Shirley Read online

  “That’s something I could have guessed. Now we really will take it from the top. We’ll begin by agreeing that there is no Prince James Charles Alexander and no beautiful Carlotta who kills herself. Right?”

  “Right,” he agreed.

  “Then who am I supposed to look like? Who is the girl in the pictures?”

  “Her name was Janet Stillman. She’s dead.”

  “Who is she? What is she or was she?” Shirley snapped. “I’m no dentist, and this is like pulling teeth.”

  “All right. Do you think it’s easy to tell you this? How do you think I feel? I may have to kill you. Do you think I want to?”

  “You feel like a louse—agreed. So keep on talking. Who was Janet Stillman?”

  “She was the only child of Morton Stillman, who owns the Stillman chain of department stores and a few other things too, and what it adds up to is about seventy million dollars—that’s all, just seventy million dollars. And he’s dying of cancer, with maybe a week or ten weeks to live, but he’s dying, and the only heir is Janet Stillman.”

  “And you said she was dead.”

  “That’s right. Two years ago, she took off with some creep called Charles Alexander, who was a cheap piano player from Charleston, South Carolina. They got married by a justice of the peace in a town called Hammond, Indiana, and then I suppose they headed for the Coast Outside of a little town in Arizona, they ran head on into a car going in the opposite direction. I guess they were moving about ninety miles an hour. The car burned, and there was nothing but cinders to identify. So there was no identification, just a can of tooth fillings and bent rings in the jailhouse at Mesquite, this town where it happened. Janet Stillman and Charles Alexander just disappeared. They vanished.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “You think I’m lying again?”

  “I don’t think. I got no aptitude for thinking,” Shirley sighed. “All I’m asking is how you know all this?”

  “I know it because a guy called Joey Santela knows it Santela has been Stillman’s secretary for five years. He knows more about Stillman than Stillman does. He’s a genius.”

  “Sure, he’s a genius.”

  “He is. And he’s still working for the old man. It was Stillman’s second marriage. There were no kids in the first marriage. Janet was born when Stillman was forty-six years old, the only issue, as they say. The sun rose and set in her, and then she takes off with this piano player louse! Imagine that!”

  “How do you know he was such a louse?” Shirley demanded.

  “Santela knows. Santela spent over a year tracing heron his own. He traced her to Hammond and then to Mesquite. He went out there himself with her dental records and checked the evidence. Then he got pictures of this Charles Alexander. That’s how I came into this.”

  Shirley raised her brows and nodded. “I begin to see. You’re the piano player—and I’m Janet Stillman. Is that the pitch?”

  “You got it, Shirley—right on the nose.”

  “All for seventy million dollars.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And now just tell me this—how did he find me out of a hundred and eighty million people, without prowling back and forth through Bushwick Brothers, looking for plastic olive jars?”

  “All right, take it easy—take it easy, Shirley. How do you think he found you? We spent months going through pictures, that is after he found me and I threw in with him. I had to, Shirley. This is the biggest thing that ever came my way—the biggest thing I’ll ever see in my lifetime. With me, an absolute likeness wasn’t so important. Old Stillman only saw this piano player once. But with Janet, it was something else, and she had to be twenty or twenty-one years old. That had to be an exact likeness, not an approximate likeness. So we got hold of every high-school yearbook, class of 1959 and class of 1960, in the whole Greater New York area—every town, every suburb within fifty miles of the city. It amounted to hundreds of yearbooks, and that was just the beginning. We were prepared to go through every yearbook in the United States. But then, this old bastard louses up all our plans with cancer—and it becomes a matter of days or weeks.”

  “That was inconsiderate of him,” Shirley agreed. “I can appreciate that.”

  “Maybe you could laugh it off, we couldn’t. So we checked out the local books, working night and day, and we came up with almost a hundred girls who were some kind of match for this Janet Stillman—”

  “And in the Morris High yearbook, you found one, Shirley Campbel.”

  “Exactly,” he said. “But we ran down every lead, and Joey Santela got a look at every girl. Would you believe it, there was only one of them that gave us any kind of hope?”

  “So then?”

  “Shirley—for Christ’s sake, don’t you understand? Our time was running out. This Stillman can die tonight. Maybe he’s dead already—”

  “It seems to me that your dandy little plan could work, whether he’s dead or not.”

  “Don’t you understand—he’s got to change his will. He believes she’s dead. Don’t you think he tried to find her? He would have, too, if Joey hadn’t been smart enough to wipe out the trail. Santela’s invested his life savings in this project. Sure, the old man has a lousy quarter of a million dollars in a trust fund just in case she should ever turn up alive, but that’s peanuts. She’s got to return while he’s still alive. The jewels alone that he bought her and that she inherited from the old lady—her mother’s dead—are worth a couple of million. Another five million in stocks and bonds are in the old man’s hands, to be turned over to her when and as he sees fit. Even if the family should fight a changed will and try to expose her, it’s good for maybe ten or twelve million. We can’t be pigs. But if the old man dies, we’re out in the cold. Let him die, and you’ll be walking into a lion’s den.”

  “You got me walking in there already,” said Shirley.

  “You going to say no to a proposition like this?”

  “And what about the prince routine? And what about the two hoodlums and the black car? And what about Seppi? You still got a pretty weak story.”

  “Look, Shirley—maybe we played our hand too quick. We had to. Santela cooked up that story. He figured that if I could convince you, you’d go for me just out of pity and affection—not to mention a title, which ain’t hay in America. Then, if I could make you fall in love with me, the rest would be simple.”

  “Make me fall in love with you?” Shirley gasped. “You can’t be serious, Buster!”

  “So it didn’t work. But Joey didn’t know you. He only saw you on the street a couple of times. He couldn’t work out your character. Then time was closing in. This Jack Flint works out the details for Joey, and he sent the two animals to get you. We figured that if you were in the same spot I was, I’d get your sympathy. It just went wrong. We couldn’t imagine that those two idiots would wreck the car and kill themselves. They were never supposed to kill you. Neither was Seppi. He was only supposed to frighten you with the knife and let you run upstairs. Instead, he goes crazy, and this cop has to plug him. I wish he got it, the lousy, stupid spick. He deserves it.”

  “I never met anyone just like you,” Shirley said with awe. “You got character, believe me.”

  “Look, no one’s asking you to marry me. All we’re asking is for you to put your hot little hands on a million dollars—or five million as your cut. That’s rough, isn’t it?”

  “You’re so sure that old Stillman wouldn’t take one look at me and call the cops?”

  “Joey took more than one look at you, and he says he’s ready to swear on a Bible that you’re Janet Stillman. Anyway, according to Joey, the old man’s so nuts for you and weeping so many quarts that his daughter ain’t by his side to watch him go, that he’d welcome you with open arms even if you were Chinese. So who should say we don’t give him a little happiness? Where he’s going, he can’t take two bits, much less seventy million.”

  “So you’re practically doing him a favor,
” Shirley nodded. “A little for you, a little for him, and joy on every hand.”

  “You can be snotty about it—or you can look at it like a sensible person.”

  “Just one thing, Buster,” Shirley said evenly, “and get this through your lovely little blue-eyed head. You ever open your mouth to me and use a word like snotty again, and I will take you apart. In person, I regard you as a punk—a creep and a liar. If I believe what you just told me, it’s because I don’t think you got enough brains to make up a story like that on short notice, and because I happen to remember reading when Stillman’s daughter disappeared. But that doesn’t give you rights or liberties. Just remember that. Maybe you can shoot me. But you don’t insult me.”

  “I’m not going to lose my temper over anything,” he said stolidly. “This is a business proposition, pure and simple.”

  “Suppose I say no.”

  Albert Soames shrugged. “Then Joey goes it alone. He’s still with the old man, and Stillman’s going to die anyway. We settle for peanuts.”

  “With me here to blow the whistle on you?”

  “You don’t blow any whistle, Shirley. I’m here—and Flint’s up on the roof. I don’t want to kill you—but if I must, I must.”

  “The cops got Seppi.”

  “Seppi’s a half-witted junkie. He doesn’t know what side is up.”

  Shirley regarded Soames thoughtfully for a long moment. His coat bulged slightly where a tiny gun nestled under his arm.

  “Well?” he said.

  “Suppose I did throw in with you? How do we get out of here? There’s a cop in the hall downstairs and another across the street.”

  “And Flint’s on the roof waiting for us, and the roof was checked out We got an exit four houses away and a car waiting. The cops are smart. They put two men downstairs and never think about the roof.”

  “They’re dumb,” Shirley smiled. “You cookies are smart, aren’t you? All right, let’s go up to the roof.”

  Soames stood up and smiled back. He unbuttoned his jacket, and showed Shirley the tiny gun in the holster under his arm. “I’m glad you were smart, Shirley,” he said. “Maybe the others don’t look exactly like Janet, hut a few were pretty good resemblances. I would hate to have had to keep you quiet. It would make me sick, I’m telling you that. I never killed anyone before.”

  “There’s a heart of gold under that rough exterior, isn’t there, Buster?” Shirley said.

  6. Flint

  Flint was a large, square man, built like a pug, with a thin mouth and a flattened nose. Soames told Shirley about him. Flint was an ex-fighter who had once been a chauffeur for Morton Stillman. According to Soames, Santela did the thinking and Flint was in charge of the action. They had gotten together on the basis of taking Stillman, but in his own direct-action method, Flint wanted to move in, clean out the safe and remove the jewels. It might mean killing the old man, and since Santela had certain prejudices about murder and a normal desire to avoid it unless absolutely necessary, he preferred the other method.

  “Anyway,” Soames explained, “what’s in the safe is chickenfeed. It’s true that the old man keeps negotiable bonds there, as well as a decent amount of cash—but suppose it adds up to a couple of million with the jewels? What’s that against the whole bundle?”

  “Sure. What’s a couple of million?” Shirley agreed.

  “You’ll laugh yourself into a box some day.”

  “How would you get into the safe?” Shirley asked him. “Blow it?” She liked the professional note in the phrase.

  “Not that safe. Too big, too strong. But what’s to blow—Joey’s got the combination. He’s had it for years. The old man trusts him. Brains.” He tapped the side of his head. “Brains, that’s what it comes down to. Joey’s got brains, but this Flint is a hoodlum. Nothing but muscle. So I don’t want you to get nervous about what happens now. Whatever happens, I don’t want you to get nervous. Let me worry about Flint. I can handle him.”

  “Who’s nervous, James Charles? Nerves, I don’t know the meaning of the word. My nerves have atrophied.”

  “And don’t call me James Charles.”

  “OK, Buster—OK.”

  They tiptoed down the hall, up the stairs, and on the top floor, Soames climbed the ladder to the roof, shouldering aside the square cover. In the old converted town houses in the Village, there were no flights of stairs to roof level, simply the ladder and the hood over the opening.

  In that moment, when Soames was at the top of the ladder, removing the opening to the roof, Shirley was free. She knew that. She knew that if she turned and bolted down the stairs, she had a better than even chance of making it down to the lower hallway and the police officer; and she played with the thought. She wanted desperately to take the chance, but she wanted something else too—and weighing one against the other, she paused a moment too long.

  “Come on up,” Soames said.

  Hooking her purse over her arm, she climbed the ladder, and Soames helped her out onto the roof. As he replaced the cover, Shirley looked around her at the tops of the old brownstones and the circle of towering buildings that surrounded the little enclave of the past. The moon was out, and beyond the glow of the city lights, the sky sparkled faintly with stars. But Flint was nowhere in sight. She and Soames were apparently alone on the rooftop.

  “Where’s Flint?” she asked him.

  “Shut up.” He faced her away from the roof’s connection with the next building. “Look this way. Keep it cool.”

  “If you’re playing games again, Buster—”

  “I said to keep it cool,” he whispered. “Shut up. Flint’s got a gun. Just do it my way.”

  A voice behind Shirley said, “Put your hands up and don’t turn around.”

  Soames raised his hands. Shirley, feeling disgusted and weary of practically everything that supposedly grown men did, let her own hands remain by her sides.

  “I said get your hands up, lady.”

  “Why? What are you going to do if I don’t put my hands up? Shoot me? Rob me? I got twenty-two dollars and maybe forty cents in my purse. Big haul! Oh, I’m so sick and tired of what passes for brains among the lot of you. Are you Flint?”

  “I want the prince there.”

  “Oh, knock it off,” Shirley sighed. “If you’re Flint, let’s get on with it. The prince has stopped being a prince. He gave up his throne.”

  The voice said, “What the hell is this, Soames?”

  Slowly, his hands still up, Soames turned around. Shirley moved with him. She saw Flint standing there in the moonlight, head hunched in his shoulders, the gun in his hand.

  “Put away the gun,” Soames said. “It’s all right. I had to level with her, because that prince story was as full of holes as Swiss cheese. I told Joey it was.”

  “You lousy, stupid punk! When Joey says do something one way, that’s the way you do it!”

  “Sure. Sure. If Joey says jump off the roof, I got to jump off the roof. I’m telling you that she’s in with us. I leveled with her. I gave her the whole layout, and she’s in.”

  “You what?”

  “I gave her the whole layout.”

  “You stupid, cheap punk!” Flint cried, advancing on Soames. “Doublecrossing us with that broad!”

  “I didn’t doublecross you! Now listen to me, Flint!”

  Watching them, Shirley saw that now Soames was not afraid. He was tight, alert, angry, but not afraid. The pink-cheeked, whimpering boy who had sat and cringed in her easy chair was gone entirely. This was someone else, another personality entirely.

  “I ought to spread you over this roof like paint!”

  “Well, you just try it, Flint,” Soames said coolly. “Just try it.” Soames raised his voice. “For Christ’s sake, put that damn gun away. The house under us is lousy with cops, and they may decide any minute that the building has a roof!”

  Shirley held her breath as Flint hesitated. Then he put the gun into a holster under his arm, and she breath
ed more easily, and Soames grinned and said to Flint:

  “It comes to the same thing, doesn’t it? The only reason Joey thought up that prince routine was so that we could count her in. Now she’s in.”

  “I don’t like it,” Flint muttered.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t like it. She don’t look to me like that kind of a broad.”

  “You’re a specialist on broads, aren’t you, Flint?” Soames smiled thinly and licked his lips. “You can read a broad’s mind, can’t you? You can take one look at a broad and you know everything there is to know about her.”

  “Just stop calling me a broad, both of you,” Shirley snapped, “or I walk right out of this.”

  “You shut your yap,” Flint growled at Shirley. “You just shut your yap or I’ll close it for you. And as for you”—he turned on Soames—“you lousy little punk, I know more about broads than you’d know in five lifetimes. Lousy little faggot, asking me what I know about broads!”

  “I told you, Flint!”

  “What did you tell me, punk?”

  “I told you never to call me that! I told you I’d kill you if you ever called me a faggot again!” The tiny gun was in his hand now. “Don’t reach for your gun, Flint! I tell you, don’t reach for your gun! Put your hands up!” Soames was taut as a bowstring, trembling with rage, poised on his toes, his lips drawn back. “Up, up!” he cried, his voice breaking with intensity.

  Shirley watched Flint raise his hands. He was frightened, she realized, afraid of Soames and of what had happened to Soames, much more afraid than Soames had pretended to be. Flint looked cruel and hard, but it was an accident of the body that nature had enclosed him in. Under the surface toughness, there was no spine, no steel, no resistance. He had been punctured, collapsed like an inflated balloon, and now his soul was crawling with fear and capitulation. With Soames, on the other hand, the skin of a motherless angel enclosed a devil. Shirley knew a lot more about men than Flint had pretended to know about women; she had been dealing with men since she was twelve years old, cozening them, fighting them off, playing the diplomat, the innocent, the bewildered—and she realized now that she had never known a man just like Soames before.