to do what I could about it. I knew Shelmerdine was behind the whole business and I knew, if I could only get something on him to place before the Crime Commission in Chicago, I might help to break him. He has a lot of front organisations: legitimate business concerns which cover his other activities. I managed to obtain a job with one of them, but I used a false name. Then, about three months back, Shelmerdine’s personal secretary left him and I was recommended for the job. Maybe you can call it providential. I quit the real estate agency which Shelmerdine owns as one of his above-board concerns and went to work out at his mansion. It’s a big place just outside a town called Rollinsville—might as well call it Shelmerdinesville, because he seems to own the whole place.”
I grunted. I knew something of Shelmerdine by hearsay, he seemed to own sections of land and everyone in them like a cattle-baron of the Old West. It wasn’t hard to think of him as an old-time patrone, making everyone act when he hollered and running them off their holdings when they dared to raise a holler for themselves.
“This mansion of his,” continued Joanne Kilvert, “is a fine old place in its own grounds. Shelmerdine lives like a king, but I always thought of him as a beast in a cave. It’s a beautifully furnished cave where everything is veneered over. Shelmerdine has a wife, a quiet and pretty little woman who never asks any questions, and a small son of about six years. He’s a family man. A big businessman who loves to spend all the time he can with his wife and child. I used to watch him play with the child on the lawn, and I’d think of my brother and his child, buried in the ground, and my crippled sister-in-law.”
She took a long pull on the cigarette and I watched the lights of distant South Bend growing bigger.
A city, seen from a distance at night, is a fairyland of lights. It’s hard to think that, among the lights, people are living out their lives; people are being born and other people are dying. It’s hard to imagine that the far cluster of lights are a spangled cloak for the squalid things of the city; dirt, disease, strife, and crime.
Joanne Kilvert went on: “Everything at Shelmerdine’s place was on the up-and-up. He rarely left home, and conducted his businesses from there. Every letter I took down and typed was a legitimate business one, touching the affairs of Shelmerdine Enterprises Incorporated. No one ever used gangster talk, no one ever produced a gun. There was no poker playing in smoky rooms, no whisky bottles strewn about the place. There were no gangsters’ molls, and nobody ever tried to paw me. I had my own suite of rooms and I was treated with respect and paid well. There were no mobster types about the place, but there was no disguising what the two chauffeurs, the gardener and his helper, and even the butler, with what he thought was an English accent, really were. There were also a couple of uniformed men who prowled about the grounds to keep out intruders. There was a very studied and very obvious gloss of respectability about the place, Mr. Lantry, but I wasn’t fooled.”
She paused to stub out the butt of her cigarette in the ashtray on the dashboard.
“I know the kind of set-up,” I told her. “I’ve been in some joints that were built with dirty money myself. I bet you could smell the rotgut booze Shelmerdine peddled in the twenties. Maybe, if you were extra-sensitive, you caught the echo of a machine-gun coming from a Chicago back-alley thirty years in the past every time you glanced at Shelmerdine’s art treasures.”
“No,” she answered. “I wasn’t interested in how Athelstan Shelmerdine made his money. I was only concerned with what he had done to people near to me.”
“And hundreds of other people, all of them near to somebody,” I said.
“He began to trust me with a great deal of work out of the usual run of a secretary’s job. Pretty soon, I had the run of his office and the keys to his safe. I only saw the business side of Shelmerdine’s life, of course, and he was always the perfect gentleman. Once in a while, men he called ‘business associates’ would call and he’d have private conversations with them. They always looked like businessmen on the surface, but I could sense what they were under the business suits.”
I smiled to myself. I would have used the word “smell.”
“I got my chance when Shelmerdine was off on one of his business trips,” she continued. “I was alone in the office and I searched the safe. There was a compartment which I never had occasion to open, but I found the key to it on the key-ring and found it chock-full of papers. They concerned Shelmerdine’s other business deals—his real business. They touched on everything: dope, drugs, vice, trade union protection; there were names and dates that would pull down Shelmerdine and a lot of other people if I could only give those papers to the Crime Commission. I had the means of wrecking Shelmerdine and his whole organisation in my hands. I locked the papers up again. I had to think it out and plan my moves.
“I knew Shelmerdine would soon be back, but he was to go on a longer trip later today, that is—if I waited, I would stand a better chance of getting clear. I packed my grip a full week before—perhaps I betrayed myself in some way, I don’t know. Anyway, Ike Tescachelli, the senior chauffeur, began to watch me in a way I didn’t like. I thought perhaps he had found out about my true identity and was suspicious; then again, he might simply have been looking out for a chance to get fresh when the big boss was away.”
I remembered the Italian-looking hood who spoke to me at the mouth of the dirt road.
“Ike Tescachelli, is he the one with the small moustache?” I asked.
“Yes. He usually stays close to Shelmerdine and drives him around, but Greg Cortines, the second chauffeur, went with him on this trip. Tescachelli had his eye on me for two or three days and I was worried. As soon as Shelmerdine set off on his trip, I opened the safe and took the papers. I stuffed them into my grip and I was ready to run for it. I had already checked the bus timetable and knew I could get a bus into South Bend once I was on the main highway, and I could take a train or bus to Chicago from South Bend.
“I had a story ready in case anyone questioned me, and I slipped out of a side door. I was about to leave the grounds of the house by a small gate leading into a back road when one of the gardeners appeared and asked me where I was going. I told him I was taking a walk into Rollinsville to have the clasp of my grip repaired and he seemed to believe me. I was clear of the house when I realised the awful mistake I had made. In my haste, I left the key in the lock of the safe after locking it. It might go unnoticed until Shelmerdine returned, but it was sure to give away the fact that I had tampered with the safe—and I’d been seen leaving with a grip.”
She paused for a moment to catch her breath, as though at the recollection of that chilling moment when she realised how she had betrayed herself.
The coupe passed a South Bend city limits sign; the glare of the city was closer now and it brought a certain warmth. It was like coming to a place of friendly men after being in the dark outlands for too long.
“I panicked, Mr. Lantry,” went on the girl. “I ran for it, trying to get to the highway as quickly as I could. I didn’t know my way around very well and I took a couple of wrong turnings. By the time I did reach the highway, I was just in time to see the bus I wanted sailing away into the distance. I was terribly scared. I just kept walking. Then an old farmer in an old-fashioned truck picked me up and gave me a lift to the other side of Peru and I kept on walking after that, even when the rain started.”
“Then I picked you up, huh,” I grunted, “and you still have those documents in the grip? No, that’s a silly question. It’s obvious that you have; you’ve been clinging to your baggage as though it’ll leave you a fortune when it dies.”
I watched South Bend growing bigger before us and I was worried.
I
