“I sure do,” she said. “I caught the devil for that.” She yawned and stretched. “Guess I better get back to my bed, Hank. Sweet dreams.”
I waited until she crossed the room, put her hand on the knob. Then I spoke up in a tight, strained voice.
“Just exactly who are you? You aren’t Betty Lafferty.”
I could have counted slowly to ten before she answered.
“What kind of a joke is this, Hank?” she laughed and said.
“It isn’t a joke. Who are you?”
As she walked back toward the bed, I reached up and clicked on the bed lamp. There was no expression on her usually cheerful face. She sat on the bed again, even though somehow I didn’t want her so close.
“I needed a job,” she said. “I wanted to work for somebody like you. I went to your old neighborhood and talked to the people who are still there that knew you. I wanted to pretend that I was from the same section. It would give me a chance to talk to you. By accident I found out about Betty Lafferty. She moved away when she was eleven and you were thirteen. She was killed in England during the war. I memorized a lot of stuff and came to see you and told you I was Betty Lafferty. It worked. Is there anything wrong with that?”
I wanted to be fair. “You could have told me of your own accord, Betty, or whatever your name is,” I said. “You knew a month after you came with me that I was satisfied and that I would have kept you on and probably laughed at the trick you played on me. Why did you wait so long? You came to work for me six months ago.”
Her face looked doughy, the eyes lifeless and dull. “I would have come to you much sooner, Miss Ryan. It took a little time to find you, you know. Your press releases call you Laura Lynn. I suppose you were trying to hide behind that name.”
“What do you mean?”
“I suppose you didn’t want to be known as Henrietta Ryan, after what happened. I didn’t get to you soon enough, you know. I didn’t have the money to follow you to Chicago.” Her voice was as lifeless as her face.
“What on earth are you talking about?”
“I didn’t want to tell you to your face. But I might as well. It doesn’t make any difference, I suppose. I wanted it to be quick.”
“You wanted what to be quick?” The fear was like something black and velvety that was slowly beginning to fill my throat.
“My name is Carla Planck. Ever hear of George Planck?” Her lips pulled back from her teeth in an odd grin.
I had heard of the name, somewhere. I repeated it softly. George Planck. Of course! George Planck was one of those fur robbers. George Planck was the one that died two hours before Dad did.
Betty saw by my face that I remembered.
“He was my brother,” she said softly. “I thought about it for a long time. George would never do that sort of thing. I was his kid sister. I was by his bed when he died. He told me before he died that he was trying to help your father catch some thieves and your father shot him.”
I tried to laugh. “He was trying to make you feel good. His prints were all over the gun he killed my father with.”
She didn’t pay any attention. “I was glad your father died. But it wasn’t enough. The police department told your mother he was a hero. She believed it. I prayed for her to die too. Then I stopped praying and I followed her wherever she went. One day I was behind her at the edge of a subway platform. Nobody would think that a little fat fourteen year old girl would do what I did. That’s how I got away with it. She screamed as she fell.”
I knew then that Carla Planck was completely mad. Her mouth twitched. Her fingers constantly curled and uncurled.
“By the time I came after you, you were gone. Part of your father lives in you, you know. You have no right to live. For nine years I’ve been waiting to kill you, Miss Ryan.”
I wanted her to keep talking. I was afraid of what would happen when she stopped.
“Why didn’t you do it when you first came to work for me?” I asked quickly.
“Because I’d be suspected. I want to go on living. After you die, I can begin to live.”
“But if you kill me in a locked apartment, they’ll get you for it.”
“Not if I open the window afterward, they won’t.” She smiled proudly. “Those two men think the window was opened once. I planted that in their minds. You have to be clever to kill. I know how to be clever.”
It was as though she wanted me to approve of her cleverness, to tell her that she was a bright kid. The gun Kim had given me was over on the bureau, a thousand miles away.
“How do you intend to do it?” I asked.
She looked at me with the dull blue eyes. “I guess I better strangle you.”
The fat hands reached suddenly for my throat. I hit her in the face with all my strength and screamed as I rolled toward the wall. I had hopes of being able to get away from her, but then her fat fingers closed on my wrist. She had the horrid, unbelievable strength of madness. I cried out with the pain, and tried to lift her and lower my head so I could bite her.
The other fat hand closed on my throat, and the world became a slowly swirling pool of darkness. A mile away glass tinkled thinly.
Then I could breathe. There was a hoarse shout, a loud explosion and a scream. It was a funny scream. It was as though somebody had stuck their head out of a moving car and screamed. It seemed to be carried away so suddenly. It ended in a squashy noise.
Somebody was close to me, breathing hard. I felt the faint touch of his breath. I wanted to tell him that it was a wonderful thing to be able to breathe and did they appreciate it?
And suddenly I was kissed. And that, in its way, was just as nice as breathing. So, to make certain that it would last an adequate length of time, I put my arms up and around the neck of someone who obviously had a neck built for the sole purpose of putting arms around.
The lips went away.
“Faker,” Kim said softly.
I looked up into his brown eyes. The wonderful glaze was there and I decided that I would become a specialist.
I would spend the best years of my life plotting exactly how to put that glaze there and how to keep it there.
Suddenly I remembered. I sat up and tried to ask a question. My voice didn’t work the first few times. Then I asked it. Kim sat on the edge of the bed.
“Baldy’s phoning your policeman friend, Dan. I had the silly idea that I could trap your visitor by hiding on the roof where I could watch the fire escape platform outside this window. I was up there when you screamed. I made good time coming down. I kicked the window out and came through. She let go of you and raced for the gun. She got there first. I knocked it out of her hand as she fired it at me. She missed. When I went after it, she went toward the window. She might have been all right except that I was waiting on the roof with a piece of pipe I picked out of the trash in front of this place. I left the pipe on the fire escape. She must have stepped on it.”
I shuddered. I clung to him, looking through tear-misted eyes toward the bedroom door.
Baldy appeared in the door, wiping his forehead with his handkerchief. He looked wryly at us. “People, you are looking at a guy with a defective judgment of the fair sex,” he said.
Kim’s voice was muffled by my hair. “Go out into the living room and sit down and maybe I’ll come and look at you,” he said. “I can’t right now.”
Baldy left.
Kim kissed me. “You make so much more money than I do, darling.”
“You shouldn’t let a thing like that bother you,” I answered softly.
He held me at arm’s length. “Bother me! Honey, I was just gloating.”
At that moment Dan knocked on the apartment door. Through the broken window I could hear heavy feet and low voices in the alley. The end of fear. Be gay, Hank. Be ready with the quick retort, the bright-colored, billboard charm.