Jail Bait

The doctor grinned. “Don’t scare the patient. A bump like that often results in temporary amnesia. It will probably go away in a few days. Hey, don’t get up.”

“I got to,” Howard said earnestly and doggedly. “I’m going to be sick.”

They helped him up and the doctor led him away to the bathroom. When they came out Howard looked a luminous blue. He sat in the big chair and shut his eyes.

“I think I can walk him down to my car,” the doctor said. “Come on, pal. Let’s see if we can make it. What’s his name, Miss Bayliss?”

“Howard Saddler.”

“Okay, you notify the police and whoever else Howard here would want you to tell. Come on, now. Upsy-daisy. And I wouldn’t touch anything, Miss Bayliss. Somebody gave this place a good going over.”

She walked them to the elevator. As soon as it started down she raced back to the apartment, shut the door and put the night chain on it. Then she saw the apartment more clearly. The bureau drawers, the cosmetics, the medicine cabinet was bad enough. The final straw was in the kitchen, where flour, sugar, coffee, rice and less identifiable substances had all been dumped out on the counter top and had spilled over onto the floor. She wanted to cry.

She phoned and asked for Detective Sergeant Sam Dolan.

“This is Jane Bayliss. Could you... could you come over?”

“What’s wrong?”

“Somebody hit Howard on the head and turned my apartment upside down.”

“Don’t touch anything. Be right there.”

Dolan arrived in eight minutes, accompanied by a uniformed officer, two lab men and the Journal reporter named Locatta.

Dolan listened patiently while she told what had happened. The lab men took her fingerprints. They began to go over the apartment. After the first five minutes one of them came over to Dolan and said, “Waste of time. Doorknobs, catches either smeared or clean. The joker wore gloves. Two strangers off the outside knob is as good as we’ll do, but odds it wasn’t him or them. Knock off?”

“Jerry, take these boys back. Loco here will give me a lift if I ask him nice.” He turned to Jane. “You have anything valuable here?”

“No.”

“Who is the other girl? Tell me everything you know about her.”

Jane gave him a complete report on Betty Alford. Halfway through he began to look bored. Before she had finished he was roaming around again, whistling tunelessly. He stopped and scratched his red head. “These things have a smell. If you can find where they left off, then the odds are they found what they wanted. This guy didn’t leave off. He kept looking.”

“There’s nothing here to find, that’s why.”

“Fill her in on developments, Red,” Locatta said in his thin, boyish voice. “Maybe she can make things fit by remembering something.”

“A couple of other things have happened. We don’t know if they’re related or unrelated. Somebody broke into the Taffeta Room last night. It was a professional job of breaking and entering, but it stopped being professional right there. They wore gloves. They stood at the bar and had a drink of the best scotch in the house and went out the way they got in. The only thing they didn’t do was leave a tip.”

“That sounds crazy.”

“Like drunk college kids doing it on a dare,” Locatta said.

“Item number two. This will be on local news tonight and in the paper in the morning. The Los Angeles Police tried to find out who Fredmans was running around with. They got a line on a girl friend. They shook down her place and didn’t find anything that meant anything except a ring. That ring disappeared along with a bunch of unmounted stones in Savannah about eight months ago. A salesman for a diamond wholesale house was slugged. He had his locked case chained to his wrist. They cut the chain with what was believed to be a heavy pair of snips. It was well planned.

“The girl was scared, and she talked. She told them Fredmans was in on the robbery. She didn’t know who else was. He gave her the ring. It was a common type of setting and a pretty fair half-carat stone. Apparently Fredmans never noticed the initials inside the band. The girl did, but she didn’t realize those initials could be dangerous, and so she didn’t throw it away. She said she hadn’t seen Fredmans for two weeks. But she said some men she didn’t know had been asking her about him. She said they acted sore. She couldn’t give an adequate description.”

Jane looked at Dolan and then at Locatta. She shook her head. “I don’t know why you should think all that should mean anything to me. It just confuses me.”

Locatta held up a snapshot Betty Alford had taken of Jane at the beach the previous summer. She had on the bathing suit that always made her obscurely uncomfortable when she wore it. “Do I have your permission to use this delectable thing in our miserable newspaper?”

“You do not! Where did you get it?”

“There’s a lot of them in that drawer, and some on the floor under the table.”

“Give it here!”

Locatta handed it over reluctantly and shrugged.

“Who hit Howard, Mr. Dolan?” Jane asked.

“Some burglar, I guess.”

Chapter Three