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

Dusk to Dawn

It was just beginning to grow dark when Lew Stahl went in to the Odeon picture theater where his roommate Tom Lee worked as an usher. It was exactly 6:15.

Lew Stahl was twenty-five, out of work, dead broke and dead honest. He’d never killed anyone. He’d never held a deadly weapon in his hand. He’d never even seen anyone lying dead. All he wanted to do was see a show, and he didn’t have the necessary thirty cents on him.

The man on door duty gave him a disapproving look while Lew was standing out there in the lobby waiting for Tom to slip him in free. Up and down, and up again the doorman walked like “You gotta nerve!” But Stahl stayed pat. What’s the use having a pal as an usher in a movie house if you can’t cadge an admission now and then?

Tom stuck his head through the doors and flagged him in. “Friend of mine, Duke,” he pacified the doorman.

“Are you liable to get called down for this?” Stahl asked as he followed him in.

Tom said, “It’s O.K. as long as the manager don’t see me. It’s between shows anyway; everyone’s home at supper. The place is so empty you could stalk deer up in the balcony. Come on up, you can smoke up there.”

Stahl trailed him upstairs, across a mezzanine, and out into the darkness of the sloping balcony. Tom gave the aisle his torch so his guest could see. On the screen below a woman’s head was wavering, two or three times larger than life. A metallic voice clanged out, echoing sepulchrally all over the house, like a modern Delphic Oracle. “Go back, go back!” she said. “This is no place for you!”

Her big luminous eyes seemed to be looking right at Lew Stahl as she spoke. Her finger came out and pointed, and it seemed to aim straight at him and him alone. It was weird; he almost stopped in his tracks, then went on again. He hadn’t eaten all day; he figured he must be woozy, to think things like that.

Tom had been right; there was only one other guy in the whole balcony. Kids went up there, mostly, during the matinees, and they’d all gone home by now, and the evening crowd hadn’t come in yet.

Stahl picked the second row, sat down in the exact middle of it. Tom left him, saying, “I’ll be back when my five-minute relief comes up.”

Stahl had thought the show would take his mind off his troubles. Later, thinking back over this part of the evening, he was willing to admit he hadn’t known what real trouble was yet. But all he could think of was he hadn’t eaten all day, and how hungry he was; his empty stomach kept his mind off the canned story going on on the screen.

He was beginning to feel weak and chilly, and he didn’t even have a nickel for a cup of hot coffee. He couldn’t ask Tom for any more money, not even that nickel. Tom had been tiding him over for weeks now, carrying his share of the room rent, and all he earned himself was a pittance. Lew Stahl was too decent, too fair-minded a young fellow, to ask him for another penny, not even if he dropped in his tracks from malnutrition. He couldn’t get work. He couldn’t beg on the street corner; he hadn’t reached that point yet. He’d rather starve first. Well, he was starving already.

He pulled his belt over a notch to make his stomach seem tighter, and shaded his hand to his eyes for a minute.

That lone man sitting back there taking in the show had looked prosperous, well fed. Stahl wondered if he’d turn him down, if he went back to him and confidentially asked him for a dime. He’d probably think it was strange that Stahl should be in a movie house if he were down and out, but that couldn’t be helped. Two factors emboldened him in this maiden attempt at panhandling. One was it was easier to do in here in the dark than out on the open street. The second was there was no one around to be a witness to his humiliation if the man bawled him out. If he was going to tackle him at all, he’d better not sit thinking about it any longer, he’d better do it before the house started to fill up, or he knew he’d never have the nerve. You’d be surprised how difficult it is to ask alms of a stranger when you’ve never done it before, what a psychological barrier separates the honest man from the panhandler.

Lew Stahl turned his head and glanced back at the man, to try and measure his chances ahead of time. Then he saw to his surprise that the man had dozed off in his seat; his eyes were closed. And suddenly it was no longer a matter of asking him for money, it was a matter of taking it, helping himself while the man slept. Tom had gone back to the main floor, and there was no one else up there but the two of them. Before he knew it he had changed seats, was in the one next to the sleeper.

“A dollar,” he kept thinking, “that’s all I’ll take, just a dollar, if he has a wallet. Just enough to buy a big thick steak and...”

His stomach contracted into a painful knot at the very thought, and salt water came up into his mouth, and his hunger was so great that his hand spaded out almost of its own accord and was groping toward the inner pocket of the man’s coat.

The coat was loosely buttoned and bulged conveniently open the way the man was sitting, and Stahl’s downward dipping fingers found the stiff grained edge of a billfold without much trouble. It came up between his two fingers, those were all he’d dared insert in the pocket, and it was promisingly fat and heavy.

A second later the billfold was down between Lew’s own legs and he was slitting it edgewise. The man must have been sweating, the leather was sort of sticky and damp on one side only, the side that had been next to his body. Some of the stickiness adhered to Stahl’s own fingertips.

It was crammed with bills, the man must have been carrying between seventy and eighty dollars around with him. Stahl didn’t count them, or even take the whole batch out. True to his word, he peeled off only the top one, a single, tucked it into the palm of his hand, started the wallet back where he’d found it.

It was done now; he’d been guilty of his first criminal offense.

He slipped it in past the mouth of the pocket, released it, started to draw his arm carefully back. The whole revere on that side of the man’s coat started to come with Lew’s arm, as though the two had become glued together. He froze, held his arm where it was, stiffly motionless across the man’s chest. The slightest move, and the sleeper might awake. The outside button on Lew’s cuff had freakishly caught in the man’s lapel button hole, twisted around in some way. And it was a defective, jagged-edged button, he remembered that now well; it had teeth to hang on by.

He tried to slip his other hand in between the lapel and his arm and free them. There wasn’t enough room for leverage. He tried to hold the man’s lapel down and pull his own sleeve free, insulating the tug so it wouldn’t penetrate the sleeper’s consciousness. The button held on, the thread was too strong to break that way.

It was the most excruciating form of mental agony. Any minute he expected the sleeper’s eyes to pop open and fasten on him accusingly. Lew had a disreputable penknife in his pocket. He fumbled desperately for it with one hand, to cut the damnable button free. He was as in a strait-jacket; he got it out of his right-hand pocket with his left hand, crossing one arm over the other to do so. At the same time he had to hold his prisoned arm rigid, and the circulation was already leaving it.

He got the tarnished blade open with his thumbnail, jockeyed the knife around in his hand. He was sweating profusely. He started sawing away at the triple-ply button-thread that had fastened them together. The knife blade was none too keen, but it finally severed. Then something happened; not the thing he’d dreaded, not the accusation of suddenly opened eyes. Something worse. The sleeper started sagging slowly forward in his seat. The slight vibration of the hacking knife must have been transmitted to him, dislodged him. He was beginning to slop over like a sandbag. And people don’t sleep like that, bending over at the floor.

Stahl threw a panicky glance behind him. And now accusing eyes did meet him, from four or five rows back. A woman had come in and taken a seat some time during the past minute or two. She must have seen the jockeying of a knife blade down there, she must have wondered what was going on. She was definitely not looking at the screen, but at the two of them.

All presence of mind gone, Lew tried to edge his crumpled seat-mate back upright, for appearances’ sake. Pretend to her they were friends sitting side by side; anything, as long as she didn’t suspect he had just picked his pocket. But there was something wrong — the flabbiness of muscle, the lack of heavy breathing to go with a sleep so deep it didn’t break no matter how the sleeper’s body fell. That told him all he needed to know; he’d been sitting quietly for the past five minutes next to a man who was either comatose or already a corpse. Someone who must have dropped dead during the show, without even falling out of his seat.

He jumped out into the aisle past the dead man, gave him a startled look, then started excitedly toward the back to tip off Tom or whomever he could find. But he couldn’t resist looking back a second time as he went chasing off. The woman’s eyes strayed accusingly after him as he flashed by.

Tom was imitating a statue against the wall of the lounge, beside the stairs.

“Come back there where I was sitting!” Lew panted. “There’s a guy next to me out cold, slopping all over!”

“Don’t start any disturbance,” Tom warned in an undertone.

He went back with Lew and flashed his torch quickly on and off, and the face it high-lighted wasn’t the color of anything living; it was like putty.

“Help me carry him back to the restroom,” Tom said under his breath, and picked him up by the shoulders. Lew took him by the legs, and they stumbled back up the dark aisle with the corpse.

The woman who had watched all this was feverishly gathering up innumerable belongings, with a determination that almost approached hysteria, as if about to depart forthwith on a mission of vital importance.

Lew and Tom didn’t really see it until they got him in the restroom and stretched him out on a divan up against the wall — the knife-hilt jammed into his back. It didn’t stick out much, was in at an angle, nearly flat up against him. Sidewise from right to left, but evidently deep enough to touch the heart; they could tell by looking at him he was gone.

Tom babbled, “I’ll get the manager! Stay here with him a second. Don’t let anyone in!” He grabbed up a “No Admittance” sign on his way out, slapped it over the outside doorknob, then beat it.

Lew had never seen a dead man before. He just stood there, and looked and looked. Then he went a step closer, and looked some more. “So that’s what it’s like!” he murmured inaudibly. Finally Lew reached out slowly and touched him on the face, and cringed as he met the clammy feel of it, pulled his hand back and whipped it down, as though to get something off it. The flesh was still warm and Lew knew suddenly he had no time alibi.

He threw something over that face and that got rid of the awful feeling of being watched by something from the other world. After that Lew wasn’t afraid to go near him; he just looked like a bundle of old clothes. The dead man was on his side, and Lew fiddled with the knife-hilt, trying to get it out. It was caught fast, so he let it alone after grabbing it with his fingers from a couple of different directions.

Next he went through his pockets, thinking he’d be helping to identify him.

The man was Luther Kemp, forty-two, and he lived on 79th Street. But none of that was really true anymore, Lew thought, mystified; he’d left it all behind. His clothes and his home and his name and his body and the show he’d paid to see were here. But where the hell had he gone to, anyway? Again that weird feeling came over Lew momentarily, but he brushed it aside. It was just that one of the commonest things in life — death — was still strange to him. But after strangeness comes familiarity, after familiarity, contempt.

The door flew open, and Tom bolted in again, still by himself and panting as though he’d run all the way up from the floor below. His face looked white, too.

“C’mere!” he said in a funny, jerky way. “Get outside, hurry up!”

Before Lew knew what it was all about, they were both outside, and Tom had propelled him all the way across the dimly lighted lounge to the other side of the house, where there was another branch of the staircase going down. His grip on Lew’s arm was as if something were skewered through the middle of it.

“What’s the idea?” Lew managed to get out.

Tom jerked his head backward. “You didn’t really do that, did you? To that guy.”

Lew nearly dropped through the floor. His answer was just a welter of words.

Tom telescoped it into “No,” rushed on breathlessly, “Well, then all the more reason for you to get out of here quick! Come on down on this side, before they get up here! I’ll tell you about it down below.”

Half-way down, on the landing, Tom stopped a second time, motioned Lew to listen. Outside in the street some place the faint, eery wail of a patrol-car siren sounded, rushed to a crescendo as it drew nearer, then stopped abruptly, right in front of the theater itself.

“Get that? Here they are now!” Tom said ominously, and rushed Lew down the remaining half-light, around a turn to the back, and through a door stenciled “Employees Only.”

A flight of steps led down to a sub-basement. He pushed Lew ahead of him the rest of the way down, but Tom stayed where he was. He pitched something that flashed, and Lew caught it adroitly before he even knew what it was. A key.

“Open twelve, and switch to my blue suit,” Tom said. “Leave that gray of yours in the locker.”

Lew took a step back toward him, swung his arm back. “I haven’t done anything! What’s the matter with you? You trying to get me in a jam?”

“You’re in one already, I’m trying to get you out of it!” Tom snapped. “There’s a dame out there hanging onto the manager’s neck with both arms, swears she saw you do it. Hallucinations, you know the kind! Says he started falling asleep on you, and you gave him a shove, one word led to another, then you knifed him. Robbed him, too. She’s just hysterical enough to believe what she’s saying herself.”

Lew’s knees gave a dip. “But holy smoke! Can’t you tell ’em I was the first one told you about it myself? I even helped you carry him back to the rest-room! Does that look like I—”

“It took me long enough to get this job,” Tom said sourly. “If the manager finds out I passed you in free — what with this giving his house a bad name and all — I can kiss my job good-by! Think of my end of it, too. Why do they have to know anything about you? You didn’t do it, so all right. Then why be a chump and spend the night in a station-house basement? By tomorrow they’ll probably have the right guy and it’ll be all over with.”

Lew thought of that dollar he had in his pocket. If he went back and let them question him, they’d want to know why he hadn’t paid his way in, if he had a buck on him. That would tell them where the buck came from. He hated to pony up that buck now that he had it. And he remembered how he’d tampered with the knife-hilt, and vaguely knew there was something called fingerprints by which they had a way of telling who had handled it. And then the thought of bucking that woman — from what he remembered of the look on her face — took more nerve than he had. Tom was right, why not light out and steer clear of the whole mess, as long as he had the chance? And finally this argument presented itself: If they once got hold of him and believed he’d done it, that might satisfy them, they mightn’t even try to look any further, and then where would he be? A clear conscience doesn’t always make for courage, sometimes it’s just the other way around. The mystic words “circumstantial evidence” danced in front of his eyes, paralyzing him.

“Peel!” Tom said. “The show breaks in another couple minutes. When you hear the bugles bringing on the newsreel, slip out of here and mingle with the rest of them going out. She’s tagged you wearing a gray suit, so it ought to be easy enough to make it in my blue. They won’t think of busting open the lockers to look. Wait for me at our place.” Then Tom ducked out and the passageway-door closed noiselessly after him.

Lew didn’t give himself time to think. He jumped into the blue suit as Tom had told him to, put on his hat and bent the brim down over his eyes with fingers that were shaking like ribbons in a breeze. He was afraid any minute that someone, one of the other ushers, would walk in and catch him. What was he going to say he was doing in there?

He banged the locker closed on his own clothes, just as a muffled ta-da came from the screen outside. In another minute there were feet shuffling by outside the door and the hum of subdued voices. He edged the door open, and pressed it shut behind him with his elbow. The few movie goers who were leaving were all around him, and he let them carry him along with them. They didn’t seem to be aware, down below here, of what had happened up above so short a time ago. Lew didn’t hear any mention of it.

It was like running the gauntlet. There were two sets of doors and a brightly lighted lobby in between. One of the detectives was standing beside the doorman at the first set of doors. The watchful way he scanned all faces told Lew what he was. There was a second one outside the street doors. He kept looking so long at each person coming out — that told what he was.

Lew saw them both before he got up to them, through the clear glass of the inner doors. The lights were on their side, Lew was in the dark, with the show still going on in back of him. His courage froze, he wanted to stay in there where he was. But if he was going to get out at all, now was the time, with the majority of the crowd, not later on when he’d be more conspicuous.

One thing in his favor was the color of his suit. He saw the detectives stopping all the men in gray and motioning them aside; he counted six being sidetracked before he even got out into the lobby. They weren’t interfering with anyone else.

But that ticket-taker was a bigger risk than either of the plainclothes-men. So was the doorman. Before he’d gone in he’d been standing right under both their eyes a full five minutes waiting for Tom to come down. He’d gone in without paying, and that had burned the ticket-taker up. But going past them, Lew had to walk slow, as slowly as everyone else was walking, or he’d give himself away twice as quick. He couldn’t turn around now and go back any more, either; he was too close to the detectives and they’d notice the maneuver.

A clod-hopper in front of him came to his rescue just when he thought he was a goner. The clod-hopper stepped backward unexpectedly to take a look at something, and his whole hoof landed like a stone-cutter’s mallet across Lew’s toes. Lew’s face screwed up uncontrollably with pain, and before he straightened it out again, the deadly doorman’s gaze had swept harmlessly over it without recognition, and Lew was past him and all he could see was the back of Lew’s head.

Lew held his breath. Nothing happened. Right foot forward, left foot forward, right foot forward... The lobby seemed to go on for miles. Someone’s hand touched him, and the mercury went all the way down his spine to the bottom, but it was only a woman close behind him putting on her gloves.

After what seemed like an eternity of slow motion, he was flush with the street-doors at last. Only that second detective out there to buck now, and he didn’t worry him much. He drifted through with all the others, passed close enough to the detective to touch him, and he wasn’t even looking at Lew. His eyes were on the slap-slap of the doors as they kept swinging to and fro with each new egress.

Lew moved from under the revealing glare of the marquee lights into the sheltering darkness. He didn’t look back, and presently the hellish place was just a blob of light far behind him. Then it wasn’t even that any more.

He kept dabbing his face, and he felt limp in the legs for a long time afterwards. He’d made it, but whew! what an experience; he said to himself that he’d undergone all the emotions of a hunted criminal, without having committed a crime.

Tom and Lew had a cheap furnished room in a tenement about half an hour’s walk away. Lew walked there unhesitatingly now, in a straight line from the theater. As far as he could see, it was all over, there wasn’t anything to worry about now any more. He was out of the place, and that was all that mattered. They’d have the right guy in custody, maybe before the night was over, anyway by tomorrow at the latest.

He let himself into the front hallway with the key, climbed the stairs without meeting anyone, and closed the room door behind him. He snapped on the fly-blown bulb hanging from the ceiling, and sat down to wait for Tom.

Finally the clock rotated to 11 P.M. The last show broke at 11:30, and when Tom got here it would be about twelve.

About the time Tom should have been showing up, a newspaper delivery truck came rumbling by, distributing the midnight edition. Lew saw it stop by a stand down at the corner and dump out a bale of papers. On an impulse he got up and went down there to get one, wondering if it would have the story in it yet, and whether they’d caught the guy yet. He didn’t open it until he’d got back.

It hadn’t made a scare-head, but it had made a column on the front page. “Man stabbed in movie house; woman sees crime committed.” Lew got sort of a vicarious thrill out of it for a minute, until he read further along. They were still looking for a guy just his height and build, wearing a gray suit, who had bummed his way in free. The motive — probably caught by the victim in the act of picking his pocket while he slept. In panic, Lew doused the light.

From then on it was a case of standing watching from behind the drawn shade and standing listening behind the door, and wearing down the flooring in between the two places like a caged bear. He knew he was crazy to stay there, and yet he didn’t know where else to go. It would be even crazier, he thought, to roam around in the streets, he’d be sure to be picked up before morning. The sweat came out of every pore hot, and then froze cold. And yet never once did the idea of walking back there of his own accord, and saying to them, “Well, here I am; I didn’t do it,” occur to him. It looked too bad now, the way he’d changed clothes and run out. He cursed Tom for putting him up to it, and himself for losing his head and listening to him. It was too late now. There’s a finality about print, especially to a novice; because that paper said they were looking for him, it seemed to kill Lew’s last chance of clearing himself once and for all.

He didn’t see Tom coming, although he was glancing out through a corner of the window the whole time; Tom must have slunk along close to the building line below. There was a sudden scurry of quick steps on the stairs, and Tom was trying the door-knob like fury. Lew had locked it on the inside when he’d put the light out.

“Hurry up, lemme in!” Tom panted. And then when Lew had unlocked the door: “Leave that light out, you fool!”

“I thought you’d never get here!” Lew groaned. “What’d they do, give a midnight matinee?”

“Down at Headquarters, they did!” Tom said resentfully. “Hauled me down there and been holding me there ever since! I’m surprised they let me go when they did. I didn’t think they were gonna.” He threw the door open. “You gotta get out of here!”

“Where’m I gonna go?” Lew wailed. “You’re a fine louse of a friend!”

“Suppose a cop shows up here all of a sudden and finds you here, how’s that gonna make it look for me? How do I know I wasn’t followed coming back here? Maybe that’s why they let me go!”

Tom kept trying to shoulder Lew out in the hall, and Lew kept trying to hang onto the door-frame and stay in; in a minute more they would have been at it hot and heavy, but suddenly there was a pounding at the street-door three floors below. They both froze.

“I knew it!” Tom hissed. “Right at my heels!”

The pounding kept up. “Coming! Wait a minute, can’t you?” a woman’s voice said from the back, and bedroom-slippers went slapping across the oilcloth. Lew was out on the landing now of his own accord, scuttling around it like a mouse trying to find a hole.

Tom jerked his thumb at the stairs going up. “The roof!” he whispered. “Maybe you can get down through the house next door.” But Lew could see all he cared about was that he was out of the room.

Tom closed the door silently but definitely. The one below opened at the same instant, to the accompaniment of loud beefs from the landlady, that effectively covered the creaking of the stairs under Lew’s flying feet.

“The idea, getting people out of their beds at this hour! Don’t you tell me to pipe down, detective or no detective! This is a respectable hou—”

Lew was up past the top floor by that time. The last section was not inclined stairs any more but a vertical iron ladder, ending just under a fiat, lead skylight, latched on the underside. He flicked the latch open, climbed up a rung further and lowered his head out of the way, with the thing pressing across his shoulders like Atlas supporting the world. He had to stay there like that till he got in out of the stair-well; he figured the cop would hear the thing creak and groan otherwise. It didn’t have hinges, had to be displaced bodily.

There was a sudden commanding knock at Tom’s door on the third, and an “Open up here!” that left no room for argument. Tom opened it instantly, with a whining, “What do you want this time?” Then it closed again, luckily for Lew, and the detective was in there with Tom.

Lew heaved upward with all his might, and felt as if he were lifting the roof bodily off the house. His head and shoulders pushed through into the open night. He caught the two lower corners of the thing backhanded so it wouldn’t slam down again as he slipped out from under it, and eased it down gently on its frame. Before the opening had quite closed, though, he had a view down through it all the way to the bottom of the stair-well, and half-way along this, at the third floor, a face was sticking out over the bannister, staring up at him. The landlady, who had stayed out there eavesdropping. She had the same bird’s-eye view of him that he had of her.

He let go the skylight cover and pounded across the graveled tar toward the next roof for all he was worth. The detective would be up here after him in a minute now.

The dividing line between the two roofs was only a knee-high brick parapet easy enough to clear, but after that there was only one other roof, instead of a whole block-length of them. Beyond the next house was a drop of six stories to a vacant lot. The line of roofs, of varying but accessible heights, lay behind him in the other direction; he’d turned the wrong way in the dark. But it didn’t matter, he thought, as long as he could get in through the twin to the skylight he’d come out of.

He couldn’t. He found it by stubbing his toe against it and falling across it, rather than with the help of his eyes. Then when he knelt there clawing and tugging at it, it wouldn’t come up. Latched underneath like the first one had been!

There wasn’t any time to go back the other way now. Yellow light showed on the roof behind him as the detective lifted the trap. First a warning thread of it, then a big gash, and the dick was scrambling out on the roof-top. Lew thought he saw a gun in his hand, but he didn’t wait to find out. There was a three-foot brick chimney a little ways behind Lew. He darted behind it while his pursuer’s head was still turned up the other way. But the gravel under him gave a treacherous little rattle as he carried out the maneuver.

There was silence for a long time. He was afraid to stick his head out and look. Then there was another of those little giveaway rustles, not his this time, coming from this same roof, from the other side of the chimney.

Then with a suddenness that made him jump, a new kind of planet joined the stars just over his head, blazed out and spotted him from head to foot. A pocket-torch. Lew just pressed his body inward, helpless against the brick work.

“Come on, get up,” the detective’s voice said without any emotion, somewhere just behind the glare. To Lew it was like the headlight of a locomotive; he couldn’t see a thing for a minute. He straightened up, blinking; even thought he was going to be calm and resigned for a minute. “I didn’t do it,” he said. “Honest, I didn’t do it! Gimme a break, will you?”

The detective said mockingly that he would, sure he would, using an expression that doesn’t bear repetition. He collared Lew with one hand, by both sides of his coat at once, pulling the reveres together close up under Lew’s chin. Then he balanced the lighted torch on the lip of the chimney-stack, so that it stayed pointed at Lew and drenched him all over. Then he frisked him with that hand.

“I tell you I was just sitting next to him! I didn’t touch him, I didn’t put a finger on him!”

“And that’s why you’re hiding out on the roof, is it? Changed your suit, too, didn’t you? I’ll beat the truth out of you, when I get you where we’re going!”

It was that, and the sudden sight of the handcuffs twinkling in the rays of the torch, that made Lew lose his head. He jerked backwards in the detective’s grip, trying to get away from him. His back brushed the brick work. The flashlight went out suddenly, and went rattling all the way down inside the chimney. Lew was wedged in there between the detective and the stack. He raised the point of his knee suddenly, jabbed it upward between them like a piston. The detective let go Lew’s collar, the manacles fell with a clink, and he collapsed at Lew’s feet, writhing and groaning. Agonized as he was, his hand sort of flailed helplessly around, groping for something; Lew saw that even in the dark. Lew beat him to it, tore the gun out of his pocket, and pitched it overhand and backwards. It landed way off somewhere behind Lew, but stayed on the roof.

The detective had sort of doubled up in the meantime, like a helpless beetle on its back, drawing his legs up toward his body. They offered a handle to grab him by. Lew was too frightened to run away and leave him, too frightened that he’d come after him and the whole thing would start over. It was really an excess of fright that made him do it; there is such a thing. He grabbed the man around the ankles with both hands, started dragging him on his back across the gravel toward the edge of the roof, puffing, “You’re not gonna get me! You’re not gonna get me! You’re not taking me with ya while I know it!”

Toward the side edge of the building he dragged the detective. He didn’t bother looking to see what was below; just let go the legs, spun the detective around on his behind, so that the loose gravel shot out from under him in all directions, grabbed him by the shoulders, and pushed him over head-first. The dick didn’t make a sound. Lew didn’t know if he was still conscious or had fainted by now from the blow in the groin Lew had given him. Then he was snatched from sight as if a powerful magnet had suddenly pulled him down.

Then Lew did a funny thing. The instant after the detective was gone, Lew stretched out his arms involuntarily toward where he’d been, as if to grab him, catch him in time to save him. As though he hadn’t really realized until then the actual meaning of what he was doing. Or maybe it was his last inhibition showing itself, before it left him altogether. A brake that would no longer work was trying to stop him after it was too late. The next minute he was feeling strangely light-headed, dizzy. But not dizzy from remorse, dizzy like someone who’s been bound fast and is suddenly free.

Lew didn’t look down toward where the man had gone, he looked up instead — at the stars that must have seen many another sight like the one just now, without blinking.

“Gosh, it’s easy!” he marveled, open-mouthed. “I never knew before how easy it is to kill anyone! Twenty years to grow ’em, and all it takes is one little push!”

He was suddenly drunk with some new kind of power, undiscovered until this minute. The power of life and death over his fellowmen! Everyone had it, everyone strong enough to raise a violent arm, but they were afraid to use it. Well, he wasn’t! And here he’d been going around for weeks living from hand to mouth, without any money, without enough food, when everything he wanted lay within his reach all the while! He had been green all right, and no mistake about it!

Death had become familiar. At seven it had been the most mysterious thing in the world to him, by midnight it was already an old story.

“Now let ’em come after me!” he thought vindictively, as he swayed back across the roof toward the skylight of the other house. “Now I’ve given ’em a real reason for trying to nab me!” And he added grimly, “If they can!”

Something flat kicked away from under his foot, and he stopped and picked up the gun that he’d tossed out of reach. He looked it over after he was through the skylight and there was light to examine it by. He’d never held one in his hand before. He knew enough not to squint down the bore, and that was about all he knew.

The stair-well was empty; the landlady must have retreated temporarily to her quarters below to rouse her husband, so he wouldn’t miss the excitement of the capture and towing away. Lew passed Tom’s closed door and was going by it without stopping, going straight down to the street and the new career that awaited him in the slumbering city, when Tom opened it himself and looked out. He must have heard a creak and thought it was the detective returning, thought Lew, and figured a little bootlicking wouldn’t hurt any.

“Did you get him—?” Tom started to say. Then he saw who it was, and saw what Lew was holding in his hand.

Lew turned around and went back to him. “No, he didn’t get me,” he said, ominously quiet, “I got him.” He went in and closed the door of the room after him. He kept looking at Tom, who backed away a little.

“Now you’ve finished yourself!” Tom breathed, appalled.

“You mean I’m just beginning,” Lew said.

“I’m going to get out of here!” Tom said, in a sudden flurry of panic, and tried to circle around Lew and get to the door.

Lew waved him back with the gun. “No, you’re not, you’re going to stay right where you are! What’d you double-cross me for?”

Tom got behind a chair and hung onto it with both hands — as though that was any good! Then almost hysterically, as he read Lew’s face: “What’s the matter, ya gone crazy? Not me, Lew! Not me!”

“Yes, you!” Lew said. “You got me into it. You knew they’d follow you. You led ’em to me. But they still don’t know what I look like — but you do! That one went up there after me can’t tell now what I look like, but you still can! They can get me on sight, while you’re still around.”

Tom was holding both palms flat out toward Lew, as though Lew thought they could stop or turn aside a bullet! Tom had time to get just one more thing out: “You’re not human at all!”

Then Lew pulled the trigger and the whole room seemed to lift with a roar, as though blasting were going on under it. The gun bucked Lew back half a step; he hadn’t known those things had a kick to them. When he looked through the smoke, Tom’s face and shoulders were gone from behind the chair, but his forearms were still hanging across the top of it, palms turned downward now, and all the fingers wiggling at once. Then they fell off it, went down to join the rest of him on the floor.

Lew watched him for a second, what he could see of him. Tom didn’t move any more. Lew shook his head slowly from side to side. “It sure is easy all right!” he said to himself. And this had been even less dramatic than the one up above on the roof.

Familiarity with death had already bred contempt for it.

He turned, pitched the door open, and went jogging down the stairs double-quick. Doors were opening on every landing as he whisked by, but not a move was made to stop him — which was just as well for them. He kept the gun out in his hand the whole time and cleared the bottom steps with a short jump at the bottom of each flight. Bang! and then around to the next.

The landlady had got herself into a bad position. She was caught between him and the closed street-door as he cleared the last flight and came down into the front hall. If she’d stayed where she belonged, Lew said to himself, she could have ducked back into her own quarters at the rear when he came down. But now her escape was cut off. When she saw it was Lew, and not the detective, she tried to get out the front way. She couldn’t get the door open in time, so then she tried to turn back again. She dodged to one side to get out of Lew’s way, and he went to that side too. Then they both went to the other side together and blocked each other again. It was like a game of puss-in-the-corner, with appalled faces peering tensely down the stair-well at them.

She was heaving like a sick cat in a sand-box, and Lew decided she was too ludicrous to shoot. New as he was at the game of killing, he had to have dignity in his murders. He walloped her back-handed aside like a gnat, and stepped over her suddenly upthrust legs. She could only give a garbled description of him any way.

The door wasn’t really hard to open, if you weren’t frightened, like Lew wasn’t now. Just a twist of the knob and a wrench. A voice shrieked down inanely from one of the upper floors, “Get the cops! He’s killed a fellow up here!” Then Lew was out in the street, and looking both ways at once.

A passerby who must have heard the shot out there had stopped dead in his tracks, directly opposite the doorway on the other side of the street, and was gawking over. He saw Lew and called over nosily: “What happened? Something wrong in there?”

It would have been easy enough to hand him some stall or other, pretend Lew was himself looking for a cop. But Lew had this new contempt of death hot all over him.

“Yeah!” he snarled viciously. “I just shot a guy! And if you stand there looking at me like that, you’re gonna be the next!”

He didn’t know if the passerby saw the gun or not in the dark, probably not. The man didn’t wait to make sure, took him at his word. He bolted for the nearest corner. Scrunch, and he was gone!

“There,” Lew said to himself tersely, “is a sensible guy!”

Black window squares here and there were turning orange as the neighborhood began belatedly to wake up. A lot of interior yelling and tramping was coming from the house Tom and Lew had lived in. He made for the corner opposite from the one his late questioner had fled around, turned it, and slowed to a quick walk. He put the gun away; it stuck too far out of the shallow side-pocket of Tom’s suit, so he changed it to the inner breastpocket, which was deeper. A cop’s whistle sounded thinly behind him, at the upper end of the street he’d just left.

A taxi was coming toward him, and he jumped off the sidewalk and ran toward it diagonally. The driver tried to swerve without stopping, so he jumped up on the running-board and wrenched the wheel with his free hand. He had the other spaded into his pocket over the gun again. “Turn around, you’re going downtown with me!” he said. A girl’s voice bleated in the back. “I’ve got two passengers in there already!” the driver said, but he was turning with a lurch that nearly threw Lew off.

“I’ll take care of that for you!” he yanked the back door open and got in with them. “Out you go, that side!” he ordered. The fellow jumped first, as etiquette prescribed, but the girl clung to the door-strap, too terrified to move, so Lew gave her a push to help her make up her mind. “Be a shame to separate the two of you!” he called after her. She turned her ankle, and went down kerplunk and lay there, with her escort bending over her in the middle of the street.

“Wh-where you want me to g-go with you, buddy?” chattered the driver.

“Out of this neighborhood fast,” Lew said grimly.

He sped along for a while, then whined: “I got a wife and kids, buddy—”

“You’re a very careless guy,” Lew said to that.

He knew they’d pick up his trail any minute, what with those two left stranded in the middle of the street to direct them, so he made for the concealing labyrinth of the park, the least policed part of the city.

“Step it down a little,” he ordered, once they were in the park. “Take off your shoes and throw them back here.” The driver’s presence was a handicap, and Lew had decided to get rid of him, too. Driving zig-zag along the lane with one hand, the cabbie threw back his shoes. One of them hit Lew on the knee as it was pitched through the open slide, and for a minute Lew nearly changed his mind and shot him instead, as the easiest way out after all. The cabbie was half dead with fright by this time, anyway. Lew made him take off his pants, too, and then told him to brake and get out.

Lew got in at the wheel. The driver stood there on the asphalt in his socks and shirt-tails, pleading, “Gee, don’t leave me in the middle of the park like this, buddy, without my pants and shoes, it’ll take me all night to get out!”

“That’s the main idea,” Lew agreed vindictively, and added: “You don’t know how lucky you are! You’re up against Death’s right-hand man. Scram, before I change my mind!”

The cabbie went loping away into the dark, like a bow-legged scarecrow and Lew sat at the wheel belly-laughing after him. Then he took the cab away at top speed, and came out the other end about quarter of an hour later.

He was hungry, and decided the best time to eat was right then, before daylight added to the risk and a general alarm had time to circulate. The ability to pay, of course, was no longer a problem in this exciting new existence that had begun for him tonight. He picked the most expensive place open at that hour, an all-night delicatessen, where they charged a dollar for a sandwich and named it after a celebrity. A few high-hats were sitting around having bacon and eggs in the dim, artificial blue light that made them look like ghosts.

He left the cab right at the door and sat down where he could watch it. A waiter came over who didn’t think much of him because he didn’t have a boiled shirt. He ran his finger down the list and picked a five-dollar one.

“What’s a Jimmy Cagney? Gimme one of them.”

“Hard-boiled egg with lots of paprika.” The waiter started away.

Lew picked up a glass of water and sloshed it across the back of his neck. “You come back here! Do that over, and say sir!” he snarled.

“Hard-boiled egg with lots of paprika, sir,” the waiter stuttered, squirming to get the water off his backbone.

When he was through, Lew leaned back in his chair and thumbed him over. “How much do you take in here a night?”

“Oh, around five hundred when it’s slow like this.” He took out a pad and scribbled “5.00” at the bottom, tore it off and handed it to Lew.

“Lend me your pencil,” Lew said. He wrote “Pay me” in front of it, and rubbed out the decimal point. “I’ll take this over to the cashier myself,” he told the waiter.

Then as he saw the waiter’s glance sweep the bare table-top disappointedly, “Don’t worry, you’ll get your tip; I’m not forgetting you.”

Lew found the tricky blue lighting was a big help. It made everyone’s face look ghastly to begin with and you couldn’t tell when anyone suddenly got paler. Like the cashier, when he looked up from reading the bill Lew presented and found the bore of the gun peering out from Lew’s shirt at him like some kind of a bulky tie pin.

He opened the drawer and started counting bills out. “Quit making your hands shake so,” Lew warned him out of the corner of his mouth, “and keep your eyes down on what you’re doing, or you’re liable to short-change me!”

Lew liked doing it that way, adding to the risk by standing there letting the cashier count out the exact amount, instead of just cleaning the till and lamming. What was so hectic about a hold-up, he asked himself. Every crime seemed so simple, once you got the hang of it. He was beginning to like this life, it was swell!

There were thirty or so bucks left in the drawer when the cashier got through. But meanwhile the manager had got curious about the length of time Lew had been standing up there and started over toward them. Lew could tell by his face he didn’t suspect even yet, only wanted to see if there was some difficulty. At the same time Lew caught sight of the waiter slinking along the far side of the room, toward the door in back of him. He hadn’t been able to get over to the manager in time, and was going to be a hero on his own, and go out and get a cop.

So Lew took him first. The waiter was too close to the door already for there to be any choice in the matter. Lew didn’t even aim, just fired what he’d heard called a snap-shot. The waiter went right down across the doorsill, like some new kind of a lumpy mat. Lew didn’t even feel the thing buck as much as when he’d shot Tom. The cashier dropped too, as though the same shot had felled him. His voice came up from the bottom of the enclosure, “There’s your money, don’t shoot me, don’t shoot me!” Too much night-work isn’t good for a guy’s guts, Lew mused.

There was a doorman outside on the sidewalk. Lew got him through the open doorway just as he got to the curb, in the act of raising his whistle to his lips. He stumbled, grabbed one of the chromium stanchions supporting the entrance canopy, and went slipping down like a fireman sliding down a pole. The manager ducked behind a table, and everyone else in the place went down to floor-level with him, as suddenly as though they were all puppets jerked by strings. Lew couldn’t see a face left in the room; just a lot of screaming coming from behind empty chairs.

Lew grabbed up the five hundred and sprinted for the door. He had to hurdle the waiter’s body and he moved a little as Lew did so, so he wasn’t dead. Then Lew stopped just long enough to peel off a ten and drop it down on him. “There’s your tip, chiseler!” Lew hollered at him, and beat it.

Lew couldn’t get to the cab in time, so he had to let it go, and take it on foot. There was a car parked a few yards in back of it, and another a length ahead, that might have blocked his getting it out at the first try, and this was no time for lengthy extrications. A shot came his way from the corner, about half a block up, and he dashed around the next one. Two more came from that, just as he got to the corner ahead, and he fired back at the sound of them, just on general principle. He had no aim to speak of, had never held one of the things in his hand until that night.

He turned and sprinted down the side street, leaving the smoke of his shot hanging there disembodiedly behind him like a baby cloud above the sidewalk. There were two cops by now, but the original one was in the lead and he was a good runner. He quit shooting and concentrated on taking Lew the hard way, at arms’ length. Lew turned his head in time to see him tear through the smoke up there at the corner and knock it invisible. He was a tall limber guy, must have been good in the heats at police games, and he came hurtling straight toward Death. Tick, tick, tick, his feet went, like a very quick clock.

A fifth shot boomed out in that instant, from ahead of Lew this time, down at the lower corner. Somebody had joined in from that direction, right where Lew was going toward. They had him sewn up now between them, on this narrow sidestreet. One in front, two behind him — and to duck in anywhere was curtains.

Something happened, with that shot, that happens once in a million years. The three of them were in a straight line— Lew in the middle, the sprinter behind him, the one who had just fired coming up the other way. Something spit past Lew’s ear, and the tick, tick behind him scattered into a scraping, thumping fall — plump! — and stopped. The runner had been hit by his own man, up front.

He didn’t look, his ears had seen the thing for him. He dove into a doorway between the two of them. Only a miracle could save him, and it had no more than sixty seconds in which to happen, to be any good.

His star, beaming overtime, made it an open street door, indicative of poverty. The street was between Second and Third Avenues, and poverty was rampant along it, the same kind of poverty that had turned Lew into a ghoul, snatching a dollar from a dead man’s pocket, at six-thirty this night. He punched three bell-buttons as he flashed by.

“If they come in here after me,” he sobbed hotly, “there’s going to be shooting like there never was before!” And they would, of course. The header-offer down at Second, who had shot his own man, must have seen which entrance he’d dived for. Even if he hadn’t, they’d dragnet all of them.

Lew reached in his pocket as he took the stairs, brought out a fistful of the money and not the gun for once. At least a hundred’s worth came up in his paw. One of the bills escaped, fluttered down the steps behind him like a green leaf. What’s ten, or even twenty, when you’ve got sixty seconds to buy your life?

“In there!” One of the winded, surviving cops’ voices rang out clearly, penetrated the hail from the sidewalk. The screech of a prowl car chimed in.

He was holding the handful of green dough up in front of him, like the olive branch of the ancients, when the first of the three doors opened before him, second-floor front. A man with a curleycue mustache was blinking out as he raced at him.

“A hundred bucks!” Lew hissed. “They’re after me! Here, hundred bucks if you lemme get in your door!”

“Whassa mat’?” he wanted to know, startled wide awake.

“Cops! Hundred bucks!” The space between them had been used up, Lew’s whole body hit the door like a projectile. The man was holding onto it on the inside, so it wouldn’t give. The impact swung Lew around sideways, he clawed at it with one hand, shoved the bouquet of money into the man’s face with the other. “Two hundred bucks!”

“Go ’way!” the man cried, tried to close Lew out. Lew had decided to shoot him out of the way if he couldn’t buy his way in.

A deep bass voice came rumbling up behind him. “Che cosa, Mario?”

“Two hundred bucks,” Lew strangled, reaching for the gun with his left hand.”

Due cento dollari!” The door was torn away from him, opened wide. An enormous, mustached, garlicky Italian woman stood there. “Issa good? Issa rill?” Lew jammed them down her huge bosom as the quickest way of proving their authenticity. Maybe Mario Jr. had had a run-in with cops about breaking a window or swiping fruit from a pushcart; maybe it was just the poverty. She slapped one hand on her chest to hold the money there, grabbed Lew’s arm with the other.

“Si! Vene presto!” and spat a warning “Silenzio! La porta!” at her reluctant old man.

She pounded down the long inner hail, towing Lew after her. The door closed behind them as the stairway outside was started vibrating with ascending feet — flat feet.

The bedroom was pitch black. She let go of him, gave him a push sideways and down, and he went sprawling across an enormous room-filling bed. A cat snatched itself out of the way and jumped down. He hoisted his legs up after him, clawed, pulled a garlicky quilt up to his chin. He began to undress hectically under it, lying on his side. She snapped a light on and was standing there counting the money. “Falta cento—” she growled aggressively.

“You get the other hundred after they go ’way.” He stuck his hand out under the cover, showed it to her. He took the gun out and showed her that too. “If you or your old man give me away—!”

Pounding had already begun at their door. Her husband was standing there by it, not making a sound. She shoved the money down under the same mattress Lew was on. He got rid of his coat, trousers and shoes, pitched them out on the other side of him, just as she snapped out the light once more. He kept the gun and money with him, under his body.

The next thing he knew, the whole bed structure quivered under him, wobbled, all but sank flat. She’d got in alongside of him! The clothes billowed like sails in a storm, subsided. She went, “Ssst!” like a steam radiator, and the sound carried out into the hail. Lew heard the man pick up his feet two or three times, plank them down again, right where he was standing, to simulate trudging toward the door. Then he opened it, and they were in. Lew closed his eyes, spaded one hand under him and kept it on the gun.

“Took you long enough!” a voice said at the end of the hall. “Anyone come in here?”

“Nome-body.”

“Well, we’ll take a look for ourselves! Give it the lights!”

The lining of Lew’s eyelids turned vermilion, but he kept them down. The mountain next to him stirred, gyrated. “Che cosa, Mario?”

“Polizia, non capisco.”

Kids were waking up all over the place, in adjoining rooms, adding to the anvil chorus. It would have looked phony to go on sleeping any longer in that racket. Lew squirmed, stretched, blinked, yawned, popped his eyes in innocent surprise. There were two cops in the room, one of them standing still, looking at him, the other sticking his head into a closet.

Lew had black hair and was sallow from undernourishment, but he didn’t know a word of Italian.

“Who’s this guy?” the cop asked.

“Il mio fratello. “Her brother. The volume of noise she and Mario and the kids were making covered him.

The first cop went out. The second one came closer, pulled the corner of the covers off Lew. All he saw was a skinny torso in an undershirt. Lew’s outside shirt was rolled in a ball down by his feet. His thumb found and went into the hollow before the trigger underneath him. If he said “Get up outa there,” those would be the last words he ever said.

He said, “Three in a bed?” disgustedly. “Sure y’ain’t got your grandfather in there, too? These guineas!” He threw the covers back at Lew and went stalking out.

Lew could hear him through the open door tramp up the stairs after the others to the floor above. A minute later their heavy footsteps sounded on the ceiling right above his head.

A little runty ten-year-old girl peered in at him from the doorway. He said, “Put that light out! Keep them kids outa here! Leave the door open until they go! Tell your old man to stand there rubber-necking out, like all the others are doing!”

They quit searching in about fifteen minutes, and Lew heard them all go trooping down again, out into the street, and then he could hear their voices from the sidewalk right under the windows.

“Anything doing?” somebody asked.

“Naw, he musta got out through the back yard and the next street over.”

“O’Keefe hurt bad?”

“Nicked him in the dome, stunned him, that was all.” So the cop wasn’t dead.

When Mario came out the front door at eight-thirty on his way to the barber shop where he worked, his “brother-in-law” was with him, as close to him as sticking plaster. Lew had on an old felt hat of Mario’s and a baggy red sweater that hid the coat of Tom’s blue suit. It would have looked too good to come walking out of a building like that on the way to work. That red sweater had cost Lew another fifty. The street looked normal, one wouldn’t have known it for the shooting gallery it had been at four that morning. They walked side by side up toward Second, past the place where O’Keefe had led with his chin, past the corner where the smoke of Lew’s shot had hung so ghostily in the lamplight. There was a newsstand open there now, and Lew bought a paper. Then he and Mario stood waiting for the bus.

It drew up and Lew pushed Mario on alone, and jerked his thumb at the driver. It went sailing off again, before Mario had time to say or do anything, if he’d wanted to. It had sounded to Lew, without knowing Italian, as though the old lady had been coaching Mario to get a stranglehold on the rest of Lew’s money. Lew snickered aloud, ran his hand lightly over the pocket where the original five-hundred was intact once more. It had been too good to miss, the chance she’d given him of sneaking it out of the mattress she’d cached it under and putting it back in his pocket again, while her back was turned. They’d had all their trouble and risk for nothing.

Lew made tracks away from there, went west as far as Third and then started down that. He stayed with the sweater and hat, because they didn’t look out of character on Third. The cops had seen him in the blue suit when they chased him from Rubin’s; they hadn’t seen him in this outfit. And no matter how the signora would blaze when she found out how Lew had gypped them, she couldn’t exactly report it to the police, and tell them what he was wearing, without implicating herself and her old man.

But there was one thing had to be attended to right off, and that was the matter of ammunition. To the best of Lew’s calculations (and so much had happened, that they were already pretty hazy) he had fired four shots out of the gun from the time he had taken it over from the dick on the roof. One at Tom, two in Rubin’s, and one on the street when they’d been after him. There ought to be two left in it, and if the immediate future was going to be like the immediate past, he was going to need a lot more than that. He not only didn’t know where any could be bought, he didn’t even know how to break the thing and find out how many it packed.

He decided a pawnshop would be about the best bet, not up here in the mid-town district, but down around the lower East Side or on the Bowery somewhere. And if they didn’t want to sell him any, he’d just blast and help himself.

He took a street car down as far as Chatham Square. He had a feeling that he’d be safer on one of them than on the El or the subway; he could jump off in a hurry without waiting for it to stop, if he had to. Also, he could see where he was going through the windows and not have to do too much roaming around on foot once he alighted. He was a little dubious about hailing a cab, dressed the way he now was. Besides, he couldn’t exactly tell a hackman, “Take me to a pawnshop.” You may ride in a taxi coming out of one, you hardly ride in a taxi going to one.

He went all the way to the rear end and opened the newspaper. He didn’t have to hunt it up. This time it had made a scare-head. “One-Man Crime Wave!” And then underneath, “Mad dog gunman still at large somewhere in city.” Lew looked up at the oblivious backs of the heads up forward, riding on the same car with Lew. Not one of them had given him a second glance when he’d walked down the aisle in the middle of all of them just now. And yet more than one must be reading that very thing he was at the moment; he could see the papers in their hands. That was he, right in the same trolley they were, and they didn’t even know it! His contempt for death was beginning to expand dangerously toward the living as well, and the logical step beyond that would be well past the confines of sanity — a superman complex.

Fortunately, he never quite got to it. Something within this same paper itself checked it, before it got well started. Two things that threw cold water over it, as it were. They occurred within a paragraph of each other, and had the effect of deflating his ego almost to the point at which it had been last night, before he’d touched that dead man’s face in the theater restroom. The first paragraph read: “The police, hoping that young Tom Lee might unknowingly provide a clue to the suspect’s whereabouts, arranged to have him released at Headquarters shortly after midnight. Detective Walter Daly was detailed to follow him. Daly trapped Stahl on the roof of a tenement, only to lose his balance and fall six stories during the scuffle that ensued. He was discovered unconscious but still alive sometime after the young desperado had made good his second escape, lying with both legs broken on an ash-heap in a vacant lot adjoining the building.”

That was the first shock. Still alive, eh? And he’d lost his balance, huh? A line or two farther on came the second jolt:

“Stahl, with the detective’s gun in his possession, had meanwhile made his way down the stairs and brutally shot Lee in his room. The latter was rushed to the hospital with a bullet wound in his neck; although his condition is critical, he has a good chance to survive...”

Lew let the thing fall to the floor and just sat there, stunned. Tom wasn’t dead either! He wasn’t quite as deadly as he’d thought he was; death wasn’t so easy to dish out, not with the aim he seemed to have. A little of his former respect for death came back. Step one on the road to recovery. He remembered that waiter at Rubin’s, flopping flat across the doorway; when he’d jumped over him, he’d definitely cringed — so he hadn’t finished him either. About all he’d really managed to accomplish, he said to himself, was successfully hold up a restaurant, separate a cab driver from his pants and his machine, and outsmart the cops three times — at the theater, on the roof, and in the Italians’ flat. Plenty for one guy, but not enough to turn him into a Manhattan Dillinger by a long shot.

A lot of his self-confidence had evaporated and he couldn’t seem to gel it back. There was a sudden, sharp increase of nervousness that had been almost totally lacking the night before.

He said to himself, “I need some bullets to put into this gun! Once I get them, I’ll be all right, that’ll take away the chills, turn on the heat again!”

He spotted a likely looking hockshop, and hopped off the car.

He hurried in through the swinging doors of the pawnshop and got a lungful of camphor balls. The proprietor came up to him on the other side of the counter. He leaned sideways on his elbow, tried to stop the shaking that had set in, and said: “Can you gimme something to fit this?” He reached for the pocket he’d put the gun in.

The proprietor’s face was like a mirror. Expectancy, waiting to see what it was; then surprise, at how white his customer was getting; then astonishment, at why Lew should grip the counter like that, to keep from falling.

It was gone, it wasn’t there any more. The frisking of the rest of his pockets was just reflex action; the emptiness of the first one told the whole story. He thought he’d outsmarted that Italian she-devil; well, she’d outsmarted him instead! Lifted the gun from him while she was busy seeming to straighten this old red sweater of her husband’s on him. And the motive was easy to guess: So that Mario wouldn’t be running any risk when he tried to blackmail Lew out on the street for the rest of the five hundred, like she’d told him to. Lew had walked a whole block with him, ridden all the way down here, and never even missed it until now! A fine killer he was!

He could feel what was left of his confidence crumbling away inside him, as though this had been the finishing touch it needed. Panic was coming on. He got a grip on himself; after all, he had five hundred in his pocket. It was just a matter of buying another gun and ammunition, now.

“I wanna buy a revolver. Show me what you’ve got.”

“Show me your license,” the man countered.

“Now, listen,” he was breathing hard, “just skip that part of it. I’ll pay you double.” He brought out the money.

“Yeah, skip it,” the proprietor scoffed. “And then what happens to me, when they find out where you got it? I got myself to think of.”

Lew knew he had some guns; the very way he spoke showed he did. He sort of broke. “For the love of Gawd, lemme have a gun!” he wailed.

“You’re snowed up, mac,” he said. “G’wan, get out of here.”

Lew clenched his teeth. “You lemme have a gun, or else—” And he made a threatening gesture toward the inside of his coat. But he had nothing to threaten with; his hand dropped limply back again. He felt trapped, helpless. The crumbling away kept on inside him. He whined, pleaded, begged.

The proprietor took a step in the direction of the door. “Get out of here now, or I’ll call the police! You think I want my license taken away?” And then with sudden rage, “Where’s a cop?”

Police. Cops. Lew turned and powdered out like a streak.

And Lew knew then what makes a killer; not the man himself, just the piece of metal in his hand, fashioned by men far cleverer than he. Without that, just a snarling cur, no match even for a paunchy hockshop owner.

Lew lost track of what happened immediately after that. Headlong, incessant flight — from nothing, to nothing. He didn’t actually run, but kept going, going, like a car without a driver, a ship without a rudder.

It was not long after that he saw the newspaper. Its headline screamed across the top of the stand where it was being peddled. “Movie Murderer Confesses.” Lew picked it up, shaking all over.

The manager of Tom’s theater. Weeks, his name was. Somebody’d noticed that he’d been wearing a different suit during the afternoon show than the one he’d had on earlier. The seat behind Kemp’s, the dead man’s, had had chewing gum on it. They’d got hold of the suit Weeks had left at the dry-cleaner’s, and that had chewing gum on the seat of the trousers, too. He’d come in in a hurry around six, changed from one to the other right in the shop, the tailor told them. He’d had one there, waiting to be called for. He admitted it now, claimed the man had been breaking up his home.

Lew dropped the paper and the sheets separated, fell across his shoes.

It stuck to his shoe and Lew was like someone trudging through snow. “Movie Murderer Confesses — Murderer Confesses — Confesses...”

Subconsciously he must have known where he was going, but he wasn’t aware of it, was in a sort of fog in the broad daylight. The little blue and white plaque on the lamp-post said “Center Street.” He went slowly down it. He walked inside between the two green lamps at the police station entrance and went up to the guy at the desk and said, “I guess you people are looking for me. I’m Lew Stahl.”

Somehow, Lew knew it would be better if they put him away for a long while, the longer the better. He had learned too much that one night, got too used to death. Murder might be a habit that, once formed, would be awfully hard to break. Lew didn’t want to be a murderer.