Part 10

“I was about to ask the same question,” Hayden said. “If you have to have a name, John will do.”

“What do you want?”

“I came to have a look around. How about you?”

“I’ve got a right to be here.”

“You wouldn’t be Mrs. Adler, would you?”

“No, I’m not Mrs. Adler,” she said, biting off the words. “But I stayed here sometimes. Sam was away a lot. He let me use the place.”

She came slowly forward then in a nondescript blue print dress, apparently no longer worried about him, and now, in the circle of the light, he knew that she had never been as attractive as Doris Lamar. There may have been at one time a superficial prettiness about her face, but it looked tired, worn, and discouraged now, the dark brown eyes mirroring disillusionment and defeat.

“The name is Flo,” she said flatly. “You a friend of Sam’s?” she added with some suspicion.

“No,” Hayden said, “but I know what happened to him.”

“So do I. The cops rousted me around a bit yesterday and I know Sam’s not coming back.”

“Is that why you were packing the suitcase?”

“Why shouldn’t I? I’ve got some things here. So did Sam. If I don’t take ’em, who will? The rent’s paid till the first of the month and the janitor said I could stay here and why not?”

Hayden was about to agree with her but he had no chance. Even as he opened his mouth he saw her glance dart beyond him and then widen instantly. He understood at once that she was staring at the hall door, and something in her manner so disturbed him that he spun quickly to face the new threat she had seen.

It may have been the abrupt violence of his move that brought the reaction from the man who had so silently opened the door and stood upon the threshold. It may have been a simple act of self-defense that had been motivated by some new suspicion. Whatever the reason, the man’s hand had moved as Hayden completed his turn, and now he found himself staring into the muzzle of a revolver that looked very large and very threatening. Only when he could bring his eyes up to inspect the tanned, good-looking face did recognition come to him; only then did he understand that he had found Ted Corbin at last.

_14_

In those first silent seconds when no one moved and no one could find anything to say, Hayden offered silent thanks for the luck, coincidence, or good fortune that had finally paid off for his gamble and his persistence. He did not know what would happen now, but he felt a confidence that had not been there before, and he understood at once why Marion had been attracted to Corbin.

He seemed now to realize that Hayden presented no great threat and he let the gun swing down. He reached behind him to close the door, a big man, standing a good six feet two and weighing two-twenty or so, most of it bone and muscle. His blond hair was thick and worn fairly short, his mouth was wide, the jaw solidly shaped. His nose was a little off line, as though bent permanently in some football combat long ago, but the eyes were blue and well spaced and the tan gave him a look of strength and vitality. Waiting there in slacks, sport shirt, and flannel jacket, he had a puzzled look until Hayden spoke.

“Hello, Corbin.”

The big man did not do very well with the question. The eyes widened slowly and the mouth opened. For five seconds he simply stared and beneath the tan the muscles were suddenly slack. Then recovery came and he had himself in hand. The eyes wrinkled at the corners as a slow smile that had little warmth but was effective because of his white and even teeth took over.

“Corbin?” he said as though finding the word unfamiliar. “Un-unh. Cannon’s the name,” he added, a trace of southern accent coming through. “Ted Cannon.”

“Marion used to have a good picture of you,” Hayden said. “I saw it many times.”

“Marion?” The word was touched with wonderment. “Marion?” he said again, and then, as the message got through, acceptance came. “Oh, I see. And who the hell are you?”

“Her husband. I’m John Hayden.”

Corbin’s shoulders seemed to sag beneath the jacket as he took a labored breath. As though becoming aware of the gun in his hand, he tucked it somewhere inside his waistband. He seemed to be searching for words, but Flo, who had been taking all this with increasing annoyance, spoke first.

“What is this?” she demanded querulously. “If you’re going to have a conference take it outside, will you?”

Corbin looked at her curiously. He looked at Hayden.

“Who’s this?”

“I’ll tell you who I am,” Flo said and proceeded to do so.

Corbin’s smile came back, crooked now but tolerant. “So you’re picking up the pieces, hunh?”

“Who’s got a better right? Why don’t you two beat it and get off my back?”

“We will,” Hayden said, “if you’ll tell us about Adler.”

“Why should I?”

“I don’t know if the police know you’re cleaning out the place,” he added, “but we could ask them.”

She seemed about to argue but thought better of it. “All right.” She sat down, her tired face sullen. “What do you want to know?”

“You were Sam’s girl friend--”

“One of them.”

“So you must have some idea why he went North.”

“He said he had a deal on.”

“When did he first say so?”

“I don’t know. Maybe a month ago. I didn’t think much about it at first. He always had some kind of a deal cooking but nothing much ever happened.”

“When did he leave?”

“Saturday. He said he’d be back by the end of this week. He wouldn’t give any details. He said he was going to make a big score and when he collected we were going to Florida for a while.”

Hayden considered the statement and found it acceptable. It was the same line Adler had given to Doris Lamar, apparently with some success.

“He didn’t tell you how he was going to make that score?”

“No.”

He glanced at Corbin, who had been watching the woman, a sardonic expression working in his blue eyes.

“I guess you knew Adler.”

Corbin nodded. “I knew him.”

“And what happened to him?”

“There were a couple of paragraphs in the paper.”

“I think we have some talking to do.”

“About what?”

Hayden paused reflectively, his mind working smoothly. He was ready to accept Flo’s presence here for what it was, and he doubted if she could be of any help to him now. What happened here, or what she took from the apartment, was no concern of his.

“About why you’re here, what you expected to find. I have an idea about that and I can tell you about the deal Adler had in mind when he came to Connecticut.”

“What makes you think I’d be interested?”

“You’d better be.”

“Yeah? Why?”

“The police are looking for you and so are the insurance people; maybe even the FBI.” That the police were probably looking for him too was something that Corbin could not yet know, and Hayden continued with confidence: “All I have to do to prove it is pick up the telephone. I think my way is better. Is there a bar around where we can get a drink while I make a proposition?”

“I could use a drink, but we don’t have bars in this state,” Corbin said, “not the way you think of them. You can get a drink at most hotels and some restaurants. But you sit down, like in a cocktail lounge, and somebody mixes your drink, using a miniature bottle like you get in Pullman cars. Otherwise you get your own bottle at a State Store and drink it at home. Where are you staying?”

Hayden told him and Corbin said: “We’ve got to eat anyway and the food’s okay there. We’ll get our drink at the same place.... You through here?”

Hayden said that he was. He had come here like a man grabbing at straws in the hope of learning something that would help him. Now that he had found his man, he had no further interest in this apartment or the woman who called herself Flo. There was much he had to know about Corbin, but that, he felt, would come if he played his cards right.

“Yes,” he said. “I’ve had enough of this.”

“Me too,” Corbin said and glanced at the woman. “Take it easy, doll.”

“Oh, sure.” The woman opened the suitcase and began to rearrange the things she had collected. “If it’s all right with you let’s forget we ever saw each other.” She turned her weary, disillusioned eyes to Hayden. “That goes for you too, Buster.”

* * * * *

When they had settled in a dimly lighted corner of the motel lounge with drinks before them, Corbin said: “How’s Marion? How long have you two been married?”

“Fourteen months,” Hayden said, “and right now she’s four months pregnant. That should give you some idea how she felt when we found out you were probably still alive.”

“Yeah.” Corbin lit a cigarette and frowned at it, his expression genuinely concerned. “I never thought it could happen. How did you find out? Adler?”

“You knew him. You had to know him, otherwise you wouldn’t have come to his place. What were you looking for?”

“I don’t know exactly. I’ve been away. I saw this piece in the paper. I thought I’d take a look at the apartment, just in case.”

“Maybe you were looking for these.”

Hayden took out the photographs he had originally taken from Adler’s wallet and spread them on the table. It seemed to him then that Corbin knew a lot about Adler, just as Adler must have known much about Corbin. How all this had come about was something he hoped to find out in time, but it could wait. He indicated the two pictures.

“He came to Marion with these. He asked for twenty thousand dollars.”

Corbin looked at the pictures, the frown still there, the concern still showing in the tanned face. “The miserable little bastard,” he said softly and then listened as Hayden explained why he had the enlargement made of the insignia on the coveralls, and how he had come finally to the filling station in Fairview.

“The fellow I talked with--”

“That was Joe Quinn.”

“--gave you a lot of protection. A real suspicious character.”

Corbin grunted softly. “The natives around here don’t always open up with Yankees, especially curious ones.... Who killed Adler?”

“Did you know he was coming to Connecticut to collect on what he knew?”

For the first time there was a moment of hesitancy in Corbin’s manner. His blue gaze, which until that instant had been direct, slid to the glass in his hand and he drained it before he replied.

“No.” He put the glass down. “The papers said he was stabbed.”

“In the back,” Hayden said, “with a kitchen knife.”

“The police haven’t made any arrests?”

“Not yet.”

“What do they think?”

“They think maybe I did it, maybe even Marion.”

“You mean they know about those pictures of me? How?”

“The Connecticut police found a Conti Street address for Adler. The Mobile people got right on it. They found the two prints and two negatives. They sent the snapshot of you up by plane and they were checking the fingerprints with Washington when I left.”

“What do you want with me?”

“I want you to come back.”

“With you?”

“Yes.”

Apparently the thought had not occurred to Corbin. He looked at Hayden with one eye, and then with both. The grin that came to warp his mouth was tight and twisted.

“Why?”

“Because it’s going to be a lot easier that way.”

“For whom?”

“For everybody.” Hayden put his elbows on the table and leaned on them. When he continued, his tone was direct and forceful. “The police are probably looking for me too,” he said. “If you go back with me I can justify this trip. What difference can it make to you? If I found you, so will the police. It’s just a question of time, and believe me they’re looking for you. Somebody’s got to get a divorce and in a hurry. Marion’s worried about the baby and so am I.”

“I could get a divorce in this state in no time,” Corbin said. “Or Marion could duck down here and get it.”

“But there’s also a little matter of seventy-five thousand dollars in insurance.”

“Yeah,” Corbin said and this time the grin, while reluctant, was genuine. “But I didn’t get it. I had amnesia. Marion collected in good faith--”

“It has to be paid back.”

“I can’t help you much there.... How about you?”

“I can’t make it all at once.” Hayden digressed to explain how the money had been used and the benefit he derived from it. “I’ll have to pay it back--most of it anyway--but I’m willing to work something out with the insurance company if I can clear up the rest of this.”

Corbin shrugged and pushed his chair back. “I guess maybe you’ve got a point,” he said slowly in that faint southern accent. “I don’t want to see Marion hurt. I thought I was doing her a favor in the first place two years ago. I thought I had it made.... Let’s eat,” he said abruptly. “We’ll work something out.”

_15_

The interior of Ted Corbin’s cottage was an improvement over the jerry-built look of the exterior. The front room bore no sign of a woman’s touch and the furniture had been selected with an eye to comfort rather than style. Photographs on the walls testified to the owner’s interest in the outdoor life--Corbin with a dead deer, Corbin and friends with a day’s bag of quail, Corbin posing proudly with a sizable tarpon--but the chairs, the couch, the television set were in good condition and the room had an over-all look of bachelor neatness.

Hayden had followed Corbin across the causeway in his rented car because, while Corbin had given the impression that he was ready to fly back and straighten out the situation he had created, Hayden wanted to stay with the big man until they were actually on the plane. Now, coming in from the kitchen with a bottle of bourbon and glasses and a pitcher of water, he sat down opposite Hayden and stretched his legs out, the ankles crossed.

“I told you I’d tell you what happened two years ago,” he said, “and try to explain the series of stupid incidents that kept me from getting on the plane that night in Capitol City. It’s a long story.”

“I’ve got time,” Hayden said.

“And it’s in two parts. The first concerns me. The second has to do with Adler. It’ll show you what a conniving little bastard he was and how he got things ready to collect on what he knew.”

He waved a hand as an invitation to pour a drink but Hayden said he’d wait. Corbin nodded and took time to light a cigarette. When he had inhaled, his gaze moved to the opposite wall and a small frown began to work on the tanned, handsome face.

“I guess it starts with Marion and me,” he said. “I mean the fact that our marriage hadn’t worked out and was about to bust up. I don’t know how much she told you about me--where I was brought up and where I went to school and what I was doing when she met me.”

He paused while Hayden related the few things Marion had told him. He nodded absently.

“That’s about right,” he said. “I liked football and I played a couple of years of the pro game but I couldn’t quite cut it. I mean, I could see I’d never be a first-string regular, but I always liked to hunt and fish, and those were things Marion had no interest in whatsoever. Oh, I guess we were in love all right when we were married, but, after six months or so, everything seemed to start going downhill and it was probably a lot more my fault than it was hers.

“I mean, we just weren’t interested in the same things. It was hard to talk to each other. She liked to read; I didn’t. She liked to go to the theater, sometimes to a concert. She liked music--Dixie, the classics, anything that was good. I just couldn’t seem to get with that sort of stuff, but I think it was the friends we had that made things worse. A man and woman just can’t get along by themselves. They have to have friends and outside contacts and mutual interests, don’t they?

“My friends,” he added, expecting no answer, “were basically guys like me. I knew some guys on the Giants and the Eagles, a couple in baseball. In football season I’d look them up or they’d look me up. They’d come to the apartment or maybe we’d go out somewhere for dinner. Real good guys, some of them with nice wives, but Marion simply couldn’t tune in on that kind of talk. It was even worse for me. She had her friends and we’d be out with them at parties and I had a hard time finding anything to say that anybody would listen to.

“I don’t mean they were snooty. They liked Marion and they wanted to like me, but about half the conversation was chitchat that didn’t mean anything and was about people I didn’t even know. The rest of it, the men I mean, was talk about stocks and investments and taxes and politics and golf handicaps and trips they had made.” He stopped and looked at Hayden. “Does any of this make any sense?”

“It makes a lot of sense,” Hayden said.

“So the marriage wasn’t working out and we both knew it. We both tried too, I think. But somehow I started to drink a little more than I should and I’d get to brooding and wondering what I could do to fix things up. Instead of getting out and trying to sell, I’d duck into an afternoon movie and brood some more. So I lost a job and then another and another. I was about to lose again when I went out to Kansas City to see if I could swing one more deal.

“I was working for a paper box company at the time, and I thought maybe if I could get a big order I could hang on a while longer, not that it probably would have done any good because we were already talking about separation and divorce. Marion had started to look for a job and I guess we both understood there wasn’t any future in it for us the way things were.”

He stopped again and, as though just becoming aware of the bottle of whisky, reached for it. He pulled his legs in and sat up; he made two drinks, not asking Hayden if he wanted one. He passed it over silently and Hayden accepted. Corbin took a big swallow, put the glass down, and again his gaze moved away and distance grew in it.

“This was right after New Year’s,” he said, “and on New Year’s they have all those college bowl games and I hit three out of four. I had six hundred dollars in my kick when I got the plane that day. I went out to Kansas City. I made my pitch. No dice. So I had one more chance, a job I’d heard about that was opening up for an outfit in Capitol City. So I went there. Same thing. I said what I had to say and they listened. They didn’t say no but I didn’t think I was going to get the job either.

“Well, this is late Friday afternoon and I’m feeling too sorry for myself to go home yet. But the next day, Saturday, they’re having the play-off of the two runner-up teams in the National Football League. The Bisons are five-to-nine underdogs but I like ’em. I have this six hundred bucks, so I lay five of it on the Bisons and they win by one point in the last forty seconds. So now I’ve got around fifteen hundred bucks--more than I’ve had since I can remember--and it’s late Saturday afternoon, so now we come to the trench coat.”

Hayden remembered the trench coat. That coat, and what had been in its pockets, had been all-important in establishing Corbin’s death, and now he put his glass aside and waited, his dark eyes somber and intent.

“I’d had that trench coat since before I married,” Corbin said, “and Marion hated it. Maybe not at first, but I always wore it when I could, and I guess it got to be looking pretty disreputable. Anyway she said it was. About once a week she’d make some crack about it. Why couldn’t I get a neat cloth coat like other men? She didn’t say I looked like a bum but that’s what she thought.”

He grunted softly and an absent smile was reflected in his eyes. “I guess it did get to be pretty crummy-looking, and for some reason I remembered how she felt about it that Saturday afternoon. So I walked into this store with all that fresh money in my pocket and bought a new one.

“I didn’t have too much time and the sleeves had to be lengthened about an inch but that salesman wanted the sale. I told him I couldn’t wait, that I had things to do. He said he could send it to the airport but I thought of something else. I said if he’d have it wrapped up and ready, I’d have my taxi come by that way and pick it up. I told him if it wasn’t ready for me by the front door there’d be no sale and he promised it would be there.... It was,” he said, and took another swallow of his drink.

“So I rode out to the airport and got a quick double bourbon and water. I was feeling pretty good then and I’d never taken any flight insurance before, but I got to thinking that now that I had some real money this would be the time the damn plane would crash, so I stopped and got this policy for Marion. I’d already wired her I’d be on that flight, so I went over to the counter, handed over my suitcase and ticket.”

He grunted softly again, an introspective sound. “The fellow stapled the baggage check to that part of the ticket they give you back--you know, the carbon part. The clerk handed me a landing pass and then I took off for the men’s room to try on my new coat. The room was empty except for two guys who were sitting on a bench and two sadder-looking characters you never saw. One was on the small side, with an old felt hat and a topcoat on. The other fellow was nearly as tall as I am but not as big around. He wore a wrinkled suit with a sweater on underneath it but no coat.