bed,” and strode into his bedroom, slamming the door.

“Now he’ll blow up any time you just look at him,” Lankford said morosely.

McPard sighed. “Well, I guess we may as well go, Gus.”

Lankford nodded and they went out together and rode down in the elevator in silence.

Five minutes later Donahue opened the bedroom door. At the same time the kitchenette door opened and the girl stood there, not on her toes yet seeming to be poised. Her eyes were warm, disturbing.

“I—I heard it,” she said.

He was biting his lip and he didn’t say anything. She ran across the room, took hold of his hand impulsively, said in a warm, rushing whisper, “You’re grand—grand!” There was no smile on her face, but a rich, a wide-open expression, pathetically ingenuous.

He muttered, “I just got sore.”

Her eyes hurried anxiously back and forth across his face and she gripped his hand harder. “You ought to know my name. Do you realize you don’t? It’s Fern Chester and I live with a maiden aunt—Bethia Samson—at twenty-six Westminster Road.”

He was darkly preoccupied, but he said, “I knew it was Fern something.”

She suddenly wilted away from him, grimacing. “But I know, I know you’re getting into something you don’t want to. And I got you to do it. Why don’t you just throw me out and tell them—tell the police?” She ran to a chair and sat down on the edge of it, her toes turned in, her hands clasped between her knees and a wet look in her harried eyes.

He regarded her stoically for the space of a minute—he still looked preoccupied—and then suddenly he took a few long strides, picked up a chair and slapped it down in front of her. He sat down and said point blank:

“We may as well get down to business. I’ve stayed out of it as long as I can. Personally I’m not curious, but the agency’s not mine, I only work for it, and the home office is pretty tough. They’ve got a reputation they’re proud of. I can go just so far with the cops, but there’s a limit. I can’t clown around with them any longer unless I get some details from you. Kelly McPard is beginning to bear down on me and there’s a certain newspaperman in town would like to see me take water.”

“I’m sorry,” she said in a small, plaintive voice.

“Loftman’s suspected of having committed a crime. You believe he didn’t do it, but that doesn’t really count.”

“I know, I know,” she grimaced. “I feel I want to tell you certain things. I feel you ought to know certain things and I feel I can trust you. How far can I trust you?”

“You’ve got to leave that to my judgment. I don’t know yet what you know, so I can’t make any promises. I’m not one of these rich amateur detectives you read about. I work for a living and I work for an agency that allows its district men a lot of leeway but lands on ’em like a ton of brick if there’s an unhappy ending. Do I understand that you’re not personally involved in this—I mean criminally?”

She started. “Of course not.”

“All right. Then I’ll promise that I’ll keep you out of the limelight if it’s humanly possible. Is that what you want?”

“That was one of the things—the least, really, I suppose, when you get right down to it.”

“What else?”

“Well”—she dropped her eyes—“I made a promise to Mr. Loftman.”

He lit a cigarette and said offhand: “What’s his real name?”

She stared miserably at the floor. “That’s what I promised: that I wouldn’t tell his real name.”

“If you’re sure he’s not guilty, what does it really matter?”

“Oh, it’s not that. He was in the city under an assumed name for business reasons, but I don’t know what they were.”

“How do you know then that his so-called business reasons were not really criminal reasons?”

“Because I’ve known him a long time. He knew my father and mother and when they died he took care of their affairs and what little money was left. The money lasted until I was about eighteen and I had to go to work. He gave me a job in his office and I soon became his secretary and worked for him a little over three years.

“Then my Aunt Bethia came into a little money and asked me if I would like to come out and live with her and take charge of the house. That was two years ago, and I came out. He and I corresponded from time to time and then he wrote me that he was coming out and that he would like me to call on him. So then you saw me at his hotel apartment. He’d told me he was expecting a Mr. Donahue, but we kept talking and talking and I didn’t get away before you arrived.”

“Did he ask you point blank not to divulge his real identity?”

“He said, ‘Fern, under no circumstances whatever tell anyone I’m here. Or that I was here, after I go. I’m on a secret business mission and I expect to be here only a day or two longer, when I’ll return to New York.’”

“Did he mention any local names?”

“He didn’t mention any names at all. I—” She paused, then began again, “I saw—” and then stopped, troubled.

“Come on, come on.”

“Well, I happened to see a memorandum on his desk. He’d written the name Flannigan on it, and an address. But I don’t remember the address. After a while, after I was there a while, he tore the memo into bits. He didn’t act guilty or troubled or anything like that.”

Donahue squinted at her. “What’s his real name?”

The hunted look in her eyes deepened and she looked up at him imploringly. “Marcus Rathbun. He used to be a congressman.”

Donahue stared intently at her for a long moment, then rose and murmured, “Um,” and walked thoughtfully about the room.

She cried: “A lot of important men use assumed names sometimes.”

“Of course, of course,” Donahue nodded. “There’s no harm in that—except when a thing like this crops up.”

She slumped where she sat, bit her lips and looked very miserable again.

“Red would break his neck over this,” Donahue said, but only half aloud and more to himself than to the girl; but then instantly he said to her. “You’d better beat it home now.” And, as she rose, “What business is he in?”

“He’s a director of the Centaur International Engineering Company. You can see,” she cried desperately, “that he wouldn’t be a man to go about killing people, hotel detectives!”

“Flannigan was the other name, huh? Any initials?”

She shook her head, then said: “Will you have to tell the police now?”

He was candid: “I may have to. But I think I can keep you out of it.” He smiled down into her troubled eyes. “I’ll try.”

“I believe you.”

He said cheerfully: “Well, just take it easy,” and walked with her to the door.

“I guess I do imagine things are worse than they are.”

“Sure, sure you do,” he said, feeling that actually things looked pretty bad. “I’ll give you a ring tomorrow.”

When she said good night there was a mixture of embarrassment and warm thankfulness in her manner; the clasp of her hand was warm and close and a little disturbing.

“I—I feel I’ve known you a long time,” she said, and then instantly blushed.