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

The elevator was somewhere else, so I went down the safety-stairs. It was quicker than waiting for it to come. Down and around, then down and around again, five times, from the sixth floor down, at a jogging trot that sounded a little bit like a tap-dancer’s time-step, because the steps had steel rims that clicked under me. Then gave the springed end-door at the bottom a sweep aside that opened up the lobby. And as it did so, there was a sudden flare-up of excitement. It had been there all the while but the soundproof door had kept it muffled.

Outside the building-entrance were two, not one but two, police patrol-cars, sometimes called Mickey Mouses in the vernacular, their red roof-reflectors swinging away and spattering all the walls opposite with blood — or red paint or mercurochrome, as your fancy sees and calls it. A cop was posted just inside the street-door, obviously to keep anyone from leaving the building. He’d already kept two people, a man and a woman; I could tell that by the way they were standing awkwardly to one side. Whether they were together or not I couldn’t make out. There was a second cop acting as a sort of liaison between the lobby and the cars outside, going back and forth all the time. In the lobby were several more nonuniformed men who were very much of the police, it stood out all over them. The doorman, on the house-phone, was saying to someone: “Keep your door locked, please. Don’t open it.” Then he was saying it to someone else. Then to still a third.

They pounced as soon as I appeared, one of them on each side of me like magic. I never knew people could move so fast. I couldn’t use my arms anymore, before I’d even felt anything.

“Where’d you just come from? Identify yourself.”

“From 6-B. I was up there to see someone.”

“How’d you happen to use the stairs?”

“Thought I’d save time. I didn’t know there was an ordinance against it.”

I started skittishly. One of them had had his hands going up and down me without my being aware of it until it was over.

They interrupted the doorman’s relay of warning calls to ask: “He live in the house?”

“No, I never saw him before.”

He hadn’t, and I hadn’t either.

“What’s it about? I asked, not indignant — because you don’t get indignant when they mean business like they did, not if you’re sensible — as much as uncomprehending. And let’s say, resolutely clear both of eye and inner knowledge and determined to show it. “What’s up?”

They didn’t answer. The attitude: You don’t ask us questions. We do it.

When I turned to the doorman in an unvoiced repetition, he didn’t, either. Apparently unsure he had their approval and not wanting to risk disfavor.

But the man over by the door whom I have said it was my impression was being kept in on a stand-by basis, being a civilian answered as one civilian sometimes will to another, police or no police. And notably when they’re being inconvenienced.

“There’s been an armed hold-up, and the man’s still at large somewhere upstairs, he never got out. They’re combing the building for him floor by floor.”

They gave him a curt look of aside (spelling: never mind talking so much) but nothing was said I noticed to contradict him. So the story stood up.

They took me back up to where I’d just come from, using the car this time.

They rang the bell, and waited, and there wasn’t any answer, no one came.

“6-B’d, you say?” they asked, beetling their brows at me in menacing distrust.

“6-B’s what I said,” I said.

They rang again.

My God, I thought, suddenly cold and constricted at the throat, I left my gun in there. I never took it out with me again. I remember now.

One of them had his hand up pummeling now — the hand that wasn’t holding my arm in a twist. And nobody answered.

“Police Department,” they kept saying, taking turns at it. And still nobody answered.

Finally they sent a call down for the building-superintendent; he came up in response and he opened it up with his master pass-key.

She’d gone back again to where I’d last seen her (I say back again for she must have got up from there in the meantime, in-between, and then gone back again; she’d have had to, there was no other way about it, no other explanation). She was lying just as before, only not shaking, not crying now. Through with crying. Her head down on the little table against the wall, one arm curved around it. The other though was hanging straight down now toward the floor, inert. Like a pendulum that has stopped.

And the gun, as if a feat of magic levitation had been performed, or as if it had been jerked by a wire suspended from a pulley, had leaped clear across the room, in a straight diagonal from the comer into which I’d thrown it over to the side she was on, and lay under her dangling hand. Not right under, out a few inches.

All that was said was: “No wonder you took the stairs coming down.”

There might be her fingerprints on the gun now where mine had been before, but they wouldn’t matter much. (Fingerprints can be manipulated by somebody else after the fingers’ owner is already dead; they knew that, and I did, too.) Erasing them of all importance was the fact it was my gun, and I had been in there with it.

What strange turns life takes, I thought, gazing down hypnotized into the gloomy pool of my own future. I came here to kill her, I changed my mind, and now they’ve nailed me for it anyway. As though it were the intention that counted, and not the act. The thought leading up to the deed, and not the deed itself.

And maybe it does. Who can say? Maybe it does.

I left the taxi with a splurge, like a man arching his legs to straddle a sidewalk puddle though no puddle was there. He called out something about my change; I showed him the back of my hand.

No elevator ever went so slowly as the one that took me up to Sutphen’s office. There were never so many floors between; so many people never got off, never got on. So many latecomers never made it at the last minute and caused the doors that had already closed to a hair’s width to reopen all the way again. The indicator sweep inside the cab never moved so reluctantly, never stayed on 3 so long, on 4 so long, on 5, on 6. Sweat never prickled so, along the pleats in somebody’s forehead, in the crotches below his arms. A heart never beat so fast before, except in the hurtle finals of the Olympics, and everything else around it so slow, so slow before.

Then at last it was at 7, and I stepped on someone’s toes, knocked someone else’s hat askew, carried still someone else’s handbag halfway out of the car with me, hooked onto the buttons of my coat sleeve.

Then I was out running, and no corridor was ever so long before or had so many people on it getting in your way before, playing that simultaneous impulse game, where they move to the left when you move to the left blocking, and to the right when you do, blocking you all over again.

He’d moved his office. The number on the door hadn’t changed, but it was fifty doors farther down the line now and twenty-five more around the turn. I was on the other side of the door at last. There was a receptionist at the desk. She didn’t try to stop me or ask me who I was. She saw my face, saw what was on it, had seen it before, but never with the shining light that showed all over me now. She just pointed. “In there, door on the left. He’s by himself.”

I pushed the door out of the way. Knocking was for other times; knocking was for times when there was time. And he was in there, walking back and forth.