STEVE BAEDECKER, THE MAN IN the traffic-control tower at La Guardia Field, watched the landing lights of a civilian plane skim along runway 36 and finally settle safely onto the pavement. Steve had been under a strain, and he swore with relief. “The damned fool finally made it!” he said explosively. Because both ceiling and visibility were below instrument-flight minimums, the field was supposed to be closed down for the time being, with traffic at a halt and take-offs and landings prohibited. The shutdown had been in effect about thirty minutes and was expected to lift in another six hours, which was about the length of time it would take the front to pass. This information had been conveyed to the civilian plane by radio, but the pilot had said he had to come in, and he had. “I’m going to cite that guy for a violation!” Steve said angrily. He clamped a thumb on the microphone switch, gave the civilian pilot taxiing instructions, and ordered him to report personally to the traffic control.
Joe Bester, the civilian pilot, scowled at this news. He jerked the radio headphone off his left ear, let it snap back against his temple, and said, “I’m gonna get a violation popped to me!”
George, who occupied the dual-control seat, was not disturbed. “I’ll take the rap,” he said. George lifted the radio mike off its hook, gave the tower man his own name as pilot, said he had chartered the plane, that this was an emergency, that he was damned if he was going to come to anybody’s traffic-control office right now because there wasn’t time, but he would take full responsibility. In return he was asked for his pilot’s license number, and he gave it. He replaced the mike. “I think that might give you an out,” he told Joe Bester. “If it doesn’t I’ll do anything else I can. I want you to know I appreciate you getting me down here in a hurry.”
Less disturbed now, Joe Bester said, “Well, we made it anyway.” The plane had reached the ramp in front of the administration building, and he swung into a parking area and cut the engine.
George paid the pilot, thanked him, and entered the passenger terminal. He carried his hat in his hand because, if he wore it, it would hurt the bruise above his left ear where Fleshman’s blackjack had struck him. He walked intently, purposefully, veering toward the pay telephone booths, but halted when he heard his name.
“George!”
“Kiggins!” George said, surprised. “Hiyah, babe!”
“Are you hurt?” Kiggins asked anxiously.
“My, my! Worried about old Georgie, were you? How about a kiss, baby?”
Kiggins visibly retreated to coolness. She was a strange, frigid woman who almost never displayed a trace of a warm emotion. She said, “I presume the attack was made on your head, since you weren’t damaged.”
George grinned. “What the hell are you doing here, kiddo?”
“Orders.”
“Oh! The boss got my message, did he?”
“Yes. It was waiting for him at his hotel, I believe he said.”
“That’s where I sent it. Is he okay?”
“Yes.”
“The girl?”
“If you mean Miss Edwards, yes.”
“By God!” George said heartily. “That takes a load off my mind! I was worried. Them two cookies on the train, Walheim and his fat hatchet boy, got wise to us somehow—by the way, did the cops latch on to them?”
“The pair escaped.”
“Whoeee! I still got them in my future then!” George tried to look alarmed but did not succeed very well, being too relieved over learning that Chance Molloy and the girl were safe. He asked, “I wonder if I’m fired?”
“I gathered not—unfortunately,” Kiggins said dryly.
“Hah! I should be! What a sucker that fat guy made of me!” George placed his hat on his head, then—after wide-flying eyes and mouth; up-jerking shoulders had registered a twinge of pain—he lifted the hat off again with care.
“This way,” Kiggins said primly. “I have a car waiting.”
“Yeah? What’s the program?”
“You are to follow my instructions.”
“Okay.”
“I imagine,” said Kiggins precisely, “you are to be my protector.”
“That’s ridiculous,” George said. “Anyone molesting you would soon be frozen to death.”
Kiggins ignored him and walked out of the terminal lobby. George followed her, an appreciative eye on her hip and thigh lines, which were not much disguised by the severe suit she wore.
The car, a rented one, was neither new enough nor large enough to stand out particularly. Kiggins drove. George leaned back in the opposite corner of the seat and complained, “I wonder when I’m supposed to sleep? I haven’t had a bit of sleep tonight, and not much last night.” This was ignored.
Kiggins occupied a rather unique place in George’s scheme of things His first impression had been that she was the coldest customer he had ever come up against, but later he began to suspect this was wrong, that appearances were deceiving, and that under the cool granite shell was a volcano. He still was not sure. A couple of times, when he thought he had found a crack in the cover, it had turned out to be nothing of the sort. He often thought of Kiggins as a neat white beehive—if somebody could pry the lid off, he’d bet there would be plenty of sting and honey inside. Once he had very seriously proposed marriage to her. She had laughed at him in a way—he hadn’t been able to figure exactly what way it was—that had made him feel not exactly right for several days.
She was Chance Molloy’s executive secretary. She had a precise, razor-edged efficiency that stood George’s hair on end. Her salary was exactly equal to that of Roy Cillinger, vice-president of BETA. She lent an austere, nun-like air to everything she did; her disapprovals, mute, chaste, seraphic, were visited on anyone who transgressed into wrong. With a mere look she could make George feel he had been handed a cake of laundry soap with instructions for use on his soul. He knew she often made Molloy uncomfortable. She was not pretty—she wouldn’t permit herself to be—but George was looking forward to the day when he might see her in a bathing suit. He sometimes suspected she was in love with Molloy, but he was positive Molloy had never made a pass at her; furthermore, if anything like that happened, George intended to quit BETA instantly.
George sighed and said, “Don’t you want to know about the horrible fate that befell me?”
Kiggins evaded the drunken driver of another car, who was holding the middle of the road, as adeptly as if she had read a mind. “I think you might tell me anything that has a bearing on future plans,” she said.
George told her how he and Molloy had trailed Walheim to Chicago, to find that Walheim had flown to Chicago in order to take the train back to New York which Julie Edwards had wired Martha she would be riding. He told of Fleshman, of the attempt on Julie’s life, their conviction that Julie had—or Walheim thought she had—something of great danger to Walheim. When he described Julie’s loveliness he gave it verve and enthusiasm, watched to see whether Kiggins would react in any way, and felt silly when she didn’t. He said that Julie had written a wire back home to Kirksville to have Martha’s old letters air-mailed to them in New York, and he had left the train to send the telegram.
“Now I come to the part I’m proud of,” he said gloomily. “I hurried the hell to the Western Union counter and got the message off. Going back, I’m in too much of a hurry to be my usual alert, wide-eyed self, or something. The train wasn’t supposed to stop long. Anyway, up pops Bozo the fat boy—I’d no idea he was off the train—and whammo! I get it. Blackjack!” George snorted bitterly. “You couldn’t guess—you wouldn’t dream—what he used on me? Hah! A pigskin poke coin purse with some coins in it! That’s what he used.” George touched the bruise on his head. “Whammo! Oh boy!”
Kiggins drove silently. She had made a turn, passed under the Long Island Railroad, and was heading for the pleasant apartment section of Jackson Heights.
“This is the point for you to show sympathy,” George said.
She did not reply.
George complained, “You might at least click your tongue and say, ‘Poor boy.’”
“Continue,” she said.
“Okay,” said George. “When I woke up I was minus my billfold and dough. I get off a phone call to the cops down the line—you know how much I was packing: four hundred bucks!—to pinch Fatso. Then I scram out to the airport and find—it was lucky I was carrying another thousand in traveler’s checks he didn’t locate or didn’t want—me a guy with a plane. We bust out of there right ahead of the cold front, race it all the way down here. We were cutting across the front, not going from it, and we nearly lost. The control-tower guy tried to make us get the hell on up into Connecticut where the weather was more open, and land, but we didn’t ... Oh yes, I wired the boss at his hotel from the airport up there, giving him my E.T.A. down here. I missed it ten minutes. The guy’s plane was slower than he said.”
They were moving slowly. The car windows, the windshield, except where the wipers were keeping two half disks clear, were frosted with tiny raindrops; the street was just damp enough to give a wet sound, as of hard breathing, under the tires. They caught the red light at a cross boulevard and Kiggins, waiting, was serenity itself, hands folded in lap.
George sighed. “What are the local developments?”
Kiggins saw green light become red, precisely meshed gears and manipulated clutch, accelerated pedal. “I was assigned the job of watching the false Martha, as you know.” She applied to speech and driving an identical, exact efficiency. “At fifteen past four day before yesterday afternoon Martha left Walheim’s hotel downtown, where she had gone in considerable excitement with the telegram from the girl in Missouri. Martha—I shall call her Martha, since we do not yet know her real name—showed continued signs of agitation. She appears to be the type who feels an instinctive need to dispel worries with exercise, action. She walked, on Fifth Avenue, looking into shopwindows, for about an hour. She had dinner, alone, at a very noisy place on Broadway—Guffing’s, near Forty-fourth Street. She occupied a window table. It was six-forty when she paid her check. She then visited four bars in succession, taking one drink in each, paying for one herself, and permitting men to pay for three. The men were merely trying to pick her up, apparently. This filled her time until nine, when she took a cab to her apartment in Jackson Heights. Instead of entering she walked, aimlessly and rapidly, for another forty minutes, making only one stop—Binder’s Liquor Shop on Roosevelt Avenue—where she purchased a fifth of gin. She then returned to her apartment house.”
It was hard for George not to ask what brand of gin. The bookkeeperlike facility for detail which Kiggins had somewhat irritated him. Had he not known better, he would have thought she could not differentiate between the trivial and the important in facts. He commented instead: “All this time she was worrying?”
“Her actions so indicated.”
“Uh-huh.”
“At her apartment she was handed a message by the telephone operator, saying a man had called and would call again.”
“Man?”
“Yes.”
“What name?”
“No name given.”
“H’mmmmmm!”
“The man,” Kiggins added, “phoned again about twenty minutes later. He said he was coming right out. At ten minutes to twelve he appeared. Height about five feet ten, wiry build, gray hair, apparent age near fifty. Not very conservatively dressed in a light tan business suit, brown moccasin-type shoes, a hand-painted necktie, brown and yellow. Waiting in the apartment house for the operator to phone Martha, he lit a cigarette, using the last match in a folder, which he discarded. The folder was from the Arctic Castle Drive-in, on Hollywood Boulevard.”
“From California, eh?”
“Possibly. Not necessarily. Advertising match books become scattered all over the country.”
“This guy—from the West Coast, if he is—get to see Martha?” he asked.
“He went up to her apartment.”
“Stay long?”
“Yes.”
“Tsk! Tsk! What do you know!” said George. “I thought that was Walheim’s territory. When the cat is away—”
Kiggins’s disapproval—uplifted chin, severe line of lip—was sharply nunlike. “You have a foul mind.” Her words had keen edges, like a doctor’s lancet going after a boil. “In thirty minutes Martha left with an overnight bag and rode in a cab to the Copeland estate, where she spent the night. The man—her visitor—remained in her apartment. He had, incidentally, brought along a suitcase when he came.”
“Came expecting to stay, did he?”
“Yes.”
“Was she calmed down when she left?”
“On the contrary, no.” Kiggins slowed the car and, ducking her head a little, tried to distinguish a street name sign, but without success, evidently, for she frowned. “Martha was more upset when she left, I would say.”
George grinned slightly and said, “If I may venture into the sewer again—I wonder if there’s anything between her and Copeland? She stayed all night out there, you said.”
The car was coming to another intersection, and Kiggins rolled down the side window two precise turns of the crank, leveled a glance at the street name sign, read it, and raised the window as exactly as she had lowered it. She said, “The man we are discussing spent all of today at the Copeland place.”
“The hell he did!”
A cat-spitting of raindrops had come in when the window was lowered and fallen across Kiggins’s left cheek, her shoulder. She ignored it. She said, “Profanity is the resort of a shallow mind and a starved vocabulary.”
“That’s the damned truth,” George agreed. “From what I hear, this phony Martha babe looks as if she was put together with the facts of life in mind. I wonder—ahem—where she is tonight?”
Kiggins replied coolly, in an impartial, untouched way, “The Copeland estate.”
“Tonight again!”
“Yes.”
“And the new guy?”
“Presumably his plans included his occupying Martha’s apartment again tonight. The telephone operator so indicated to me.”
George grinned. “You bribed the PBX operator at the apartment, eh?”
“Yes,” Kiggins said with sharp self-disapproval.
“That’s what I like about you, baby,” George told her. “Your high moral tone doesn’t interfere with the practical side of life. You’re impartial, too. You don’t like my cusswords, and you don’t like a bit of bribery when you do it yourself. Consistent, I’d say. I love you, tutz.” He turned his hat in his hands, pulling the tan leather sweatband down, then pushing it back. “Where are we going now?”
“Martha’s apartment house.”
“Why?”
“The phone operator was supposed to find out for me, if possible, the man’s name.” Kiggins swung the car carefully around a corner, wary of the increasing wind and madly driven rain. “I reported to Mr. Molloy the information I have given you. I did this from a point near the Copeland place. Mr. Molloy’s orders were to pick you up at the airport, then drop by Martha’s apartment and learn whether the operator had ascertained the man’s name.”
George leaned back on the seat. His mind dealt with Kiggins’s efficiency, her damned efficiency, as he preferred to think of it. She had permitted herself not an ounce of pride during the account she had just given him, yet he knew darned well she had done a job that would have stumped many a good detective. When he reviewed his own accomplishment—getting knocked on the head and robbed of four hundred bucks—he was unhappy.
Presently Kiggins curbed the car.
“I will be gone five minutes,” she said.
“Which building is it?”
“Six-eight-seven-eight.”
George watched Kiggins slide out of the car, draw a grass-green raincoat about her shoulders, and move away, coping quite calmly with the bustling attack of wind. Apartment buildings shot up on each side of the street, bulky, comfortable, but with an air of middle-class taste which he liked. It might be nice, he reflected, to put down roots in a place like this, providing a guy had a cushy job in some office. Plenty of bars not too far, a race track within distance, nice shows, room to step out a bit on the little woman without too much chance of getting caught. George did not fancy the country; he was not an ivy-covered cottage man.
God! I’m thinking domestic, he thought ... With Kiggins? Hah! That would be something! He moved impatiently in the seat, hauled his head down between thick shoulders, and began wondering, among other things, when he was going to get a shot at some sleep. He’d had none tonight, hardly more last night. His eyelids were heavy, the lower part of his face had the thick dull feeling that came from fatigue.
He had, and surrendered to, the temptation to drop his head back against the full-bosomed sweep of the back cushion. He closed his eyes—oh—no! None of that. No dozing off. He held the conviction—fairly correct—that he was a sound sleeper, that awakening him was a job for a blacksmith with a hammer ... He consulted his watch, then began, suddenly, to worry about Kiggins’s welfare. What the hell was keeping her? What had befallen ... “Oh,” he said, and watched Kiggins come to the car. He said, “Six minutes, that’s what you took! You said five.”
Kiggins said, “The man is away. He is supposed to be back and spend the night. He is supposed to be unable to find a suitable hotel room—which is quite possible, incidentally—and be using Martha’s apartment while she stays in emergency quarters at her employer’s—Copeland’s—residence.”
“Okay,” George said. “We wait here for the guy to come back? That the program?”
“His name,” said Kiggins, “is N. N. Nesbitt.”
George’s eyes grew round. “Who?”
“And we are going to search his luggage.”
“Wait a minute! Who told you—”
Kiggins was coolly matter-of-fact. “That he was Nesbitt? The phone operator. To search his baggage—Mr. Molloy.”
George gave his jaw a violent rubbing as if to erase surprise. “Nesbitt—there’s a guy, general manager of Transfa Air Industries, Copeland’s company ... ?”
“The same, evidently.”
“Nesbitt! So Nesbitt’s in it with Walheim!” he exclaimed.
Kiggins, silent, serene, wore the calm air of a nun. She was pulling on dark gloves. She said, “If you have gloves it might be well to wear them.”
“We gonna search this Nesbitt’s stuff now?”
“Yes.”
“How do we get in?”
“The superintendent leaves his master key with the night phone operator. I have arranged with her.”
The wind came against the car with whistling force, made it rock a little, tossed small twigs, street litter, against the metal body of the machine. Kiggins opened the door.
“Whew!” George shuddered. “This Nesbitt is probably as dangerous as Walheim!”
Disturbed, he slid across the seat, hurled the door back with his shoulder, climbed out and let the door slam shut, shivered as the icy wind flattened his trousers coldly against his legs. Head down, a hand clutching his coat collar to his throat, he stumbled toward the apartment building.
“Wouldn’t it be funny,” he said grimly, “if this Nesbitt managed to get at Molloy or Julie?”