False colors (18 page)

It was midnight when I left. I would have stayed longer, but eveiyone else was leaving and Lassiter was beginning to glance

curiously at me. In theory, Nancy had slipped out the back way and gone home long ago. But I had no way of being sure of that.

When I got outside I headed for her house. Rittenhouse Square was deserted and my footsteps came back to me in flat little echoes. By the time I reached her street I was almost running. I poked the doorbell, and waited. There was cotton stuffed in my chest and it kept me from pulling in enough air. William opened the door.

"She's home, isn't she?" I said. "Isn't she?"

His face looked old and tired. "Come in, Mr. Meadows," he said. "She isn't home. And I think she's in trouble."

"Do you know anything or is that a guess?"

"She telephoned here three times, Mr. Meadows. She expected to find you waiting here for her. She's going to call back again. I don't know what's wrong, but her voice sounded shaky."

"I'd better talk to her parents," I said. "They ought to know about the jam she's in. Are they still up?"

"I'm sorry, Mr. Meadows, they're away on a trip. I've been hoping you would keep track of her."

"Sure. It's no harder than tailing a bolt of lightning."

I sat down in the hall near the phone and waited. Beside me a grandfather's clock ticked solemnly. The face plate said it had been made by William Ericke, Clockmakers Company of London, 1730. It had been minding its own business for a long time, which is the way to survive to a ripe old age. The hall light drew sleek reflections from the cabriole legs and claw-and-ball feet of Chippendale furniture. Everything in the house said that here was a staid Philadelphia family that simply couldn't produce a rebel like Nancy. And yet, back a half-dozen generations, there were Vernons playing hide-and-go-seek with Indians and galloping off with the Philadelphia Troop of Light Horse to help with a revolution. Probably those traits had to flare up now and then.

The phone rang. It jarred me like a fire bell going off. William picked it up and said a few words and then handed it to me.

"Hello, Pete," Nancy said. "I'm still all right."

"Oh, fine. I'm glad one of us is. Where are you?"

"Well, I'm upstairs in Mr. Lassiter's house."

"Good. I was afraid you might have done something silly, like getting out and going to the police."

"Please don't be angry with me," she said meekly. "I really am a little scared."

"Can't you get out?"

"I don't seem to be able to. You know that kitchen door I was going to use? When I tried it, the door wouldn't open. Whoever locked it must have taken the key. And the door from the kitchen into the exhibit rooms is still locked. That gate across the main stairway is still locked. The elevator is parked across from the open door of Mr. Lassiter's room on the second floor. I'm afraid to use it to go downstairs because you can hear it plainly now that the house is quiet. The upper story windows have horribly strong screens, and I can't open them to try to climb down. So here I am still on the second floor."

I said harshly, "Lassiter will start charging you rent."

"Please don't make a joke of it."

"I'm not making jokes. I'm covering up the fact that I don't know what to do."

"Haven't you any ideas?"

"I can always call the cops."

"Probably," she wailed, "I'll be arrested as a burglar or something."

"I'd feel pretty safe with you in jail."

"That's silly. You know Mr. Lassiter wouldn't make any charges. But if I get caught, he'll know exactly what we've been up to. That may not be fun. Can't you think of anything else?"

"No. I've been out of my mind for the last two hours, so I don't know what thoughts I've been having. Where are you in the house?"

"Second room from the front, on the second floor. It's a spare bedroom and I'm in a closet with the phone. Mr. Lassiter has a couple of rooms at the rear of the second floor."

"All right. Hide where you are for the next hour. Don't come out no matter what happens. I'll try to sneak into the place

and get you. If I can't do it in an hour I'm calling the cops."

"But if I can't get out, how can you possibly get in?"

"I don't know. Just sit tight for an hour, see?"

"Yes, Pete. Thank you, Pete. I think you're wonderful."

"Now I know you're crazy," I said, and hung up.

I asked William for paper and an envelope, and scrawled a note and sealed it and handed it to him. "If we're not back by 4:00 a.m.," I said, "call the police and read this to them."

"Mr. Meadows," he said, "there's one more bit of trouble that Miss Nancy is in. You probably ought to be told about it. But she ordered me not to tell you."

"Did she tell you about it over the phone tonight?"

"No sir. It happened before she went out."

"Then save it," I said. "There isn't room in my head to park another headache."

I left the Vernon house and hurried back toward Lassiter's. It was around one o'clock now. Earlier in the evening the Rit-tenhouse Square section had been lively. Cars had winked by steadily on Walnut Street and the big apartment hotels had lifted honeycombs of light into the dark sky. The section was blacking out now. On Lassiter's side of the square, away from the apartment hotels, only a few yellow windows were pasted against the night.

Lassiter's sawed-off castle loomed up ahead of me. It was only four stories high but it couldn't have looked harder to handle if it had been the Tower of London. The setup was all wrong. What they needed here was a guy with nerves of steel and muscles of iron. If mine had ever been like that, they certainly were badly rusted.

I checked the outside of the place. The heavy double doors at the entrance were locked, and steel shutters covered the front windows. One side of the house extended along a side street. Its shutters were closed. In the back, there were more shutters and another locked door. The other side of the house was separated by a narrow twisting alley from the neighboring place, and that side was locked up like a bank vault, too. I stood outside Lassiter's office, which was on the alley side, and

wondered how you got into the joint if you didn't have a key or a search warrant or dynamite. I might as well tiy to open an oyster with a toothpick.

I hunted through my pockets to see if anything in them would give me an idea. The blue-green silk gave me an idea I didn't like. The photo of the fake Rembrandt didn't give me any. It-Wait a moment. Lassiter had shown me how the steel shutters outside his office worked. He hadn't closed the window itself when he did it, so the window might still be open. And he had mentioned an electric eye system that protected the windows. I tried to remember how those alarm systems worked. You have a beam of black light going from one side of a door or window to a photo-electric cell on the other side. If anything breaks the beam of light, the alarm goes off. I studied the steel shutters just above me and saw that they didn't clamp together perfectly. There was a tiny space between them. It would be possible to hold one end of the four-by-five-inch photo and stick the rest of it through that crack. It would reach about four inches inside the shutters. If the electric eye was within four inches of the shutters, and if I moved the photo up and down the crack, I could break the circuit and set off the alarm.

The question was, what then? Would Lassiter call the police the way an ordinary citizen would? It wasn't likely. First he might want to know who was trying to break in, and whether it was someone he would rather handle without any help from the law. Nick Accardi might be a good example. Or a guy named Meadows.

Probably the alarm system had a control panel that showed where the circuit had been broken. So Lassiter would hurry to his office. When he found nobody inside yet, he or his tame thug might run out to the alley to try to catch the guy at work. That would leave the front or back door open for a few moments. And during those moments that slick operator Meadows would breeze into the house.

More likely I would drop the photo inside the shutters, and nothing would happen.

However, nobody was offering me a better idea, so I went to work. I went to the back door and borrowed the garbage can. There were four empty milk bottles, and I arranged them so that anyone coming out of the back door would kick one over. I carried the garbage can into the alley and placed it under the office shutters and climbed up on it. That let me reach the full length of the shutters. I gripped the photo firmly and pushed the free end through the crack and slid it all the way up and down.

I don't know what I had expected. Maybe a pinball game climax with flashing lights and buzzers. Nothing happened. Not a sound came from the house. But there was no use fiddling around. Electric eyes don't close for naps. Either I had set off the alarm or I couldn't set it off. I jumped off the garbage pail. The alley had a couple of angles where it bent around a side bay window, so anyone coming from the front would have to go down the alley to check on the office shutters. That would give me a few extra seconds to get into the house. I sneaked around to the front and hid in an angle formed by the stone entrance stairway and the wall. If anybody came out the back door, I ought to hear the crash of a milk bottle.

I waited. Across the square, a late trolley car banged over a switch and mashed a couple of my nerves. A cat came along and looked at me as if I were a new and poor variety of mouse. A church bell marked the half-hour by letting a teardrop of sound plunk into the silence.

A shadow drifted past me. It moved so quietly that at first I thought it might be the shadow of a tree, thrown on the house by the headlights of a moving auto. Except for one thing. Tree shadows don't carry revolvers. The shadow was Joe Molo. He floated past and turned into the alley. I jumped up. Above me, a hunk of blackness the size of a coffin showed between the big front doors. I went up the steps. Either Lassiter was guarding the doorway into his office or he was guarding this one. The way to find out was to take a deep breath and step into the blackness. I did. Nothing happened. Halfway down the inside hall I was still alive, so Lassiter must be at his office door. The

bronze gate at the end of the hall was open and I went quickly upstairs.

When I reached the second floor I realized that I was slowly suffocating. The breath I had taken just before entering the house seemed to be a little second-hand, so I turned it in for a new one. Nobody but Meadows could walk into a nest of stranglers and almost commit suicide by holding his breath.

Nancy had said she was in the second room from the front on the second floor. I moved down the dimly lighted hallway and opened the door of the second room and stepped in and closed the door behind me. It was very dark. I whispered Nancy's name. The sound scurried around the walls without getting an answer.

"It's Pete," I said. "Where are you, Nancy?"

Something reached out of the dark and grabbed me and said, "Here." It was Nancy, of course. But the grab came a second before she spoke, and if her grip hadn't been strong she would have been left talking to herself. As I recovered from the grab, she began dusting my face with quick little kisses. It was harder to recover from that. It made my heart act like corn in a popcorn machine.

She gasped, "I was never so glad to see anyone."

"Are you sure you have the right guy?" I said weakly. "Maybe you didn't catch the name. This is Pete. Is this really for me?"

"Oh, Pete, it's so wonderful that you got in, and I'm so grateful."

"Save some of that gratitude. We aren't out yet."

"How did you get in?"

"They have an alarm system on the windows. I managed to set it off from outside, and Lassiter's bodyguard ran out to see who was monkeying around. He left the front door open and I sneaked in."

"That was very clever of you."

"I'm beginning to wonder. It's bad enough to stir up a hornet's nest without climbing into the nest afterward. We'll have to hide here until things quiet down."

She patted my shirt as if she hoped to find a manly chest un-

der it. "I know you think this was horribly reckless and stupid of me," she said. "But I really did find out something. It's up on the third floor. Do we dare go up so you can see?"

"Why don't you just tell me about it?"

"You have to see it, Pete. I want to find out if you get the same idea from it that I did."

I went to the door and opened it and peered down the shadowy hall. There wasn't a sign of anybody moving around. Probably Lassiter and Joe Molo were still downstairs. "Well," I muttered, "we can't get in any more trouble on the third floor than we're in here. So let's go."

We padded down the hall and up the stairs to the third floor. Nancy led me through an open doorway. Not much light oozed in from the hall but the place seemed to be a living room or study.

"Watch this," Nancy said, switching on her tiny flashlight.

The flat disk of light slid over a wall and crawled around a corner and suddenly a nightmare face leered back at us. The eyes were a black gash under hooded lids. The lips had never smiled. A couple of horns curled forward from the back of the head. It might have scared me except for the horns. That carried things too far. I stayed calm and identified it as a bronze mask.

"And look there," Nancy whispered.

Her light picked up a crudely carved wooden bowl, supported on each side by the kneeling figure of a Negress. The bowl sat on a table covered with a yellow cloth. The light twitched around the room and showed me black modernistic furniture and plants with shiny leaves and rugs and drapes in different shades of yellow.

"Does it give you any ideas?" Nancy asked.

"You can't miss it," I muttered. "Kay Raymond decorated this room."

"I knew it! Those African masks and carvings are her trademark. She's been working with him, hasn't she?"

I stared at a closed door across the room. It didn't look like a

closet door. "I think we can go even further than that," I said. "Lend me the flashlight."

I took the light and crept toward the closed door and reached for the knob and started to turn it. I didn't complete that action. The knob twisted out of my grip and the door jerked open and the beam of my flashlight glinted on a revolver.