Catch-As-Catch-Can Page 8

  Her heavy lids curled craftily. She glanced at the hitch between the trailer and the car. “Thank you very much, Mr. Breen. And au revoir.”

  Clive’s feet shuffled. “I’m going to say I don’t know anything about this. Mrs. Fleming will back me up, won’t she?”

  Pearl’s eyes despised him. “We have not seen this man, Estelle,” she said.

  “No, dearest Pearl.” A blank look came down over Mrs. Fleming’s face, like a shadow falling. Then she was fluttering after Pearl.

  “Ah, Pearl, bon voyage. And come safe home.”

  Pearl kissed her in benediction. She got into her coupe. Estelle had turned away, not to be too much affected by this parting. Laila was invisible, for the trailer windows were covered with slatted blinds.

  Clive stood in the yard. Pearl stepped on the starter. It came over him what he was. He was a murderer! It came over him clearly that this was true, and furthermore, one person could prove it.

  Laila could prove it. Her promise was based on her ignorance. She could and would and must prove his intent to let her die … unless she did die!

  He shouted, “Wait!”

  Pearl waited. Clive started toward her and then he could not bear it. He ducked between the trailer and the car. “O.K.” he called in a moment “O.K. I was just checking.”

  Pearl bowed her head in grave farewell. Her house on her back, bound for the blue, she drove out into the alley, turned right, and was away.

  Clive put his jumping hands in his pockets. He started back across the yard, not knowing where he was walking. He’d gone over a line.

  All right. He did want her to die. He wanted that money. He had done his stupid best to see that she stayed lost until the poison worked.…

  But he knew she wasn’t going to die. All his fumbling was stupid. He’d never get the money. He would be ruined. They would pick Pearl up. Laila would tell them how he’d put the car radio out of order. Laila would have to tell them that he knew about that urgent broadcast and, even so, he had helped her run away.

  Clive groaned aloud. He hadn’t cooked anybody’s goose at all but his own.

  Unless she did die!

  Clive drew a shuddering breath. A flood of chancey hopes began to flow in his mind.

  He had entered the house through the glass door. He saw Mrs. Fleming tilting her head in question and surprise. He started to stammer an excuse, to ask her permission to go through to the front door, when he saw Laila’s hat and Laila’s handbag on the couch.

  He licked his lips. Going to be a murderer, he thought savagely, better take care of these loose ends. This Estelle—he tried to remember how Pearl had handled her. Finally, he said, “Pearl sent me to ask you to put Laila’s things out of sight.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Oh yes.”

  He watched her put them away in a table drawer. She seemed to have no idea why she acted. Her obedience was uncanny. He said, “May I go out at the front?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “I wanted to thank you, Mrs. Fleming,” he gushed, “for promising to forget that I was here. It’s very good of you.” Her eyes were so vague, she worried him. “You won’t say I was here?”

  “My promise to Pearl is sacred,” said Estelle a trifle huffily. She stood with her eyes on a bowl of marigolds.

  It occurred to Clive that she wasn’t going to make the most impressive witness in the world. Anyhow, there was nothing he could do about her. Everything rode on the winds of chance. Everything about this whole business was catch-as-catch-can, somehow.

  As he let himself out of the lady’s front door, he was thinking of time. How many hours had gone by already? It was three thirty-five now. Midafternoon. If Pearl got away, and kept Laila away for the entire day tomorrow, it would probably do. He thought, if the stuff does get her, Pearl Dean will have some fun proving she didn’t know a thing about it.

  A trifle comforted, he started off the tiny stoop. When he saw the cab, he thought, Luck. When Vince Procter leaned out of it and said, “Hey, buddy …” Clive knew the luck was bad.

  “Yes?”

  “What about that kid in the pink suit? What’s your angle?”

  Clive said stupidly, “What?”

  “You heard me. What’s the pitch. Anything in it for somebody like me?”

  “I don’t know what you are talking about,” said Clive flatly. He simply did not know what else to say.

  “Listen,” said Vince, “this ain’t a hospital, is it?”

  Clive stared.

  “Of course, I don’t know if there is a reward.…” Vince put on an evil leer, and waited for a reaction. When he saw there wasn’t going to be any, he said, “O.K. I can always call Madison 7911.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Clive angrily. (All he knew was that he dared not know.) “Do you want a fare?”

  “So you don’t know what I’m talking about?” said Vince. “O.K. As I say, I can always call in. Thought I’d see if you had any ideas, that’s all. You got no ideas, buddy? Is that right?”

  “I simply don’t …” Clive froze. His voice dried up. Vanished, died, in the back of his throat.

  “… know what I’m talking about,” finished Vince. “O.K. O.K. It won’t do any harm if I call up, though.” He felt frustrated. His little stratagem hadn’t paid off. This man wouldn’t play, the way villains did in the movies. Vince slammed his cab into motion.

  He was full of civic virtue, now. He was going to call up, dump it on the police, and the heck with trying to detect anything.

  The cabdriver went out of Clive’s thoughts entirely. He was looking at the blue convertible that had turned the far corner and was sliding toward this curb. He was frozen on this doorstep.

  Here he stood, watching his red-haired cousin, Dee, and Andrew Talbot, tumble out and come pelting toward him.

  CHAPTER 11

  Dee flew up the short walk and Andrew Talbot came less impetuously after. Dee cried out her surprise to see Clive and Clive seemed paralyzed with his own surprise to see them. It crossed Talbot’s mind that Clive had made good time, had heard the news most promptly. What would he be doing here but looking for Laila? Dee made the same assumption, for she cried, “Clive, is she here?”

  Clive said, “Gosh, I don’t know, Dee. I just arrived.…” And the motion of his hand said, couldn’t they see, he had come in the cab.

  Clive looked frightened. Dee was trying to smile at him. “Nothing bad is going to happen,” she promised. She was heartened by having got here herself, at last.

  How does she know nothing bad is going to happen, thought Andy, even as her faith lightened the weight of his own fear, in contagion.

  “We’ll find her,” Dee said. “Have you rung the bell?”

  “Dee, this is awfull” Clive said with chattering teeth. “Listen, what hap …?”

  “How did you hear about it?” asked Talbot, coming up quietly. He was thinking, we were not so long delayed.

  Clive jerked around. “I heard it on the air. I thought, right away.…”

  “We all thought of Pearl Dean.” Dee was pressing the bell with a firm finger. “She must be here.” Dee yearned against the quiet door.

  “Where’s your car, Breen?” asked Andy.

  “With the finance company,” said Dee over her shoulder. “Clive, did you go to the house?”

  Clive’s mouth opened and closed. He was jittery to the point of panic. He said, “No. No, I.… Say, isn’t anybody home?” And he began to push the bell.

  “Coming,” said Talbot calmly. “Stirling got the warning on the air pretty fast, didn’t he?” Talbot felt vaguely something out of true.

  Clive’s mouth made a silent jawing and then the door opened. Estelle Fleming chirped, “Yes? What is it?”

  “Oh, Mrs. Fleming,” cried Dee. “Is Laila here?”

  “Laila?” Estelle cocked her head sharply and tasted the name on pursed lips as if it were some strange fruit. Meantime, her eyes wandered over their faces.


  Clive said, hoarsely “My name is Clive Breen. My cousin and I are looking for Laila.…”

  Dee cut in impatiently. “I’m Dee Allison. Surely you remember me. I called you earlier.…”

  “Oh yes, Miss Allison,” said Estelle, brightly. “And Mr. Breen, of course. Friends of Miss Dean. Yes, I remember. And Mr.…?”

  “Talbot,” said Andy. The woman was a type that irritated him. He knew at once that one had to try to communicate through a fog. No use to try for anything but a few brute facts. “Laila isn’t here?” he demanded.

  “But there is no one here but me, you know. Pearl has gone.”

  “Gone!” Dee said. “Where?”

  “Oh, I never know where,” said Estelle airily.

  “How long ago?” asked Talbot quickly. Pound it out of her. Time and place. All you could hope for.

  “Some time ago.” Mrs. Fleming’s head went sideways and she looked vague.

  “It couldn’t have been long ago,” said Dee. “Pearl left our house at noon.…”

  “She left a while ago,” said Estelle with a hurt little frown. “I’ve been resting. I really.…” She began to retreat from the doorway.

  “Did she leave suddenly? Had she had a phone call?” pressed Andy.

  “I don’t … I really … I’m sorry.…”

  “You saw her go?”

  “Of course I saw her go.”

  “May I use your phone?” said Andy briskly.

  “Why, I suppose so.” She stood aside doubtfully. “Won’t you … come in?”

  They walked into her house and her eyes fluttered as they passed her. Dee walked through the tiny foyer to the prim sitting room across the front. Sunlight in the big glass porch across the back pulled her to stand in the wide opening to that place which was empty and silent.

  Andy spotted the phone in the foyer and took it up quickly.

  Clive came last. Andy, dialing the operator, looked back. He saw this Mrs. Fleming cast upon Clive Breen a withering, angry, sharp and positive look. He gave Stirling’s number. He pursued, in his mind, a fleeting wonder. Clive cleared his throat. “You mean to say that Pearl went off alone?” he said loudly.

  “Dearest Pearl so often travels alone, you know,” said Estelle evasively. She made a distortion of her mouth, meant to pass for a smile. “But she is coming back, of course.” She nodded sharply three times. “Perhaps tomorrow.” Andy frowned, sensing the evasion. But he had his party.

  “Talbot, Doctor. From the Fleming house. Pearl Dean has gone. Don’t know where. Laila hasn’t been here.”

  Stirling said, “Well, that’s that, eh? Could they be meeting someplace?”

  “Not unless there was a phone call. Laila doesn’t use the phone too readily.”

  “She might have, this time. Also, she might come there yet, you know.”

  “Yes, we’ll take care of that.”

  “O.K. No news here. Three false rumors. Girls with long hair.”

  “Bound to be those,” said Andy.

  He forced the sickness out of his throat. No time for feelings of any kind. The head, the brain. No time to look at Dee’s bright hair where the light was caught in that orange-gold. No time to feel for her, or be easy and gentle. Cut through everything to the facts of time and place until under some one unguessable stone, you’d find her, and be free of the guilt for your stupidity.

  “What’ll you do now? Wait there?” buzzed Dr. Stirling in his ear.

  “If that seems best.”

  “Still the best bet,” Stirling agreed. “Laila could have got confused, lost her way. Make it yet.”

  “Have you tried to check on taxicabs? Dee thinks.…”

  “Thought of that myself. Jonas Breen never took a bus in his life. I got onto as many cab companies as I could. Also got it on the afternoon news. Radio.”

  “How early?”

  “Couldn’t say. Why?”

  “Never mind,” said Andy. “How’s Mrs. Vaughn?”

  “Looks pretty serious, I’m sorry to say. Talbot, somebody better get that girl to me.” He was matter-of-fact. The cry for haste screamed on the wire, just the same.

  “Clive is here,” said Andy suddenly.

  “Is that … so?” said Stirling as close to a drawl as he ever came. “He ought to be helpful,” he snorted.

  “He … may … be,” said Andy slowly.

  “What’s that?”

  “I’ll keep in touch, sir.”

  “What about Clive?” said Stirling sharply.

  “Something a little odd about it,” said Andrew Talbot. “I’ll try to check, sir.”

  “Call me back.”

  Andy put the phone down thoughtfully. Speaking of probabilities, how probable was it that Clive took a cab all this distance in cousinly alarm? Came personally. He was not Dee. Dee would do everything personally if she could. But for Clive, it was a little … odd. Clive’s panic was a little odd, too. It wasn’t consistent with Clive’s glossy surfaces. And why had this Mrs. Fleming given Clive that dirty look? There was a certain intimacy about a look as cross as that. One did not give a near-stranger, a man who had to tell you what his name was, quite such a glare. Or at least, if you did, there was something a little odd about it.

  Dee had gone into the sunroom and was looking out at the garage and the bare lawn. Andy could see her. It seemed to him that she stood in an attitude of prayer, as if she were imploring the great sprawling city with its host of suburbs, the vast community of miles, of millions, frothing up the mountainsides, nestling to the sea, dribbling off into the lowland valleys, to give her some clue.

  Andy came sharply to fact. “Mrs. Fleming,” he said, “Laila Breen may come here yet and if she does.…”

  “Oh, she won’t come here,” said Estelle, somewhat too confidently. It was odd.

  Dee turned around.

  “But if she should,” Clive took it up hastily. His voice had a tremor. “The doctor wants to get ahold of her.”

  “Doctor?”

  Andy said loudly, “Yes, the doctor.” But he knew she must be Pearl’s disciple and the word might not have the same ring to her, the ring of integrity and command.

  “It’s important!” chimed Dee. “If she comes, you must call the hospital. I’ll write the number.…”

  “Hospital?”

  There was a word, too, corrupted in her mouth.

  “She’s been poisoned.” Dee was bent over, writing.

  “Why, how could she be poisoned?” said Estelle, almost merrily. “That’s very strange.”

  “That’s what the doctor says,” Clive offered nervously. “The doctor wants to get her to the hospital. The doctor—” Clive licked his lower lip.

  Talbot let himself stand there very quietly. It crossed his mind, now, that Clive’s panic was a fact and must have a cause.

  Clive looked as if he’d scream. He said shrilly, “We can’t just stand here!”

  Dee straightened and tore off the bit of paper.

  Talbot said coldly, “Mrs. Fleming, if you are concealing something and it keeps us from finding Laila in time, the girl may die.”

  “That’s so, Mrs. Fleming.” Dee put the piece of paper in her hand. “That’s really so.” Dee blazed, as Andy was cold, in the same cause.

  “Not really?” said Estelle vaguely. “How very strange!” She glanced down. “This is the number?” Her eyes were too sly. They glanced at her wristwatch. Then she gazed at the marigolds. It seemed that they had settled into a tableau, there in the sunroom. Estelle watched the marigolds and Andy watched her cocked head, the press of her lips in a half-smile, over secrets. Dee’s blue eyes came puzzled and frightened to Andy’s face.

  But Clive flung himself across the room in long strides and back again as if he could bear no more of this. “Say,” he blurted. “Dee … I’ve thought of something!”

  “What, Clive? What?”

  “Listen.… Come here.” He plunged across the room again and out through the glass door and Dee, caught by the mere mot
ion, went after him.

  Talbot was slower, but Talbot followed Dee.

  In the backyard, Clive gulping air, said to them, “Now look. If that Fleming is lying for Pearl you’re not going to break her down. But why don’t we see if anybody in the alley saw Pearl go off in her car. Could have seen Laila.”

  Dee cried, “Of course! Come on!” She started to run toward the alley and Clive hurried beside her. It was Clive who looked back. Andy was following.

  Clive thought it was safe enough. There was no one in that alley, as far as he knew, and if there were, why, Laila had been hidden. So he moved without hesitation hurrying his cousin Dee along. He was giving them the illusion of progress and Dee, at least, had fallen for it. He was getting them away from that dizzy Fleming dame. Who was willing to lie, perfectly willing. But she was a lousy liar and he didn’t like the way Talbot turned quiet, and that Estelle was so vague she might tell the truth just by accident. She wasn’t reliable. He couldn’t bear any more of her. Clive rushed on.

  Estelle was watching them through the glass. That dark quiet Mr. Talbot was the one who made her uneasy. Not what he had said, for she had been careful not to listen. But something in his manner, some unbendable thing she had met before. But she’d promised. Dear Pearl had been gone for not quite fifteen minutes and it wasn’t time.

  Clive, stumbling beside his red-haired cousin, felt as if he were caught in something as frantically confusing as a revolving door. Dee went flying down the alley, peering, snooping, at sedate little enclosures, quiet flower beds, neat incinerators and cans of trash, looking for something alive.

  At last, back of the three foot fence at the last residence before the shops along the cross street, they saw an elderly man puttering about the yard. Dee flung herself at the fence.

  The old gentleman in his flowered shirt was happy to answer questions. Why, sure, he’d seen a car. Yep. Knew the lady. Big lady, always wore a black dress? Sure, he knew the one. Came along with her trailer and stayed up the block every once in a while.