Ghost of a Chance (10 page)

Across the windows was a long, green and white striped sofa. In each corner of it sat a faded, soiled kewpie doll. Between the two kewpies lolled a woman. Thelma Kennedy.

There seemed to be a contest between the two lady friends to see which could look the younger. As of today it was just about a draw. That possibly explained why these two could remain friends.

Thelma was slightly older, but she tried harder than her pal. Her hair-do was a frivolous concoction that dripped bangs almost into her eyes. Her make-up was so excessive that I began to worry about her missing her next show. Her clothes trapped a lush, middle-aged figure into a silhouette that was a used-up thirty. Her eyes were large ovals that in fact, seemed constantly to be in motion. When she spoke her voice startled me. I expected it to be sharp, hard. It was a throbbing contralto, rich and caressing, every note of it an embrace. She directed her attention, I soon noticed, exclusively to Jeff.

“Well, May,” she said, “and who is this?”

“They’re from the bank,” May said. “They came to tell you about a savings account you forgot you had.”

She went into a gale of laughter; Thelma Kennedy didn’t appreciate whatever it was that May was appreciating so raucously.

“You’re a scream,” she said. “Put something on the Vic.”

May wound up the portable phonograph and set the needle on the record that was already in place. Helen Morgan began to sing “My Man.” On her way to the sofa May took a piece of candy from a large heart-shaped box. She bit into it, made a face, and passed it on to Thelma who popped it into her mouth without glancing at it.

“Sit down,” Thelma said to us.

We sat down.

Jeff said, “My name is Jeff Troy.”

“What’s in a name?” May asked him, as if she expected an answer. But Jeff refused to go into that. He said, “And this is my wife, Haila.”

“I was afraid of that,” Thelma said.

“It’s no skin off your nose,” May said to Thelma. “I saw him first.”

“We,” Jeff said hastily, “are friends of Frank Lorimer.”

“Any friend of yours is a friend of mine,” Thelma said. “Who did you say?”

“Frank Lorimer. He was your father’s coachman. Or was Hinam Kennedy your father-in-law?”

Thelma smiled. “I like your attitude, but Hiram wasn’t my father or my father-in-law. He was my brother-in-law. I married his kid brother, and I mean kid brother. Louis was thirty years younger than Hiram.”

“Your husband…” Jeff said, and hesitated.

“He’s dead,” Thelma said. “He died.”

“Oh, I…”

“It’s all right. Those things happen. One day a man is alive, the next day he isn’t. Just like that and you wake up and find yourself a widow.”

May giggled. “Thelma, you ought to wake up and find yourself a widower.”

“Who wants a widower?”

“I might,” May said. “How many have you got?”

“How many do you need?”

“It depends on how big they are,” May said.

Laughter had been foaming up inside the two ladies and now it gushed from them in torrents. They shrieked like a pair of schoolgirls. Their routine had them in the aisles; they knocked themselves out. Jeff waited until each was gasping for breath simultaneously, then he made his pitch.

“Mrs. Kennedy,” he said, “do you remember Frank Lorimer?”

May snapped up Jeff’s cue. “Was he tall, dark and handsome? If the answer is no, then Thelma don’t remember him.”

Thelma said, “Do me a favor, kiddo, drop dead.”

“Drop dead? Okie dokie. But it’ll be the last thing I ever do for you.”

“I get it,” Thelma said.

“Now you got it, what are you going to do with it?”

“It might look nice over the mantel,” Thelma said.

The Marx Sisters sounded as though they could keep this sort of thing going forever, or at least until eleven o’clock the next morning.

Jeff waded into the act and broke it up; he didn’t bother being charming about it. There wasn’t time for that.

“Girls,” he said, “I’m all in favor of organized play when it’s too nasty to go out of doors, but this is serious. Mrs. Kennedy, you must remember Frank Lorimer.”

“Sure I do. But by the time I married Louis, Frank was Hiram’s chauffeur, not his coachman. That coachman stuff threw me off, What’s this all about?”

“Frank hired me to help a woman who needs some help. Frank thought this woman was going to be killed. Murdered.”

“Murdered? What woman? Who?”

“Frank never told me. He…”

Thelma Kennedy laughed. “Baby, you’ve been taken!”

“I don’t think so.”

“Yes, you have. Frankie has been hitting the bottle for so long that pink elephants bore him. Now it’s got to be a woman’s going to be murdered.”

“No,” Jeff said. “Frank knew what he was talking about. He was killed because he knew what he did. He was murdered, pushed in front of a subway.”

May gasped. Thelma stood up suddenly. She walked to the phonograph and stopped Helen Morgan in the middle of her lament about her man. She went back to the sofa.

She said, “It could have been an accident.”

“No.”

“Yes. Frank drank like a fish. Hiram had to fire him because of that. Then later Frankie got in trouble while he was drunk, out near Chicago someplace. He hit somebody with a car and he went to jail for it. The last I heard tell of him, he was out on parole. That was quite a while ago.”

“Out on parole,” Jeff said. “Then that’s it. Frank must have jumped his parole. That’s why he came to me, instead of to the police.”

“Frank certainly fooled you,” Thelma said. “It looks like he found the two people in the world that would take him seriously.”

Jeff told her why we were taking Frank Lorimer seriously; he told her what had happened to us since we had taken over from Frank. She listened with a deepening frown.

“Well, even if it’s true,” she said, “what can anybody do about it? What are you doing?”

“We’re trying to find the woman,” Jeff said. “In time.”

“The time,” I said, “Is eleven tomorrow morning.”

“Good God,” Thelma said. “Do you have any idea who the woman is?”

“She might be someone Frank hardly knew. But more likely it’s someone who meant a great deal to him. A member of his family or… or someone he once worked for…”

“Me, for instance?” Thelma’s eyes widened. “You mean me?”

“All I know is that it’s a woman.”

Thelma smiled wryly, shook her head. “Not me. I can’t make it at eleven tomorrow. I got an appointment at the hairdresser. I’ll be tied up all morning. If it’s me they want, tell them I’m sorry. Now maybe the day after tomorrow…”

“Wouldn’t it be funny,” Jeff said, “wouldn’t it be hilarious if it were you?”

“No, you’ll have to keep on looking. If I was dying, Frank Lorimer couldn’t walk across a room to save me. He couldn’t stand the sight of me. I wasn’t good enough to marry Hiram’s kid brother.”

“He’d forget about that, if your life was in danger.”

“No. I knew Frank and he hated me. I mean hate.”

“So you’re sure,” Jeff said, “that you can’t be the woman?”

“Believe me,” Thelma said, “It don’t make any difference to anyone that I’m alive and it wouldn’t make any difference to anyone if I was dead. That’s me, in a nutshell.”

“Move over,” May said, “and I’ll get in the nutshell with you.”

“You get a nutshell of your own.”

“Girls,” Jeff said wearily. “Mrs. Kennedy, do you know if Frank had any family.”

“Not that I know of. But then I wouldn’t know.”

“What did he do before he started working for Hiram Kennedy?”

“He was a coachman. For old Hollingsworth Cortland and his wife. They were good friends of Hiram’s.”

“Are they in New York?” Jeff asked.

Thelma smiled. “I’ve sort of lost touch with the Hollingsworth Cortlands of late. I can’t think why.”

Jeff said, “Are you the only one of the Kennedy family left?”

May suddenly giggled. “I’ll tell him, Thelma, so you don’t have to mention her name. You’d strangle on it.” May turned to Jeff. “There’s Sally Kennedy.”

“Yes,” Thelma said. “Hiram’s darling daughter.”

“Where is she?” Jeff asked.

“She’s in New York,” May said. “She’s staying at the Sultan.”

“She is?” Thelma was surprised. “How do you know that?”

“I read it in a column.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“As if you care, Thelma!”

“Sure I care.” Thelma laughed, then said, “After all, I’m her aunt.”

“You somebody’s aunt!” May thought that was stupendous. “Aunt Thelma!”

Jeff said, “You and Sally aren’t friends, Mrs. Kennedy?”

“Hardly. We haven’t seen each other for years. Or spoken to each other.”

“Did Frank Lorimer like her?”

Thelma sneered. “She’s a Kennedy, isn’t she?”

“I think,” Jeff said, “that we should see Sally.”

“Give her my love,” Thelma said.

“Good-bye, girls,” Jeff said.

Neither of the girls volunteered to show us to the door. We made our way through the hall and Jeff eased open one side of the massive mahogany portal a few inches. He looked out through the narrow slit. Then, carefully, he closed the door again.

“I think,” he said, “It would be smart to play it safe and go out through the back.”

“Jeff, what did you see out there?”

“A delivery truck. It’s parked across the street. It’s one of those little black jobs without any name painted on it. The kind mugs rent to peddle stolen suits, for instance. I mean anyone can rent one, anyone at all.”

“Did you see the driver?”

“Yes. He’s no one I’ve ever seen before.”

“But that,” I said, “doesn’t mean anything. There might be someone hidden in the back, mightn’t there?”

“There might be,” Jeff said.

“With a gun. A rifle maybe, this time.”

“It’s possible.”

“Jeff,” I said, “I agree with you. Considering everything, I wholeheartedly agree with you. I think we would be smart to play it safe and go quietly out through the back.”

It was twenty minutes later
that Jeff knocked on the door of the Hotel Sultan numbered 807 and, after a moment, a far-away voice called, “Come in.”

There was no one in the big living room of the suite, there was hardly space for anyone. Sally Kennedy’s possessions were piled high and wide. Dress boxes, shoe boxes, round, shiny hat boxes, all proudly displaying Fifth Avenue labels, swamped the room. On the coffee table a pile of new books and all the latest magazines threatened to squeeze the life out of a bright red hat festooned with tiny, jet-black feathers. A fur coat was slung carelessly over one chair, a fur jacket over another. Three suitcases, so battered and worn that they looked out of place amid all this luxury, sprawled open on the floor.

The bedroom door swung open.

“Miss Kennedy?” Jeff said.

The girl in the pale blue negligee nodded.

“I’m sorry to bust in on you like this,” Jeff said. “I apologize.”

“It’s quite all right, I suppose,” Sally Kennedy said.

She wasn’t beautiful. She had red-gold hair that swept into a cluster of little curls at the top of her head. She had the face, the figure of an angel from that part of heaven over Hollywood, California. She had all that, and she wasn’t beautiful. Her face was cold, disdainful and as uninteresting as pure white. Now it was touched with perplexity and the expression seemed to be trespassing.

“I was expecting a bell boy,” she said. She spoke hesitantly, as though she hated to use her voice. “What do you…”

Jeff went into his routine. Sally was quite nice about it. Her attention never wavered. When Jeff told her that Frank Lorimer was dead, she made the right sounds of sympathy. When he told her that Frank had died to save the life of a woman we were trying to find, she didn’t say that Jeff was mad. She was quite nice. She was interested and willing to help… if it didn’t take up too much of her time. She let us know how valuable her time was by frequently consulting it on her watch.

She said, “I was only a child, you know, when Frank worked for my father. I wasn’t very well informed about the women in his life.”

“He never talked to you about his family?”

“Not at all that I remember.”

“Was Frank ever married?”

“I couldn’t say, really.”

“We know,” Jeff said, “that he also worked for the Cortlands.”

“Oh, yes, the Cortlands.”

“Do you know of anyone else he ever worked for?”

“No, I’m afraid I don’t.”

“Miss Kennedy, I don’t want to alarm you, but…”

She raised a hand to halt Jeff; she smiled at him with patient understanding. “No,” she said, “I know what you’re thinking. But you’re wrong. It can’t be I who is to be killed. It’s quite impossible that this plot should be against me.”

“But you don’t blame us for checking every possibility?”

“I think it’s splendid of you to be so thorough. But it really can’t be I. You see, I’ve just returned to this country. Only three days ago.”

“Why does that make you immune?”

“May I explain?”

“Natch,” Jeff said.

He didn’t like Sally Kennedy. That made three people who didn’t: her Aunt Thelma, Jeff and I.

She was going on in her cool, detached voice. “I’ve been abroad for nine years. I was a child when I left America to go to school over there. A child has no enemies. I certainly made no enemies in my absence. So no one could possibly wish me dead.”

“You’ve been away nine years?”

“Yes. When war broke out I was interned in Austria.”

“You didn’t hurry home after it ended.”

“No, I didn’t. I stayed on there. As a nurse.”

“You did what?” Jeff said.

“I stayed on in the camp where I had been interned. The people were in such horrible straits. There was so very much to be done. I did what I could for them. It was only a little, but it was something.”

“Yes,” Jeff said inadequately.

“So you see it can’t be I Frank meant. And you mustn’t waste time here with me. You will keep trying to find this woman, won’t you?”

“Yes,” Jeff said. “We will.”

“I’m sure you will.”

The door was open; Sally Kennedy was holding it open. If she bade us good-bye, I didn’t hear her. We were outside in the corridor and the door closed softly behind us. We didn’t speak of Sally. We couldn’t think of anything nice to say about her, and you can’t say anything else about a girl who had done what she had done in Austria.