Now Matt did slow down. Carleton Nairn was leaning way across the front seat, calling to him.
“Cold for walking! Can I give you a lift somewhere?”
His coat had fallen open in front. Matt saw a pen clipped to his lapel, with something white on top? A golf ball? Or a skull?
Receiving no answer, Carleton Nairn blinked. “Headed up to my sister’s, in Highland Park. If you’re going north, I can drop you off./ No problem.”
Matt looked north. He couldn’t see the spa with the “tanning booths” or even the tall weatherbeaten sign of the dead restaurant. Then he looked at Carleton Nairn.
Urgency and danger danced in his brain, linking arms and swinging around, with Matt-the-Writer adding color commentary. Carleton Nairn was Miss Skull, but couldn’t kill Matt without first finding out how much he knew. Carleton Nairn was not Miss Skull because Miss Skull was a figment of Ada Silberwetter’s verse imagination and Matt was hurrying back to make an ass of himself some more. Carleton Nairn was Miss Skull, and so sure of his hold over Ada Silberwetter that he knew nothing would happen even if Matt were found dissected in gutters from here to the spanking salon. Carleton Nairn was not Miss Skull; he likely DID have a sister in Hghland Park, and while they waited here discussing things, Holly Mactaggart was moving closer to the imprisoned Ada Silberwetter, a white hot curling iron in one hand.
“It is cold,” mumbled Matt, ducking his head to get into the passenger seat. Of Carleton Nairn was Miss Skull, okey dokey: refusing the ride made no difference. Nairn had only to drive off, circle the block, and come back around to run Matt down from behind. Matt didn’t know why, particularly, but dying on cold, wet pavement was probably his second most feared finish. How that could be worse than being run down in summer he didn’t know; he had just always known it would be.
He pulled the passenger door shut and plastered himself to it, putting himself far enough from the driver so a knife thrust would take a second longer and give him a better chance to dodge. On further reflection, he pulled a little closer to the steering wheel. Up close, he could make a better grab at the gun. Miss Skull had used a gun, and might try that again.
Carleton Nairn noticed none of the soul-searching and strategy. “Where to?” he said, shifting into Drive.
“Er….” A real detective would have noted the street sign by the bus stop. “I, er…let me off at the corner of…it’s just a couple of blocks. There’s, um, an old restaurant with a sign like….”
“Oh, you’re going to Hildegarde’s.” The car pulled away from the curb. “No need to be shy. We all used to go there. Practically a City department. Before your time, of course. Before Hildegarde’s time, too, come to think of it—when I was young and twenty and the newspaper photogs didn’t take much interest in me. Bad place for an upwardly mobile young man to get his picture taken.”
It sounded like the right place; Hildegarde might be that hostess. “Well, I’m just going there to meet….” He paused, and realized there was no way to make this sound better. ‘To meet a friend.”
Carleton Nairn nodded gravely. “Won’t matter once it hits the media. They’d…. Hey, I know!”
They had come to an intersection. Carleton Nairn wrenched the wheel to the right, and sent the car shooting up a new street.
“Hildegarde always had a rear exit in case of a raid,” he explained, over Matt’s faint expostulations. “See if it’s still there.”
At the next corner he took a left. Then a right. Then another left. The streets were even barer than the main drag; one more left took them into a dead parking lot. Ice and snow humped up over gravel, plowed into hills and valleys. A semicircle of mixed ice and snow sat in front of a battered screen door in the backside of a homely building. This wall of the building had obviously not been designed for show: beige siding mixed indiscriminately with industrial green, both so age-battered that it was impossible to tell which was original and which replacement.
It pleased Carleton Nairn, though, as he pulled to a stop and squinted through the windshield. “Yeah,” he said. “See those punch-numbers by the frame there—no, where the doorbell would be. Just punch 3907 on the button box and go right in. You’ll be in the storeroom, and somebody from up front will come and get you.”
This was more or less what Matt was afraid of. He reached behind himself for the door handle, not taking his eyes off Carleton Nairn. “Er, thanks.” The door opened; he jerked forward before he tumbled out. “Er, see you Monday.”
“Sure thing, Mr. Benz,” said Carleton Nairn. Matt eased backward, closed the door, and took three giant steps away. No gun appeared out of a side pocket to blast him. Instead, Carleton Nairn started the car and, waving, pulled out of the lot.
Matt waved back, and mopped his forehead as the car disappeared around the corner. Realizing what he was mopping his face with, he shoved it back into his pocket. He turned toward the door, but didn’t start for the door. What if Hildegarde’s was the wrong secret salon?
Gravel crunched under his feet, especially whenever he paused to kick at a lump of snow. All the snow was frozen in place; bruised toes didn’t make him any more decisive. Growling to himself, Matt kicked this lump again, succeeding in breaking off a piece. Why didn’t he just keep walking? Carleton Nairn might not be Miss Skull, but he was still Carleton Nairn. By lunchtime Monday, everyone at own would know who’d been sneaking into the storeroom at Hildegarde’s. And going to meet somebody! No one could possibly make a guess at who that could be. Real stroke of genius, he told himself. That’s a nice little Christmas present for Walter Prince. You should’ve said…should’ve said….
He reached the screen door before he thought of anything he should have said. He took a deep breath and punched in the combination he’d been given.
A little green light appeared on the box, to a peremptory buzz. Matt pulled back on the screen door. He smiled. Two could play that game. If it had been so long since Carleton Nairn had visited Hildegarde’s, how did he know the combination?
He moved into the cold twilight of the storeroom. Before he let the inner door close behind him, he let his eyes make the shift so he could see where he was going. Only half a dozen utility lights fought the shadows from way up in the ceiling. The floor was pocked and pitted, and the detritus of years sat I bunches on the floor, or stacked in shelves apparently set around the room at random. A tower of nested wastebaskets was at one elbow as he moved into the room. Next to it, a bundle wrapped in torn paper sat atop a cardboard barrel. Matt peered at the contents, which seemed to be paper and thus right up his alley. A sheet dangling from the stack was instantly recognizable to anyone used to forms and files: a column of signatures was accompanied by times, arrival and departure. With dates from forty years ago. What wouldn’t some inquiring historian pay for those in-and-out registrations!
Straightening, Matt moved on, so an arriving hostess wouldn’t find him being vulgarly inquisitive. Someone would surely be coming soon; he reached into his pocket for his mask, to prove he’d been here earlier. No, he tossed that aside on his way out.
He continued to hear only his own footsteps, echoing through the room. Had they failed to hear the buzz, with all the noise up front? But the store part had been nearly silent, and there must be a computer….
“Hello?” he ventured.
That echoed, too. Otherwise, the only sound was a rippling creaking of the roofbeams high overhead.
Matt squinted into the shadows. The ceiling seemed a long way away. The place Ada took him hadn’t looked so tall from the front. Of course, a lot of buildings out this way had probably been through a dozen identities, each new owner building on whatever seemed like a good idea at the time. That was why the smite club was able to show successive layers of depravity, stretching back into the rambling building.
He stepped around some grey-green aluminum shelving and peered up the corridor between them and a row of battered old filing cabinets. He tried again. “Hello?”
A sound of tiny feet scampering along the concrete made him jump back, though he saw nothing. On the way, his right shoulder brushed a sagging box that was just one too many for its shelf. It hit the floor with a resounding pop, spraying the floor with white Styrofoam packing, little brown boxes, and thin black cylinders Matt recognized at once.
He knelt to sweep the Styrofoam toward the box, and took up one of the ballpoint pens. A smile of nostalgia rippled his cheeks. Sure, there were still plenty of these at work, though of course the name of the department had changed about three years….
His forehead crumpled; his head drew back between his shoulders. Why did Hildegarde’s have a carton of obsolete City ballpoint pens?
A click and a buzz brought him to his feet. Putting one eye to a space between boxes on the shelf, he watched the dark shadow appear in the white rectangle pf light from outside. The angle of the shadow’s hand made him back toward the filing cabinets.
“Hey, Benz! Mind if I join you?”
Matt eased along the row of cabinets. His feet came down very gently on the uneven concrete. Watching through the gap left by the fallen box of pens, he saw nothing new: just Carleton Nairn and the twin of the gun Matt had already handled.
“You’d’ve saved me some trouble just eating the burger, Benz.” Carleton Nairn stepped all the way in and let the door close behind him. “But I didn’t waste it. Passed it on to a panhandler in a wheelchair on the corner. My contribution to City sanitation.”
