Dan Marlowe - Killer with a Key

Johnny swung up on the landing, past the executive offices, and turned right. He hurried as he swept the bulls'-eye flash around the dim shadows of the interior lounge; he wanted to get back upstairs. He could easily hear the echoing sound of his heels in the quiet as he walked down the far side of the mezzanine and tried the doors of the travel bureau, the barber shop, the beauty shop, the haberdashery, the theatre ticket agency and the public stenographer's office. Satisfied, he descended the same flight of stairs to the main floor lobby and cut back underneath through the muraled swinging doors which led into the bar, dark except for the night light.

He walked down its long expanse and removed a key from a clip on the band of his wrist watch. He unlocked the door at the far end of the bar leading into the kitchen and, flashlight in hand, made a quick circuit of the cavernously gloomy area whose long stainless-steel counters sprang to glistening life under the probing beam of the light. He tried the fire door at the back end of the huge room, the padlocked doors on the walk-in boxes and the hooked catches on the windows, and returning to his starting point let himself out and re-locked the door.

Back in the lobby he returned to the registration desk and found Paul behind it, idly turning the pages of the early edition. “Vic go out? How soon's he due back?”

“Any time.” Paul glanced at his watch. “He's a little overdue right now. Another couple of minutes, probably.”

Johnny hesitated, and Paul looked at him inquiringly. Paul, the elevator operator, was a slender man, four or five years older than Johnny's thirty-five; his hair was dark and slicked down closely to a small skull. He had a stolid, unimaginative face, but a firm mouth and chin; Paul was reliable. “I want you to cover for me,” Johnny explained. “I need to run upstairs a few minutes.”

“So go ahead,” Paul said at once, folding up his paper. “Vic'll be back in a minute. I'm not likely to get any conventions to check in till he gets here.”

“It's quiet enough,” Johnny agreed. “Okay. If you need me ring 629. It's not on the board.”

Paul nodded. As he turned away from the desk Johnny reflected that one of Paul's primary virtues was that he needed no diagrams.

Johnny stepped out into the sixth-floor corridor after anchoring the cab of the service elevator with a slab of wood, and a flash of white at the end of the hall caught his eye. He looked more closely and discovered a white kitten galloping in spurting dashes, twin white paws batting at a dustball. “What the hell?” Johnny was surprised to find that he had said it aloud. There couldn't be two white kittens in this place. Not on the sixth floor, anyway. This kitten should have been behind the door of 629, and since it wasn't something was wrong.

He advanced on the kitten, which wheeled to confront him. When Johnny was half a dozen paces away the small back arched slowly, and the white fur seemed to swell enormously, especially around the neck. A long, surprisingly loud hiss accompanied this display of defiance, and Johnny laughed as he dropped to his knees. “You need a new matchmaker, white stuff; you're givin' away too much weight.” He extended a finger, slowly and steadily, and the kitten watched its approach, eyes of an unexpectedly bright blue fearlessly studying the problem. Johnny ran the finger right up to the ridiculous whiskers, and in movement too quick to follow the kitten turned its head and seized the finger in its mouth.

It was not a bite; Johnny could feel the impression of the needle-like little fangs, but he knew it was just a holding action while the kitten debated the seriousness of the assault. With his left hand he scooped up the small body, and the fangs closed down. Johnny stood up and worked his finger free, and he and Sassy looked down at the two bright drops of blood which dotted its surface. “Okay, tiger; you won a battle, but you lost the war. It's happened to heavyweights. Now let's go see how you got out here.”

With the kitten riding his arm he turned back down the corridor to 629. He could see that the door was tightly closed as he approached it, and his feeling of unease increased. He couldn't imagine Ellen Saxon opening the door of that room to anyone in the mood in which he had left her, yet somehow the kitten had gotten out into the hall.

At the door he fumbled for his pass key. Then the door opened inward suddenly as he reached for the lock, and Vic Barnes stood teetering on the threshold, breast-to-breast with Johnny.

Vic's face was ghastly, perspiration streamed down the faded, round cheeks, and the eyes were all whites. Vic's mouth opened convulsively, but no sound emerged; he half turned to look back over his shoulder, and rubberlegged a sideways step as Johnny impatiently pushed past him and inside.

A stride beyond the door he stopped in his tracks.

Ellen Saxon lay on the bed where he had left her; for a long moment Johnny stared in disbelief at the twisted limbs, the outflung arm with which she had sought in vain to protect herself, the so-well-remembered face that was now a death mask of horror. A puffed, blue, strangulated horror.

He drew a harsh breath and crossed the room in a lunge. He felt for a pulse and dropped the limp wrist hopelessly. There was no pulse. Ellen-he still couldn't believe it.

He fought his way back up to the surface; he couldn't seem to get off dead center mentally. He forced himself to lean forward and look more closely at Ellen's outthrust arm and hand; he avoided looking at her face. When he turned to Vic he didn't recognize his own voice. “What were you doing up here, Vic?”

Vic never even heard him. The stocky man had dropped down on a chair just inside the door and had retreated to a private world of his own. He was bent nearly double in the chair, with the lower half of his face cradled in his hands and the protruding eyes staring glassily.

Johnny stepped into the bathroom and turned on the cold water. He grabbed a towel from the rack, soaked it in the running water, wrung it out hard, folded it three times lengthwise and brought it out and handed it to Vic, who plunged his face into it. Johnny was already making the round trip to wet down another towel; by the third trip Vic was back on his feet and Johnny had a hand on his shoulder. “Why did you come up here, Vic?”

The waxen-faced man swallowed hard. A hand crept up and removed his glasses, absently stuffing them into the breast pocket of his jacket. He had trouble finding his voice; it seemed to come from a long distance. “I–I can't tell you.”

“What the hell do you mean you can't tell me!” Johnny rapped back at him. Without the glasses the deathly pale features looked more defenseless than before. He looked at the water marks from the wet towels on the shoulders of the black alpaca jacket, and he tried to keep his voice down. “Look, Vic; this is Johnny. I don't think you did it. I know you better than that. I know you didn't do it, but I also need to know a few other things. Why did you come up here?”

Vic stared at him dumbly.

Johnny fought for patience. “How much time you think we got, Vic? This is important. I've worked with you for seven years. Fifty times I've asked you to block out a room for me. This is the first time you ever came upstairs. Why?”

The stocky man's voice was a leaden monotone. “The p-police will say I did it.”

It brought Johnny up short. They would, too, if Vic didn't make any more sense than he had up to now. If they don't think you did it, he added silently to himself. He had to find out what Vic knew before the police got there, or he wasn't going to find out anything at all.

He pushed Vic back down into the chair again, and the spaniel eyes stared up at him. “Are you listening, Vic? Do you hear me?”