“I never scold people. That’s not my job.”
“Like you said about overhereing—I would have, you know, just sat here out there and overhered if could have. But only I couldn’t, so I opened the window a little teenie and scrootched down on the floor and dropped just like Eve in the Garden of Edam. I’d been watching, you know, and I saw Ms. Snake come in, and I was overworried about poor Mr. Free.”
“I’m glad you did what you did, Mrs. Baker, and if you were trying to help Mr. Free, nobody can blame you for that.”
“And then later I heard Ms. Girth ask about a hotel, and somebody said the Consort. But I didn’t know you were there until I tapped one of those hoppers.”
Stubb nodded to himself.
“Are you about finished, Mr. Barnes?”
He took a final sip of cocoa. “No, I haven’t really started yet, Mrs. Baker. I want you to tell me everything about those two women. We might begin with the way they were dressed.”
“Well, if that don’t beat the Dutch.” Mrs. Baker shook her head in wonderment. “And the Dutch meet the Devil.”
A Better Neighborhood
The doorman’s whistle sounded less often now. Most of the businessmen were at the airport, and the hurrying crowds of office workers had thinned to sauntering shoppers. The sun was higher and the blue shadows had gone, but it was still bitterly cold.
The witch wore a ranch-mink coat appropriate to the Consort. It had a hood, and the hood was up, so that her exotic face was framed in soft fur. She walked half a block past the doorman and his line of cabs, then left the sidewalk and stepped into the path of a Cadillac sedan.
The driver braked. Although the street was largely clear of snow and ice, the big car skidded, its rear wheels sluing before it came to a stop with its bumper touching the witch’s mink. She opened the right front door and got in.
“Young woman,” the driver said, “you were very nearly killed.”
“Perhaps.”
“Not perhaps.” He was a man of fifty-five or sixty, with a clipped white mustache. “I almost couldn’t stop. If my reaction had been a trifle slower, you’d be dead at this moment.”
“How fortunate for you that I am not. It would have been most embarrassing.”
He took his foot from the brake and let the car drift toward a dozen others waiting at the light. “You don’t seem much shaken up.”
“It is my nature,” the witch said. “Within, I am seething, often. Outside, nothing.”
“Your legs aren’t trembling?”
“No.”
“Then may I drop you off someplace?”
“Yes. The address is sixteen twenty-three Killdeer Lane. It is in Bellewood. That is a suburb to the north.”
“I’m afraid that’s out of the question. It’s at least an hour’s drive.”
“In this car, at this time of day, it will take no more than forty minutes.”
“I’m afraid I can’t spare that. I’m going down this street to Broad, then turning left on Broad to Nineteenth. I’ll be happy to drop you anywhere along the way.”
“You will take me to the address I have given you,” the witch told him. “Or if you are in a great hurry, you may drive to your destination and give me your keys. I will take care of my errand and return your car there—certainly, I would think, before five o’clock. I will leave your keys beneath the seat.”
As the traffic began to inch forward, the driver stared at her. “You’re insane.”
“No. I am only a determined woman in urgent need of transportation. What are your alternatives? You are a wealthy and distinguished man, married, with several children and many business contacts. You may, if you like, drive to a police station or merely stop where you see a policeman. I will cling to you and scream. Cry. You may drive to your destination; I will do the same thing, and it will be still worse.”
“You don’t even know my name.”
“It will not matter. I will give a name—any name—and the police and the journalists will believe that you have given me a false one. No doubt it will be a bit of gossip that will enliven many business lunches.” The witch opened her purse, took out a compact, and inspected her face critically in the mirror. “I am a beautiful woman, but I am not asking you for a hundred thousand dollars, or even for a nice little condominium on the most fashionable side of the park. Only for an hour or two of your time. You will drive me where I wish to go, and I will get out, and you will never see me again. You will get off very cheaply—if you act now.”
“You are a very clever young woman,” the driver said. “But it isn’t going to do you any good.” He accelerated the Cadillac to make the next light.
“No. I am a deep young woman, if you like, Mr. McAlister. A desperate young woman. But not clever. To tell the truth, I am too busy to be clever.”
He spun the wheel to swing the big car around a corner. “A clever and unscrupulous young woman, ready to use my position against me.”
“This is not Broad Street.”
“No,” he said, “but this will get us to the freeway. Want to give me that address again?”
“Sixteen twenty-three Killdeer Lane. Mr. McAlister, my kind of person has been telling your kind for many centuries that you are enslaved by your possessions. It is irrational of you to resent it because occasionally your master chooses to crack his whip.”
There was a radiotelephone in the Cadillac’s dashboard. McAlister picked it up. As they turned onto the On ramp, he said, “It’s me, Bill. Tell them I’m having a little trouble—I’m going to be a couple of hours late. Make my apologies, will you?”
The witch used the Cadillac’s lighter to light one of her Turkish cigarettes and turned her head away as though to study the grim, costly buildings they passed.
When the Cadillac was purring down a boulevard lined with winter-naked oaks, McAlister announced, “I live here myself. I’d just driven in when you stopped me.” It was the first time he had spoken since they had turned onto the Interstate.
His passenger permitted herself a slight smile. “Are you not afraid I may use that information against you?”
“Certainly I am, but you could have gotten it from the telephone book. If you try another stunt like this, you’ll find I’m not such easy meat.”
“You regret that you did not call the police? Do so now. There must be police in Bellewood.”
He shook his head. “I said I’d take you, and I will. Just don’t try it again.”
The witch laughed.
Killdeer Lane was a winding residential street where large, well-kept houses stood on three-acre lots. As McAlister stopped the car in the drive of sixteen twenty-three, he asked, “How are you going to get home?”
“You have guessed already that this is not my home. That is very clever of you.”
“I told you I live here. We’re a community of only about three thousand, and if you lived here too I’d have noticed you.”
“Unless I had just moved in.”
“Let’s not beat around the bush. How are you going to get back to wherever you came from?”
“I cannot say.”
“Somebody here will drive you?”
“Perhaps. I doubt it.”
McAlister nodded. “And I don’t think you’ve got money for a cab. They charge double outside the city, so it’s about a thirty-dollar ride. Miss—Ms. whoever you are, I’ll pay you fifty dollars right now, cash, if you’ll tell me how you knew my name.” He slipped a calf-skin wallet from his coat and took out two twenties and a ten.
She smiled at him. “Suppose I take your money and tell you it was magic?”
“I don’t think you’ll do that. I think you’re a young woman who keeps her bargains.”
“Firm but fair. Is that not what they say of you in the boardrooms?”