Danger Is My Line Read online

  “There’s one other thing,” I said.

  Kolding raised his pale blond eyebrows at me. “Yes?”

  His fist had moved no more than six inches when he knocked me down. I let my own right fist move just six inches—into the pit of his stomach.

  He settled slowly on the chaise longue, clasping his big hands over his gut like a tired Buddha. Beads of sweat broke out on his face. He was straining with the effort to get up, but his big body wouldn’t respond. His mouth made motions like a fish’s mouth breathing.

  “No one ever did that to him before,” the Baroness said softly but with conviction. “He’ll kill you. You don’t know him. He’ll kill you.”

  “He has my card,” I said.

  “Are you going now?”

  “Yeah.”

  The Baroness Margaretha looked disappointed.

  “But I don’t have a car.”

  “Ollie will drive you.” She called, “Ollie!”

  I met little Ollie Meer around the side of the house while Kolding was still trying to get his breath, the Baroness hovering over him. There was a black Olds parked out front, that Kolding had come home in, but Ollie took the maroon Volvo, gleaming with its new coat of polish, out of the carport.

  When I got in alongside of him rubbing my bruised jaw he asked fraternally, “Which one of them hit you?”

  “In a way, Ollie,” I said as he began to drive, “it was both of them.”

  7

  THE MAROON VOLVO delivered me to the Farrell Building less than an hour later. Ollie was one of those personally timid men who make daring, sometimes reckless, drivers—as if to compensate behind the wheel of a car for other shortcomings. He maneuvered the little Swedish car, in and out of traffic like a kid in a fender-dueling hotrod.

  But I couldn’t get anything out of him except grudging thumbnail sketches of the Koldings and their house-guest. Gustaf Kolding was a vice-consul here in Washington on detached duty from Iceland’s New York consulate. The duty, Ollie thought, was about over, for Gustaf had come to Washington to state Iceland’s case against the British in the offshore dispute. Though Gustaf was Icelandic, his murdered father had been a Swede who had married Gus-taf’s Icelandic mother. The marriage hadn’t panned out, Mrs. Kolding had raised her children in Iceland, but they had kept their father’s name.

  Gustaf was thirty, his sister Maja seven or eight years younger. An airlines stewardess on leave, she had come down to the District to visit her brother. “And take potshots at George Brandvik?” I had asked Ollie.

  “No comment, mister. No comment.” He was instantly sullen and defensive when we talked about Maja. I got the idea he liked her in a mooning, unrequited adolescent way.

  But he was vituperatively talkative about Baroness Margaretha Schroeder. She and the dead Jorgen Kolding, Ollie said, had been the talk of the international social set. “Now she’s making a play for Gustaf,” Ollie spat, almost taking the right front fender off an Imperial he cut in front of on M Street. “He might have been her stepson, the bitch.”

  I had an idea the Baroness might have made a play for anything that wore trousers, but I let that ride. “She a real baroness?”

  “Her? Sure she is. Old Swedish nobility, that’s her. I think the family title goes all the way back to old Gustaf Vasa. But she don’t have much of the long green,” he added with pleasure, becoming ungrammatical in his enthusiasm as he often did. “None of them barons do, in a welfare state.”

  I got out of the car when Ollie pulled up beside a fire plug in front of the Farrell Building, but stuck my head in through the rolled-down window.

  “Ollie,” I said, “the F.B.I.’s going to be looking for Maja. If you know where she is, it might prevent some grief if I got to her before they did.”

  “Yeah? What kind of grief?”

  “She tried to kill Brandvik once. It could happen again.”

  “So? Let Brandvik worry about that. Nobody can touch Maja, she’s got diplomatic immunity.”

  I tried another tack. “This time Brandvik may’ be armed.”

  “Nuts to you, mister.” He drove off, almost taking my head with him.

  I had two hamburgers and a chocolate shake in the luncheonette that held down one corner of the ground floor of the Farrell Building. Then I went upstairs to my office on the seventh floor, put my feet up on the desk where the phone had been, set the phone cradle on my lap and dialed the Central Arms.

  An effusively polite voice that I recognized as Mr. Thwaite’s said that Mr. Brandvik did not wish to be disturbed, but I finally got through to him.

  “Jesus,” he said as soon as he found out who I was, “they got Wally Baker!”

  “Why?” I said.

  “How the hell should I know why? My life ain’t worth a plugged nickel now.”

  “Calm down, Brandvik. Why did they want to kill Wally?”

  “They’re nuts. That girl, she’s nuts. Baker—”

  “What kind of questioning was he doing to write your story?”

  “Talking to me, that’s all. I don’t know. All I know is Wally Baker wanted you to protect me. He told you that, didn’t he?” Brandvik said desperately, then shouted, “It was his dying wish!”

  “Wouldn’t you be better off moving?”

  “Huh? Moving?”

  “Going someplace to cool, off. To hide.”

  “What? Me hide? Kolding deserved to die,” Brandvik cried illogically. “He had it coming.”

  “Had it coming why?”

  “It’s in the second installment of my life story,” Brandvik said importantly, the pride in his voice edging out the fear. “Wally Baker already wrote it.” The fear surged back. “Then they … oh Jesus, you’ve got to protect me!”

  Brandvik’s pride and fear drove us around in circles, like a snake eating its tail. I couldn’t get anything out of him and thought of Ollie Meer. I hadn’t been able to get anything out of him either. It just wasn’t my day. I hung up promising to drop in on Brandvik later. It was as good a place as any for Maja to turn up, I told myself. Better than most, in fact.

  The moment I hung up the phone started ringing.

  “Mr. Drum? This is Dr. Chappell at the Maternity Hospital. I took the liberty to look your name up in the directory. I’ve been trying to. reach you all morning.”

  “How is she?”

  “Physically she is fine. It was false labor after all. But she isn’t here, Mr. Drum. Mrs. Baker isn’t here.”

  “What?” I said.

  “It was one of those unfortunate things. A woman in the semi-private room next door had a copy of the Times-Herald and saw the article about Mr. Baker’s—uh, death. And went next door, before any of us knew what was going on, to offer her condolences.”

  I set off a string of four-letter words, like firecrackers.

  “My sentiments exactly, Mr. Drum. What happened after that was Mrs. Baker had a resident who knew nothing about her situation examine her and sign a release. Then she left the hospital.”

  “You got their house covered?”

  “A registered nurse is waiting there for her. But she hasn’t come. A woman in her condition, made desperate by grief … I was wondering if you knew whether she had any relatives in the Washington area, or friends, perhaps, that she might have gone to.”

  “She has no one,” I said.

  “Yourself, perhaps?”

  “We were good friends once. The three of us. I haven’t seen her in three years.”

  “But if she does come to you, could you inform us?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Of course. And that works both ways, doe. If you find her I want to see her. I think she’d want to see me.”

  “Naturally. And thank you so much for your time.”

  I hung up. My throat felt sore and dry. “Marianne,” I said out loud.

  Marianne Wilder and I had been more than friends before she met Wally Baker. We had had a protracted affair, first in the States and then in India, but Marianne is a volatile woman a
nd I am not the steady type she’d need to keep her feet on solid ground. Wally Baker, with his slow laughter and placid nature, had been that type. And now he was dead.

  I paced some more, then remembered George Brandvik and picked up the phone to call police headquarters. A moment later I was talking to Lieutenant Margeson of Special Services.

  “What happens to Brandvik’s request for protection now?” I asked.

  “You mean on account of what happened to Baker?”

  I said that was what I meant.

  Margeson sighed unhappily. “Scuttlebutt has it the Commissioner will send down an order to give him two men around the clock. The order hasn’t come down yet. When it does, if it does, we’ll comply. That ought to make you and the Commissioner very happy.”

  “Me?” I said, just to be saying something. “I’ll lose fifty bucks a day and expenses.”

  “My heart would bleed for you, Drum,” Margeson said, “only I just gave a pint of blood to the Red Cross and don’t have any to spare.”

  While he was saying that, I heard footsteps outside in the hall. They were slow steps and wide-spaced. Then I saw the silhouette through the pebbled glass. It was a woman. She was small, as small as Maja Kolding, but very wide in the waist. Time hung, waiting. There was a silence on Margeson’s end of the line. I hung up on him. I walked on eggshells across the worn carpet to the door. The figure stood still out there, absolutely still. I opened the door.

  It was Marianne Baker.

  She wore a black maternity dress with a white ruffle at the throat. There was no makeup on her face, but she hadn’t been crying. She had no kind of expression at all as far as I could see. Just the remembered, pretty face, blank of everything.

  “Hello, Chester,” she said.

  I made a noise that was supposed to be her name. I stood back and let her. enter the office and shut the door. She sat down in the client chair with her back to me, staring across the desk at my swivel chair. I went around there and touched her shoulder on the way, squeezing it lightly. I sat down.

  “Dr. Chappell was looking for you,” I said. “He called.”

  “Yes. I thought he would be,” Marianne said tonelessly. “That’s why I didn’t go home. I don’t want to go back to the hospital.”

  “He thinks you’d be better off there.”

  “I don’t want to go back just yet.” She sat with her hands folded in her lap across the wide, swelled tent of the maternity dress. “It’s good to see you, Chester. After all these years.”

  I hung a sick little smile on my face, kept it there a moment, and then let it fall off.

  “Chester, why did he have to die?”

  There was no answer to that one. There never is.

  “It’s funny,” Marianne said, going on as if she hadn’t asked the question. “One time, a long time ago, I had thought I might want to … well, to marry you. But one of the things, you were a detective, you led a violent life, I’d have to sit home day after day, nights sometimes, not knowing.… Wally was a photographer and a writer.…” Her mouth remained open when the words stopped, and I thought for a minute she was going to cry. But she didn’t. “We were very happy together,” she said. “These were the happiest three years of my life, Chester. But already—God, already they’re like a dream, like a happy little dream you wake up smiling from but sorry because it’s over. Oh God, God, God, why did he have to die?” She stood up, looked about her in bewilderment as if wondering what she was doing here, then sat down again.

  “I have nothing to live for,” she said. “Nothing.”

  I leaned across the desk toward her and a voice, something like my own, started speaking. “Wally kept on talking about the baby last night, Marianne. He was very happy talking about it. He wanted to have the baby.”

  “We both wanted it. Very much. So what? Wally’s dead. He’s dead. He’ll never even see the baby.” She squeezed her small hands into fists and put them on the edge of the desk. “I wish I could die. I just wish I could die.”

  I took a deep breath. “Wally’s baby wouldn’t like that,” I said.

  Then she started to cry. Silently at first, her shoulders moving convulsively, then out loud. I went around the desk and she stood up and I took her in my arms. She cried against my chest.

  After a long time she said, “Remember in India how Wally got so mad the first time he saw you? He thought you were trying to give me a hard time. He took a poke at you.”

  “I didn’t know you knew about that.”

  “Wally. He told me. But he wasn’t much of a fighter.”

  “He was too mad to see straight,” I said.”

  Marianne smiled a little through her tears, remembering. “We had a dog,” she said. “He was named Benares, after that city in India where … Chester, will you take me home now? I want to go home.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “But promise you won’t let them take me back to the hospital until tonight. Promise?”

  “I promise.”

  “It will be all right tonight. I’ll do whatever they want. I just want to go home for a little while first.”

  We drove to Georgetown in my car. I turned the corner of their block slowly, but the police had already removed the ruined Jaguar. When we parked, a nurse in a crisp white uniform unwilted by the heat stepped out of a Plymouth that stood at the curb ahead of us.

  “Mrs. Baker?” she said.

  “It’s all right now, nurse,” Marianne told her.

  The nurse looked at me. I said, “Come back tonight around eight or after supper anyway. Will that be okay?”

  “Yes, sir,” she said, and drove off in the Plymouth.

  I spent the afternoon with Marianne. The cry had done her a lot of good. She took me around the house showing me all of Wally’s things. They had a little den in back where the walls were hung with the pictures that had made him famous.

  “He … he felt so strongly about everything, that’s why he could take the kind of pictures he could take, and write the way he wrote. He was a quiet man, but he felt everything, Chester. He was one of those lonely people who have to cry out against all the world’s grief. There are … so few of them left.”

  “You kept him from being lonely,” I said.

  She showed me around some more, then said with a forced bright smile, “You must be hungry. I’m starving myself. Would you like some supper?”

  I said I would and offered to help, but she insisted on doing all the preparing herself. There were steaks in the freezer and some frozen peas, and Marianne boiled and mashed some potatoes. When everything was finished, though, the steaks sizzling and the vegetables steaming, she just picked at her food.

  A little while after we finished, the nurse returned. “Are you ready now, Mrs. Baker?” she asked. “Dr. Chappell really does feel it would be best if you remained under his care until the baby comes.”

  “I’m ready,” Marianne nodded. “Whatever he says.”

  We went outside to the nurse’s car. “Can I come and visit you in a day or so?” I asked Marianne.

  “I’d like that.”

  “There may be some questions I’ll want to ask you then.”

  She looked at me steadily. “Are you … going to find them?”

  “I’m going to find them,” I said.

  The car drove off.

  8

  WHEN I PULLED UP in front of the subdivided Georgian mansion where I had my apartment, I saw the maroon Volvo. It was parked under a street light where I wouldn’t miss it, and the taillights were on.

  I went over and poked my head in at the rolled-down driver’s window. I saw Baroness Margaretha’s insolent green eyes about half a foot from my own.

  “I looked you up in the book,” she said.

  “Gustaf getting his kicks in a steam bath tonight? Is that why you’re here?”

  Her thick lips parted in a slow smile. “Always the wisecrack.”

  “Okay. No wisecracks. You want what?”

  “You wan
t Maja Kolding. I found her for you.”

  I walked around the front of the Swedish car to the curb-side door. Baroness Margaretha leaned across the seat to open it from the inside. I got in and shut the door as she slid back part way to her side of the car. That left her right and my left thigh in contact.

  “Don’t be subtle,” I said. “Hit me over the head with it.”

  That got a deep, throaty laugh from her, but she moved her leg. “Aren’t you at least going to thank me? I said I found Maja. Or, to be more accurate, she called me.”

  “Where is she?”

  “She said she was in trouble.” The Baroness gave me a lazy, up-from-under look, as if the trouble could wait.

  “Where?”

  “A hotel here in Washington. The Central Arms.”

  “Hold it,” I said. I went back to my own car, unlocked the glove compartment and took out my Magnum .357 in its spring holster. I slipped my jacket, buckled on the rig, buttoned my jacket and returned to Baroness Margaretha. But she shook her head.

  “I’m not going there. You are.”

  “How do you know I am?”

  “Aren’t you?” She touched my jacket and the bulge of the gun under it. “I can’t. For Gustaf’s sake. His sister has made enough trouble for him already and I’m his—a house-guest.”

  I leaned toward her. The key was in the ignition lock. I turned it and the self-starter coughed, caught and held.

  “Get a move on, house-guest,” I said. “You’re driving me there.”

  First her green eyes were mad, then they softened. “I like a bold man,” she said. “I like you.” To prove it she kissed my cheek, then turned my face slowly with her hand so I could kiss her lips. She could do more with her mouth than most women could, or would, do with their bodies. We broke it off. The Baroness sighed, and started driving. She drove with a cool calm confidence, contemptuous both of the traffic regulations and the cars we passed. She was perfectly relaxed but drove much too fast. We hit seventy on the Whitehurst Freeway. She’d cruise in the passing lane, flipping her brights on and off high beam when she wanted to pass and then gunning it till the cars ahead of us moved to the right and dropped back. She took Washington Circle on two wheels, or maybe it was just one. She had a compulsion to pass everything on the road, but her face remained perfectly composed. In a way, I thought, that might have been the story of her life.