LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

South Bend.”

      She sat up in her seat, settled herself in with admirable coolness, considering what had just occurred, and began to preen rebel strands of hair with her fingers.

      “I’m sorry I got you into this,” she began, and I marvelled in silence at the composure that now settled on her. No more trembling, in spite of her sodden clothes, no wide eyes and quivering mouth. She had self-control and guts all right, now that the immediate danger of the black coats and fedoras was over.

      “Trouble is what I like, Miss Kilvert,” I said. “Unfortunately, this is one time trouble caught me on the hop. I’m returning from a vacation, and my heater is with my sport clothes in the trunk. I didn’t figure I’d need it passing through Indiana.”

      She smiled, vanquishing those hard lines that had shown on her face. I was glad they could be washed off with a single application of a smile. Hard lines on the face are for guys who live within smelling distance of the grubbier side of our civilisation—guys like me—for pretty girls still young enough to have voted in only one Presidential Election.

      “Perhaps it was fate, meeting up with you,” Joanne Kilvert went on. “I mean, I might have been given a ride by anybody who wouldn’t have a notion what to do when those men showed up.” She was talking like a comic-strip heroine who was used to being chased and fired on as a matter of course.

      I wasn’t kidded. I remembered a scared little girl, anybody’s kid-sister from anywhere at all, standing under a tree.

      “They had you scared, girlie,” I remarked. “I give you credit for having guts; many a woman would still be in hysterics after that experience, and many another would keep ’em up clear to South Bend. Give with the story.”

      “I’ve had to have guts, the way I’ve been living for the past three months, Mr. Lantry.” The hint of those hard lines crept into her soft features again.

      The lights of Plymouth grew bigger before us.

      She gave with the story.

      CHAPTER TWO

      Joanne Kilvert had guts. The story she told me as we drove through Plymouth and on out towards South Bend proved that.

      She got those transient lines of bitterness on her face the same way I got mine—living within smelling distance of the underworld. By the time South Bend showed up as a myriad scattering of lights on the far horizon, I had a great respect for the slight, dark-haired girl.

      “My brother knew only too well who was behind the trade-union pushing in the Chicago region,” she said. “It was the Shelmerdine organisation. Almost everybody knows that: the union men who are forced into giving a cut of their funds for protection, the politicians, the newspapers, and the police. They all know, but they won’t act. Athelstan Shelmerdine isn’t just a man—he’s a—a beast. You know how newspaper cartoonists draw something evil as an octopus with legs gripping a lot of people at the same time?”

      I nodded.

      “Well, that’s what Athelstan Shelmerdine is. He’s a monster. He has his tentacles stretching out all over the Middle West. He owns places and people at all levels; he can intimidate people into being his property, or he can buy them. When anyone offers resistance, or even looks dangerous, he can have them put out of the way.…”

      She paused. I suppose she was thinking of her brother, his wife, and their baby. I took one hand off the wheel, fumbled in my pocket, and found my packet of cigarettes and my lighter, then gave her a cigarette and took one myself.

      She puffed the cigarette into life gratefully.

      “My brother was sick and tired of the undercover deals in his union. He was a fighter, Mr. Lantry. They gave him a medal for killing North Koreans when he was only a youngster. He thought he had a right to live in a clean and decent United States, and he went out to fight corruption almost on his own, but he wasn’t looking for another medal. All he wanted was a decent life for his family and himself. One or two of his supporters lost heart after a crowd of hoodlums beat them up. Arthur was beaten up too, but that only made him more determined. He began mentioning names. He produced a pamphlet on gangster interference in trade unionism, and laid charges against big people who were corrupt to the core. You know what happened to him.”

      “Sure, I know. The little man against the big combine. A lot of men tried what your brother tried, girlie. They had guts, but that’s not enough when you’re up against rotten and bribed officials. You need official support, and you need to know that the official who’s giving you the support is not buying his highballs and showing his girl a good time with money your enemies put in his pocket.”

      “I was trained as a secretary,” went on Joanne Kilvert. “I suppose I must have some of the same spirit Arthur had—I like to think I have. After my brother and his child were killed that day, by thugs who made a clear getaway, I was determined to do what I could about it. I knew Shelmerdine was behind the whole business and I knew, if I could only get something on him to place before the Crime Commission in Chicago, I might help to break him. He has a lot of front organisations: legitimate business concerns which cover his other activities. I managed to obtain a job with one of them, but I used a false name. Then, about three months back, Shelmerdine’s personal secretary left him and I was recommended for the job. Maybe you can call it providential. I quit the real estate agency which Shelmerdine owns as one of his above-board concerns and went to work out at his mansion. It’s a big place just outside a town called Rollinsville—might as well call it Shelmerdinesville, because he seems to own the whole place.”

      I grunted. I knew something of Shelmerdine by hearsay, he seemed to own sections of land and everyone in them like a cattle-baron of the Old West. It wasn’t hard to think of him as an old-time patrone, making everyone act when he hollered and running them off their holdings when they dared to raise a holler for themselves.

      “This mansion of his,” continued Joanne Kilvert, “is a fine old place in its own grounds. Shelmerdine lives like a king, but I always thought of him as a beast in a cave. It’s a beautifully furnished cave where everything is veneered over. Shelmerdine has a wife, a quiet and pretty little woman who never asks any questions, and a small son of about six years. He’s a family man. A big businessman who loves to spend all the time he can with his wife and child. I used to watch him play with the child on the lawn, and I’d think of my brother and his child, buried in the ground, and my crippled sister-in-law.”

      She took a long pull on the cigarette and I watched the lights of distant South Bend growing bigger.

      A city, seen from a distance at night, is a fairyland of lights. It’s hard to think that, among the lights, people are living out their lives; people are being born and other people are dying. It’s hard to imagine that the far cluster of lights are a spangled cloak for the squalid things of the city; dirt, disease, strife, and crime.

      Joanne Kilvert went on: “Everything at Shelmerdine’s place was on the up-and-up. He rarely left home, and conducted his businesses from there. Every letter I took down and typed was a legitimate business one, touching the affairs of Shelmerdine Enterprises Incorporated. No one ever used gangster talk, no one ever produced a gun. There was no poker playing in smoky rooms, no whisky bottles strewn about the place. There were no gangsters’ molls, and nobody ever tried to paw me. I had my own suite of rooms and I was treated with respect and paid well. There were no mobster types about the place, but there was no disguising what the two chauffeurs, the gardener and his helper, and even the butler, with what he thought was an English accent, really were. There were also a couple of uniformed men who prowled about the grounds to keep out intruders. There was a very studied and very obvious gloss of respectability about the place, Mr. Lantry, but I wasn’t fooled.”

      She paused to stub out the butt of her cigarette in the ashtray on the dashboard.

      “I know the kind of set-up,” I told her. “I’ve been in some joints that were built with dirty money myself. I bet you could smell the rotgut booze Shelmerdine peddled in the twenties. Maybe, if you were extra-sensitive, you caught the echo of a machine-gun coming from a Chicago back-alley

Скачать книгу