Manhunt. Volume 5, Number 1, January, 1957

...Into the Parlor by Paul Eiden

Just phoning these beautiful girls gave him a charge. Then, to Diener’s everlasting regret, he actually met one...

Diener got the picture of a girl in white panties and bra out of his jacket pocket and then fumbled a cigarette into his mouth. The girl’s body was long-legged and beautiful and arched in a provocative pose. Thick dark hair framed a heartbreaking twenty-year-old face. The picture had been ripped from a glossy-paper magazine. On the margin Diener had written “Linda Land” and a phone number. He dialed the number.

The phone whirred in his ear and Diener sourly studied his reflection in the glass door of the drug store phone booth. He hated his small nervous face and the thinned-out mouse-colored hair that let the freckles on his scalp show through. For the millionth time, Diener wished he was four inches taller, thirty-pounds heavier. He wished he had a really decent suit, and thick curly black hair like Farley Grainger or Tony Curtis.

“Hello? Hello?” the warm contralto voice came through the phone.

“Hello, Linda!” Diener burst out. Then his voice grew thick and cottony. “Know who this is?”

“Who?” The voice had become sharp with annoyance. “Listen, what number do you want?”

Diener forced a chuckle. “Listen, Linda. This is Farley Curtis. Remember?”

A tiny sound that might have been a gasp answered him. The line went dead for a long moment.

“Oh! Hi, Farley!” The girl’s voice had come back sounding strained, unsure of itself. “I thought I was never going to hear from you. It’s been such a long time, I thought you forgot all about me.”

“As if I ever could,” Diener laughed suavely into the phone. “It’s — I was out of town. On a little business trip.” Something was soaring inside him like a rocket. “Texas!” he improvised wildly. “A little business trip to Texas!”

“Oh. But you could have called me long distance.” Was there a pout in her voice, Diener wondered, panicky. But before he could answer, she grew suddenly eager. “Why don’t you come up now? I’m going to be all alone. I’ve been laying here in bed just wishing something exciting would happen to me tonight...”

“B-but,” Diener spluttered, thinking of his old raincoat, his cheap, wrinkled suit. “I couldn’t. I’m not dressed. Just some old clothes I wear when I have to go out to my oil fields.” His legs began to tremble violently.

“I don’t care, Farley!” The voice lilted in his ear. “I–I’d like to see you that way. I’ll tell you what — I’ll dress exactly the way you told me I was in the first picture you saw of me.”

Diener’s mind reeled, remembering a wispy, lace-topped negligee dipping down to bare young breasts, open over a strong, naked leg. The phone was slippery in the sweat of his palm. He fought his timidity, but lost to it again. “I can’t, Linda. I—”

“Farley Curtis, if you don’t come up right now, I’ll hang up on you every time you call. I swear I will!” The anger went out of her voice then. “Please!” she pleaded. “I’ve never even met an adventurous man like you!”

The words were like straight whiskey to Diener. “Okay. Where’s your place?”

She gave him an address in the east Eighties. Diener hung up. He dropped the cigarette and crushed it thoroughly under his shoe. It’s all in the way you talk to them. You’ve got to be bold. Women love bold men. Diener hooked up the corner of his mouth in a smile, the way Errol Flynn does, and went out to find a cab.

The apartment building lobby was all glass brick and marble. A uniformed doorman pushed one of a row of buttons and said into the phone that hung beside them, “Mr. Curtis, ma’am.” His eyes were faintly envious as he nodded toward the self-service elevator. “14-A, sir.”

The elevator door slid open with a pneumatic whoosh and Diener stepped into a tiny foyer with three doors opening off it. He rapped too sharply on the one marked 14-A, feeling himself taut with lust. There was a muted click behind him and the elevator door rattled faintly as the cage began its descent.

The door of 14-A was drawn quickly open and Diener beheld Linda. Her face was abnormally white against the mass of dark hair. The scarlet lips were parted and her jaw made nervous chewing motions. With a flicker of disappointment, Diener took in the quilted gray housecoat buttoned to her chin. She was taller than he had thought, too.

Something scraped lightly on the floor behind him and a sledge hammer drove into his kidney. Diener shot, stumbling, past the side-stepping girl into the dark apartment. A small gossip bench crashed away from his clawing hands. Diener fell to his knees, his cheekbone thudding into the edge of a doorframe. He felt two huge hands grip him, swing him to his feet.

Linda was at the door, closing it against his flight. The man who held him was over six feet tall, red-haired, huge in a costly blue suit. He held Diener’s shirt in a choking ball at his throat and his cocked fist shot forward. In the split second before the fist exploded against his face, Diener thought giddily: “What a handsome guy!”

The room tilted. Diener was on his knees again, watching his blood drip onto a polished parquet floor inches from his nose. Two sharp kicks drove a scream through his puffed lips. He was hauled to his feet again.

The big man didn’t curse. Silently, methodically, he threw his maul-like fists into Diener’s ribs, at his heart. Diener clutched feebly at his sleeves, feeling himself on the edge of oblivion. “No, no, Tim!” Linda was calling from a mountain-top. “That’s not him! That’s not the one!”

The big man stepped suddenly away from Diener. Diener leaned slackly against the wall. “You’re sure?” The big man asked. “This isn’t the one you saw? He’s not the one that threatened you?”

“No! Don’t hit him again, Please!”

The big man eyed Diener thoughtfully for a moment. Then he bent and righted the tiny bench. He thrust Diener contemptuously into the seat. Unhurriedly, he drew a badge in a leather holder from his hip pocket and held it inches from Diener’s face. “Lieutenant Patterson, vice squad. Get your I-D out.” His breathing was only slightly disturbed from the exertion of having beaten Diener helpless.

Diener shook his head dazedly. With surprising gentleness, the big man went through Diener’s pockets until he found a wallet. He turned to the girl. “Better get him a drink,” he muttered, and Diener heard Linda’s mules clatter out of the entrance hallway.

“Elroy Diener,” Patterson read out of the wallet. “I thought you said your name was Curtis?”

“I thought — thought it sounded better,” Diener choked out, grateful for the man’s calmness.

“What did you think you were trying to do?”

Diener said: “I—,” and then shook his head hopelessly.

“You ever been arrested before, Elroy?”

“No! No!” Diener for the first time raised his eyes. He repeated himself, for it seemed important to show this man he was innocent of any past guilt.

Linda was back then, holding two glasses, one of water, the other a third full of whiskey. She handed them to Diener. He could smell her perfume. He thought her eyes seemed warm and forgiving.

“I got to take you in anyway,” Patterson said.

In the lobby, Patterson walked on his left, shielding him with his bulk from the eyes of the doorman. The big policeman seemed bored now and disposed to be kindly. Outside, he tugged Diener gently toward a black and yellow ’56 Buick convertible. He held the door open for Diener and didn’t handcuff him.

After a silent, two-mile drive downtown, Patterson parked before the twin green lights of a police station near Third Avenue. A big Italian sergeant behind the desk flashed a smile and called, “ ’Lo, Tim!” Patterson replied with a wave and led Diener up a rickety, sour-smelling staircase into a long room on the second floor.

The room contained battered desks and filing cases, grim under the harsh overhead lights, and a long row of yellow oak chairs. Two men sat at one of the desks, drinking coffee from cardboard containers. They looked quizzically at Patterson when they saw Diener’s bruised, white face. “Got a cutie,” Patterson told them, and they went disinterestedly back to their coffee.

Diener was brought to a high fingerprint table against the wall. He stood passive and unspeaking while Patterson fastened a fresh card in the holder, squeezed ink onto a glass plate and spread it with a roller. “Now just relax and let me do it,” the big man said, pressing Diener’s fingers into the ink and rolling them one at a time onto the card. His voice was soft. Diener, remembering the fists thudding into his ribs, felt relief shake his knees.

Patterson led him to one of the chairs, removing a pair of handcuffs from his belt. He fastened one link to the chair and pushed Diener’s sleeve back. The metal clicked, cold and irrevocable, around the bared wrist. A deep sigh of resignation wheezed through Diener’s nostrils.

Patterson, carrying the fingerprint card, paused to speak briefly with the two detectives and went out of the room. Diener hadn’t heard what had been said. He closed his eyes. The whiskey the girl had given him burned sourly at the back of his throat. His body and his head ached.

Don’t get sick. He’s not mad anymore. Maybe he’ll let me go. He seems like a nice guy. Don’t get sick. He might get sore again if I puke here. Maybe he’ll let me go. He repeated it over and over to himself, like a kid praying. Maybe he’ll let me go.

He relived lying in bed when he was little, hearing his old man come in, mean drunk as usual, looking for somebody to beat up. He used to lie there, saying over and over to himself, “If I’m quiet, he won’t come in here.” Sometimes it had worked.

A half hour passed. The two men at the desks argued desultorily about Leo Durocher. Maybe he’ll let me go, Diener thought.

Then Patterson was back, standing over him. The handcuffs came off. “Comeon, Elroy,” Patterson said. Diener rose and followed the broad, beautifully tailored back down the stairs and into the street.

Patterson paused by his car, a big man with thick healthy hair, coatless against the chill night. “There’s a bar around the corner on Third,” he told Diener. “You want a beer?”

Diener nodded dumbly.

In the half-empty bar, Patterson slid into a booth and held up two fingers to the waiter. “A pair of brews.”

The little Puerto Rican grinned and said, “Si, Teem.”

Patterson watched thoughtfully while Diener poured the beer into his burning throat. “It’s a good thing for you, you didn’t lie to me,” he said at last. “I called headquarters after I got a classification on your prints. You don’t have any record. What did you think you were doing up there tonight?”

Diener flushed and lowered his eyes to the table top. “I–I don’t know. It’s crazy, all that stuff I told her. I just wanted to meet her, I guess.” A wild hope was running through Diener. Maybe he’ll let me go, if I can just make him see what it’s like. “I can never talk to girls when I meet them. An ugly guy like me. I’m too shy.” He moved his head abruptly to look Patterson in the eye. “I’m thirty-four. I never had a girl in my life without paying her for it!”

Patterson was nodding his head attentively. He grinned. “No romance without the finance, eh? Well, we all pay them for it, one way or another.”

Patterson had even white teeth, deep dimples. Diener thought, he could be a movie star, or on TV. A big shot. I wonder why he stays just a cop? He’s the kind of guy everybody likes, right off, man or woman...

Aloud, Diener said: “But with me it’s always been just streetwalkers. ‘Five dollars, please.’ Wham! Bam! ‘Thank you, ma’am!’ I guess that’s why I call up all those models out of the magazines when I can find their names in the phone book. They don’t know what I look like, and I feel, you know, bolder...”

Patterson’s eyes were thoughtful. The big man sipped his beer and asked, “Where do you work?”

Diener told him the name of the restaurant chain that employed him and the location of the store he worked in.

“What d’yuh do?” Patterson asked, and after Diener told him that he was a short order cook, “What shift you got?”

“Midnight to eight,” Diener said.

Patterson sipped his beer silently for a minute. Abruptly, he said: “Linda Land’s my first cousin. She’s been getting phone calls from some creep who says he wants to marry her. Sometimes he even hangs around the entrance of her apartment building. He’s threatened to throw acid in her face if she doesn’t see him. She had a police guard for awhile, but nothing happened and it was taken off.”

“I never did — said — anything like that,” Diener choked, panic charging at him again.

“That’s why I was there tonight. Hoping that guy would call up and I could set up a trap for him. But you showed up instead.” Patterson drummed his fingers irritably on the table, his eyes growing hard. “You know I could get you a sixer on Riker’s Island for tonight’s work, don’t you? How would you like shoveling stiffs into pauper’s field for six months?”

“Lieutenant — uh, lieutenant,” Diener began, but whatever he was going to say clogged and died in his throat.

“That’s what you’re going to get, and I’ll see to it personally. Unless you help me out.” His hard eyes caught Diener’s and held them. “This creep, whoever he is, wouldn’t have the guts to try anything with Linda unless she was alone. But, by God, I can’t be with her every minute of the day. That’s where you could help.

“I’ll give you a chance, Elroy. You seem like a pretty good guy. I like you. Whenever anything comes up where she has to leave the house, and I can’t be with her — you could keep her company.” Patterson leaned his big body across the table until his face was inches from Diener’s. “Now is that such a hell of a lot to ask, when I’m saving you from doing a six month’s bit?”

Relief seeped through Diener. He thought of the warmth in Linda’s eyes and a tingling excitement began to grow in him. “Hell, you can count on me for that. It’ll be a pleasure.”

Patterson smiled. “Just stay home where she can get you on the phone.” Suddenly, he held out his big hand to Diener. “Let’s shake on it.”

The call came the next night at five-thirty. The landlady called through the door: “Phone for you!” Diener dashed to the wall-box.

“Elroy?” It was Linda’s voice. She was breathless. “Thank God!”

“Where are you? What’s the matter?” The sound of his name on her lips had been like the clash of cymbals to Diener.

“I’m at the Rouge et Noir. It’s a restaurant.” She gave him an address in the East Sixties. Her voice grew hushed with fear. “Elroy, he’s outside, waiting for me. I saw him. I’ve been trying to phone my cousin Tim, but he’s on duty somewhere.”

“I–I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

“Thank God you’re coming!” Her voice was on the thin edge of hysteria.

Diener delayed long enough to don his last clean shirt and his freshly pressed suit. There was a singing elation in him as he dashed out of the room with the worn raincoat under his arm.

Diener flung two dollar bills at the cab driver and stepped out into the rain that had been falling steadily since noon. The Rouge et Noir was the second door from the corner. A short flight of stairs between two potted evergreen plants led down to a canopied entrance. It was in the dim shadow of the awning that he found Linda. Her face was pale beneath the Hood of her rain cape.

“I think he’s up there on the sidewalk waiting for me to come out.” Her arms trembled beneath his hands. “Move over there and watch for him. A gray-haired man about fifty. In a blue trench coat.”

Diener went to the opposite end of the canopy. Shrugging into his raincoat, he was aware of leaded windows to his right, with smartly dressed women and successful-looking men talking across the candle-lit tables behind them.

Diener felt uneasy. Patterson had said “that creep” would never try anything against Linda unless she were alone. But how could he be sure? Diener’s flesh crawled at the thought of acid splashing into his face. Above them, pedestrians were streaming by. Cabs crept along in the slow crosstown traffic. “Let’s get out of here,” Diener called to the girl hoarsely.

The girl held her wrist watch close to her face as she bent toward the light from the restaurant windows. “No! Wait a few minutes!”

A cab angled to the curb. Diener saw the passenger leaning forward to pay the driver. Diener moved closer to Linda. “Let’s take that cab and get out of here,” he pleaded. Then he saw the man as he stepped out of the cab. A man carrying a light suitcase. A man about fifty, with gray hair showing under his homburg. A man in a blue trench coat.

Diener felt the girl behind him, her arms going around his waist. “Him! Him! It’s him!” she breathed against his ear. The cab began to slide off. The man in the trench coat bent to pick up his bag, and saw them. A smile touched his face. “Linda!” he called.

Something between Diener’s arm and side spat flame and noise twice. Utter disbelief showed on the gray-haired man’s face. Then the man spun slowly on his right heel and crumpled backwards into the gutter. A tall cop in a rain-wet slicker that shone like a gun-barrel charged savagely around the cab. The girl behind Diener pressed something hot and metallic into Diener’s hand.

The oncoming cop slipped at the wet curb and went to his knees. He roared a curse and flame blossomed from his hand. Diener heard glass tinkling behind his shoulder. The uniformed cop’s face was that of Lieutenant Timothy Patterson. Naked murder blazed in his eyes. Diener whirled away from Linda, into the restaurant.

He saw a blur of startled faces, men half-raised from their chairs, women with hands at their rounded mouths. Then he was tearing between the tables, away from the man behind him. A hand snagged his coat and he slashed at the face above it with the hot weight in his hand.

Behind him, above the screams and babble, he could hear Patterson’s roar: “Get down, damn it! Get out of the way!”

Diener was at the end of the room. Swinging doors to his right. The kitchen — no escape there. At his left, the entrance to a dim, oak-paneled bar. More startled faces gaping at him, but beyond them Diener saw a door and the blessed crowds of Madison Avenue. Head down, he plunged for the bar and the outside.

The cool rain struck his face. He heard a woman scream. Then he was dashing heedlessly into the traffic. Horns blared wildly and tires screeched, but he was across the avenue and around the corner. Diener thrust the gun into a pocket and sprinted down the long block to Fifth Avenue and the dark immensity of Central Park.

Later, heart pounding and stomach twisted into a sour knot, Diener sat in the sheltering gloom of the newsreel theatre in Grand Central Station and wondered how he had ever managed to get there. He had flung himself down the subway stairs at Columbus Circle, not able to believe he was escaping, that Patterson was lost somewhere behind him. Then the Times Square Station and the shuttle to Grand Central, because it was the safest place he could think of.

Diener slumped in his seat and shut his eyes against the sickness and fear welling up from his viscera. He couldn’t think. He didn’t want to think. He didn’t want ever to think again. He wanted to die.

The theatre closed at midnight. Diener slunk out to the newsstand in the waiting room. His hand was sweaty on the gun as he read the Mirror’s headline:

Diener bought a copy and locked himself in a pay toilet in the men’s room.

The rest of the story was mainly biographical details of the dead man. Diener read automatically through it, understanding not a word.

Diener sat on the toilet seat an hour, aching for death. He understood it all, now. The trap Patterson had laid for him in the apartment the night before, the phony trip to the police station to instill the fear of prosecution in him. He realized now how Patterson had used him — Patterson and Linda. He wondered how long they’d been planning to kill Land, and how long they’d had to wait for a sucker like him to come along.

The big cop had maneuvered him into a hopeless spot. There were a hundred diners in the restaurant who would swear he killed Land. There was no money for him to run anywhere. He could not even go back to his room. Patterson would long since have made an anonymous phone call that would send the homicide men racing there to wait for him. And he couldn’t go to work. Patterson wanted him dead. And wanted it fast.

There were pictures in the Mirror fallen to the floor between his feet. White-coated men rolling Land on a stretcher. Linda, beautiful and tragic, being led away. Patterson, in his shiny slicker, talking to a deputy commissioner, the movie star face grim.

Diener thought of all he had read of Harry Silver’s hired cops and their lush pickings. That explained why Patterson, so handsome, so likeable, fore-ordained to success and beautiful women, had been only a policeman. And after that bonanza ended, he had stayed a cop — just long enough to find someone to frame for Land’s death. Because he wanted Land’s money and Land’s woman.

A strong, confused anger began to grow in Diener. Part of it was Patterson — Patterson, who was everything Diener was not, and still had to be a cheat. And another part of it was never having a woman he hadn’t bought first. Patterson said: “We all pay them for it, one way or another.” Well, he had payed Linda...

Diener left the toilet cubicle and went up the stairs to the rain of Lexington Avenue. He began the long walk up to the Eighties. It was worth it.

It was two-thirty when he stood across from Linda’s building, the angry picture of what he had coming to him still clear in his mind. But the doubts were beginning to gnaw at him. How could he get past the doorman? Could he make Linda open the apartment door? Maybe Patterson would be there — with a gun.

A low black Thunderbird turned into the silent street and stopped at the building’s canopy. Diener watched a bulky uniformed figure crawl out from beneath the wheel, and cursed his own hesitation. It was the doorman. A moment earlier, he could have walked through the empty lobby to the elevator, unchallenged.

The doorman crossed the sidewalk to the lobby entrance. Seconds later, a slender girl in a rain cape emerged from the building, her walk unsteady. Diener’s heart hammered as he recognized her. Linda! He crossed quickly over the glistening macadam, tore open the sports car’s right hand door and slid inside, just as she released the handbrake.

Linda’s scarlet mouth came open and she made a little choking sound. The dark pupils of her eyes grew glaringly large, and the drunkeness ebbed swiftly out of them.

Diener laughed. “Go ahead,” he told her. The eveness of his voice surprised him. “You’re going to meet him, aren’t you?”

Her jaw made its characteristic nervous chewing motions and she stared at Diener mutely. The terror was rising in her visibly. Diener struck her roughly on the shoulder with the heel of his hand. “Go ahead,” he ordered. The Thunderbird moved away from the curb, began to roll slowly down the deserted street.

A light caught her at the first corner. The hands on the wheel were white-knuckled with tension and she moved her head stiffly to watch him out of the coiners of her eyes. Her soft fluid body had grown rigid with fear. “Don’t hurt me,” she was praying. “It wasn’t my idea. I only told him about you calling me up all the time. He was the one who thought up the scheme.”

Diener scarcely heard her, wondering where he could take her. Not one of those grimy little hotels off Times Square. There was that motel he had seen on the way up to White Plains. Could he find it? Would they have an empty now?

A sudden thought pricked him. “Where are you going now? Are you going to meet him?” he asked her.

The girl nodded earnestly. “Uh-huh. Yes. At my old apartment.” The words came tumbling frantically out of her. “I always kept it, so we would have a place to meet when my husband was in town.” Linda licked her lips. “It’s him you want, Elroy. Not me. He’s coming there. I talked to him on the phone. They’re taking him up to the Bronx to look at a stick-up suspect. Of course he knows it isn’t you, but he had to go along...”

“Where is this place of yours?”

“Oh. Down in the Village. Nothing real nice, but discreet. A separate entrance on one of those little side streets.”

Diener leaned back with a lordly grin. “Take me there.”

The rain had ceased to fall when Linda turned the Thunderbird into Gay Street, a. crooked little lane off Waverly Place. She braked the car at the curb and sat motionless, staring straight out over the wheel. Watching her, Diener saw a thick tear run down the curve of her cheek. Her breath had filled the car with the heavy smell of whiskey.

“Are you going to kill me, Elroy?” she asked.

“No.”

“Oh, thank God,” the girl said. “Thank God.”

Diener twisted in the scat to look up and down the tiny block. Patterson’s black and yellow Buick was nowhere in sight. In her fright, she was probably telling him the truth.

Linda said: “He won’t be here for hours yet — honey.”

Diener grinned tightly and slid out of the car behind her.

Linda turned a key in a heavy green door, in the wall of a brick building built flush to the narrow sidewalk. Diener put his foot against the door, moved through it with his body touching hers.

Diener shut the door, twisted the snap lock as the girl found a wall switch. They were in a good-sized one-room basement apartment. Diener stood on the narrow landing with its cast-iron railing, watched the girl go shakily down the three steps into the room.

She turned nervously to face him. But Diener continued to study the room silently, enjoying the girl’s fear. A kitchenette, a bathroom door were at his left. Over-stuffed chairs and big drum-shaded lamps crowded the carpeted portion of the room.

Linda moved to a green fold-away bed against the wall, pulled it open. She tore the raincoat off her, turned to face him. She wore blue brocade pajamas. The jacket hung straight down from the twin points of her breasts, inches away from her belly, like a curtain.

“You — you aren’t going to kill me, Elroy?”

Diener’s laugh was half sneer. He came down the three stairs, watching the panic race behind Linda’s eyes. She said: “I—, You—,” and then, “Honey,” and threw her slender body into his arms. Diener felt her hands under his coat, her nails sharp in his back as she hugged herself to him, her body tight against his.

Her mouth was warm and wet against his throat. “Don’t hurt me,” she was praying. “It wasn’t my idea.” She moved her lips to his ear. Linda was fighting the only way she knew how.

“I told him he shouldn’t do it to you.” Her breath was a flame in his ear. “I told him you were just a shy, helpless guy. I told him you were just backward with girls. You just need one that understands you.”

Her thighs moved strongly, insistently, against Diener’s. He took his hands from the raincoat pockets and put them hungrily on her arched back, feeling the stiff cloth slide on her flesh. He still held the gun. It was a snub-nosed .38. It was the first time Diener had really seen it.

Linda’s hands were exerting a different pressure on his back now. They were pulling, moving him toward the bed. Diener allowed her to move him. “You’ve been payed, tramp,” he thought.

“I’ll understand you, Elroy. Always. I’ll help you. We can run away. I’ve got money. I want a man like you to make love to me. Make love to me, Elroy.”

They half-fell onto the bed. Diener held the gun loosely, the muzzle at the girl’s temple. She knew it was there. Her mouth was open, mobile and frantic under his...

She raised cool fingertips to his temples. Gently she squeegeed the perspiration from the short hairs there and laughed up at him. Diener kissed her — without passion now, almost absently — and raised himself from her body.

Patterson came at four-thirty. Diener got up from his chair and stood behind the door when he heard the car, knowing it was his and no other’s. He listened to the slam of the Buick’s door and Patterson’s quick, light heels crossing the walk; he could imagine the big policeman feeling pleasantly tired now, but satisfied with the night’s work, exulting over the widow who was his now.

Linda lay on the rumpled bed, her naked back to the door, as if asleep. No blood showed where the two bullets had entered the thick brunette hair, just above her left ear.

Patterson’s key ground in the lock, and Diener thought: come into the parlor, said the spi—

He came in with his trench coat open, a brown pork pie hat in his hand, chuckling drily at the blazing lamps and the naked girl waiting for him. In the next second, bending over the bed, seeing the girl was dead, he sensed Diener behind him.

Patterson whirled. His jaw dropped. Then he smiled at Diener. How quickly he smiles, Diener thought.

“Leave your gun alone!” Diener shrieked. Aiming carefully, he put the last two bullets into Patterson’s big thigh.

The red-headed man clutched his leg just above the knee. Blood spurted between his fingers. He groaned. As Patterson fell to the floor, Diener wiped the gun clean and threw it at him. Then he watched Patterson slowly twist himself upright against Linda’s bed, lifting his wounded leg like a log. His courage ran out of him with his blood. His eyes looked like Linda’s had looked, pleading, frantic.

“How’d you get here?” Patterson groaned. Outside, Diener could hear a window slide up, a woman’s voice calling, distant, frightened. He pulled the door open, looked out. The short block to Waverly was empty.

He cast a glance over his shoulder. Patterson, rocking back and forth on the floor with set teeth and sick eyes, could never leave without help. And Patterson could never explain the dead girl there beside him, the empty gun, nor Land’s death.

Diener sucked in a deep breath of the night air, flung himself through the door of the apartment. Within two minutes, he was rocketing away on a Sixth Avenue express. He felt no elation, only the remembered terror of the rabbit who has somehow managed to squeeze out of the trap.