Jail Bait

“You don’t have to. Suppose I give you a ring when I’m ready to leave. Maybe you could bring my car around. I put it in that lot around the corner from your place. The claim check is here in this drawer.”

“All right. See you later, Howard.”

She hurried down the corridor, down the wide stairs and along the main-floor corridor to the lobby. There were two booths. In the second one the receiver stood on the little shelf by the phone. She closed herself inside the booth.

“Hello. This is Jane Bayliss... Hello?... Hello?”

A silence, yet somehow not the silence there is when someone has hung up. It was a listening silence. She could hear no breathing. The impression was vivid. Her hand felt cold and shaky as she hung up. She looked across the tan tile of the lobby and saw a familiar figure standing at the desk, porkpie hat at the remembered jaunty angle. She turned and took the receiver from the hook and dialed without putting a coin in the slot, pretended to carry on a conversation. When she risked another glance, Locatta was no longer at the desk. She saw him go through the far archway that divided the lobby from the main-floor corridor.

Jane walked in the other direction, out the main doors and into an afternoon that was turning colder. She kept thinking about the phone call. If it was not her imagination, then it meant that someone knew she had come to the hospital.

She wondered if she should go into a drugstore and phone Dolan and tell him. She remembered his skeptical attitude, his comment about its being some kind of burglar who slugged Howard. She was a girl with a strong will, well accustomed to taking care of herself, with no inclination to yell for help or have attacks of the vapors.

She began to window-shop. She made no effort to look behind her, or find a window that would reflect what was in back of her. After she passed West Adams Street, she walked more slowly, spending more time on each window, trying to remember the exact location of the shoe shop she liked over on Walden, the avenue that paralleled the boulevard. It was very close to the middle of the block. Clarissa’s was the name of the shop. She found a small dress store on the boulevard which, she hoped, was practically back to back with Clarissa’s. She studied the window for some time and then went in slowly.

The clerk came from the rear of the store. “May I help you?”

“I thought Clarissa’s shoe store was right along here somewhere.”

“Oh, no, miss. That’s right over on West Adams, just about opposite here,” the clerk told her.

Jane made a rueful face. “All the way around the block. I don’t suppose there’s any way I could cut through, is there?”

“You could go out through our rear door and across the alley and in through their rear door, but—”

“Oh, thank you so much. Right out through here?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

The rear entrance to Clarissa’s was a narrow door that opened into a passageway piled high with cartons and littered with scraps of paper. She passed a storeroom and pushed open a swinging door and went into the shop proper. The clerk she liked saw her and said, “Hi, Miss Bayliss! New way to come in. Say, you’ve really been in the papers, haven’t you?”

“Margaret, how would you like to be a dear and forget you saw me in here? I’m in a terrible rush and I’m trying to duck someone. I’ll be back and tell you all about this business later on.”

“Sure. You run on, Miss Bayliss. And come back soon. We’ve got some new things in your size.”

Jane went out the front door and turned right on Walden, going back in the direction she had come. She remembered the old hotel on the corner of West Adams and Walden and hoped there would be a cab stand there. There was a stand with one cab waiting. She got in quickly and sat well back in the corner of the seat and told the driver to take her to the center of the city. She paid off the driver, and walked rapidly east. She knew the place she wanted to go. It was a quiet apartment hotel with a limited number of transient rooms. It was not far from the airlines terminal, the place to which the limousines brought passengers from the airport.

The sky was now much darker. The wind had increased. The first chill, hard-driven drops of rain began to fall when she was thirty feet from the entrance. She ran the rest of the way, went into the small, dark, sedate lobby flicking droplets of rain from the shoulders of her coat. An elderly man serviced the desk. He said mildly that he had a room. She signed, in an abnormal backhand, “Mrs. Howard S. Alford” and gave Betty’s family’s address in Wilmington.