The Dead Can Tell: A Detective McKee Mystery. Helen Reilly

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СКАЧАТЬ Euen helped Sara into it, got in himself. Pat Somers watched them drive away. The tip of his cigar glowed and ashed and glowed again. He took the cigar from his mouth, threw it in the gutter and, as the roadster disappeared around the corner, he started for the Avenue.

      Cristie found a cab at the corner of Madison and Sixty-third. She gave the driver general directions. She dismissed the cab on the side street to the west, walked toward Franklin Place, paused near the opposite corner. Euen Firth’s roadster was standing in front of Steven’s apartment hotel, a big building overlooking the East River. Sara and Euen were seated in the cream-colored roadster. There was no sign of Steven up or down the block.

      Perhaps he was in the rooms on the fourteenth floor already. Perhaps he had returned since she had called from the penthouse. But perhaps not. She must telephone again and make sure. She looked back along the dark side street. Yes, the garage was there, she had noticed it when she drove past. Its lights streamed out. Garages always had telephones. She turned her back on Franklin Place, walked toward it quickly.

      The telephone was in a booth just inside the big doors. No one stopped her or interfered with her. Luckily she had change. She called the Hazard apartment. Again it was the maid who answered. Thank God. Steven wasn’t home. She was in time. But she would have to hurry.

      Back near the corner opposite the towering apartment house, dotted here and there with a few illuminated windows, she settled down to wait.

      Sara Hazard was out of the cream-colored roadster. She was having trouble getting away from Euen. It was very quiet. Cristie heard Euen urging her to go down to Jimmy Kelly’s with him for “ ’nother little drink” but Sara refused. She said good-night curtly and disappeared through the big grilled iron doors.

      The night was still warm but Cristie was shivering. Suppose Steven had gone in while she was telephoning from the garage? No, that was scarcely likely. If he had, Sara would probably have gone upstairs with him. Where was he and what was he doing? Pain seized her again, numbing her faculties, destroying her equilibrium. She climbed clear of it with effort, braced her shoulders against the brick-work of the wall against which she leaned in a dense bank of shadow and kept her eyes fastened on the apartment across the way and to the north.

      Euen’s car was still standing at the curb. He sat sprawled back against the cushions. Only the fact that he was smoking showed that he hadn’t fallen asleep in an alcoholic stupor. A man and a woman entered the apartment hotel. A colored man came out and sloshed water on the steps, went in again. Someone was polishing the inside of the doors.

      Fifty feet farther away a dim globe burned above the service entrance. When Cristie had been standing there for about ten minutes, a woman came out of it, a slender blonde in modish black. Euen Firth moved. He sat erect, put his hand on the door of the roadster. She heard him call, “Mrs. Hazard.” The woman passed the main entrance, glanced at him curiously and continued on her way. Euen sank back. The woman wasn’t Sara Hazard. The colored man was on the steps with another bucket of water. He spoke to the woman. Cristie didn’t know that it was Eva Prentice, the Hazard maid. Presently Euen Firth drove away.

      The apartment door opened. Cristie caught a glimpse of women on their knees with mops and pails. A clock somewhere struck three. The door started to close. It was Sara Hazard who came out. She had changed her evening gown for a dark suit and a small dark hat. Cristie caught the gleam of her hair beneath the hat brim. She was carrying her purse under her arm.

      Where was she going at that hour of the night? There was a suggestion of watchfulness about her. Out on the Place, she paused, looking right and left.

      A couple of stray cabs went past. An ambulance clanged distantly. The faraway murmur of traffic rose and fell. It was fainter now. New York was approaching its zero hour.

      After that sharp right and left stare, Sara Hazard walked to the corner, the corner opposite the one on which Cristie stood well back in deep shadow. Sara Hazard turned into the side street running down to the river. A car was parked in the obscurity near the top of the short steep hill. Its back was toward Cristie. It was facing the East River Drive below. It was Steven’s gray convertible.

      Mrs. Hazard got in and switched on the lights. They did little more than make the darkness visible. There was no sign of Steven. Get as near as possible to the apartment, Cristie thought, so as to catch him when he arrived.

      The mouth of the steep side street was almost directly in front of her on the far side of Franklin Place. The car with Sara Hazard in it was some fifty feet from the corner. Cristie started across. The roadbed was smooth, even. She was in the middle of it when she jolted to a stop. There was movement in front of her, in and around the gray coupe.

      Cristie’s knee twisted under her and she almost fell. She recovered herself, stumbled over the curb, collided with a stanchion. She was oblivious, ducked around it and raced on, fighting for breath.

      Less than thirty seconds later she stood motionless at the top of the hill. Her senses reeled crazily. The red tail light of the gray convertible, Steven’s car with Sara Hazard at the wheel, was plunging down the precipitous grade and weaving from side to side.

      A flash across the darkness beyond and below. The gray convertible hurtled out of the side street at a terrific rate of speed. It shot straight across the Drive, struck the iron railing on the far side, crumpled it like so much papier-mâché, sawed into the air, and dropped like a stone into the swirling waters of the black East River.

       Chapter Five

      FILE ON SARA HAZARD

      GEORGE MORRIS, a paper salesman of Pelham, New York, was an eye witness of what took place. He gave the police an accurate account of it later. Morris was proceeding north along the East River Drive after a somewhat hilarious night at Barney Gallant’s when the accident happened. Conscious that he wasn’t in the best possible shape, Morris was driving slowly, a fact for which he was to thank his lucky stars forever after. Otherwise he would have been a gone goose.

      The gray convertible with a woman in it cut directly across his path less than ten feet away. The crash, the leap into the air, the sickening dive, jarred every tooth in Morris’s head.

      He managed to bring his own car to a stop. He was shaking. Sweat covered him from head to foot. He wasn’t the only one who raced for that jagged gap in the iron railing above the river. Running feet pounded the pavement, there were shouts, cries. They gathered volume. There! Where? The fence. God—look!

      A few minutes earlier the Drive had been deserted. People began springing up out of the darkness. A policeman arrived. A radio car appeared. The crowd thickened. Someone must have telephoned because an ambulance pulled up in short order just after the police emergency squad rolled up and took over.

      The throng of spectators, dense by this time, was ordered back. A space was cleared. A wrecking truck eased its way to the broken fence above the river. Spotlights were trained on the sluggish black water. Two or three big policemen, stripping hastily, had already dived in. They were swimming around in circles and calling to each other.

      The crane with chains suspended from it went down slowly. They had to try twice before the men in the water could dive down and fasten the chains securely round the car lying in the mud eighteen feet below. When it was almost up, the car slipped. A groan went up from the crowd. The whole process had to be repeated.

      Pale light that was the precursor of dawn was coming up in the east when the hood of the submerged car at last broke the surface. Voices were raised. Someone moaned. The gray convertible belonging to Steven Hazard had gone into the river with a woman at СКАЧАТЬ