Stab in the Dark

FOLLOW IN A DEAD MAN’S FOOTSTEPS!

Paul Knox, secret agent for the U.S. Government, had been around. But never had he seen anything as vicious as this new twist in the blackmail racket. Wealthy and prominent people were being exposed to international scandal, the kind that could give not merely themselves but their nation a black eye, and it had to be stopped. Further, it was known that the criminal ring was about to expand.

But when Paul found his only contact had been stabbed through the eye with an icepick, he realized several things: first, his own life was in immediate peril; second, he could trust no one on either side of the law; and third, with no more leads to follow, his only hope was a STAB IN THE DARK.

CAST OF CHARACTERS

PAUL KNOX

He knew all the angles, but almost got thrown by the curves.

CORA DEANE

She was a smart gal, who knew shorthand and the art of the Mickey Finn.

JOCK DYLAN

He wanted his name in the paper. It got there—in the obituary column.

NAT TINSLEY

She had a male name, a female body, and the heart of a cold-blooded gambler.

MADDY KEEHAN

He knew how to make a guy confess—just use the rubber hose.

LEO AUFFER

He was a wealthy playboy, until a killer played him for keeps.

A C
LASS
A, big city hotel was a complicated place. Just how complicated Cora Deane had never realized until she had come to work in one. She paused now in the dark corridor with its dank, water-stained plastered walls and peered ahead through the gloom.

She was two levels down. Two levels beneath the lobby and the restaurant and bar and other expensive services that the Hotel Winton offered to its public. She smiled faintly at her own thoughts, aware that she was letting them run through her mind simply to keep up her courage.

And there was nothing to be afraid of really. She kept telling herself that, over and over, almost with each reluctant step forward. This was a metropolitan hotel; she was in the sub-basement, a place of gloomy storage rooms, of corridors lighted by dim, wire-bracketed bulbs. Because it was gloomy and silent, cut away from all the noise and movement that she associated with the hotel, that didn’t mean she had anything to fear.

But it was different, and no matter what she told herself—she was afraid.

She walked on, letting the dim lights from above guide her. To her left a corridor ran to the bakery. She knew it was that because she could smell the fresh bread. She went on past, into deeper gloom. What had she been told? Third corridor on the right, small room at the end on the left side.

But why down here? She asked herself the question for the dozenth time and, as before, had no answer. Why not more openly? In the bar, perhaps. Or in the coffee shop. Or even in his room. No one would have suspected anything. Off duty she had the right to go anywhere in the hotel that she chose.

She couldn’t see where such a meeting would have aroused any comment. Certainly not as much as if she were found wandering down here, well out of her own territory. But those had been the orders and she was in no position to disobey them.

Not that she wanted to disobey them, of course. This was what she had waited for so eagerly. Now, with the third corridor visible just ahead, she hurried. She should not. Her high heels wobbled dangerously on the uneven and occasionally damp cement of the floor. As she turned into the narrower corridor, the swish of her full skirt echoed sibilantly in her own ears. With an effort, she swallowed back a sudden desire to run—to run away from the empty dimness behind and toward the meeting ahead.

There was the end of the corridor, a door on either side. The one on the left was closed; the one on the right was open perhaps two inches. She put a hand over the knob of the closed door. The lock clicked back but the door stuck a little. Almost fretfully, she gave a little thrust and the door swung inward sharply, nearly pitching her into the dark room.

There was no light, no light at all. She thought bewilderingly, “I’m early,” although she knew that if anything she was late.

Her hand groped for the light switch, found it, and pushed. The light came on, a big bulb hanging from the center of the ceiling. Momentarily the brightness was blinding.

And then she could see again. But only for an instant. Only long enough to glimpse the person sprawled in the center of the floor. Not long enough to scream. She could not have screamed anyway. The steely hardness of fingers came too swiftly to clamp themselves about her throat. Before her eyes were fully adjusted to the light, long before her mind had fully absorbed what she had seen, blackness came down, blotting out everything.

P
AUL
K
NOX
fidgeted in the easy chair, comfortable but impersonal as all hotel furniture, and stared unseeingly at the blank television screen. From there his eyes moved to the bed, to the dresser, to his luggage on the rack, to the desk, and back to the television screen. He shifted his position.

It was always this way at the beginning of a job. First the planning, then the actual moving in and beginning—and then the let down while he readjusted himself, oriented himself. He hadn’t expected it to be so difficult since on this case he was returning home. But three years had made a lot of changes; he found it even harder than working in a strange place.

Take this hotel, for example. When he had left, the Winton was fairly new, certainly the fanciest place in town. It still looked new and still was the fanciest place in town. But it was different for him. He had never been a paying guest here before. His visits to the Winton’s rooms had been strictly business—on those rare occasions when it had been necessary for the hotel to call in the police.

This was definitely different. Now he wore hand tailored gray flannel instead of long-lasting ready made serge. Now when he put his feet up, he could look at thirty-five dollar shoes instead of police brogans. Not that he couldn’t have afforded better, but it made things easier when he wore the same as others in the same salary bracket.

In some ways the old had been better, in other ways not so good. Certainly now he had more freedom from routine and could live more the type of life he liked to live. But the old comradeship was gone. Now he knew only a small percentage of the men he worked with and he knew none intimately. Some were little more than names—and they were scattered all over the country, all over the world.

Thinking of comradeship, he reached out a hand for the phone to call Mel Beeker. He had intended waiting until Beeker was off duty, but his restlessness was too great. And so was his nostalgia. Of all the men he had worked with, he wanted to see Beeker most. Nine years together from rookies into plain clothes. They had moved up fast, both of them. They had started as two college trained cops laughed at by the old timers, but laughed at less as test after test pushed them up the ladder, and as a cleaned up city regime proved that a cop could be smart as well as big and tough.

The operator said, “Your order, sir.”

He hesitated briefly, recalling the number. Someone was standing by the switchboard, close to the operator, because he heard a man’s voice say softly but distinctly, “Make a complete record of all calls—in and out.”

Knox cradled the telephone softly, his lower lip out thoughtfully. The phone rang almost immediately. “Your order, sir? You rang?”

“I only wanted a drink but I changed my mind. Think I’ll have a bath first.” He hung up and rose.

Something was going on. Something that might or might not touch him. Probably not since it was a homicide matter. If it wasn’t homicide, then he had lost his sense of hearing. He could have sworn that was Maddy Keehan’s voice he had heard. And so far as he knew, Maddy Keehan was still working under Mel Beeker.

He took the elevator down from ten to the lobby and strolled casually into it. It looked much the same as it had when he had checked in an hour before. He received the same too casual glances from the ever present women who hung around such lobbies. Even the best of them, got the same faint, hopeful smiles when his eyes met those glances, and then the pout as he looked away again.

It looked much the same except for Maddy Keehan. When Knox was in the middle of the lobby he could see him standing by the telephone switchboard. He stood as usual with his solid legs slightly spread, his squat, long-armed body bent a little forward. He was looking directly at Knox.

He walked up. “Hello, Maddy.”

“Damn,” Keehan said in. his gravelly voice. He saw Knox’s hand and shook it without much enthusiasm. His eyes took in the two hundred dollar suit, the careful grooming, the out of place tan. Out of place because here in the northwest there wasn’t enough sun in the winter to turn an albino pale pink.

“Trouble?”

“Don’t we always?” Keehan asked.

“Where there’s Keehan, there’s Beeker. How is he?”

“Mel? Busy.” Keehan looked uneasy.

I’m getting a brush off, Knox thought. It angered him a little. “I can at least pay my respects.”

“He’ll be up.”

Up? Then something had happened in the basement. Knox said, “If you see him, tell him I’m in the coffee shop grabbing a sandwich.” He started in that direction, turned before he reached the coffee shop doors, and mounted two steps that took him onto a second level that ran the length of the rear of the lobby. He went through doors into the men’s room. It had two entrances, with the second opening onto a corridor that led to the side entry of the hotel. Off this corridor another ran to the service entrance on the alley and the freight elevators. Knox remembered it better now than when he had lived here. He should: he had studied the floor plan of the hotel thoroughly before making this trip.

He went out the side entrance, along the corridor, to the right, past the alley entrance, and down the stairs that ran alongside the service elevators. The first basement was a hodgepodge—kitchens, cleaning shop, storerooms for immediately needed goods, a couple of rooms where nonresident help could rest. Knox stopped and listened. There was no particular sound that seemed out of place. He continued on down.

A uniformed patrolman was at the foot of the stairs. He put out a hand. Knox said, “Lieutenant Beeker. Keehan said he was …” He stopped, not quite making a full lie out of it. He was disturbed now; doing this was more than wanting to see Beeker, more than just idle curiosity. Something fairly big was in the wind, or Beeker and Keehan and cops guarding stairways wouldn’t all be in on it.

‘'Yeh?”

“Yeh,” Knox said. He didn’t smile “Detective-Lieutenant Knox, resigned.” He walked on by the cop and was three steps away when the resigned part sank in.

“Hey, you.”

Knox kept on walking. The cop yelled. Another one popped out of a corridor on the left. Along with him came the smell of baking bread. The man stopped him none too gently.

Knox said, “Hello, Peddy. Still in harness.”

He was a man going gray and heavy but there was strength in his grip. He dropped his hand and grinned. “Paul, be-damned. Where did you show up from?”

“California sunshine,” Knox said. “Keehan gave me to understand that Mel is down here.”

Peddy had an embarrassed look on his face. “I don’t think the Lieutenant wants to be disturbed, Paul.”

The way he said “the Lieutenant” surprised Knox. Always before it had been Mel or Loot. Knox said, “What’s going on?”

Peddy just looked blank. Knox knew that if he was to get past this point and see Beeker, he would have to bring out his letter from the Commissioner. He didn’t like it. He hoped to save that for later, when he might really have need of it. But it was obvious that he wasn’t getting any cooperation from the department. Those three years he had been gone had changed a lot of things.

He showed Peddy the letter. It was brief, succinct. Members of the city force were to give any and all aid and cooperation necessary to Paul Knox, the bearer of the letter. The Commissioner’s signature was even bolder and more definite than usual.

Peddy handed back the letter. “Third corridor on the right, down to the end, Paul. The Lieutenant can tell you what he’s doing.”

Flushing a little at Peddy’s clipped tone, Knox walked with his easy, long stride down the dim corridor, made his turn, and went to where light streamed from an open door at the far end. He had to pass two more uniformed police. But neither of them gave him any trouble when he said, “Peddy sent me on to see Lieutenant Beeker.”

Beeker was standing just inside the doorway to the lighted room. As usual, he was dressed in well cut clothes that looked as if he had slept in them. He was a big man, taller than Knox, and a good deal heavier. His bigness was the kind that later would go to thickness in the middle, giving him a paunch. But now he was well under forty and he looked all shoulders and chest. He moved his bulk with surprising grace and quickness. Seeing Beeker again reminded Knox of the times he had tried to stop the man on the football field. They were rueful memories.

He said, “Hello, Mel.”

Beeker’s craggy face did not light up as Knox had expected. There was no handshake, no backslap, no anything. Knox had expected this to be easy, the renewal of an old friendship. But it wasn’t that way at all. He thought he knew Mel Beeker, but this man before him was almost a stranger. Hard. Angry. A man with a lot of weight on his shoulders.

Beeker stared at him. “What are you doing—slumming?”

Knox could have expected the crack but that didn’t mean he had to like like it. There was a handful of men in the room, a doctor, two photographers, some fingerprint boys. They glanced up and then away, embarrassed.

Knox said evenly, “If you weren’t so big and in such good shape, I’d sock you for that.”

“I’m busy,” Beeker said.

Knox looked past him at the body he was busy with. It lay on its side, back to him. It was that of a man, a medium-sized man dressed neatly in an expensive, soft blue suit, the bottoms of custom made shoe soles showing beneath bright, clocked socks. There was a crushed hat half under one shoulder, an overcoat puddled near on the floor. The room was full of chairs as well as men. Chairs of all sorts. It was obviously a storeroom for them. But from the doorway half into the room there was an aisle perhaps six feet wide. The man lay curled crosswise in this aisle. Knox could not see how he had died.

“Who is it?”

“See you later, Paul.”

Knox took out his letter and handed it to Beeker. He hated this worse than he had showing it to Peddy.

Beeker handed it back, his eyes bleak. “Dough’ll do anything.”

“Think it your way,” Knox said. He had himself under control because he had to be that way. He wished he didn’t, wished that he could show Beeker what he, Knox, thought of an attitude like that.

Beeker shrugged. “All right. It’s Leo Auffer. He was a guest at the hotel here. We identified him by some cards in his wallet, although most of his things have been cleaned out. His money, anyway.”

He paused and glared at Knox. “Someone stabbed him in the eye with what looks like an icepick. Then to make sure, they pulled it out and jabbed three more times in the belly. He’s dead.”

“The first one got him,” the doctor said unnecessarily.

Knox scarcely heard him. He had been well schooled to hide his thoughts but this news jolted him. He said faintly, “Auffer?”

“Know him?” Beeker was all cop, his voice jabbing the question at Knox as if he might be a suspect.

“I’ve heard of him. Who hasn’t?” Leo Auffer, five million dollars anytime he wanted to cash in a handful of his assets. Those were the really liquid ones. Auffer, the international playboy, one time tennis champion, yacht race champion, world traveler who made films of exotic places, wrote books about them, gave lectures about them—and thus had access to areas few men could go into with impunity. Leo Auffer lay dead in a dirty storeroom in a hotel basement.

Leo Auffer, who was Knox’s sole contact here, and the man he had come from the West Indies to see. Paul Knox swore. It was soft but heartfelt.