The Blood Stone

Chapter Four The Trap Is Set

Jimmy didn’t mind my doing private charity work, going around to a few handicapped cases I happened to know of and doing what I could for them, but he didn’t like the parts of town it took me into at times. Above all, he didn’t like the idea of my going alone into some of those places. He’d warned me again and again to take someone with me.

I made the rounds only about once a month, anyway. I wasn’t a professional welfare worker. I never had more than half a dozen at a time on my list.

Like this old Mrs. Scalento, living alone and too proud to apply to the city for help. She wouldn’t have been eligible anyway; she could make enough to support herself when she was well. But right now she was laid up with arthritis or something, and needed tiding over.

I got out of the cab outside the tunnel-like black entrance of the rookery she lived in. They never had any lights on the stairs there, but I’d brought a little pocket-flash along in my bag for just that purpose.

I sent the taxi off. I usually stayed up there a considerable time with her, and it was cheaper to get another one when I came out again.

I groped my way down the long Stygian bore that led back to where I knew the stairs to be — from my memory of past visits alone.

Did you ever have a feeling of someone being near you, without seeing anything, without hearing anything move? Animals have that faculty of detection, I know, but that’s through their sense of scent. Scent wasn’t involved in this. Just some sort of a pulsing that told of another presence, reached me. To one side of the battered staircase.

I got the flash out and it shot a little white pill of light up the stairs in front of me before I’d even realized I’d nudged the little control-lever on. It must have been obvious which direction I was going to turn it in next, by the way it shook and slopped around in my hand.

The voice was so quiet. So reassuringly quiet. It seemed to come from right beside me, my very elbow almost. “Don’t turn the light this way, Mrs. Shaw.”

Mrs. Shaw. So then I knew what it was.

“Weill’s man. Don’t be frightened, Mrs. Shaw. We’re covering every one of these places you’ve showed up at tonight. Just act as you would at any other time.”

I went on up the stairs, after I’d gotten my breath back and my heartbeat had slowed a little, thinking resentfully, The fool! The Other One himself couldn’t have frightened me any worse!

That was what I thought.

I knocked when I got up to her door, and then let myself in without further ado. I had to; the old lady didn’t have the use of her legs.

She was sitting there propped up in bed, the way I usually found her. She didn’t seem glad to see me. Her face always lit up as though I were a visiting angel when I came in, and she’d start to bless me in Italian. Tonight she just stared at me with an intentness that almost seemed to have hostility in it.

She had just this one large barren room, and then a black hole of a kitchen without any window at all, leading off from it. I closed the door after me. “Well, how are we tonight?” I greeted her.

She gave an impatient swerve of her head away from me, almost as though she resented my coming in on her, as though I were unwelcome. I pretended not to notice the unmistakable surliness — not to mention ingratitude — of the reception I was getting.

The air of the room was stagnant, murky; none of these people were great believers in ventilation. “Don’t you think it would be a good idea to let a little fresh air in here?” I suggested. I crossed to the window and raised it slightly from the bottom. She glared at me.

“How’s your plant getting along?” I asked her, crouching slightly to peer out at it. I’d sent her over a potted geranium, to cheer her up. She kept it out there on the window ledge.

A look of almost ferocious vindictiveness passed over her face, as I straightened up and turned away. “You no got to worry about it; iss all ri’,” she let me know in husky defiance. It was the first remark she’d uttered since I came in.

I tried to win her over. “Have you been using that electric heater? Does it take any of the stiffness out, make you feel any better?”

She said gruffly, “Lotsa bett’. Lotsa bett’.”

She had folded her arms across her chest now in a sort of stubborn sulkiness, and she kept jabbing one hand surreptitiously out from underneath the opposite arm. Not toward me, more — toward the door.

I said finally, in a low confidential voice: “What’re you trying to tell me?”

Her face flashed around toward me. She bared her almost toothless mouth in a grin that held frightened supplication in it. “I no tella you noth’. What you hear me say? Do I tella you anything?”

“I’ll do my own telling,” the new voice said.

Someone had come out of the kitchen and was standing right behind my chair. Its back had been turned that way.

I rocketed to my feet, chest going up and down like a bellows. A hand slipped around from behind me and riveted itself to my wrist, steely and implacable. The chair slashed over, discarded.

“Remember me?” was all he said.

The old lady, as if released from a spell, began to jabber now that it was too late: “Signora! This man he come here early tonight, he say he know you make visit every time on firsta month, he’ssa going to wait for you. I not can make him go ’way—”

He chopped the gun butt around horizontally at her forehead, without letting go of me, and she flopped back stunned on the pillow. I never saw anything more brutal in my life.

He gave it a little dextrous flip, then, that brought his grip back to the heft. “Now let’s take up where we left off the other night, you and me.”

I saw he was going to let me have the bullet then and there. He swung me around toward him by my arm, and brought the gun up against my side. He wasn’t taking any chances this time.

He’d maneuvered me out away from the bed — I suppose so there’d be room enough for me to fall. But that had unnoticeably changed our respective positions now. He was between me and the door. His back was to it, and I was toward it. But I couldn’t see it, or anything else, just then. I never even heard it open.

“Drop that gun, Nelson, you’re covered three ways!”

There was an awful moment of suspended motion, when nothing seemed to happen. Then the gun loosened, skidded down my side and hit the floor.

A man’s head and shoulders showed up, one at each side of him, and there was a third one overlapping a little behind him.

They said to me, “You must have seen him the minute you got in, to tip us off so quickly—”

“No, I didn’t. I didn’t see him until just a minute ago.”

“Then how did you manage to—”

“I knew he was here the minute I stepped through the door. I could tell by the frozen expression of her face and eyes she was under some kind of restraint or compulsion. And the air was close with stale cigarette smoke. He’d smoked one or two too many, back there, while he was waiting for me to show up. I knew she never used them herself. But it was too late to back out through the door again, once I’d shown myself; he would have shot me down from where he was. So I stepped over to the window under the excuse of getting some air into the room, and gave that potted plant she kept on it a soundless little nudge off into space.”

The man in charge said, “Hold him up here for a couple of minutes, give Mrs. X. a chance to make her getaway from the neighborhood first, before anyone spots her. You see that she gets home safely, Dillon.”

“Will she be all right?” I asked, indicating Mrs. Scalento.

“She’ll be all right, we’ll look after her.”

“Poor Mrs. Scalento,” I said, going down the stairs with the man delegated to accompany me, “I’ll have to buy her another plant.”

The formal identification was brief, and, as far as I was concerned, of about the same degree of comfort as the extraction of a live tooth without anesthesia. Why they had to have it I don’t know, since, according to my bargain with Weill, my own identity was to remain unrevealed. It took place in Weill’s office, with a heavy guard at the door, to keep pryers — even interdepartmental pryers — at a distance.

“Bring him in.”

I didn’t raise my eyes from the floor until the scuff of unwilling shoe leather dragged against its will had stopped short.

“Mrs. X. Is this the man you saw in the living quarters of one John Carpenter, at two-ten East forty-ninth, at about four-thirty A.M. on the fifteenth day of April?”

My voice rang out like a bell. “That is the same man.”

“Did he have a weapon in his hand?”

“He had a weapon in his hand.”

“Stand up, please, and repeat that under oath.”

I stood up. They thrust a Bible toward me and I played my right hand on it as if we had been in a courtroom. I repeated after the man swearing me in: “...the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” Then I said: “I solemnly swear that I saw this man, with a weapon in his hand, in the living-quarters of John Carpenter, two-ten East forty-ninth Street, at about four-thirty A.M., April 15th.”

Nelson’s fatigue-cracked voice shattered the brief silence. “You can’t pin this on me! I didn’t do it, d’ya hear?”

“No, and you didn’t kill Little Patsy O’Connor either, did you? Or Schindel? Or Duke Biddermen, in a car right outside his own front door? Take him out!”

“She’s framing me! She done it herself, and then she made a deal with you, to switch it to me!”

They dragged him out, still mouthing imprecations. The closing of the door toned them down, but you could still hear them dying away along the corridor outside.

Weill turned back to me and let his fingertips touch my gloved hand reassuringly for a moment, maybe because he saw that it was vibrating slightly, as an after-effect of the scene of violence that had just taken place. “That’s all. That finishes your participation in the affair. You just go home and forget about it.”

I could carry out the first part of the injunction all right; I had my doubts about the second.

“But you had a stenographic transcription made of my identification of him just now, I noticed,” I faltered uneasily.

“Yes, and I’m also having depositions made out to be signed by those two witnesses I had in the room, regarding what took place here. In other words I’m preparing affidavits of your affidavit, so that it doesn’t have to hang suspended in midair. But that needn’t alarm you. I have the okay of the D.A.’s office on getting around it in this way in your case.”

“But in the courtroom, won’t he — won’t his lawyer, demand that you produce me?”

“Let him. The D.A.’s office is taking that into account, in preparing its procedure. I’m prepared to take the stand in your place, as your proxy, if necessary. And police lieutenant or not, I don’t think I’d make the kind of a witness whose testimony is to be lightly disregarded.”

He seemed to have taken care of every contingency; I felt a whole lot better.

He shook my hand. “I keep my bargains. You’re out of it to stay. All knowledge of you ends with us.”

He said to the detective standing outside the door, “Take this lady to the special departmental car you’ll find waiting for her outside. Go along in it with her and keep everyone at a distance. Take her to the side entrance of the Kay Department Store.”

That was the biggest one in the city. I went in, walked through it on the bias without stopping to buy anything, got into a taxi a moment later at the main entrance, and had myself driven home.