Free Evil That Men Do by Hugh Pentecost

would be allowed to interfere with his relaxed enjoyment of it.
    Chambrun wasn’t alone. Miss Ruysdale was with him, and a startlingly large Negro who had to be T.J. Madison. The ex-fullback was undeniably eye-catching. I’d guess he was about six feet four, with broad, broad shoulders tapering down to a ballet-dancer’s waist. He was quietly dressed in a charcoal-gray suit, white shirt, and a plain navy-blue tie. One look at him close up and you knew why some linebackers in the pro football league had retired early. They used to say of him that no one man could bring him down when he was carrying the football. They talked of him still as the greatest ever, of his extraordinary balance, speed, and power.
    Chambrun introduced us, and he spoke my name in a low pleasant voice without any trace of the South in it. I remembered he’d graduated from one of our top Eastern colleges.
    “Mr. Madison has a problem,” Chambrun said. “Lieutenant Hardy and Naylor haven’t brought any formal charge against Miss Standing, but they’ve warned us that if she tries to leave her suite, one will be placed. A plainclothes cop outside her door has a warrant for her arrest, charging her with murder which he’ll serve if she steps out into the hall.”
    “They have no right to hold her without charging her,” Madison said, “but in effect they are holding her.”
    “She’s certainly better off where she is than locked up in a cell downtown,” I said.
    “I’m not sure,” Madison said. “I’m not sure we aren’t playing their game by letting her be a voluntary prisoner. They haven’t got a thing on her except that she was in the next room when Slade was shot.”
    “She says she was in the next room,” I said.
    Madison’s dark-brown eyes studied me. “You’ve made up your mind about her, Mr. Haskell?”
    “Just trying to think the way Hardy thinks,” I said. “Has the fog lifted any?”
    “Fog?”
    “The blackout. The ‘amnesia bit,’ ” I said.
    “Nothing,” Chambrun said. “Ruysdale and I have been through the papers. We draw a blank on February twenty-fifth, or any other day. Neither Doris nor any of her friends made the papers in that three-week span.”
    I explained that I hadn’t had a chance to go through the papers myself, which brought me to a brief account of my meeting with Gary Craig. Craig’s name didn’t seem to ring any bell with Madison or Chambrun. Miss Ruysdale had read three of his novels.
    “He’s a man with hope, competing with our successful writers who write hopelessly about their unhappy childhoods and their adolescent failures,” Miss Ruysdale said. “He’s one of the few adult novelists of our time. It seems nobody wants to be adult today, which is why he is determinedly overlooked.”
    “Is there any reason I can’t get his message to Doris Standing?” I asked.
    “Technically, no,” Madison said. “But they’re playing this so high-handedly that they may or may not let you in to see her.”
    “She has to eat,” Chambrun said, glancing at his wrist watch. His own dinner was due. “Pick up a menu on your way in. We provide de-luxe service, even to people under house arrest.”
    I took Chambrun’s cue and did it up in spades. I had a shaker of martinis made up at the service bar and carried it, with two glasses and a dinner menu to the door of 9F. One of Hardy’s men was sitting outside reading an evening paper. He knew me from a year ago.
    “Might as well make the lady comfortable while we can,” I said.
    The cop shrugged. “Normal hotel service is permitted,” he said.
    “She can see friends?”
    “Not without Hardy’s okay,” the cop said.
    “Then she is under arrest?”
    The cop grinned at me. “You know better than to get nosy, Mr. Haskell. Take the lady her drink. I’ll bet she can use it.” He unlocked the door for me.
    I went into the sitting room. Doris was standing by the center table, her eyes blazing with anger. “Am I not even allowed the