The Fatal Frails

CHAPTER XIII

The corridor was deserted when Johnny stepped out onto it from the fourth-floor landing. He moved rapidly to the door of 407 and tried the knob. The lock in the patched panel rattled loosely, but it held. Johnny debated trying his Duarte passkey, and decided against it. It probably wouldn't work, anyhow, and he didn't know how much time he had. He put his shoulder to the door and applied steadily increasing pressure. The lock burst with a grieving sound of overstrained metal and he stepped inside and pushed the door closed.

Inside he went directly to the large closet at the rear of the room. After opening it he found it so dark inside he groped for a light switch, then for a cord. Finding neither, he backed out and turned on the room's overhead light. This time, when he returned, he could see the glint from closely aligned bottles in a case of Armagnac at his feet. He toed the case thoughtfully. Tremaine never had come through on his promise to drop off a case at the Duarte.

When he raised his eyes, Johnny found himself looking at an attache case on the eye-level shelf. Because of its dimensions he reached for it hopefully. He shook his head in disgust as soon as he lifted it down; it didn't weigh enough.

He set it down out of the way, and swiftly went through the rest of the closet. Disappointed, he backed out and ran his eye around the rest of the room. It offered few likely looking hiding places for thirty-pound objects.

He tested the frame and the base of the sofa, fruitlessly. He was considering the bed when he heard the voices at the door. “-lock's been forced, Ernest,” a feminine voice said hollowly from outside. “What can have happened here?”

Johnny padded noiselessly back to the closet, closed the door, snatched up the attache case from the floor and fled to the bathroom, whose door he pushed three-quarters shut. He looked out to see Ernest Faulkner cautiously reconnoiter the apartment from the hallway with Gloria Philips at his shoulder. The lawyer's prim mouth pursed soundlessly at the sight of the disheveled interior.

“Look at the place!” the redhead exclaimed, less reticent. “What in the world-” She pushed past Faulkner and click-clacked rapidly in her three-inch high heels across the room beyond Johnny's range of vision. He was left in no doubt as to her whereabouts when he heard the closet door reopen. Her voice came again immediately, muffledly. “It's gone!” Almost at once she spoke again more clearly, as though she had turned to face the lawyer. “The case is gone, Ernest. Where can he have put it? He wouldn't have any reason-”

Her voice died out as Faulkner moved forward to join her. “Let me look,” he said nervously.

“I tell you it's gone,” she repeated impatiently. The tap-tap of her high heels sounded as she evidently got out of Faulkner's way. “I don't understand why-”

In the bathroom Johnny snatched a bath mat from a wall rack and swathed the attache case in it, to muffle sound. Probing with his big thumbs through the mat's thickness, he found the case locks and popped them one at a time with a barely discernible sound. From outside he could hear a flurry of movement and half-questions and quarter-answers as the man and woman searched in an obviously increasing state of anxiety.

Johnny discarded the mat and opened the case, silently. He groped around inside and felt his knuckles brush against a piece of metal. He picked it up, and stared down uncomprehendingly at a snouted, tubular piece of steel attached at a right angle to a flat metal plate. He hefted its light weight in his palm puzzledly, turned it over and looked at it from another angle. He started to return it to the case, opened that wider for a better view of its other contents and nearly dropped the whole thing at the sound of another voice outside.

“What are you two doing here?” Detective James Rogers' voice demanded crisply.

Johnny shoved everything back in the case, closed it and tucked it under his arm. Back at the door he looked out through the aperture at Ernest Faulkner's white, shaken features, peering in dismay at the sandy-haired man standing in the hallway arch.

“I-ah-have a key,” the lawyer got out in a voice that sounded better than he looked. “Not that we-I needed it. Upon our arrival we found the door had been forced.” Johnny could see him gaining confidence at the sound of his own voice. “I really-”

“I asked you what you were doing here!” the detective rapped back at him sharply. Johnny couldn't see the redhead at all. “And where's Killain?”

“Killain?” Faulkner echoed blankly.

Johnny opened the bathroom door and stepped out. Faulkner's jaw dropped ludicrously. Gloria Philips stood at the end of the sofa. There was no particular expression on her face that Johnny could decipher, but her eyes were on the attache case under his arm.

“There you are,” Rogers said drily. “I missed you downstairs. What the hell's going on here?”

“I just been catchin' up on my homework as to how Jack Arends was killed, Jimmy,” Johnny said easily.

“I know how Arends was killed. You missed the excitement downstairs by skipping off back up here. I just barely got to Tremaine in time to keep him from gunning Stitt with an automatic he'd dredged up from somewhere. The wagon and the ambulance were loading side by side.”

Johnny ignored the interruption. “If you had to kill a man so bad you couldn't wait, Jimmy, and you had two minutes alone with him in a room two closed doors away from other people in the same apartment, how would you do it?”

Detective Rogers opened his mouth, and closed it again. He looked at Ernest Faulkner, who looked baffled, and at Gloria Philips, who looked as beautiful as ever. He looked back at Johnny. “With a silencer,” he said finally. He shook his head impatiently. “If I could get it out past the other people in the apartment. And if you're still speaking of Arends, that's where you're all wet. We found the gun, and there was no sign of a silencer. And the gun was an automatic, which can't take a silencer.”

“Can't, Jimmy?”

The sandy-haired man gestured irritably. “You know what I mean. Stop being difficult. Instead of fitting on the barrel as a silencer does on a revolver, because of the barrel's action on an automatic the silencer would have to go on the slide. It would be a tricky damn job, one for a craftsman. I've never seen one.”

Johnny removed the attache case from under his arm, opened it, picked up the snouted piece of metalware and tossed it to the detective. “So now you have, Jimmy.”

The sandy-haired man turned it over and over in his hands. He reached in a jacket pocket, removed Stitt's blued-steel Mauser, looked at it questioningly and shoved it back. From the opposite pocket he removed a black automatic — Tremaine's, Johnny realized-and looked at it searchingly. “Let's see,” Roger murmured, half aloud. “I come into the room-” He ran through it in his mind. He turned back to Johnny with a negative shake of his head. “Still no good. You're forgetting there was no silencer on the automatic beside Arends.”

“Get yourself in gear, Jimmy. There wasn't supposed to be. You come into the room with a silenced automatic ready to go. You pop the guy. If you've come ready with another slide, how long does it take you to break down the automatic, remove the slide with the silencer and shove in the plain one? Stick the silencer in the attache case in which you lugged the whole works in there an' put it back under your arm, drop the automatic on the floor beside the body an' holler murder?”

Jimmy Rogers' hazel eyes were slits. “Let's find out,” he said grimly. He walked to a small table and pushed aside the lamp on it. He placed Jules Tremaine's automatic and the wicked-looking silencer attached to its slide down together, slipped out of his jacket, rubbed his hands together and looked around at Johnny. “Okay. This won't work perfectly unless this is an identical gun, but it looks close. Anyway, it'll give me an idea. This is the reverse, now- silencer onto automatic, instead of off. You time me. Say when.”

Johnny waited for the second hand on his watch to creep around to straight up. “Go, man.”

The detective's slim white hands flew into action. He had the automatic broken down in what seemed no time to Johnny, but in snatching up the silencer with its slide he had to make three tries before he hit the groove. After that, the automatic with its ugly-looking silencer fairly sprang back together. Rogers laid it down, slapped his hands together and looked inquiringly at Johnny.

“I made you in a tick over seventy seconds,” Johnny announced.

“I could do it faster, with practice.” “Look at your hands, Jimmy.”

Roger looked down at his greasy, oily hands. “What did you expect? You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs.” With the tip of two fingers he fished out a handkerchief and wiped off his hands.

“You just don't plan your murders, Jimmy.” Johnny opened the case again, removed a pair of white women's gloves and tossed them to the detective. Rogers' lips tightened at the sight of the dried black grease marks on them. “She kept me from goin' back up there that night to fetch these for her when I thought she'd forgotten 'em,” Johnny said quietly. “She had a good reason. An' you talk to Tremaine now about the night I got winged in the blonde's doorway an' I'll bet you'll find she wasn't supplyin' any alibi for him that night. He was supplyin' one for her, for value received. You got to give her credit-she played the field. She used Tremaine, me, Palmer, even Stitt who had her scared half to death, an' finally Ernest here.” He grinned at the lawyer, who was standing in shocked silence. “Tremaine lost his usefulness to her when he went to pieces an' started drinkin'. Tremaine knew too much. He had to go. She put Stitt onto Tremaine's back by tellin' Stitt that Tremaine was goin' to frame him for the muscle job on Tremaine's face with his gunbutt, Ernest?”

The lawyer paled. “They-did?” he croaked. He swallowed noisily. “Stitt did?” He glared at Gloria. “You did that to Jules?” He advanced on her, his already high-pitched voice sliding shrilly up the scale. “Why I ever listened to you, you nasty bitch-” His hands clawed at her face.

Gloria Philips swung her handbag on its strap and hit the lawyer in the chest, knocking him backward. “You goddam queen!” she raged, and swung the bag again. Ducking ineffectually, Faulkner stumbled and fell. He rolled onto his back as Gloria Philips rushed at him and sank a three-inch high heel out of sight in his body as she stamped on him. Ernest Faulkner screamed and doubled up into a fetal position.

Johnny's backhanded slap knocked her away from the lawyer before she could repeat the performance. “Grab her, Jimmy, and keep her hands out of that handbag!” he said sharply. He bent down over Faulkner, and saw that the lawyer was out cold. Johnny sighed, picked up the slender man and started for the bathroom with him. “I'll bring him around. You better get on the phone an' put the wheels in motion, Jimmy.”

In the bathroom he eased the limp body down onto the tile. Ernest Faulkner's weak features were bloodless. Johnny hurriedly soaked towels one after the other and knelt down to apply them to the lawyer's forehead. He looked up at a scuffling noise in the bathroom doorway to see Jimmy Rogers backing in, a silly grin frozen into a grimace on his face, Gloria Philips' handbag in one hand. Right behind him came the redhead, herding him with a small, pearl-handled gun competently aimed at his middle.

“Thigh holster,” the detective said over his shoulder as if he still couldn't believe it. His body was between Johnny and the redhead, but Johnny could see her face. “Thigh-”

“Watch it, Jimmy!” Johnny punched the sandy-haired man hard behind the right knee. The detective went down in a spiraling spin just as Gloria Philips fired. The bullet thudded into the wall behind the detective and Johnny a second before Jimmy Rogers' head hit the wash basin heavily and he pitched sideways, unconscious.

“Well, isn't that nice,” the redhead said tightly. “I always knew you'd be good for something one of these days. Love and kisses, sweetheart.” She shot Johnny in the chest as he surged up from his knees. He was still stumbling backward from the smashing blow when she ran out the bathroom door and slammed it.

Too high to mean anything, Johnny told himself, and tried to rock himself forward into motion. Too high. His legs didn't believe it. He stepped on both Faulkner and Rogers getting to the door. He couldn't help it. Each time it almost threw him.

He had a terrible struggle with the door before he got it open. His hands wouldn't co-ordinate. He shuffled through the apartment, swaying from side to side. He wasted seconds at the door into the corridor before he remembered it opened inward.

In the corridor he could see her in front of the elevator shaft, punching furiously at the button. He lumbered toward her, his legs like two shafts of pig iron. She turned at the sound and incredulity gave way to panic. Her hand darted to her bag.

They both heard the sound of the ascending elevator. She raised the gun deliberately when he was still yards away. She looked at him, looked at the elevator indicator, turned to run, turned back, screamed despairingly, raised the gun again and, as the elevator doors opened, shot herself in the head.

Still six feet away and unable to check his lead-footed progress, Johnny catapulted heavily over her falling body. The last thing he remembered was the pop-eyed stare of the uniform-trousered brunette operator, her jaws still working rhythmically on her gum as she bent down over him.