Fletcher Flora - The First Golden Age of Mystery & Crime MEGAPACK™ - 26 Stories by Fletcher Flora

“It’s time now to do it,” the voice said softly and suddenly.

“What?” she thought.

“It’s time to kill Hugo Weis. We have waited long enough.”

“How?”

“With the gun. Didn’t you buy the gun?”

“Yes. The gun and cartridges.”

“Good. It will be quite simple, really. You’ll see.”

“What should I do?”

“First you must go to the city where he is, of course.”

“What then?”

“Go to a hotel. Later, at the right time, you will go to his office. He sees all sorts of people there, mostly people who come for favors, and no one will think it odd that you have come too. Have you learned where the office is?”

“Yes. It’s on the south side of the city, near the railroad station. On Euclid Street.”

“So it is. I see you have been preparing yourself well.”

“Won’t I have trouble getting in to see him?”

“Probably none at all. He makes a point of trying to see personally all the supplicants who come to him. It’s a trick. He sustains much of his power that way.”

“What will happen to me afterward?”

“Never mind that. Don’t worry about anything.”

Having asked the question, what would happen to her afterward, she felt for an instant a terrible fear, but in the next instant the fear had passed, and she arose and returned the book to the stacks and left the library. Home, she told her mother that she had decided to go up to the city for a day or two, which was something she had done occasionally ever since she had been old enough, and then she went upstairs to her room and at once began to pack the loaded gun and a few things in a small bag. She had no feeling of having come to a point of crisis in her life, not the beginning of anything or the end of anything or even a radical change from what had been. There was a train, she knew, that left for the city at five o’clock, and having packed and said good-by to her mother, she called a taxi and reached the station with several minutes to spare.

That was yesterday and last night, and now here she was in a room of the hotel to which she’d come, and it was, she saw by her watch, nine o’clock in the morning. She stopped brushing her hair and stood up and put on the light coat she had worn on the train. After putting on the coat, she stood quietly with her head bent forward in a posture of abstraction, as if, now that she was prepared to leave, she had forgotten where she was going or for what purpose. Then, moving all at once, she took the loaded revolver from the small traveling bag and put it in her purse and went out into the hall and downstairs. She walked down, ignoring the elevator, and she walked slowly, not like one reluctant to reach a destination, but with a kind of implicit aimlessness suggesting no destination at all.

She had, in fact, plenty of time. It was over a mile from the hotel to the office of Hugo Weis, and it would not be wise, she thought, to get there too early. From the lobby of the hotel, she passed into a coffee shop and sat down at a small table in the rear. A waitress came with a breakfast menu, but she was not in the least hungry, although she had not eaten since noon of the day before. She ordered only a cup of coffee. She drank the coffee so slowly that it was quite cold before it was half gone, and then she sat on over the cold cup for another ten minutes before leaving. By that time it was just past nine-thirty.

Reaching Euclid Street, carrying the purse under her arm and still walking with the implicit aimlessness of one with no place in particular to go, she turned south in the direction of Hugo Weis’ office. She could not recall exactly how she had learned where the office was. Probably it was something she had known for a long time. It was a rather famous location, after all, and had received a lot of publicity at various times. It was the first office Hugo Weis had ever had, two dark rooms in a shabby building in a poor section, and it was evidence of his great vanity that he had remained there all these years, exercising his swollen power and gathering a fortune in the same place where he had begun. It was another trick, she thought. A lie. An illusion of humility sustained by a monster of conceit.

Walking along the street, she felt wonderfully good, almost exhilarated. She felt, indeed, rather gaseous, hardly touching the concrete pavement with her feet, on the verge of rising and floating away with every step. She had felt this way sometimes as a girl, especially early in the morning of a spring day when she had got up ahead of all the others and gone alone into the yard. And there in the window of a department store was a thin dress of palest blue that was just the kind of dress for the effervescent girl that she had been and now wasn’t. She stopped in front of the window and gazed at the dress for several minutes, clutching under her arm the purse, and the gun in the purse, and then she turned away and walked on and came pretty soon to the certain shabby building in the poor section. On the street outside the building, as she waited before entering, the voice spoke to her for the next to the last time it ever would. As always, it was a voice of poignant beauty, with a whisper of sadness running through it.

“Here you are at last,” the voice said. “It took a long time.”

“Yes,” she thought. “A long time.”

She continued to wait, her head inclined and cocked a little to one side, but the voice did not speak again, and after a minute or two she crossed to the entrance of the building and went into a dark hallway from which a narrow staircase ascended through shadows to the second floor. She went up the stairs, hesitating for a moment at the top, then turning back toward the street along a kind of narrow gallery at the edge of the stair well. There were two doors spaced along the gallery, each with a pane of frosted glass on which nothing was printed. She went past the first to the second, the one nearer the street, and opened it and entered a small room that seemed to make a special point of its drab bareness. The floor was uncovered, blackened and greasy from the application of sweeping compound. A dozen straight chairs stood at intervals against three walls. On one chair sat an old man in a stained and wrinkled seersucker suit, his withered hands twisted together in his lap. On another chair, against the opposite wall, sat a woman with bright yellow hair who was wearing an expensive fur piece around her shoulders and a bored, carefully detached expression on her face.

These two appeared to be the only occupants of the room, but then Freda saw a man behind a desk beside a door in the fourth wall. She crossed to the desk and stood looking down at the man. He had a thin face with a long nose above a lipless line of a mouth. His quality of deadliness was as discernible as scent or sound, and although he was serving as a receptionist, his first function was obviously that of bodyguard. Looking down at him, Freda had a feeling of immeasurable superiority, a singing sense of exhilaration that was the climax of the effervescence she had felt on the way to this place. No one, she thought, could prevent her from doing what she had come to do. No one on earth.

“I would like to see Mr. Weis,” she said.

“Your name?”

“Freda Barkley.”

The man looked up at her with a glitter of contempt in his eyes and down again immediately at his hands lying spread on the desk as if they were fingering silent chords on an invisible keyboard.

“Do you have an appointment?”

“No, but I’ve come a long way, from out of town, and I would like to see him only for a few minutes. It’s very important.”

“It’s always important. Always.” The man shrugged and folded the fingers of his hands. “Have a chair over there. He’ll see you, all right. He sees everyone.”