Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 51, No. 1 & 2, January/February 2006
- Автор: Бетанкур Джон Грегори, Jr. William J. Carroll,
- Год: 2006
- Язык: английский
- Год: Dell Magazines/Crosstown Publications
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 51, No. 1 & 2, January/February 2006». Краткое содержание книги:
She looked in the direction the girl indicated and saw a man in a suit striding purposely toward her, either a floor dick or a Purple sent by Ray to whack her. She bolted around the counter, spotted a door with a sign marked stairs, flung it open, and rushed up a flight. No footsteps sounded below. Her head spinning and her stomach roiling, she collapsed on a concrete step, fighting a wave of gin-induced nausea. She took off her fur coat and dabbed the beads of sweat from her forehead with a crumpled handkerchief she found in her pocket.
When the nausea passed, she opened the door and threaded her way through housewares to the elevator. She rode to the fourteenth floor, smoothing her hair and straightening her hat.
When it stopped, she stepped out into a corridor swarming with clerks. She hoped she was less conspicuous without the fur coat on. She stopped a secretary hugging folders to her flat chest. “Lost and found?” she asked.
“In there,” the woman replied, pointing to a door marked detectives.
“Hell’s bells,” Marilyn cursed under her breath. But there was nothing for it. She had to have that purse. Screwing up her courage, she strode to the door and entered. Instead of a posse of detectives waiting to arrest her, she entered a quiet, bland office. A large woman sat behind an enormous desk that almost filled a cramped reception area. The nameplate on the desk read MISS SIMMONS.
“Is this lost and found? I’m looking for my purse,” Marilyn asked, finding she didn’t have to work so hard at making the words clear now.
“Let me check.” Miss Simmons eased herself up from her chair and waddled to a filing cabinet in the corner. “What did it look like?”
“Brown leather with a drawstring.”
Miss Simmons opened a drawer and pulled out a purse. “Is this it?”
“No. Let me look.” Half a dozen limp, deflated purses filled the drawer, but none of them were hers.
“Sorry. Would you like to leave a name in case it turns up tomorrow?” Miss Simmons returned to her desk and extended pen and paper toward her.
Tomorrow? She’d be dead by tomorrow. She shook her head. She rode the elevator down and drifted through the aisles toward the street entrance like the ghost she would soon be.
An arm grabbed her from behind. “Back again? So soon?” It was the same store dick that had been stationed near the perfume counter on her earlier visit, a big, raw-boned guy who reeked of Ivory soap. “For your information, Miss Lightfingers, a bottle of very expensive cologne disappeared on your last visit.”
“You’re accusing me?” She yanked her sleeve from his grasp, then made a show of slipping on her fur coat. “I can afford anything I want in this joint.” Indignation reawakened the slur. “That pisswater you’re trying to pass off as perfume? I wouldn’t take it if you were giving it away.” She adjusted the collar of her coat haughtily.
“Obviously we weren’t giving it away.” He glared back.
There was nothing he could do about it now and they both knew it. She cocked her head to one side and looked him over. “Hey, you’re a dick,” she baited him. “Maybe you can figure out what happened to my purse when I was here. I think one of your customers stole it right under your nose.”
He cocked his head, meeting her challenge. “Could be. We get a lot of grifters here.”
“Did you happen to notice whether I had it with me?”
“Can’t say I did. You were making a pretty good getaway at the time.” He put his fists on his waist. “How about if I escort you to the door just so neither one of us loses something else this time?”
“You again!” The doorman at the Book Cadillac Hotel chuckled at O’Neill. “You’re a dogged one!” He glanced around, as if he were nervous of being overheard. “You missed her at the Kibbutzer Club because she came back here.”
“Obliged.” O’Neill made to push through the revolving glass door.
The doorman yanked his sleeve. “Just a minute, buddy. She’s not here now. She left. Well, you might say she was shown out. Asked to leave, so to speak.”
“I see.” O’Neill frowned. “Cab?” he asked and sighed.
“Not this time. She headed down the street.”
“Then I might catch her?” He turned on his heel.
“Maybe. That way.” The doorman pointed in the opposite direction.
“Just in case, where does she live?” he asked.
The doorman hesitated, glancing around.
O’Neill produced another five spot.
The doorman plucked the bill from his fingers. “21 Second Avenue.”
He tipped his homburg in thanks.
That left only the bank. Clarity creeping back, Marilyn strode down the street to the First National where she had gone to get dough for Ray’s cologne.
The bank dick, a slim man with a thin mustache that he thought made him look swank, blocked the door, a fistful of keys in his hands.
The door refused to open. Locked. She banged on the glass.
The little man held up his wristwatch and pointed to its face. Five o’clock, closing time.
She yelled through the glass, “Did I leave my purse here?”
He shook his head.
“Did I have a purse with me when I left?”
“Sure you had one. You socked me with it,” he yelled back at her, rubbing his scrawny arm.
Then where was it? She stepped away from the door in a daze. Stone sober now, she wandered aimlessly down the street torrential with office workers heading for home, huddling into her coat, the wind whipping tears into her eyes.
Mentally she retraced her steps. She’d taken money from the bank and walked to Hudson’s. Had she stopped anywhere? No. She hadn’t been tempted as there were no speakeasies in the neighborhood. That’s what flasks were for anyway.
She’d gone into Hudson’s with the purse, but had she come out with it? Maybe. She’d then walked to the Book Cadillac Hotel without stopping except for a few more swigs, arriving in more of a fuddle than she’d intended. She’d stayed at the hotel only for a few moments. From Ray’s birthday celebration at the hotel, in a drunken fury, she’d called a cab to take her to the club where she’d realized she’d lost the purse. The cab! She’d left it in the cab!
Abruptly she stopped and a stocky businessman slammed into her. She forced herself to focus on remembering the cab or the driver’s face. Nothing came to her. Useless. Gone forever. It was all a gin-soaked blur.
Now some cabbie was gleefully spending the five C-notes intended for the cops that some cursing, corked flapper had left in a purse on his back seat. And some cop was wondering where the payoff was that she was supposed to have delivered at noon. And by now, some trigger was searching for her with orders to bump her off.
O’Neill hurried down the sidewalk packed with workers and businessmen on their way home. Several times he thought he glimpsed a dark bob or a fur coat ahead which could have been Marilyn, but each time he caught up to the woman, it wasn’t her.
He gave up after twenty minutes. Might as well try her at home.
At the nearest trolley stop, he boarded, and jumped off at the corner of Highland and Second Avenue at a stylish new apartment building. He entered expecting to find a doorman, but no one seemed to be about. According to the mailboxes, her apartment was on the third floor. He climbed the stairs and rang the doorbell. Silence. He waited and rang again. When no answer came, he left.
Marilyn didn’t know how long she wandered, anticipating a bullet in the back or from the window of a passing jalopy. As the sunset reddened the sky, she found herself near a lunchroom the Licavoli Gang, rivals to the Purples, sometimes frequented. The lunchroom’s windows spilled light into the spring dusk. The dinner crowd had come and gone and the place was deserted except for a young couple at a corner table.