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

Names are not too important — they are only labels used to differentiate people. It is the action stemming from given characteristics within a given situation that counts more as identification, that brings forward the individual personality. And since one played the part of the killer, and one the part of the dead, let them be known as Killare and Dade. That will characterize them beyond all doubt. The killer and the dead.

As he stood there waiting for the bus he’d missed that night, Killare wasn’t even thinking of this man he’d dedicated himself to kill. It was one of the few times, night or day, that he wasn’t. A skin-teasing, mosquitolike rain was needling him, and it felt more like icy pollen than rainwater. His collar was turned up, his hat brim down, he was chilled and getting more chilled by the minute. His shoes were starting to squirt instead of scrape when he scuffed them.

The bus must have broken down along the way, and had to be taken off the run and towed back to the garage. Which meant there would only be one more coming along after that — the buslines closed down for the night at 1:00 a.m. and didn’t start rolling again until 5:00 in the morning and the last bus wouldn’t get to his stop until about 1:15 or even later.

He turned and looked around despairingly for some kind of shelter to tide him over during the wait he foresaw coming up. He was standing out in front of a corner residential hotel. He el noticed it when he first halted at the bus stop, but hadn’t given it a second thought since.

Now as he looked again he caught sight of a small, neat neon sign with the word Bar on it posted above a separate doorway to one side of the main entrance. Also he noticed that the doorway was flanked by a number of lighted windows that looked out on the very stretch of sidewalk he was standing on.

He decided to do his waiting in there, and warm up while he was about it — that is, if he could find some place to sit that would let him keep an eye on the bus-stop zone outside. He walked over and went inside. It was a happy little place, warm and restfully lighted and sprightly — not raucous, but with the sound of soft-spoken voices. And his luck was working — the end seat at the bar, the one nearest the windows, was vacant. Probably because all the rest were taken up by couples, and this happened to be an odd seat, one left over.

He sat down on it, ordered a short but stiff bourbon, and as he slowly started to glow back to welcome warmth again, he kept his head turned, watching the sidewalk outside the window, which the rain kept covering with a patina of little disappearing pinpricks all the time, no two of which ever landed in the same spot twice. They looked like a swarm of drowning bees.

Finally, to ease the strain on his neck muscles, he turned around and glanced the other way, down the line of people extending along the bar. Man and girl, girl and man, two men, man and girl. Just then, at the opposite end of the barline, a man stood up to leave. This brought his head and shoulders up two or three feet higher than those of everyone else. If it hadn’t been for that, the man would probably never have attracted Killare’s attention or been given a second look, among all those people and in that subdued light.

But standing head and shoulders above everyone else like that, he caught Killare’s eye. Killare focused it on him, Killare gave him a double-take, Killare recognized him.

And it was he, Dade, the man it had become his daydream and nightmare to kill.

If he had any doubts about it, the barman clinched it for him. “Good night, Mr. Dade,” he said in a voice clearly audible above the confidential conversations going on all around. “Stop by and see us again sometime.”

Dade nodded, said a word or two to the man in the next seat, then turned and went out. Not through the street door by which Killare had come in, but through a door at the opposite side of the bar — a door which led inside to the hotel lobby.

So he had a room right here in the hotel, Killare thought, noticing that Dade didn’t have a hat or coat with him. And now that an extraordinary coincidence had dropped Dade right in his lap, he wasn’t going to brush him off like an ash or a stray crumb; he was going to take advantage of it.

Killare put a dollar down on the bar top, got up, and went in the same direction Dade had gone. He didn’t hurry or try to overtake him; he went at the same casual pace Dade had moved.

He turned right outside the door as he had seen him do.

He found himself in an intimate little side corridor, groomed with crystal prisms and white-leather banquettes. It opened onto the main lobby, and he stopped there and hung back a moment. The desk was a little offside, not in a direct line, and Dade was standing in front of it.

He heard him say, “Can I have the key to Room 212, please.”

The clerk said, “Good night, Mr. Dade,” as he handed it to him.

Killare turned and doubled back out of sight. Not all the way, for he might not have been able to make it in time without Dade getting a glimpse of him. But everything seemed to be working out just right for him, to unroll as smoothly as in a dream. A dream about murder.

There was a pay telephone booth to one side of him, and all he had to do was edge into that and sit down on the little slab-seat. It obviously had a light to go with it — a light that usually went on automatically; but even this was on his side. The electric bulb was burned out.

There were a few moments’ wait. Then Killare heard the elevator panel slur open, click closed, and Dade had gone up.

Killare came out of his cranny and went over to the desk.

“I just missed the last bus,” he mourned as the clerk looked up.

This was literally true, but the clerk misconstrued it, just as Killare had wanted him to, and thought he meant an out-of-town or commutation bus. “Would you like a room?” he offered. “We’d be glad to have you with us.”

“You’ve saved my life,” Killare smiled. (“And cost somebody else his,” he refrained from adding.) “I like a low floor, as low as I can get. How about the second?”

“I’m sure we can fix you up with something.”

“Do you have a line of Number 13 rooms in this hotel?” Killare asked craftily.

“No, we’re superstitious. We skipped over them,” the clerk smiled.

“All right, how about 214 then?”

The clerk checked his file. “Sorry, Room 214 is occupied.”

“Well, 211 then?”

“I can give you that,” the clerk nodded, after checking a second time.

Killare thought: I haven’t given him a chance to realize yet how I’ve been fishing for one particular location; in a minute or two, after I’ve gone up, it’ll start to sink in, what I did just now. So I’d better take the sting out of it by beating him to it, and explaining it myself. Better my own harmless explanation, freely given before it happens, than his own dangerous inference, put on it after it has happened.

“I met an old acquaintance I haven’t seen for years, in the bar just now. Mr. Dade. We’ve planned getting together over breakfast in the morning — that’s why I asked for a room near him, on the same floor.”

“How long will you be with us, just the one night?” the clerk asked as Killare signed in.

“How long is Dade staying?”

“Until the day after tomorrow.”

“Then I may as well stay over a second night myself, now that I’m here,” Killare told him. “I’ve got some important business to attend to.”

He needed the next day to get the gun. He’d decided long ago it should be a gun, and only a gun. A gun was tidy, swift, and usually successful. Knives were messy, and impact weapons like crowbars and wrenches and bludgeons — they got matted with gore and hair; and besides, they could be warded off by a sudden twist or turn of the body. A gun, now, that was a man’s weapon, and this was a man’s killing.