The poetic justice of it must have appealed to him. Once again I had set myself up nicely for him, and once again he did not have to kill me. Easier by far merely to kill the girl, to leave me just where I had been before, and then to fly back to California while I was left with a murder rap I could not possibly shake, PLAYGIRL SLAYER DOES IT AGAIN. And doesn’t get out through a loophole this time, but gets the chair instead.
Of course it didn’t have to be him. It might have been any of the others on my list, each supplied with a hazy conjectural motive. But at the moment I liked the way he checked out. There was a pattern to it all, and I could see the pattern clearly.
His name-
I had Gwen’s last letter somewhere around my own room. Some masochistic impulse had made me keep it in prison, so that I could read it over from time to time to remind myself that I no longer had a wife, among other things. I couldn’t remember the damned name. I paced around and smoked cigarettes and closed my eyes in an attempt to bring the letter into focus, and I couldn’t get hold of it I needed his name and address for a starting place. It was all in the letter, and the letter was in a cardboard carton full of letters and books and such, and the carton was in the closet in my apartment on East Ninth Street, and I couldn’t go there, I didn’t dare go there.
They would certainly have the place staked out The police are not fools, and they know that criminals all too frequently try to go home, however unsafe it is. There was sure to be a prowl car on permanent stakeout outside my building, maybe even a cop perched on a chair in the hallway. And, even if the stakeout had been lifted or never established in the first place, there were still my neighbors to be considered. Neighbors in New York are traditionally anxious not to get involved, and those in my neighborhood have little love for the police, but I was no ordinary criminal, I was the mad playgirl slayer, and if someone spotted me there was a better than average chance that the police would be called.
Of course Gwen’s sister would know. I looked her up in the Manhattan book, and there was no listing. Which meant that she had moved out of the city or married someone new or switched to an unlisted number or died-any number of things could happen in all those years.
In any event, I didn’t think she would welcome me with open arms.
I left the hotel. I took a bus downtown to Tenth Street and walked east. It was dangerous, but so was sitting still, and I was impatient to get something in motion. The odds that Gwen’s husband had had anything to do with the murders were long, true. Yet as long as the possibility existed I couldn’t think along any other lines. All I could do was try to remember the bastard’s name.
I walked my old-man walk, and I stayed in the shadows and turned my face toward the buildings when people approached. I was half a block away when I saw the patrol car. The stakeout was in no sense a subtle one. They hadn’t even used an unmarked car. A regular squad car was parked in front of my building and there were two plainclothes cops in it.
I gave up and turned around and walked away. I got to the corner, and then I remembered the fire escape.
I circled the block and entered a tenement on Tenth Street that, with any luck at all, would be more or less opposite my own building. I got into the front door by ringing an upstairs bell, and then I got to the basement and worked my way into the furnace room at the rear. There was a window facing out on the airshaft between that building and my own. I wedged myself between the furnace and the window. I couldn’t get the damned thing open and I was afraid to smash it.
Then I heard glass breaking somewhere nearby, and recognized the sound-the residents of the Lower East Side lighten their garbage disposal problem by habitually chucking empty beer and wine bottles out the window. The tinkle of breaking glass never alarms anyone.
It would take, I should think, a keen ear to distinguish between the shattering of a window pane and the implosion of a wine bottle. So I took off a shoe and smashed the window to bits. I knocked all the glass from the frame, then stood waiting, putting my shoe on once again. I listened carefully, and as far as I could tell no one had shown the slightest interest in the sound of breaking glass.
I cut my hand climbing through the window. Nothing serious, just a small shard of glass my shoe had failed to dislodge.
I found the fire escape. It ended at the second floor, out of reach from the ground, so that burglars would not be able to climb it. I stood beside it for a moment, calculating just which window was mine. Then I found a garbage can and maneuvered it beneath the fire escape. By standing atop the can, I could just reach the bottom rung of the ladder.
Somewhere another idiot threw a bottle out his window (or lacked out a basement window, as far as that goes). I gripped the fire escape’s bottom rung and wondered just how much noise it would make if I swung up onto it. There was more reason to get into my place than Gwen’s letter. I could change my clothes-they rather needed changing-and I could probably pick up some pawnable possessions. The sailors’ ninety dollars would not last forever.
I sort of pulled and yanked and jumped, and I managed to swing up onto the fire escape. It made more noise than I’d hoped and less than I’d feared, which was fair enough. I went up a few flights. Someone came to a window and stared out but didn’t seem to see me. I reached my own apartment and I tried the window, and that window was also locked, Goddamn it.
I knocked the glass out with my shoe without first removing my foot. This time it didn’t sound like a bottle smashing. It sounded far more like a window being kicked in. I climbed through, and there was noise and movement in the building below me, and I turned on a light and found that the whole damn thing was a waste of time. They had stripped the place clean. Everything I owned was gone, no doubt tucked away in a police laboratory. It seemed a waste of time to check the closet but I did, and the carton of books and papers was gone.
I was at the window, one foot out one foot in, when the door to my apartment flew open behind me.
9
I WENT THROUGH THE WINDOW WHILE A VOICE SHOUTED “HALT!” behind me. I scampered down the fire escape, hoping they’d think I was nothing more dangerous than a burglar with a bad sense of direction, hoping they’d decide I wasn’t worth the trouble of an all-out chase. I kept going, and the voice shouted again, and I ignored it, and someone fired what I suppose were warning shots, two of them, echoing incredibly loud in the air shaft between the buildings.
I kept on going, expecting to be shot yet never even considering the possibility of giving myself up. It was not bravery. It just did not occur to me. I kept going, and I dropped from the bottom of the fire escape and hit the garbage can, and it skidded crazily out from under me. I landed badly, one leg doubled up under me, pain flickering in colored lights. Another pair of shots, and not for warning this time. One hit the garbage can. I ran. There was more shooting, a steady barrage of it, as I ran across to the window I had kicked in earlier. None of the bullets came particularly close. It was dark, and they had to shoot almost vertically, and I suppose that helped. I dove through the window, squeezed past the furnace, raced for the stairs. The door of the super’s apartment burst open in front of me and a huge Negro with a cloth cap and no shirt stepped out, blocking my way. I said, “Turk!” but of course it wasn’t Turk, it wasn’t anyone I had ever known.
I ran straight into him. We bounced off each other, and I made a fist and threw one enormous punch at him. If he had dodged it I am sure I would have fallen down. But he was as surprised as I, and my fist found what must have been precisely the right spot on his chin. His eyes went absolutely blank and he began falling in slow motion. I ran on, to the stairs, up the stairs, down the hall, out the door.