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

“Who is she?” he demanded, clapping the glass down. “How’d she get in there? I thought you had every way in and out spotted. How’d she get through?”

“We have, we have. It was just a blind coincidence, one of those things that happen every now and then; that there’s no way of preventing because they’re completely unforeseeable, unguessable beforehand. I did some checking after she left. They’re old friends, from years back. She didn’t come to see him, didn’t even know he lived here. She came in to see someone else, a woman friend. He and she must have come face-to-face in one of the little lounges or passageways that weren’t being spot-covered by us — the ground floor is honey-combed with them — and he gave her his room-number. Then later on, after she left her other friend, she looked him up to talk over old times. No sex, she’s not that type. There was no particular reason to single her out; she might have ridden the elevator along with other people, and been thought to be accompanying them.

“It was just one of those flukes, Mike,” he said. “Like that bit with the taxi.”

“It’s always just one of those flukes, with him,” Mike brooded darkly. “For three and a half years now, it’s been just one of those flukes, over and over and time after time. Till I ask myself: which is the punisher and which him that’s punished? Who’s on the right side and who on the wrong?”

His face screwed up blindly for a minute, and he acted as if he were going to cry. But didn’t.

“He’s spooked. He’s got the luck of the damned. He’s got a sixth sense of some kind that protects him.”

“No he hasn’t, Mike. And even the luck of the damned finally runs out one day.”

“I want him,” Mike whispered, with the awful irrevocability of a last sacrament.

“You’ll have him, Mike,” Terry said softly, and put his arm out and let his hand come to rest on Mike’s shoulder, as in an accolade of transposed filial promise. “You’ll have him.”

Mike left for his bi-monthly check-up at French Hospital early Monday morning in a glossy black departmental limousine, toiling along from hotel to car like a big Alaskan bear held upright, Terry under one arm, a team-mate under the other, fanging imprecations against the enemy he was temporarily turning his back upon, growling admonitions to the two supporting him. At the last moment, perhaps recalling happier days, he gave an impatient combination fling-and-wrench that sent them both staggering clear of him, and climbed in the rest of the way alone, with a morose “I was walking by myself before the two of you ever saw the light of day, and I’ll still be walking by myself when the two of you are resting in the ground where all good men go.”

The car-door gave a curt crack of dismissal after him.

“There goes a man,” said Terry’s companion admiringly.

“We’ll never see his like again,” Terry agreed.

The car gave a U-turn around the tulip-beds in the middle of lower-section Park Avenue, coursed the downtown lane for a couple of blocks, and then turned off and slipped from sight. The hospital was almost on a direct line with the hotel but the width of the island away, over on the West Side.

Mike was coming out again Wednesday at nine, which was exactly when the hospital raised the boom on him, and not a minute sooner (but not a minute later either, no hospital could hold him longer than that). Which gave Terry forty-eight hours on his own. Twenty-four to be exact, for he had to split shifts.

He had twenty-four hours on his own. He turned and went back into the hotel alone.

He waited until ten, as if for some private time-signal to strike, unheard by others. When it had, he got up abruptly, walked out and went down the hall toward that other door.

A tray with a coffee-pot and used cup was standing on the floor to one side of the door. There was a sound like a fly buzzing against a window-screen. An electric shaver.

Terry turned and walked back the other way again, more slowly this time, killing time.

A waiter got oil the service-elevator and carried the tray down. When Terry walked back to the door again, the buzzing had slopped.

This time he knocked.

There was a special way he knocked. It wasn’t aggressive. It wasn’t timid either. It was matter-of-fact, normal. Like a man calling on somebody he knows, no more, no less.

A voice said “Yes?”

“Talk to you a minute,” Terry said.

“What about?”

“About you.”

Nothing happened.

“Me and you — both,” Terry changed it.

Still nothing happened.

“Mutual benefit,” Terry said.

Nothing yet. But the mere fact that there was no answer showed that his mind was working on it.

“I’m not kidding, it’s to our mutual advantage,” Terry reiterated. “But I can’t say anything more from out here.”

Finally the door opened, not to let him in, but to get a look at him.

He’d left the chain on. The incident with the girl had taught him that much.

Terry did it very carefully. Like you move slowly, not to frighten away a bird or a butterfly, or something volatile like that. Slipped out his wallet with his identification-badge, and turned it around, and let him look at it. But kept it well back, didn’t thrust it sharply forward as in an arrest.

Then he spoke very quickly, because the man’s face was already turning ghastly ill. “I’m not ordering you to let me in. It’s up to you to let me in or not. It’s got to be of your own free will.”

And then he added, very low and under-breath, “I promise not to touch you.”

Maybe that did it. Who knows what did it? Terry didn’t know. The man himself probably didn’t know what did it.

“But you are a cop.”

“A hungry one,” Terry admitted. “I’d also like something newer than a sixty-one Dodge.”

The door closed. The chain fell. The door reopened unchained. Terry was in. Step one.

Terry pointed to a side-table halfway down the room. “Can I go over by that table?”

The man nodded, but didn’t appear to understand what he was nodding about.

Terry went over to it, kept his back turned so the sight of the gun wouldn’t panic the man. Took it out, put it down on the table, walked away from it backwards, and then turned.

He held tip his elbows at shoulder-height. “This is so you’ll trust me. That’s the only one I have, over there. Now frisk me.”

The man hesitated.

“I insist.”

The man touched him in the various places a gun might be.

“Now go over there and stand by it. I’ll stay here. You’re at least six times closer to it than I am. Now we can talk.”

The man glanced at the door.

Terry caught his implied meaning and went over to it. He chained it and he double-locked it. Then he turned around and faced him again.

“This way we’re safe from sudden outside interruption,” he said. “Could be anybody; and I can’t chance being caught in here with you.

“You have to learn to trust me,” he said. “Until you do, what I say won’t make any sense. Once you do, it’ll make plenty.”

The man still didn’t, obviously. His eyes were oscillating like two little metronomes, back and forth, back and forth, ready to spring wide in alarm at the first suspect move.

“You know what you’ve done,” Terry said. “For years you were on the payroll of one of the crookedest big-time operators that this town has ever known and right while you were on the force. When a raid was building, somebody tipped him off. Who could that have been? Whoever it was figured it could never be proved, and it never was. But whoever it was didn’t figure Mike’s son was going to be in the raiding detail. And get a bullet, and get killed. The guy that shot him went to the chair years ago. But the guy that was really the cause of it, all he got was a dismissal from the force, exact charges never specified. And with all that nice dirty money piled up waiting for him.”