Such heating attempts ended in a slow burn. With herself as the victim.
Horne frankly asked himself how long he could take it without giving in. She was very feminine, very desirable, and delectable to kiss, as he had discovered. And he was very male and very human. He realized that neither of them would go on making dry runs for any length of time. His conscience held him back: the knowledge that their chosen professions dug a wide, deep gulf between them. For the time being, at least, he couldn’t bring himself to make love to a girl he would throw into jail at the earliest opportunity. The big question mark in his mind was: how long would “the time being” last? He tried hard to confine himself to pecks on the cheek when she demanded good-night kisses.
She was patient; extremely, cleverly patient. She took the attitude that he could get away with it this week, and perhaps next week, but there were months and years to come. He would unbend. She knew men; she knew the power of her body and her clothes. He would unbend.
Horne discovered the dog was let in each night before Hilda and Bumble retired. Horne’s hopes of sleeping on the studio couch were quickly dashed. On his third night in the house, the one following the beer party, he picked up a pillow and blanket from Betty’s bed, stalked past the astonished Betty, and made a bed before the fireplace. The dog flopped in the exact center of the studio couch, eying him.
He put a book beside his pillow, kicked off his slippers and lay down. Betty stood in the bedroom door, dressed in something a brash manufacturer had placed on the market as a sleeping garment, eying him in some consternation.
“Are you going to sleep there?” she demanded.
“I’m going to try. I didn’t have much luck last night.”
“But why don’t you come to bed?” she insisted.
“Because I want to sleep.”
When she slammed the door the vibrations shook the house. He grinned and picked up the book. It was Bumble’s picture book, the anthology of Ripley’s Believe It or Not cartoons. He leafed through it, idly courting sleep. Almost asleep, he turned over a final page and read how a convict had made a bomb by stuffing wet, mashed playing cards into a lead pipe. The convict had blown his way to freedom.
Betty drove away immediately after breakfast and Horne descended to the basement to search for a piece of lead pipe. A wise Bumble — or a wise Betty — had left nothing like a bit of pipe in the way of weapons lying around. So Horne, under the guise of something to do, took apart the oil burner’s innards. He timed it so that Hilda called lunch in the middle of the job. The two of them climbed the stairs, leaving the scattered pieces behind them on the basement floor.
Eating, Horne wondered if it would work. Cellulose was used in the manufacture of playing cards, he knew, and cellulose under the tightly-packed condition mentioned, was probably combustible. What about a fuse? A pipe cleaner might serve. Did he have a pipe cleaner? He did not. Perhaps Betty had thoughtfully provided him with some. If she had, they would be in the dresser drawer she had set aside for his use. But there remained the problem of plugging up the ends. Offhand he’d not seen a sack of cement lying around, and he doubted if a cap from a gas pipe would fit his bit of pipe, even though there were some way he could plug up the gas pipe after stealing two caps.
How about a beer bottle, he said to himself? Or a glass fruit jar with a tight fitting lid? Well — it would require a hell of a lot of mashed, sodden cards to fill a beer bottle or a fruit jar.
After lunch he returned to the basement. With his eye he chose the length of pipe he wanted, felt his pockets for his pipe and tobacco, and a match. He discovered he had no matches and looked expectantly at Bumble. Bumble turned, ran up the stairs and into the kitchen, got a box of matches, and carried them back to Horne. Horne thanked him, lit his pipe, pocketed the matches and slowly put the oil burner together again.
There would be hell to pay if he didn’t find a way to make the bomb work before cold weather set in.
Betty returned from Boone with an earful of news and a paper. She deemed it prudent to remain away from the town for a while inasmuch as almost every good-looking girl on the street was the subject of suspicion. Two men whom the city police had brought in from Chicago to investigate the explosion, she said, had returned home, apparently empty-handed.
Horne looked at her sharply but said nothing.
She went on to describe how plainclothes detectives were watching his office building and particularly his office from across the street. The detectives were stationed in a second-story room and equipped with binoculars. Another was secreted in the basement of the building, watching the tunnel which she had used to tap his telephone wire. She knew that because she had entered the basement of another building a block away and crawled up the tunnel to his building. She also decided not to risk getting his mail from the office. He had some, because she could see it on the desk with her binoculars from the roof of the building across the street.
Horne shook his head in admiration and envy.
“What about me,” he asked. “Surely I’m missed.”
“You certainly are, darling. The police no longer think you just walked away from them — they’re pretty certain I have you. I made a slip.”
“Another slip, you mean. What was it?”
“I left the imprint of my shoe in a patch of dust. Just across the street from your house. The night I collected you I had to knock out a man who was watching your house. He was hiding under a protruding window across the street from you. The rain washed away my footprints in the yard, but I forgot about the dry dust under that window. They found it.”
“I wondered what had happened to that guy. How is Eliz — Doctor Saari taking it?”
“Oh, that woman. She doesn’t seem to be crying about it. She was riding around with a cop this noon.”
When he failed to rise to the bait she informed him that his continued absence was being kept secret from press and public alike, that the police investigation into his whereabouts was strictly off the record. Do you know why, she asked him savagely? He replied that he did not.
“Because those damn fools think they’re fooling me, that’s why! They believe that as long as they can pretend they don’t know you are gone, I’ll fall into their way of thinking and come out in the open. Stupid idiots!”
“What about the old lady? The animal hospital?”
“All’s quiet. Your company hasn’t paid the money yet and the old lady is furious. She demanded I produce the balance — quick. That phony file card didn’t cause the trouble we expected. The police haven’t been back.”
The police won’t go back, Horne thought happily, until Wiedenbeck has a warrant in his hand and evidence in his pocket. Wiedenbeck was no fool. Wouldn’t it be funny, he added to himself as an afterthought, if Wiedenbeck had had the foresight to tap the hospital’s phone?
“How are you going to get the rest of her money?”
The face beneath the attractive red hair turned to look at him. “That’s what the old bitch asked me.”
“What did you tell her?”
“I pointed out,” Betty said evenly, “that if the worst came to the worst, you were insured for about twenty thousand.”
Startled, shocked, Horne jumped to his feet.