Deadline at Dawn

Chapter 11

She paced back and forth in front of the place, grinding her fist into its opposite palm. They wouldn’t let her in any more. The sign over the entrance was out. The trashcans full of refuse were out. The last lush was out. It was dead. Dead, but not quite cold yet, still only in the process of giving up the ghost. Every few moments a solitary figure would emerge and walk away, somebody who earned a living inside. This was the five o’clock in the afternoon of the night-club workers, whose clock goes in the opposite direction to that of the rest of the world.

While she paced, picketing the place for information so to speak, she kept thinking it out. Inside there, in this place I’m doing sentry-duty before, a redhead in a light-green dress handed Graves a note earlier tonight. I’ve got the place and I’ve got the note. All right, I’ve got that much. Let’s see now. To write that note in the first place she needed a pencil and paper. Those are things that the average chippy of her kind doesn’t carry around with her ordinarily; she sends most of her messages with her eyes and hips. Maybe this one did have pencil and paper; if she did, that’s my tough luck. Let’s say she didn’t have, though. Then in that case she must have had to borrow them from somebody in there. She wouldn’t be likely to interrupt one of the dancers on the floor and ask “Can you lend me a pencil and paper?” She wouldn’t be likely to accost some pair or group at one of the tables and ask it. What’s left? The waiter at her table, if she sat at a table. The man behind the bar, if she sat at the bar. The girl behind the hat-check counter. The attendant in the powder-room.

That narrows it down to somebody who works in there.

That’s what I’m doing out here now.

Even in their street-clothes she could more or less identify them at sight as they came out one by one. This trim, pert little good-looker, emerging now modishly garbed as any of her customers, for instance, couldn’t be anyone but the checkroom girl in such a place.

She stopped short as she felt Bricky’s hand come to rest on her sleeve, and then a look of genuine surprise overspread her face at the discovery that the arresting hand was feminine for once. She even seemed a trifle frightened or guilty for a moment, as one dreading retribution, until the question had been put.

“No, it works the other way around at my stall,” she said in a fluting, baby voice. “They all take out their own pencils and use them, where I’m concerned.” She opened her handbag and dug up a fistful of assorted cards and scraps of paper bearing names, addresses, telephone-numbers.

One escaped, and she thrust it away with her foot. “Let it go,” she said, “I’ve got enough without that.” She put the rest away. “No women borrowed a pencil from me; in fact I haven’t one to lend.” She went on up the street, with a little twittering sound of diminutive feet.

This colored damsel coming out, equally modish in her turn, could only be the powder-room attendant.

“Wut kine pencil?” she answered the query aloofly. “An eyebrow pencil?”

“No, the regular lead kind, the kind you write with.”

“They doan come in there to write, honey, you got the wrong number.”

“No one did ask you for one, though, all evening long?” Bricky persisted.

“No. That’s about the one thing they left out. Come to think of it, that’s the one thing I ain’t got in there to give. You’ve give me an idea; I think I’ll get me one tomorrow night and have it in there, I might get a call for it.”

A man came out.

He stopped and shook his head. “Not at my end of the bar. Better ask Frank, he works the other end.”

Another man came out right after him.

“Are you Frank?”

He stopped and smiled and singed her with his eyes. “No, I’m Jerry, but I’m not doing anything. Don’t let the name stand in your way.”

This time she was the one who had to go away, ten yards or so away, until he was gone and the coast was clear again.

But by that time somebody else had already come out and was well on his way. She had to run up the street after him to overtake him.

“Yeah, I’m Frank.”

“Did a girl borrow a pencil from you tonight, at your end of the bar? She was a tall girl, and she was red-haired, and she was in a light-green dress. Oh, it was a long time ago, earlier in the night, but see if you can remember— Did someone? Did anyone?”

He nodded. She got it. “Yeah,” he said, “someone like that did. I remember. It was way back around twelve o’clock, but someone did.”

“You don’t know her name, though?”

“No, that I don’t. I’ve got an idea she works in one of the other clubs around here—”

“You don’t know which one, though?”

“No. The only reason I say that is because I happened to overhear somebody else say to her, ‘Whatcha doing in here? You through at your own place already?’ ”

“But you don’t know—?”

“I don’t know who she is or where she works or anything else about her. Only that she borryed a pencil from me and bent over close, scribbling something behind her arm for a minute, then looked up and gave it back to me.”

He stopped by her a moment longer. There wasn’t anything else for either one of them to say.

“Wish I could help you.”

“I do too,” she said wanly.

He turned and went away. She stood there looking down at the sidewalk at a loss.

That was as close as she could probably hope to get. So near and yet so far.

She raised her head. He’d turned a second time and come back to her again.

“It seems to have you worried.”

“Plenty,” she admitted forlornly.

“Here’s a tip for you. I don’t know if you’re in club work yourself or not, but they’ve got funny habits. There’s a theatrical drugstore they all hang out in after the clubs’ve closed up. People that aren’t in the know, they think they step out with these stage-door johnnies, go on champagne parties. Well, some of them do some of the time, but most of them don’t most of the time. Don’t you believe it. Nine times out of ten they head for this place like a bunch of kids when school’s been let out. They like it better. They gang up there and drink malted milks and let their hair down. Go over there and take a shot at it. It’s worth trying, anyway.”

Was it! She broke away so fast she left him standing there staring after her. She ran all the way. It was only down a couple of blocks from there.

They weren’t exactly lined up at the fountain, as he’d led her to expect. Maybe that was because it was too late and the majority of them had already disbanded. But there were a group of three still lingering down at the far end. One of them had a Russian wolfhound with her. She must have brought it out for an airing before going to bed for the morning. They were all ganged up around it, feeding it crumbs from their plates and making a fuss over it. Its owner was in what might be called a state of street-wear deshabille. She had a polo coat thrown over her shoulders, and under it peered the bottoms of a pair of boudoir pajamas, stockingless ankles, and house slippers. None of the three was a redhead.

Their heads came up. Their attention left the borzoi and settled fleetingly on Bricky instead.

“She means Joanie, I guess,” one of them said. She addressed her directly, and rather fatuously. “That who you mean?”

How could she tell, if she didn’t know herself?

They didn’t know her last name, it appeared.

“I just know her from in here,” one said.

“Me too,” a second one added.

“She didn’t show up tonight,” the third one supplied. “Why don’t you go around to her hotel, look her up there? It’s just down the line a ways. I think it’s called the Concord or the Compton or something like that.” Then she qualified it: “I don’t know if she’s still there, but she was a couple nights ago. I walked her over as far as the door, to give Stalin some exercise.”

They shrugged her off. Their gnat-like attention went back to the borzoi again, as being the more interesting of the two rival bids for attention.

The hotel had every earmark of one of those shady places catering to card sharps, confidence men, and other fly-by-nights. It held no terrors for her, though. She had met its type of denizen on the dance floor every night of her life, for years past. She went up to the desk with the assurance of one who doesn’t expect to be turned away. An evil-looking night-clerk with a cast in his eye, a collar that hadn’t been changed in a week, and a whiff of stale alcohol on his breath, shifted over a little to match her position.

She leaned comfortably over the desk on the point of one elbow. “Hello, there,” she said breezily.

He widened his mouth and showed her a space between two of his teeth. It was probably supposed to be some kind of a grin.

She swung her handbag around on the end of its strap with her free hand. First around one way, then back around the other. “What room’s my girlfriend got?” she said unconcernedly, staring off across the mildewed lobby. “I wanna run up a minute and tell her something I forgot. You know, Joanie. The one in the light-green dress. I only just now left her this minute in the drugstore, but—” She gave him a snicker; “this can’t wait, it’s too good.” She bent over and slapped hilariously at her own thigh. “Is she gonna die!” she brayed.

“Who’s that, Joan Bristol?” he asked, with a fatuous look that was an invitation to her to share the joke with him, whatever.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” she rattled off, as if that were to be taken for granted. Giggling, she poked him in the side. “Listen, you wanna hear something funny?” She bent her head over in the direction of his ear, as if about to whisper something to him confidentially. He inclined his head accommodatingly.

Suddenly, with the typical volatility of the gamin-part she was playing, she changed her mind. “Wait a minute, I want to tell her first. I’ll tell you when I come down.” She took a step away from the desk, but not without chucking him under the chin first. “Stay there now, Pops; don’t go ’way.” Then quite by way of parenthesis, still all a-chortle over this other, more important matter: “What room’d you say it was, again?”

He fell for it. She’d worked hard at the little act, and it had gone over. “Four-oh-nine, sugar,” he said amiably. He even straightened his weather-beaten tie, caught up in the momentary mood she had managed to create. Of intimacy that took no account of visiting-hours, it was so close. Of harmless, giddy frivolity.

He took a step in the direction of the decrepit switchboard, which it was also evidently part of his duties to attend to.

“Oh, skip that,” she called out ribaldly, flinging her hand at him. “She don’t have to put on airs with me. Who’s she kidding? I know she’s two weeks behind in her rent.”

He guffawed with mealy-mouthed laughter, and the intended announcement over the house-phone went by the board.

She stepped into the Cleveland-Administration elevator with an exaggerated swing of her hips, and the venerable contraption started to creak slowly upward under her. The stationary doors were not solid, but grilled ironwork. As the descending ceiling of the street-floor came down and cut her off from his sight, it seemed to scrape the raffish smirk from her face in time with its own passage, like a slowly-falling curtain of sobriety passing over her features, and dimming them again to taut gravity.

She and the colored man toiled upward for four endless, snail-like floors together, and then he stopped the mechanism and let her off. He seemed to intend to wait for her return there, at floor-level, so she got rid of him with a pert: “That’s all right, I’ll be in there quite some time.”

He closed the rickety shaft-door, and a line of light ebbed reluctantly down the glass, like something being slowly siphoned off; left it shadowed and blank.

She turned and walked down the musty, dimly-lighted corridor, along a strip of carpeting that still clung together only out of sheer stubbornness of skeletal weave. Doors, dark, oblivious, inscrutable, sidling by; enough to give you the creeps just to look at them. All hope gone from them, and from those who passed in and out through them. Just one more row of stopped-up orifices in this giant honeycomb that was the city. Human beings shouldn’t have to enter such doors, shouldn’t have to stay behind them. No moon ever entered there, no stars, no anything at all. They were worse than the grave, for in the grave is absence of consciousness. And God, she reflected, ordered the grave, for all of us; but God didn’t order such burrows in a third-class New York City hotel.

It seemed like a long corridor, but maybe that was because her thoughts were quick. They were churning wildly, while her feet carried her toward the imminent showdown that lay just ahead, around the turn.

“How am I going to get in? And if I do, how am I going to know, how am I going to find out if she killed him? They don’t tell you these things. Not the whole majestic State of New York can make such words pass their lips, as a rule, so how can I, alone, unaided? And even if I do, how am I going to get her back there, all the way up to East Seventieth Street, without causing a big commotion, calling on the police for aid, involving Quinn in it far worse than he is already, getting the two of us held on suspicion for days and weeks on end?”

She didn’t know. She didn’t know any of those things. She only knew she was going ahead, there was no backing out for her. She could only pray, to the one friendly auspice there was in all this town for her, as she drew closer, closer.

“Oh, Clock on the Paramount, that I can’t see from here, the night is nearly over and the bus has nearly gone. Let me go home tonight.”

The door-numbers were stepping up on her. Six on this side, seven on that, eight back on this side again. And then a dead-end, the corridor ended in a door, the last of them all, at right angles to it: 409, there it was. It looked so neutral, so impersonal — and yet behind it lurked her whole future destiny, in shape unseen.

On this single slab, she thought, on this great square of old, dark, scabrous wood, depends whether I become a human being again or remain a rat in a dance-hall for the rest of my life. Why should one door have so much power over me?

She looked down at the back of her own hand, as if to say: Was that you? Gee, you had guts just then! It had knocked just then on the wood, without waiting for the rest of her.

The door swept open before she had time to plan anything, to think what to do when it should open, and they stood looking at each other eye to eye, this unknown woman and she. Hard, enamelled face very close to hers, so close she could see the caked pores in it, like fine mesh. Hostile, wary eyes, so close she could see the red-streaked vessels in their corners.

The upper hall at Graves’ house came back to her again, the memory of creeping through there in the dark with Quinn, and she knew, without being conscious of it, that she must be smelling the same perfume again; that was what was doing it, linking the two experiences.

The eyes had already changed. This thing was going to go fast. Hostile wariness had already become overt challenge. A husky voice came up from somewhere below to join them. A voice that didn’t let you kid around with it.

“Well, what’s the angle? Didje come around to borrow a cup of sugar or didje hit the wrong door? Anything in p’tic’lar in here y’want?”

“Yes,” said Bricky softly, “there is.”

She must have taken a draw on a cigarette just before she opened the door, the other, and been holding it until now and speaking through it. Smoke suddenly speared from her nostrils in two malevolent columns. She looked like Satan. She looked like someone it was good to stay away from. She was still willing to have it that way herself — so far. Her arm flexed, to slap the door closed in Bricky’s face.

Bricky wanted to turn around and go away, turn around and go away fast. Boy, how she wanted to turn around and get away from there. But she wouldn’t let herself. She knew she was going to get in there, even if it was to her own destruction. That door had to stay open.

She did it with her foot and with her elbow.

The woman’s muzzle became a white cicatrice of menace. “Take that out of the way,” she warned in a sort of slow-rolling growl.

“We don’t know each other personally,” Bricky said, borrowing her huskiest dance-hall tones, “but we’ve got a friend in common, so that makes it even.”

The Bristol woman gave her head an upward flip. “Wait a minute, who are you? I never saw you before in my life. What d’ya mean a friend?”

“I’m talking about Mr. Stephen Graves.”

A white flash of consternation came over the Bristol woman’s face. But she might have reacted that same way, Bricky realized, even if she’d only been up there trying to blackmail him and then had walked out again, without anything else.

Until now, on a strip of background-wall visible just behind her, there had been a vague outline-shadow discernible. Not a very sharply etched one, just a faint tracing cast by some impediment in the way of the light coming from the room off to one side. It now moved very subtly, slipped off sidewards, disappeared — as though whatever was causing it had altered position, withdrawn, was secreting itself.

The caraway-seed centers of the woman’s eyes flicked briefly in that same offside direction, then immediately straightened back again, as though she had just received some imperceptible signal attuned to herself alone. She said tautly, and with an undertone of menace: “Suppose you come in a minute, and let’s hear what’s on your mind.” She widened the door. It wasn’t done hospitably, but with a sort of commanding jerk, as if to say: Either come in of your own accord, or I’ll reach out and haul you in.

For one moment more Bricky was a free agent; the hallway stretched unimpeded behind her. She thought: Here I go. I hope I get out of here alive. She went in.

She moved slowly past the other woman, turned aside into a tawdry, smoke-stenched room. Behind her the door champed back into its frame with a sound of ominous finality, as though it were meant to stay that way for good. A key ticked twice; once against the lock in turning, the second time against the keyhole in withdrawal.

She’s locked me in here with her. I have to stay and win now, I can’t get out again.

The battle was joined. A battle in which her only weapons were her wits, her sheer nerve, and the feminine intuition that even a little chain-dancer is never without. She knew that from this point on every veiled glance she cast around her, every slightest move she made, must be made to count, because there would be no quarter given, no second chances.

The room was empty, apparently. A door, presumably to a bath, was already firmly closed when her eyes first found it, but the knob had just stopped turning, hadn’t quite fallen still yet. If it appeared that she didn’t know too much, the door would stay that way, wouldn’t open again. But if it developed she knew too much— Therein lay her cue; how to find out just what there was to know here, and what too much of it was. That door would tell her. She already had a yardstick to measure her own progress.

For the rest, drawers in the shabby bureau were out at narrow, uneven lengths, as though they had recently been emptied. A Gladstone bag stood on the floor at the foot of the bed. The bag was full, ready for removal. A number of objects were strewn about on top of the bureau, as though the room’s occupant had returned in some turmoil, flung them down on entering. There was a woman’s handbag, a pair of gloves, a crumpled handkerchief. The handbag had been left yawning open, as if the agitated hand that had plunged into it in search of something had been too hurried to close it again.

The Bristol woman sidled in after her, surreptitiously ground something out under her toe, but then a moment later, as she turned to face Bricky, was holding a half-consumed cigarette between her fingers again. Bricky pretended she hadn’t noticed it smoking away on the edge of the table, ownerless, until now. A man will often leave a cigarette balanced on the edge of a table or some other bare surface, a woman hardly ever.

It really was superfluous. That flexing of the doorknob just now, that shifting of light-tones on the wall before, had been enough to tell her all she needed to know. There are three of us here in this place.

Joan Bristol drew out a chair, adjusted it, swerved it, so that its back was to the closed door. Then she invited: “Help yourself to a seat.” Even if Bricky had wanted to sit somewhere else, she made it the only one available by taking the only other one herself. She lowered herself into it as though she were on coiled springs ready to be released at any moment.

She moistened her rouge-matted lips. “What’d you say your name was again?”

“I didn’t say, but you can put me down as Caroline Miller.”

The other gave her a smile of disbelief, but took it in her stride. “So you know some guy named Graves, do you? Tell me, what makes you think I know him? Did he mention me to you?”

“No,” Bricky said, “he wasn’t doing any mentioning of anybody.”

“Then what makes you think I—?”

This would have been sheer repetition, and she wanted to get past this point. “You do, don’t you?”

Joan Bristol tasted her own rouge some more, reflective. “Tell me, you been over to see him lately?”

“Pretty lately.”

“How lately?”

Bricky said with crafty negligence: “I just came from there now.”

The Bristol woman was tautening up inwardly. You could tell it quite easily on the outside, though. Her eyes strayed to some indeterminate point over and beyond Bricky’s shoulder, as if in desperate quest of further guidance. Bricky carefully avoided turning her head to follow the look with her own eyes. There was nothing but a door there, anyway.

“How’d you find him?”

“Dead,” said Bricky quietly.

The Bristol woman didn’t show the right type of surprise. It was surprise, all right, but it was a vindictive, malevolent surprise, not a startled one. In other words, it wasn’t the news that was surprising, it was the source of it.

She didn’t answer right away. She evidently wanted to “confer” with the recent shadow on the wall. Or it did with her. A brief spurt of water from a faucet somewhere behind the closed door, turned on, then quickly off again, was the signal to this effect.

“Excuse me a sec,” she said, getting up. “I must have forgotten to tighten the tap in there.”

She sidled around Bricky’s strategically-planted chair and slipped inside to the bath without opening the door widely enough to show anything beyond it. She closed it behind her for a moment, so the visitor couldn’t turn her head and look in.

She had given Bricky the chance herself. The chance to find whatever there was to find, if there was anything. It was only good for thirty seconds. For the space of time it would take to receive a whispered instruction in there on how to proceed. And it wouldn’t occur again. Almost before the knob had fallen still in the door behind her, she was up out of the chair. She only had time to go for one thing. She made it the open handbag atop the dresser. It was the obvious place. More than that, it was the only accessible one, within the limitations of time and space granted her. The bureau-drawers were presumably empty, their position implied that. The Gladstone bag was presumably locked already, its fullness indicated that.

She darted across the intervening room-space, aimed her hand at the gaping bag, plunged it in. Outright evidence she knew she couldn’t expect. That would have been asking too much. But something, anything at all. And there was nothing. Lipstick, powder-compact, the usual junk. Paper crackled against her viciously probing fingers from one of the side pockets. She drew it hastily out, flung it open, raced her eyes over it. Still nothing. An unpaid hotel-bill for $17.89, from this place they were in. A man would have left it there. Of what value was it? It had no connection with what she was here after.

And yet some inexplicable instinct cried out to her: “Hang onto it. It might come in handy.” She flung herself back into her original seat again, did something to one of her stockings, and it was gone.

An instant later the door reopened and the Bristol woman came out again, her instructions set. She sat down, fixed Bricky with her eyes, evidently to keep her attention from wandering.

“What’d you do, go up there to Graves’ place alone? Or’d you have somebody with you?”

Bricky gave her the knowing look of someone who is over seventeen. “Sure. You don’t suppose I take my grandmother along at times like that, do you?”

Her interlocutor got what she’d wanted her to out of it. “Oh, times like that, that’s it.”

“That’s it.”

“Well, uh—” She nibbled some more at her lip-rouge. “Somebody stop you at the door and tell you, that how you found out? Were there cops outside, people hanging around, lots of excitement, that how you knew he was dead?”

Bricky was answering these questions on instinct alone. Until they came out, she didn’t know herself how they were going to come. It was like walking a tight-rope — without a balancing pole and with no net under you.

“No, no one was around. No one knew it yet. Think I’d have walked in? I was the first one found him, I guess. See, I had a key to the house; he’d given it to me. I went in and all the lights were out. I thought maybe he hadn’t got home yet, so I’d wait for him. I went up, and there he was, plugged.”

Joan Bristol kneaded her hands together with feverish interest in the recital. “So then what’d you do? I suppose right away you beat it out and hollered blue murder, brought them all down on the place.”

The demi-mondaine sitting in Bricky’s chair gave her another of those worldly-wise looks. “What d’you think I am, sappy? I beat it out all right, and fast, but I kept the soft-pedal on. I put out the lights and locked up the door after me, and left the place just the way I found it. Sister, I didn’t breathe a word. Think I wanted to get mixed up in it? That’s all I need, yet.”

“And how long ago was it you were up there?”

“Just now.”

“Then I guess nobody knows yet but you—”

“You and me.”

She had a slight sense of motion taking place behind her. The air may have stirred a little. Or something may have creaked.

“Did you come down here alone?”

“Sure. Everything I do, I do alone. Who’ve I got?”

The mirror on the dresser, aslant toward her, showed her the hinged end of the door behind her slowly bending outward. The surface of the glass wasn’t wide enough to encompass the other end, the actively-turning end, show her that.

She didn’t have time to turn her head. She only had time to think: The door has opened behind me. There’s somebody about to— That shows they did it. I’ve hit the jackpot. My trail was the hot one, Quinn’s the cold.

That knowledge wasn’t going to do her any good now. She’d asked for it, and she was about to get it.

Bristol asked her one more question; more to hold her off-guard a split moment longer, than because she needed to have it answered any more. “And how’d you come to tie me up in it? Where does your coming around here figure in?”

There was no need for her to worry about the answer; none was expected. Two and two had already been put together quite successfully without her further aid.

Something thick and pimply, full of tiny little knots, suddenly blanketed itself around her face from behind. A Turkish bath-towel wound into a bandage-arrangement, most likely, although she had no leisure to identify exactly what it was. She reared up galvanically, and lost one hand behind her, secured at the wrist by some powerful grip. The Bristol woman had jolted to her own feet in time with her, and she secured the other. The two were brought together at her back, crossed over, and tied crushingly with long thin strips of something, perhaps a dismembered pillow-case or linen face-towel.

She couldn’t draw free breath for a moment, the rough-spun towelling muffled her whole face. The horrible thought that she was about to be smothered to death then and there occurred to her — but she realized dimly that they wouldn’t have gone to all the trouble of tying up her hands if that had been their purpose. That alone kept her from going into an unmanageable paroxysm of struggle that might have brought about the very result it was trying to evade, as has happened in so many countless cases before.

Then a rough hand, heavier and larger than the other woman’s, fumbled a little with the towel, brought it down half-face, freeing her eyes and nostrils. The remainder was tied far more tightly than the whole had been, with such constriction at the back of her head that she had a feeling as though her entire skull was going to be crushed with the pressure. But at least she could get air into her lungs and relieve the bursting coughing that had already started in.

Bristol was still in front of her eyes, as they came clear, addressing someone unseen behind her back. “Watch her mouth now, Griff. You can hear everything through these walls.”

A man’s voice growled: “Get her feet — them high heels are barking my shins.”

The woman crouched down out of sight — the snowy mantle of the towel prevented acutely downcast vision — and Bricky felt her ankles knock together and some more thin strips whip dexterously in and out around them, lashing them together. She became a helpless sheaf, tied at both ends.

Joan Bristol came up into sight again. “What’s the play now?” she asked.

The man’s voice said: “Don’t you figure we ought to—?” He didn’t finish it. Bricky got the uncompleted meaning by indirection, via the suddenly-taut look on the woman’s face. Her blood ran cold. He’d said it as calmly as though they were talking about lowering a shade or putting out a light.

The woman was scared. Not for Bricky’s sake, just for their own. She must have known him better than anyone, whoever he was; known just how capable he was of doing it.

“Not here in the room with us, Griff,” she said bleakly. “They know we were in this room. That’s begging for it!”

“Naw, you don’t get me,” he argued matter-of-factly. “I don’t mean chop-chop, that kind of stuff.” He went over to the window, drew the sash up carefully, like one of those men who are handy to have around the house, suggesting an improvement. A patch of electric-lighted mold was revealed, on blank brickwork opposite. He edged his head forward a little and looked speculatively downward. Then he turned and spoke to the woman quietly. “Four floors ought to be enough.” He motioned expressively with one hand. “The three of us get drinking up here, she goes over to the window to try and open it, get a little air in, it jams and— How many times does that happen?”

Bricky’s heart was burning its way out through her chest like a blow-torch.

“Yeah, but there’s always a follow-up. That’s no good for us this time, Griff. We’d get hooked here for hours, answering all kinds of police questions, and they’re liable to work their way back a little too far — and before you know it, other things’ll come into it.”

She shot him a look that was only meant for the two of them, but there were three of them there that understood it.

“What’re we gonna do, leave her behind us here?” he snarled.

The Bristol woman raked distracted fingers through her hair. “Look at the mess I got us into now,” she bleated querulously. “What the hell did y’have to—”

“Shut up,” the man answered flintily.

“She knows already. What d’you suppose brought her down here?”

“Then why the hell didn’t you handle it right in the first place, like you were supposed to?”

“I couldn’t manage him, he got out of hand. I only went down to the door and let you in thinking you could throw a scare into him, get him to come across. That didn’t mean you had to sign off on him!”

“What’d you expect me to do, when he made a grab at it like he did, let him take it away from me? You saw what happened. I had to cork him up in self-defense. Anyway, what’s the good of talking about it now? You loused it up and the damage is done. It’s this twist we’ve got to think about now. I still think the smart thing would be to—”

“No, I’m telling you, Griff; no! That would be the dumb thing to do, not the smart thing. Let her chirp after we’re gone. It’s still only her word against ours. She went up there too, didn’t she? She coulda done it just as well as us. Just let’s get out of here—”

He flung open a closet-door on the other side of the room, looked in. “How about this? Let’s stuff her in here, ditch the key. It backs up against a dead wall, so she’ll never be heard. That ought to be good for plenty of head-start. It’ll be days before they get around to busting this door open—”

They lugged her across to it between them, her legs trailing after her. They thrust her inside like some sort of a mothproof garment-bag.

“Better hitch her to something,” he said, “otherwise she might try thumping against the door with her whole chassis.” He rigged up a sort of halter-arrangement of sheeting-strips, passed it under her arms, wound it around one of the clothes-hooks behind her. She was left upright, with her feet to the floor, but unable to shift out from the rear wall of the closet.

The woman said: “Can she breathe in here, in case they take some time to—?”

“I don’t know,” he answered callously. “She should find that out and tell us about it afterwards.”

They closed the door on her. A sudden pall of darkness obliterated everything. The key was withdrawn, the key that they were going to throw away somewhere outside. She could still hear them through the door, for a brief moment or two longer, making their last-minute preparations for departure.

“Got the bag?”

“What about that stew down at the desk? He must’ve seen her come up here.”

“I can handle that easy. Where’s that pint of rye I bought this afternoon? I’ll offer him a goodbye-slug across the desk. He always goes around behind the letterboxes to down a shot. You duck out while he’s back there, and make like she’s with you, talk to yourself or something.”

“What about the jig on the elevator?”

“We’ll take the stairs. We’ve done that plenty of times before when we got tired waiting for him to come up, didn’t we? The pushbutton don’t work, that’s all; he didn’t hear us ringing it. Come on, you ready?”

“Hey, I’m missing that hotel-bill. We’ve got to settle up before we can get out of here. It must have fallen on the floor somewhere around the room here—”

“Never mind looking for it now; let it go. He can make out a new one for me down at the desk—”

The outer door closed and they were gone.