Instinct to fight the tightening wire which would kill me in seconds drove out all other thoughts. I let the .38 fall from my grasp and grabbed with both hands for the wire.
Then I realized fighting the wire was exactly what my attacker expected. What he didn’t expect was for me to grip his forearms as if they were bars and jerk my knees to my chest, curling toward the very weapon meant to end my life.
If he’d been larger he might have maintained his balance. Instead, my unanticipated weight pitched us both forward. We slammed into the metal stairs.
It caused my assailant to lose his grip on one end of the garrote. I flung myself to the side, rolling over the edge of the bottom few steps of the fire escape. The short fall onto the brick alley hammered my bones but I was free.
My fingers groped frantically at the ground beside the fire escape. They brushed what I was hunting. My Smith & Wesson. As soon as I found the trigger I fired, without caring where.
A snarl of rage rewarded me.
I fired again. I had no sense of where my attacker was. A voice hissed above me. Muffled steps ran. A window slid swiftly down.
Heart beating so I thought my chest would split, I pulled myself up. I gasped for air, coughed, tried again, felt it wheeze through my windpipe. When I put my hand to my throat, it came away wet.
“Everything okay?” The kitchen door of the hotel opened. A man who must be the room service waiter stood peering out.
“Car backfired,” I rasped. I got to my feet. “Scared the bejeezus out of me. Even dropped my bottle.”
The door clicked closed.
Breathing still didn’t come easily. At the moment, I was glad it came at all. When I’d steadied some, I crossed the street and climbed into my DeSoto. I placed the Smith & Wesson on the seat beside me. I tilted the mirror to look at my neck. A narrow two-inch line across my windpipe bled merrily.
* * *
Running into the hotel the way I was dressed, with a bleeding neck, would cause too many questions. I drove to the office and dialed the nighttime number Tucker had given me.
“Check the safe,” I said when he answered. “And check things on the second floor. Let me in the kitchen door in fifteen minutes.”
He didn’t waste time on questions. I hung up and sat at my desk with all the lights on. I’d never had a run-in with a garrote before, but I knew if my reactions had been a few seconds slower it would have strangled me, possibly cutting an artery on the side of my neck or crushing my larynx for good measure.
Whoever had gone in the window was playing for high stakes.
And he — or she — had an accomplice.
* * *
“The way you were attacked... it was the same as Polly, wasn’t it?”
Frances bent over the back of the couch in their apartment winding a ribbon of gauze around my neck. I’d just filled them in on what occurred in the alley.
“Different method of choking.” I wasn’t sure about that, but her fussing embarrassed me.
“You’re sure you don’t want a doctor to look at this?”
“Thanks, but I’m okay.”
As she tied off the gauze, I reached for the coffee cup sitting in front of me. On the opposite side of a low table Joshua Tucker was sipping whiskey, but I needed something to keep me awake. It was almost four in the morning.
“What about the safe?” I asked.
Tucker rubbed his hands together, faintly pleased.
“Didn’t look to me like it had been touched. I used to manage a first-rate magician. It hit me yesterday I could use a trick of his to keep track of the boxes.”
Tugging at the sash of her silky green dressing gown, Frances came around to settle on the couch beside me.
“This tonight, someone sneaking in a window, it proves Joshua was right about that empty box doesn’t it? Somebody was — is — getting into the safe.”
I nodded. The joe wasn’t doing much to revive me.
“Why not grab everything at once? Why go in again?” Tucker rubbed his overnight stubble.
“Maybe the first time was testing the waters. Maybe they meant to make their real play tonight, but stumbling into me, and then you hotfooting it downstairs scared them off.”
Maybe. Maybe, maybe.
Or maybe not.
“The smartest thing for you to do is hire a guard to sit in your office,” I said. “Somebody in plain clothes.”
“No.”
“I can take what’s left of tonight—”
“No.”
“Just until I find out if there’s some sort of burglar alarm you can get installed.”
The stubborn little hotel owner was shaking his head.
“Too much hustle and bustle. It’d scare off whoever’s doing this.”
“Which is probably the smartest idea. I have to tell you, the chances I’ll be around at exactly the right time to stop whoever wants in the safe, or figure out who that is beforehand, aren’t good. And Archie Clarke’s wife came into the dining room while I was there tonight. The diamonds she had on would choke an elephant.”
Tucker’s grin lacked its usual wattage, but it was there.
“I got confidence in you, kid. And I’m a good judge of talent.”
“Besides, if we’ve got a rotten apple working for us, we want to know who,” Frances chimed in.
It was just enough to keep him going when he might have seen reason. I tried a different angle.
“Do you know any jewelers who do appraisals? Ones you’ve dealt with and trust?”
“Sure,” said Tucker. “We took some of Franny’s jewelry to one a year or two back. Daniel-something. Nice fellow.”
“Call him first thing tomorrow. This morning. See if he’ll come have a look at what’s in the safe and estimate what you’d be out if you lost the whole lot.”
Hearing the price tag might scare some sense into them.