Флетчер Флора - Leave Her to Hell

I hadn’t ignored the possibility that I might be waiting in a trap. Turning away from the window, I sat down behind the desk out of reach of the faint light. In the belly drawer of the desk was a loaded.38 automatic. I opened the drawer and removed the automatic and laid it on the desk in a position convenient to my right hand. Besides the narrow window overlooking the alley, the only way into the room was the door from the hall. I sat and watched for a sudden shadow on the glaze of glass, but there was no shadow and no sound, except the tired sounds of the old building in the night, and I continued to sit there in the expectation of anything or nothing from a little after nine until a little after nine-thirty, about twenty years altogether.

I stood up and stretched and lit a cigarette and sat down again, and all at once I became intensely conscious of the telephone. It crouched on the desk like a black and breathing miniature monster, exploiting in malice its constant threat to shatter the silence with its shrill bell, and tension and malice gathered and grew between us as I waited and waited for another twenty years for the bell to ring, but it never did. At ten o’clock exactly by the luminous dial of the watch on my wrist I stood up again and put the.38 into the pocket of my coat on the right side and went out through the little waiting room and beyond the glazed glass into the hall. After locking the door behind me, I read the address on the scrap of paper Colly Alder had given me, and then I went down to my car and started through the streets toward the street of the address.

I was driven now by a growing sense of urgency. I didn’t know why precisely. I only knew that Colly had not called, and that his not calling was somehow of ominous significance to him and possibly to me. It took me almost half an hour to reach the apartment building in which Rosie lived. I ignored the elevator and climbed the stairs to the right floor and the right door. I knocked three times with intervals between, but no one came, and I had a feeling that no one would ever come if I knocked at intervals forever.

Made wary by a premonition of trouble, I used a handkerchief in handling the doorknob. It turned smoothly and silently under pressure, and I slipped into a tiny foyer and took two steps into a living room. A light was burning in a wall bracket and another on a table at the end of a sofa, and I saw immediately by the light that my premonition had been solid. Someone was in trouble, bad trouble, and it might turn out to be Percy Hand, or person or persons unknown, but whoever it was, it wasn’t little Rosie the redhead, for Rosie was out of trouble for good and all. I could see her bare feet and ankles and about six inches of green velvet lounging pants projecting beyond the end of the sofa opposite the table with the lamp, and from the position of the scarlet-tipped toes, pointing at the ceiling, it was apparent that she was lying on her back on the floor, and the odds were enormous against her having lain down there for a nap.

I walked across the room and around the sofa and looked down at her. She was not as cute as she had been a few hours ago when she had given me the formal treatment and stared her resentment of my casual threat to pull Colly’s nose. Her eyes were open and fixed in anguish and terror, and her slender throat was bruised and crushed by the pressure of fingers. There is, I think, something especially terrible in a killing by hands. A knife or a gun or a bludgeon seem, somehow, to come between the killer and the victim and to share the guilt of the killing. But there is nothing to share the guilt of naked hands. A hands killing has an incomparable quality of cruelty.

In a gesture of futile formality, I knelt beside the body and felt for a pulse, but there was none. The flesh, however, was still warm and pliant, and I was shaken by the anger and pity that were elements of my futility. Rosie the redhead had probably been an avaricious little wench, surely no better and probably not so good as she should have been. But she had at least been faithful and important to one odd and insignificant runt. Most of all, she had been warm and alive and full of juice, and it was wrong and ugly and pitiable that she was now dead by hands. After perhaps thirty seconds beside her, I stood up and went out the way I had come in, using my handkerchief on the knob as I went.

At first I thought I’d call the police, but then I thought I wouldn’t. Not yet. Behind the wheel of my car, I lit a cigarette and tried to think logically. What I tried logically to determine was why Rosie had died, and it seemed to me pretty apparent. Colly had said to go see Rosie at ten if he had not called before. Rosie would have, he had said, something interesting to tell me. This meant, no doubt, that Rosie had been possessed of certain dangerous information she was under instructions to divulge if a certain questionable and perilous venture in which Colly was certainly engaged went wrong. In brief, Rosie and I together had been Colly’s insurance, and the insurance, like the venture, had gone wrong. Ten o’clock was long past, and Rosie was dead, and Colly had not called, and why hadn’t he? Well, it didn’t take any genius to answer that one. He hadn’t called, I was sure, for the same reason that Rosie hadn’t answered the door.

Starting the car, I drove to the good block of good street where Colly had his office, but the street door to the lobby was locked, and I could see, looking up the face of the building, not a single light in any window. I considered rattling up the watchman, if any, but decided against it. Instead, I found a telephone booth in a cigar store and looked up Colly’s name in the white pages of the directory. He had a private residential phone, all right, and the place of his residence was a fair hotel on the south side of town. While I was in the booth, on the long chance of better luck than I expected, I spent a dime and dialed his number, but luck was not better, and no one answered, and after three long rings I hung up and returned to my car and drove to the hotel.

The small lobby was empty, and no clerk was in evidence behind the desk. I’d have preferred climbing the stairs unseen, and that’s what I’d have done if I’d known the number of Colly’s room, but I didn’t know it, and so I couldn’t. There was a call bell on the desk, and I slapped it with a palm and waited and slapped it again, and pretty soon after the second slap a tousled character came out of a back office digging the sleep out of his eyes. I thought that he might be annoyed and slightly recalcitrant because of being wakened, but he didn’t seem to be. He seemed to be no more than anxious to dispose of me and to get back to his cot. I gave him Colly’s name, and he checked a file and gave me Colly’s number, and I went up to the number while he went back to the cot.

There was a crack of light under Colly’s door, and the knob of the door turned easily in my hand. I went into the room and closed the door behind me, and there was no one there but me. A magazine was lying face down on a lumpy sofa. A small radio on a small table was playing softly a current tune. As I looked and listened, the tune ended and a clever deejay announced another tune that was to follow. And in a few seconds, sure enough, it followed. There were two doors in the wall of the room to my left as I stood by the door to the hall. One of the doors was partly open to disclose a closet. The other was tightly closed, and I went over and opened it. Beyond was a bathroom, and Colly was in it. Besides being dead, he was in extremely bad condition.

He was lying in the bathtub with his mouth stuffed full of a handkerchief gag and his head propped against the rise of porcelain beneath the water taps, and his face was swollen and stained by tears. His shirt had been torn open at the throat, and his tie was missing, and the reason the tie was missing was because it had been used to bind his wrists together behind his back. The belt had been removed from his trousers to secure his ankles, and the shoe and sock had been stripped from his left foot. The sole of the foot was deeply burned in three places where something very hot, probably the coal of a cigarette, had been applied. Besides all this, there was a neat small-caliber hole in his forehead just above the bridge of his nose, and a trickle of blood had run down from the hole to add its stain to the stain of tears.