Джон Макдональд - A Key to the Suite

“Somebody close,” she said in a sighing voice, “to hold.”

“I know.”

“It was kinda sweet.”

“Yes.”

“Stay just like this, please, for a while.”

The phone began to ring.

As soon as Dave Daniels came sagging back down out of the wildness, back to awareness of himself, back to the ability to identify this time, this place and this woman beneath him, he pushed himself away from her and stood up in the dark room, his heart still hammering, his breathing still ragged.

He squatted and fumbled at his discarded clothing and found his cigarettes and lighter. He lit a cigarette and walked to the terrace door, slid it open and stepped out onto the tiny triangular terrace. There was a slight breeze in the humid night, and it felt more pleasant against his sweaty flesh than had the air conditioning in the room behind him, where the woman lay.

He perched one hip on the rough texture of the concrete wall and, as the heart beat ever less rapidly, he looked at another angle of the hotel, at the few rooms where he could see in, where people moved and talked in their little bright boxes. It made him feel remote, wise and powerful to be naked and unseen in the darkness and look at people who could not know he was there. Below him were the areas of brightness and shadow, tinted spots on the palm trunks, twisted shadows of tropical plantings, the bright outlines of the lighted pools. He heard the merged sounds of many kinds of music and the gutturals of the sea and the constant soft alto of city traffic, pierced by a yap of car horn, a far siren, a woman’s bright tipsy laugh from the shadows far below him.

He knew he was still a little bit drunk, but not very much, because the prolonged strenuous taking of the woman had boiled it out of his blood. He felt tired, calm, wise and agreeably wicked. The bitch had been a disappointment. After fighting him so explosively, she had been stubbornly inert, but he had built himself to such a peak of wanting her that her reactions were not truly important.

Daniels scores again, he thought. Daniels never misses. Sometimes it is damned close to what they call rape, but they usually find out it’s exactly what they want. Twice it didn’t work out just right and it was expensive to settle it quietly. But not with this one. Not with a girl on call.

He snapped his cigarette out into the night and went back into the room, half expecting her to have gone into the bathroom, but she was as he had left her, tumbled and spread diagonally across the foot of the bed she had been in when he had come into the room, her head over the edge. He could just make her out in the small light that filtered into the room.

He stood near the foot of the bed and said, “You’re not that worn out, cutie.”

He reached down to touch her in a hearty, familiar, casual way, put his hand against flesh, snatched it away, backed slowly until his shoulders touched the wall. He stood there breathing through jaws held wide.

After a long time he found the energy to go draw the draperies and turn a single floor lamp on and look at her. “But I didn’t hit you that hard!” he whispered. “You shouldn’t have got loose and run for the door. You shouldn’t have done that, damn you!”

He wanted a drink desperately, and at the same time was glad there was no liquor in the room, because he knew he was going to have to start thinking very soon, thinking with great care and caution. Because now, unless he was very careful, everything could go whirling down the drain. He wanted to cover the body so he could stop looking at it, but he knew he should take no meaningless action. It was like being in a pit with a poisonous snake. If you moved perfectly, you were home free. If you did the smallest thing wrong, you were dead.

He went into the bathroom, turned on the cold white blaze of fluorescence, filled the basin with cold water and sloshed his face and head, snorting and snuffling. As he dried himself, he remembered the night bolt on the room door and fixed it.

After making certain there was no gap in the closure of the draperies, he turned on every light in the room. He paced back and forth, glancing at the body, accustoming himself to it, because he knew he would have to touch it sooner or later. He hummed to himself. He beat his fist into his palm. He cheered himself by thinking, I have been in a hundred jams. I have gotten out of every one. I can get out of this one.

He sat on the other bed, facing her, and her upside-down face was close enough to touch, her eyes partially open. He got up quickly and checked the room for her possessions, found clothes, purse, swimsuit, bathing cap.

The big limiting factor was how much Floyd Hubbard might remember. There was too good a chance he would remember giving the room key to Daniels. That seemed to eliminate the chance of leaving her just as she was, or dressing her and dumping her over the edge of the terrace railing.

He hit himself over the ear with his clenched fist, shook his head violently, and went over it again. Any look of murder would result in a more careful investigation than he could stand. There was a subtle, sickening exaggeration to the angle of her head. The backhand blow had snapped her neck just before he had caught her up and tumbled her back onto the foot of the bed. There was a faint blue bruise on the delicate line of her jaw.

He looked at his upper arm, near his shoulder, at the three deep parallel gouges her nails had made as she had gotten away from him the second time. They could check the meat and blood under her nails, type it.

The plan was vague at first, but as he went over it in his mind it became ever more specific. The single crucial factor was the night bolt and chain. He turned all the lights off and went out onto the terrace again. The vertical sawtooth construction made it impossible to reach the terraces to the right or the left. When he was certain he was not being watched by anyone, he stepped over the railing, stood on a narrow edge of concrete, crouched and, holding onto the railing, looked down onto the terrace directly below. The room was dark. It would be a simple matter to lower himself, hang from the edge on which he stood, swing in and drop onto the terrace below. He had always been a good athlete. He trusted his body to perform as he wanted it to, without fear or hesitation. It was unlikely that the terrace door below would be locked on the inside. It could be forced if it was. And if the room was empty, or if people were asleep there, in either case he would go quickly and quietly through the room and out into the seventh floor corridor.

He went back into 847 and turned the lights back on. He wiped his hands on his thighs several times before he could force himself to touch the small body, so eerily still, so oddly flattened. Once he had begun, he worked steadily and quietly.

He did not know how long it took. When it was done, he tried to look at the scene the way a policeman might. They would have had to use nippers on the night chain. They would find both beds neatly made, her clothing laid out on one of them. They would find one lamp on in the bedroom, and the room key on the desk. They would hear the sound of the shower, and when they opened the bathroom door they would find her sprawled halfway out of the shower, the glass shower door open. She would have her swim cap on, and she would be belly down across the raised sill of the shower stall, the damp cake of soap inches from her outstretched hand. (And they would not guess how he had gagged as he had cleaned the nails of that outstretched hand.)

Because they would have to cut the chain to get in, they would not be suspicious. And he knew he could not take the risk of leaving by way of the room door. He had not been seen entering, he knew.