Ghost of a Chance (12 page)

“Well,” the lawyer said. His eyes went back to the target over Jeff’s head. “Hiram Kennedy had a brother, Louis, who was almost thirty years younger than he. He had high hopes for Louis, he was like a father to him. But when Louis married that… that Thelma person, Hiram was through with him. He cut him off without a cent. He left everything to his daughter, to little Sally. Everything, that is, except the house. Louis got that. Of course, Hiram put Louis next in line, but he knew that little Sally would outlive Louis, which she has done. Louis died rather strangely in a boating accident on the Sound some years ago. His body was never found.”

“Then Sally got all of her father’s millions?”

“Not yet, not quite. Sally gets the bulk of the estate on her birthday. Then everything will be hers, entirely hers, to do with as she wishes. Hiram made certain that Sally would be mature and stable enough to handle such a large amount of money. Then there will be no chance for that wife of Louis’ ever to get her greedy hands on the money.”

“Mr. Dobbs, when is Sally’s birthday?”

“In a few days,” the lawyer said. “The day after tomorrow, in fact.”

Jeff stood up. “And if anything should happen to Sally before her birthday? The money will go to Louis’ heir, to Thelma? Is that right?”

“Why, yes. Yes, of course. But nothing can happen… look here, you’re not imagining that Sally Kennedy is the woman Frank Lorimer meant?”

“Thelma Kennedy would gain by her death?”

“This is ludicrous.”

“At least,” Jeff said, “Sally should be warned, she should…”

“She should be nothing of the kind, young man!” The lawyer rose to his feet. “Miss Kennedy has had enough alarums and excursions in these past war years. I won’t have her upset by this… this fantastic hallucination. She needs rest and calm and she’s going to get it!”

“But we can’t take a chance, sir, if-”

“Troy! Frank Lorimer evidently did get himself, and you with him, mixed up in some mischief. From your tale of what has happened to you and your wife, it is obvious to me that these are the sordid machinations of some underworld, gangster mob… precisely the sort of thing one would expect Frank Lorimer to become involved in. Sally Kennedy is my client; indeed, I might almost say she is my ward. I am responsible for her welfare. And I will not, I repeat, have you annoying her with this preposterous and false alarm!”

Mr. Dobbs sat down, marking the end of the time he had to give us. We could consider ourselves advised, chided and dismissed. We walked out of his office and to an elevator. Then we were standing in front of Rockefeller Plaza, looking at each other helplessly.

“He may be right,” Jeff said. “If this is a false alarm, we shouldn’t bother Sally Kennedy with it.”

“But if it isn’t false, if she’s the woman…”

“Then it will be our fault for listening to Dobbs.”

“We’ve got to talk to her again, Jeff. We can do it without scaring her. Mrs. Cortland said she was coming to tea today. Couldn’t we…”

“Yes. You call them, Haila. Ask them if we can come back for some more tea.”

A maid answered the Cortland’s phone and I had to wait a few moments before Mrs. Cortland’s voice floated breezily into my ear. She was glad that I had called again so soon. How was my nice husband?

“Mrs. Cortland,” I said, “Sally Kennedy is coming to your place this afternoon, isn’t she?”

“My dear, Sally just phoned me. No, she isn’t coming. She begged off because she doesn’t feel up to it.”

“Oh, is she ill?”

“Not ill, really, just still shaken up from the other day. Nerves, I suppose. She wasn’t touched at all, you know. Actually, it was very, very providential…”

“Mrs. Cortland,” I said, “what happened to Sally?”

“Why, that accident the other day. She was walking down Madison Avenue when the truck came up over the sidewalk. It was out of control, you know, and just barely missed her.”

Afterwards, I couldn’t remember whether or not I had hung up the phone, I raced out of the booth and shouted at Jeff. Then we were in a cab, charging up Fifth Avenue, bulling our way through the traffic. In three minutes, two minutes now, we would be at the Sultan Hotel. It might take another two minutes to reach room 807.

I said, “Thelma Kennedy gets that money if Sally dies before her birthday. It’s Thelma who must be engineering this thing, isn’t it? Jeff, we’ve got to do something.”

“As soon as we take care of Sally, I’ll call Hankins,” Jeff said. “Just in case it is Thelma. But somebody might be doing it for her.”

“We know somebody is. She’s hired Joyce and…”

“No,” Jeff said. “I mean somebody else might be the brains.”

“But who? Who else would gain?”

“Her husband,” Jeff said. “Louis Kennedy.”

“But, Jeff, he’s dead. He died years ago.”

“Yes. In a boating accident. And his body was never found.”

“You mean he’s still alive?”

“I mean he might be. It’s possible.”

“But why would he have staged his own death? What would he gain by that?”

“From what I’ve heard,” Jeff said, “If Sally were suddenly to die, everybody in the world would suspect Louis. But a dead man is never suspected of murder, not in this day and age. He’d be free to go around losing control of trucks and pushing people in front of subways. Probably the murder is to seem accidental and the money won’t be tied up. Thelma could get it right away. But even if the accident was discovered to be murder… well, Louis died a long time ago. He’s in the clear. And I bet that Thelma would have an unquestionable, absolute alibi. It’s all a guess, of course, but…”

“But it sounds reasonable. Horribly reasonable.”

“His body was never found. It’s amazing how few bodies are never found. People are always finding bodies.”

The cab plunged through a red light and we were on Sixty-eighth Street. The Sultan stood a hundred yards away. Jeff found some money, held it ready for the driver. The door we would use was on my side; I had my fingers on the handle.

In front of the Sultan another cab blocked our way to the curb. The hotel’s doorman was standing at attention beside it. Then we saw a girl, hatless, her red-gold hair a flame in the shadow of the canopy, run across the sidewalk and dart into the taxi. She was carrying a black overnight bag. The doorman slammed shut the rear door and the car started east.

Jeff’s voice heaved with relief as he spoke to our driver. “That’s the girl we want. In that cab. Will you catch her for us?”

Sally’s taxi turned uptown on Park Avenue. We were halted by a changing light and the traffic it uncorked. It was at Ninety-third that we spotted her again. Her cab was three blocks ahead of us and going fast. The New York Central tracks snaked out from under the ground and Park Avenue did a quick-change from full dress to working clothes. We raced on by garages, used furniture stores, antique shops, stores with Spanish lettering on their windows. The Municipal Market hove in and out of sight. We had gained only half a block on Sally.

“Jeff, where could she be going in such a hurry? And why?”

“I can’t imagine why. But I’m afraid she’s headed for the 125th Street station.”

He was right. Sally was out of her cab almost before it stopped. She ran through the side entrance of the station. Jeff slapped some money into our driver’s hand and was across the sidewalk in two steps. When I caught up to him he was talking to the gateman at the foot of the stairs that led to the overhead tracks. The man said, “Yeah,” and jerked his thumb aloft. We chased up the steps. There was only one train in the station, and it was beginning to move. We took one frantic look for Sally and then Jeff was pushing me up the steps of the quickening train.

“Jeff,” I gasped, “what… where…”

“Damn her,” he said. “The next life I try to save is going to belong to somebody in a slow wheelchair.”

“She doesn’t know we’re after her, that we’re trying to help her.”

“You’re right,” Jeff said, “but I’m tired. Well, this is a nice change from a taxi cab. Let’s find Sally.”

“She mightn’t be on this train. We’re just taking it for granted that she is. Or did you see her get on?”

“No, I didn’t. But she wouldn’t run for a train that wasn’t in the station, would she?”

“That sounds logical.”

“Thank you. Now let’s stay logical. If we start out to find her by working our way to the back end of the train, where will Sally be?”

“In the front.”

“Naturally,” Jeff said. “So we’ll go toward the front first.”

The four coaches we went through were filled, but Sally Kennedy was not in any of them. The dining car, too, was crowded. The steward shook his head and started toward us as we pushed through the door. Over his rapidly approaching shoulder I scanned the people at the tables. I almost missed her.

She was seated in the furthest corner at a table for four, wedged in between the window and a stout woman in a bright green coat. She held the menu spread before her and it shielded her face. But above it I could see the sweep of bright hair topped with the clustered curls.

I nudged Jeff, but needlessly. He, too, had discovered her. As we brushed by the steward, he mumbled something about speaking to a friend. We went to Sally’s table and stood beside it.

“Miss Kennedy,” Jeff said.

The big white card went down with a jerk. For a moment she stared at us blankly, but only for a moment. Then her face played a dual role. Her lips broke into a pleased smile of greeting while her eyes narrowed into slits that signaled caution. She cast a sidewise glance toward her tablemates that warned us against them as she thrust her hand in front of the stout woman and grasped mine. It might have looked like a friendly gesture, but it wasn’t. Her nails bit sharply into my palm, her thumb pressed pleadingly on my knuckles.

“The Troys!” she exclaimed. Her voice was steady, her smile bright, but under it her lips were quivering. “How wonderful! I’m so very glad to see you. It’s… it’s been so long!”

“Hasn’t it?” Jeff said. “We have so much to talk about. Couldn’t we…”

She burst in quickly, the hysteria seeped up through the social razzle dazzle in her voice. “Of course we must get together and have a talk! I have so much to tell you, so much has happened since last I saw you! Where are you sitting?”

“We’ll be in the last car,” Jeff said.

“I’ll gulp down a sandwich and join you.” She nodded her head toward the door in a silent, pleading gesture of dismissal. “I’ll be with you in just a few minutes!”

Bending over the menu, she pulled the order blank toward her. She lifted her pencil and held it poised at the top line. I saw that her hand was trembling.

Something had happened to the Kennedy heiress since we had heard her coolly decry the possibility of anyone wanting to murder her. Something had happened that was making her run away, as though forty red devils were hot on her heels. Something that, even here in the safety of a crowded dining car, held her in the clawing grip of fear.

She had been afraid even to speak to us. As we turned away, I looked quickly at the three other occupants of her table. The woman beside her sipped her tea and buttered her toast, apparently unaware of the giddy reunion that we had just run through. Across from Sally an elderly man gazed morosely out the window at the darkening landscape and evinced no interest in anything else. The fourth person at the table, a dapper little man with a trim blond moustache, was intently inscribing his dinner choice on an order blank.

Each seemed completely absorbed in himself, completely disinterested in the others. Yet Sally Kennedy had warned us. She was in danger, and that danger was close by.

There were plenty of seats in the last car. It was the smoker and few of the passengers had yet worked up a yen for a cigarette. We found two empty double seats and swung one back to make a place for Sally when she joined us. We settled down and watched the conductor work his way toward us.

“Jeff,” I said, “where will we buy tickets to?”

“I don’t know.”

“Tickets, please,” the conductor said.

“We’ll have to buy them from you,” Jeff said.

“All right,” he said jovially. He pulled a ticket pad from his pocket and stood waiting.

“Where are we going?” Jeff asked him.

The conductor blinked.

Jeff tried again. “Where are you going?”

The man in blue smiled. “I’m not going anywhere,” he said. “I’m working today.”

“I mean,” Jeff said lamely, “the train.”

Our neighbors were gawking at us with amused curiosity. Across the aisle two men and a woman in facing seats were joined by a third man with an unlit cigarette drooping from his mouth. The four of them leaned forward, anxious not to miss a word of our uncomfortable plight.

“This is the 4:45 out of New York for Albany,” the conductor said. “Would you like to go to Albany?”

“No,” Jeff said, “I don’t think so.”

The conductor sat on the arm of the seat in front of us and winked broadly at his audience. He was going to make the most of this; this was something he would enjoy telling the wife about. Then, looking at him again, I could see that he enjoyed the reputation of being a great kidder.

“What’s wrong with Albany?” the conductor asked. “Why don’t you want to go to Albany?”

Jeff didn’t have the heart to spoil the man’s fun. He said, “The water there doesn’t agree with me.”

“I see. Well, now, Tarrytown’s a nice little place. Would you be interested in Tarrytown?”

“No,” Jeff said. “What else have you got?”

“I’ve got Ossining,” the conductor said. “Ossining, Chappawan, Croton, Oscawana… I think you’d like Oscawana. There isn’t any water there at all.”

“Two for Oscawana.”

“All right. I don’t think you’ll ever regret it.” He disconnected two strips from his ticket pad, punched them and handed them to Jeff. “Before you pay for these, would you like to step outside and look at them in the daylight?”

Jeff didn’t try to think up an answer to that one. He paid for the tickets and the conductor, chuckling heartily and happily to himself, went his way. We had made his day for him. Jeff looked gloomily past me out the window.

The train, cornered by the junction of the Harlem River with the Hudson, turned north, clicked by the shipyards at Yonkers and raced on toward Oscawana, wherever that was, and Albany. We lit cigarettes and did our bit toward making the air in the smoker unfit for human consumption.