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“The tunnel.”
She unlocked a door with a key. Here was the tunnel, low-ceiled, narrow, and damp. It stretched into darkness. She took a battery light from a hole in the wall and by its flashing beam led them underground for what felt to Scully to be a distance of two city blocks. By the twists and turns and breaks in the walls, he surmised it was actually a right-of-way constructed through a series of connected cellars.
She unlocked another door, took his hand again, and led him up two flights of stairs into the conventionally furnished parlor of an apartment with high windows that offered views of the Chatham Square El station flooded in sunlight.
Scully had been in the dark so long, he found it hard to believe that daylight still existed.
“Thanks for the rescue, ma’am.”
“My name is Katy. Sit down. Relax.”
“Jasper,” said Scully. “Jasper Smith.”
Katy threw down her bag, reached up, and began removing hatpins.
Scully watched avidly. She was even prettier in the daylight. “You know,” he laughed. “If I carried a knife as long as your hatpins, the police would arrest me as a dangerous character.”
She gave him a cute pout. “A girl can’t wear her chapeau all crooked.”
“It doesn’t seem to matter if a girl wears a cartwheel or a little ding-dong affair, she always nails it down with hatpins long as her arm. I see you are a fellow Republican.”
“Where’d you get that idea?”
Scully reached for the ten-inch steel pin she was removing and held it to the light. The decorative bronze head depicted a possum holding a golf club. “ ‘Billy Possum.’ That’s what we call William Howard Taft.”
“They’re trying to make a possum like a teddy bear. But everyone knows that Taft is no Roosevelt.”
She stuck all four pins in a sofa cushion and tossed her hat beside them. Then she struck a pose, with her strong hands on her slim hips. “Opium is the one pleasure I can’t offer you here. Would you settle for a Scotch highball?”
“Among other things,” Scully grinned back.
He watched her mix Scotch and water in tall glasses. Then he clinked his to hers, took a sip, and leaned closer to kiss her on the mouth. She stepped back. “Let me get comfortable. I’ve been in these clothes all day.”
Scully searched the room quickly, thoroughly, and silently. He was looking for a rent bill or gas bill that would show whose apartment it was. He had to stop when the El clattered by because he couldn’t hear her coming back from the bedroom. It passed, and he looked some more.
“Say, how you doing in there?” he called.
“Hold your horses.”
Scully looked some more. Nothing. Drawers and cabinets were bare as a hotel room. He cast a look down the hall, and opened her purse. Just as he heard the door open, he hit the jackpot. Two railroad tickets for tomorrow’s three-thirty p.m. 20th Century Limited-the eighteen-hour excess-fare flyer to Chicago-with connections through to San Francisco. Tickets for Katy and whom? The boss? The Hip Sing boyfriend?
WHEN SHE FOUND the little thirteen-ounce.25 holstered in the small of his back, she wanted to know what it was doing there.
“Got robbed once carrying the payroll for my clerks. It ain’t gonna happen again.”
She seemed to believe him. At least it didn’t get in the way of the proceedings. Not until he saw her add the knockout drops to his second highball.
Scully felt suddenly old and blue.
She was so very good at it. She had the patience to wait to dress the second drink so he’d be less likely to taste the bitter chloral hydrate flavor. She hid the vial expertly between the crease of her palm and the fleshy part of her thumb. She crossed her legs as she did it, with a dis
tracting flash of snow-white thighs. Her only failing was her youth. He was too old to be buncoed by a kid.
“Bottoms up,” she smiled.
“Bottoms up,” Scully whispered back. “You know, I never met a girl quite like you.” Gazing soulfully into her pretty blue eyes, he reached blindly for his glass and knocked it off the table.
ISAAC BELL GOT to the Knickerbocker’s cellar bar ten minutes early. Midafternoon on a sunny day, it was largely empty, and he saw right away that Abbington-Westlake had not yet arrived. There was one man at the bar, two couples at tables, and a single slight figure seated on the banquette behind the small table where he had sat with the English Naval Attaché in the darkest corner of the room. Immaculately dressed in an old-fashioned frock coat, high-standing collar, and four-in-hand tie, he beckoned, half rising and bowing his head.
