Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 17, No. 90, May 1951
- Автор: Кристи Агата, Куин (Квин) Эллери
- Год: 1951
- Язык: английский
- Год: Mercury Publications
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 17, No. 90, May 1951». Краткое содержание книги:
Joe was short and clean, comfortable-looking, with red cheeks and bright little eyes. He dried his hands on his apron and came over with a mug of coffee.
“She’s new,” he said, following Kerrigan’s nod with his eyes. “Nice kid. Rose Cady’s getting married next week and I had to get someone to take her place. I guess Rose gave up hope of hooking you, Kerrigan.”
“Cakes,” the woman expert ordered, “and some of those toothpicks you call sausages.” He stirred his coffee and looked back again at the cage. “How’d you happen to get her?”
Joe called, “Cakes with, Eddie,” and pushed the sugar bowl toward Kerrigan with one hand. “Don’t you ever get tired lining them up, fella? She seems like a good kid. Came in late last night and sat around fiddling with a cup of coffee until it was time to close up. I got to talking to her; she looked kind of lost. Got in yesterday from some place out west, thinking that a job was set for her. Somehow or other that blew up, and I guess she didn’t have the fare back, though she didn’t say so. I felt kinda sorry for her, and I knew Rose wanted to quit a couple of days ahead, to do shopping and all that. So I told her if she wanted to cashier here—”
“Sucker,” Kerrigan grunted. “She tell you she was Scarfe’s girl?”
Joe’s eyes got round and wondering in his fat face. “No!” He looked incredulous. “You kidding, Kerrigan?”
“Do I ever kid?” the woman expert demanded, stirring his coffee irritably. “We got a tip last month that Scarfe hid out in a small town in Indiana and went line and sinker for some dame there — this dame. He got sozzled one night and cried into his beer about her, and someone passed the word along. So we got the police out there to keep an eye on her. Day before yesterday they wired in she’d bought a ticket to New York on the afternoon train. She bought it a day ahead, and that gave me time to fly out there and pull the sucker act on the train. We had nothing on her but we knew she was heading for Scarfe.
“Scarfe always liked girl shows, and I figured he’d want to celebrate the first night she got to town. Guys like him can’t stay cooped up forever, so I said I had passes, and if she wanted to come and bring a friend—” He looked up at Joe moodily. “She came all right, and we put the collar on Scarfe.”
“A kid like that,” Joe said, looking worried. “You wouldn’t believe it. Think I ought to get rid of her?”
“Before she walks off with the store.”
“Yeh.” Joe rubbed his forehead vaguely. “I guess I’d better. This afternoon; soon’s I get another.”
But it didn’t really surprise Kerrigan when she was still there that evening. Joe was a soft hearted slob, and all this Susan Butler had to do was pull the old line on him. Small-town kid — no money. He could see Joe mumbling helplessly between his teeth, looking uncomfortable. Well — But she couldn’t pull that stuff on Kerrigan. He was grimly amused when she tried it. She paled a little at first as he presented his check, and then grabbed his arm. “Oh!” she said. “Wait a minute, please. I want to—” The woman expert only grunted, “Save it, sister,” and scooped up his change. He didn’t have to find out about women from her. Women were Kerrigan’s job. Some cops remembered faces, and some never forgot license tags, so that if a hundred cars went by them they’d pick out the stolen ones just by looking at the tags. But Cornelius Kerrigan knew women. They were his knack.
Joe, however, was different; every night he’d argue about Susan Butler. “Look, Kerrigan,” he’d say, “suppose she’s telling the truth?”
Kerrigan would grin wearily and ask him to shut up. He’d give this Susan Butler credit because she was smarter than the rest. She never tried to see Scarfe, or write to him, and she gave up trying to put over her story on Kerrigan. After a while her face was as cold and detached as the woman expert’s own when he gave her his check. The boys noticed that. “Falling down?” they asked. The ribbing got under his skin. “Say,” Kerrigan growled, “in a month I could have that dame shining my shoes. You want to bet?”
None of them did, but Kerrigan had done it anyway, perhaps to show them, perhaps because it seemed to reflect on his professional ability, perhaps for some other reason that would never enter a woman expert’s mind. He turned on the charm, not overdoing it, little by little — just making out he’d been wrong, and stopping by her desk a bit longer every day to talk. In two weeks he was taking her to the movies. In a month she was crazy about him.
The funny part was that this one time Kerrigan guessed he had been wrong. She’d never been Scarfe’s girl; she’d just swallowed his hot air about the broker, and the job. She hadn’t known what she was walking into. Kerrigan knew that was the truth, because nobody, not even a woman, could keep on lying like that. He wasn’t fooled into it, Kerrigan, because he never made a pass at her; he never kissed her. One night, indeed, he asked her why she didn’t go back to Indiana.
“It’s queer,” she said, her round young face grave and quiet. “I’d always thought of it as home and now it isn’t — it’s just like another place on the map. It’s like here.” She stopped a moment; but before the woman expert could put in something about the movies she went on, softly: “You’ve been nice to me — you and joe. You’re the only people I know. Oh, they try to make dates at the counter — I don’t mean that. You’re the only ones who—”
Even at the movies Kerrigan was uncomfortably aware that her thoughts were running like that. All the way home she held his arm, and in the doorway, after they’d said good night, she came very close to him.
“Cornelius,” she said, in that grave voice of hers, “you were so nice on the train, so — oh, I don’t know. But it wasn’t only your job, Cornelius? You did like me? I’m so lonesome when I don’t see you. I think you’re only making out again, perhaps. That you don’t really—”
A woman expert shouldn’t have kissed her and told her he did mean it. Kerrigan knew that, of course, but what else could he do? It was the old song and dance.
It was a queer thing he fought against — a mingling of pride and injured vanity and the dreary knowledge of all the years since they’d kidded a rookie at a Bronx precinct house about his attraction for women. You’ll have to do better than that, Cornelius Kerrigan thought — much better, sister. He wasn’t forgetting any angles. He knew how they started, trying to make you feel sorry for them, trying to get the soft spot in you. Sometimes you couldn’t cure that soft spot; but if you were a woman expert, if you knew your way, you wouldn’t give it a start.
The woman expert didn’t give it a start. For a week he simply avoided Joe’s and that kid who’d tried to give him the business. And on the last night of that week Johnny Scarfe escaped from custody.
Even Kerrigan didn’t find out much about the method of his escape, for everyone around headquarters was pretty sore, and things were kept under the hat. There was a story that Powell was grilling the guards, who claimed that Johnny Scarfe had suddenly pulled a gun on them as they brought him back from the visitors’ room; but Lou Evans scoffed at that story. Johnny Scarfe’s wife, he said, had visited him that afternoon; if she brought along a bundle of cash, to be split three ways among three so-and-so turnkeys—
Kerrigan himself didn’t believe it was bribery. Dora Scarfe might have found some way to pass him a gun; but she wasn’t handing out any cash. Kerrigan was sure of that because he knew the kind of dame Dora Scarfe was. Fat and almost forty, with blond hair that anyone could see didn’t go with her dark, bold eyes, Dora Scarfe knew how to take care of herself. That type was only rabbits to Kerrigan. Fifteen years younger, he could find a dozen for you in any dance hall. Baby-eyed and hardhearted, nobody’s sucker, using perfume and highly colored nail polish, reading confession magazines and tabloids, they had given the woman expert his easiest assignments. A dame like that was always on the make, always looking out for number one; but if you knew how they reacted they were apple pie. Johnny Scarfe had married this Dora years ago, and deserted her off and on since; for the tall punk fancied himself as a ladies’ man, and Dora Scarfe wasn’t a bargain any more.