Then he heard something else. A woman’s voice—she was screaming. The scream was cut short abruptly. It was as if a hand had been clapped suddenly over her mouth.
Keller frowned. It’s none of my business, he told himself. He was a married man with three kids. It didn’t make sense to butt into somebody else’s quarrel.
But still, he was right next door. Maybe someone was getting hurt. He put his shoes on and went outside.
He paused for a second outside the adjoining room, Room 24, trying to make up his mind. He could hear a couple of low masculine voices inside, and a steady quiet female sobbing sound. The sensible thing would be to turn around and go back into his own room and forget the whole thing. Or else to phone the desk clerk and let him go investigate the scream.
But almost before he knew what he was doing, Keller reached out and knocked at the door of Room 24.
The door opened almost instantly. A lean-faced man with piercing eyes glared out at Keller. The man was about Keller’s own height, five feet ten inches.
“Yeah? What is it?”
“Pardon me for intruding,” Keller said mildly. “I’m in the room next door. I heard someone cry out, a couple of minutes ago, and I wondered if there was any way I could help—”
“Yeah,” said the lean-faced man. He grinned, showing wolfish yellow teeth. “You could help out. Yeah.”
Suddenly he reached out and caught Keller by the collar of his shirt. He yanked the salesman into the room with one quick jerk. Keller was too surprised to do anything but tumble inward.
The door slammed shut behind him and he heard the lock click. In his first puzzled moment he looked around at the group that faced him.
He saw the gun first. He knew enough about guns to recognize it was a .357 Magnum that, at this distance, could blow a hole through him big enough to fit a cat through.
The man holding the gun was sitting in the armchair, legs crossed. He was a pudgy-looking, greasy-faced man with glossy black hair.
The girl was on the bed. She was a blonde, in her early twenties. She was wearing only a brassiere and a slip. She had been tied up with strips torn from her dress and her blouse, and one side of her face was puffing up where someone had hit her.
The lean-faced man was standing by the door. There was a third man in the room, a good-looking fair-haired kid of about twenty or twenty-one. He was sitting on the bed, ready to clap his hand over the girl’s mouth if she tried to yell again.
Keller felt his knees go watery. He was thirty-four, so he had been old enough to be drafted in World War II, but he had spent the whole war policing a prisoner-of-war camp in Colorado, and this was the first time in his life anyone had ever pointed a gun at him and meant it. He wanted to sit down, but there was no place to sit.
He said, “Look here, guys, I don’t want any trouble. I don’t know what you’re up to, but I’m a married man with kids and I want out.”
“Shut up,” said the man with the gun.
“I’ll go back to my room and forget I ever came in here,” Keller pleaded. “I don’t want to get mixed up in—”
“Shut up,” said the man with the gun a second time. The big gun twitched meaningfully in a little circle and came to rest in a dead line with Keller’s forehead. Keller gulped and decided not to say anything further just now. The girl on the bed was staring at him oddly, almost with sympathy. Keller wondered what this caper was all about. He wished fervently that he had minded his own business and not tried to play Boy Scout.
“Raise your hands high up in the air,” the fat man with the gun commanded thinly.
Keller obeyed without a word. The hard-looking man who had pulled him inside approached him and efficiently frisked him from shoulders to hips.
“He’s clean,” the hard-faced man reported.
“Good,” the fat man commented. He stared at Keller.
“Okay. When you stuck your face in here a minute ago, you asked if you could help. Well, the answer is yes. You can help us quite a bit.”
Keller stood stiffly erect, feeling tremendously uncomfortable. He thought of his book lying face down in his own room, only a few feet away. He thought of Beth, many miles to the east. By now all the children would be asleep. Beth would be in the living room, listening to the radio, sewing, maybe. Perhaps Nora Matthews from next door had come to visit her. Certainly Beth was not at all likely to suspect that at this moment her husband was looking down the barrel of a deadly .357 Magnum.
“How can I help you?” Keller asked.
“You know what a Judas goat is?” asked the plump, greasy-faced man.
Keller nodded jerkily. “The Judas goat is the one that leads the rest of the herd to slaughter,” he said in an uneven voice.
“Yeah. That’s right. Well, we want you to be our Judas goat for us. It’s nice and convenient that you dropped in just when you did. Saved us the trouble of looking around for a fellow to help us out.”
“Just what do you want me to do?” Keller asked. “Who are you, anyway? What’s going on here?”
The greasy-faced man said, “My name is Johnny Coppola. Does that mean anything to you?”
“No. Should it?”
“Depends on how law-abiding you are,” Coppola said.
“Plenty,” Keller said.
“Then you ain’t likely to know me. But everyone in Chicago does. I’ve got a few—uh—business enterprises down in Chicago. These men are two of my associates. Three more of my associates are registered in other rooms of this motel.”
Chicago gangsters, Keller said to himself. His throat was terribly dry.
“As for the girl,” Coppola went on, “her name happens to be Peggy Ryan. She keeps company with a cheap hood name of Mike Fitzpatrick. You know Fitzpatrick?”
Keller shook his head.
Coppola shrugged. “Fitzpatrick is also a Chicago operator. But he happens to be up in this neighborhood right now, because two days ago someone kidnapped his girlfriend Peggy and someone else sent him an anonymous tip that she had been taken up into middle Wisconsin.”
Keller looked at the girl on the bed. Her hands were tied behind her back, and her ankles were tied together. Her face was full, her lips moist and sensual. Hatred smoldered in her eyes. She had high round breasts and long, creamy legs.
Coppola said, “Fitzpatrick is looking for his girlfriend and he wants her back real hard. He and his boys are in a hotel in Portage, a few miles up the road. And here’s where you come in. We sort of want you to drive up to Portage and find Mike Fitzpatrick, and tell him where his girlfriend is. Tell him that she was abandoned by her kidnappers and that she wants him to come pick her up. That’s all you have to do.”
“And then what happens?”
“To you, nothing. You go away and forget you ever came here tonight.”
“But to Mike Fitzpatrick? It’s a trap for him, isn’t it?” Keller asked. “I lure him down here with the girl as bait, and he comes in here all unsuspecting—”
“Yeah,” said the hard-faced man behind him. “You sort of get the picture fast, smart boy.”
Keller nodded. He didn’t give a damn if these two mobs slaughtered each other. He just wanted to get out of here, away from that cannon pointed at him, wanted to get away alive and without any holes in him.
“Okay,” Keller said. “I’ll do whatever you want me to if you’ll leave me alone afterward. You want me to go right now?”
Coppola nodded. “Yeah. You have a car, don’t you?”
“Yes,” Keller said.
“Okay. You get in your car and go up to Portage. He’s at the Bailey Hotel. You tell him that Peggy Ryan is down here at—what’s the name of this place—Wofford’s. You tell him that she was kidnapped, but her heisters got scared off when they learned that he was in the next town, and they dropped her at this motel. You tell him that she’s stuck at the motel without a dime, and the motel owner won’t let her check out and he’s watching her like a hawk, and so he has to come down in person to her. And
you give him this, just as a clincher.”
Coppola nodded and the hard-faced man handed Keller a ring. It was a diamond ring, about two carats. Keller looked at it closely. It was inscribed along the inside of the band, To Peggy from Mike, with all my love. Keller guessed that a ring like this might be worth a couple of thousand.
“Everything clear?” Coppola asked.
Keller nodded. “I’ll leave right away.”
The fat gangster grinned. “Just one more little thing. Gimme your wallet.”
“My wallet? But—”
Keller felt the hard-faced man prod him in the ribs. He took his wallet out and handed it to Coppola. He had about eighty bucks in it, but Coppola obviously wasn’t interested in the cash. He was looking through the wallet, through the card section and the photos. Keller kept snapshots of Beth and the kids in the wallet.
Finally Coppola looked up, smiling coldly. He drew Keller’s social-security card from the wallet and handed everything else back to Keller. He said, “Okay Mr. Mike Keller of 404 Maple Avenue, Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. I see you got a wife and three kids. That’s nice.”
“What are you getting at?” Keller asked edgily.
“I just want some insurance. I want to make sure you won’t just get away and never come back. And I want to make sure you don’t louse us up by tipping off Fitzpatrick.”
“I won’t try any funny stuff,” Keller promised.
“You better not. Because in case you never go to Fitzpatrick, or in case you call the cops, or in case you pull some other stunt—if you try any of that, Mr. Mike Keller, and anybody in my gang should survive this night, you’re going to regret it. I know where you live, now. I know you got a family. And if you try to cross me, Keller, I’ll see to it that you and your family get hunted down and wiped out, one by one. First your kids and then your wife, and you last of all. You got that straight?”
“Don’t worry. I won’t cross you.” Keller’s voice was hoarse-sounding He was no more of a coward than the next guy. But this kind of threat shook him deeply.
“Good,” Coppola said “Okay. Scram. Bailey’s Hotel, in Portage. And remember my warning.”
The hard-faced man opened the door for him, and Keller stepped out onto the little porch that ran the whole length of the motel. He gripped the railing tight and took a deep breath. His heart was thundering.
He knew he didn’t have any choice but to do what Coppola wanted. It was too risky to try calling the mobster’s bluff. He couldn’t risk the lives of Beth and the kids by notifying the police or by simply leaving the motel and vanishing. Maybe Coppola would track him down and maybe not, but there was no sense chancing it.
Keller let himself into his own room and slipped into his jacket. His book still lay where he had put it down, twenty minutes ago. He shook his head mournfully. If he hadn’t butted in where he didn’t belong, he wouldn’t be caught up in this pattern of violence and revenge now. But it was no good trying to second-guess. He had butted in, and now he was forced to be an unwilling accomplice in the ambush Johnny Coppola was planning for his gang enemy.
He took his car keys from the dresser, locked up his room, and went outside again, down the porch steps and toward his car. He saw that the door of Room 24 was slightly ajar. Although he could see no one, he was certain that the lean, hard-faced man was standing there, peering out, watching him.
Keller got behind the wheel of his car. His hand was shaking so much that he had trouble fitting the key into the ignition. But finally he got the car moving, and drove down the motel driveway and onto the main road, heading north and west toward the town of Portage.
It was no more than five miles away—a six-or seven-minute drive, at best. The night was quietly cold, with an almost-full moon lighting up the broad flat countryside, and a sharp sprinkling of stars overhead. The time was about quarter to ten. Back home, Beth would probably be combing out her long, lovely red-brown hair now, and getting ready for bed. He missed her tremendously.
While he was still a couple of miles from Portage, he drove up to a late-night roadhouse whose neon signs proclaimed BEER WINE WHISKEY COCKTAILS. The place was full of local kids, rocking and rolling to the strains of a booming jukebox. Keller steadied his nerves with a single shot of bourbon, then returned to the car. Ordinarily he did not drink while he was behind the wheel, but tonight, he thought, was something special. One shot wouldn’t affect his coordination much, and it would go a long way to settle the butterflies in his stomach.
A few minutes later he was in Portage, a town of about eight thousand people. He had been through the town maybe fifty times in the last few years, but he had never stayed in it overnight, and so he had no idea where the Bailey Hotel was. He pulled up at a gas station.
When the serviceman came out, Keller said, “I’m looking for the Bailey Hotel.”
“Go along Main for a while, then turn left at the third traffic light. The Bailey’s on the left-hand side of the street. You can’t miss it.”
“Thanks. Let me have three bucks’ worth in the tank, too, while you’re at it.”
While the station-man filled the gas tank, Keller jotted the amount down on his expense card with a shaky hand. The man grinned at him as Keller forked over three singles.
“Say, Mac, are you feeling okay?”
“Sure,” Keller said.
“Well, you look kinda pale to me, that’s all.”
“Just nerves,” Keller said. “Been working a rough schedule. You know how it is.”
“Yeah. Well, take it easy.”
Keller drove off. Not much later, he reached the third traffic light on Main, turned left, and pulled his car to a halt outside the swinging sign that read bailey hotel. It was a dingy-looking place, four stories high, with a redbrick front. Keller went inside.
It had the usual kind of cheap-hotel lobby—old battered armchairs, a couple of tables covered with last month’s magazines, a video set, a few big potted plants in the corners. The man at the desk was playing solitaire when Keller came up to him.
“I’m looking for a party named Fitzpatrick, from Chicago. Could you give me the room?”
The desk clerk frowned “Don’t think, we have any Fitzpatricks here. Lemme check.”
He checked. When he was through checking, he shook his head. “Sorry, nobody by that name been here all week. Maybe at Crawford’s, four blocks up—”
Keller shook his head. “Maybe Fitzpatrick isn’t here yet,” he said. He should have realized that the gangster would not have registered under his own name. “But some of his friends must have arrived. You have anyone else from Chicago here?” Keller took a wild flyer. “Mr. Smith, maybe, or Mr. Jones?”
The clerk brightened. “Yeah. Room 34, upstairs—here it is, Smith and two friends, all from Chicago. I’ll ring them and find out if they’re in. Who’s calling, please?”
Keller said, “Tell them it’s Mr. Black. Tell them I’m a friend of Miss Ryan.”
“Okay. Hold on.” The clerk ambled over to the switchboard, plugged in a jack, and waited. A moment later he said, “Mr. Smith? The desk calling. A gentleman named Mr. Black is here, says he wants to see you. He says he’s a friend of Miss Ryan. Yeah, that’s right. Ryan.” There was a long pause. “He’ll be right up,” the clerk said, and broke the connection. He said to Keller, “Take the elevator over there. It’s on the third floor.”
The elevator was an old creaky affair that wheezed and moaned all the way up. Keller was glad to get out of it on the third floor.
Room 34 was right opposite the elevator. Keller knocked once and the door opened. He found himself facing a man in his early thirties, with sharp cheekbones and an ugly scar lacing diagonally across one cheek. Behind him were two other men, one heavyset and muscular, the other smaller and thinner. The air of the room was gray with cigarette smoke.
The one with the cheekbones said, “I’m Mr. Smith. You want to see me?”
“I have a message from Miss Ryan,” Keller said, trying to keep his
voice calm. “Can I come in?”
“Sure,” the man who called himself Smith said. Keller stepped inside. He noticed that all three men were poised, ready to whip out guns at the first hint of trouble. Well, he wasn’t going to make any trouble.
He had already taken the diamond ring out and held it in the palm of his hand, so it would not be necessary for him to reach into his pockets and so possibly draw fire. He opened his hand and held the ring out.
“Does this look familiar, Mr. Smith?”
Smith’s hard eyes glared. “Where did you get that ring?” he demanded.
“Miss Ryan gave it to me to bring to you. That is, if your name isn’t Smith. She said the man I was looking for was named Fitzpatrick. Is that you?”
“Maybe,” Smith said. “But suppose you start telling me things, and tell them fast. What do you want? Why did she give you the ring? Who the hell are you, anyway?”
“I’m just an innocent bystander,” Keller said. “I’m a furnace salesman, and I pulled into this motel tonight, and ten minutes after I got settled in my room there was a knock on the door. A girl. Blonde, young. Scared looking. She told me she’d been kidnapped by some gangsters in Chicago a couple of days ago and taken up here. That her boyfriend and his pals were on her trail. The kidnappers had found out they were being traced, and they left her at the motel and beat it. She said her boyfriend’s name was Mike Fitzpatrick, and he was staying at the Bailey Hotel in Portage, and she asked me to drive up there and take a message to him for her.”
“Why couldn’t you just drive her up here, instead of all this roundabout business?”
“She owes two days’ rent at the motel,” Keller said. “The owner won’t listen to any stories about kidnapping. He keeps an eye on her and won’t let her off the grounds for fear she’ll skip. But it was okay for her to send me out and have me tell you to come get her. That’s why she gave me this ring, so you’d believe me.”
Keller handed the ring to “Smith,” who looked at it once, then fingered it without looking at it. “Okay,” the man who called himself Smith said. “You came to the right guy. I’m Mike Fitzpatrick. These are some friends of mine. Where’s the motel?”