The 9 Dark Hours Read online

  THE 9 DARK

  HOURS

  Lenore Glen Offord

  FELONY & MAYHEM PRESS • NEW YORK

  With love to

  TANTE

  Who once made an innocent journey

  to the city of San Francisco

  Contents

  ONE Perfect Gentle Knight

  TWO It Rains into the Sea

  THREE One Cat Too Many

  FOUR My Own Petard

  FIVE Eat with the Devil

  SIX Follow My Leader

  SEVEN Later Than You Think

  EIGHT Reasonable Facsimile

  NINE Closed for Repairs

  TEN Suitable for Framing

  ELEVEN Lady into Fox

  TWELVE Doubled and Vulnerable

  THIRTEEN Forfeit to the Dawn

  ONE

  Perfect Gentle Knight

  MY NAME IS Cameron Ferris. On a driver’s license I’m described economically: “Sex, F. Race, White. Married? No.” Up to the night of February 14, that was practically my life story. I have a few details to add to it now.

  Just after Christmas, coming over on the ferry from an early morning train, I’d had my first glimpse of San Francisco. That day was clear, and the white towers climbing up and down the city’s hills were washed in clean gold. The red bridge and the silver bridge flashed in the light, soaring over Golden Gate and Bay. “Ah, California and sunshine,” I’d said to myself—though fortunately not aloud. “Ah, San Francisco, city of adventure!”

  That, until February 11, had been my last look at clear sunlight. Any adventure I had found you could have put in your eye.

  I’ll admit I was looking for it in an unlikely place. Maybe if I’d been an artist, starving in a shack on North Beach, there would have been more scope for the imagination; but I’m an ordinary person, with no artistic talents and a hearty appetite, and a job—any job—was good enough for the present. Caya & Co., Wholesale Hardware, needed a filing clerk, and Miss Ferris was in, as from Jan. 1.

  Sometimes the advertisements try to make us believe that there’s high romance in all types of business, could one but see below the surface. “Think,” they might say of a concern such as ours, “think of this carload of widgets, resting in Caya’s warehouse. Picture the far-flung territory over which they will eventually be scattered. The farmer on the lonely Dakota plains waits eagerly for the new widget without which his tractor will not run. The shipyards, springing up like magic from Maine to California, could not be built without widgets. From Alaska to South America—”

  You know the sort of thing. Maybe I could have worked up an interest in Caya’s merchandise, but I never so much as laid an eye on it. As I went to work I saw the wholesale district, dungray, huge, hideous and dripping with rain. Inside the office my nose was glued to a filing cabinet.

  I did manage for a while to extract a mild amusement from the orders I handled. Caya’s sold nails and tools and model trains, of course, as any hardware firm does; but in addition to these there would be orders, in habit-forming quantities, for the most incredible things like barswingles and Hagedorn clamps. Don’t be literal, of course those weren’t their names; they just sounded like that, and I’ll never know what they actually are. Somebody named Flaherty would demand 100 gross Hagedorn clamps, for delivery not later than Jan. 31. Well, I’d think, there was plenty of time to pack up that order even if the warehouse boys had to pick it out clamp by clamp. But what would Flaherty do with it?

  That amusement, I knew, would pall before long; but there was one bright spot on my horizon, not scintillating, you understand, but a perceptible glow. This was Mr. Tripp, the head of the order department in which I worked.

  Anyone would have to admit that he was a good-looking lad, with brown hair and hazel eyes and a profile that may not have been Barrymore’s but showed a distinct Grecian cast. He was kind, he was courteous and patient in teaching me my job—though it wasn’t hard to learn after one had grasped Mr. Caya’s peculiar system of doing business—and I thought he approved of me. Very well, then, I knew it.

  At first I had wondered what this handsome youngish creature was doing here. After a time I found out. Near-sighted eyes had kept him out of the draft; and as for his surroundings, they were meat and drink to him. Roger Tripp actually loved the wholesale hardware business. He put his whole soul into it, and would certainly go far. Within ten years, doubtless, he would be manufacturing his own barswingles in an improved form.

  Before I had spent three weeks among the files, it was plain that if I wanted to hand out the least little bit of encouragement I could work up beside him and eventually become the hardware queen.

  It was proved to me, along toward the last of January, by a slight dust-up I had with old Mr. Caya. It was our first personal contact, though from the study of his astonishing filing system I felt somewhat acquainted with the character of my employer. I owed my job to his idiosyncrasies, and to the complicated method he’d invented in the days of his fiery youth, somewhere back in the nineties.

  Every firm that sent us an order was expected to indicate a deadline for delivery. The order forms, after being copied, cross-indexed, handled and re-handled, were placed in the warehouse file—arranged not alphabetically, nor in order of receipt, but according to the deadline dates. Thus the warehouse boys knew exactly how fast they’d have to work, and could catch their breaths and enjoy a few crap games between bouts of shipping.

  I don’t know if anyone else does business this way. In our case it seemed practical enough, since Caya’s proudly boasted that barring acts of God no customer had ever been forced to wait for the filling of his order. The perfect record had to be broken some time, I suppose; and for a while it looked as if that distinction had been reserved for me.

  One rainy Monday morning Mr. Caya sent for me, and I’d no sooner stepped inside his office than I felt about eight years old and convicted of throwing spitballs. In the embarrassed presence of a harried-looking stranger named Smith, of Mr. Caya’s secretary, and of Roger Tripp with his hands full of duplicates and cross-file cards, Mr. Caya barked at me.

  “’S Ferris. You’ve been handling the A to M orders.”

  I didn’t deny that. Over the bristling white head, Mr. Tripp sent me an encouraging smile. He was a bit nervous himself. The boss hadn’t enough energy to modernize his office, but plenty for taking the hide off employees.

  “What did you learn first thing when you came here, huh? Orders filed by date for delivery. Don’t interrupt me. You know that. That’s the important thing to watch. It’s all you have to watch.”

  Yes, I did. Yes, it was. Yes.

  “Miss Ferris is new here,” Mr. Tripp put in kindly.

  “New! She’s been here long enough to learn one simple little thing. I will not have carelessness. She can’t learn to be accurate, she can leave. Mist’ Smith, here, ’s a busy man—came all the way over from Oakland to find out about that shipment to Flaherty. Telephoned twice, I told him shipment must be on its way, delay couldn’t be our fault. Now I find out the warehouse men never saw that order. Hagedorn clamps, a hundred gross of ’em! Flaherty needs ’em bad, can’t do a thing without—”

  I said, “Mr. Caya, I remember that order. The goods were to be shipped on or before January thirty-first.”

  “Thirteenth, Miss Ferris, thirteenth! You looked at it and didn’t see it! You copied it wrong, got it in the cross-files wrong! You’ve been told over and over—”

  “I don’t pretend to be infallible,” I told him, “but I’m sure I made no mistake in this case.”

  “Godsakes, Miss Ferris, didn’t you look at that date? January thirty-first is a Sunday!”

  I stood my ground. “The order said not later than the thirty-first.”<
br />
  “Alibis, alibis!” Mr. Caya shouted. “Why don’t you admit you’re careless, instead of telling a pack of—”

  The Celtic blood of the Ferrises went up to 211° F. “I do not lie my way out of mistakes,” I said, with intent to blister. Mr. Caya began slowly and visibly to swell, and creaked round in his swivel chair.

  And then Roger Tripp, bless his heart, came to the rescue. “I know that’s so,” he said. “Miss Ferris has been here only a short time, but I’ve had a chance to observe her. She might be in error, but if so she’d admit it at once. I should call her—dependable.”

  The secretary rolled an eye at him and then at me. It seemed that the accolade had been bestowed.

  Mr. Caya rounded on him. “And how, in that case, do you explain the date on those duplicates?”

  Almost with bated breath, I offered a meek suggestion. Anywhere else they’d have tried it first, but not here. “Couldn’t you find the original order?”

  “Yes,” Mr. Tripp said, “and that will prove it. I’ll find it myself. It must be somewhere in the warehouse; I’ll go down and put the fear of the Lord into those men!”

  He was magnificent, striding out. The profile had never looked better to me.

  Mr. Caya grudgingly told me I could sit down. For the next ten minutes, while the secretary industriously typed and the silent Mr. Smith looked out the window at a rain-lashed street, the old boy treated me to a speech on the importance of the Hagedorn clamps, without which Mr. Flaherty’s building—whatever it might be—would inevitably fall down at once. He was as gruff as ever, but not so sure of his ground. There were no more aspersions.

  The boys in the warehouse, I heard later, were having a refreshing cigarette and catching up on the adventures of Dick Tracy when Roger, breathing flame, descended upon them. They were affronted, but reluctantly uncoiled their legs and joined in the search.

  The Flaherty order was run to earth, way down in the pile of next week’s jobs. The boys protested that they had lots of time on it, and what was all the shouting for? They were left expostulating to the vacant air. Mr. Tripp charged back to the office in triumph, bearing the original order. It was plainly dated January 31.

  Mr. Caya, deflated, glared at him and me as if he suspected us of conniving at a forgery. The harried Mr. Smith looked at the date, and his frown deepened. “But—our carbon!” he cried wildly. “Our carbon of this order read thirteenth! That’s what put us off, because we—but how on earth could the original form be different?”

  Then he turned and stared at Mr. Caya, and his voice changed. “Has this happened with other people’s orders—anyone’s but ours?”

  “Never happened before, not in the forty years I’ve—”

  “Well, it’s not the first time we’ve been held up on this job. There have been other things. Last week there was a delay in shipping us some lumber—we thought it was just bad luck, but now I think I’d better look into it more closely. You know what it means, Mr. Caya, if we lose even a day.”

  “Bad business,” said Mr. Caya perfunctorily. As long as the mistake wasn’t ours, he didn’t seem to care what happened.

  I’d been waiting patiently for dismissal, and now it came, with a muttered apology from both men. Smith said, “I’m sure I didn’t mean to—you know, these things have to be investigated.”

  Well, what would you have thought? Just what I did—that he was making heavy weather of a very small mystery. I never remembered to ask what Mr. Flaherty was constructing.

  When I say that this incredibly dull episode marked the high point of my career in hardware, maybe you can guess what the rest of it was like.

  There were, however, two aftereffects. Mr. Caya looked at me very hard whenever we met, and several times came and stood behind me as I worked, causing the Ferris teeth to grit. Also, from then on, in his own eyes as well as those of the whole department, Mr. Tripp became my protector and champion.

  I didn’t know whether or not to like this. These situations have a way of getting out of hand, and we were now at the stage where too much cordiality on my part might give him ideas. Handsome and steady and kind as he was, I wasn’t sure that I was ready for any avowed interest. And yet, he had braved the old man and jeopardized his own position in my defense; there were times when I felt that he was really very sweet.

  He took to coming round in slack moments, leaning on my desk and telling me the plot of the movie he’d seen the night before. Now and then disapproval was expressed. Sex dramas didn’t please him, and as for Hedy Lamarr and Ann Sheridan, they might be full of oomph but that wasn’t his type at all. There was something unwholesome about them.

  This confidence, accompanied by a look indicating that the type he preferred was sitting not three feet away, gave me a quite ridiculous feeling of annoyance. He should have made me feel that Lamarr might be glamorous, but that in his eyes I could make her look like Carrie Nation. Nobody wants to be told she can’t compete in a major league.

  That was unreasonable, of course. I knew it.

  You’ve seen girls like me, who because of some directness of look or sturdiness of carriage seem boyish, no matter how many curves they may have. It’s something to do with straight blondish hair in a neat bun at the nape of the neck, or with heavy eyebrows a lot darker than the hair,—or, more likely, with firm pink cheeks that owe nothing to the cosmetic counter. You may have enjoyed looking at those girls—I don’t believe my face has ever frightened any babies—but what were the words that came into your mind as a description? I know. Solid, wholesome, dependable. That’s an accurate thumbnail sketch of Cameron Ferris’ outward appearance, and if you think I am complimenting myself, ask any woman if those are not the three most loathsome adjectives in the language.

  A person who looks like that is more than likely to lead a solid, wholesome life, no matter how great her craving for a bit of caviar in the shape of adventure. As for playing the lead in a sex drama, my kind of face is like a mask. There had been some men, certainly, who had professed to be in love with me; but I knew they saw nothing but the mask, and the qualities it promised were all they wanted. The ones I could have loved never troubled to find out what was behind the face. They saw Merideth instead, my lovely sister whose looks do not belie her capacity for passion.

  Jock Crosley, whom she married, once said, “Ronnie looks like a pale pink zinnia.”—You know, the sturdy cheerful flowers in your grandmother’s garden. Poor lamb, he thought he was pleasing me! By that time I was almost over my unspoken, unguessed-at love for Jock, but I think that speech completed the cure.

  And yet that experience had given me a queer complex about love. I knew what it should be, and felt unwilling to accept substitutes. I wanted something I wasn’t likely to get, the kind of romance that stings and sparkles, that—oh, well, why describe it? It’s what everyone wants, and a few achieve.

  If I didn’t get over the complex, it was going to spoil Roger for me. In a way, that was too bad. I could be what he wanted: a cheerful companion, a good housekeeper, a mother for his handsome children. I could grow fond of him. There were times when I thought that was all I was meant to have out of marriage—and times when I rebelled at the thought. But sometime soon, I should have to make up my mind.

  So January went out and February washed in on a torrent of rain, and I went on filing orders and did not ask Mr. Tripp to call on me at my new apartment. Maybe he would have hesitated to come, anyway. He was touchingly thoughtful of my reputation.

  When he spoke to me about the change of address, nothing could have been kinder; not fussy at all, just interested. It was my fault that it happened to irritate me.

  “Miss Ferris,” he said one afternoon late in January, “I see by your registration card that you’re no longer staying at the girls’ club. There wasn’t any trouble, I hope?”

  “None at all,” said I. The girls had nearly talked me to death, but you couldn’t call that trouble—not compared with a bombing raid.

  “You’re s
haring this apartment with a friend?”

  “No. I’m alone.”

  “I see.” Roger was silent for a moment. Then he said, “Of course you want to be independent; but—could we pretend for a minute that I’m your father?”

  “I’m afraid not—unless you were a very precocious youth.”

  He laughed. “Make it elder brother, then.”

  Not so elder, either. I am twenty-eight, though I love to tell myself I don’t look it.

  “You see,” he went on, “Mrs. Brent is married, and Miss Hamilton lives with her family. As members of my department, I’d feel responsible for them, too, if they were alone.”

  Oh yeah?

  “But you’re—well, I know you’re too sensible for any of the obvious dangers, letting strange men pick you up, anything like that; but do you think it’s quite wise to—uh—to set yourself entirely adrift, with no protection from older people?”

  Sensible. There’s another fightin’ word. “Why, Mr. Tripp,” I said, “nothing can happen to me. Were you thinking of the apartment? It’s quiet and respectable, and close to town.”

  “Oh, I feel sure you’d never choose a place that wasn’t respectable. It’s your being alone that worries me. You’re a stranger in town, and I—well, I don’t like to think of your going home at night to a lonely room, with no one to—well, to care about your welfare, or to help if anything should go wrong.”

  I said I hadn’t been ill in years.

  “I was thinking of something besides illness,” he said soberly. “This is a big, cosmopolitan city, and—dreadful things can happen to young women, you know. I beg your pardon? Did you say something?”

  I had muttered “No such luck,” under my breath, but now I gave him a smile and returned, “Really, I enjoy being alone.”

  He wasn’t convinced, but the elder-brother gag couldn’t be carried to the point of giving orders. Preparing to leave, he murmured, “I can’t feel that it is quite—well, quite—”