The Blood Stone

Chapter Two Payoff in Blood

When I got out in front of the sinister looking place I told the driver to wait for me. I looked up the front of it, and I saw just the one lighted window — his. He was up there, and he was still awake. Maybe he’d stepped out for just a minute at the time I’d rung.

I said to the driver, “Have you got a watch on you?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Well, I want you to do something for me. Time me. If I haven’t come out in ten minutes, step over and ring the bell. The one that says ‘Carpenter’ on it.” I smiled insincerely. “Just to remind me. I don’t want to stay too long, and I have a bad habit of losing track of the time.”

“Yes ma’am. Ten minutes.”

I went in. The entrance door was supposed to work on a spring lock, but somebody had forgotten to close it, so I passed right through without waiting and started the long climb that I’d already made once before. The place was a walkup. I wanted to give him as little advance notice of what had brought me back as possible; my best chance of recovering the ornament without any further strings being attached to it was to catch him off guard, before his crooked mind had been able to go to work on this new situation.

I knocked quietly, when I finally got up to the top. It was the only flat on that floor; an extra story must have been added when the building had been converted to multiple tenancy.

He didn’t move, didn’t make a sound. I’d expected that. Live dangerously, and a knock on the door can make you freeze. I could visualize him standing at bay somewhere in there, holding his breath.

I knocked again. I inclined my head to the seam, said in a guarded voice: “Let me in. It’s me again.” I couldn’t bring myself to use his name. As far as I was concerned he didn’t deserve one, only a number. I had sense enough not to use my own.

He still didn’t stir. I wrangled the knob in growing impatience, and the door fell inertly back before me.

I ventured in after it, expecting to find him sighting a gun at me. That was the usual trick they pulled, wasn’t it? He wasn’t in the main room, he must be in the little darkened bed-alcove. Had lain down in there and forgotten to put the light out in here.

I didn’t go in there. There was just a slim chance — a very slim one — that he hadn’t found the earring himself yet, that it was still lying around out here unnoticed, and that I might be able to pick it up on my own hook and slip out again without having to accost him. I doubted it very much; it would have been too good to be true. But I started to look just the same.

First I looked all over the sofa where I’d sat riffling through the letters. Then I got down on all fours, gold dress and all, and started to explore the floor, around and under and alongside it. It was a decrepit, topheavy thing and threw a big shadow behind it from the ceiling light.

My groping hand crept around the corner of it, and nestled into somebody else’s, in a macabre gesture of a handclasp. I whipped it back with a bleat of abysmal terror and sprang away, and at the same time I heard a sharp intake of breath.

I stepped around and looked down, and he was lying there. The position of the bulky sofa had hid him from me until now. Did I say just now he deserved a number? He’d gotten one. And it was up.

One arm was flung out along the floor — the one that I’d just touched. He was lying on his back, and his jacket had fallen open. You could see where he’d been shot; it showed on the white of his shirt. It must have gone into his heart; the hole in the fabric and the bloodied encrustation that surrounded it were around that region. The gun he hadn’t had time to use had fallen uselessly over to one side.

My first impulse, of course, was to turn and race out. I fought it down. Find that earring first, I reasoned with myself. You’ve got to get it back! It was more vital to recover it than ever. It wasn’t just a case of keeping my presence here from Jimmy’s knowledge now, it was a case of keeping it from the police! What was blackmail compared to being dragged into a murder case—and all the avalanches of notoriety that would ensue?

I found myself doing something I wouldn’t have believed I had the nerve to do: bending down over him and going through all his pockets. He didn’t have it on him. He didn’t have the ten thousand cash any more either, but I didn’t care about that; it wasn’t identifiable.

I crouched there, suddenly motionless. My hand had just then accidentally, as might have been expected, fleetingly contacted his in the course of my search. The brief touch was repellent, yes, but that wasn’t what made me freeze rigid like that, stare unseeingly along the floor before me. It was this: the touch of his clammy skin was already cool, far cooler than my own. My sketchy knowledge of such matters was sufficient to tell me that meant he’d been dead some little time, at least half an hour or an hour. The point was, he’d certainly been dead by the time I’d come into the room just now.

And belatedly, like a sort of long-delayed and not at all funny mental double take, I was just remembering that I’d heard a sharp intake of breath at the moment I’d jolted back and given my own strangled little cry of discovery just now.

If he was dead, he hadn’t made the sound. And you can’t cry out, and still draw in your breath, so I hadn’t either.

It could have been a discarded shoe of Carpenter’s, dropped to the floor in there and happening to land upright. Even though it was pointing straight toward me, as if to match an unseen pair of eyes somewhere high over it, looking out through an unsuspected rent in the drape. It could have been, but then it wouldn’t have moved.

As if the direction of my eyes had power to lend it motion. It shifted stealthily back and was gone.

There was only one coherent thought in the fireworks display of panic going off inside my head: Don’t scream. Don’t move. Someone in there has been watching you ever since you came in. He may let you go, if you don’t let on you’ve spotted him. Work yourself over toward the door, and then break out fast.

I straightened up. The earring was forgotten, everything else was forgotten. I just wanted out. My feet took a surreptitious step under the cover of the gold dress. Then another. Then a third. Like in that kid’s game, where they’re not supposed to catch you moving. I was halfway over to it now. But even if the maneuvering of my feet couldn’t be detected, the position of my body in the room kept changing. That was enough to give me away.

About one more step now. I was just starting to raise my hand unnoticeably in front of me, to tear at the knob and fling myself out, when I heard a click behind me. The sort of a click that a triphammer makes when it goes back. My eyes went around in spite of myself. The drape was out of the way and a man had taken its place now. He was holding a gun at about belt-buckle level.

Even if I hadn’t met him across a gun — and across a man he’d already killed — the mere sight of him would have thrown a jolt into me. His expression was the epitome of viciousness. You didn’t have to wonder if he’d shoot, you only had to wonder when he would. His face was a mirror: it showed me my own imminent death about to take place. He hadn’t had to step out and show himself, he could have let me get away without seeing who he was. The mere fact that he had stepped out, showed I wasn’t going to be let get away alive.

You could hear his breath rasp against his imperfectly shaved upper lip, like something frictioning sandpaper. That was all you could hear in the place, that little sound. You couldn’t hear my breath at all; my heart had blown a fuse.

Suddenly he made a move and I thought for a minute the bullet had found me. But he’d only hitched his head at me, ordering me to come closer.

I couldn’t; my feet wouldn’t have done it even if I’d wanted them to. “No, don’t,” I moaned sickly.

“You’re not getting out of here to pin this on me,” he slurred. His lips parted and white showed through. But it wasn’t a grin, it was just a baring of teeth. “I want the dough he was coming into tonight, see? I got a line on that, never mind how. Now come on, where is it?”

“I have—” I panted. I couldn’t go ahead. I pointed to the still form lying between us on the floor.

Did you ever hear a hungry hyena howl against the moon? That was the inflection of his voice. “Come a-a-a-ahn, what’d you do with it?” Then his jaws snapped shut — still like a hyena’s on a hunk of food. “All right, I don’t have to ask for it. I can just reach for it!” But he didn’t mean with his fingers, he meant with a bullet. “You’ve seen me up here now. That’s your tough luck.” And he said again what he had in the beginning: “You’re not pinning this on me.”

The gun twitched warningly, getting ready to recoil against the flat hollow of his indrawn stomach, and this was my last minute.

Then instead of going bam! it went gra-a-a-ack! Like those little flat paddles on sticks that kids swing around to make noise with. And instead of coming from in front of him, it came from behind him, up on the wall of the bed-alcove somewhere. My knees dipped to let me down, and then stiffened and went on holding me up some more.

It startled the two of us alike. But I was able to recover quicker, because I knew instantly what it was, and he didn’t. It threw him for a complete loss. It was one of those sounds that are so indefinite as to cause, and yet it was so close by, so harshly menacing. It was simply that taxidriver downstairs reminding me my ten minutes were up.

He swung first to one side, then to the other, then all the way around, half-crouched, and the gun went off me completely. I pulled at the doorknob, whisked out, and went down the stairs like a gold streak.

He came out after me just as I reached the first turn. There was a window there and it was open a little both at the top and bottom, in order to ventilate the stairs and halls during the night. He shot down the stairs at me, on a descending line of fire, just as I flashed around the turn and got out of it. It didn’t hit me, but it should have hit the window and shattered it or it should have hit the plaster of the wall and ploughed into it. It didn’t hit anywhere.

Later, long afterwards, it came back to me that it must have, through some freak of downward slanting, neatly gone out through that slender inches-wide lower opening without hitting anything. I didn’t think of that then. I didn’t think of anything then except getting down the rest of those stairs and out to the street.

He didn’t fire after me a second time. He couldn’t aim at me from where he was any more. The underside of the stairs over me protected me now. His only chance of hitting me would have been to run down after me and overtake me on the same section of stairs. He still could have done that if he’d tried. Any man is quicker than any woman, particularly a woman in rhumba clogs. But he was afraid of whoever it was that he imagined to be coming up from below, and he was afraid of rousing the house.

I heard his feet go scuffling up the other way, higher still, toward the roof.

The entryway was empty when I got down to it. The hackman must have gone right back to his machine after dutifully giving me the summons I’d asked for. He’d even missed hearing the shot. I could tell that by the cheerful matter-of-factness of his opening remark when I streaked out and burrowed into the back of his machine. “Well, I sure brought you down fast, didn’t I, lady?” he asked.

“T-take me back uptown,” I said.

The guardian milk bottle was still standing there by our door when I got out my latchkey for the second time that night.

I let myself in and crept down the hall toward the bedroom. I opened the door and stopped short with my hand on the light-switch. Jimmy had come back, and was in there ahead of me, asleep already. I could hear the soft purr of his snoring in the darkness. He evidently hadn’t been surprised by my continued absence. He must have thought I was still at the night club with the Perrys. His breathing was so rhythmic, so regular, it almost sounded studied.

I crawled into my own bed in the dark and just lay there. I hadn’t got the earring back. That was almost a minor matter by now. I kept seeing that face before me, viciously contorted, mirroring death to come. As sure as anything he was going to track me down, find me, and kill me. My life was forfeit to a murderer’s self-preservation. I was the only one who knew he had been up there. I was the only one who knew who had killed Carpenter. He had to get rid of me.

Somewhere, sometime, when I least expected it, death was going to strike out at me. I was on borrowed time.

He would surely get me, unless — I got him first.