“I haven’t screamed yet,” she observed. “Why suggest it?”
“Not a sound from you nor a movement! And step out of that car!”
“Well, I can’t do that, you know,” she answered sweetly.
Laury bit his lips. “I mean, get out of your car at once! Men like me are used to having their slightest order obeyed immediately!”
“Well, I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting any men like you before, I’m sorry to say. As it happens, I’m not well acquainted with the profession.”
“Then you better remember that my name is whispered with terror from coast to coast!”
“What’s your name? Mine’s Jinx Winford.”
“You’ll be sorry to learn my name! Everybody will tell you that my hand is of steel; that my heart is of granite; that I pass in the night like a death-bearing lightning, leaving terror and desolation behind!”
“Oh, really? I
am
sorry and you have all my sympathy: it must be awfully hard to live up to such a reputation!”
Laury looked at her strangely. Then he remembered that great bandits are always courteous to women. So he spoke gallantly:
“However, you have nothing to fear: I crush all men, but I spare women!”
“That’s nothing to be proud of: women are the bunk and you ought to know it!”
“I’m profoundly sorry that I have to do this,” he continued, “but you’ll be treated with the greatest respect and courtesy, so you don’t have to be afraid.”
“Afraid? What of?”
“Say, will you please step out of your car and get into mine?”
“Is that absolutely necessary?”
“Yes!”
“Will you please kindly tell me what the hell this is all about?” she asked very suavely.
“You are being kidnapped,” he explained politely.
“Oh!”
He didn’t like that “Oh!”—it was not what he had expected at all. There was no terror or indignation in it; it sounded rather simple, matter-of-fact, as a person would say: “Oh, I see!”
She jumped lightly to the ground, her short skirt whirling high above graceful legs in tight, glistening stockings. The wind blew her clothes tight around her body and for a moment she looked like a slim little dancer in a wet, clinging dress, on an immense black stage, torn out of the darkness by the bright circle of the car’s spotlight. And behind her, as a background—a gray, sandy piece of hill with bushes of dry, thorny weeds sticking out like deer horns.
“Will you please kindly wait while I lock my car?” she asked. “I don’t mind being kidnapped, but I don’t want some other gentleman to get the notion of kidnapping my car.”
Calmly, she turned off the headlights, locked the car, and slipped the key into her pocketbook. She approached his old sports car and looked it over critically.
“Your business doesn’t pay, does it?” she asked. “That buggy of yours doesn’t look as though you get three meals a day.”
“Will you please step in!” he almost shouted, exasperated. “We have no time to waste!”
She stepped in and snuggled comfortably on the seat, stretching her pretty legs far out on the slanting floorboard, her pleated skirt hardly covering the knees. He jumped to the wheel beside her.
“Do you expect a lot of money out of this?” she asked.
He did not answer.
“Are you desperately in love with me, then?”
“I should say not!” he snapped.
With a sharp, hoarse growl and a convulsive jerk from top to tire, the sports car tore forward, snorted, shuddered and rolled, wavering, into the darkness, towards the lights of Dicksville.
The wind and the dark hills rushed to meet them and rolled past. They were both silent. She studied him furtively from the corner of her eye. All she could see was a black mask between a gray cap and gracefully curved lips. He did not look at her once. All he knew of her presence was a faint, expensive perfume and tangled locks of soft hair that the wind blew into his face occasionally.
The first houses of Dicksville rose by the side of the road. Laury drove into town cautiously, choosing the darkest, emptiest streets. There were few streetlamps and no passersby. He stepped on the gas involuntarily, when passing through the white squares of light streaming from lonely corner drugstores.
Laury lived in an old apartment house in a narrow little street winding up a hill, in a new, half-built neighborhood. The house had two floors, big windows, and little balconies with no doors to them. There was an empty, unfinished bungalow next to it and a vacant lot across the street. Only two apartments on the first floor were occupied. Laury was the sole tenant on the second floor.
As the car swung around the corner into his street, Laury turned off the headlights and drove up to the house as noiselessly as he could. He looked carefully around before stopping. There was no one in sight. The little street was as dark and empty as an abandoned stage setting.
“Now, not a sound! Don’t make any noise!” he whispered, clutching the girl’s arm and dashing with her to the front door.
“Sure, I won’t,” she answered. “I know how you feel!”
They tiptoed noiselessly up the carpeted steps to Laury’s door. The first thing that met Jinx’s eyes, as Laury politely let her enter first, was one of his dirty shirts in the middle of the little hall, that had rolled out of an open clothes closet. Laury blushed under his mask and kicked it back into the closet, slamming its door angrily.
The living room had two windows and a soft blue carpet. A desk stood between the windows, a tempestuous ocean of papers with a typewriter as an island in it. The blue davenport had a few cushions on it, also a newspaper, a safety razor, and one shoe. The only big, low armchair was occupied by a pile of victrola records with an alarm clock on top of them; and a portable victrola stood next to it on a soap box covered with an old striped sweater. A big box marked “Puffed Wheat Cereal” served as a bookcase. A graceful glass bowl on a tall stand, intended for goldfish, contained no water, but cigarette ashes and a telephone, instead. The rest of the room was occupied by old newspapers, magazines without covers, covers without magazines, a tennis racket, a bath towel, a bunch of dry, shriveled flowers, a big dictionary, and a ukulele.
Jinx looked the room over slowly, carefully. Laury threw his coat and cap on a chair, took off the mask, wiped his forehead with a sigh of relief, and ran his fingers through his hair. Jinx looked at him, looked again, then took out her compact, powdered her face quickly, and passed the lipstick over her lips with unusual care.
“What’s your name?” she asked in a somewhat changed voice.
“It doesn’t matter, for the present,” he answered.
She settled herself comfortably on the edge of his desk. He looked at her now, in the light. She had a lovely figure, as her tight silk sweater showed in detail, he thought. She had inscrutable eyes, and he could not decide whether their glance, fixed on him, was openly mocking or sweetly innocent.
“Well, you showed good judgment in choosing me for kidnapping,” she said. “I don’t know who else would be as good a bet. If you had less discrimination you might have chosen Louise Chatterton, perhaps, but, you know, her old man is so tight he never gets off a trolley before the end of the line, to get all his money’s worth!”
She glanced over the room.
“You’re a beginner, aren’t you?” she asked. “Your place doesn’t look like the lair of a very sinister criminal.”
He looked at the room and blushed. “I’m sorry the room looks like this,” he muttered. “I’ll straighten it out. I’ll do my best to make you comfortable. I hope your stay here will be as pleasant as possible.”
“There’s no doubt about that, I’m beginning to think. But then, where’s your sweetheart’s picture? Haven’t you got a ‘moll’?”
“Are you hungry?” Laury asked briskly. “If you want something to eat, I can . . .”
“No, I do not. Have you got a gang? Or are you a lonely mastermind?”
“If there’s anything you want . . .”
“No, thanks. Have you ever been in jail yet? And how does it feel?”
“It’s getting late,” Laury said abruptly. “Do you want to sleep?”
“Well, you don’t expect me to stay up all night, do you?”
Laury arranged the davenport for her. For himself he had fixed something like a bed out of a few chairs and an old mattress, in the kitchen.
“Tomorrow,” he said before leaving her, “I’ll have to go out for a while. You’ll find food in the icebox. Don’t make any attempts to run away. Don’t make any noise—no one will hear you. You will save yourself a lot of trouble if you will promise me not to try to escape.”
“I promise,” she said, and added with a strange look straight into his sunny gray eyes: “In fact, I’ll do my best
not
to escape!” . . .
Laury’s heart was beating louder than the alarm clock at his side when he stretched himself on his uncomfortable couch in the dark kitchen. The couch felt like a mountainous landscape under his body and there was an odor of canned chili floating from the sink above his head. But he felt an ecstasy of triumph beating rapturously, like victorious drums, over all his body, to his very fingertips. He had done it! There had been no one in that dump of a town bright enough to commit a good crime. He had committed it; a crime worthy of his pen; a crime that would make good copy. Tomorrow, when the
Dawn
’s headlines would thunder like wild beasts . . .
“Mr. Gunman!” a sweet voice called from the living room.
“What’s the matter?” he cried.
“Is it an RCA victrola you have there in the corner?”
“Yes!”
“That’s fine. . . . Goodnight.”
“Goodnight.”
——III——
The headlines on the
Dicksville Dawn
were three inches high and blazed on the front pages like huge, black mouths screaming to an astounded world:
SOCIETY GIRL KIDNAPPED
And an army of newsboys rolled over Dicksville like a tidal wave, with swift currents branching into every street and an alarming, tempestuous roar of hoarse voices: “Extray! Extra-a-ay!”
The eager citizens who snatched from each other the crisp, fresh sheets, with the black print still wet and smearing under their fingers, read, shivering, of how the charming young heiress, Miss Juliana X. Winford, had disappeared on her way home from a visit and of how her sports car had been examined by the police on a lonely road two miles out of town. The sports car had two bullet holes in its side and one in a rear tire; the windshield was broken, the upholstery ripped and torn. Everything indicated a grim, desperate struggle. The sports car had been discovered, the
Dicksville Dawn
proudly announced, by “our own reporter, Mr. L. H. McGee.”
There was a big photograph of Miss Winford, where all one could distinguish were bare legs, a tennis racket, and an intoxicating smile. The thrilling front-page story that related all these events was entitled: “Society Beauty Victim of Unknown Monster”—by Laurence H. McGee. It started with: “A profound sorrow clutched our hearts at the news that our fair city’s peace and respect for law, of which we had always been so proud, was suddenly disturbed by a most atrocious, terrifying, revolting crime. . . .”
The old building of the
Dicksville Dawn
looked like an anthill that somebody had stepped on. The presses thundered; the typewriters cracked furiously like machine guns; a current of frenzied humanity streamed down the main stairs and another one rolled up. City Editor Jonathan Scraggs dashed around, sweat streaming down his red face, rubbing his hands with a grin of ecstatic satisfaction at the thought that the
Dawn
had received the great news two hours before its rival, the
Dicksville Globe.
Laury McGee sat on the Editor’s desk, his legs crossed, calmly smoking a cigarette.
“Great stuff, that story of yours, Laury, my boy!” Mr. Scraggs repeated. “Never thought you had it in you!”
The telephones screamed continuously, calls from all over the town, anxious voices begging news and details.
Chief Police Inspector Rafferty himself dropped in to see the City Editor. He was short, square, and nervous. He had a big black mustache, like a shaving brush, and little restless, suspicious eyes always watching for someone to offend his dignity.
“Cats and rats!” he shouted. “What’s all this? Now, I ask you, what the hell is all this?”
“It’s quite an unexpected occurrence,” agreed Jonathan Scraggs.
“Occurrence be blasted! That any scoundrel should have the nerve to pull that off in my town! Cats and rats! I’ll be hashed into hamburger if I know who the lousy mongrel could be! It isn’t Pug-Nose Thomson, ’cause he was seen stewed like a hog in some joint, last night!”
“The affair does seem rather mysterious and . . .”
“I’ve sent every man on the force to comb the town! I’ll fire them all, each goddamn boob, if they don’t pull the bum out by the gullet!”
That afternoon, Mr. Christopher A. Winford’s gray automobile stopped before the
Dawn
building and the tall gentleman walked up to the city room, with a step that implied a long acquaintance with respectfully admiring eyes and news cameras. He was cool, poised, distinguished. He had gray eyes, and a mustache that matched his eyes, and a suit that matched his mustache.
“Yes, it’s most annoying,” he said slowly, his eyes half-closed as one used to conceal his superior thoughts. “I wish my daughter back, you understand.”
There was a slight wonder in his voice, as though he was unable to see how his wish could be disobeyed.
“Certainly, certainly, Mr. Winford,” Mr. Scraggs assured him. “You have all our sympathy. A father’s heart in a misfortune like this must . . .”
“I came here personally to arrange for an announcement in your paper,” Mr. Winford went on slowly, “that I will pay a reward to anyone who furnishes information leading to the discovery of my daughter’s whereabouts. Name the sum yourself, whatever you find necessary. I will pay for everything.”