Текст книги "The Villiers Touch"

Автор книги: Brian Garfield

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

“How?”

“I’ve got to have a man to put in charge of Melbard once I’ve got control of it-a straw board and an agreeable president. Why not you? You’ve got a respectable society name. I know those people-you’ll be blackmailing Rademacher, but he’d rather be blackmailed by you than by an outsider. He’ll be more willing to come around if he knows you’re going in as the crown prince, ready to become president of the company as soon as the deal goes through.”

“You’re going to hand me the company just like that?”

“With strings. You won’t be free to handle it your way.”

Wyatt grunted. “In the long run, you’ll get done with whatever you wanted it for. Then it’ll be a drag on you. All I have to do is wait you out-you’ll turn it loose sooner or later.”

“Maybe,” Villiers said, smiling again. “At least it’s worth the gamble, from your point of view.”

“Sure it is.”

“Get it done fast,” he said, and hung up. He pulled open the booth door and stood up. Two weeks, he thought. By two weeks from now I’ll have the world in the palm of my hand.

16. Russell Hastings

Shortly after three o’clock Russ Hastings checked NCI’s closing price on the ticker, scribbled the figures at the bottom of a column in his notebook, and buzzed his secretary. “Miss Sprague, ask the Exchange to have Herb Capps call me right away, will you?”

“Yes, sir.”

He flipped back through the notebook and scowled. He had spent three days tracking investors who had recently bought blocks of NCI common. He had been able to reach only a handful; none of them had told him anything useful; by now they shifted together in his mind, as vague as the characters in a Russian novel.

Intercom buzz. “I have Mr. Capps on the line.”

“Thank you… Hello, Herb? I see by today’s close, NCI is up another two points for the week.”

“Still worrying that bone, Mr. Hastings? You won’t find much meat on it.”

“Possibly. It happens I’m calling you about something else.”

“That list of buyers I was going to send you. Look, I’m sorry about that. My secretary’s out sick, I’ve been trying to put it all together myself, evenings. I’m a one-finger, hunt-and-peck typist, it’s gone kind of slow. But I’ll have it up to date and on your desk by Monday morning.”

“All right. Thank you. I hope it’s nothing serious-your secretary?”

“What? Oh, only a summer flu bug. She’ll be back early in the week, I expect.”

When Capps broke the connection, Hastings picked up the notebook and walked out past Miss Sprague’s desk. She looked up. He discovered her neck was ropy, wondered that he’d never noticed it before, and said, “I’m going up to the boss’s office. I need you to handle a small discreet job for me.”

“Yes, sir?”

“See if you can find out if Herb Capps’s secretary has been out sick this week. Don’t let Capps find out you’re inquiring about it.”

“All right, sir.”

He grinned at her and looked at his watch. “Buzz me in the field marshal’s office if you find out about her before I come back.”

He went down the hall to Gordon Quint’s sanctum.

The fat man gave him an amiable glare. “What now?”

“My liege, I come bearing curious tidings.” Hastings sat down without waiting to be asked. “Do you believe in coincidence?”

“Of course.”

“I don’t. Not unless every other possibility has been ruled out.”

“Things are never neat and tidy,” Quint said. “You have a suspicious mind.”

“That’s what I’m paid for, isn’t it?”

“Let’s have it, then.”

Hastings flipped back the cover of his notebook. “There’s been considerable escalation in purchases of NCI common, in blocks, by a large number of investors who don’t want to be traced. Over the past seven weeks, all together one million eight hundred thousand shares of NCI have been traded. Of those shares, about two hundred thousand have been bought in small lots. That leaves a million six. Of which something like five hundred thousand shares have been bought by bona-fide institutional investors-banks, mutual funds, pension funds. Another eighty or a hundred thousand shares I can eliminate from suspicion because I’ve been able to track down the buyers and they’re reputable.”

“Leaving a million shares you haven’t yet accounted for,” Quint said.

“Your math’s good enough. Want to know who bought those one million shares?”

“That’s childish. I don’t enjoy riddles. Get on with it.”

“It’s one riddle I haven’t found the answer to. You can follow those purchases just so far, and then a door slams in your face. Canadian front men. So-called mutual funds that turn out to be nothing more than dummies for unspecified stockholders. Anonymous numbered Swiss bank accounts. Corporations in Liechtenstein that won’t divulge the names of their officers and principal stockholders. I’ve traced a quarter of a million dollars’ worth to a call girl and another quarter of a million to a gangster. The other day you wanted to know if I had anything more than a hunch. Well?”

Quint grunted. He leaned on the leather arm of the chair and dipped his finger into the abalone-shell ashtray to stir candy wrappers as if they were tea leaves in which he expected to find an oracular message. Presently he looked up. “You are not making me a very happy man. I was looking forward to a quiet, untroubled weekend in the country.”

“A thousand pardons if I’ve disturbed your royal slumbers.”

“Oh, shut up, Russ.”

Hastings grinned at him.

The fat man stirred and made a face. “You haven’t finished, have you?”

“No. There are more curious coincidences. Herb Capps, the NCI floor specialist at the Big Board. That’s number one. He promised me a list of buyers, but somehow he’s managed to delay it from day to day, and I still haven’t seen it. Is that coincidence? My secretary’s trying to find out right now. Number two, Elliot Judd. I tried to reach him in Arizona. I intended to make it a personal call, just sound him out, see if he had anything on his mind. It would help to know if he’s got suspicions of his own.”

“Has he?”

“I didn’t get a chance to find out. It seems he’s not taking phone calls.”

“That’s hardly surprising. Does J. Paul Getty answer his phone every time it rings?”

“Judd and I are pretty close. He’d be happy to talk to me-unless he had a specific reason not to.”

“Are you suggesting he knows something he’d rather not have us know?”

“It could be. Or it could be he isn’t well enough to come to the phone. You see what that could lead to, don’t you?”

Quint scowled at him. He was about to make a remark, but his interphone announced a call for Hastings; Quint handed him the phone and Miss Sprague said in Hastings’ ear, “About Mr. Capps’s secretary, she’s been out of the office since Tuesday. One of the girls in the adjoining office overheard Mr. Capps calling a florist to send flowers to her at home. She’s expected back at work Monday or Tuesday.”

“Thank you,” he said.

“Not at all.”

He had to get up to cradle the phone; he stayed on his feet, restless and irritable. “The NCI floor specialist appears to be ruled out for now, but I’m not scratching anybody off the list just yet. I wouldn’t be surprised to find all kinds of people in this right up to their hairlines.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s big.”

“Granted. But we still need to know whether Elliot Judd has an active part in it. Without that piece of information, we’ve got nothing.”

“I know.” Hastings put his hand on the back of the chair he had vacated and squeezed it until the knuckles whitened. “I want to fly out there.”

“To Arizona?”

“Yes.”

“If he won’t come to the telephone, what makes you think he’ll see you?”

“It would be awkward for him if he didn’t-it would tell me something. Assume he’s doing something illegal-would he risk confirming my suspicions by turning me away?”

“And you honestly think if he’s concealing something you’ll be able to sniff it out just by seeing him?”

“That’s possible, isn’t it?”

“It’s also possible you’ll put him on the alert and make it ten times as difficult for us to catch him.”

“I think we have to take that chance,” Hastings said.

“Why?”

“Because I don’t really believe he’s got anything to do with it. And if that’s true, he’s got to be warned. Right now. You see that, don’t you?”

Quint hesitated. Finally he said, “When do you plan going?”

Hastings moved his grip from the chair, “The first flight I can get tomorrow morning.”

“Very well,” Quint said.

17. Carol McCloud

Carol McCloud had two telephones, both in the living room of the suite. One was her listed number; the bell was disconnected, she never knew if it was ringing. An answering service took her calls on that line.

The unlisted telephone rang. She was lounging on the divan with a book; in her occupation, with most of the day to herself, she had a good deal of time for reading.

“Hello?”

“Carol?”

A man’s voice, calling her by her first name. She had the brief wild thought that there was only such a tiny handful of people in the whole world who would think of her when they spoke the name “Carol.”

She said, “Hello, Mason,” absenting all feeling from her tone.

“Have you got a date tonight?”

“How delicately you put it,” she said. “It’s Friday. What do you think?”

“Break it.”

“My clients don’t like that sort of thing.”

“Break it,” he said again. “Find somebody else to take your place.”

“If I could be replaced that easily at the last minute,” she said, “I wouldn’t be in my tax bracket.”

He laughed. Over the phone it was a hard, metallic sound. He said, “That’s my own line you’re using against me. Do you think that’s fair?”

“Since when have you ever worried about whether anything was fair?”

“Break your date,” he said. “I’ll be there at seven.”

Click.

She put the receiver down slowly and glanced at the Seth Thomas clock on the mantel-ten past five.

She had to make nine phone calls before she was able to find a suitable girl to cover for her. Afterward she went around the apartment doing meaningless busy things-adjusting ashtrays, moving a chair six inches, fiddling with air-conditioners. She was too angry to go back to her book.

In the bathroom mirror she inspected the fresh bruise on her right cheek and applied a new coat of makeup to cover it; the bruise had come on top of an old one that hadn’t quite healed, and her cheek stung with throbbing agony.

An East Side hotel manager had called yesterday-he had four tycoons from the Coast looking to have a party. She had rounded up three girls and shepherded them to the appointed suite. The four tycoons were in real estate, and there was an hour’s bragging about the millions they had made from Southern California land, after which they began to complain that the hotel manager had made them shell out the price of a small aircraft carrier and you girls God damn better be worth it.

The girls gave the johns a full-scale stag act. Three of the tycoons were high enough to loosen up and enjoy it. The fourth was beyond that stage into drunken surliness. He babbled something about his wife, something about Good Christian Women, something about Sin and Communists, and he belted her across the face. She laid his face open with her fingernails and kneed him in the groin and left him to his three companions, who shut him up.

It didn’t happen often; it had been a long time since she had accepted a john without references. She didn’t like being mauled; she feared exposure, the unknown allegiances of strangers. There were only two things she feared more. One was time, which would age her; the other was that voice on the telephone just now.

She went into the bedroom and put on her leotards and rolled out the mat on top of the carpet. She had done her exercises once today, but now she did them again, needing that mindless concentration on ritual physical movement. She spent an hour at it, exhausted herself, and knew she would be stiff in the morning; she took a hot shower, and a cold shower, and creamed and powdered her body, and after that she dressed herself in floor-length satin hostess pajamas. She took a great deal of care and time with her hair and her eye makeup, but just the same it was only six-forty when she was done. She went into the living room and sat down facing the door, folded her hands in her lap, and waited with no expression at all on her face.

He always made her vividly aware of the past she didn’t want to remember. She remembered the sagging clapboard Victorian farmhouse with its paint long gone, weathered to a splintery gray. Kentucky, childhood, endless cuddlings by numerous “uncles.” Her father had been an unidentified sailor who had spent one night in Lexington on his way to New London. About the only home she remembered was the old farmhouse, with a rusty De Soto up on blocks in the yard, a sagging washday line hung between house and tree, chickens and dogs, two rusty truck fenders, and a dented galvanized milk can. They were on the relief rolls, recipients of charity packages of clothes and food at Christmastime. Her mother had been a sleazy middle-aged bag of Southern discomforts, too distracted by sex and alcohol to mind living in lackluster filth.

She remembered herself, a child of nine, curiously watching through an open window, seeing her mother step out of her clothes and leave them on the floor while a man, whose two-and-a-half-ton truck sat warm-hooded in the drive, came into sight putting a can of beer to his lips, wiping his mouth, brutally crushing the empty can in one hand. She remembered the torn undershirt, a wedge out of the cloth open and flapping at the side, revealing the man’s hirsute pelt. The man tossed the mangled can away and reached impatiently for her mother’s sagging naked body. The clatter of the can on the linoleum floor, the resigned flatness of her mother’s withdrawn face, the man’s blasphemous laughing remarks, and then the crash and squeak of the bed.

One day her mother had gone down to the crossroads to get a bottle of whiskey. She hadn’t come back. Somebody said she took up with a salesman driving through. Carol had been twelve then; she remembered teen-age boys sneaking looks at her legs, a teacher who’d fondled her developing breasts, the groping hands of the men folk of the hill families who’d passed her from hand to hand after her mother ran off. She had done chores, now and then gone briefly to school. One seventeen-year-old had taken her to a boondock party, and he had put something in her drink that had made her feel good all over. Whatever it was, it ran her up the walls. She had stayed with him in the woods for four days. Afterward someone said something, and the boy’s father horse-whipped her off the farm.

At fifteen she was slinging hash in a crossroads tavern. The cook’s young brother came home from the Army, he was a smiling dandy with worldly charm, and they were married in the spring by a circuit preacher. Their sensuous delirium had lasted almost a week, after which Floyd had turned sulky and cross and dragged her off with him, to Concord and then to Pensacola, and then to Houston, on the trail of elusive wealth: “You want to eat beans the rest of yo’ life?” He had borrowed money to open a Japanese car franchise, but it had failed; he had wildcatted an oil field and hit a dry hole; he met some gamblers, and they went to Miami.

He had become rough and cursory in bed, mounting her and pumping his spurt into her and leaving her hung up dry. She learned to make her body a nerveless thing, without shame or sensation, a bitter insensitive receptacle for his absentminded pleasures. He was making enemies then, with his surly ways, and they were not the kind of enemies a man could afford. He had already become a compulsive loser; now he ran his gambling debts up so high there was nothing to do but run for it. By then she had a spiderweb of scars on her buttocks from his tantrums. He refused to leave her behind; they left in the middle of the night, traveling in a car he had stolen, driving across the South by night, holing up by day. She was sixteen then, pregnant, and terrified. They fled into the Southwest and ditched the stolen car in Amarillo, hitchhiked to Albuquerque, and stopped there. He found work pumping gas in a filling station and began to lay plans to rob the till.

Whenever she argued with him, he beat her. He told her to meet him at the gas station at two in the morning, and she was too frightened to refuse; and when she arrived at the appointed hour, she found him bending over the owner’s body, searching the pockets for the cash-register keys-he had smashed the owner’s larynx with a tire iron. He emptied out the register, and they drove north in a car someone had left overnight in the gas station for a lube job. They left it parked on a side street in Trinidad, took a bus to Colorado Springs, stole a pickup truck out of a shopping-center parking lot, and drove through the night across the Rockies to Grand Junction, where a man spotted them having coffee in a diner and followed them outside. The man was from Miami.

They left with a squeal of tires, but the pickup was no match for the green Buick with Florida plates. The Buick followed them at a steady distance until they started up into the mountains toward Aspen; then it closed the distance and cut across a bend in front of them, crowded them away from the inside cliff, and forced them off the road. The pickup turned over twice before it hit the creek. She ended up crushed against her husband in the mangled wreckage of the cab. She was bleeding at her nose, in cuts on her shoulder and forearm, and between her legs.

The man from Miami came down the hill, scrambling in expensive shoes on the loose shale footing. She closed her eyes to slits and held her breath. He wrenched open the door and poked around until he was satisfied her husband was dead. Then he said, “You can open your eyes, I ain’t going to hurt you.”

Still she didn’t stir, and after he slapped her a couple of times he left, evidently satisfied she was unconscious and couldn’t identify him. She waited till she heard the Buick drive away, and then she dragged herself up to the road, bleeding, and waited for a car to come along.

In the clinic she told them a simpleminded story, some of it true. She said she came from Kentucky, she was an orphan, a man had got her pregnant and deserted her, she had been hitchhiking west to find some town where nobody knew her where she could have her baby. She had thumbed a ride with the man in the pickup truck, and he had lost control of it and gone over the rim. It was a simple, straightforward story, and she stuck to it when the police came and wanted to know how much she knew about the dead driver of the pickup. It seemed he was wanted for murder in New Mexico and several charges of auto theft and transporting stolen cars across state lines. She had thrown away her wedding ring in the woods along the road, and she played dumb with the cops, and after a while they left her alone.

She got out of the clinic after ten days, no longer pregnant; the wreck had made her miscarry. There were five forgettable months of hash-slinging in a diner, and then a man in a Lincoln took her away to Las Vegas for his pleasure. He was not a disagreeable sort, and for a day or two she even felt a small echo of the needs that had been deadened in her; but he went on to the Coast without her. She took jobs and survived, teaching herself to be hard. Now and then she dreamed in a far corner of her mind that one day, with someone, she would rediscover the frantic roaring tumult of eager happiness.

By the time she was nineteen, with her looks, her good body, she had climbed fast from a job in the pony lineup of a downtown Vegas dive to a good post as hostess in the show-bar room of a hotel on the Strip. And then one night she had come in to work and a man sitting at the bar had stared at her, then turned to talk rapidly to his companion. The man was the Buick driver from Miami.

The old terrors came back, froze her, put a sour knot in her throat. She was here, alive, and she was a witness to the murder he had committed. He wouldn’t do anything here, not in this crowd. But later, when she left, he would follow her. She began to think of how it must be done, how to elude him. She went through the motions of the job, guided people to their tables, and distributed menus, wearing a mechanical smile, keeping the man from Miami in sight in the corner of her vision. She would slip out through the kitchen, she decided, drive home, pack her things, and drive straight through the night to Los Angeles. Change her name again and get a different kind of job. She decided it all with numb resignation; there wasn’t any room for regret.

But then the man from Miami got up off the bar stool and headed for the door with his companion. The two of them stopped in the doorway and looked straight at her, with never a break in their expressions. His companion was a tall young man with a hard and handsome face, the eyes of a stalking predator; yet he was not a gangster like the one from Miami, she could tell that much. The face was lofty, self-assured, filled with cool ambition and arrogant intelligence. If he had been an actor he would have been singled out for “star quality.” He had a sensual presence, even across the room.

When the two of them walked out of the club, her dread returned. She got through the rest of her shift and walked out through the kitchen, concentrating her attention on the simple act of walking steadily. She said good night to the kitchen staff with a nervous smile; she came around the back of the hotel and swept the parking lot with a quick, frightened glance. No one was in sight. She hurried to her car and got in, and had to sit there motionless before she summoned the strength to start the car. Her nerves twanged with taut-drawn vibration; a red pulse thudded in her eyes. She shot out of the parking lot and drove fast through the back streets, taking a dark route home, knowing enough to choose the deserted streets so that she could see if she was being followed.

No one tailed her. She began to feel more calm; driving the last ten blocks, she was deciding exactly what things to pack and what things to leave behind. She pulled into the driveway of the little stucco house, switched off the headlights, and got out of the car, and for a moment stood by the spiked yucca plant in the dusty front yard to look both ways along the street. All the parked cars in sight were familiar. It was three in the morning; there were no pedestrians abroad. Presently she went up the gravel walkway, unlocked the front door, and went into the dark house. She flicked the living-room wall switch; the light came on, she turned into the room, and saw the tall young man with the hard arrogant face sitting in the armchair, smiling coolly.

She stood perfectly still. Her heart crashed alarmingly. She felt faint with dread, tightened her muscles against it, gave him a stare as cool and hard as his own, not wanting to give anything away.

He seemed in no hurry to speak. Finally, broken by the silence, she breathed, “How did you get here?” and realized immediately it was a stupid thing to say.

“Rocco dropped me off,” he replied in a reasonable, resonant voice. “Which is why you didn’t see a strange car outside. Take it easy, Rocco’s not here.”

“How did you find this place?”

“I own a piece of the hotel. It was no trick to find out where you lived.”

She took a deep breath. “All right. What do you want?”

“Easy-gentle down. Why don’t you have a drink?”

“I don’t want a drink. What do you want of me?”

“You’re lovely,” he said, as if he hadn’t heard the question. “You’ll have to study voice modulation, of course-that hill-country twang won’t do. You’ll need to learn how to walk and turn like a model, how to smile and pose. How to do things in bed. Or do you already know that much?”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“I bought you from Rocco,” he said. “You belong to me now.”

She stared at him, full of bewildered dread. She had to put a hand against the wall to steady herself.

He crossed his legs and selected a cigarette from a silver case. “I’ll explain it very clearly, just once,” he said, “so that you’ll never need to ask questions. Pay attention.”

She watched him with terrified fascination. “I hope you start making sense,” she said, fighting back the impulse to scream.

He said, “You’re going by the name of Carol McCloud now. It’s not the name you started out with. You were Minnie Jackson until you got married, and that made you Minnie Bragg. Floyd Bragg was into the loan sharks in Miami-Rocco claims he carried Floyd longer than his mother did. You and Floyd ran out on Floyd’s debts, which is always a mistake, particularly when you’re dealing with people like the crowd Rocco works for. You dropped out of sight for a while, but then Floyd killed a man in New Mexico. The police found his fingerprints all over the tire iron. The alarm went out, and Rocco’s people came in on it. It wasn’t too hard to trace you two from there-it was mainly a question whether the police or Rocco and his friends would find you first. I won’t bother with the rest of it-I’ve only gone over this much of it to convince you I do have all the facts, I’m not just bluffing.”

“Go ahead,” she said in a thin voice. “You’ve got the floor.”

He said, “You were in that gas station with Floyd when he killed the owner. How much do you know about criminal law? If you’re involved in a crime like robbery, and somebody gets killed in the process, all parties to the lesser crime are equally guilty of felony murder, no matter who did the actual killing. Do I make it clear to you? There’s still a warrant out on Minnie Bragg for first-degree murder, they still have the mandatory death penalty for felony murder in New Mexico, and there’s no statute of limitations on a charge of murder. You’ll never get off the hook, Minnie-your head’s on that chopping block for the rest of your life. That’s why Rocco isn’t here-you can’t threaten him, not without admitting who you are and going back to Albuquerque to stand trial for murder.”

She whispered, “I wasn’t even there.”

“Where?”

“When he killed the man. I wasn’t there.”

“Legally it doesn’t matter. Get that through your head-you shared in the proceeds of the robbery. That’s all it takes to prove you’re guilty of felony murder. They don’t even have to prove whether you were there or not.”

“How do I know you’re not lying?”

“Call a lawyer. Go down to the library in the morning and look it up. Ask somebody you trust. Do I look stupid enough to lie to you about something you could verify that easily?”

His eyes were locked on hers; she felt her face flaming. She looked away. “What do you want of me? Who are you?”

“My name is Mason Villiers.”

The greater part of communication between people, she had learned, was nonverbal. It was in gestures and expressions, postures and physical movements; in the tone of a voice, even in the pace and depth of a person’s breathing, the pinched-artery throb of a crossed leg, the way he moved his hands through his hair-things seen and absorbed, even if not recognized consciously for the signals they were.

What made it impossible to detect Mason Villiers’ emotions was not his choice of words, the carelessly insulting diction, or the sometimes brutal impersonality of his sentences, but rather the control he exercised over all his physical responses. He let no clues escape. Rarely was he caught off guard; rarely were his reactions not studied and deliberate. Even his rages were not genuine: they were calculated for their effects. Sometimes he appeared to inflict outrageous insults on people just to see what the response might be.

Trying to understand him was like trying to hit him-something she did just once. Her fist cracked against the taut muscles and stopped cold, penetrating no farther, doing no damage, achieving nothing except to make him laugh at her.

He bedded her often, sometimes with drive and fury, but no one could have called it making love; sex was like food to him-something to nourish physical needs, not emotional ones-and if it gave him pleasure he made no indication of it. She was never sure how he really felt about her, if in fact he had feelings about her at all. She was useful to him, that was all: useful with men from whom he needed favors, men to whom he owed favors, men he wanted to control with infrared photographs. He told her once that the world was filled with women of glamour and beauty but she had something unique: “You make them think of Marlene Dietrich,” he said. “Call it mystery.” There were stag parties in expensive hotels. There were weekends for which johns paid fortunes. Three thousand dollars for a six-day cruise. Villiers never bought her gifts that were not part of the role he created for her, and he never paid her except in clothes, books, coiffures, training in voice and body movement-none of it given personally. He made her pay her own way from the start; he made it clear he was not going to keep her.

She became wholly professional about it. For her it wasn’t hard, she didn’t have to learn that most toads were not Prince Charmings in camouflage, they were just toads. She studied Villiers and by emulating him taught herself to close her mind to all feelings when she went through the ritual stag body grinds, pulling her dress slowly over her head until her breasts popped out, servicing panting drunks with no more feelings about it than she would have devoted to the act of feeding pigs at a trough. She invented an elaborate litany of self-justification (It pays well; everybody sells himself for something; what harm in taking a sucker if that’s what he wants? Might as well get paid for what you’d give away anyway.) but she soon discovered that all these rationalizations were part of the standard lexicon of every prostitute. Every whore had an excuse. After she learned that, she stopped trying to defend herself. No apologies necessary, thank you very much. Perhaps there was something wrong with her. Her conscience didn’t trouble her; she wanted only to be safe-she just didn’t want to be caught and sent back to Albuquerque. Whatever it took to ensure that, she would do. She became neat, calm, careful. She prepared for the worst; it was possible some freak accident could happen someday, someone would find her out, New Mexico would extradite her. Not likely, perhaps, but possible. With that in mind, she had made plans accordingly. Over the years she had set aside a growing emergency hoard, though it hadn’t been easy. Her high prices had to include the expenses of a considerable overhead-the grease sheet: bell captain, house dick, elevator boys, the cop on the beat, the precinct captain, two assistant district attorneys; and the weekly medical checkup, clothes, high rent. But she had saved enough to pay the highest fee of the country’s best trial lawyer. Before a jury, a good lawyer, together with her own good looks and acting ability, would be more than a match for any hick district attorney who might try to put her away. And so, slowly and deliberately, she was paving a path out of Mason Villiers’ trap.