Free Ransom Game by Howard Engel

all my reading here, because her face got serious and her fingers were trying to make up their minds about whether to take off her coat or not. They decided to unbutton and I helped her put the fur on the back of her chair.
    â€œYou said you wanted to see me. Has something happened?”
    â€œTell me about what you said on the phone. The men in the Mustang. Are you all right?”
    â€œThey wanted to know what I was doing and who I was working for. Have you any idea who they might be working for? It would make my job that much simpler.” Muriel looked at me and opened up her blue eyes in a way that she had tried on me before. They were Little Red Riding-Hood eyes and I was learning not to trust them.
    â€œI told you before, Benny. I don’t know who they could have been.”
    â€œWhat about Eddy Milano? Could they be working for him?”
    â€œWhat do you know about Eddie? What has he got to do with this?”
    â€œYou admit you know him, then. Why did you leave that part out yesterday?”
    â€œBecause, Benny, it doesn’t have anything to do with Johnny. Eddie’s only one of the people looking for Johnny. Sure, he can find muscle when he needs it. Maybe it was him. Go ask him if you want to know for sure.” She’d placed her reddish leather purse on the table next to my atlas. It smelled like a luggage store. Inside I could see that she’d been shopping at two of the better stores along St. Andrew Street.
    â€œWhy did you ask me to meet you Muriel? It wasn’t just to break up your shopping.”
    She was looking at her watch when I looked at her again. Then she ferreted around in her bag and came up with an envelope with my name on it. “This is for you,” she said. “Only don’t open it unless you don’t hear from me for forty-eight hours.”
    â€œIs it an insurance policy? Come on, Muriel, you’ve got to trust somebody.” She stopped worrying the corners of her mouth and looked at the green stone of her ring for the first time since she’d come into the library. It seemed to be her calm centre, a rallying point for her concentration.
    â€œLet me play it this way. I’ve thought about it.”
    â€œOkay, you’re the boss.” She put the envelope into my hand and watched me put it away in my inside breast pocket. Only then did she allow herself a healthy sigh of relief, which, as usual with Muriel’s sighs, had a lot of incidental appeal.
    She was in another sweater. This time it wasn’t angora but it was blue and a size too small for getting away without causing a stir. Her navy skirt was slit up one side revealing a froth of white lace and long slim calves.
    â€œWill you call me tonight?” she asked, tilting her head so that I forgot I was on the pay-roll. I nodded and grinned, and she started packing up. I helped her back into the Persian lamb and she gathered gloves and bag. We left together.
    There was no Mustang parked in front of the library, but I walked her down the steps past the monumental pediment of the old library which had been re-erected on the approach to the new one. When we parted, she pressed my hand and gave me a peck on the cheek I didn’t feel I’d earned.
    â€œCall me tonight,” she said again, but in a confidential, almost conspiratorial voice. “Try me around nine. I may have good news. God bless,” she said, and moved off in the direction of Lake Street without looking back once.

NINE
    Steve’s Garage was a rusting, tin-fronted, overgrown shack that had been built back in the late thirties with the hope that it might last for ten years. It wasn’t always Steve’s Garage. Steve Tokarski had come on the scene fairly recently. He had installed pumps calibrated metrically and once in a while put up streamers when the oil company sent them. But he didn’t know what to do about that rusting front. The stain slid down a new coat of paint the