Корнелл Вулрич - A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

“I was watching him from an unmarked car once,” Mike put in rancorously, “when he still used to go around outside the hotel sometimes, and I saw him cross the whole width of the sidewalk just to drop a tiny rolled-up ball of foil from his cigarette-pack into a litter-basket, instead of letting it fall on the ground.”

“We have a complete dossier on him, starting with the original charge that triggered the whole case—”

“Why couldn’t you use that?”

“Lack of corroboration and too circumstantial. Like I said, we have it all down in the dossier, that and lots more, but what good is a dossier without an act? We need an act. A clear-cut, definite, exposed act, punishable by statute. It doesn’t have to be sex, it can be anything. Just so we can get our hands on him, and hold onto him, nail him clown once and for all and give him the business.” The sound of Mike’s teeth grinding together could be heard clearly all around the room.

“The way it stands now, he can’t get out and away, and we can’t get in and at him. It’s a stalemate. The way it stands now, we’re on one side of the door, he’s on the other. We have to get somebody inside it with him on his side, but working for us. That’s the only thing that’ll break up the deadlock. Follow?”

“I follow,” the girl said quietly.

“So now you have an idea what you’ll be up against. An intelligent mind — very wary, very alert, very cagey — but an unbalanced one, all the signs point to that.”

Mike roared angrily. “Why beat around the bush? He’s criminally insane!”

“I didn’t want to frighten her too much,” Terry temporized.

“She may have to tangle with a guy who’s nuts with fear, and she better know about it!” Mike lashed out relentlessly.

The girl widened her eyes momentarily. That was the only sign of fear she gave. Then she dropped her lids over them calmingly. “All men are nuts, more or less — when you get too close to them,” she said thoughtfully.

“Don’t be afraid. We’ll be covering you. We’ll be all around. Just a call-for-help away.”

“That can be awfully far sometimes,” she said reflectively.

“He’s committed acts that would have gotten him stoned to death in the old Bible days,” Mike snarled.

“Don’t take her nerve away,” Terry pleaded with him.

“I’ll be all right,” the girl said. “And if I do get into the room with him?”

“You’ll have to play it by ear. The main thing is to win his confidence. Then it’ll unroll by itself.”

“Oh, my darlin’,” Mike mourned with typical Gaelic sentimentality, “I’ll give you a bonus out of my own pocket. I’ll buy you a string of pearls.”

“I don’t use jewelry,” the girl said gravely. “The life I lead, it’s only a hazard.”

She opened the door. “I better get under way,” she said briskly. Then she turned to them. “Pray for me,” she said, and closed it and went out.

She said it with a smile, but she wasn’t joking.

She came up to the door with a free-swinging stride, and rapped loosely and almost casually on it, just as you would when you drop in on a friend informally.

The man who opened it wasn’t old, but he looked it. His hair was cut short to the point of travesty, about the height of worn-down toothbrush-bristles. The deep circles of sleepless nights were under his eyes. He looked strained and haggard. Not just at the moment, permanently so.

“Yes?” was all he said. And even that one short word managed to crowd uneasiness into it.

From that point on the thing moved fast, staccato. Like the quick-beats of a drum climbing up to a climax and a crash.

“Had a hard time finding your room—” she tossed off, and swung the door back before the man could catch it and hold onto it, and somehow side-stepped past him and was already in the room before the man could grasp the fact of what had happened.

The man had to turn his head now, because she was behind him.

“You must have the wrong—”

“Don’t you remember? Down in the bar a little while ago? You said, “Come on up have a drink, let’s get better acquainted—’ ” “Pour something,” she encouraged. “Let’s make it friendly.”

The bathroom door opened unexpectedly. It had a full-length mirror set into it. As this swung around, blurring perspective, the lights reflected on it came to a head and produced a bright but soundless flash, like sheet-lightning or the flash-bulb of a camera.

A woman stepped out into the middle of the incipient crisis, cool and casual. She wasn’t a girl, she wasn’t that young any more, but she still looked satisfactorily young. She had that innate something about her that spells good breeding and demands consideration. Not just a cheap stray to be disregarded.

She was looking only at the man.

“What is it?” she said evenly. “What does she want?”

“She’s got me mixed up with somebody she claims she met in the bar—”

“How could you have been down there? The two of us have been light here in the room since eight o’clock—”

There was a body-turn swift as a bolero dancer’s, and the girl was gone again, just as springy and sudden as she’d come in.

The little splash of spread-out sparks from the cigarette she’d flung down headlong slowly soaked into the carpet and glimmered out.

The man stood there frozen, as if a snake had just fallen unexpectedly onto his shoulder from somewhere and then dropped harmlessly off again.

Terry had to call down for help and have a bellboy come up and give him a hand, before he could wrestle the heaving, forward-straining Mike away from the door and back toward the bed out of which he’d cannoned when he first learned of what had happened. At that, the call, brief as it was, had cost him considerable ground, because he’d had to hang onto Mike with only one arm hooked around and under Mike’s arm while making it with the other. When the auxiliary, actually a stocky man of fifty, arrived, they managed between the two of them to establish sufficient counterweight to stall and reverse Mike’s impetus. But in a respectfully passive way, not actively using their arms to oppose or push him at all. Terry in fact simply used the backs of his own shoulders as an impediment, and gained leverage by digging his heels in front of him and pumping backward. The tripartite mass of figures they made somewhat resembled the classical Laocoon statuary-group, except that they weren’t marble, weren’t motionless, and had clothes on. Finally by a series of lurching drags, first on one side then on the other, they got him back within orbit of the bed, much as men move a frigidaire or some other equally ponderous object without casters. Then he suddenly stopped straining, went spent, and sank down heavily onto the edge of the bed.

“No, Mike, don’t,” Terry lamented. “You’ll give yourself another stroke.”

“It’s you that’ll be giving it to me,” Mike accused. “And the likes of all the rest of you.”

Terry held out a drink and Mike promptly gave it back to him, all over the face.

Terry wiped himself off on his sleeve. The droplets clinging to his jawline had made him look for a moment as though he had a curious, beaded beard. He had the uncomplaining look on his face of a dutiful son who has just been buffeted and accepts the justice of it, even though he may not be sure just exactly what it was for.

The mature bellboy had retired by now.

Terry waited a tactful moment or two until Mike’s breathing had subsided still further, then took a chance on pouring out another.

This time Mike put it where it belonged, down his own gullet. His face slowly went back to red again, from the almost-black it had been before.