brandy for him. He couldn't carry the load, an' he started to go to pieces. At the same time our friend here, when Arends was knocked off, all of a sudden becomes one of the landed gentry an' he's no longer interested in grubby little smugglin' deals. Tremaine figured he had to be kept in line, both because of the warehouse facilities an' knowhow, an' Stitt's European contacts. I'm just guessin' now, but I think Tremaine made the mistake of hintin' to our boy here that, unless he continued to co-operate, the police were goin' to get word to look in his direction for what happened to Madeleine Winters. It looked so much like his trademark it would've been easy to do. If he had an alibi, okay-he hired it done.” He waved the Mauser at Max Stitt. “Stitt come over here to show him who was givin' the orders.”
“You'd have to say he made his point,” Detective Rogers said drily. “I don't see why these two-” He broke off as the battered door opened to admit two blue uniforms followed by an apprehensive looking gentleman obviously an assistant manager. “Come in, men,” Rogers said, and waved at Stitt. “Take him on down. I'll think up the charges later.”
The assistant manager paused in the doorway at sight of Jules Tremaine. “Dear me,” he said involuntarily. He turned to look uncertainly at Rogers. “A physician is needed? Unfortunately we have no house man. We use one from the neighborhood. I'll call-”
“Ambulance should be here any second,” the detective said. He watched as Max Stitt went out the door in the custody of the two patrolmen. “You'd better get that door fixed, though. I want to lock this room.”
“Certainly, sir. Certainly. I looked at it on the way in. I believe it can be fixed temporarily well enough to lock it.” He walked importantly to the phone.
Johnny silently handed the Mauser to Detective Rogers, who pocketed it. The ambulance crew arrived, and the white-coated doctor took one look at Jules Tremaine's face and eyes and stretched him out on the sofa. He worked on him for quite a long time before he signaled for the stretcher. “Come on, Johnny,” Rogers ordered when the tide had ebbed from around them. “I want to talk to him as soon as I can.”
“Sure, Jimmy.” Johnny followed him on out past a workman in carpenter's overalls muttering under his breath at the state of the door.
In the lobby, when he was sure that Rogers was in full flight after the stretcher, Johnny veered off to one side. He wanted a look at that room of Jules Tremaine's, and he wanted no one looking over his shoulder while he did so.
Ignoring the elevator, he headed for the stairs.
CHAPTER XIII
The corridor was deserted when Johnny stepped out onto it from the fourth-floor landing. He moved rapidly to the door of 407 and tried the knob. The lock in the patched panel rattled loosely, but it held. Johnny debated trying his Duarte passkey, and decided against it. It probably wouldn't work, anyhow, and he didn't know how much time he had. He put his shoulder to the door and applied steadily increasing pressure. The lock burst with a grieving sound of overstrained metal and he stepped inside and pushed the door closed.
Inside he went directly to the large closet at the rear of the room. After opening it he found it so dark inside he groped for a light switch, then for a cord. Finding neither, he backed out and turned on the room's overhead light. This time, when he returned, he could see the glint from closely aligned bottles in a case of Armagnac at his feet. He toed the case thoughtfully. Tremaine never had come through on his promise to drop off a case at the Duarte.
When he raised his eyes, Johnny found himself looking at an attache case on the eye-level shelf. Because of its dimensions he reached for it hopefully. He shook his head in disgust as soon as he lifted it down; it didn't weigh enough.
He set it down out of the way, and swiftly went through the rest of the closet. Disappointed, he backed out and ran his eye around the rest of the room. It offered few likely looking hiding places for thirty-pound objects.
He tested the frame and the base of the sofa, fruitlessly. He was considering the bed when he heard the voices at the door. “-lock's been forced, Ernest,” a feminine voice said hollowly from outside. “What can have happened here?”
Johnny padded noiselessly back to the closet, closed the door, snatched up the attache case from the floor and fled to the bathroom, whose door he pushed three-quarters shut. He looked out to see Ernest Faulkner cautiously reconnoiter the apartment from the hallway with Gloria Philips at his shoulder. The lawyer's prim mouth pursed soundlessly at the sight of the disheveled interior.
“Look at the place!” the redhead exclaimed, less reticent. “What in the world-” She pushed past Faulkner and click-clacked rapidly in her three-inch high heels across the room beyond Johnny's range of vision. He was left in no doubt as to her whereabouts when he heard the closet door reopen. Her voice came again immediately, muffledly. “It's gone!” Almost at once she spoke again more clearly, as though she had turned to face the lawyer. “The case is gone, Ernest. Where can he have put it? He wouldn't have any reason-”
Her voice died out as Faulkner moved forward to join her. “Let me look,” he said nervously.
“I tell you it's gone,” she repeated impatiently. The tap-tap of her high heels sounded as she evidently got out of Faulkner's way. “I don't understand why-”
In the bathroom Johnny snatched a bath mat from a wall rack and swathed the attache case in it, to muffle sound. Probing with his big thumbs through the mat's thickness, he found the case locks and popped them one at a time with a barely discernible sound. From outside he could hear a flurry of movement and half-questions and quarter-answers as the man and woman searched in an obviously increasing state of anxiety.
Johnny discarded the mat and opened the case, silently. He groped around inside and felt his knuckles brush against a piece of metal. He picked it up, and stared down uncomprehendingly at a snouted, tubular piece of steel attached at a right angle to a flat metal plate. He hefted its light weight in his palm puzzledly, turned it over and looked at it from another angle. He started to return it to the case, opened that wider for a better view of its other contents and nearly dropped the whole thing at the sound of another voice outside.
“What are you two doing here?” Detective James Rogers' voice demanded crisply.
Johnny shoved everything back in the case, closed it and tucked it under his arm. Back at the door he looked out through the aperture at Ernest Faulkner's white, shaken features, peering in dismay at the sandy-haired man standing in the hallway arch.
“I-ah-have a key,” the lawyer got out in a voice that sounded better than he looked. “Not that we-I needed it. Upon our arrival we found the door had been forced.” Johnny could see him gaining confidence at the sound of his own voice. “I really-”
“I asked you what you were doing here!” the detective rapped back at him sharply. Johnny couldn't see the redhead at all. “And where's Killain?”
“Killain?” Faulkner echoed blankly.
Johnny opened the bathroom door and stepped out. Faulkner's jaw dropped ludicrously. Gloria Philips stood at the end of the sofa. There was no particular expression on her face that Johnny could decipher, but her eyes were on the attache case under his arm.
“There you are,” Rogers said drily. “I missed you downstairs. What the hell's going on here?”
“I just been catchin' up on my homework as to how Jack Arends was killed, Jimmy,” Johnny said easily.
“I know how Arends was killed. You missed the excitement downstairs by skipping off back up here. I just barely got to Tremaine in time to keep him from gunning Stitt with an automatic he'd dredged up from somewhere. The wagon and the ambulance were loading side by side.”
Johnny ignored the interruption. “If you had to kill a man so bad you couldn't wait, Jimmy, and you had two minutes alone with him in a room two closed doors away from other people in the same apartment, how would you do it?”
Detective Rogers opened his mouth, and closed it again. He looked at Ernest Faulkner, who looked baffled, and at Gloria Philips, who looked as beautiful as ever. He looked back at Johnny. “With a silencer,” he said finally. He shook his head impatiently. “If I could get it out past the other people in the apartment. And if you're still speaking of Arends, that's where you're all wet. We found the gun, and there was no sign of a silencer. And the gun was an automatic, which can't take a silencer.”
