Ladies of Chance Read online

I put it out of my thoughts, concentrated on the dope I knew she was getting set to spill.

  I led her over to the lounge and set her down. “Pull yourself and that negligee together. What have you women gotten yourselves into that pulling a gun on yourselves looks like the only way out?” I didn’t turn on a light. Sat down in a chair and looked past her so I could keep my mind clear for the job immediately at hand.

  Dolly faltered: “I guess I went crazy for a minute, Ed.”

  “You always were a little bit nuts. What’s sent you off the deep end?”

  “I’ve been so worried. I … I didn’t know where to turn.”

  “What about Herman?”

  She shuddered. “Oh no! Not him.”

  “Oke. Herman’s out. Just like the Benton gal’s husband was out, eh?”

  I wasn’t watching her so I don’t know how she reacted to that. Except that she said:

  “June … hasn’t anything further to worry about.”

  “And you have, eh?”

  Dolly moaned and lay back on the lounge. I pulled my chair up close enough to take hold of her hand. “You need to talk to someone. I’m a swell talker-to. Spill it. You can’t tell Herman. How about letting me pinch-hit for him?”

  “Can you?” Her voice was dreamy. It was dark in the room. I had four highballs inside of me.

  “Don’t you know I can?”

  “You’re sweet, Ed.” Her fingers tightened on mine.

  I let myself slide to the edge of my chair. I could see the blur of her face. The pressure of her hand didn’t let up. I slid from the chair to the lounge. She lifted my hand to her lips.

  “Love me a little, Ed.” Her voice was a passion-drugged murmur.

  I pulled far enough away from her to get my mind to working again. There was a dictograph planted in my hotel room. If Dolly had the dope I thought she had, it was a job for witnesses.

  I said: “Let’s get out of here. We can go to my hotel.”

  “I don’t want to move.” She snuggled against me.

  I said: “Damn it, I never did like to foul another man’s nest. Even if he’s a guy like Herman. Get something on and let’s go to my room.” I got up and pulled her up. She was breathing heavily. I pushed her toward the bedroom.

  “I’ll wait for you in my car down front. Slip into any sort of a dress and come on.”

  I grabbed my coat and hat and got out before she had time to argue. There was a telephone booth downstairs. I called the Bugle and got Pete Ryan on the phone. He and I had worked together in Newark before he came with the Bugle and I was sent to Miami on special assignment.

  I told him to get a stenographer and go to room 306 in my hotel that was rented in my name and unlocked. It was next to my room and the dictograph came out there.

  Dolly came down the stairs just after I hung up, and we beat it to the hotel.

  Chapter 2

  “Now, suppose you crack loose and tell me what all the shouting’s about.” I reached out for a cigarette and match from the table near the head of the bed. Dolly’s face on the pillow next to me showed white in the flare of the match. Her lips were parted and she was breathing easily like a baby. She blinked and turned her face from the light.

  “I feel like telling you everything, Ed. Here in the dark with no one to hear.” Her sigh was almost a moan. “I feel as though I’d go absolutely crazy if I didn’t talk to someone.”

  “Swell.” I lay back and puffed on my cigarette. “Get it off your mind to Uncle Dudley.”

  “You swear you’ll never tell a soul, Ed? It would be too horrible if Herman ever found out.”

  “It’ll be as secret as though you were at confession,” I promised, squeezing her hand. Then I reached out to the table and threw the switch opening the dictograph so Pete and his witness could listen in from 306.

  Dolly said: “I hardly know how to start. It’s all such a mess.”

  “Start at the beginning.”

  “That was at Mrs. Faraway’s. Where a bunch of us used to play bridge.”

  “For money?”

  “Of course. It isn’t any fun unless you bet. And she suggested going to this other place where you could play all sorts of things. Like roulette and betting on the horses.”

  “And you were unlucky?”

  “But I didn’t bet half as heavy as June. I’ll never forgive myself for taking her the first time. I didn’t know she’d be like that. Honest to God, I didn’t. I thought it would just be fun for her to go. But she didn’t know when to stop. She’d just bet and bet and keep on losing and then bet some more.”

  “Her husband must have plenty.”

  “But he hasn’t. That was the terrible part of it. He’s got an insurance office and Herman says he isn’t doing a bit good. But they’d just been married about six months, you know, and they still had a joint bank account. That’s where she got her money at first.”

  “Sounds like the same old story.” I put out my cigarette and yawned.

  “You haven’t heard anything yet. That’s just the beginning.”

  “I haven’t heard anything worth slitting her goozle over.”

  “Ed. You wouldn’t be so heartless if you knew.”

  “I’m waiting for the sordid details.”

  “I tried to get her to stop. Honest to God, I did. But she just wouldn’t listen to me.”

  “No one’s blaming you … yet,” I told her. “Get on with your story … if you’ve got one.”

  “I’m trying to tell you but you keep interrupting.”

  I lit another cigarette and didn’t say anything. She said:

  “Well?”

  “What?”

  “Why don’t you say something?”

  “I’m practicing not interrupting so you can get on with your yarn.”

  “Oh. Well, I lent her some money the first month to put back in the bank so Jim wouldn’t know. She swore to me she’d quit as soon as she got even. But she didn’t get even. She was terribly unlucky like I told you. And the second month all her money was gone and she was frantic and went to Mr. Parker—he’s the manager—and he was awfully kind and loaned her the money to put back in the bank so the statement would look all right to Jim.”

  “Quite a philanthropist.”

  “What?”

  “Let it pass. Did he loan her the money without any security?”

  “Only her IOU. And he made her promise to bring it back and gamble with it after Jim saw the bank statement.”

  “And she was fool enough to do it?”

  “What else could she do? He had her IOU. It wasn’t her money. She just wanted to get back even so she could quit.”

  I said, “Of course,” and let it go at that.

  “That was when she quit telling me things,” Dolly went on quickly, sucking in her breath. “Jim was out of town a lot on some business, and June began going out evenings. I asked her where she went and she acted awfully funny. Just as if I wasn’t her best friend. And sometimes men came to her apartment and stayed late. Strange men. I left my door open a crack and saw them. But I didn’t ask her any more because I didn’t want her to feel like I was sticking my nose into her affairs.”

  “God forbid,” I muttered.

  “What?”

  “No matter. You saw these things through a crack in your door. How long ago was that?”

  “Three or four weeks ago. I was going to this place every afternoon and I had worries of my own. Herman was beginning to gripe about money being missing from his pants, and I was trying awfully hard to win back enough to pay the grocery bill before the man got mad and sent it to Herman.”

  “Why didn’t you try borrowing some from the kind Mr. Parker?”

  “We-e-e-ll. I did. Finally. That was just last week. And he said I could borrow any amount I wanted … just as long as I promised to not use it for anything else except gambling. And the funny part of it was, Ed, that when I told June about how nice he had been, she begged me not to sign any IOU’s. I couldn’t understand.
She cried about it and made an awful scene. I couldn’t get her to tell me why, but she just begged and begged me not to.”

  “So you didn’t, of course.”

  “Well, I promised her I wouldn’t. But I didn’t tell her I already had.”

  “How much?”

  “A … a thousand dollars.” Dolly said it in an awed voice.

  “How much is left?”

  “Not … any. I lost the last of it yesterday on a horse that the man said was a sure winner at six to one. Shows how much he knew. The old nag came in so far behind they didn’t even list him.”

  “What the hell has all this to do with June Benton committing suicide in your apartment this afternoon?”

  That, I thought, would give Peter Ryan a jolt, listening in on the dictograph.

  There was a catch in Dolly’s voice when she said: “I’m just leading up to it, Ed. It’s so horrible I … it makes me feel sick at my stomach to think about what made her do it.”

  “Go to the bathroom if you’re going to be sick.”

  “Not really sick, Ed. You know … I just feel sick.”

  “Go on. Get it out of your system.”

  “Get what out of my system?”

  “Either the story or what you ate for lunch.”

  “I was going to tell you about June. Mind you, I didn’t know anything about all this until this afternoon when poor June came in white as a ghost and said she’s just been to a doctor and he said she had … you know … a nasty disease.”

  “What sort of disease?”

  “A … a venereal disease. The worst one there is.”

  “Syph?”

  “Oh-huh. Isn’t it awful? I thought I’d just die when she told me. It’s almost as bad as leprosy or something, isn’t it?”

  “Almost. Did she tell you how she came to get a dose?”

  “She told me everything. I felt so sorry for her. She used to be so sweet and nice. You’d never dream she’d do anything like she did. When she loved Jim so. But it was really because she loved him so much that she did it. She couldn’t stand to have him find out what she’d been doing with the money. And when they began demanding that she pay it back, she was frantic. They threatened to go to Jim and she begged them hot to. She knew it would just kill him. And they wouldn’t let her have any more money and she was desperate. So she … well … she was crazy to earn enough money to get her IOU’s back and get away from them.…”

  “So she took the easiest way?”

  “It’s horrible of you to say it like that, Ed. You wouldn’t if you knew June like I knew her. She wasn’t that kind of a girl. I don’t believe any man except Jim had ever touched her. She told me she walked the floor two nights praying to God before she decided it would be better to do that and not have Jim know than to be prudish about it and have him find out.”

  “All right. All right. Your friend was a sweet innocent little angel. It’s a cinch she didn’t know the ropes, getting dosed up. How did she get in touch with the men?”

  “I … I think Mr. Parker had something to do with it. He was the one that first suggested she do it to make the money back.”

  I swore under my breath. This was nastier than I had even suspected. But I had just about cleaned Dolly of information. She owed them a grand, and was wondering when they were going to start putting the clamps on her to make her “earn” it back.

  I switched off the dictograph and comforted her by promising to get her some clean clients if it finally came to that.

  Chapter 3

  A whole raft of telephone messages were waiting for me when I got back to my hotel at four o’clock the next morning after taking Dolly home. All between midnight and three o’clock and all from Ellsworth Grange, managing editor of the Bugle.

  The final one on the list was marked three-fifteen A. M. It said, tersely: “Mr. Barlow is to call Mr. Grange immediately no matter when he comes in.”

  I stuffed the sheaf of messages in my pocket and went up to my room. I knew hell must be popping to have Grange so hot on my tail, but I needed to relax and have a snort before I found out what he was chewing his fingernails about.

  Right here will be a good time to give a picture of the situation I was in.

  The Miami Bugle is the newest of a string of tabloids on the Atlantic Seaboard. The main office in Newark pulls the strings that make the Bugle go. I’ve been with the outfit a good many years, filling a dozen different jobs; reporter, copy desk, rewrite, even city editor for a couple of rags on the string, finally settling down to covering feature stuff wherever it happened to break.

  That’s how I drew the Miami assignment. The job called for a man who wasn’t known in the Magic City; a man who wouldn’t be suspected of having any connection with the Bugle until the whole story was tied up and in the bag.

  My meeting Herman and Dolly Meade had been an accident. I didn’t even know they had moved to Miami. When I took the assignment I’d sworn I didn’t know a soul below the Mason and Dixon line.

  There had been a wave of society-woman gambling sweeping the country. Remember? It seemed to start in New York and spread west and south. I covered the story in Boston and Philly without getting any big results. We uncovered a certain amount of dope pointing to one big syndicate behind the whole layout, but didn’t get anything definite to tie to.

  By the time we got onto the story, the syndicate had begun to cover up and move on. That gave the boss the bright idea of sending a man to a city where it hadn’t begun to break publicly, with the idea of boring in and exposing the racket before the syndicate behind it got scared and took to cover.

  Miami was the city selected; Ed Barlow, the man.

  I’d been in Miami a week without uncovering anything. I stayed away from the Bugle office and contacted Grange by telephone only. They had a stack of murmurs and hints of what was going on, and I had run down a number of false leads before bumping into Dolly.

  In the north we had uncovered the viciousness of the racket, the system of inveigling pretty young married women and mothers to gamble on credit until so deeply involved they were afraid to tell their husbands, then forcing them into prostitution in houses owned by the syndicate.

  The rankest sort of blackmail and white slavery. Inevitably, a wave of suicide and divorce had followed the gambling craze.

  Grange suspected it was reaching that point in Miami, and he was hot on my tail for results.

  I went up to my room feeling pretty good. Meeting Dolly had been pure chance, of course, but Grange didn’t need to know that. I figured I’d be a damned fool not to make it look like a nice piece of gumshoeing.

  I slipped out of my clothes into pajamas and a dressing gown, got out a bottle of Three-Star and had a straight snifter before I called Grange at his home.

  I heard the phone buzz twice before he answered. His voice was thick with irritation and sleep. “Hello.”

  “Barlow speaking.”

  “Barlow?” The irritation increased and the sleepiness went out of his voice.

  “Hope I didn’t wake you up.” The cognac kept my voice from being too conciliatory.

  “Of course you awoke me. The phone’s right by my bed. I had just dozed off after waiting all hours for you to call.”

  “Sorry.”

  “What did you call Ryan out for this evening?”

  “I had a hot date with a cutie and I wanted to make him jealous.” I could just see Grange swell up over that. He’s a toad-like little fellow with an Irvin Cobb underlip.

  “Is that what we’re paying you for?”

  “Why ask me? You’re the one that signs the checks.”

  “Goddammit, Barlow! I don’t like your tone.”

  “That makes us even,” I told him with a chuckle.

  He paused long enough after that crack for me to tilt the bottle. To hell with him. I was feeling pretty cocky about the dope Dolly had spilled. And he was just my boss by proxy, anyway.

  “Are you deliberately trying to irritate me, Barlow
?” he managed after a long pause.

  I lied cheerfully: “Not at all. Why get your guts in an uproar because I’ve been putting in a hard evening and haven’t been here to yes you over the phone?”

  “A hard evening … with a cutie?” He said the last word as though it all but strangled him.

  “Why not? Haven’t you ever?”

  I could hear him breathing hard into the mouthpiece and decided to ease off the pressure before the fool did have apoplexy or something.

  “I ran into a lead this afternoon, Mr. Grange, and I’ve been following it relentlessly.”

  That got him. It sounded like one of his own headlines. “Information about the syndicate, Barlow?” he bellowed.

  “Nothing less. And plenty. This cutie is being taken all the way down the line.”

  “Get much out of her?”

  “Plenty. In more ways than one.”

  Grange chose to disregard my pleasantry. He was all choked up and excited. “You’re sure your connection with the Bugle is completely covered?”

  “Sure as hell.”

  “Don’t be too sure. That’s what I’ve been trying to get you about. We had an anonymous telephone call this evening. A plainly-worded warning for the Bugle to stay out of the story you’re on. It’s a fight to the death, Barlow.”

  “Eh?”

  “Indeed, yes. The scoundrel who telephoned didn’t mince his words. He gave us to understand clearly that any man we assigned to cover the woman gambling situation was marked for death.”

  “Hey.…” I started feebly.

  “I wanted you to know immediately.” Grange sounded very executivish and energetic. I could imagine him sitting in the middle of his bed in mauve pajamas—or a baby-blue nightshirt.

  “I defied him, of course. I gave him to understand emphatically that the Bugle is not to be intimidated in any of its battles for the right.”

  How sonorously the words rolled off his thick tongue. He sounded as though he was chafing at the bit for an opportunity to take up his sword and venture out to fight dragons single-handed.

  “Wait a minute,” I protested. “I’m the goat that you’re marking for slaughter.”

  “Tut, tut, Barlow. This is no time for trivialities. I tell you this is the most glorious crusade the Bugle has been privileged to embark upon. A magnificent and unparalleled opportunity for Public Service.” His voice imbued the words with capital letters.