The Oxford Book of American Det (52 page)

“She’s been here five days,” Tony said. “Waiting for you. She hasn’t left the hotel a minute.”

The man’s mouth worked a little. His smile had a knowing tilt to it. “I got delayed a little up north,” he said smoothly. “You know how it is. Visiting old friends. You seem to know a lot about my business, copper.”

“That’s right, Mr. Rails.”

The man lunged to his feet and his hand snapped at the gun. He stood leaning over, holding it on the table, staring. “Dames talk too much,” he said with a muffled sound in his voice as though he held something soft between his teeth and talked through it.

“Not dames, Mr. Rails.”

“Huh?” The gun slithered on the hard wood of the table. “Talk it up, copper. My mind reader just quit.”

“Not dames, guys. Guys with guns.”

The glacier silence fell between them again. The man straightened his body out slowly.

His face was washed clean of expression, but his eyes were haunted. Tony leaned in front of him, a shortish plump man with a quiet, pale, friendly face and eyes as simple as forest water.

“They never run out of gas—those boys,” Johnny Rails said, and licked at his lip.

“Early and late, they work. The old firm never sleeps.”

“You know who they are?” Tony said softly.

“I could maybe give nine guesses. And twelve of them would be right.”

“The trouble boys,” Tony said, and smiled a brittle smile.

“Where is she?” Johnny Rails asked harshly.

“Right next door to you.”

The man walked to the wall and left his gun lying on the table. He stood in front of the wall, studying it. He reached up and gripped the grillwork of the balcony railing. When he dropped his hand and turned, his face had lost some of its lines. His eyes had a quieter glint. He moved back to Tony and stood over him.

“I’ve got a stake,” he said. “Eve sent me some dough and I built it up with a touch I made up north. Case dough, what I mean. The trouble boys talk about twenty-five grand.” He smiled crookedly. “Five C’s I can count. I’d have a lot of fun making them believe that, I would.”

“What did you do with it?” Tony asked indifferently.

“I never had it, copper. Leave that lay. I’m the only guy in the world that believes it. It was a little deal that I got suckered on.”

“I’ll believe it,” Tony said.

“They don’t kill often. But they can be awful tough.”

“Mugs,” Tony said with a sudden bitter contempt. “Guys with guns. Just mugs.” Johnny Rails reached for his glass and drained it empty. The ice cubes tinkled softly as he put it down. He picked his gun up, danced it on his palm, then tucked it, nose down, into an inner breast pocket. He stared at the carpet.

“How come you’re telling me this, copper?”

“I thought maybe you’d give her a break.”

“And if I wouldn’t?”

“I kind of think you will,” Tony said.

Johnny Rails nodded quietly. “Can I get out of here?”

“You could take the service elevator to the garage. You could rent a car. I can give you a card to the garage man.”

“You’re a funny little guy,” Johnny Rails said.

Tony took out a worn ostrich-skin billfold and scribbled on a printed card. Johnny Rails read it, and stood holding it, tapping it against a thumbnail.

“I could take her with me,” he said, his eyes narrow.

“You could take a ride in a basket too,” Tony said. “She’s been here five days, I told you. She’s been spotted. A guy I know called me up and told me to get her out of here. Told me what it was all about. So I’m getting you out instead.”

“They’ll love that,” Johnny Rails said. “They’ll send you violets.”

“I’ll weep about it on my day off.”

Johnny Rails turned his hand over and stared at the palm. “I could see her, anyway.

Before I blow. Next door to here, you said?”

Tony turned on his heel and started for the door. He said over his shoulder, “Don’t waste a lot of time, handsome. I might change my mind.” The man said, almost gently: “You might be spotting me right now, for all I know.” Tony didn’t turn his head. “That’s a chance you have to take.” He went on to the door and passed out of the room. He shut it carefully, silently, looked once at the door of 14A and got into his dark elevator. He rode it down to the linen-room floor and got out to remove the basket that held the service elevator open at that floor. The door slid quietly shut. He held it so that it made no noise. Down the corridor, light came from the open door of the housekeeper’s office. Tony got back into his elevator and went on down to the lobby.

The little clerk was out of sight behind his pebbled-glass screen, auditing accounts.

Tony went through the main lobby and turned into the radio room. The radio was on again, soft. She was there, curled on the davenport again. The speaker hummed to her, a vague sound so low that what it said was as wordless as the murmur of trees. She turned her head slowly and smiled at him.

“Finished palming doorknobs? I couldn’t sleep worth a nickel. So I came down again.

Okay?”

He smiled and nodded. He sat down in a green chair and patted the plump brocade arms of it. “Sure, Miss Cressy.”

“Waiting is the hardest kind of work, isn’t it? I wish you’d talk to that radio. It sounds like a pretzel being bent.”

Tony fiddled with it, got nothing he liked, set it back where it had been.

“Beer-parlour drunks are all the customers now.”

She smiled at him again.

“I don’t bother you being here, Miss Cressy?”

“I like it. You’re a sweet little guy, Tony.”

He looked stiffly at the floor and a ripple touched his spine. He waited for it to go away. It went slowly. Then he sat back, relaxed again, his neat fingers clasped on his elk’s tooth. He listened. Not to the radio—to far-off, uncertain things, menacing things. And perhaps to just the safe whir of wheels going away into a strange night.

“Nobody’s all bad,” he said out loud.

The girl looked at him lazily. “I’ve met two or three I was wrong on, then.” He nodded. “Yeah,” he admitted judiciously. “I guess there’s some that are.” The girl yawned and her deep violet eyes half closed. She nestled back into the cushions. “Sit there for a while, Tony. Maybe I could nap.”

“Sure. Not a thing for me to do. Don’t know why they pay me.” She slept quickly and with complete stillness, like a child. Tony hardly breathed for ten minutes. He just watched her, his mouth a little open. There was a quiet fascination in his limpid eyes, as if he was looking at an altar.

Then he stood up with infinite care and padded away under the arch to the entrance lobby and the desk. He stood at the desk listening for a little while. He heard a pen rustling out of sight. He went around the corner to the row of house phones in little glass cubbyholes. He lifted one and asked the night operator for the garage.

It rang three or four times and then a boyish voice answered: “Windermere Hotel.

Garage speaking.”

“This is Tony Reseck. That guy Watterson I gave a card to. He leave?”

“Sure, Tony. Half an hour almost. Is it your charge?”

“Yeah,” Tony said. “My party. Thanks. Be seein’ you.” He hung up and scratched his neck. He went back to the desk and slapped a hand on it.

The clerk wafted himself around the screen with his greeter’s smile in place. It dropped when he saw Tony.

“Can’t a guy catch up on his work?” he grumbled.

“What’s the professional rate on Fourteen-B?”

The clerk stared morosely. “There’s no professional rate in the tower.”

“Make one. The fellow left already. Was there only an hour.”

“Well, well,” the clerk said airily. “So the personality didn’t click tonight. We get a skip-out.”

“Will five bucks satisfy you?

“Friend of yours?”

“No. Just a drunk with delusions of grandeur and no dough.”

“Guess we’ll have to let it ride, Tony. How did he get out?”

“I took him down the service elevator. You was asleep. Will five bucks satisfy you?”

“Why?”

The worn ostrich-skin wallet came out and a weedy five slipped across the marble. “All I could shake him for,” Tony said loosely.

The clerk took the five and looked puzzled. “You’re the boss,” he said, and shrugged.

The phone shrilled on the desk and he reached for it. He listened and then pushed it toward Tony. “For you.”

Tony took the phone and cuddled it close to his chest. He put his mouth close to the transmitter. The voice was strange to him. It had a metallic sound. Its syllables were meticulously anonymous.

“Tony? Tony Reseck?”

“Talking.”

“A message frorr’,A1. Shoot?”

Tony looked at the clerk. “Be a pal,” he said over the mouthpiece. The clerk flicked a narrow smile at him and went away. “Shoot,” Tony said into the phone.

“We had a little business with a guy in your place. Picked him up scramming. Al had a hunch you’d run him out. Tailed him and took him to the curb. Not so good.

Backfire.”

Tony held the phone very tight and his temples chilled with the evaporation of moisture. “Go on,” he said. “I guess there’s more.”

“A little. The guy stopped the big one. Cold. Al—Al said to tell you goodbye.” Tony leaned hard against the desk. His mouth made a sound that was not speech.

“Get it?” The metallic voice sounded impatient, a little bored. “This guy had him a rod.

He used it. Al won’t be phoning anybody any more.”

Tony lurched at the phone, and the base of it shook on the rose marble. His mouth was a hard dry knot.

The voice said: “That’s as far as we go, bub. G’night.” The phone clicked dryly, like a pebble hitting a wall.

Tony put the phone down in its cradle very carefully, so as not to make any sound. He looked at the clenched palm of his left hand. He took a handkerchief out and rubbed the palm softly and straightened the fingers out with his other hand. Then he wiped his forehead. The clerk came around the screen again and looked at him with glinting eyes.

“I’m off Friday. How about lending me that phone number?” Tony nodded at the clerk and smiled a minute frail smile. He put his handkerchief away and patted the pocket he had put it in. He turned and walked away from the desk, across the entrance lobby, down the three shallow steps, along the shadowy reaches of the main lobby, and so in through the arch to the radio room once more. He walked softly, like a man moving in a room where somebody is very sick. He reached the chair he had sat in before and lowered himself into it inch by inch. The girl slept on, motionless, in that curled-up looseness achieved by some women and all cats. Her breath made no slightest sound against the vague murmur of the radio.

Tony Reseck leaned back in the chair and clasped his hands on his elk’s tooth and quietly closed his eyes.

JOHN DICKSON CARR (1906-1977)

It seems fitting that the author most memorable as the creator of locked-room puzzles set largely in upper-crust and often British milieus should also be a political conservative. Since John Dickson Carr spent his writing life being more English than the English, it is not surprising that many readers are surprised to learn that Carr was American.

If one can call an American a Tory, John Dickson Carr deserves the title. Born into a prominent Pennsylvania family (his father was a United States congressman), he attended prep school and exclusive Haverford College before completing his education in Paris. After marrying an Englishwoman in 1932, he lived in Great Britain, writing an average of four novels a year plus radio dramas for the British Broadcasting Corporation. His draft board called him back to the United States in 1942, but he was sent back to London to continue writing propaganda for the BBC. After the war, he moved back to the United States whenever the Labour Party held power in Britain.

Carr produced seventy novels, most of them falling within three series. His major series characters include Henri Bencolin, an elegant Parisian
juge d’instruction
whose adventures are narrated by Jeff Marie, a young American in Paris. Another of Carr’s series sleuths is Dr. Gideon Fell, an obese and omniscient sleuth who works on English shores, sometimes along parallel lines of investigation with Chief Inspector David Hadley of Scotland Yard. Using the pseudonym Carter Dickson, he created Sir Henry Merrivale, another highly intelligent character whose legal and medical expertise is put to good use in investigating seemingly impossible crimes. Inspector Humphrey Masters often investigates alongside Merrivale.

Among Carr’s historical mysteries is
The Hungry Goblin,
featuring Wilkie Collins as a sleuth. And he wrote an authorised biography, Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He also collaborated with Adrian Conan Doyle on a pastiche,
The Exploits of Sherlock
Holmes.

An examination of Carr’s fiction proves that he possessed a great sense of play within a form that requires considerable structure and adherence to rules of fair play and careful clueing. Many of Carr’s locked-room mysteries deliver comedy, atmosphere, and bizarre twists that are rarely surpassed in the genre. In 1963, he was named Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America.

Written under the Carter Dickson name,
The Footprint in the Sky
is a prime example of straightforward narration and a neatly tied ending, in sharp contrast with the nearly unbelievable events and unlikely clues that the sleuth must interpret. Colonel March of

‘The Department of Queer Complaints’ is called in to provide a surprising solution to what appears to be an open-and-shut case. March appears in nine stories written under the Carter Dickson pen name, originally collected in
The Department of Queer
Complaints.

The Footprint in the Sky

She awoke out of confused dreams; awoke with a start, and lay staring at the white ceiling of her bedroom for a minute or two before she could convince herself it was anything but a dream.

But it was a dream.

The cold, brittle sunlight poured in at the open window. The cold, brittle air, blowing the curtains, stirred a light coating of snow on the window-sill. It stirred briskly in that little, bare room; it should have set the blood racing, and Dorothy Brant breathed it deeply.