A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

It Only Takes a Minute To Die

Why he wanted to kill him need not be brought within the compass of this story. It would drag it too far back — through too many long, brooding, rancorous, and sick-minded years for it to be cohesive. And a story must have a concise starting point, otherwise it becomes just a formless loose-leafed casebook. All that need be said is that he wanted to kill him, he did kill him, and he botched it — and now let the story begin.

Names are not too important — they are only labels used to differentiate people. It is the action stemming from given characteristics within a given situation that counts more as identification, that brings forward the individual personality. And since one played the part of the killer, and one the part of the dead, let them be known as Killare and Dade. That will characterize them beyond all doubt. The killer and the dead.

As he stood there waiting for the bus he’d missed that night, Killare wasn’t even thinking of this man he’d dedicated himself to kill. It was one of the few times, night or day, that he wasn’t. A skin-teasing, mosquitolike rain was needling him, and it felt more like icy pollen than rainwater. His collar was turned up, his hat brim down, he was chilled and getting more chilled by the minute. His shoes were starting to squirt instead of scrape when he scuffed them.

The bus must have broken down along the way, and had to be taken off the run and towed back to the garage. Which meant there would only be one more coming along after that — the buslines closed down for the night at 1:00 a.m. and didn’t start rolling again until 5:00 in the morning and the last bus wouldn’t get to his stop until about 1:15 or even later.

He turned and looked around despairingly for some kind of shelter to tide him over during the wait he foresaw coming up. He was standing out in front of a corner residential hotel. He el noticed it when he first halted at the bus stop, but hadn’t given it a second thought since.

Now as he looked again he caught sight of a small, neat neon sign with the word Bar on it posted above a separate doorway to one side of the main entrance. Also he noticed that the doorway was flanked by a number of lighted windows that looked out on the very stretch of sidewalk he was standing on.

He decided to do his waiting in there, and warm up while he was about it — that is, if he could find some place to sit that would let him keep an eye on the bus-stop zone outside. He walked over and went inside. It was a happy little place, warm and restfully lighted and sprightly — not raucous, but with the sound of soft-spoken voices. And his luck was working — the end seat at the bar, the one nearest the windows, was vacant. Probably because all the rest were taken up by couples, and this happened to be an odd seat, one left over.

He sat down on it, ordered a short but stiff bourbon, and as he slowly started to glow back to welcome warmth again, he kept his head turned, watching the sidewalk outside the window, which the rain kept covering with a patina of little disappearing pinpricks all the time, no two of which ever landed in the same spot twice. They looked like a swarm of drowning bees.

Finally, to ease the strain on his neck muscles, he turned around and glanced the other way, down the line of people extending along the bar. Man and girl, girl and man, two men, man and girl. Just then, at the opposite end of the barline, a man stood up to leave. This brought his head and shoulders up two or three feet higher than those of everyone else. If it hadn’t been for that, the man would probably never have attracted Killare’s attention or been given a second look, among all those people and in that subdued light.

But standing head and shoulders above everyone else like that, he caught Killare’s eye. Killare focused it on him, Killare gave him a double-take, Killare recognized him.

And it was he, Dade, the man it had become his daydream and nightmare to kill.

If he had any doubts about it, the barman clinched it for him. “Good night, Mr. Dade,” he said in a voice clearly audible above the confidential conversations going on all around. “Stop by and see us again sometime.”

Dade nodded, said a word or two to the man in the next seat, then turned and went out. Not through the street door by which Killare had come in, but through a door at the opposite side of the bar — a door which led inside to the hotel lobby.

So he had a room right here in the hotel, Killare thought, noticing that Dade didn’t have a hat or coat with him. And now that an extraordinary coincidence had dropped Dade right in his lap, he wasn’t going to brush him off like an ash or a stray crumb; he was going to take advantage of it.

Killare put a dollar down on the bar top, got up, and went in the same direction Dade had gone. He didn’t hurry or try to overtake him; he went at the same casual pace Dade had moved.

He turned right outside the door as he had seen him do.

He found himself in an intimate little side corridor, groomed with crystal prisms and white-leather banquettes. It opened onto the main lobby, and he stopped there and hung back a moment. The desk was a little offside, not in a direct line, and Dade was standing in front of it.

He heard him say, “Can I have the key to Room 212, please.”

The clerk said, “Good night, Mr. Dade,” as he handed it to him.

Killare turned and doubled back out of sight. Not all the way, for he might not have been able to make it in time without Dade getting a glimpse of him. But everything seemed to be working out just right for him, to unroll as smoothly as in a dream. A dream about murder.

There was a pay telephone booth to one side of him, and all he had to do was edge into that and sit down on the little slab-seat. It obviously had a light to go with it — a light that usually went on automatically; but even this was on his side. The electric bulb was burned out.

There were a few moments’ wait. Then Killare heard the elevator panel slur open, click closed, and Dade had gone up.

Killare came out of his cranny and went over to the desk.

“I just missed the last bus,” he mourned as the clerk looked up.

This was literally true, but the clerk misconstrued it, just as Killare had wanted him to, and thought he meant an out-of-town or commutation bus. “Would you like a room?” he offered. “We’d be glad to have you with us.”

“You’ve saved my life,” Killare smiled. (“And cost somebody else his,” he refrained from adding.) “I like a low floor, as low as I can get. How about the second?”

“I’m sure we can fix you up with something.”

“Do you have a line of Number 13 rooms in this hotel?” Killare asked craftily.

“No, we’re superstitious. We skipped over them,” the clerk smiled.

“All right, how about 214 then?”

The clerk checked his file. “Sorry, Room 214 is occupied.”

“Well, 211 then?”

“I can give you that,” the clerk nodded, after checking a second time.

Killare thought: I haven’t given him a chance to realize yet how I’ve been fishing for one particular location; in a minute or two, after I’ve gone up, it’ll start to sink in, what I did just now. So I’d better take the sting out of it by beating him to it, and explaining it myself. Better my own harmless explanation, freely given before it happens, than his own dangerous inference, put on it after it has happened.

“I met an old acquaintance I haven’t seen for years, in the bar just now. Mr. Dade. We’ve planned getting together over breakfast in the morning — that’s why I asked for a room near him, on the same floor.”

“How long will you be with us, just the one night?” the clerk asked as Killare signed in.

“How long is Dade staying?”

“Until the day after tomorrow.”

“Then I may as well stay over a second night myself, now that I’m here,” Killare told him. “I’ve got some important business to attend to.”

He needed the next day to get the gun. He’d decided long ago it should be a gun, and only a gun. A gun was tidy, swift, and usually successful. Knives were messy, and impact weapons like crowbars and wrenches and bludgeons — they got matted with gore and hair; and besides, they could be warded off by a sudden twist or turn of the body. A gun, now, that was a man’s weapon, and this was a man’s killing.

He’d paved the way for the gun long ago; he knew where to get it, whom to get it from, and how much it was going to cost him to get it. But he hadn’t wanted to get it until he was ready to use it; it was an illegal gun, it had to be, and to carry it around on him for any length of time beforehand was too risky — it would be asking for trouble in the worst way. Even to keep it hidden somewhere on his own premises was no longer safe. The police now had this new break-in-and-search procedure, which didn’t stand back to wait for warrants, and you could never tell when they were going to spring it on you. Violence that had become almost an everyday commonplace in the city had in turn brought about police methods that were often not strictly out of the lecture room or official handbook.

So the gun was his for the asking and paying — he’d already seen it and handled it; but he needed the extra day to get it. He hadn’t had the faintest idea he was going to meet Dade that night, and in this unlooked-for way.

“Take this gentleman up to Room 211,” the deskman instructed a bellboy.

The door to Dade’s room was squarely, point-blank opposite his own, he saw when he got up there. And the separation wasn’t the width of the main corridor, but of a side corridor. He could step from his door to Dade’s without putting down the same foot twice.

Lingering behind a moment while the bellboy fiddled around the room, he imagined he could even hear Dade’s breathing coming through the opposite door, with the cloying heaviness of approaching sleep.

Sleep tight, he wished him grimly. It’s your last night on earth for doing so. Tomorrow night this time you’ll be sleeping in a different way — cold and doughy and smelling of formaldehyde.

The bellboy went out, and Killare picked up the phone without a minute’s waste of time, almost before the door had latched back into place, and asked for a number. It was in the Yellow Pages, but you wouldn’t have found it if you’d looked under “Guns.”

There was an unusually long wait, as though the telephone was ringing in the back of somewhere. The back room of somewhere. Then even after the connection opened up, there was nothing — no voice, no one said anything. As though the person standing by it was very cagey, very wary about answering his calls, didn’t even like to commit himself to a noncommittal “Hello” until he had some idea who was calling.

Finally, to break the deadlock, Killare said, “How about it? You there?”

“Whosis?” came back a guarded voice — so guarded it was barely allowed to pass through the speaker’s lips.

“Remember me? I was in there a couple of times about — something.”

“I don’t remember you,” the voice said peremptorily. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I am—” Killare started to elaborate.

The voice cut him off almost hysterically. “Look, no names! There could be woodpeckers somewhere along the line. Tap, tap, tap — you know? Everybody has them nowadays,” he went on. “Even housewives.”

“This has nothing to do with your regular business. It’s something we discussed on the side.”

“Oh,” the voice said, enlightened. “Now I know.” The voice sounded almost relieved, as though bargaining over the sale of an illegal gun was a mere nothing, a bagatelle, compared to the man’s main-line occupational hazards.

“You know that package?” Killare said. “That package you’re holding for me? I’m coming around to pick it up. I have to have it tomorrow. I’m coming around tomorrow about five.”

The voice was still determined to play it safe. “A lot of people leave packages in my care that I don’t know anything about. It’s like I was running a parcel service. Sometimes they never show up again, sometimes they show up a year later and expect me to remember.” Which would be his “out” if the gun were ever to be traced back to him; Killare got that. “You could come around here tomorrow at five, like you say, and I still wouldn’t know you from Adam.” Which was an oblique way of saying, All right, come ahead around at five; and Killare understood that too.

“Even if you brought four hundred dollars with you, I still wouldn’t know you.” And he understood that too.

Killare gave an unmirthful laugh. “Price has gone up, I see.”

“When you want a thing bad it always goes up.”

“I want it bad,” Killare said to himself.

He was well satisfied as he hung up. The man on the other end made him smile, with his melodramatic antics, his stage waits on picking up the phone, his cryptic conversations, and the rest of his cover-up gymnastics — all of which were as out of date in today’s hard-shelled, gear-stripped world as a man’s opera cape or a mushroom-shaped helmet on a cop. The police themselves would have been the first to laugh at him. The man probably had read too many dime novels when he was a boy, or else he had an ineradicable sense of guilt about not having stayed honest, which expressed itself in this form. But he was reliable. He delivered the goods — when you laid cash on the line.

Nothing to do now but raise the money and wait. And strangely enough, he enjoyed the waiting too. It made him feel twice as good. It added a spice to the enterprise. It was like doing it over twice, once in contemplation and once in commission.

He stretched out across the threadbare sofa in one long, straight, unbroken line from the top of his head to the backs of his heels, and made a cushion of his clasped hands and placed them at the back of his head for a head-rest. A little table-top radio beside him, which he had flicked on, warmed up and cut in with almost bull’s-eye patness on a deep-throated woman growling a blues: “There’s gonna be some shooting like there never was befoa, And the undertaker-man is gonna knock upon his doa—”

“Sing it, lady, sing it,” he urged.

It may feel bad at first when you’re wronged or damaged or trampled on in some way there’s no forgiving, but it feels good later to kill the man you hate for doing it to you. It sure feels good, he exulted.

It feels like a drink on the house.

It feels like a Cadillac all your own.

It feels like when the dice come up with your point, and the floor is papered with other people’s money.

It feels like when a beautiful blonde runs her fingers through your hair, and then throws away her shoes because she says she’s never going to walk away from there again.

It feels even better than all those things put together.

When he returned to the hotel at eleven the next night, he had the gun.

Dade wasn’t back in his room yet — he could tell because he glimpsed the key still sticking out in the mail box adjoining his, when he stopped at the desk to pick up his own. Not that this was an infallible guarantee; most hotels kept spares in their mail boxes, in case a guest locked himself out and had left the key inside the room.

He preferred it this way— Dade not yet in. It could give him time to get things warmed up inside of him.

He went into his own room, closed the door, and made the few, very minor preparations there were indicated — and they were far less complicated and taxing than those required on many less crucial occasions, he reflected.

First, he adjusted his door so that it could open at one clean sweep, without the interruption hitch of freeing the latch by turning the knob, and without the accompanying warning sound this would give. In other words, the door was left open a narrow crack — but this couldn’t be detected unless it was peered at closely from either side.

Next, he took the telephone directory, which each room was supplied with, from under the nightstand and stood it up on end against the wall just inside the door, in readiness for its particular use. To make it even more suitable to the purpose he had in mind for it, the hotel had encased each directory in its own stiff binding, with the name of the hotel and the room number stamped at the top. The binding made the directory rigid and unbendable.

Finally, he checked the gun — but this was purely a fidget reflex, not a necessity, for it had been turned over to him in perfect readiness.

After that he spent the time walking aimlessly around the room — not wanting to sit down, for some unfathomable reason — touching various objects at random as he passed them, without even knowing he was doing so. Now the edge of the dresser, now the comer of the bed, now the back of a chair. Once he turned off a lamp as he went by it, then immediately turned it on again in the course of the same stride. A number of times he tightened and loosened his necktie, and once he lifted his foot to the arm of a chair, and undid, then retied the shoelace. All for some unknown reason.

The behavior pattern of a particular man passing the time while waiting to commit a murder.

The one thing he did not do was the one thing he might have been expected to do the most — smoke. Perhaps he did not want to be caught with one in his hand, if Dade unexpectedly showed up, and not know what to do with it, where to put it. Even infinitesimal things like that can throw a timetable off balance.

His excitement was very great — it would be a lie to say it wasn’t; but equally it was under very great control. Besides, it wasn’t an unwelcome excitement: it was a buoyant, uplifting one. It was a heady feeling, like the kind champagne gives. It was the feeling an actor has just as he’s about to go onstage; a prizefighter when he’s about to step into the ring; a racing-car driver when he’s about to open up the throttle; a parachutist when he’s about to dive out the hatch. It was Exhilaration — the benzedrine of the psyche.

A little short of 1:00 a.m. he heard the sound of a cab driving up at the street entrance, and wondered if it was Dade; but he didn’t go to the window to look. If it was, then he’d find out when Dade got up here, and if it wasn’t it wasn’t.

But it was. After a couple of minutes’ interval he heard the scuff of a step come up to the door across from his own. He widened the crack in his door just enough to frame one eye in it, and saw Dade standing there with his back to him, putting his key to his door. He wasn’t staggering, ballbearing-kneed drunk, but he’d had a couple — you could tell that by the formless little tune that was simmering under his breath, and if nothing else that meant his reflexes would be slower by that much.

Everything was on Killare’s side. Everything, everything. There never was such a stacked murder before.

The act of entering a room by opening up a closed door ordinarily entails three separate stances or directional pivots, although it is such an habitual act, performed so many times a day, that no one ever gives it that much thought. First, you face the door and open it. Second, you enter and turn around to face the direction in which the door is going to close. Third, you close it back to where you found it. It is simple, but it does have these three moves to it, which are usually run together as if they were one continuous motion.

Killare caught him neatly between the first and the second positions, right where the split was, right where the joint was. Dade had the door open, he was in through it, and he was just turning. Killare’s door sluiced open without a hindering latch-break, and Killare aimed his telephone directory at the opening across the way and slid the thick book full force along the floor. It went in just right, dead center, in the groove, and jammed there.

Before Dade had time to react by more than just a bugged look downward, trying to understand what the inexplicable obstacle was to closing his door, Killare had straddled the directory with a scissoring spread of his legs and was inside Dade’s room with him.

He did the two things now that Dade hadn’t had the coordination to do for himself in time: he kicked the slablike directory back out of the way into a corner of Dade’s room, and he closed Dade’s door. But from the inside — which made all the difference in the world. The gun had come out, somewhere during the course of his in-leap, and immediately took charge of Dade’s numbed reflexes.

“Now don’t open your mouth to make any noise,” he said with taut tonelessness, “because I’ll let this go at you.

“And don’t move your hands anywhere near me,” he added. “Keep them by you where they belong.”

Dade didn’t open his mouth; he seemed unable to.

Killare went on talking, as if he found it a necessity to. “Those’re the only two things you’ve got to remember, and then everything’ll be all right,” he cautioned him. Which was a false promise, but then there was no future beyond the next minute for one of them, and a promise by its very nature lies in the future.

“And don’t be nervous about it,” he warned him. “Because if you are, then you’ll get me nervous too. And if I get nervous, then I won’t be able to control myself. Just take it easy — that’s the best thing for both of us.”

Dade, through lips that were as loose as a rubber band — and almost about the same color — finally managed to quaver, “What is this? Is it money you’re after?”

“No questions,” Killare said curtly. “No conversation, I’m not going to tell you that a second time.” And he lifted his thumb away from the gun, as if it were itching him, then allowed it to fall back again.

“Where’s the bathroom?” he asked him.

Dade nudged toward it with his head, afraid now to talk any more.

“Go in there and put on the light.”

Dade did.

“Now turn on the water full force — both taps, the hot and the cold. The tub, not the shower.”

He wanted this to deaden the dialogue. And to diminish the shot — when it came. Water running down inside a shower stall makes only a hissing sound. Water tumbling into the resonant hollow of a tub makes a deep booming sound. It pounded like walloping drumbeats.

He had to pantomime him outside again by head motion, since the rushing water drowned out their voices at that distance.

Even outside in the room Killare had to step closer to him than before, in order to speak and be heard, but he kept the gun beyond the orbit of any hand-swinging snatch, and that was what counted.

In stories and in television pictures men are continuously charging against guns and their holders, and overthrowing both; but in real life it doesn’t work that way. The only kind of man who would charge a pointed gun is not a brave man, but a fool.

“Now start getting undressed for bed, just like you would any other night. Put your things where you always put them.”

Dade discarded his outer clothes, seeming to have twenty fingers that got in each other’s way. He stood there holding the garments up like a jittering clothes-tree.

“Where do you put your coat and pants ordinarily, on other nights?” Killare demanded impatiently. He had to lean toward Dade’s ear a little to ask it, so that, ludicrously, it made it seem as if the information imparted was a secret.

“I put the coat on a hanger in the closet, and I attach the pants by their cuffs to that pants holder on the side of the door.”

“Well, do it, then. Don’t stand looking at me.”

After Dade had swung open the closet door, Killare kicked a chair over against it to hold it pinned back, so that Dade couldn’t suddenly shut himself into the closet away from the gun.

“Don’t you take things out of your pockets?” he said sarcastically. “I do.”

Dade dumped out a pocket key-case with a snapdown cover, a wallet, a fistful of loose change, a ball-point pen, a warped package of cigarettes, a clean handkerchief, an unclean handkerchief, and two books of matches, all onto the dresser top. One rebellious quarter rolled off and landed on the floor.

“Let it lie there,” Killare instructed. “Looks more natural.”

“Now what do you do with your shirt?” he prodded, like a headmaster in some boy’s prep school trying to teach personal neatness. Only in this case the penalty wasn’t a demerit; it was death.

“I put on a fresh one every morning, so I just throw the used one across a chair.”

“Just throw it across a chair, then. And your necktie?”

“I change according to the shirt. So I just spread it out on the dresser, until I’m ready to take out another.”

“Spread it out on the dresser, then. Now get into your pajamas.” Dade turned a little to one side, self-conscious about stripping in front of a stranger.

“Now go over to the desk there. Sit down and put on the desk light...

“Now take out a sheet of notepaper, an envelope, and a pen...

“What’s your wife’s first name?”

Dade shuddered uncontrollably; you could only see it from the back, the way he was sitting.

“Patricia,” he whispered, as though he were all out of breath.

“Turn around. I can’t hear you on account of the water.”

Dade turned and said it again. He looked as if the thought of her was making him feel ready to cry.

“What do you call her around the house?”

“Pat.”

“Then write this: ‘Dear Pat—’ ”

Dade wrote, Killare back of his shoulder reading as he wrote. “ ‘It’s no use, I can’t go on—’ How long you been married?”

“Fifteen years.” He said it with what sounded like a sob, but with the water pounding in the bathroom you couldn’t tell; it might have been a wet-hiccough sound.

“ ‘—after fifteen years. To have you tell me you’re in love with someone else and want to leave me is more than I can take.’ ”

Dade flashed him a white look over one shoulder, then turned back again, as the gun suggested with an almost imperceptible lift.

“ ‘I’m going to let you have your freedom, Pat, but not the way you think. This way.’ ”

Killare arched his back to scan what had been written.

“Make your handwriting shake a little more,” he criticized. “It looks too steady.”

“I don’t know how, on purpose,” Dade said with a haggard face.

“Try it. This ought to help you do it.” Killare twisted the bore of the gun, like an awl, flush against the nape of Dade’s cringing neck. The next specimen of handwriting came out spidery and agitated.

“ ‘I love you, Goodbye.’...

“Now sign your first name...

“Now fold it over and put it in the envelope...

“Now seal the flap...

“Now write on the outside: ‘Kindly deliver to my wife.’...

“What’s that on your finger, a wedding ring? Take it off and put it on the envelope.”

Dade had a hard time with it. “It hasn’t been off in fifteen years,” he said wistfully.

“Spit on it,” Killare ordered.

It came off with a jerk.

“Now have you got a snapshot of her in your wallet? Go over and get it.”

Dade tried to show it to him on the way back, as if hoping it would soften him. Killare didn’t look at it.

“Put that on top of the note too...

“All right, that’ll do it. Now come over here and sit down on the edge of the bed. No, don’t turn the covers down, you’re not going to get into it.”

Dade was unmanageably crying by now. His eyes were bright, and a shiny puddle had gathered in each comer without spilling over. The sight of the ring and the snapshot had probably hit him in his weakest spot.

“Die like a man,” Killare said scathingly. “Not like a sniffling schoolboy. It only takes a minute to die. What’s so big about it?

“Now swing your legs up onto the bed. That’s it. Take off the top one of those two pillows, and hand it over to me.”

Killare took it from him and shoved it under his own arm, temporarily.

“Now lie back on the other one. Put your head back on it and look straight up. No, don’t do that!” he warned suddenly.

Dade’s control began to shred. “I can’t take any more,” he moaned. “You do it too slow. Hurry, if you’re going to, only hurry. I can’t hold out any more.”

A scream of hysteria was trying to form and escape from him, far too late and far too useless. His mouth rounded into a noiseless O. He put one hand over it, fingers spread out like spokes. Then he put the other hand over that, fingers also spread. It looked as if he was kissing some kind of a squirming baby octopus. Or munching it.

“Look straight up,” was the next to last thing Killare said to him. “See that spot on the ceiling? That one there? Keep watching it.”

He let his whole body fall forward on top of him, using the pillow as a buffer between them, obliterating Dade’s face under it. Pressing it down hard at both sides. Then quickly releasing one side, but only to force the gun under the pillow, and fire into the middle of Dade’s face.

Dade’s legs quirked up, in motor-reflex response, fell back again, and that was all. He never made another move.

When Killare took the pillow off, which he did at once, he could tell Dade was dead. But so newly so, so just-now so, that the last breath was just coming out of his widened mouth, with no more behind to follow it. And his eyes were just dimming closed, to spring open again and stay that way forever.

The hole had gone right between the eyes. It was a beautiful shot, considering that it had been fired blind.

He pulled Dade’s head up a little, using the collar ends of his pajama jacket as a halter to raise it by, in order not to have to touch the head itself, which he was squeamish about doing, and inserted the second pillow underneath again.

He did things to the gun the importance of which he was personally contemptuous of and which he felt to be greatly overrated; but for the sake of prudence he decided he might just as well be doubly sure: namely, he cleaned off both sides by scouring the gun diligently up and down one trouser leg, then held it thereafter with a scrap of tinfoil extracted from a package of cigarettes.

He tried to hook Dade’s index finger around the trigger guard and let the gun hang that way. One of Dade’s arms was dangling loose over the side of the bed. But the finger was not yet rigid as in rigor mortis, yet not resilient as in life; it was simply inert, and the gun kept sliding off and falling down.

He finally lifted the whole arm up over the body, and attached the gun there, and the body itself held it in place.

There was very little else to be done. He noticed a slab-shaped pint bottle of whiskey, nearly full and probably left over from the night before; he poured a little into a tumbler and stood it beside the bed close to Dade’s head. Then he poured the rest up and down the bed and body, in flicking, criss-cross diagonals, giving Dade a last fling, so to speak. Or a requiem.

Then he let the bottle fall down empty, wherever it happened to fall — but not until he had made certain that none of his own fingerprints were on the glass or the bottle.

Then he went in and with a handkerchief wrapped round his hand, turned off the two apoplectic bath-taps. The stopper hadn’t been set, so there was no danger of an overflow, but the continuing uproar might have finally attracted attention outside in the hall and brought about an investigation.

Then he went out and closed the door firmly after him.

And it was all over, just as easy as that.

All done with.

Finished.

He drew a vast sigh of unutterable, boundless release. He’d never felt so good before, never in his whole life. They told you that people were frightened after doing a thing like this, scared sick, that they sweated, panicked, didn’t know which way to turn. Well, either they didn’t know what they were talking about, or these were a different kind of people — weak, unsure; or perhaps they hadn’t hated hard enough, as much as he had.

The others — the weak ones — shouldn’t have done it in the first place. They weren’t meant for murder — except on the receiving end. Because now all he felt was a supreme sense of well-being, placidity, repose; the calm after the storm. The way you feel when you come off the massage table in a Turkish bath, with every muscle encased in velvet and every nerve resting on rose petals.

Six long years of pent-up hate had been swept away, all in the space of a single minute (“It only takes a minute to die,” he’d said), and now he was shiny-new again, whole again, his own man again, free to lead his own life again.

He stood there by the window, his hands expansively in his pockets, teetering buoyantly on the balls of his feet, up and then down again, up and down. He stood there by the window, but he wasn’t looking out; he was looking inward, at himself, and he was content with what he saw. Love can’t hold a candle to murder, when it comes to emotional intensity and satisfaction. Not little fly-by-night, potshot murders in the course of a holdup, no; but a murder like this, like his, the goal of six years of hoping, planning, waiting, seething, living with it, almost dying with it.

He could have checked out then and there; there was nothing to keep him in the hotel any longer. But he thought, why mar an otherwise perfect accomplishment by a single false note, when it isn’t necessary? To check out at two in the morning from a room directly opposite the one in which a man will be found murdered is bound to be remembered afterward. But to check out at nine in the morning, perhaps after an innocent-looking attempt to call the dead man’s room to suggest they have breakfast together — that would be a master stroke of tactics, of bravado.

He couldn’t have been expected to hear the shot; other rooms nearby were occupied, the clerk had said, and the people in those rooms obviously hadn’t heard it. And there was no way in which he could be placed in the murder room — no way at all.

Yes, the clever thing to do was to stay on, normally, naturally. And it took no courage to do it, as he found when he proceeded to do so. He unslung his necktie, without taking it off; even, presently, asked for bar service and ordered a double bourbon sent up to the room.

He was amazed, after he’d finished it, to find himself actually nodding, dozing off, in the chair in which he was sitting. He picked himself up, went over to the bed, and lay down on it, without taking off his clothes, only his shoes.

He wouldn’t have believed it was going to happen, but the next thing he knew he opened his eyes and it was past nine in the morning. There was an unusual amount of subdued coming and going immediately outside his door, even for a bustling little hotel, and he saw that he’d slept for six hours, deeply, dreamlessly.

He wondered if anyone had ever done that, in the whole history of the world, after doing what he’d done the night before.

After he had showered and shaved — the hotel provided its male guests with little complimentary shaving kits, in case they were caught without their own, as he had been — he stuck his head out the door and took a quick, inquiring look. No harm in that, anyone would have, with the amount of traffic going on in and out the opposite door. At that particular moment the door across the corridor happened to be closed, but there was a conspicuous Do Not Disturb sign dangling from its knob. It was still jittering from its last swing back and forth. There was a low sound of voices going on in the room.

He shut himself in again, hesitated briefly, then picked up the phone and said casually, “Room 212, please.”

The girl was patently disconcerted by it. She gave a noticeable breath-catch, said, “One moment please,” and then went offside, apparently to ask instructions about what to do.

When she came back again she said, “I’m sorry, I can’t reach Room 212 just now.”

You bet you can’t, he thought grimly.

“Do you care to leave a message?”

“No, nothing important,” he said indifferently, and hung up. It would have involved leaving his name, and that would have been going a little too far. But the indifference in his voice wasn’t put on; it was a genuine indifference — he really felt that way.

He decided to soak in, luxuriate in the sensation of complete immunity he had — to enjoy it, to play it up for all it was worth.

So he went to the phone and ordered breakfast sent up to his room. A big breakfast, with all the trimmings. It was a time to celebrate, to indulge himself.

It arrived remarkably quick, in less than ten minutes, but when he opened the door in answer to the knock, instead of breakfast he got two detectives.

They announced what they were, then came on in without waiting to be asked.

They began questioning almost before the door had closed behind them.

“Did you hear any sounds in the room opposite you — 212 — at any time during the night?”

“Not a thing. I slept like a log,” he said. Which was the truth.

“Mind if I use your phone?” one of them then said.

“Go right ahead.” But he wondered why they hadn’t used the one in the murder room, which was just a few steps away.

“What’s that number again, Barney?” one of them now asked the other.

His partner answered, “You’re a very absent-minded guy, Jack. Can’t even keep a telephone number in your head.”

Killare somehow received the impression that the conversation was completely insincere and meant only for his benefit.

“I’ll look it up,” the first one said. “Got a directory in here?” he asked Killare.

“Sure, help yourself.”

“Where is it?”

Killare saw the hole opening under his feet.

But there was nothing he could do.

He went tumbling in headlong, beyond all escape and all recovery.

The book wasn’t in here. It was in there.

“You better come along with us,” was the next remark. No more questioning, no more fooling around. All business now — deadly business.

“We checked every room on this floor. Every room but two has one directory in it. Standard equipment. One room has two in it. Where he died. One has none. This one.”

They took a half-tum twist in his coat sleeve, one on each side of him.

“That doesn’t place me in there,” he said stubbornly. “How do you know it belongs in here? It might have come from somewhere else.”

“Each directory is in a special hotel-binding. With the hotel’s name stamped on the top of it. And the number of the room it belongs in. The second one in there has 211 at the top big as life.”

One of them closed the door after the three of them with his free hand.

The Do Not Disturb sign on the opposite door seemed to mock Killare as he went past it. It even quivered a little with the draft from their passing — the way a person shakes a little when he’s laughing to himself.