Читать книгу A Gunman Close Behind - A. A. Glynn - Страница 6

CHAPTER TWO

Joanne Kilvert had guts. The story she told me as we drove through Plymouth and on out towards South Bend proved that.

She got those transient lines of bitterness on her face the same way I got mine—living within smelling distance of the underworld. By the time South Bend showed up as a myriad scattering of lights on the far horizon, I had a great respect for the slight, dark-haired girl.

“My brother knew only too well who was behind the trade-union pushing in the Chicago region,” she said. “It was the Shelmerdine organisation. Almost everybody knows that: the union men who are forced into giving a cut of their funds for protection, the politicians, the newspapers, and the police. They all know, but they won’t act. Athelstan Shelmerdine isn’t just a man—he’s a—a beast. You know how newspaper cartoonists draw something evil as an octopus with legs gripping a lot of people at the same time?”

I nodded.

“Well, that’s what Athelstan Shelmerdine is. He’s a monster. He has his tentacles stretching out all over the Middle West. He owns places and people at all levels; he can intimidate people into being his property, or he can buy them. When anyone offers resistance, or even looks dangerous, he can have them put out of the way.…”

She paused. I suppose she was thinking of her brother, his wife, and their baby. I took one hand off the wheel, fumbled in my pocket, and found my packet of cigarettes and my lighter, then gave her a cigarette and took one myself.

She puffed the cigarette into life gratefully.

“My brother was sick and tired of the undercover deals in his union. He was a fighter, Mr. Lantry. They gave him a medal for killing North Koreans when he was only a youngster. He thought he had a right to live in a clean and decent United States, and he went out to fight corruption almost on his own, but he wasn’t looking for another medal. All he wanted was a decent life for his family and himself. One or two of his supporters lost heart after a crowd of hoodlums beat them up. Arthur was beaten up too, but that only made him more determined. He began mentioning names. He produced a pamphlet on gangster interference in trade unionism, and laid charges against big people who were corrupt to the core. You know what happened to him.”

“Sure, I know. The little man against the big combine. A lot of men tried what your brother tried, girlie. They had guts, but that’s not enough when you’re up against rotten and bribed officials. You need official support, and you need to know that the official who’s giving you the support is not buying his highballs and showing his girl a good time with money your enemies put in his pocket.”

“I was trained as a secretary,” went on Joanne Kilvert. “I suppose I must have some of the same spirit Arthur had—I like to think I have. After my brother and his child were killed that day, by thugs who made a clear getaway, I was determined to do what I could about it. I knew Shelmerdine was behind the whole business and I knew, if I could only get something on him to place before the Crime Commission in Chicago, I might help to break him. He has a lot of front organisations: legitimate business concerns which cover his other activities. I managed to obtain a job with one of them, but I used a false name. Then, about three months back, Shelmerdine’s personal secretary left him and I was recommended for the job. Maybe you can call it providential. I quit the real estate agency which Shelmerdine owns as one of his above-board concerns and went to work out at his mansion. It’s a big place just outside a town called Rollinsville—might as well call it Shelmerdinesville, because he seems to own the whole place.”

I grunted. I knew something of Shelmerdine by hearsay, he seemed to own sections of land and everyone in them like a cattle-baron of the Old West. It wasn’t hard to think of him as an old-time patrone, making everyone act when he hollered and running them off their holdings when they dared to raise a holler for themselves.

“This mansion of his,” continued Joanne Kilvert, “is a fine old place in its own grounds. Shelmerdine lives like a king, but I always thought of him as a beast in a cave. It’s a beautifully furnished cave where everything is veneered over. Shelmerdine has a wife, a quiet and pretty little woman who never asks any questions, and a small son of about six years. He’s a family man. A big businessman who loves to spend all the time he can with his wife and child. I used to watch him play with the child on the lawn, and I’d think of my brother and his child, buried in the ground, and my crippled sister-in-law.”

She took a long pull on the cigarette and I watched the lights of distant South Bend growing bigger.

A city, seen from a distance at night, is a fairyland of lights. It’s hard to think that, among the lights, people are living out their lives; people are being born and other people are dying. It’s hard to imagine that the far cluster of lights are a spangled cloak for the squalid things of the city; dirt, disease, strife, and crime.

Joanne Kilvert went on: “Everything at Shelmerdine’s place was on the up-and-up. He rarely left home, and conducted his businesses from there. Every letter I took down and typed was a legitimate business one, touching the affairs of Shelmerdine Enterprises Incorporated. No one ever used gangster talk, no one ever produced a gun. There was no poker playing in smoky rooms, no whisky bottles strewn about the place. There were no gangsters’ molls, and nobody ever tried to paw me. I had my own suite of rooms and I was treated with respect and paid well. There were no mobster types about the place, but there was no disguising what the two chauffeurs, the gardener and his helper, and even the butler, with what he thought was an English accent, really were. There were also a couple of uniformed men who prowled about the grounds to keep out intruders. There was a very studied and very obvious gloss of respectability about the place, Mr. Lantry, but I wasn’t fooled.”

She paused to stub out the butt of her cigarette in the ashtray on the dashboard.

“I know the kind of set-up,” I told her. “I’ve been in some joints that were built with dirty money myself. I bet you could smell the rotgut booze Shelmerdine peddled in the twenties. Maybe, if you were extra-sensitive, you caught the echo of a machine-gun coming from a Chicago back-alley thirty years in the past every time you glanced at Shelmerdine’s art treasures.”

“No,” she answered. “I wasn’t interested in how Athelstan Shelmerdine made his money. I was only concerned with what he had done to people near to me.”

“And hundreds of other people, all of them near to somebody,” I said.

“He began to trust me with a great deal of work out of the usual run of a secretary’s job. Pretty soon, I had the run of his office and the keys to his safe. I only saw the business side of Shelmerdine’s life, of course, and he was always the perfect gentleman. Once in a while, men he called ‘business associates’ would call and he’d have private conversations with them. They always looked like businessmen on the surface, but I could sense what they were under the business suits.”

I smiled to myself. I would have used the word “smell.”

“I got my chance when Shelmerdine was off on one of his business trips,” she continued. “I was alone in the office and I searched the safe. There was a compartment which I never had occasion to open, but I found the key to it on the key-ring and found it chock-full of papers. They concerned Shelmerdine’s other business deals—his real business. They touched on everything: dope, drugs, vice, trade union protection; there were names and dates that would pull down Shelmerdine and a lot of other people if I could only give those papers to the Crime Commission. I had the means of wrecking Shelmerdine and his whole organisation in my hands. I locked the papers up again. I had to think it out and plan my moves.

“I knew Shelmerdine would soon be back, but he was to go on a longer trip later today, that is—if I waited, I would stand a better chance of getting clear. I packed my grip a full week before—perhaps I betrayed myself in some way, I don’t know. Anyway, Ike Tescachelli, the senior chauffeur, began to watch me in a way I didn’t like. I thought perhaps he had found out about my true identity and was suspicious; then again, he might simply have been looking out for a chance to get fresh when the big boss was away.”

I remembered the Italian-looking hood who spoke to me at the mouth of the dirt road.

“Ike Tescachelli, is he the one with the small moustache?” I asked.

“Yes. He usually stays close to Shelmerdine and drives him around, but Greg Cortines, the second chauffeur, went with him on this trip. Tescachelli had his eye on me for two or three days and I was worried. As soon as Shelmerdine set off on his trip, I opened the safe and took the papers. I stuffed them into my grip and I was ready to run for it. I had already checked the bus timetable and knew I could get a bus into South Bend once I was on the main highway, and I could take a train or bus to Chicago from South Bend.

“I had a story ready in case anyone questioned me, and I slipped out of a side door. I was about to leave the grounds of the house by a small gate leading into a back road when one of the gardeners appeared and asked me where I was going. I told him I was taking a walk into Rollinsville to have the clasp of my grip repaired and he seemed to believe me. I was clear of the house when I realised the awful mistake I had made. In my haste, I left the key in the lock of the safe after locking it. It might go unnoticed until Shelmerdine returned, but it was sure to give away the fact that I had tampered with the safe—and I’d been seen leaving with a grip.”

She paused for a moment to catch her breath, as though at the recollection of that chilling moment when she realised how she had betrayed herself.

The coupe passed a South Bend city limits sign; the glare of the city was closer now and it brought a certain warmth. It was like coming to a place of friendly men after being in the dark outlands for too long.

“I panicked, Mr. Lantry,” went on the girl. “I ran for it, trying to get to the highway as quickly as I could. I didn’t know my way around very well and I took a couple of wrong turnings. By the time I did reach the highway, I was just in time to see the bus I wanted sailing away into the distance. I was terribly scared. I just kept walking. Then an old farmer in an old-fashioned truck picked me up and gave me a lift to the other side of Peru and I kept on walking after that, even when the rain started.”

“Then I picked you up, huh,” I grunted, “and you still have those documents in the grip? No, that’s a silly question. It’s obvious that you have; you’ve been clinging to your baggage as though it’ll leave you a fortune when it dies.”

I watched South Bend growing bigger before us and I was worried.

I couldn’t leave this little chick to run about the countryside with Athelstan Shelmerdine’s strong-arms on her tail.

“You intend to hand the papers to the Crime Commission in Chicago?” I asked. She nodded and I fell to musing out loud. “And Shelmerdine pulls almost every string that’s pullable in Chicago; if his outfit knows you’re in the Windy City, they’ll serve up the table d’hôtel pretty damn quick—with you as the dish. Where will you go, once you’ve succeeded in putting the papers in the hands of the crime-chasers, I mean?”

“Why, home. My parents live out at Woodstock.”

I thought about that for a while. Woodstock was close to Chicago and Shelmerdine’s hired hands might track the girl out there.

“Does Shelmerdine and his crowd know you hail from the Chicago area?”

“Yes, but nobody at Shelmerdine’s country house knows my home address and they think my name is Maybelle Jones.”

“But they’ll probably figure you’ll head for Chicago, since that’s your hometown.

“It’s my guess that our friends who had the mishap in the sedan were chasing you because they realised you’d blown with something out of the safe, and they wanted you back—and whatever you’d taken—before Shelmerdine got back from his trip. It was desperate and ham-fisted. That business of opening fire on a state highway proves it. Shelmerdine left that sort of stuff behind him with prohibition. When he wants shooting done in public, he hires gutter-rats like those who killed your brother to do it; his kind of smooth mobster doesn’t allow those who are close to him to charge around the country blasting away with heaters—it’s bringing the dirt too close to his own doorstep. The real chase, girlie, the top-shelf subtle stuff, will come when big shot Athelstan gets back and finds out just what’s missing from the safe.”

She tried to stifle a sneeze by pressing a slender forefinger to her top lip. It escaped her clutches.

The sneeze decided me on a half-formed plan that had been floating about my mind.

“Listen,” I told her. “You’ve been soaked to the skin and you’ve had a rough time. You need rest and dry clothing. I’m on my way to visit some old friends in South Bend and you stay right with me. These folk are great—an old army pal and his wife—they’ll fix you a place for the night and the strong-arm hoodlums will never think of looking for you in South Bend. Tomorrow, we’ll push on to Chicago. Meantime, I’ll get in touch with my branch in Chicago to stand by for some action. World Wide Investigations will back you up, girlie. You deserve somebody on your side and, besides, I have an interest in this fight—those bums fired bullets into my car. Deal?”

She nodded her approval while stifling another sneeze.

So, we drove into South Bend and into the realisation that it was Saturday night. I jockeyed the car along the wide sweep of Michigan Street with its bright sky-signs and its trees. The movies were disgorging their patrons at that hour. There was a bustle of activity on the street, still glossed by recent rain.

I drove steadily through the mass of cars. It was my first time in South Bend for some years, but I remembered my way around. On the way up from the south, I had reflected pleasantly on how surprised Jack and Beth Kay would be at my unexpected visit. Now I was calling on them with a total stranger but, what the heck, Jack and Beth were friendly, happy-go-lucky people, they’d make us both welcome.

I could book a couple of rooms at a hotel, but the Kays would be highly insulted if I stayed in South Bend without making use of their high, wide, and handsome hospitality. That’s the kind of folk Jack and Beth were. Good folk.

It’s comforting to think that the world holds more of their kind than the other species.

Cautiously, I drove along Michigan with its bright lights and glittering theatre awnings, waited dutifully at the intersection of Munroe Street until the traffic cop signalled me across. I took the coupe easily though the tangle of crossings at mid-Michigan Street and on up to the bridge spanning the St. Joseph River, then over the river to Leeper Avenue.

It was quiet and residential. The buildings of the University of Notre Dame stood not too far away, a stately group against the summer night sky with a church spire and a great golden dome dominant.

I glanced at Joanne Kilvert. She had been very quiet for a long time.

She was sound asleep. Just like a kid.

I drove along steadily with one eye on the neat painted houses. I remembered Jack’s place vaguely, but recognised the house as soon as the headlight beams picked it out. A pang of something, maybe envy, hit me as I saw the trim house and its neat lawn.

It looked like it belonged to somebody and somebody belonged to it.

Why the hell didn’t I have a comfortable house, a nice wife, and a nine-to-six job? Settling down would be great.

I hit the brakes, shaking off the feeling with the action.

I had no squawks coming. I had wanted to be a private dick. From starting out in a back room, I’d wound up with a worldwide investigation outfit. I didn’t want to be another solid citizen. I already was what I wanted to be—a shamus, but a shamus par excellence, I hoped.

The jerk of the brakes wakened Joanne. She sat up quickly and looked about in slight alarm.

“Relax. You’re with friends,” I told her as I stepped out of the car.

The sidewalk was still wet after the rain. There was a fresh scent from the nearby trees.

I walked up the pathway, mounted the three or four steps to the Kays’ porch, and hit the doorbell. Deep in the soul of the house there was a buzz which ceased when I took my thumb from the bell-push.

Through the frosted glass of the door I saw a bloom of light as someone opened a door in the interior of the house. The bulk of a figure loomed against the light and a light illuminated the hallway as a switch snapped. The door opened and Jack Kay stood there, blocky, with a crew-cut, and wearing the kind of clothes a man can loaf around in. There were house slippers on his feet.

“Tear yourself away from that television set, you’re entertaining tonight,” I said. There was a hollowness to the words, the joviality was forced. I wasn’t sure I was doing the right thing in bringing Joanne here.

Jack Kay’s features settled into a wide grin of surprise and he hit me a playful blow in the stomach.

“Lantry, you old scoundrel! Come in!”

I jerked my thumb towards the coupe standing at the kerb.

“I have somebody with me—a girl.”

Jack put his hands on his hips and looked at me steadily.

“I detect a certain furtive tone,” he said. “Can it be that you finally got married and are suffering from henpeck malady? Or are you eloping with somebody?”

I grinned at Jack’s easy-going joshing. This was him all over.

“Look, Jack, this is to do with a case,” I confided. “It’s something I got into by accident when I was driving up from Florida. I was on my way to see you anyway, but I gave this kid a ride and found she’s on the run from Athelstan Shelmerdine’s mob. She wasn’t one of his crowd—don’t get that idea; she’s been doing some slick detective work on her own. She’s the sister of Kilvert, the guy who was killed in Chicago some time back.”

“Arthur Kilvert, the trade union guy?”

I nodded.

“She has something on the Shelmerdine crowd that can break them for keeps, that’s why she’s on the lam.” I went on to give him a quick outline of the story behind Joanne Kilvert. Jack gave a low whistle of surprise. “Right now, she’s about all in. Maybe a spell with decent folks in respectable surroundings will help her along. She’s got guts and she’s held out well, but she’s weary and she’s been soaked to the skin.”

“Well, bring her in,” he invited. “You know us. Our friends and friends of our friends always welcome,” he turned towards the hallway and bellowed: “Hey, Beth. It’s Mike Lantry and a friend. Break out the coffee-pot!”

I heard a squeak of surprise from Beth, somewhere deep in the house, as I walked down the pathway towards the car.

I brought Joanne Kilvert back along the walk. Beth Kay, slim and dark, was standing in the doorway with her husband.

“Long time no see,” she called cheerfully to me.

Joanne Kilvert was shy and self-conscious, trying to smooth out the creases in her rain-stained skirt, and straighten the crumpled jacket of her summer costume.

Also, she had the sniffles.

I introduced everybody. Joanne was still a little troubled. I guess Jack must have given Beth a very brief and whispered outline of the set-up while I was helping the girl out of the car, for she put Joanne at ease at once in her matter-of-fact way.

“Cold coming,” she observed. “Hot bath is what you need, honey, then some hot coffee. Finest cure in the world.” Beth put her arm around Joanne’s waist and shepherded her into the house. I was glad to see the girl afforded this womanish tenderness; it would help a lot after my own ham-fisted way of dealing with the damsel in distress.

Jack ushered me into the lounge while the two disappeared upstairs. He settled me on the davenport, produced scotch and glasses, and fisted a generous drink into my hand.

“So you’re fighting the Shelmerdine organisation,” he murmured as he seated himself in an easy chair. “It’s a big team to lick, Mike.”

“I know it,” I replied. “I got into this by accident, Jack, but if ever anyone needed backing up, it’s that kid. I’ll stick close by her until I can get her to safety where the Shelmerdine crowd can’t hurt her or her folks. I’m putting my Chicago office on to this Shelmerdine guy—we’ll get those papers into the hands of the Crime Commission, and I’m sticking around the Midwest until we do.”

“Where do you intend sending the girl?” he asked. “Anywhere within a big radius of Chicago will hardly be safe with the Shelmerdine organisation on her tail.”

“I half thought of New York—yes, I think I’ll put her on a train for New York tomorrow and phone Lucy, my secretary, to meet her and look after her for a while. In fact, I’ll put a call through from here to Lucy’s apartment and one to Walt Toland, my Chicago agency chief. I’ll tip Walton off about this set-up, and put those papers the girl took in the mail to him as soon as I can. I guess the U.S. Mail is as safe a place as anywhere for documents as red hot as those.”

Jack’s face clouded. He shook his head gloomily.

“Sorry about the phone—it’s kaput. We had a freak storm here this evening and lightning hit the power-line for this whole neighbourhood, I guess every phone in this section of the city is out of action.”

I grunted.

“I guess it’ll keep until tomorrow, I’ll use a public telephone somewhere around the city.”

Beth came into the room.

“Your protégée is wallowing in hot water…,” she began.

“You can say that again,” I cut in with an attempt at humour.

“Scat!” said Beth. “She’s wallowing in hot water and she tells me she has a change of dress in her grip out in the car. Don’t sit around drinking whisky, go get her grip—and put your car in the garage while you’re about it.”

I jumped, remembering the grip with those incriminating papers out in the car. Although Joanne had clutched hold of that grip as though it owed her money previously, I guessed her good manners jibbed at walking into the house of total strangers with it in her hand.

I went out quickly, took the car into Jack’s garage and removed my own grip from the trunk, taking it back to the house with Joanne Kilvert’s.

Beth took the girl’s baggage and hastened upstairs with it.

I joined Jack again and finished my drink.

Beth reappeared, ducked into the kitchen and, in a remarkably short time, was hollering for us to come and get it.

Jack and I settled ourselves down at a laden table that looked and smelled pretty good. I’d forgotten how hungry I was.

Joanne appeared in the doorway, shyly. She was wearing a wide-skirted summer dress, her hair had been smoothed neatly. There were no lines of bitterness on her face now, and her gently moulded features were touched with a judicious amount of cosmetic.

She looked mighty good.

In spite of her sniffles.

“Wade into supper,” invited Beth, “and we’ll be in time to catch the late night epic on TV.”

I stretched lazily.

“Ah, civilised American life,” I said.