Danger Is My Line Read online

  Danger Is My Line

  Stephen Marlowe

  A MysteriousPress.com

  Open Road Integrated Media Ebook

  1

  IT MUST HAVE BEEN a pretty snazzy hotel once, say about the time Calvin Coolidge chose not to run. Now it sat behind its tired Victorian façade on Rhode Island Avenue like an old dowager writing her memoirs.

  I went in past a sign that said transients were accepted and up to a long counter that ran along one wall in the dim, musty lobby. Behind it were the usual mail cubbyholes and keys hanging on hooks and a thin young guy in a shiny blue suit that had paid too many visits to the dry cleaner. He stood watching a couple across the counter from him and trying very hard not to yell.

  The woman nudged her companion with an elbow. “Go ahead, Ralph,” she said. “Tell him.”

  “Okay, okay,” Ralph said, not putting much heart in it. He added, looking at the lapels of the shiny blue suit across the counter: “Mr. Thwaite?”

  “Yes, sir,” Mr. Thwaite said, attempting the weary bored politeness of his trade. “What can I do for you, Mr. Jackson?”

  “Well, you see, the Missus feels—”

  “We feel, Ralph. We feel,” Mrs. Jackson prompted.

  “We have always felt,” her husband got out in a rush of words, “that the Central Arms was a nice quiet respectable apartment hotel, but now unless you can assure us that this man Brandvik will leave—”

  “This week,” Mrs. Jackson said.

  —“we will have to look for an apartment elsewhere. Because, you see.…” But Jackson was all finished. The rush of words trailed off.

  “Because we won’t stay in the same hotel with a confessed murderer,” Mrs. Jackson supplied.

  “Well, that’s it,” her husband said, looking pleased that it was all over.

  Mr. Thwaite mopped his pale forehead with a crisp white handkerchief. “Our Mr. Congreve is taking the matter into consideration,” Mr. Thwaite said. “I assure you that you are not the first to register this, uh, complaint. It is a very delicate problem.”

  “There, you see?” Mrs. Jackson said triumphantly, nudging her, husband again with an elbow. He nodded; she nodded and said, “Please let us know as soon as you can, Mr. Thwaite. We’re respectable, God-fearing people,” took her husband’s arm and tug-boated him out into the street and away.

  “Yes, sir,” Mr. Thwaite said as his pale eyes found mine. “What can I do for you, sir?”

  “Brandvik,” I said. “What did he do, steal their milk bottles?”

  Mr. Thwaite showed me his teeth.

  “I’d like to see him. Brandvik.”

  Mr. Thwaite winced. “Oh no, sir. That’s quite out of the question. Quite. Mr. Brandvik isn’t seeing anyone. Are you a reporter, sir? Mr. Brandvik isn’t seeing reporters. Or anyone.”

  I took out a business card, the one with the magnifying glass embossed in the upper lefthand corner, and dropped it on the counter. Mr. Thwaite tapped it with a long index fingernail.

  “Mr. Brandvik isn’t seeing anyone,” he said.

  “If you say it once more I may get the idea. But I’m not a reporter, I’m a sleuth. So why not let Mr. Brandvik decide for, himself? Tell him Wally Baker of View Magazine sent me.”

  His eyes examined my card for the first time. It said I was Chester Drum, I did confidential investigations, I had an office in the Farrell Building on F Street in downtown Washington and could be seen with or without appointment or any way at all.

  “View Magazine?” Mr. Thwaite chirped. “Why didn’t you say so, Mr. Drum? That may make a big difference.”

  “Lucky me,” I said as he dialed a house phone and spoke into it with his back to me in a discreet, barely audible voice. After a while he hung up and turned around. “It’s 411, Mr. Drum. That’s the fourth floor. You may go up.”

  As I was heading for the elevator, a businesslike old number in a starched dress rustled toward the counter, brandished a furled umbrella and shouted: “If that Brandvik fiend isn’t out on the street by nightfall, I’m leaving.”

  Mr. Thwaite winced again. Maybe I should have got the idea.

  I knocked on the door of 411 and waited. I didn’t hear any footsteps but a voice, very close, said, “Who is it?”

  “Drum. Wally Baker of—”

  “Slip it under the door.”

  “Slip what under the door?”

  “Identification. You think I’m nuts?”

  Squatting on my hams, I shoved a business card between the bottom of the door and the doorsill. Unseen fingers snatched it all the way through.

  “Didn’t Wally Baker call?” I asked.

  “Sure he called.” The voice moved up slowly from floor level. “This looks legit. You alone?”

  I said I was alone.

  Lock tumblers fell, the doorknob turned and the door opened about four inches to show me a pair of nervous blue eyes in a fleshy face that needed a shave and had probably needed one yesterday. The eyes blinked and shifted sideways, and the door opened another four inches to reveal a man my own height but heavier, wearing a rumpled seersucker suit on his body and an anxious, wary expression on his face. His right arm hung down stiffly, the wrist and hand hidden by the doorjamb, as if holding something moderately heavy and trying to hide it. Such as a gun.

  “Do I come in,” I said, “or do you shoot me through the door?”

  His mouth opened. “Jesus, that’s a laugh,” he said. “Shoot you through the door.” But he wasn’t laughing. Opening the door wider and stepping back, he dropped a big automatic, probably a .45, in the side pocket of his seersucker jacket.

  “You read View?” he said with pride and fright in his voice, sidling around behind me as I entered the room and then shutting and locking the door.

  “No. I haven’t read it.”

  “You’re kidding! Got a circulation of five and a half million, almost as much as Life. I’m on the cover this week.”

  I looked at his tired, worried face with the sagging blueish pouches under the eyes and the lines of fatigue bracketing the thick-lipped mouth. “Congratulations,” I said.

  “You really mean you haven’t read it?”

  “That’s right. I was down in South America on business. I just got back yesterday.”

  Disbelief widened his tired, blood-shot eyes. “And Mr. Baker didn’t tell you what this is all about? He’s doing the series on me. You know, one of those ‘by George Brandvik as told to Wallace Baker’ things. Mr. Baker even takes the pictures himself. He won a Pulitzer prize once.”

  “There was a note waiting in my office from Wally Baker,” I said. “All it told me was a man named Brandvik at the Central Arms needed a private detective.”

  “That was mighty white of Mr. Baker,” Brandvik said, nodding piously. “Telling you nothing in advance he couldn’t prejudice you. He’s a right guy, huh?”

  “Prejudice me in regard to what?”

  Brandvik didn’t say anything right away. I sat down in a standard apartment hotel overstuffed chair and watched him standing there with his broad back against the door and his big right hand in the pocket of his seersucker jacket over the butt of the .45. I looked around the room: it had a sofa-bed, made up untidily, probably by Brandvik himself, a night table, a small desk with a pair of rumpled pajamas on the blotter, a closet, the chair I was sitting on, Brandvik and me. Through an open door I could see the bathroom. The single window behind the desk framed a breathtaking view of an air-shaft. It did not seem the sort of room, not by a few country miles, where you’d find a man who had made the cover of View Magazine.

  “Well, I need a bodyguard,” Brandvik said finally. “You do that kind of work, don’t you?”

  “I do any kind of work that’s reasonably legal ex
cept divorce work,” I said.

  “Mr. Baker told me you like to work with celebrities.”

  I let that one float out into the airshaft.

  “Me, I’m a celebrity.”

  “Why do you need a bodyguard?”

  “Why? That’s a laugh,” Brandvik said again, not laughing again. “Man, you really have been out of touch.”

  I got out a cigarette and lit it. The motion frightened Brandvik: I saw his big right fist, under the thin seersucker of his jacket pocket, clutch convulsively over the butt of the .45.

  “Well, why?” I said.

  Brandvik showed me a smile as fleeting as a pawnbroker’s, or a tax-collector’s, or an undertaker’s.

  “Because I killed a man,” he said. “Because I’m a murderer. Because five and a half million copies of View Magazine say so.”

  The fleeting smile again, then a glare of can-you-top-that defiance in his eyes. I couldn’t top it. I couldn’t even come close.

  “Because I’m a killer,” Brandvik said.

  2

  IT WAS A HALF HOUR LATER, 11:30 of a Wednesday morning on Rhode Island Avenue in Washington. Summer, with cooking smells wafting up the airshaft and the shower hissing and drumming beyond the closed bathroom door because George Brandvik, murderer, had now decided it was safe to attend to his toilet, though I hadn’t said anything one way or the other about taking the job.

  He had left me at the desk with a bundle of threatening fan-mail, most of them obviously from semi-literate cranks, and a copy of View Magazine dated 12 July. Except for, the logos, the date and the price, his face had the cover all to itself, the narrow eyes balanced on their pouches of sleeplessness, the lines of fatigue and worry, the expression half of pride and half of fear that Wally Baker had caught so perfectly with his Rolleiflex.

  Saving the copy of View Magazine for last, I pawed through the threatening letters. None of them were the kind that would raise the hackles on the back of your neck, not even if your name was George Brandvik and you had admitted in five and a half million copies of View Magazine, despite the fact that the people of the District of Columbia had exonerated you in a fair and public trial, that you had killed a man. A typical example, post-marked in Laramie, Wyoming, was penciled in a childish scrawl and read:

  Dear Mr. Brandvik, I’m going to Assasernate you in the Nite when you Least Expeck it.

  A Friend of the Victom.

  I dropped Friend of the Victom’s threat back with the others, shook my head, scowled at the airshaft and was just about to pick up the copy of View Magazine when someone knocked at the door.

  The shower was still going, so Brandvik wouldn’t have heard it. I got up thinking of. housewives in Laramie, Wyoming, who had nothing more exciting to look forward to than a visit by the Fuller Brush man. I went to the door.

  “Yeah?”

  “Chambermaid, sir.”

  I unlocked the door, preparing, to open it a few inches as Brandvik had done. Maybe his caution was catching. But just then the telephone started to ring. I relaxed my grip on the doorknob for an instant, about as long as it would take for a determined girl to push her, way into the room. Which is exactly what happened.

  She was a small blonde with ice-blue eyes only a little colder than the Rhone glacier. She wore a trim tight navy-blue skirt that might have been part of a uniform unless it was the bottom half of what they call a man-tailored suit. I’ll never know why they call it that: it showed the flaring curve of her hips and as nice a pair of firmly rounded thighs as you ever saw on a small trim blonde. Above it she wore a white blouse, probably nylon, that fell like a waterfall from her high, full breasts. Her face was pretty, with a suggestion of dimples, but thin-lipped. With her left hand she shut the door behind her and leaned on it. That made her right-handed, because in her right hand, and pointing it where such things will be pointed, she held a small, snub-barreled revolver, a belly-gun.

  The phone went on ringing. The shower went on hissing and drumming. I went on living—for a while.

  “Mr. Brandvik?” the blonde said. “Mr. George Brandvik?”

  I shook my head and said, “Not here.” That got nothing out of her, not even a blink of the ice-blue eyes.

  What you’re supposed to do is distract their attention just long enough to make a swipe at the gun. Then if the trigger finger, already white with pressure, jerks back, all they do is shoot a hole in the plaster ceiling. That’s what you’re supposed to do, but if your timing is off a fraction of a second you’re dead.

  “George Brandvik,” she said. “I’m going to kill you, George Brandvik.”

  I listened to the telephone. It stopped ringing. Then the shower stopped too.

  “Just like you killed Jorgen Kolding,” the blonde said.

  From the bathroom Brandvik called, “Didn’t I hear, the phone out there?”

  The blonde blinked, looked at me and blinked again. “You—you’re not George Brandvik,” she said.

  I made a grab for the gun.

  A leather shoulder-strap bag dangled from her left shoulder. We swung around in that direction, my left hand covering her right fist, that had the gun in it, and my right hand on her forearm. When her right hand and my left hit the shoulder-strap bag, the revolver went off.

  Brandvik shouted hoarsely. The bathroom door opened and slammed shut, Brandvik staying inside. I began to put pressure on the blonde’s right hand. Her eyes narrowed and she called me a name, not in English. Tight skirt or no, she brought a knee up swiftly. I turned my leg to meet it. With her free left hand she grabbed at my hair but could find nothing to hold in a crewcut. I squeezed some more. She dropped the gun. It made more noise hitting the floor than it had going off. I kicked it across the room, under the bed.

  “Okay,” I told Brandvik. “You can come out now.”

  The blonde sat down in the overstuffed chair and started to cry. Reassured by the sound, Brandvik opened the bathroom door a crack and peered out.

  “Who the hell is she?” he said.

  “I was hoping you could tell me.”

  The blonde covered her face with her hands and cried.

  “Miss,” I said. She ignored me. “All right,” I said, “you came here to shoot George Brandvik and you got stopped. Who are you?”

  She looked up at me, her eyes brimming.

  “What did you expect me to do, tip my hat and point the way to the shower?”

  “You don’t understand. I thought you were Brandvik. I almost shot you.”

  She spoke English very well but with a faint accent I couldn’t place. Knuckling her moist eyes, she sat there staring at the floor. “I’ve been shot at before,” I said. “Let’s start with something easy—like, for example, what’s your name?” But she ignored the question, and me, and even Brandvik, when he came out of the bathroom wearing his seersucker pants and a damp towel draped around his muscular neck.

  “Know her?” I asked him.

  He gave her the once-over. “Never saw her before in my life. She sounds like a Swede, though. He was a Swede.”

  “Who was a Swede?”

  “Hell, the guy I killed,” Brandvik said, sounding disappointed that I didn’t know. “Jorgen Kolding.”

  The name hit me suddenly. Jorgen Kolding. It had been in the papers a few months back, before I’d left for South America. Kolding was an independently wealthy Scandinavian, Swedish on his mother’s side, Danish on his father’s. He was a yachtsman, a flyer, a cross-country skier who had won an Olympic medal maybe ten years ago. He was working for the U.N. as a trouble-shooter for Dag Hammarskjold. What kind of trouble it had been his job to shoot I didn’t remember. Right before I left the States he had been murdered in his hotel suite here in Washington.

  “You killed Jorgen Kolding?” I asked Brandvik.

  “Hey, what’s the matter with you anyway?” he said. He was piqued. “I said so, didn’t I? I shot him. I’d do it again. They gave me a trial, didn’t they?” He tittered. He was a big man, and the titter seemed out
of place. “I was acquitted, wasn’t I? So View Magazine gave me fifty thousand bucks for the exclusive to my story. Kill him? You’re damned right I did. And I’d do it again.”

  The blonde catapulted from the chair and hurled herself at Brandvik. He had time to raise his hands in front of his face before she was on him. She was just a small blonde you’d like to take a stroll, a dance, or a roll in the hay, with, but mass times velocity did the rest. Brandvik went over and down and she landed on top of him.

  I had to get down on my knees to pull them apart. Brandvik sat up, breathing heavily, with four red scratch-marks on his chest. I deposited the blonde, crying again, in the overstuffed chair. What I got out of the tussle was her shoulder-strap bag.

  So of course I opened the bag. It contained a comb, a wad of tissues, a lipstick, a phial of perfume, a silver compact with some kind of winged emblem on it and a leather wallet hand-stitched with rawhide thongs. The money compartment of the wallet contained five dollar bills and not quite two hundred kroner—Norwegian, Danish, Swedish and Icelandic, she had all of them. Either she was a numismatist or she was a girl who liked to travel. Her identification card behind its plastic window settled that. It said:

  ICELANDIC AIRLINES LOFTLEIDIR

  Name

  Maja Kolding

  Position

  Stewardess

  Date of Birth

  1936

  Color of hair

  Blond

  In case of accident, notify

  G. Kolding, Icelandic Consulate, New York

  Height

  5′3″

  Weight

  108 lbs.

  Color of eyes

  Blue

  There was a second card with the same information in a language that meant nothing to me, probably Icelandic.

  “The name’s Kolding, too,” I told Brandvik, who had climbed to his feet and was lighting a cigarette with shaking hands. “She’s a stewardess for Icelandic Airlines.”