Coming silently to the door of apartment 202, I listened. Not a sound. This was no time for hesitation. I pressed the bell-button.
As close together as the tapping of three keys under the fingers of an expert typist, but a thousand times more vicious, came three pistol shots. And waist-high in the door of apartment 202 were three bullet holes.
The three bullets would have been in my fat carcass if I hadn’t learned years ago to stand to one side of strange doors when making uninvited calls.
Inside the apartment sounded a man’s voice, sharp, commanding.
“Cut it, kid! For God’s sake, not that!”
A woman’s voice, shrill, bitter, spiteful screaming blasphemies.
Two more bullets came through the door.
“Stop! No! No!” The man’s voice had a note of fear in it now.
The woman’s voice, cursing hotly. A scuffle. A shot that didn’t hit the door.
I hurled my foot against the door, near the knob, and the lock broke away.
On the floor of the room, a man—Quayle—and a woman were tussling. He was bending over her, holding her wrists, trying to keep her down. A smoking automatic pistol was in one of her hands. I got to it in a jump and tore it loose.
“That’s enough!” I called to them when I was planted. “Get up and receive company.”
Quayle released his antagonist’s wrists, whereupon she struck at his eyes with curved, sharp-nailed fingers, tearing his cheek open. He scrambled away from her on hands and knees, and both of them got to their feet.
He sat down on a chair immediately, panting and wiping his bleeding cheek with a handkerchief.
She stood, hands on hips, in the center of the room, glaring at me.
“I suppose,” she spat, “you think you’ve raised hell!”
I laughed—I could afford to.
“If your father is in his right mind,” I told her, “he’ll do it with a razor strop when he gets you home again. A fine joke you picked out to play on him!”
“If you’d been tied to him as long as I have, and had been bullied and held down as much, I guess you’d do most anything to get enough money so that you could go away and live your own life.”
I didn’t say anything to that. Remembering some of the business methods Harvey Gatewood had used—particularly some of his war contracts that the Department of Justice was still investigating—I suppose the worst that could be said about Audrey was that she was her father’s own daughter.
“How’d you rap to it?” Quayle asked me, politely.
“Several ways,” I said. “First, I’m a little doubtful about grown persons being kidnapped in cities. Maybe it really happens sometimes, but at least nine-tenths of the cases you hear about are fakes. Second, one of Audrey’s friends saw her on Market Street between 8:15 and 8:45 the night she disappeared; and your letter to Gatewood was postmarked 9 p.m. Pretty fast work. You should have waited a while before mailing it, even if it had to miss the first morning delivery. I suppose she dropped it in the post office on her way over here?”
Quayle nodded.
“Then third,” I went on, “there was that phone call of hers. She knew it took anywhere from ten to fifteen minutes to get her father on the wire at the office. If time had been as valuable as it would have been if she had gotten to a phone while imprisoned, she’d have told her story to the first person she got hold of—the phone girl, most likely. So that made it look as if, besides wanting to throw out that Twin Peaks line, she wanted to stir the old man out of his bullheadedness.
“When she failed to show up after the money was paid I figured it was a sure bet that she had kidnapped herself. I knew that if she came back home after faking this thing we’d find it out before we’d talked to her very long—and I figured she knew that too, and would stay away.
“The rest was easy, as I got some good breaks. We knew a man was working with her after we found the woman’s clothes you left behind, and I took a chance on there being no one else in it. Then I figured she’d need clothes—she couldn’t have taken any from home without tipping her mitt—and there was an even chance that she hadn’t laid in a stock beforehand. She’s got too many girl friends of the sort that do a lot of shopping to make it safe for her to risk showing herself in stores. Maybe, then, the man would buy what she needed for her. And it turned out that he did, and that he was too lazy to carry away his purchases, or perhaps there was too many of them, and so he had them sent out. That’s the story.”
Quayle nodded again.
“I was damned careless,” he said, and then, jerking a contemptuous thumb toward the girl. “But what can you expect? She’s had a skin full of hop ever since we started. Took all my time and attention keeping her from running wild and gumming the works. Just now was a sample—I told her you were coming up and she goes crazy and tries to add your corpse to the wreck!”
The Gatewood reunion took place in the office of the captain of inspectors, on the second floor of the Oakland City Hall, and it was a merry little party. For an hour it was a toss-up whether Harvey Gatewood would die of apoplexy, strangle his daughter, or send her off to the state reformatory until she was of age. But Audrey licked him. Besides being a chip off the old block, she was young enough to be careless of consequences, while her father, for all his bullheadedness, had had some caution hammered into him.
The card she beat him with was a threat of spilling everything she knew about him to the newspapers, and at least one of the San Francisco papers had been trying to get his
