Death Is Her Bridegroom

Chapter III

He went down the hall with choppy strides, his bag swinging, and Jeff crossed to his own door. Inside, he left the door cracked and the light off. Removing his outer clothing, he shoved the room’s one overstuffed chair into position before the crack and sat down. Damned foolishness, he told himself. No kidnapper would openly approach a contact in a hotel room. A kidnapper would always work under cover. But no matter. Jefferson Pitt had been hired to do a job. The job was to keep an eye on Cleo Constance. He sat in the chair patiently, looking down the hall at the door through which Constance had vanished.

He was aware, after a while, of the murmur of voices. Twisting, looking up at an angle over the back of his chair, he saw a rectangle of weak light high in the wall behind him. Then he saw that it was not really in the wall at all. The light came through an old-fashioned transom above a tall, narrow door. The door obviously led to the next room and had apparently been locked and nailed shut to make two singles out of a double.

Getting up, he fumbled in darkness for a straight chair and carried it over to the door. Standing on the chair, he could look through the transom into the next room. Up there, with his ear near the crack along the bottom of the rectangle, he could even distinguish words.

The mouse stood looking out the window into the rainy night. She had taken off her dress and had on a sleazy pink slip. On the bed behind her, her companion on the bus lay in pants and undershirt, looking at the ceiling. His hands were under his head. A cigarette hung from his slack lips.

Pretty soon the mouse turned away from the window to look at the sprawled figure on the bed, and Jeff saw that her eyes were red and swollen. Her voice was pleading.

“It won’t be so bad, Dickie. Honest, it won’t. We can get a justice of the peace to do it in Darrowville tomorrow.”

He didn’t answer.

“We can get an apartment, Dickie, and maybe after a while we can buy a little house of our own. And some furniture. I’ll work, Dickie. After the baby comes, I’ll get a job right away.”

The cigarette bobbled. “Yuk, yuk, yuk. For God’s sake, shut up.”

“It could be fun, Dickie. It could be fun, if only you’d let it.”

“Fun. Oh, for God’s sake.”

“You didn’t talk like that when you were talking me into it.”

“I was drunk.”

“Don’t hate me, Dickie. It wasn’t my fault. Please don’t hate me.”

“Hate you? Hell, yes, I hate you. I hate your ugly face, and your skinny body, and most of all I hate your damned whiney voice. How the hell I was ever nuts enough to get in a fix like this with a dame like you, I’ll never know. Times sure must’ve been hard.” He sat up, swinging his legs off the bed. “I’ll get hitched, all right, because I see I’ve got to. And like you said, right after the kid comes you can get a job. At least you better, because I’m taking off. That’s as long as I stick around, see? Just till the kid comes. Maybe, if I’m lucky, you’ll both die.”

She didn’t flinch. There were no more tears. She just stood there against the window with the black rain outside, and Jeff got down off the chair in a hurry. His pulses hammered. He stood spraddle-legged in the darkness with sickness rising to make him dizzy. A drop of cold sweat fell away from his armpit and ran down his ribs.

It would be so easy to kill, he thought. Sometimes it would be so easy.

He sat in the chair again and stared blankly. The rectangle of light behind him winked out. Outside the cracked door, the shabby hall stretched silent and empty. His mind functioned now with a kind of cold clarity, receptive to intuition. An ugly little medico who quoted Whitman, remembered hell, and practised compassion. A pretty junkie now at peace. A mouse whose gray little life had reached the incredibly bleak point of being dependent on a pimply punk kid for pity. Kidnapper? Contact for a kidnapper? No. They were all on other business. The errands, the flights, the ceaseless, senseless motion between dark and dark.

And so, stepping on flotsam, he came back to the central figure. Cleo Constance, private detective. A handsome, cold fish. A man isolated, thinking his own thoughts, going his own way. Going his own way with fifty grand in his pocket.

He’s a bad one, Jeff. Under the cold correctness, the clipped aloofness, there’s an unplumbed potential for evil. A queer, cold fish; one of earth’s eternal exiles.

And there’s been no contact. You can’t prove it, of course. Somewhere along the way, in some unobserved fashion, the pass could have been made. But it wasn’t made, and it won’t be, because the ransom is already paid. It was paid in the house of Reed Roman hours ago. It was paid to a queer, ascetic-looking kidnapper with ice water in his veins, and right now he’s got it in a shabby room right down the hall.

Take it from the beginning. From the moment you knew immediately that it was all wrong, there in the house of the old man yesterday afternoon. Contact specified in the ransom note. Has it ever happened before? Kidnapper specifying himself as contact. Dammit, the guy must be nerveless. He must be put together differently from the rest of us. And it builds. The jewel case. The chance to initiate an acquaintance. Maybe more. A cold, handsome devil like that might make a hellish appeal to a wild dame like the Roman. The birth of an idea. The birth and slow growth and icy, calculated consummation.

So what do you do? Somehow you make him break. Somehow you crack that stony, satanic arrogance. Now. Right now. Because morning will be too late. Let’s see. It’s nearly two. Human resistance is at its lowest ebb at two in the morning. The time for ghosts and fear of hell.

In the darkness, he stood up and dressed. His shoulder holster, nesting its .38, went under his coat. Moving swiftly, without noise, he went down to Constance’s door and knocked softly. Waiting a few seconds, he knocked again. The door swung inward away from his knuckles.

Constance was still fully dressed. He hadn’t even removed the perfectly tailored coat of his dark suit. He stood there without speaking, his pale eyes still and wary, the planes of his thin face stonelike in the dim light.

Jeff made a half-gesture toward the room. “I’d like to come in.”

Constance moved back, and Jeff moved in. The door clicked shut. Constance came back past him and turned.

“Yes?”

Jeff grinned. “I want in, Constance.”

“You are in, my friend.”

Jeff kept the grin. It was work, but he kept it. “I don’t mean in the room, Constance. I mean in the act.” He waited, tension drawing to a throbbing point of pain in his chest. “About halfway in fifty grand, let’s say.”

There was no change in the face. The voice became a little softer, slightly more clipped. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“No?” Jeff shifted weight, lifted his shoulders. “Don’t be a fool, man. You think old Reed Roman’s lost his marbles? If you do, you’re making a mistake. He saw the possibilities in this thing from the start. Naming yourself as contact, for instance. A little obvious, really, to a sharp old bird like Roman. He had me on your tail before you’d been gone an hour. Fifty grand might seem like a lot of money to a private detective, he said. He seemed to think it might be a temptation. His only mistake was, he forgot I’m a private detective too. Fifty grand looks just as big to me as to the next one. Even twenty-five looks big. That’s all I’m asking. Just an even split. In return, I put you solid. I verify the contact.”

Constance’s lips moved stiffly. “You’re mad.”

“No.” Jeff shook his head. “Why don’t you give up, man? You’ll split or bum, and it’s as simple as that.”

He couldn’t tell if it was working. Constance just stood there, hardly touched. His lips twitched spastically, betraying inner tension, that was all.

“Conceding what you say is true, what makes you think I’d carry fifty grand around like car fare?”

“In case of emergency, maybe. In case, for some reason, you couldn’t anticipate, you had to produce it. Like now, I mean.”

“You guessed wrong, friend. I didn’t anticipate having to produce it.”

“You picked it up at the old man’s at six-thirty. You had to make it to the bus station in an hour. That didn’t leave you much time.”

“Time enough. It’s waiting for me in a tight spot.”

So it was true. Constance was the man, carrying the whole deal through in lonely arrogance. The sharp pain of tension behind the hard bone of Jeff’s chest was almost unbearable. In his head there was a thin, wild singing.

“It can wait for me just as well. Half of it, I mean. I’m in no hurry.”

The lonely, proud, ambitious man. Maybe it was because the years had been too long, the cold veneer of his reserve wearing too thin for the persistent erosion of frustration. Maybe, after all the waiting and the final exhilaration of the big dream consummating, the sudden threat of disaster was the final impetus to hysteria. However it was, it was certain, now, in the end when he most needed to do what was exactly right, that he did the worst possible thing. Jeff had no warning. There was no gradual disintegration of the cold veneer. There was only a swift white flame of madness in pale eyes and a gun leaping as if by magnetic attraction from under the dark blue coat.

Jeff spun away with the sound of thunder in his ears, and something hammered at his right shoulder, slamming him against the wall. He thrust himself sideways in a reflex motion as he fell, rolling into cover behind a heavy chair. A slug thumped into upholstery, beating out a thin cloud of dust.

Using his left hand, Jeff reached his .38 and got it out. He was not ambidextrous, and the shot he returned around the edge of the chair was wild. He heard the shattering of glass and thought for a moment his lead had gone through a window. Then he heard the sound of feet on the iron fire-escape, and he knew that it was Constance that had gone through.

Jeff pulled himself up behind the chair, his shoulder a mass of fire, and lurched across the room. Glass fragments grated under his feet. He was remotely aware that the rain had diminished, falling now in a soft cloud that seemed, against the street lights below, hardly more than a mist. The fire-escape went down against the brick wall to the ground, reversing the direction of its angle with each floor. Below, leaping three steps at a time, Cleo Constance had almost completed the descent.

Jeff wasted no shot. Stretching flat across the platform outside the window, he braced his inadequate left hand against iron, taking aim on the spot where Constance must leave the fire-escape. When the big figure came across the sight, he fired once, the gun leaping in his hand. The sound bounced off old brick and came crashing back around him.

Far below, Cleo Constance stopped and stood rigidly, a grotesque parody of a man being shot, like a kid playing cops and robbers. Then he pitched sprawling on the wet pavement, his arm flung wide for something that wasn’t there.

He had to get up, had to get up, had to get up. It seemed to him that he lay on the wet pavement in the gray soft rain for long, precious minutes, repeating the injunction. Actually, he had hardly fallen before he was clawing at asphalt, scrambling to his knees, to his feet, lurching ahead. Another shot ricocheted with an angry whine off the pavement ahead of him, and he kept moving.

At the comer, around the edge of the building, he hesitated, looking around wildly. Across the street, idling in front of an all-night short-order joint, a Buick Roadmaster waited with the yellow glare of its eyes projecting through the wet darkness. A break. A great, good break.

Holding his left elbow tucked into his guts and his smashed left shoulder pulled forward, he lurched across to the Buick and got in. With a desperate, instinctive concern for small matters that had assumed overwhelming importance, he noticed that the needle of the gas gauge showed almost a full tank on the face of its lighted dial. The big motor roared under his heavy foot, the car leaping ahead.

The sodden night went past him. That was the way it seemed. He sitting idle in the big immobile car while the night went past. The needle of the speedometer wavered at eighty, but surely the speedometer lied. He was sitting still while everything went past him. Everything, everything, all the wide world.

The wound hurt. It was alive and insatiable, tearing at him with hooked talons. It seemed lower than he’d thought at first. Farther in, too. Not really in the shoulder at all, but in the chest. His shirt was warm and sticky against his body. Blood, his bright, bright blood, seeping away in a cursed car that wouldn’t move while the whole wide world rushed by.

The Buick hit the edge of the highway and leaped into the air, coming down with a tremendous jolt and a long sickening skid on the muddy shoulder. The impact drove him forward, the lower arc of the wheel ramming into his guts to send a great sheet of fire searing upward across his vision. He jerked his head up, fighting for breath and sight, heaving at the wheel. The car came back onto the highway rocking, two wheels elevated in a terrible moment of suspension. Then the wheels dropped, and the big Buick hurled itself forward.

Close. Too close. For some reason, he had trouble seeing. Everything seemed blurred, wavering in a kind of fog. The rain! The rain, of course. He felt a vast, consuming relief that made him want to shriek with laughter. For a moment, he’d thought it might be the effect of the wound.

Rocking up over the brow of a hill, the Buick boomed down. Ahead, abruptly, the highway disappeared, and the light of headlamps lay yellow across swirling water. It was too late to slow down, and he ploughed in, water fanning up and out from the shuddering car in a giant V. The sudden retardation of speed again hurled him brutally against the wheel. Again the sheet of fire, the lurid pain. But even in the midst of it, at its most terrible intensity, he thought with despair of the motor. He heard it cough and sputter on the edge of death, and finally, with that vast, hysterical relief, heard it catch fire and resume its steady roar.

That guy in the bus. That tall, lanky guy in the rear seat. There’d been a feeling about him from the beginning. One of those things. One of those odd little threats of danger that seem to come like faint electrical impulses from certain people. He’d felt the guy’s eyes on him during the ride. Like two hot projections burning into his skin just where the hair feathered on his neck. As if the sun had been focused there through the magnifying glasses.

For Jefferson Pitt, whose name he didn’t even know, he possessed a virulent hatred that worked on him with a physical ravishment that was almost equal to that of his wound. Damn the guy! Oh, damn him, damn him, damn him! The curse repeated itself over and over in his mind with the effect of an evil incantation. Pray for his damnation. Pray, pray to the devil.

After a long time, he saw ahead of him the sign of the by-pass, a detour established for traffic that Wanted to circle the city. It rejoined the highway beyond the limit on the other side. At the junction, with the instinctive caution of a wounded and hunted animal, he wheeled the Buick onto the by-pass. Probably there was no immediate danger in the city. Probably the heavy rain had interrupted telephone service out of Hogan. But you couldn’t be sure. Maybe not. Maybe the news had gone ahead of him.

He was driving now with one hand. His left lay useless in his lap. His torso was gutted and drained and he seemed to be sitting in a puddle of something warm and wet. It was, moreover, increasingly difficult to think. He was unable, somehow, to give proper consideration to the details of escape, which were things he should certainly be considering. Funny, the curious coloring the night had acquired. It was more red, now, than black, as if the world were ending in the fulfillment of fiery prophecy.

Brenda. Brenda would know what to do. Brenda was a kind of beautiful panacea, and he had only to reach her to make everything right again. He saw her quite clearly in a pink froth, and he fought for the vision, shutting everything else out. He did recall briefly, however, the fifty grand that was, contrary to what he’d said, still in his pocket He thought of the money only because it had become in his mind her constant associate. He would take the money to her, and she would get them safely away, because she was beautiful and clever and all things were possible to her.

They’d go south, maybe. To the hot countries. Mexico, Brazil, Argentina. He’d never cared for the tropics. Colder climates for him. Climates of energy and drive and ruthlessness. But with Brenda it would be all right. With Brenda, all things would be all right. That fool back there. That lanky fool. Thinking he had kidnapped Brenda. Thinking he could do it. Hot and cold, tender and cruel, complex, contradictory, beautiful, beautiful Brenda.

He never knew when he regained the highway. Nor when he turned off into the hills on the narrow gravel road. At the end, he was only dimly, redly conscious of turning up the sharp climb to the cabin, of the Buick’s skidding out of control and slamming into a stand of scrub oaks.

Opening the door, he pitched out. He lay on the wet mat of dead grass and leaves for several minutes, sobbing with pain. Finally he crawled erect and continued afoot, elbow in guts, shoulder crumpled forward. Slipping and sprawling, always regaining his feet by a fierce exertion of will. Up the slope and across the cleared area in front of the cabin. Up the steps onto the porch. Three steps. Three, arduous, body-wracking, heartbreaking miles. Clawing at the plank door, beating at it desperately with the meaty side of a clenched fist.

A light came on inside, and the door opened. He plunged headlong into the room, and Brenda stood looking down at him with her breath caught in a hard, hurting knot in her throat.

“Connie,” she said. “Connie.”