“Just whimsy, Mr. Moon.” His expression turned bored. “What’s this about Lydia and alimony?”

  “You’d like to get Lydia to take a cut, wouldn’t you?”

  He examined me estimatingly. “Naturally. Nobody likes to give away money.”

  “That why you’re chasing her around the country?”

  The racket king’s eyes narrowed slightly. “Just what are you getting at Mr. Moon?”

  I said, “Lydia is giving out the impression it’s her appeal that’s drawing you back.”

  Gorilla-shaped Egg-Head boomed out an hilarious laugh and brought one palm down on his knee with the crack of a pistol shot. Venner stared at him silently until the pseudo-butler’s look of glee faded to a subdued expression and he leaned back in his deck chair again.

  “That answers that,” I said. “You know the details of what happened last night?”

  “Just what I read in the papers. I know somebody named Sheridan was shot in Lydia’s dressing-room, and a girl named Fausta something-or-other was arrested for the killing.”

  “The girl had nothing to do with it,” I said. “Did you know Lydia has been receiving extortion notes demanding ten thousand dollars?”

  Venner’s face turned wary. “No, I didn’t. But how does that concern me?”

  “Maybe it doesn’t. But it occurred to me if Lydia suddenly dropped dead, it would save you over two hundred thousand dollars a year. And if a few crude extortion notes demanding a measly ten grand were found in her effects, no one would think to suspect a big-time operator like Joe Venner. This morning I discovered Lydia isn’t afraid of the extortionist any more. Maybe she came to the same conclusion I did, and made a deal to insure her life. Tell me, Mr. Venner, has Lydia agreed to a cut in alimony since last night?”

  Joe Venner’s face had become an expressionless mask. Apparently the three listening gunmen had suddenly stopped breathing, for all at once the room was eerily quiet.

  “Is this an attempted shakedown, Mr. Moon?” Venner asked quietly.

  I shook my head. “I’m only interested in two things. Clearing Fausta Moreni and making the damn fool who arrested her look like the damn fool he is.”

  “You’re a rather brave man to come charging in with an accusation like this. You must know that if it’s correct, you’ll never walk out of here alive.”

  “I’m hoping it’s only half correct,” I said.

  He frowned at me.

  “There are two things wrong with the theory I just outlined,” I said. “I don’t think any of the talent you employ would have missed Lydia and accidentally killed an innocent bystander. And I don’t think you yourself would have been waiting for her at the stage door. You’d have been miles away getting yourself a beautiful alibi.”

  Now his expression was puzzled. “I don’t quite understand you, Mr. Moon. Just what are you after?”

  “Your cooperation,” I said bluntly. “I think you’re behind the extortion notes and deliberately let Lydia know you were in order to scare her into accepting a reduction in alimony. But I don’t think you had anything to do with the killing. Nevertheless you’d be in a spot if I passed my theory on to the cops. Even if you’re innocent of both the killing and the notes, you can’t afford a police investigation with this Congressional committee on your back. I knew if I just walked in here and asked for help, you’d tell me to go to the devil. So I’m putting you on a spot. Call it a shakedown, if you want.”

  Venner was watching me with a thoughtful expression. “You’re beginning to give me an idea, Mr. Moon. Go on.”

  “I don’t think anyone was shooting at Lydia. I think Charlie Sheridan was the intended victim. Now, you’ve got a widespread organization that isn’t doing anything at the moment because the heat is on you. I want you to employ your organization to find out everything there is to know about Sheridan. In return I’ll forget to mention to the cops that you’ve been sending your ex-wife extortion notes.”

  The racket king’s expression had become even more thoughtful. “You know, Mr. Moon, the more I think about the idea you’ve unwittingly given me, the better I like it.”

  The expression in his eyes suddenly made me uneasy. “What idea’s that?”

  “With all your guessing you’ve been right about only two things, Mr. Moon. I would like to get Lydia out of my hair, and I had nothing to do with the killing last night. But you’re wrong all the rest of the way. I never even heard of Lydia receiving extortion demands before you walked in here. Bur you’ve given me a splendid idea.”

  He smiled a thin smile. “Having already been attacked once, the police would naturally assume it was the same attacker again if Lydia suddenly caught a bullet. And since there seems to be a bona fide extortionist for the police to hunt down, it wouldn’t even occur to them to look in my direction.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “I didn’t come here to sell you a murder idea. If anything happened to Lydia now, I’d have to yell cop on you.”

  “Exactly, Mr. Moon,” he said nodding. “That makes you rather dangerous to my welfare, doesn’t it?”

  He glanced at Buck, who still stood in the doorway behind me, and raised one hand negligently. Something hard and round pressed into my back.

  I felt perspiration begin to collect on my brow.

  “Don’t go off half-cocked,” I advised. “I let the cops know where I was going, just in case I didn’t come back.”

  Joe Venner covered a polite yawn. “No you didn’t, Mr. Moon. If you had even mentioned my name to the police, you wouldn’t have had anything to bargain with.”

  My forehead grew even damper. “The desk clerk in the lobby will remember my visit.”

  “You’d be surprised how much silence you can buy for a couple of hundred bucks,” Venner said boredly. He glanced at Egg-Head. “Go along with Buck and make a good job of it.”

  “Let me go instead, Boss,” Slim requested in an eager tone. The gun-metal eyes in his colorless face glittered at me anticipatorily.

  “I may want you to drive somewhere.”

  “Egg-Head can drive.”

  Joe Venner twisted his head to frown up at his chauffeur. “Why so eager?”

  Slim was examining me with pleasure. “I promised this guy I would look him up. He was a little impolite last night.”

  Venner gave an indulgent shrug. “All right. Leave the sedan and take the panel truck. It’s less conspicuous.” You couldn’t have told his tone from that of a mother instructing her children to wear their rubbers.

  In his eagerness Slim led the way. Buck walked trail position, his gun still prodding my back. When we reached the tiny lobby containing the elevator, Mona came to the door of the library. Her full mouth curled with pleasure when she saw the gun in my back.

  “So you only deal with the big brass,” she said mockingly. “Maybe you meant big lead.”

  “Buck and Slim are just guarding me from harm,” I said. “The boss hired me as his personal valet. By the way, he told me to ask if you’d emptied the chamber pots upstairs.”

  The library door slammed shut.

  When we got on the elevator, Buck still tickling my back with his gun, I wondered how they expected to get me across the hotel lobby without attracting attention. I got the answer when the doors opened again and I discovered we weren’t in the lobby. We were in the hotel’s basement.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  As soon as the elevator doors opened, the pale-featured Slim stepped out into the basement. Buck immediately pushed the button marked I, causing the doors to close again, but before the car had risen more than a few inches, he pressed the emergency stop. This halted the car with the doors closed.

  Then we waited. Apparently the two gunmen were used to functioning as a team, for although no conversation had occurred between them, they seemed to be operating according to a pre-conceived plan of action. I guessed that Slim intended to bring the panel truck mentioned by Joe Venner to one of the basement entrances, then check the passageway between the elevator and the entrance to make sure no casual hotel employee would spot us on the way out.

  Buck watched me from eyes containing no emotion whatever. He had shifted his snub-nosed revolver from his right to his left hand in order to operate the button system without having to face away from me. But apparently he was ambidextrous, for the gun looked as lethally efficient in his left hand as his right. I stood facing him from the opposite front corner of the car.

  Having nothing to do but wait for Slim’s return, I let my gaze play over the inside of the elevator car. It was depressingly bare: just four blank walls, the rear one containing a six-inch square ventilator screen, an equally blank floor and ceiling, and a small electric bulb in the ceiling’s center to furnish dim illumination.

  Then I noticed that the trip switch controlling the light was next to the door on my side, rather than under the push-button panel, as on most self-service elevators.

  “Mind if I smoke?” I asked.

  The stolid gunman thought the question over carefully, but apparently could see nothing dangerous in it. “Go ahead.”

  Taking a cigar from my breast pocket, I peeled off the cellophane and dropped it on the floor. “Havanas,” I said. “Have one?”

  Apparently Buck wasn’t used to having his intended victims offer him cigars. After regarding me suspiciously for a moment, he merely shook his head.

  I bit off the cigar end, spat it out, and felt in my left pocket for a kitchen match. Left-handed I scratched my thumbnail across the head, carefully scratching the sulphur instead of the sensitive tip. Naturally it failed to light.

  I scratched it again, frowned impatiently and tried it a third time. Buck grinned faintly.

  “Maybe you’re a little nervous,” he suggested.

  “Go to hell,” I said irritably, reaching out to scratch it against the wall.

  I swept it down hard, catching my little finger on the light switch at the end of the sweep. As the light suddenly went out, I dropped both the cigar and the flaming match and flung myself backward. The match too went out when it hit the floor.

  The darkness was instant and total. Buck’s gun roared and a lance of flame scared through the place I had been a micro-second before. The concussion in that restricted place slapped against the eardrums like an H-bomb going off in your head. A second lance probed toward the corner to which I had thrown myself, but by that time I was standing right next to the stolid gunman.

  My left hand slashed down six inches behind the muzzle flash and gripped his wrist. Jerking him off balance, I lashed upward with my right elbow and heard the satisfying crunch of bone against bone. The gun clattered to the floor.

  But Buck was a long way from through. Falling to one hand and one knee, he thrust out in the darkness with his left foot and luckily kicked my good leg from under me. Still gripping his wrist, I fell heavily on top of him.

  As air whooshed out of him, I attempted to bring a knee into play before he could recover. But in the dark I misestimated the location of his stomach, ramming my left knee into his right with such force we both gasped in pain.

  A fist like a flung anvil caught me alongside the head, smashing me to a seated position on the floor. Bright red and green lights spun about me, but I maintained my single-handed grip on that wrist as though my life depended on it—which it probably did.

  Sensing another blow whistling toward me in the dark, I dropped flat on my back, jerked the captured wrist toward me and lashed upward with my left foot. This time I connected squarely with a stomach.

  Before my opponent could shift position, I let my leg recoil, raised the altitude slightly and rammed the underside of my shoe against his jaw.

  When I flipped the light again, Buck was lying flat on his back, his arms outspread and a thin trickle of blood running from one corner of an already welling mouth. The snub-nosed revolver lay almost touching one outstretched hand.

  Coughing at the haze of burned cordite in the confined space, I picked up the gun and leaned against the rear wall to await Slim’s return. Aside from a faint buzzing in my head, the result of Buck’s anvil-like fist, my only casualty seemed to be a throbbing knee, which I sensed would turn stiff when the throbbing stopped.

  Though the concussion of the two shots had been terrific inside the small car, for that very reason I doubted that Slim or anyone else had heard them. Muffled by steel walls, which in turn were encased in a concrete elevator shaft, even immediately outside the elevator entrance they would have sounded no louder than popping light bulbs.

  Five minutes dragged past. Then the car gave a hum and dropped the few inches it had previously risen, as someone in the basement pressed the “down” button.

  Then his pale face was gazing at me blankly and his right hand was moving instinctively toward his armpit. I cocked the revolver. His hand hesitated; then in company with his other one slowly rose to shoulder height. His glance glittered down at Buck, who picked that moment to groan and sit up groggily.

  “Step in, Slim,” I invited cordially. When he complied, I spun him around, jammed the gun against his back and reached under his arm with my left hand to relieve him of a similar snub-nosed revolver.

  As we started up, Buck remained seated on the floor, gingerly feeling his jaw and shaking his head back and forth. But when the numbered lights next to the push-button panel indicated the trip was half over, I ordered him to get to his feet. He complied in a punch-drunk manner, managing to teeter erect just as we stopped and the car doors slid open.

  With my left-hand pistol I gestured the two gunmen out ahead of me. Hearing their footsteps, Mona opened the library door and came out. Her inquiring expression turned to one of consternation when she saw me step from the elevator with a gun in each hand.

  I said, “Get in the parade, Mona. We’re going back to see Joe again.”

  Her mouth began to open in what looked like a tentative attempt to scream.

  “You’ll get a bullet in your beautiful brisket!” I snapped.

  Her mouth closed and she looked at me in outrage.

  “Don’t let my normally chivalrous air fool you,” I said. “I wouldn’t have any more compunction about shooting a woman than I would these punks.”

  That, of course, was a lie, but I was hoping no one but me knew it. Apparently my tough tone impressed her.

  Her nose went up in the air. “I wasn’t fooled. I knew you were a rat the minute I laid eyes on you.”

  She joined the marching column without further objection, and we passed in single-file through the living room, the dining room, the small room containing the bar, and finally into the sun room.

  Joe Venner and Egg-Head, their former positions unchanged, looked up in mild surprise at seeing the two gunmen back so soon. But the surprise drained away to be replaced by fear when they spotted the twin guns in my hands.

  “Keep your seats,” I advised. “And keep your hands on the arms of your chairs.”

  Both carefully followed instructions. To the trio I had brought with me, I said, “Lie on the floor on your stomachs with your hands straight out, and keep your mouths shut.”

  All three complied with such alacrity, you would have thought they were waiting for a signal to do just that. Buck’s at least was genuine. He was still half-staggering when we entered the room, and he welcomed the chance to lie down with a sigh of relief.

  “Now you,” I said to Egg-Head. “Take your gun out carefully and drop it on the floor.”

  Egg-Head too, showed no disposition to argue with the hair-triggers of my cocked guns. A moment later I had kicked his gun into the room behind me and the gorilla-shaped gunman was flat on his face with the others. Except for the prone Mona, the decor of the room was not improved by the addition of four human rugs, but it allowed me to concentrate on Joe Venner without being distracted.

  Carefully I glanced over the racket king’s lean body, detecting no suspicious bulges under his thin polo shirt and shorts which might indicate a gun.

  As my eyes probed him, his face gradually turned pale and his tongue flicked over suddenly dry lips. All at once I realized he thought I was going to kill him, and was looking him over to pick the best place to put a bullet.

  “Feels different when you’re on the receiving end, doesn’t it?” I asked.

  “Just name what you want,” he said in a voice that cracked slightly. “Money? All the money I’ve got.”

  “All I want is for you to hold still while I blow off the top of your head,” I told him in a voice as brittle as I could make it.

  His face turned the color of fine bond paper. “My God!” he whispered. “You can’t kill me in cold blood!”

  I looked at him distastefully. “Of course I can. You tried to have me killed, and as much as admitted you planned to kill your ex-wife. There isn’t a jury in the country that wouldn’t give me self-defense.”

  “Please! I’ll give you anything. Anything at all.”

  “Listen to the rat whine,” Mona said in a suddenly vicious voice. “Why don’t you plug him and get it over with?” Venner’s mouth gaped open and spittle trickled from one corner. His whole body began to shake in terror.

  “Oh stop it,” I said disgustedly. “I’m not going to kill you unless you fail to do exactly what I tell you to.”

  Venner’s relief was so tremendous, for a moment I thought he was going to fall forward out of his chair and embrace my knees.

  “Just name it,” he said eagerly. “Anything at all.”

  “I want you to get the information I asked you for before,” I told him. “Pick up your phone and get it right now.”

  “Sure, Mr. Moon,” he said, eagerly reaching for the extension phone on a stand by his side.

  His hand stopped on the phone and he said, “What information? You mean about that man, Sheridan?”

 

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