Golden Trap Read online

  I have to say right here and now that I have never been so scared in my whole life. I was scared for myself and even more scared for Shelda. I could imagine her, there in the cold darkness of her apartment with a lunatic. I cursed myself ten times over for not having gone for the police instead of handling things myself—or mishandling them. But when I thought about it I wondered how much difference it would have made. Get the cops battering on Shelda’s door and you couldn’t guess how young Mr. Dark would react. His situation was pretty desperate, too. He wasn’t going to get away with this. Even if he killed Shelda and me and Lovelace in cold blood he wasn’t going to get away with it. Marilyn had evidently marked him up so that he’d have no explanation. To run would be like a confession. A hundred to one Hardy would come up with his fingerprints. His goose was cooked; all that apparently mattered to him was to finish off Lovelace before he was trapped. If Shelda and I got in his way, he wasn’t going to be bothered about adding us to his list.

  All I wanted was to get out of there, with Shelda. At that moment I couldn’t have cared less how Lovelace and Dark settled their vendetta. But I was pinned down where I lay behind Shelda’s evergreens just as firmly as if someone had driven a spike through my body. In my world, when you have a problem, you say, “Let’s talk it over.” If I stood up now and shouted to Dark that I wanted to talk, I’d probably get a slug right between the eyes, just the way the late John Smith had gotten one. I lay there, waiting for Lovelace to come up with a miracle.

  I began to try to figure out what would happen as time passed. It was now a little past five by my watch. It was daylight, but the city was still asleep except for a few scattered cab drivers, the cops on their beats, the subway motormen and brakemen, the guys on the sanitation trucks kicking garbage cans around, the night people in factories, in gas and electric plants, in the telephone offices. There’d be a few tired disc jockeys playing records at the radio stations. Back at the Beaumont the cleaning crews were at work in the lobby, the bars and restaurant rooms, and the ballroom, with their vacuum cleaners, their brass-and-glass-polishing potions, their electrically driven trash wagons, their dusters on long poles for cleaning the magnificent chandeliers, their buckets, their mops propelled by old-fashioned elbow grease. I could imagine Chambrun, heavy-lidded, sitting at his desk, waiting for some report from Hardy. I could imagine Jerry Dodd and his men searching the hotel once more, just in case Lovelace and the killer might have found a place there to hide. No one would be worrying about me and Shelda. Unless Chambrun suddenly needed me and called Shelda’s place there would be three or four hours before anyone began to wonder why I wasn’t back on the job.

  There was a chance that, in an hour or two, someone would look out of a window in one of the tall apartment buildings surrounding Shelda’s place and see two guys lying in the shrubbery. It was a hundred to one that whoever saw us wouldn’t do a damn thing about it. Mind-your-own-business is the key to security in a big city.

  I looked at Lovelace. His eyes were closed. I thought he’d gone to sleep or passed out. I reached out and touched him and his tired eyes popped open.

  “When will they come looking for you?” he asked.

  “When Shelda doesn’t answer a phone call, or when I don’t show up for work about eight-thirty or nine o’clock.”

  “Long wait,” he said.

  “And if they do come looking for me?” I asked. “What happens then?”

  “I’ve been trying to think the way he’s thinking,” Lovelace said. “I didn’t come at him in the dark. He has to know I’m hurt. He has to guess my gun is empty or almost empty. In the dark I had almost an even chance with him. I didn’t take it. In the daylight the odds are all with him. He’s the one under cover and if I show myself I’ve had it.”

  “Whatever he does he can’t get away with it,” I said.

  “He can’t expect to,” Lovelace said. “He has just one problem. He has to stay alive ten seconds longer than I do. If he could be sure my gun is empty he’d walk out here right now and shoot me, the way you would a horse with a broken leg. But he can’t be sure. He knows that if I have one bullet and he shows himself, everything he’s done will be wasted. He’d be dead and I’d be alive. It would seem that all that matters to him is to make sure that I die. But the chance that I have a bullet or two left has him sweating in there. I think he has figured that it’s a question of who can outwait the other one.”

  “Oh, we can wait,” I said bitterly, “because we can’t go anywhere without getting plugged.”

  “He may not know you’re here,” Lovelace said. “He could have been distracted by your girl for the few seconds you were visible on the top of the fence. That could have him sweating too. Did you guess Miss Mason was in trouble in spite of the act she put on? If you did you’ve gone for the police, as any sensible man would have done.”

  “Who’s sensible? Maybe he knows I’m not sensible,” I said.

  “Why didn’t you call the cops?”

  “Because I didn’t dream Shelda’s trouble had anything to do with you. I thought there was some local nut in there. I was afraid to give him time.”

  “Hold it!” Lovelace said. His hand closed over my wrist like a vise. He was looking across the garden at the apartment.

  The door to the garden had opened, and Shelda came out, very slowly, walking like someone in a trance. I tried to scramble up but Lovelace held me down.

  “Wait!” he whispered.

  There was a small sundial in the center of the garden. A flagstone path ran from the house straight down to where we were hiding. A second path bisected the garden from sidewall to sidewall. The sundial was dead in the center of the intersection of the two paths. Shelda came down the path from the house toward the sundial, a step at a time. I could see her face quite clearly in the rapidly increasing daylight. It was the color of ashes. The distance from the house to the sundial was perhaps twenty yards, and from it to us another twenty. Shelda’s eyes were wide and frightened. When she reached the sundial she stopped and seemed to steady herself by leaning on it.

  “Mr. Lovelace!” Her voice was small and shaky but it reached us.

  “Shelda!” I said.

  “Mark! Oh, my God!” she said.

  “Just stand there, Miss Mason,” Lovelace said in a cold, hard voice. “Don’t show any sign that we’ve answered you. Look from left to right, as though you were waiting for an answer. Do what I say!”

  Slowly Shelda turned her head.

  “Call out my name again—so he can hear you,” Lovelace ordered.

  “Mr. Lovelace!” Shelda said, loud and clear.

  “Keep looking from right to left.”

  She turned her head, slowly.

  “You are supposed, when I answer you, to come directly to me,” Lovelace said. “Don’t nod! Don’t give any sign that you hear me.” Lovelace’s breath made a whistling sound as he watched her. She was doing exactly what he said. “Good girl,” he said. “I assume you are supposed to locate me, walk to me, and then you drop and he opens fire. Call to me again.”

  “Mr. Lovelace!”

  “We’ve only got seconds before he guesses we’re up to something,” Lovelace said. “Walk, as though I’d answered now, to the left—to the far corner over there where the marble bench is. When you’re close enough, dive for cover behind the bench. Don’t hesitate, Miss Mason. It’s your only chance.”

  It was a performance I’ll never forget. Shelda turned her head. She seemed to be listening. Then she walked, briskly now, toward the marble bench. At the last minute she took a headlong dive behind it.

  Instantly Dark opened fire from the apartment. I could see him, as he emptied his gun at the bench.

  Chips of stone flew off it. He sprayed the shrubbery around it.

  And then his gun was empty and he disappeared.

  “Shelda!” I called out.

  “Keep still!” Lovelace whispered fiercely.

  “But she may be—”

  “Keep
still!”

  My mouth and throat were powder dry.

  “Cold-blooded bastard,” Lovelace said softly. “She was supposed to point, like a bird dog, and then be caught in the line of fire.”

  “He did fire at her,” I said. “She may be—”

  “I think she made it,” Lovelace said. “Quite a girl, your Miss Mason.”

  “He must know you haven’t got a gun that’s working,” I said. “You didn’t fire when he showed himself.”

  “He may think it was because Miss Mason was in the way. We’ll know soon enough.”

  “How?”

  “If he has decided my gun is empty he’ll come out after me when he’s reloaded.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then it’s all over,” he said quietly. “He’ll walk out here, locate me, and empty his gun at me. When his gun is empty maybe you can take him. Now you inch away from me. Crawl over to the far corner by the wall. If we’re both together here you may get it too.”

  “What chance is there someone will react to those shots he fired at Shelda?”

  “Not much.”

  “You can’t just lie here and take it!” I said.

  “What else? If I try to run for it he’ll finish me with one shot and then you and Miss Mason don’t have much of a chance.”

  “What would you do if you were alone?” I asked him.

  “What could I do?” he said calmly. “I can’t walk. The minute he risks coming out into the clear all his doubts will disappear. He knows I’d fire at him when he makes a target of himself—if I could fire. There’d be very little difference, Mark. The only difference now is that he’ll be so concentrated on me you may be able to take him.” He reached inside his jacket and produced his gun. He held it out to me. “At least you can use it as a club,” he said.

  “You’re committing suicide!” I said.

  “The hell I am,” he said. “The building is burning and there’s no way out, Mark. That’s all. There’s one thing—”

  “Yes.”

  He brought his fist down in the soft earth of the flower bed. “I’d give an arm to know why! Who is Curtis Dark? Is he just Carleton’s gun, or is there something personal—some reason unconnected with Carleton? It’s a silly thing to say, but I wish I didn’t have to die without the answer.” He was looking past me toward the house. “Mark?”

  “Yes.”

  “If Marilyn comes through this, will you tell her how very much she was on my mind when the show ended? Last night—well, I thought there was a way, together, for both of us to make something out of the rest of the time left to us. I wanted it to happen.”

  “I’ll tell her,” I said.

  I was dreaming of heroics. Dark would come out, and somehow, between us, Lovelace and I would take him. Maybe we could make him enough trouble so that Shelda, if she was all right, could run for help. Sweat was running off me, though the morning was cold. If she was all right!

  Then I felt myself freeze. The apartment door into the garden opened. Curtis Dark came out onto the terrace. He was carrying the jacket of his suit over his left arm. The sleeves of his white shirt were rolled up, and in his right hand was a gun. I could see the two patches of adhesive tape on his face, one over his left eye, one on his chin, which Shelda had probably put there out of the kindness of her foolish heart. There was a cigarette hanging from one corner of Dark’s mouth. He moved his right arm out from his body to make sure the shirt wasn’t binding its movement.

  He didn’t seem to be in any hurry. He’d figured it out beyond a doubt for himself. We were fish in a barrel waiting to be had.

  He came slowly down the path toward the sundial. He was looking carefully along the line of evergreen shrubs behind which Lovelace and I were hiding. He looked toward the marble bench where Shelda had taken cover. He was taking his time, figuring out just how to play it. He couldn’t be certain Shelda had misled him. Lovelace might be over there behind the bench with her.

  He stopped, lifted his left hand and took the cigarette out of his mouth for a moment, and then replaced it. He had only one worry as far as I could see. He couldn’t know for sure that Lovelace was immobile, so he couldn’t risk getting so close that Lovelace could rush him before he was cut down.

  He studied every inch of that hedge of evergreens, from one corner of the garden to the other. Once it seemed to me that he was looking straight into my eyes.

  I can tell you now that the old cliché about a drowning man reliving his whole life in a matter of seconds is for the birds. I was drowning and I wasn’t reliving anything. I was only trying to figure a way to sink down through that flower bed toward China before Dark started to spray the place with bullets.

  Dark hunched his shoulders as though he’d finally made up his mind on how to proceed. He took a step almost directly toward us. He must have seen something, an imperceptible movement of one of the shrubs, a glimpse of white shirt.

  “Stay exactly where you are, Dark!”

  The voice startled me into a violent movement. It wasn’t human. It reverberated through the whole neighborhood.

  “Cops!” Lovelace whispered.

  I realized then the voice had come through one of those hand-loudspeakers cops and firemen use in a crisis to talk to people a distance away.

  Dark was a frozen statue, his head raised, looking up toward the buildings behind us.

  “Drop your gun, Dark,” the foghorn voice ordered. “Don’t take another step. You’re in range of four expert riflemen.”

  There was a faint crack and a bullet struck a flagstone not a foot away from Dark, whining as it ricocheted off toward the house.

  “Next time it’s you, Dark,” the foghorn warned. “Drop that gun!”

  I could see the corner of Dark’s mouth jerk in a sort of spasmodic twitch. Then he moved with incredible speed, not toward us but in a diving, rolling tumble toward the shrubbery along the left wall. Bullets tore up the earth and glanced off the stones all around him. I couldn’t tell if he was hit.

  There was what seemed to be an interminable silence. In the distance I could hear voices. Evidently that fusillade of shots had gotten some people in the area out of bed.

  The foghorn spoke again. “Sit tight in there, Mr. Lovelace, Mr. Haskell, Miss Mason. Do you hear? Sit tight. We’re coming in.”

  “They’re up above us somewhere,” Lovelace said. We couldn’t look up without the chance Dark would spot us.

  I think I hit Lovelace on the shoulder. “We’re going to make it!” I said.

  “Get away from me,” Lovelace whispered. “We haven’t made it yet. He’s sure to make a last dive at me. Get away and you may still have your breakfast coffee.”

  “Don’t be silly,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant.

  “He isn’t going to make it,” Lovelace said. “He’s going to take his last chance at me. You can count on that. Get away from me, Mark. You may be able to work your way around to where Miss Mason is. You can’t help me by staving here. If you could, I’d ask you to stay. The cops just may get in here before he can move. Do what I tell you, Mark. Give yourself a chance.”

  Let’s be honest. I wanted to leave him. I wanted to get just as far away from George Lovelace as I could. I could justify it. I was concerned for Shelda. I couldn’t do anything empty-handed against a crazy man with a gun. But for some cockeyed reason I didn’t want to leave Lovelace alone. He’d been alone all his life. He’d worked for an organization that wouldn’t lift a finger to help him out of a tight spot. He deserved a friend in the clutch just once. Anyway, I hesitated just too long.

  “Lovelace!” It was Dark’s voice, harsh, angry. He couldn’t be more than ten yards away.

  Lovelace’s hand tightened on my wrist again. He shook his head for silence.

  “Let your friends go,” Dark called out. “They can walk into the house and I won’t touch them. I’ve got nothing against Haskell and Miss Mason. You and I aren’t going to get out of here alive, Lovelace, and you know it. Let the
others go.”

  I looked at Lovelace and he shook his head. “He’s just trying to locate me,” he whispered.

  Where the hell were the cops?

  Then there I was, face to face with Curtis Dark. He’d crawled around the corner of the evergreen hedge and he was on his hands and knees looking straight at me. I could almost have reached out and touched him. I was squarely between him and Lovelace. His gun was pointed straight at my face.

  “I’ll give you one second to flatten out on the ground, Haskell!” Dark said.

  One second isn’t very long and I knew he meant it. I went down, but as I did I threw a handful of flowerbed dirt straight in his face. Then the world seemed to explode in my ear. Dark was firing and firing—or so it seemed. I waited for something to tear into my head or back.

  And then there was silence, and I was evidently all in one piece.

  “It’s all right, Haskell,” a familiar voice said.

  I rolled over and looked up at Lieutenant Hardy, standing over us with a smoking gun in his hand. I glanced to my right. Lovelace was lying against one of the bushes, clutching his left shoulder. But his eyes were open and he gave me a twisted little smile.

  “Thanks, Mark,” he said.

  I turned the other way. Curtis Dark lay, face down, in the soft earth. There wasn’t much left of the back of his head.

  “How did you happen to get here?” I asked Hardy.

  “You can thank your friend Chambrun for that,” he said. “As usual he came up with something at the critical moment.”

  And then Shelda was kneeling beside me and her arms were around me, and her face was against my cheek. I could taste the salt of her tears. It tasted wonderful…

  When I lifted Shelda to her feet, holding on to her for dear life, the first person I saw was Chambrun. He was coming toward us from the apartment, an old trench coat draped over his shoulders. He was still wearing last night’s dinner jacket.

  “My dear Mark,” he said. His hand gripped my arm painfully. “You’re both all right?”

  “About thirty years older,” I said.

  “He’s a hero,” Hardy said dryly. “He threw dirt in Dark’s face. It made Dark rise up and I could see him. He got off one shot at Lovelace but then I got him.”