“In bed,” he said. “In bed you can call me Richie. When you’re in bed with me.”
She turned and looked at him. “You want me now?”
He nodded.
“Now?”
“Now.”
She started to come toward the bed and he stood up to take her into his arms. When he kissed her he sensed something that he couldn’t pin down, some uncertainty or anxiety, but he didn’t care to spend any time analyzing it. Anyway, it was gone when he kissed her a second time, and during the third kiss when they were lying together on top of the big bed he forgot that the uncertainty or anxiety had ever existed at all. He needed her very urgently and he could not wait this time, could not wait and do things nice and slow the way she usually liked to do things. He was in a hurry.
“Honey, you’ll rip my dress!”
“I’ll buy you a new one.”
The voice did not even sound like his own. And the hands that hurried with her clothing were much stronger, much more certain of themselves than his hands. The hands, the clever and hungry hands that touched that perfect body all over, they were not his hands at all.
He took her and it was good, very good. It was hard and tough and fast and the blood pounded against his brain. It was an affirmation, a declaration, and when it was over he felt not exhausted but reinvigorated, as if he had taken a vitamin pill instead of a woman.
Usually, after they had made love, he would lie limp and weak in the shelter of her arms. This time, however, he rolled away from her as soon as the initial glow had passed from him. He lay on his side, not facing her, and for some reason he did not want to look at her just then.
A moment later he was on his feet, drawing the covers over her nude body and heading for the bathroom. “I want to take a shower,” he called over his shoulder. “Then I’ll go see about the papers. You stay right here until I come back.”
He turned on the shower and stepped into the tub. From the bed Honour Mercy could hear the water pounding down in steady torrent. Then, above the roar of the shower, she heard another sound, one she had never heard before.
He was singing.
After the abortive phone call to Canelli, Joshua Crawford had sat at his desk for perhaps twenty-five seconds. Then, all at once, he sprang to his feet and hurried out of the office without saying goodbye to anybody. He hailed a cab and left it at the corner of Third Avenue and 24th Street in front of an establishment known only as HOCK SHOP. That was what the black letters on the dingy yellow clapboard proclaimed and that was what the three golden balls were there to signify. That was enough.
The owner, a round-shouldered man with thick glasses who looked like all pawnbrokers everywhere, was speedily persuaded to sell a .38-caliber police positive revolver to one John Brown for the sum of two hundred dollars. The pawnbroker, who had bought the gun from a sneak thief for ten dollars, was pleased with the transaction. Joshua Crawford, who didn’t give much of a damn what the gun cost him, was equally pleased. He put the gun in his briefcase, tucked the case under his arm, and strode out of the store.
He called Selma from a pay station in a candy store two doors down the street. “I’m working late,” he told her, hardly caring whether or not she believed him. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Another cab took him to Grand Central. He bought a ticket on the Empire State, boarded the train and collapsed into a coach seat. The train seemed to crawl and the briefcase on his lap weighed a ton but he lived through the trip without knowing just how he managed it. It was a few minutes to nine when he was on his way out of the Albany terminal with the briefcase once again under his arm.
Finding them, he knew, was going to be a problem. He had to nose them out all on his own, and he had to do it without attracting any undue attention, and this was not going to be the easiest thing in the world. Then, when he did find them, he had to get to Richie without Honour Mercy seeing him. Then, and only then, he had to put a bullet into Richie, a bullet that would forever eliminate Richie as any sort of competition whatsoever.
Then he had to get away. If nobody saw him and if he got clear of the scene of the crime, then he ought to be safe all the way. There was no connection between him and Richie other than Honour Mercy, and it was extremely unlikely that she would have any suspicion at all that he had killed Richie. The gun was untraceable. The anonymity of a coach seat on the Empire was complete.
But the big thing went beyond guns and witnesses. It was simply that the police would never suspect him, and unless they started investigating him, they would have to leave the crime forever unsolved. If they had any idea it was him, they would get him in no time, no matter how much trouble he took in covering his trail. That was why murderers got caught — because they had motives for their murders. If a man had no motive, or if his motive was sufficiently obscure, getting away with murder was a lot easier than it sounded.
But first he had to find them. And before that he had to eat — there was no point in killing a man on an empty stomach. He went to Keeler’s, on State Street, because it was supposed to be the best restaurant in Albany. The steak they brought him was tender and juicy and the baked potato was powdery with a crisp skin. The coffee fit the three traditional tests — it was black as hell, strong as death, and sweet as love. He had three cups of it and felt one hell of a lot better when the caffeine got to work on his system.
It was almost ten when he left the restaurant. The night was cold and clear, the streets virtually empty. He started walking downtown on State Street, wondering just how he was going to find that idiot Parsons, when, impossibly, he saw him.
At first he did not believe it. For one thing, the guy a block ahead of him wasn’t walking like Richie had walked. His head was held high and his shoulders were back; there was even a certain amount of spring to his step. That didn’t jibe with the picture Crawford had of him.
But it was Richie. Crawford got a look at his face when he stopped to study a window display at a sporting goods store, and there was no longer any question in his mind. It was Richie, and Richie was just standing there waiting to be killed, and now all he had to do was catch up with him and take the revolver from the briefcase and blow a hole in Richie Parsons’ head.
Which would be a pleasure.
But how?
He kept following Richie, staying about a block behind him, hoping he would leave the main street and find himself a nice quiet alley to get shot in. That would be the best way, the easiest way all around. Shooting him dead on State Street would be a pretty tricky proposition, especially since the damned gun didn’t have a silencer. He had tried to buy a silencer, but that ass of a pawnbroker hadn’t had one to sell him. When the gun went off, it was going to sound like a cannon, and State Street was hardly the place to shoot off a cannon.
When Richie went into the Conning Towers Hotel, Crawford felt like crying. But there wasn’t a hell of a lot he could do about it. He had missed his chance for the night, but there was always a chance that he would get a crack at Richie in the morning, or later on if the two of them didn’t go back to New York the next day. The identification Richie had come for might take a while to prepare, in which case Richie Parsons would never leave Albany alive. If Crawford never got another chance at him, then Canelli could have the job in the city and Crawford would do the fingering. That would be safer in the long run, anyhow, even though there was a certain personal satisfaction in doing the job on his own.