CHAPTER XVIII
Knowing that he had come alone, except for the taxi-driver whom he had instructed to wait, Calvin did not reckon upon other persons forming an erroneous and, as it turned out, also a far-reaching interpretation of his appearance at the Temple. Of course it was a fault of Calvin's that he dealt too confidently with what was in his own mind, ignoring, or not even suspecting, the ideas in the heads of others.
Frankie Zenn and George Baretta were, on the contrary, a pair of enterprising gentlemen who had elevated themselves to agreeable, if somewhat precarious, positions of affluence and authority through the circumspect exercise of a habit of making a liberal allowance for the intentions and motives of others.
At an hour considerably earlier than Joan Daisy Royle's appearance at the Temple, both Baretta and Frankie Zenn had come into possession of the information that one of Considine's friends had "squealed." They knew not only the general source of the squeal, but it's exact nature—that is, they knew that not Considine's death but the Ketlar murder had been described in damaging detail.
This was an affair concerning which George Baretta was extremely sensitive; for it had been a personal, and not a business, killing; also it had been a shooting of a girl; moreover, it had never been necessary. Indeed, from a practical point of view, when coolly considered, it could be held to have been hardly advantageous. The girl had made him mad when he had been drunk enough to be in a "trigger temper," and before he had controlled himself he had gone too far.
At the time, he had expected immediate trouble; but two circumstances had saved him—the fact that Ketlar himself had been fooling around that night and that Adele Ketlar's friends were ignorant that she had had an affair with Baretta.
Some of his friends knew; and it had put an unpleasant power into their hands—power which they had been wise enough, however, not to employ until after the Considine incident. Even now silence might have been maintained, had not the end of the trial of Ketlar forced matters. Obviously, if Ketlar were convicted for the killing of his wife, it would be much more difficult to inform against Baretta than when the guilt was not yet legally fixed. So, to-night, the squeal was out; and Baretta and Frankie Zenn had been wondering what, if anything, was to be done about it, when the girl, who was the witness for Ketlar and had sworn to having seen a stranger with Adele, walked into the Temple with a reporter.
Now Calvin Clarke was come; and the fact that it was Clarke, instead of another assistant state's attorney, was proof to Baretta that the law concerned itself to-night with no such innocuous offenses as liquor selling and gambling, nor with the unprovable circumstances of Considine's decease, but with the bungled bump-off of the Ketlar girl.
With all this in mind, Baretta and Frankie Zenn presumed that Clarke, whom they instantly recognized, had come prepared to take them; they did not imagine that he had entered without supporting squads posted about the place until word was brought to them that apparently such was the case.
Calvin seriously misconceived the situation created by his arrival because he still believed in Ketlar's guilt. He did not quickly discover the Royle girl; indeed, he failed to find her until half of the company of the Temple had disappeared.
The process of their vanishing, although rapid, yet assumed nothing of the nature of a rush for the doors. The waiters, under orders, were whispering to selected patrons, "Looks like a raid," and the favored ones immediately departed.
Calvin discerned this; and he had obtained, also, a glimpse of Baretta before the proprietor had favored himself at the very first moment after he had learned that the rear door was not covered. Frankie Zenn imperturbably remained, exhibiting a puzzling contrast to his chief's conduct. Why, if Baretta expected a raid upon the place or if he feared trouble over the Considine affair, did not Zenn fear it even more? What to-night personally and particularly threatened George Baretta?
Likely he had heard, Calvin reckoned, that some of his former friends were saying that he had shot Adele Ketlar; but why should a rumor such as that upset him? For one reason only—if it were provable. So Calvin was shifting some of the settled certainties in his own mind, when he caught sight of the Royle girl at a table with Oliver.
She was seated, wearing her coat and hat, ready to go out, as also was the reporter; evidently they had noticed him some moments earlier, for Calvin found them both watching him, and she glanced up at Oliver, who was standing beside the table, and they exchanged some words regarding himself, Calvin believed. Oliver advanced and Calvin met him at the edge of the cleared dance floor.
"She's identified him positively, sir," Oliver whispered, importantly.
"Who?" asked Calvin.
"George Baretta; he was the man in the flat. It's positive," repeated Oliver with a satisfaction which further shook Calvin's unsettled certainties.
Calvin looked at the Royle girl, and his stubborn confidence in his own opinion collapsed. He saw her seated, waiting for him to come to her, quivering in her sureness of proof of her truth. She stood up, when he did not approach, and joined Oliver. "I saw him," she said quietly and distinctly to Calvin. "He's the man I saw with Adele."
"You're taking him to-night, sir?" asked Oliver, believing Mr. Clarke had come with a squad.
"Take her home," said Calvin.
"You don't want her here?" asked Oliver.
"Take her home," Calvin repeated, his mind suddenly of no service to him as he gazed at her eyes.
"I'll take her outside," agreed Oliver, "and I'll come back."
"Don't come back," commanded Calvin. "I tell you, take her home."
He felt himself become hotly excited, though he controlled his appearance; he wanted to push the reporter to the door, and he wanted to seize the Royle girl's wrist—her white, slender wrist and hand—and lead her out under his own protection.
"We'll go outside," said Oliver to her; and they added themselves to the throng at the doors.
Every one who was in control of his faculties was leaving the dance-room; except for a few patrons, sunk in sleep upon their chairs, every table was deserted; a half dozen waiters nervously strolled about, but the rest had disappeared; every one was bent on personal escape as silently and inconspicuously as possible; but, in spite of this, they squabbled at the doors.
Calvin went to a telephone booth, conveniently placed for the use of guests. His coin in the box brought no response; the line was dead. "Wire cut," he thought and tried a second public booth before seeking the office, where he found, not Zenn, but a black-browed subordinate in charge.
"No phone to-night," this substitute commented, after Calvin attempted vainly to use Baretta's wire. "All outa order."
Calvin returned to the empty hall and visited the front door which stood open and brought him the sounds of starting cars Darkness, except for the moonlight, was over the pylons; the garish lights had been switched off. Here and there couples stood in the snow, the girl huddled against the man, but each pair was separated from the others.
"No taxis," complained a youth. "And no phone."
Oliver and the Royle girl had gone, Calvin thought, until he stepped back into the hall and encountered them both. "Somebody's grabbed our car," Oliver explained.
"I have a taxi waiting," said Calvin.
"Don't fool yourself," advised Oliver. "Nothing's waiting but a couple of frozen flivvers; neither of 'em 'I'll start and they're locked anyway. We've been all around. You got nothing coming?" he inquired, his exploration having disabused him of the theory that Mr. Clarke was supported.
"No," admitted Calvin.
"Then it's on hoofs for me to the next phone," Oliver announced. "I got to call my office; they're certainly Waiting to hear from me," he emphasized, as he thought of his paper. "See here, what statement will I send in for you? You're not saying there's nothing to this now?"
"No," said Calvin.
"Well, what do you say about her?" Oliver demanded, seizing the arm of the Royle girl roughly.
No roughness was intended, but Calvin resented it; he had an absurd impulse to strike down Oliver's hand. Outwardly he controlled himself, but he was become again unwarrantably excited.
"I'll have a statement to-morrow," he replied.
"I want it to-night," insisted Oliver.
"I won't give it to-night," Calvin refused, with his stubborn mind severed, it seemed, from his extraordinary emotion, which warmed him with satisfaction when Oliver released the Royle girl's arm. Yet his mind kept control, for he wanted to replace Oliver's hand with his own and take her to his protection; and he did not, but simply said to her, "We'll go home now."
She addressed to him the first word she had spoken since she had told him of her identification of Baretta. "How?" she asked.
"Come outside," bid Calvin, and he felt that she accompanied him rather than Oliver.
The moonlit area before the pylons had been abandoned during the last minutes; no motor car or other vehicle was visible in either direction upon the road; the couples who had been stranded were walking on the snowy cement toward the city.
"You can't hoof it," said Oliver, gallantly, glancing down at the Royle girl's small dancing slippers.
"Why not?" she inquired. "They are."
"You can't," said Calvin, quickly, with far more emphasis than Oliver, and, realizing that he offered no alternative, he set off on his own scrutiny of the sheds where Oliver had found the frozen flivvers, and there he came upon a short, stocky man unlocking one of the cars.
The fellow looked about and bent to crank and prime as Calvin approached, and he was rewarded by a few explosions, which soon had the engine running. He raced it loudly, and in the noise said, "I'm Neski, Mr. Clarke."
"Hm," said Calvin, peering closer, and recognized him as a plain-clothes officer who had been working with Seifert.
"You better get in," suggested Neski, himself slipping into the driver's seat of his car, which was of touring model with top and curtains. "Baretta and Frankie Zenn 've made themselves scarce. They'll not be back."
"Wait," bid Calvin; but the delay was short, for Oliver and the Royle girl had heard the motor.
"Who's he?" Oliver questioned Mr. Clarke cautiously.
"I know him," Calvin replied, and Oliver followed the Royle girl to the rear seat. Calvin got in beside Neski, who backed and swung onto the road headed, not east, but west.
"This is the best way," he explained, crowding the motor.
"Why?" asked Oliver.
"Oh, it's the way I take," replied Neski. "It'll be quicker to-night."
"It won't be," Oliver objected. "I got to get to a phone right away. I got to call my paper."
Neski shoved out the curtain beside him and peered back along the road; thereupon he increased the speed of the car for several hundred yards until, suddenly, he put on the brakes and drew up at a lonely dwelling, where a dim night-light flickered.
"Pound these birds out of bed," Neski invited. "They'll have a phone." And he reached over the seat, flinging open the rear door for the reporter.
"Wait for me a minute?" Oliver asked, stepping down.
"It'll be no minute. You can buy a ride in for five spots or flag a bootlegger," Neski dismissed him, unceremoniously, and started the car. "Shut that door, please," he requested the passenger remaining in back.
Joan Daisy felt the palpable approach of danger. "We oughtn't to leave him, ought we?" she protested.
"He's all right," rejoined Neski. "Maybe he's the one in luck. Go on; shut the door."
She obeyed, since there was no object in leaving it swinging with Oliver left far behind. Again the driver crowded the motor, and the car pushed away at its top pace.
The driver—Joan Daisy did not know his name nor anything more about him than she had heard in the three words from Mr. Clarke—pushed out the curtain, as before, and after his glance back, he worked at his throttle in attempt to increase the speed.
Joan Daisy knelt on the seat and gazed out through the little rear window and discerned, far behind, a car without lights which was keeping up with or gaining upon them.
It passed the lonely house, where Oliver had been left, and followed, increasing in size and distinctness under the clear moonlight; it was the only car in sight and Joan Daisy watched it, trying at the same time to hear the words which Mr. Clarke exchanged with the man, whom he knew.
"Hold on!" warned the driver, loudly; and she did, but was flung to the side of the seat as the car swung to the left, and, refusing to be straightened to a new course, skidded and spun about until it headed almost directly up the road down which it had been pointed.
"Don't turn again," bid Mr. Clarke's voice. "Go ahead," and the driver hurried the car across the road, upon which it had been traveling, and onto a branch to the north.
Joan Daisy gazed through the isinglass in the side curtain and saw the other car about a block away, as she reckoned.
Of course, there were no blocks out there in the country. It was meadow or flat farmland with old cornstalks sticking up through the snow. Joan Daisy knelt and looked rearward in time to see the other car make the turn after her and Mr. Clarke and the man he knew. The unlighted machine was going very fast and skidded only a little so it gained a good deal.
"Yes," said Mr. Clarke's voice distinctly; and Joan Daisy realized that he had been looking back and was informing the driver that the other car turned after them.
"I guess so," replied the driver in a voice which told that he guessed no longer, but was sure that the unlighted car pursued with ugliest purpose; for Baretta's reputed method of ridding himself of persons dangerous to him, was to shoot from a car; and Joan Daisy, kneeling and looking back, knew it.
She realized that it had been in the driver's mind when he had avoided the straight road to the city upon which Baretta would have expected them; she found meaning in the remark that Oliver, left at the lonely house, might be the one in luck; she believed that Baretta and Zenn, with other gunmen, were in that black car and that their purpose was to shoot through the curtains into this car and kill her and Mr. Clarke and the driver. Baretta would leave no witness.
She clung with strained hands to the back of the seat, and her heart half choked her with its throbbing, but, queerly, she looked back as if upon a terror approaching another, as if a frightful thing was to be done to some one else, not to herself. It seemed a different order of occurrence from any which could happen to her; it was the sort of death of which one read often and heard report but always it had been visited upon some one else.
"Get down," said Mr. Clarke's voice; and he brought her to herself. She, Joan Daisy Royle, the witness for Ket and who would be the witness against Baretta—she was kneeling and looking out a glass in a rear curtain at a car coming up with gunmen to shoot her. A bullet, and she would lie as Adele had lain, and as had been told so fully in the court. "Get down!" said Mr. Clarke, and he reached back and grasped her. "Get down on the floor, Joan Daisy!"
She felt herself firmly held; she turned, his hands guiding her, and she faced him, as he knelt in his seat with his arms over the back of it, grasping her.
"I think they'll shoot," he said, speaking steadily as he had before. "You get down on the floor."
"What are you doing?" she asked him.
"Get down," he begged, and his hands pressed her down as a glare of light darted through the little window and the snow alongside was agleam.
The driver of the other car had flashed on his headlights, and a spotlight played on the rear curtain and through the little window. Looking back into the glare, Calvin saw the car swing to the side as it came closer, and he called to Neski, "Now!"
They had agreed, Neski and he, to keep to the road as long as they were ahead; for of course it was possible that the unlighted car bore, not Baretta and Frankie Zenn, but merely a drunken party on a wild, midnight joyride; it was possible, too, that luck of engine or of tire would intervene and let Neski's machine slip away upon the road; but before the car was overtaken Neski would turn into the fields.
Calvin had given the signal for this, and he braced himself for the jolt, or perhaps the overturn, when the little car left the road; and with one hand he held firmly to Joan Daisy. He expected firing at any moment, with bullets ripping through the flimsy canvas of the rear. He carried no pistol, so he had taken Neski's, only to find himself helpless to use it until the pursuers declared themselves beyond doubt. They would do this with a volley, if they were Baretta's gunmen, Calvin knew; yet he must wait.
He was flung with the leap of the little car as Neski swerved it from the road and upon the bumps of the frozen field; he heard shots, heard the windshield crack and wood splinter, and he thrust Neski's pistol between the curtains and fired.
It was almost at random, he realized, with no chance of hitting while the car jounced in the frozen furrows, so he withdrew his hand; the other car, too, ceased to fire. It had run on the road past the point where Neski had taken to the fields; it was, Calvin saw, a much larger and heavier car and it carried, to judge from the volley of pistol shots, three or four gunmen.
With his left hand, Calvin clung to the arm of Joan Daisy. "You hurt?" he asked her.
"No, are you?"
"All right?" he asked of Neski.
"Yeh. What they doing?" Neski could not take his eyes from the obstacles of the ground.
"Coming after us," Calvin reported, for the big car followed into the field; and he released Joan Daisy to have both hands for reloading the pistol.
"Keep down," he begged her.
"What's the use?"
No use, he realized, when he saw, as had she, that the frozen ground supported Baretta's car which was cutting across ahead of them. "Go left," said Calvin to Neski.
"Fence there."
"Go ahead."
"Sure," said Neski. "Sure. . . . Give me my gun, when we stop."
Calvin held it, reloaded, and he counted, as he used to in imaginary battles when he was a little boy, how each cartridge could finish one man; but he knew that each would not; he knew that the men in the other machine first would finish him and Neski and Joan Daisy, would kill them all together and leave their bodies to be found in the car in the field. He was become a witness, and soon would be a lifeless victim of one of those ferocious sallies of cold-blooded, merciless city savages who, though he had gathered evidence against them and tried to prosecute them, never had become quite credible to himself. Of course he well knew they existed; for they were named and pointed out, and he had seen the subjects of their ferocity—bodies shot through and through and flung upon a city street or kicked to the side of a country road or left in a car running wild until it crashed into something.
"Get down," he begged Joan Royle, though knowing it was no use in the end; but he had to do something to protect her, so he seized her and again pressed her to the floor as he heard crackling under the wheels and the car lurched deep, flinging sidewise, and did not right itself but went over.
Wood and glass and ice—though he did not recognize this until later—shattered about him; his head was struck, but his shoulders took the heaviest blow. He and the car and the glass came to rest; he was under the car, pinned down upon hard, sharp ground, not flat but steeply sloped, unless he was very dizzy. Edges of glass touched him everywhere, altogether too much glass for the windshield; so he came to realize—not connectedly, but now a little and next a little more amid other discoveries—that he was lying on the side of a deep ditch which must have frozen over when full, and later had emptied, leaving a thin surface of ice through which the car had broken.
He spoke to the Royle girl and heard her voice; she claimed that she was all right; and he felt her hands at his shoulder. She proved able to move, having been in the space between the seats, when the car capsized, so that she was not caught under the rear seat as was he by the front seat. Neski, beside him, fared like himself and lay at the bottom of the ditch under the steering-wheel.
"Where's the gun?" Neski groaned, swearing. "Where's the gun?"
Calvin felt for it, remembering that he had clutched it when the car went over; it must be at hand, he thought, and he must find it to fight the savages who, in cold blood and without a moment's mercy, would kill them all. Their engine had stopped, and in the silence Calvin heard the crunch of wheels slowly approaching on the icy ground; it came very cautiously, that motor car of gunmen, and as it drew alongside, some one began shooting.
His first bullet tore through the bottom of the dashboard; the second splintered the bottom of the front seat; the third struck almost in the same place and the next came a little rearward as the gunman deliberately and accurately raked the wreck from end to end.
Another pistol took up the task, perhaps in the same hand; perhaps another gunman fired in his turn.
Calvin struggled and stifled himself, gasping in helplessness under the horror of these methodical shots.
"Down," he whispered to Joan Daisy. "Down as low as you can." For the bullets all struck above them. The metal of the car in part protected them, but their chief shield was that which had overturned the car—the depth of the ditch. The gunmen underestimated it or else could not fire lower without shooting into the ground, for neither Calvin nor Joan Daisy nor Neski was hit.
"Where's my gun?" Neski demanded; and Calvin's fingers fumbled for it amid the ice.
The pistol shots ceased. Calvin heard the gunmen's car maneuvering. Likely they had come to the edge of the ditch and were backing before making a turn. The shots came again, and the car was nearer; bullets struck into the ditch, but they were strays deflected from the frame of the car. Still nobody was hit, though more than two automatics must have been emptied.
The gunmen's car again drew alongside; maybe twenty feet away, Calvin's thought; and somebody put shots into the wreck, methodically once more, at spaces of about a foot from end to end. Throughout all this, the ditch had given no sign of life at all; so the gunmen's motor car halted; the shooting stopped; a door opened and somebody stepped down, his feet crunching the crusted snow. A gunman was coming, Calvin knew, revolver in hand to explore the ditch and make sure of his work.
"My gun," Neski demanded, "my gun."
"Quiet!" gasped Calvin but knew that the voice was heard. Movement in the ditch also was to be heard; for the Royle girl was trying to crawl up between the rim of a door and the ice on the side of the slope. Calvin said no word to her, and she none to him. He thought that if she, being a girl, cried out for mercy they might tell her to crawl forth and might not kill her immediately; but she did not cry out, though the gunman crouched at the edge of the ditch. Instead of a cry from her, there roared a pistol; it roared and flashed again and again, as fast as a trigger could be pulled. The Royle girl fired it up at the form on the edge of the ditch in the moonlight; and the form toppled back.
Calvin's lungs filled with breath and his groping fingers clenched, ending their search for Neski's gun. The Royle girl had it.
Revolver shots, scarcely to be heard after the deafening noise under the car, spat from the machine in the field and sang upon iron and steel. The Royle girl slid down into the ditch. "Hit?" called Calvin. "They hit you?"
"I hit him," she cried. "I shot him!"
"They hit you?"
"They didn't! I shot him; I shot him over!"
Calvin's pulses pricked and swelled wildly with her triumph. It might be for only the minute, but she had shot one gunman; the next minute others might come from the car.
They fired into the wreck, but no one else visited the edge of the ditch; no one else left the car except, it seemed, to drag into it the man who had advanced to the ditch and who, after being shot, had been left to get himself back to the car, coughing.
The transmission grated and the car moved away.
Calvin's strained muscles relaxed, and he lay feeling the weight less crushing upon him. He was pinned by his shoulders and stabs of pain centered in his shoulders; but his head was clear, and his hands and feet could move. Neski, held under the steering wheel, coughed; Neski's ribs were broken probably, Calvin thought; but Neski remained conscious. With much difficulty he found cartridges to reload his revolver and handed them to the Royle girl, praising her meanwhile.
She made no reply, and Calvin spoke to her sharply, imagining that she might be fainting. "I'm listening," she told him. "Are they coming back?"
How she responded to the thrill of danger, Calvin thought; how she had risen to fight; how she had taken her triumph, though in the next instant she might have been killed.
"You got one sure?" asked Neski.
"I shot him over."
"Nobody'll be back," said Neski. "Not them. They'll lay for you somewhere else. Too much chance for us here."
Calvin's head was awhirl with his unsettled certainties tumbling over one another; he tried to arrange his thoughts, rallying them to some new idea upon which he could depend; and he raised, for the rallying point, a conception of the Royle girl, clean and true.
He could not know how she, out of the welter of evil in her environment, could have emerged as he at last had found her to be; but, lying there under the car, he knew that she had seen, not Ketlar but Baretta, in the window of Adele Ketlar's flat, and that Joan Daisy Royle had nothing whatever to do with the murder, but that she had visited the shore that night, as she had told him, following some dream of her own wherein she had laid the stones in the sand in the pattern of stars in the sky.
He felt her trying to better his position. "I'm all right," he said; then he heard her crawling out. "Where are you going?"
"To look around."
She did so and reported, "Nobody's in sight."
He felt a scarcely perceptible shift of the pressure upon him, and he knew that she was trying to lift the wreck. She recognized the impossibility of this and desisted, sensibly, when he spoke to her.
"I'll bring help from the road," she said.
"Look out for th' road," warned Neski.
"Go to a house," said Calvin; then he said, "Wait."
"What is it?"
"I've been wrong about you, all wrong, wrong," he acknowledged to her.
He heard no reply but a footstep and whether nearer to him or away, he did not know; soon he heard her steps cracking the crust between the furrows as she hurried off. He quivered with cold and with fear when she was gone, imagining a sudden swoop of the black car from behind a barn or gunmen lurking in some hollow of the field and shooting her down.
They would return, then, for Neski and himself; some one would deliberately put a pistol to him and pull the trigger and do the same with Neski. Calvin wondered whether he would be first or second. . . . Joan Royle would be stretched in the frozen field somewhere near.
He cast off that image. He listened and, hearing nothing, he imagined to-morrow with himself and her both alive; and Ketlar.
Ketlar! Of course, it was plain that Ketlar was innocent, whatever the jury might have voted. To-morrow it would be Calvin Clarke's duty, if he lived, to inform the judge of the new evidence and to ask the discharge of Ketlar; whereupon Ketlar, freed and no longer with a wife, would certainly seek Joan Royle and claim her.
Calvin's breast swelled and his muscles drew taut and he strained so that Neski supposed him to be struggling to free himself.
"No use," said Neski, swearing. "You can't lift it."