Golden Trap (18 page)

“Please!”
she whispered.

Just as sure as God there was someone behind her in the room—someone there in the darkness.

“Are you all right?” I asked, making it sound as cheerful as I could.

“Fine. I just don’t want to see you now,” she said.

Out of the line of vision from the darkness beyond I made a little okay circle with the thumb and forefinger of my left hand.

“My lawyer will see you in the morning,” I said, loud, and hoping it sounded like a joke.

“Goodnight, Mark,” she said, and closed the door in my face. I heard all the locks clicking back into the closed positions. I stood there, my heart thumping against my ribs.

Living in New York in the Sixties is not always the most comfortable experience you can imagine. Everyday you hear of muggings, of senseless sexual attacks on girls who live alone, the breakings and enterings, the psychotic behavior of young people who have indulged themselves with a little LSD. Life is cheap as hell. Just as sure as God some lunatic had gotten in there with Shelda.

Find the nearest cop, you say. Well, I did look up and down the completely deserted street. I did see a police call box down near the corner. But in this age of violence you get to think in strange ways. It would take a minute to walk to the call box. It might take another five to ten minutes for a patrol car to show up. Whoever was in there with Shelda, if he was off his rocker, might have been kicked off by my almost getting the door open. He might be wondering if we had managed, somehow, to communicate. Right this minute his hands might be around her throat. I could get in there a hell of a sight faster than a hoped-for policeman.

I ran swiftly and silently down the alley between buildings. At the far end of the board fence that surrounded Shelda’s garden I took a jump up and clung to the top of the fence. Inch by inch I pulled myself up. I’d gone there because I knew there was a little hedge of evergreens at that far end. I could drop down behind them and stay hidden for a moment while I figured things out.

When I reached the top of the fence, sweat was pouring out of me from the sheer effort of pulling myself up. I rolled off the top with the idea of landing on my hands and knees in the soft flower bed.

I landed not in the flower bed but on a body.

There was an anguished moan, and I scrambled a foot or two away, fighting my own impulse to let out a yell of terror. I could see a dark shape move slightly.

“For the love of God keep still, whoever you are,” a low voice said.

I could hear my breath swoosh out of me like a collapsing balloon. The voice belonged to George Lovelace…

In the last five minutes I had completely forgotten about Lovelace and the Beaumont. It hadn’t even crossed my mind that Shelda’s danger had any connection with the bloodletting at the hotel. It had seemed perfectly clear to me that some neighborhood nut had somehow forced his way into the apartment.

There was just enough light from the city’s electric aura for Lovelace and me to see each other, crouching like two dogs in the darkness, nose to nose.

“Mark!” he whispered.

“In God’s name—” I said.

“Quiet!” he said. I could sense he was fighting pain. “I—I must have passed out.”

“Who’s in there with Shelda?” I asked.

“Shelda?”

“Shelda Mason, my secretary—my girl!” I said.

“I didn’t know. He went into this apartment. I—I tried coming at him from this side, but I fell getting over the fence. My leg—”

“Who went into the apartment?” I said.

“The Englishman.”

“Carleton? He’s back at the hotel, under guard. He couldn’t be in there with—”

“Curtis Dark,” Lovelace said.

“Dark!”

Lovelace’s breath exhaled in a kind of shudder. “Marilyn?” he asked.

“In the hospital. She’s badly hurt, George.”

“I knew,” he said bitterly.

My head was spinning around. “Dark!” I said. “Are you telling me he’s the one who attacked Marilyn?” My eyes were getting used to the darkness—or perhaps I was getting a little help from a faint light in the East. I could see his white, haggard face.

“He’s the one,” Lovelace said. “I was out like a light. You remember the pills you gave me? But I came to, and all hell had broken loose in your living room. I—I didn’t know Marilyn was there. I called out. The struggle ended and I heard the door slam. I—I was in a fog, Mark. I scrambled out of bed, like a drunk. I had my gun. I got out there and found Marilyn. I could see how bad it was. I called the doctor and covered her. My head was getting a little clearer. I wondered how whoever it was had gotten past the brass polisher in the hall. I went out. No one.”

“We knew you found him on the emergency stair,” I said. “We know you were wounded.”

“Must have lost quarts of blood,” he said. “My leg. Got a makeshift tourniquet on it in the taxi.”

“You saw Dark on the stairway?”

“Yes. His first shot winged me, which is why I didn’t get him. I was half doped and hurting. My shooting wasn’t good. But I saw him, clearly. Marilyn had damaged his face quite a bit.”

“But why? Where does Dark fit in?”

“You’ve got me,” Lovelace said. “He’s Carleton’s boy. That’s all I know. He ran. I couldn’t follow that fast. I got to the street just as he was climbing in a taxi. I heard him give the address of this apartment. Then I got a cab myself and came here after him. I didn’t see him go in, so I didn’t know which apartment he’d entered. There were no lights at the front of the house. So I came around here. There were lights in this ground-floor apartment. I saw him inside, with a blond girl helping him to get his face cleaned up. I climbed the wall, fell, and passed out.”

“They heard you?”

“I think so.” He turned his head toward the apartment. “No lights now.”

“He’s still there,” I said. I told him how I knew.

“How would he happen to come to your girl’s apartment?” Lovelace asked.

“They had a date tonight,” I said angrily. “He knew where she lived, the bastard! Shelda wouldn’t hesitate to let him in when he rang the bell. He probably had some story about how his face got scratched and torn—some kind of a barroom brawl. She’d help him get cleaned up.”

“Marilyn couldn’t talk?”

“She’s very badly hurt, George.”

“What was she doing there?”

“She wanted to stay there while you slept. She fought to protect you.”

“Oh, God!” he said, his voice shaken.

“Can you move?” I asked him.

“Crawl is about all,” he said.

“You’ve got your gun?”

“No good,” he said. “I fired it empty at that sonofabitch. Extra cartridges are back in my luggage in your rooms.”

“I’d probably be just as effective with it empty as loaded,” I said. “You think he heard you when you fell over the fence?”

“Why else the blackout? Why would your girl turn you away? Because he’s threatened her if she doesn’t play ball with him.”

“But he can’t get away with it now!” I said “You know. I know. Shelda knows. If Marilyn is eventually able to talk, she knows. He’s had it!”

“There’s still me,” Lovelace said. “He still means to get me before he’s taken. And he knows I’m out here in this garden.”

“I’m going for the cops,” I said.

Lovelace raised his head. “Too late,” he said. “Dawn. You climb that fence he’ll knock you off like the head pin in a bowling alley. That baby knows how to handle his gun, and I suspect his is reloaded.”

“So we just wait until he decides to come out here and pot us?” I asked.

Lovelace didn’t answer, I guess because he didn’t have an answer just then. I kept thinking he’d have to come up with something. Most of his adult life had been spent in a climate of violence. He must have techniques I’d never dreamed of. But all he did was lie there in the earth of the flower bed, his grey face twisted with pain.

I have to say right here and now that I have never been so scared in my whole life. I was scared for myself and even more scared for Shelda. I could imagine her, there in the cold darkness of her apartment with a lunatic. I cursed myself ten times over for not having gone for the police instead of handling things myself—or mishandling them. But when I thought about it I wondered how much difference it would have made. Get the cops battering on Shelda’s door and you couldn’t guess how young Mr. Dark would react. His situation was pretty desperate, too. He wasn’t going to get away with this. Even if he killed Shelda and me and Lovelace in cold blood he wasn’t going to get away with it. Marilyn had evidently marked him up so that he’d have no explanation. To run would be like a confession. A hundred to one Hardy would come up with his fingerprints. His goose was cooked; all that apparently mattered to him was to finish off Lovelace before he was trapped. If Shelda and I got in his way, he wasn’t going to be bothered about adding us to his list.

All I wanted was to get out of there, with Shelda. At that moment I couldn’t have cared less how Lovelace and Dark settled their vendetta. But I was pinned down where I lay behind Shelda’s evergreens just as firmly as if someone had driven a spike through my body. In my world, when you have a problem, you say, “Let’s talk it over.” If I stood up now and shouted to Dark that I wanted to talk, I’d probably get a slug right between the eyes, just the way the late John Smith had gotten one. I lay there, waiting for Lovelace to come up with a miracle.

I began to try to figure out what would happen as time passed. It was now a little past five by my watch. It was daylight, but the city was still asleep except for a few scattered cab drivers, the cops on their beats, the subway motormen and brakemen, the guys on the sanitation trucks kicking garbage cans around, the night people in factories, in gas and electric plants, in the telephone offices. There’d be a few tired disc jockeys playing records at the radio stations. Back at the Beaumont the cleaning crews were at work in the lobby, the bars and restaurant rooms, and the ballroom, with their vacuum cleaners, their brass-and-glass-polishing potions, their electrically driven trash wagons, their dusters on long poles for cleaning the magnificent chandeliers, their buckets, their mops propelled by old-fashioned elbow grease. I could imagine Chambrun, heavy-lidded, sitting at his desk, waiting for some report from Hardy. I could imagine Jerry Dodd and his men searching the hotel once more, just in case Lovelace and the killer might have found a place there to hide. No one would be worrying about me and Shelda. Unless Chambrun suddenly needed me and called Shelda’s place there would be three or four hours before anyone began to wonder why I wasn’t back on the job.

There was a chance that, in an hour or two, someone would look out of a window in one of the tall apartment buildings surrounding Shelda’s place and see two guys lying in the shrubbery. It was a hundred to one that whoever saw us wouldn’t do a damn thing about it. Mind-your-own-business is the key to security in a big city.

I looked at Lovelace. His eyes were closed. I thought he’d gone to sleep or passed out. I reached out and touched him and his tired eyes popped open.

“When will they come looking for you?” he asked.

“When Shelda doesn’t answer a phone call, or when I don’t show up for work about eight-thirty or nine o’clock.”

“Long wait,” he said.

“And if they do come looking for me?” I asked. “What happens then?”

“I’ve been trying to think the way he’s thinking,” Lovelace said. “I didn’t come at him in the dark. He has to know I’m hurt. He has to guess my gun is empty or almost empty. In the dark I had almost an even chance with him. I didn’t take it. In the daylight the odds are all with him. He’s the one under cover and if I show myself I’ve had it.”

“Whatever he does he can’t get away with it,” I said.

“He can’t expect to,” Lovelace said. “He has just one problem. He has to stay alive ten seconds longer than I do. If he could be sure my gun is empty he’d walk out here right now and shoot me, the way you would a horse with a broken leg. But he can’t be sure. He knows that if I have one bullet and he shows himself, everything he’s done will be wasted. He’d be dead and I’d be alive. It would seem that all that matters to him is to make sure that I die. But the chance that I have a bullet or two left has him sweating in there. I think he has figured that it’s a question of who can outwait the other one.”

“Oh, we can wait,” I said bitterly, “because we can’t go anywhere without getting plugged.”

“He may not know you’re here,” Lovelace said. “He could have been distracted by your girl for the few seconds you were visible on the top of the fence. That could have him sweating too. Did you guess Miss Mason was in trouble in spite of the act she put on? If you did you’ve gone for the police, as any sensible man would have done.”

“Who’s sensible? Maybe he knows I’m not sensible,” I said.

“Why didn’t you call the cops?”

“Because I didn’t dream Shelda’s trouble had anything to do with you. I thought there was some local nut in there. I was afraid to give him time.”

“Hold it!” Lovelace said. His hand closed over my wrist like a vise. He was looking across the garden at the apartment.

The door to the garden had opened, and Shelda came out, very slowly, walking like someone in a trance. I tried to scramble up but Lovelace held me down.

“Wait!” he whispered.

There was a small sundial in the center of the garden. A flagstone path ran from the house straight down to where we were hiding. A second path bisected the garden from sidewall to sidewall. The sundial was dead in the center of the intersection of the two paths. Shelda came down the path from the house toward the sundial, a step at a time. I could see her face quite clearly in the rapidly increasing daylight. It was the color of ashes. The distance from the house to the sundial was perhaps twenty yards, and from it to us another twenty. Shelda’s eyes were wide and frightened. When she reached the sundial she stopped and seemed to steady herself by leaning on it.

“Mr. Lovelace!” Her voice was small and shaky but it reached us.

“Shelda!” I said.

“Mark! Oh, my God!” she said.

“Just stand there, Miss Mason,” Lovelace said in a cold, hard voice. “Don’t show any sign that we’ve answered you. Look from left to right, as though you were waiting for an answer.
Do what I say!”