Doorway to Death

Chapter I

Johnny Killain straightened impatiently in the big wing chair and attempted to force the topmost brass button on his blue-gray uniform through its reluctant buttonhole; he released it to make a silencing grab at the phone which rang shrilly upon the table at his elbow. “Yeah?” His heavy voice was a basso burr. “Yeah, Paul; Mr. Martin will be right down. Throw his bag in the rack.” He replaced the receiver and looked over at the slender man carefully knotting an expensive looking tie at the bureau mirror. “Airport limousine's here, Willie.”

“I heard you. Plenty of time.” The flying fingers directing the swirling course of the tie stilled momentarily, and Willie Martin turned in the direction of the phone, only the silvered temples belying the youth of the lean, aristocratic face. “I could still get you a seat?”

Johnny shook his head. “I'm geared down from that country jumping ratio nowadays. I wouldn't know what to do with myself over there.” His right hand returned absently to the stubborn button as he appreciatively watched the slim figure at the mirror slip into the jacket of a conservative sharkskin suit. “That set of threads set you back much?”

“Tell you when I get the bill.” In the mirror Willie Martin studied Johnny's renewed struggle with the button. He was smiling when he turned. “Here, let me do that. You always were all thumbs. Stand up.”

Johnny stood up; he was barely a quarter inch over six 7 feet, but he towered a head over the slender man who in two deft motions slipped the recalcitrant button into place. Johnny had thick, unruly blond hair, and the prominent cheekbones on the deeply tanned face emphasized heavy matching brows and an aquiline nose. The rugged features tapered to a square jawline on which healthy skin fit his bones so snugly as to give an impression of leanness, an impression belied by the breadth of shoulders in the uniform. The lean mouth, abrupt facial angles, and the frostily pale eyes all contributed to a hard-bitten ensemble. “I must be gettin' fat. Thanks, Willie.”

“Pas de quoit.

You haven't gained six ounces in fifteen years; it's just your ice age twenty and a half inch neck. Sure you won't come along? I could keep you amused. Busy, even.”

“Busy doin' what? Holdin' your coat while you horse around with some madame concierge about the price of a hundred cases of Calvados? You're not handlin' my brand of action these days, Willie.”

The slim man smiled, a flashing, good-humored smile. “Who is? Well, I'll be back in two weeks. Approximately. We'll have a party.”

“I'm still feelin' the last one. That Shirley girl of yours has at least one hollow leg.”

Willie Martin's smile was still there, but it had changed, “Kind of keep an eye on her for me, Johnny? Discreetly?”

Johnny stared, then looked away. “Sure, Willie. If you say so. You ready? I'll take you down in the service elevator.”

“Place is like a damn morgue,” Willie declared as they walked down the silent corridor. “If it wasn't for the school kids on tour we'd have a washtub full of red ink this season.” He looked at Johnny appraisingly as he swung open the flanged door of the anchored elevator cab. “How's my new manager doing?”

Johnny shrugged as the cab started down. “You should know better'n me; I never see him hardly on this shift Don't your pencil pushers tell you?”

“Too soon for an accurate appraisal. Well, boy, can I depend on you to keep the baling wire tight on this old arc while I'm gone?”

“This mausoleum'll still be here when we're all dead an' gone, Willie. Nothing ever happens around here.” He flung open the door at the lobby level, and grimaced at the persistent ringing of the phone in the semi-darkened lobby. He nodded at the recessed niche between the elevators. “That's me. Take care, Willie. Keep those wings flappin'.” He moved in behind the desk and picked up the phone, his eyes still thoughtfully on the trim, erect figure which turned in the foyer and waved before passing through the outer door. Johnny returned the wave as he spoke into the phone. “Bell captain.” He listened, and scribbled a note on the scratch pad on the desk. “Yes, ma'am. Right away.”

He moved out from behind the desk into the main lobby as the elevator doors on his left clashed noisily, and he spoke without looking. “Paul?”

“Yes?” The middle-aged “boy” in the bellhop uniform looked out inquiringly from the passenger elevator.

“Icewater to 1618.”

“Right.”

Johnny crumpled the slip of paper in his hand; across the lobby Sally Fontaine caught his eye from behind her little cubicle to the right of the reservation desk, and beckoned imperiously with her head. Johnny sighed, but shuffled toward her in the swaying, bearlike stride created by the excess of weight in chest and shoulders. “Yes, ma?” he inquired, passing through the little gate which separated her switchboard from the lobby proper.

“Wait till I get this board clear-”

He watched the nimble fingers on the big board; Sally was dark, and almost painfully thin, but with a facial vitality which eased the sharpness of her features. Brown eyes studied him as she turned from the switchboard. “Did you get his lordship off safely?”

“Why'nt you lay off on the spurs, ma?”

She sniffed. “Can I help it if he makes me feel I'm supposed to genuflect every time he walks through here?”

“Willie's not like that,” Johnny said patiently. “He's not like that at all. Willie's-”

“Here's a message I have for you,” Sally interrupted him, and he looked at the note in her hand without offering to take it.

“Same message?”

She nodded. “Same message. Three times since midnight.”

“Tear it up.”

“He insists that you call him, Johnny.”

“An' who the hell is he to insist? Tear it up.”

The brown eyes measured him. “What's with you and Max Armistead, Johnny?”

“Now you're gettin' nosy, baby.”

“So I'm nosy. How else do you find out things? And you haven't answered me.”

“You thought I was goin' to?”

“Listen to me, Johnny.” The thin face was anxious. “He's… he's very unpleasant. He sounded… mean.”

His grin was mirthless. “He's not all that mean.”

“You'd better call him. Here's the number.”

“Forget it, kid.”

She looked up at him, exasperated. “He's not going to like it if you don't call.”

“He wouldn't like it if I did, either.”

She sighed, and reached for a plug as the board buzzed. “May I help you?” She looked over her shoulder at Johnny. “For you. No, it's not him. 705.”

He reached over the railing and picked up a house phone on the mantel. “Yes? Bell captain.” Thick fingers twisted at the trailing cord. “Okay, ma'am. On the double.” He depressed the phone rest momentarily. “Ring housekeeping, Sally.”

The phone rang interminably before a soft voice answered languidly.

“Get the lead out, Amy. Accident in 705.”

“What kinda accident, Mist' Johnny?”

“Bring your mop.”

“Oooh,” Amy mourned. “That kinda accident. Looks like a looong night. 705. Okay, I'm flyin' low, Mista Johnny.”

He hung up and replaced the phone on the mantel, then leaned forward and breathed warmly on the back of Sally's slender neck. A prolonged shiver ran through her, and he looked down at the goosebumps prickling the downy hair on the smooth skin of the thin forearms. “You comin' up in the mornin', ma?”

“If I disconnect someone-!”

His heavy voice was muted thunder in her ear; his lips nuzzled at her as she ducked awkwardly under the constricting headphone. “You gettin' anything strange lately, ma?”

“Johnny!”

“You know why Max is after me, baby?”

Her head came around sharply. “Why?”

“Him an' me split the women in the place right down the middle. You were in his end, but I'm holdin' you out. He's jealous.”

“Oh, you-” But she smiled involuntarily, the planes of the thin features softening remarkably. “You be careful, y' hear? That's a bad man.”

Johnny grunted skeptically. “He show you his clippings? I'm gonna lean on that little bastard, he don't stay out from underfoot-”

“But he's never alone!”

“He wants to keep a good polish on, he better not be.”

Sally was looking behind her down the narrow aisle. “Vic's calling you.”

Johnny looked inquiringly down the congested walkway between the enclosed switchboard and the marbled registration desk to where Vic Barnes, the night front-desk man, held out his phone invitingly. “See if you can find out what this one wants, John. The police or the pope, sounds like.”

Johnny thrust his bulk in behind the desk and accepted the phone. “Yes?” He listened, a faint smile gradually replacing the rugged impassivity; a forefinger traced the course of a stubby blond eyebrow. He spoke after an interval, the deep voice lightening as liquid syllables of a foreign language rose and fell in patient exposition. He turned away as he hung up. “I'm goin' out front for a smoke, Vic.”

“Okay. What'd she want?”

“You guessed it. The pope.”

“Aww, come on-!”

“The nearest Spanish speaking church.”

“Oh. I thought she was French-”

“Spanish. Andalusia.” Johnny's pale eyes stared out un-seeingly over the darkened lobby. “They've got olive trees there. And sun… and dust-” He pulled himself up. “Tell Paul I'm out front, if he needs me, huh?”

It was cooler on the sidewalk in the neon refracted surrealistic shadows. He lit his cigarette and leaned back until his shoulders rested solidly against the polished granite buttress and invited a mental blankness that soothed. It was all written down somewhere….

Movement caught his eye; his glance passed beyond the two women approaching on his left and then returned with quickened interest. The figure on the inside had a nicely articulated walk, an easy way of moving, gracefully deliberate. She was tall, very well put together, and a little more fully fleshed than he remembered.

Johnny flipped his cigarette out into the street. He knew the plainly tailored lightweight summer suit, the flat-heeled shoes, the undistinguished features, the mild eyes behind the horn-rimmed glasses. She was smiling as they came up to him. “Nice to see you again, Johnny.” Her voice was a breath, low but dear. The dean lines of her face were just beginning to be blurred with excess flesh; even in the after-midnight half-darkness her skin was fresh looking, and the dose-cut uncharacterized brown hair as usual a little untidy. There was a softness about her….

“Nice to have you with us again, Miss Stevens. I hadn't seen the register. Another group on tour?”

“Yes,” she sighed. “Lovely little monsters. This is Mrs. Crosby, Johnny, a fellow chaperone.”

He bowed slightly, his glance flicking fractionally from the dumpy, white-haired older woman back to Miss Stevens.

“Johnny is a real help to us unfortunates chaperoning these groups, Carolyn,” Miss Stevens explained. “When you've made as many trips as I have you'll begin to realize the purely devilish ingenuity of these kids in evading authority. Johnny runs his own bed check on them for us, keeps the sexes separated most of the time, and in fact will be the mainspring in preserving a few shreds of sanity in us before we leave.”

“I see,” Mrs. Crosby murmured, nearsightedly peering at Johnny.

“Do you think you have any of that wonderfully cold orange juice, Johnny, at this hour of the morning?”

“Be right up. Something for you, too, ma'am?”

“No, thank you, young man-” She half turned to look back at him as they passed on into the foyer, and in the night air her voice carried farther than she realized. “Most unusual face, Maria. Like a blond gladiator.”

“Entirely deceiving, Carolyn. In five years I've never even heard him raise his voice.”

“My dear, I've lived a little longer than you: don't wager he couldn't raise it. Why, years ago I knew a man-”

The lobby doors closed behind them, and Johnny grinned and settled back against the building. He debated lighting another cigarette, and decided against it. Give them fifteen minutes….

Inside he glanced at the desk at Vic working over his transcript. “Gonna prowl the top decks a while, Vic.”

“Right, John.”

He took the service elevator which he used nights and shot back up to the sixth floor, where he propped the elevator door open with a slab of wood. In the room he had just left with Willie Martin he quickly divested the small refrigerator of ice cubes, orange juice, and vodka, arranged them with a pitcher on a tray, and returned to the elevator. He got off again five floors up, closed the cab door all but a crack, and crossed the dim corridor until he confronted 1109. He knocked lightly, and Miss Stevens opened the door at once. She nodded, and he stepped inside.

Gone were the horn rimmed glasses, and the severely tailored suit. A gossamer robe fragmentarily hid a pastel blue silk nightgown, and the unspectacular street-time hairdo had given way to a softly rolled crown on the small and delicately made head. Johnny put down the tray, settled his big hands on the slim shoulders and rocked her to and fro. “You're lookin' great, kid,” he told her in his husked bass. He could feel her warm flesh moving under his hands.

“Grand … to see you again,” she breathed.

“I thought the second I knocked I should've checked the room list.”

“You know they always give me this room.”

“Some day they won't, and I'll be fifty percent of a surprised duet. The dragon retired?”

She smiled and nodded, and pulled his face down to hers. “It's been too long, Johnny-”

“Yeah. You still teaching music, baby?”

“Still… teaching-”

“You want a drink first?”

She shook her head; her voice was a whisper. “Later-”

He turned her around. “Where's the hooks on this damn thing?”

“Let me. Why do you always look at me there first?”

“Some day I'll tell you. You're quite a piece of machinery, kid.” She smiled up at him as he swung her clear of the floor and over to the bed. “Now, baby. Andantino. That the word?”

“That's the word. And that's the… way.”

He could see the torn lace on the pillow case's edging. “Now. Allegretto?”

“Yes!”

He could hear her breathing, and his own. “Hit it, baby. Sforzando.”

“Ahhh … con … molto!” The soft voice trailed off in a wordless bubble of sound….

She stretched lazily on the bed while he mixed a drink, and he smiled across at her as he deftly juggled bottles and ice cubes. Carrying the glass to her he caught up her robe from the floor in passing and lightly admired with his hand the luxuriantly full-fleshed amplitude before spreading it over her as she leaned up on one elbow to accept the proffered drink.

He shook his head wonderingly. “Damn if you don't surprise me every time, kid.”

“You mean the Sunday-schoolish appearance?” she asked, sipping her drink.

“I mean period. What you've got, lady, the world needs more of, in spades.”

“Thank you, sir. I don't know what I'd do, Johnny, if I didn't have these little twice-a-year visits to look forward to. You can't even begin to imagine how desperately dull it is in my little home town.”

“Packin' your own antidote, the way you do?”

She smiled, but her tone was wistful. “Who's to unpack it? Or even know it's there? I'm just that nice, plain Maria Stevens who plays the organ in church and is vice president of the garden club. Sometimes I think I can't stand it another minute until I can get up here again… you're wonderful for me, Johnny. And to me.”

He grunted and picked up his tray.

“I mean it,” she insisted, handing him her empty glass as he walked back to the bed. She looked up at him. “Do you think we might-?”

“You damn right I think we might. When you leavin'?”

“Day after tomorrow.”

“I'll call you, for sure.”

“Fine. Goodnight and thanks. And I don't mean for the drink.”

He closed her door quietly behind him, his long stride noiseless he retraced his steps in the corridor and approached the elevator he had left anchored. He stopped dead. The elevator was occupied.

Two large men in dark suits flanked a dapper little man in faultless sports clothes, but even a stranger's glance would have ignored the physical disparity; plainly the little man was the heart of the matter.

“Welcome aboard, Killain.” Max Armistead smiled unpleasantly, thin lips under the wisp of mustache showing scarcely more color than the pallid features. “Get my messages?”

“I got them.” Johnny set his tray down carefully on the corridor — floor, straightened up, and stepped aboard. He closed the elevator door and started down slowly, and the black anger rose in his throat. He eased the car to a stop between floors. Let it come … get it over. He felt the old familiar tightening in stomach and shoulder muscles, and it pleased him unreasonably. There was still a thing or two in the world besides women. “You figure New York is big enough for both of us, Max?”

“I'll debate it with you, wise guy.” The small eyes in the pallid face glittered as Johnny turned carefully to face them; he inched his feet fractionally apart, as equidistant from all three as he could manage without being obvious.

“Listen, Max,” Johnny said abruptly. “Let's look at the blueprints. You think you can put a collar on me. Well, I'm tellin' you that you can't. You want to move a few women in here nights, I imagine, and you want me to do business. The answer is no.”

“I don't think you can make that stick, Killain.” Max Armistead's voice was soft, but his face was not. Slender, foppishly dressed, thin featured, effeminate looking except for the arrogant light eyes … a man used to the driver's seat.

“I don't run your kind of ship, Max.”

“You could change your mind. Or have it changed.”

“Not by you, mister. I don't like you. You're a dirty little pimp, besides I don't know what else. You're-”

He broke off as the man on his left drew back suddenly. The pent up violence in Johnny exploded; he charged them, the weight of the big body bouncing them into each other as they tried to find working room in the elevator's narrow confines. Almost happily he slipped under a punch and swung the rigid edge of his palm viciously against the nearest fat neck overflowing its crumpled collar, and the man's eyes turned inward as he sagged floorward like a rag doll, face down.

Johnny grunted as a jolting blow took him in the short ribs, and he reached for the second man. “Come on, pretty boy,” the man wheezed, and light glinted from his knuckles. Johnny absorbed another body punch, but snapped a hook to the straining face and felt flesh and bone crunch under his knuckles. The man staggered back, blood spurting from his nose, his bulk pinning the smaller Max in the farthest corner.

“Now, you sonofabitch-” Johnny stepped inside the big man's aimlessly flailing hands and circled the blocky body with his arms. He locked his grip rigidly, and for the first time in longer than he could remember he called on all the strength in his power-packed body, channeling it into the constriction. The man in his grip writhed, screamed hoarsely until his voice soared to a shriek, then fell to his knees, his dead weight breaking the terrible pressure. Johnny straightened reluctantly, set himself, and swung down in short, brutal arcs into the popeyed face, left, right, left, right, left.

He drove the face right down onto the floor of the cab, and on the way down it disintegrated into a crimson blob. He stepped back and pivoted to confront the six-inch blade on Max's knife as the little man moved whitefaced from his corner. Feinting with his left hand, Johnny stamped hard with his heel on the nearer instep in its low-cut cordovan, and Max yelped in anguish. A sledgehammer blow to the elbow of the knife arm caused the blade to fly across the elevator and clatter noisily on walls and floor.

Brushing aside the ineffectual opposition, Johnny grabbed the white silk shirt front and hound's tooth checked jacket in a twisting grip that pinned the wearer to the wall. “I got a lot of people rootin' for me now, Max. You've had this done to a lot of people… now try it on for size-”

The slender man thrashed frantically at the end of the pinioning arm, toes straining to reach the floor. “I'll kill you, Killain-” It came from deep in his throat.

“Don't miss your first shot, then, because if I ever get my hands on you I'll break you up three quarters of an inch at a time. Now, damn you-”

The elevator rang with the deliberate full-armed slaps he dealt the crimsoning face. A thin trickle of red ran down from the nose and dripped onto the wreckage of the fancy clothes; when the straining figure went limp, Johnny felt only surprise. He stepped back and let the sodden mass slip slowly to the floor where it sprawled leadenly over the bodies of the other two, and in the sudden silence Johnny became conscious of his own harsh breathing. He stared down at his hands and relaxed them with a shudder. It was over, finished….

Almost tentatively he placed a hand on the elevator's controls, as if wondering whether it would once again perform the familiar duty. He shook himself roughly and dropped the car like a stone to the sub-basement. He flung open the door in a crash of metal, grabbed a pair of heels and dragged a heavy body fifteen feet along the cement floor and out a side door to the alley, damp with night mist. On the second trip he felt his saturated uniform split through the shoulders; he was wringing wet and shaking from the reaction, but his resentment still smouldered.

He threw the whimpering Max out onto the pile of flesh, straightened, and released a great explosion of breath from pent-up lungs. From the alley bed drifted a mewling cry. “Don't hit me again- Don't-”

Johnny growled in disgust and jerked shut the heavy outside door with a clang. He slid the bolt, wiped the perspiration from his streaming features, returned to the elevator and rose swiftly to the sixth floor. Standing in the middle of the room he ripped and tore the sticky shreds of the uniform from his body and on the way to the shower picked up the phone, the dark hair matted on his still heaving chest and his skin gleaming with the sweat running down his flanks.

“Sally? Everything quiet?”

“Johnny! I think I rang every phone in the house trying to find you! Max is around here looking for you with two big-”

“I met the gentlemen, ma.”

“You did?” Her voice soared. “What happened?”

“I signed a release. You're in his stable now.”

“Quit kidding. What did happen? You sound funny. Or have you been chasing some blonde through the corridors?”

Johnny flexed a bruised knuckle and tenderly explored a lumpy welt below his ribs. “I disremember, ma. Tell Paul I'll be down in fifteen minutes.” He hung up and walked into the shower, where he stood in a torrent of hot and then cold water. He grimaced at the muscled nudity in the mirror on the back of the bathroom door as he toweled himself vigorously. “Still lucky, aren't you, Ugly? There must be a corker lined up for you when they turn the right page.”

He drew on a robe, sat down in an armchair, and listened as the hammering pulse and heartbeat gradually lessened. He rose finally, took down a fresh uniform from the closet, dressed leisurely, and headed back to the service elevator.