Catch-As-Catch-Can Page 13

  Finally she asked, quietly, “Did they find Laila Breen?”

  “Now.…”

  “You haven’t heard that name? She wasn’t in the trailer?” Dee was being so cool and calm, he had to answer.

  He said, soothingly, “I believe there was a Mr. Breen.”

  “Yes. What happened to him?”

  “He’s all right. He wasn’t hurt”

  “I see,” she said. She had a brief recollection of a very brief and unbelievable impression. It had seemed to her, for one second, that Clive had meant to smash into something. She couldn’t be thinking quite straight. Her head felt swollen.

  She said, “I suppose the police were there?”

  “Oh yes. They were there.”

  Dee let herself feel relieved. Surely, surely, Laila was found and all was well. Unless.… She said, “Was there another girl injured?”

  “Just this lady.”

  Dee turned her head and saw the big bare forehead, the lank hair, the sagging mouth, the unconsciousness of Pearl Dean. Her heart leaped in sorrow and alarm. “How is Miss Dean?” she asked, keeping her voice hushed and steady.

  “Ribs,” he told her. “Thigh fracture. Maybe more. You know her?”

  Dee said, “Yes, I do. Was the trailer hit?”

  “What trailer is that, Miss Allison?”

  Dee bit her lips sharply. She said carefully, “I am trying to find out what happened to a girl named Laila Breen. I believe she was riding in a trailer behind Miss Dean’s coupe.”

  He looked just blank.

  “Was there any other ambulance there?”

  “No, Miss Allison.”

  “Then if she was there she is still there.” Dee lost her control a little. “But she ought to be going to a hospital! Why didn’t Clive send her with us?” Her voice was rising. “I’m all right. You shouldn’t have me. You’ve got the wrong girl! Where’s Laila?”

  Pearl Dean’s deep voice came booming, “Doctor,” it said. “Laila. Poison. Doctor.”

  As the attendant bent over her, Pearl’s eyelids rolled up and the huge eyes were revealed, full of fear and pain. He said, “Now, Miss Dean.…”

  Dee thought she saw his intention. She thought he was going to put this one out of her misery, right away. She cried, “Pearl! It’s Dee. Quick, tell me. Where is Laila?”

  “Laila’s in the trailer,” said Pearl. Her words came faster. “Clive Breen put her in the trailer.”

  “Oh, Pearl …! You and Clive …!”

  “Not I. Not I. No one told me. I heard the voice. I turned to go back. To the doctor. I am not such a fool, Dee.” Pearl tried to raise herself. “What was the poison? I didn’t make the turn? I didn’t make it! Where is Laila? Where is she now?” The big woman had lost all her calm and her majesty. She was shrill and frantic for her child.

  Dee said, “Oh, Pearl! Too bad. She must be … back there. Laila must be with Clive.”

  The woman’s eyes rolled. Pain caught up with her. She had one more sentence and it came in her old pompous boom and dignity. “Clive is not good for her,” said Pearl Dean.

  The siren wailed. The attendant was bending over Pearl, who seemed to have fainted. Dee gathered the muscles of her legs like springs. “I’ve got to get out of here,” said Dee to herself. So she sat up, stealthily, behind the attendant’s back.

  He knew it, though. He turned around quickly.

  She said, quietly, steadily, “A girl is going to die if I don’t get back there. Another girl. Not I.”

  He said, just as quietly, “When we get to the hospital, you can tell someone. We’re going to Long Beach. We are nearly there.”

  Dee said, “Don’t drug me, please. This is very important.”

  He was not qualified to give her a hypo but cautiously he did not say so. “Will you lie back, then? I have to do my job, Miss Allison.”

  So Dee lay back. “I understand,” she said, still speaking quietly. “I don’t think you believe me, do you? Yet that girl’s situation is being broadcast, all over the city.”

  “By the police?”

  “Yes, I.…”

  “Nothing to worry about, then.”

  Dee said, “It’s a little different than they know. Somebody doesn’t want her found and saved.”

  The attendant raised his eyebrows, amiably enough. But his mind was on his own responsibility.

  So Dee was quiet.

  CHAPTER 17

  By five forty, the mess at the. crossroads was yielding to order. Some people still stood about in knots, still talking it over, but many had gone on about their business already. All the undamaged vehicles had pulled away, leaving the intersection to the wreckers, working to tear apart and tow away Pearl’s coupe, and Andy’s convertible, to haul off the Buick with the bashed bonnet The trailer, on the margin of the road, remained where it had come to rest, since it was not an obstacle to traffic.

  The red panel truck still stood with its nose in the road. Traffic, however, was still blocked off. In front of the TV remote truck, drawn up on the Baxter property, there was an argument going on. Meantime, some of the TV people were frantically busy. But some were self-importantly defending themselves to the policeman who seemed annoyed and took no interest in the driving necessities of their time-ridden profession.

  Clive Breen, still making play with the handkerchief in a nervous repetition, leaned on a mailbox near the trailer. He felt very shaky. He was trying to think what he would do now, if he were as innocent as he wished to appear. He was trying to think, at the same time, about the truth, and so his mind whirled in two ways at once. Clive got hold of himself enough to take one thing at a time.

  Truly, Laila was gone. She would not be found here. What would become of her, now, rested on pure chance. There was nothing Clive could do about it. Even had he wanted to, he could not have told what kind of truck it was in which she had been carried away. No, she was gone, afloat on the mercy of that kid who had shut those doors. He, Clive, had not seen her. Clive would never admit that he had been able to see her. All right, maybe he had known she was in the trailer, but now she had disappeared!

  He was getting mixed up again, between the true and the false. Wait a minute.

  If Laila were found soon enough, he could be ruined and undone. But she was lost. And if she were lost long enough, he thought he could probably squirm out of it. A chance, still.…

  Pearl Dean and Dee, hauled off to a hospital, were hors de combat. They wouldn’t be looking for Laila for a while. Pearl Dean, he felt sure, would not live—not long. They would keep Dee; Dee was no factor. The police had no idea where to look, and Laila was hidden, and time kept passing. It was getting toward six o’clock. Getting dark. Incongruously, in the warm September weather, the sun still followed the year’s pattern and it was going down.

  Clive pondered. If he were innocent, what would he do? Phone Dr. Stirling, he thought. Yes, he’d better. But he hung back. He was in shock from the accident, or so he could say. He could take a little more time to pull himself together.

  He had not exactly meant to hit the coupe. And yet, he had meant to do some smashing thing. Pearl’s passing the man with the flag was a kind of opportunity. He hadn’t wanted to hurt Pearl Dean. But in some ways it was better, than if he’d hit that trailer. He shook.

  He thought a good lawyer could get him out of this accident mess. There were so many other people involved he wasn’t worried. But he saw, now, that he had time to think a minute if he, Clive, her heir, had accidentally—well, say injured Laila. That wouldn’t have been so good.

  One thing, surely nobody had ever been through so nerve-wracking a series of experiences as he, in the last hours. In a way, it was a pity he could never make a yarn of it. How many hairbreadths had he been from exposure, how many times? But, by a combination of good luck and quick thinking and he knew not what else, here he was, and there was still a chance … he kept thinking it a better and better chance … that everything was going to turn out all right for Clive. If he co
uld only remember the truth from the lies.

  Clive began to feel stronger. Phone? He glanced up toward the porch of the house. In the dusk he could distinguish a woman in a wheel chair, a nurse in a gray uniform, and a woman in a print dress. He didn’t feel like encountering them. He didn’t want chatter.

  He glanced at the house across the road. Before this one swarmed that knot of men. And all those cars. The TV truck, that red truck, and two passenger cars … all parked carelessly, making a kind of wall. And in the road there was an argument. But the house was dark and silent, obviously vacant or in the process of being vacated. The door on this side of the house was wide open. Clive concluded that there would be no phone connected in there.

  So it would have to be the gas station or the little store. He chose the gas station which was catty-corner, as most likely to have a closed booth. Now, he must choose and cross two sides of the square.

  He chose to cross toward the arguing men. They were too busy to pay him any attention. He could hear scraps of the argument, the loud voices lapping each other.

  “For your information, we got to set up here.…”

  “I don’t care.…”

  “And that takes time.… We’re late. We go on the air at seven!”

  “You see those wrecks, don’t you?”

  “Little matter of a sponsor’s money and what he’s got a right to expect.…”

  “Don’t care who you know.…”

  “We had a right to place that truck in our picture. And our man had a flag—”

  “I want names, addresses and some cooperation—”

  “We’re busy! We’re busy! You don’t understand our problem.”

  “Public safety is my.…”

  “Our job to do, too.”

  Clive started to leave this southwest corner, to skirt the red truck, and take a curving course around the wreckers struggling in the center of the roads. But as he reached a point where he could see down the road to the west, what he saw turned him and sent him scuttling to the shelter of that red truck, where he stood jittering and undone.

  Two men were walking fast in the deserted roadway, coming here. One of the men was Andrew Talbot, and that was not so startling. But the other man was the cabdriver! The same one. The one who would know Clive Breen at sight. The one whom he had thought never to see again.

  Clive didn’t have this thought through.

  He didn’t know what he must say, exactly.

  He realized that he could not run up any empty road and get away. It was not yet dark enough for that. Nor were there any trees, no thicket here in which to hide himself. No hedge. Yes, there was a hedge—A thick-clipped line of pittosporum, about four feet high, along the walk to the side door of this vacant house. It divided the neat front yard from the less formal back yard of the corner plot Clive realized that no one in the wrangling group the other side of this truck could see him, now. And if he slipped back, beyond the red truck, and reached the hedge, the people catty-cornered could not see him, either, from where they stood before the store.

  No one could see him but those women on that porch and if he were to slip to the other side of the hedge and into the side door of this vacant house, there he could lie low. He must! He must! His nerves would not hold.

  The women on the porch were not looking his way. The nurse had her back to him and she blocked the vision of the one in the print dress. The old lady in the chair was lying back as if she were tired or maybe even asleep. Old and invalid as she was, probably half blind in this poor light, what did it matter if she did see?

  He must! Must hide! There was nothing else that he could bear to do.

  So he did it. Trucks and cars parked like spokes of a fan shielded him from a casual glance, as he went, fast and slippery, and hidden behind the house corner, he slipped inside. It was ten minutes of six and the light was leaving the sky.

  Agnes Nilsson, big, strong, blonde, hard-eyed, soft-voiced, gripped the handles of the wheel chair. “Excuse us, Miz Johannes? Mrs. Gilman must go indoors and rest now.”

  “Not going to watch the TV, Mrs. Gilman?” the neighbor asked. Mrs. Gilman nodded.

  But Agnes said, “Oh, not now. She had planned.… But not after all this excitement. Much too much for her.”

  Mrs. Gilman’s fingers drummed.

  “She can watch it on her screen, indoors,” said Agnes soothingly, “while she has her nice supper. Just as she does every Wednesday.”

  “My husband’s so crazy about It’s a Living,” said Mrs. Johannes. “Of course, I’m not. I get a little bored, with that program. Always the same, it seems to me. Of course, it is different when they do the show right here in the neighborhood. I don’t want to miss that.”

  I don’t want to miss it, either, wailed Mrs. Gilman silently in her scarred and broken throat. Oh, I don’t. She tried to brake the chair’s wheels with her thin hands.

  But Agnes, pretending not to notice, tipped the chair, and the wheels went over the threshold. Agnes pushed her inside. The dead familiar closed around her. All the lovely excitement was shut away. It was not for Mrs. Gilman to be altogether alive, any more.

  The moment the ambulance came to a stop, Dee Allison, coiled in a tension she hoped did not show, was ready and watching for her chance.

  Every red hair on her head was determined. For herself, and her own state of health, she had no concern. She felt battered but well enough and she was not going to be on the sidelines. She knew better than to get herself entrapped in hospital regulations, where they would preach incapacity, where they believed in it. Until Laila was found and safe, Dee Allison wasn’t going to be incapacitated or made to concede that she was.

  She knew where the ambulance had brought her. This was Long Beach. She had watched as many turns as she could. She knew exactly what she was going to do. If a chance came, she was going to get away.

  They handled Pearl first and it was Pearl who produced the chance. The stretcher was tilting, half in, half out, when Pearl suddenly came to life. Pearl’s head raised. Pearl’s fat arms went back of her head, with what pain only Pearl knew, and Pearl’s hands were scrabbling, scratching and grabbing for the white coat carrying her head, and Pearl’s voice boomed … “Now, Dee! Now! Go to Laila!” And Dee, with amazement exploding in her mind, was still ready.

  So she flashed through, under, and around the men and the stretcher on which Pearl was writhing, and then Dee was running as fast as her pretty legs would carry her, with shouts in the gathering dusk behind her.

  But they could not drop poor Pearl, their hands were full of Pearl. She thought she heard someone running, a female calling, but nobody caught her. Dee was around the corner of the hospital grounds and into a shopping street, through the doors of a dime store and out again at the side.… The store was closing. Luck, she thought. No one could follow, now. She drew up gasping on the sidewalk.

  In all this swift activity of legs and breath, Dee’s mind remained amazed. Pearl had read her tension and her mind. There was such a thing as telepathy, then. Or intuition. Or something not always in the list we count on. Pearl had tried to help. Pearl, too, was thinking of Laila Breen and her peril, with no more regard for Pearl’s pain than Dee had for her own. Dee felt like weeping, for just a moment. She hoped … she hoped the big woman would be healed of her injuries. She felt a double burden, now. Her own anxiety for Laila was the heavier for Pearl Dean’s.

  No time to be amazed. Making her mood brisk, Dee looked about her. Long Beach. She stood gasping on the sidewalk and home-going people jostled her. Dee had no purse, any more, and no money. But she could telephone. Somebody would give her a coin or two.

  Sublimely sure of it, Dee stopped a bent and hurrying woman in a shabby gray coat. “I’ve lost my purse,” she said breathlessly. “Could you please loan me some dimes to phone my friends?”

  The woman straightened from her driving walk. Silently, she opened her purse and handed Dee some silver.

  “Thank you. Thank you. Thank y
ou.”

  The woman smiled. “I was pretty when I was younger. You want to be more careful.”

  “Yes, I … will.…” Dee’s eyes widened.

  “But I know how it is. I … remember.” The woman nodded and scurried on her way.

  Amazed, and cancelling amazement, Dee ran into a drugstore. All her instincts said hurry. Go back there. She dialed Stirling’s number and it was busy. Wild with impatience, she dialed Jonas’ house.

  “Lorraine?”

  “Oh yes. Miss Dee!”

  “Listen. You call Dr. Stirling. I can’t get him. Tell him this. Write it down. There was an accident but I’m all right. Tell him that. Laila was in Pearl’s trailer. Clive put her there and Pearl told me so. Got it, Lorraine? Now, I am going back to the corner of Lemon Grove and Neptune Road. The trailer is there. That’ll do, I think. He’ll understand.”

  “Miss Dee, did you find her?”

  “I know where she was,” Dee told her. “Call him as soon as you can, Lorraine. Good-bye.”

  Now, to get back. It would be east and north of here. Not far. Dee still had no money but that didn’t worry her. Nothing easier than to hitch a ride. In the rumpled green with her flaming hair, her fabulous coloring, she was conspicuous, and she was vivid and determined, and she got a ride.

  The man who picked her up may have had wolfish intentions but if so they were frustrated. For Dee, with the sure skill that she’d begun to learn with her first lipstick, took him ruthlessly out of his way and into hers. And when they ran into a road block, she abandoned him, giving sweet thanks and no mercy. He was left, gnawing his lip, a good Samaritan whether he would or no.

  It was getting dark. Dee’s head pained her, now and then. Sometimes she was a little dizzy. But she ran in a weary shuffle north along the car-less road. The next crossroad could not be far and it would be the scene of the accident. Police would be there and maybe Laila found, and all well. If not, she could explain, and get after Clive and Laila quickly.

  It must be nearly six o’clock. Less than six hours to find Laila now. They couldn’t be sure of more margin than that. Stop thinking about time. Use it. Keep going. Dee put her head down and slogged along. A tentacle touched her heart as she wondered if poor Mrs. Vaughn would live.