The Sinful Ones

Chapter Five Trail of Desire

Carr didn’t move. His first impulse was to confront the woman, but right on its heels came the realization that she’d hardly be acting this way without some sort of authorization—and hardly obtain an authorization without good cause.

His mind jumped back to his fleeting suspicion that Jane was mixed up in some sort of crime. This woman might be a detective.

On the other hand, she might have walked into the office without anyone’s permission, trusting to bluff—her very brassiness and self-assurance—to get away with it.

Carr studied her from behind the glass panel. She was undeniably beautiful. With that lush figure, faultless blonde hair, and challenging lips, she might be a model for billboard advertisements. Even the slight out-of-focus look of her eyes didn’t spoil her attractiveness. And her gray sports outfit looked like a high-class hundred dollar or so.

Yet there was something off-key, unpleasantly exaggerated, overripe about even her good looks and get-up. She carried the lush figure with a blank animal assurance’ there was unhidden cruelty in the challenging lips, there was an unashamed barbarousness in the two big silver pins piercing her mannish gray sports hat. She seemed utterly unconcerned with and contemptuous of the people around her. She glanced through Carr’s folders with the cold detachment of a biologist examining cancer slides. If ever there was a woman who gave the impression of simply using people, of using the world, this was she. Carr felt strangely cowed.

But the situation was getting impossible, he told himself. Tom, apparently busy with some papers at the next desk, must be wondering what had happened to him and what the devil woman was up to.

Just then the blonde dropped back a folder, shut a drawer, and stood up. Carr faded back into the men’s room. He waited perhaps fifteen seconds, then cautiously stepped out. The woman was no longer in sight. He looked into the outside corridor. It was empty. He hadn’t heard the elevator for the last few seconds. He ran to the head of the stairs. He spotted the gray sports coat going though the revolving door. He hurried down the stairs, hesitated a moment, then darted through the lobby entrance into the small tobacco and magazine store adjoining. He could probably still catch a glimpse of her through the store’s show window. In any case, it would be less conspicuous than dashing right out on the sidewalk.

The store was empty except for a middle-aged man who, in the proprietor’s absence, was coolly leaning across the counter and helping himself to a package of cigarettes. Carr ignored this slightly startling scene and moved quietly toward the window. With commendable nerve—or perhaps he was a bit deaf—the middle-aged man tore open the filched pack without looking around. He was well-dressed and inclined to portliness.

Just then Carr glimpsed a patch of familiar gray approaching and realized that the blonde woman was coming into the tobacco shop from the street.

The lobby door was too far away. Carr sidled behind a magazine rack.

The first voice he heard was the woman’s. It was as disagreeable as her manner.

“I searched his desk. There wasn’t anything suspicious.”

“And of course you did a good job?” The portly man’s voice was quite jolly. “Took your time? Didn’t miss anything?”

“Of course.”

“Hm.” Carr heard a match struck and the faint crackle of a cigarette igniting. His face was inches away from a line of luridly covered magazines.

“What are you so worried about?” The woman sounded quarrelsome. “Can’t you take my word for it? Remember, I checked on them yesterday.”

“Worry pays, Miss Hackman, as you’ll discover when you’ve been in the situation a bit longer.” The portly man sounded pleasanter than ever. “We have strong reason to suspect the girl. I respect your intelligence, but I’m not completely satisfied. We’ll do another check on the girl tonight.”

“Another? Aren’t we supposed to have any time for fun?”

“Fun must be insured, Miss Hackman. Hardly be fun at all, would it, if you felt someone might spoil it? And then if some other crowd should catch on…No, we’ll do another check.

“Oh, all right.” The woman’s voice expressed disgusted resignation. “Though I suppose it’ll mean prowling around for hours with the beast.”

“Hm. No, I hardly think the beast will be necessary, Miss Hackman.”

Carr, staring sightlessly at the pulp and astrology magazines, felt his flesh crawl. It wasn’t so much the murky import as the utter matter-of-factness of the conversation.

“Why not let Dris do it?” he heard the woman say. “He’s had the easy end lately.”

“Hm. That’s a possibility, all right. We’ll think it over.” The portly man’s voice was moving toward the street door. “Best be getting on now.”

Several seconds later Carr peered around the rack. Through the window he could see the big blonde and the portly man entering a black convertible. The driver was a bored-looking young man with a crew haircut. As he turned toward the others, throwing his right arm along the top of the seat, Carr saw that it did not end in a hand, but a hooked contrivance. He felt a thrill of recognition. These were the three people Jane had mentioned in her note, all right. “…affable-seeming older man…” Yes, it all fitted.

The driver had his hand hook on the wheel, but the car didn’t move yet. All three of them seemed to be discussing something. Again Carr got that intimidating impression of power he’d had when watching the woman upstairs.

The driver seemed to lose interest in the discussion. Turning sideways again, he dangled his hook into the back seat. There was a flash of glistening black, which instantly vanished. Carr felt another shiver crawling along his back. Perhaps the driver had merely flirted up the corner of a black fur driving robe. But this was almost summer and the black flash ha been very quick.

The middle-aged man seemed to speak sharply to the driver. The convertible began to move. Carr hurried to the window. He got there in time to see the convertible swinging around the next corner, rather too swiftly for sensible downtown driving.

He stood there for a few seconds, then turned around. The proprietor had returned, but Carr ignored him. He slowly walked upstairs.

He hesitated at Tom’s desk. He had half an impulse to tell Tom about things, ask him about the woman, but the big Swede was busy with an applicant. Another applicant was approaching his own desk. Frowning, he sat down.

He felt extremely puzzled, disturbed. Above all, he wanted to think things through, but as luck would have it the afternoon turned out to be a busy one.

Yet through all the details of job histories and qualifications, references and referral slips, his thoughts—or rather his sensations—kept wandering. At one time it would be a remembered phrase: “Worry pays,” “Fun must be insured,” “I hardly think the beast will be necessary.” At another it was the pulp magazines on the rack downstairs; he hadn’t remembered seeing them at the time, but now their covers stood out very clearly in his mind. He could read the frantic titles. Once he had the momentary feeling that the portly man had walked into his office. And for several minutes he was bothered by something black and rough poking now and then around the end of one of the benches in the waiting room, until he looked more closely and saw it was a woman’s handbag.

With a slump of relief he watched the last applicant depart. He’d thought she was going to keep on talking forever—and it was a minute past quitting time and the other interviewers were hurrying for their hats and wraps.

His glance lit on a scrap of pencil by the wire basket on his desk. He rolled it toward him with one finger. It was fiercely chewed, making him think of nails bitten to the quick. He recognized it as the one Jane had dropped on his desk yesterday.

Damn it all, he didn’t want to get mixed up in anything. Not now that he’d made his peace with Marcia and ought to be concentrating on the Keaton Fisher proposal. He’d let jumpy nerves get the better of him yesterday, he didn’t want that to happen again. The rather ridiculous episode with Jane was something that ought to remain a closed incident. And how was he going to warn her even if he wanted to? He didn’t even know her last name.

Besides, it didn’t sound as if those three people actually wanted to harm her, when you came to analyze the conversation he’d overheard downstairs. They’d spoken of “checking” on her. The impression was that they were afraid she might harm them, rather than the reverse. References to a “beast,” though admittedly grisly-sounding at the time, were probably some figure of speech. The “beast” might be merely a disliked person, or an automobile, or even a camera or suitcase.

Furthermore, Jane had intimated several times that she didn’t want him to learn about or interfere with the three people against whom she’d warned him, that it might mean danger to her if he did. What was it she’d said about them? “horrible and obscene….?”

Who could they be and what could be up to? Secret agents of some sort? Loads of people were being “checked” today. Yet there’s been that mention of “some other crowd,” that talk about “fun.” Still, presumably even secret agents wanted to have “fun” occasionally.

Jane was wealthy, he’d guessed. But again these people didn’t sound as if they were out for money, only some sort of security, so they could have their “fun” in perfect safety.

“Fun” in perfect safety…Once again there came back that tremendous impression of ruthless power the three had given him. His desk invaded, his file folders searched…The stolen cigarettes…The slap…No, damn it, he couldn’t drop pit here. Whatever Jane had intimated, it was his duty to tell her what he’d overheard, to warn her about tonight.

And there was a perfectly obvious way of doing it. He knew where she lived, since last night. He’d go out there right now.

He stood up, only now noticing that the office had emptied itself while he’d been thinking. The cleaning woman, dry mop over her shoulder, was pushing a cart for the wastepaper. She ignored him.

Carr grabbed his hat and walked out past her, tramped down the stairs.

Outside the day had stayed sparklingly fair, so that, instead of yesterday’s gloom, the streets were flooded with a soft white light that imparted a subdued carnival atmosphere to the eager hurry of the rush hour. Distant faces stood out with unnatural distinctness, as if seen through the wrong end of a telescope. Voices hung on the air. The general clatter sounded almost jolly. Streets and shop windows were colorful with mannequins ogling the paychecks of Spring.

Carr felt a touch of dancing, adventurous excitement being to add itself to his tension. Instead of heading over to Michigan Boulevard, he took a more direct route northward, crossing the sluggish river by one of the blacker, more nakedly girded red bridges. The sky here spread out big, above vast remote walls formed by windowless warehouses and office buildings with ornate marble, gilt, or ebony spires. Westward loomed the railway yards, a black expanse studded with grim, baffling structures that looked capable of lifting locomotives and maybe did just that.

Beyond the river, the street slanted downward into a region where the economic tides of the city moved at their shallowest and rapidest. The small, ill-washed shop-windows were mostly those of beaneries with unappetizing tiers of hot dogs, second-hand magazine stores, small saloons that were all blacked-out windows and beer advertisements, check-cashing cubby-holes, drug stores with screaming displays laid out six months ago. Overhead, crammed apartments. Here and there, a soot-darkened church with shut doors.

This kept up for some eight or ten blocks without much change except an increasing number of cramped nightclubs with winking blue signs and tiredly smiling photographs of the girls who presumably disbursed the “continuous entertainment.”

Then, in one block, by the stern sorcery of zoning laws, the squalid neighborhood was transformed into a wealthy residential section. First a few apartment hotels, massive, aloof, with the first story dark and barred like old city strongholds of Florence or Venice. Then heavy-set houses with thickly curtained windows, their fenced and untrod lawns suggesting the cleared areas around forts, the shrubs like cheval-de-frise.

If memory served him right, Jane’s house lay just a block and a left turn ahead.

But now, for the first time, Carr’s footsteps lagged. It occurred to him that he might have to give his warning under rather difficult circumstances. What if her parents wouldn’t let him see Jane, or at least demanded a preliminary explanation? He’d have to tell about last night and would Jane want that. Just a fellow she’d picked up, who didn’t even know her last name (unless he found it on the mailbox).

He quickened his step. Such speculations were futile, he told himself. He’d have to gauge the situation when he got there, invent suitable lies if necessary.

He rounded the corner, noting a broken street lamp. He remembered the odd pattern of its cracks from last night.

He came to a high fence of iron and brick, to a tall gate of twisted grillework which he recognized.

He stopped dead, stared, took a backward step.

This couldn’t be it. He must have made a mistake.

But the spears of broken glass in the street lamp could not have been duplicated, nor, hardly, this elaborate gate.

The sunken sun, reaching a point from which its rays were reflected from the underside of a cloudbank, suddenly sent a spectral yellow afterglow. Everything was very clearly illuminated. Nothing was lost in shadow.

A gravel drive led up to just the sort of big stone mansion he had imagined—turreted, slate-roofed, heavy-eaved, in the style of the 1890’s.

But the gate and fence were rusty, tall weeds encroached on the drive, lawn and flowerbeds were a wilderness, the upper windows were blank and curtainless, most of them broken, those on the first floor were boarded up and the door as well. Pigeon droppings whitened the somber brown stone, and in the center of the lawn, half hidden by the weeds, stood a weather-bleached sign: