Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 46, No. 11, November 1982

Susie’s gaze strayed nervously about the room. Shelves of case reporters and digests rose up into the shadows far above her head. There was a spiral staircase leading to a gallery and a door which gave access to the twenty-first floor lobby. Going from floor to floor, she had often used the stairs as a shortcut. She recalled how the lawyers, interrupted at their studies, would frown up at her. Their books and yellow pads were lying on the tables even now, awaiting the morning and the resumption of work. It was only a few hours away. Five hours from now, the room, and the building, and the city, would be full of people. But at this moment there was no one to help her. She fingered the envelope in her pocket, and waited.

The door from the lobby opened, and Hellmuth emerged from the shadows below the gallery. He was a tall man in his fifties, heavyset and balding. He wore the customary dark pinstriped suit, the vest buttoned tightly over a slight paunch.

He glanced at the calendar she held clutched to her breast. “Bring it here.”

Susie stepped back, slipping the envelope from her pocket with her free hand. “No. I have an offer to make you.”

The words brought no surprise to his face, only a look of irascible boredom. “What kind of offer?”

She backed up into the corridor. There was a mailchute set into the wall. Her eyes never leaving Hellmuth, she raised her arm until the envelope was poised over the slot. “I recorded our talk — the important part of it. The tape is in here. It will come back in tomorrow’s mail, and they’ll know who you are, and what you tried to do. Unless you turn and walk out of here now, I’ll drop it.”

“Ah,” Hellmuth murmured. “So that was your scheme.”

“Look, I’m not bluffing.” Susie did not understand his words, and tried to cover the only flaw she could see in her plan. “I did record you.”

“Oh, I know that. You think I can’t tell when I’m switched through a speakerphone? That distinctive bottom-of-the-well sound? I work in an office just like this, you know.”

He was advancing on her as he spoke. “Stop!” she cried. “Stop or I’ll let this go.”

But he did not stop. Susie waited until the last moment, when he was just an arm’s length away, and opened her fingers.

The envelope dropped a few inches and jammed in the slot.

Hellmuth did not glance at it. His tired, contemptuous eyes were on hers. “The cassette’s too thick. Haven’t you noticed that you can’t get more than one letter at a time through those slots?”

Slowly he reached out a hand. Susie cringed, pressing herself back against the wall, but he merely took the envelope from the slot and put it in his pocket.

“Now bring the calendar over,” he said, turning away.

He settled himself at one of the long teak tables, as if it were his own desk, and she set the calendar before him and waited in meek silence, as if she were his secretary.

“You might as well know the rest now,” Hellmuth said.

She shook her head. “I don’t want to know. Take what you want and go. Please.”

“No,” he said. “It can’t be as simple as that.”

A chill knifed through Susie’s insides. “You said I wouldn’t be harmed.”

“That was expedient.” He paused, then went on, “I can’t leave you to tell them about it in the morning.”

When he finished speaking the silence in the room seemed palpable to Susie. It seemed to hold her motionless. When Hellmuth came at her, she would not even be able to raise a hand against him.

The silence stretched on unendurably. When at last Hellmuth made a move, it was only to open the calendar in front of him.

“You know where Stant was this afternoon?”

He asked the question indifferently, putting on his reading glasses, as if he would merely dismiss her as soon as she answered. She realized that he could not bring himself to kill her. Not yet. The paralyzing fear lost its grip on her. If Hellmuth wanted to talk, let him talk.

She mumbled an answer: “At the hospital, I think.”

“Yes. The question was, which hospital?” He had reached the day’s date, and his finger traced the line he wanted. Then he wrote down the name of the hospital and the client Stant had seen there. “You know, when you suddenly find yourself a criminal, it is a great advantage if you also happen to be a lawyer. You have all the right connections.”

He closed the calendar and put the note in his pocket. “Getting the access card for this building, and key to this office, for instance. A simple matter, as one of your associates has the locker next to mine at the Athletic Club.

“In fact, I would never have heard about Stant’s visit to the hospital if I hadn’t been at the Bar Association cocktail party. Someone said, they’d heard Harry Stant called an ambulance chaser before, but they hadn’t realized how true it was.”

Hellmuth was leaning back in his chair, dangling his glasses over his pinstriped paunch. He seemed to have forgotten that Susie was there. He was listening to his own mellifluous voice.