Back in the living room, I lit a few more matches and snooped behind chairs and pawed around in drawers. An antique cherrywood desk held letters addressed to A. J. Keever, some bills with his name on them, half a dozen cigars wrapped in cellophane, plain white envelopes and some stamps in one of the pigeon-holes, several paper matchbooks with AJK on them and one from a New York hotel, a couple of old burned-out light bulbs and a handful of thumbtacks in one of the lower drawers. A lot of odds and ends. Nothing for me.
I didn’t hear a noise — I felt it.
There was a half open door in the wall to the left of the desk... I thought and tried and couldn’t remember if it had been closed before. I had no recollection of the door at all. Pain seared my fingers as the matchflame burned close to them and died.
I quit breathing again.
My shoes turned to lead. It took all the energy that I had left to lift them forward. When my groping had touched the door frame, I reached the other one into my pocket and gripped the butt of the thirty-two. My lungs caught on fire and my chest began to heave. I had to breathe. I felt up and down the wall inside the door, touched a switch, snapped it.
Keever was lying on the floor in his bedroom — dead.
Somebody had beaten the side of his face to a pulp. The shoulders of his coat were spattered with fresh blood. Blood matted his hair. There was blood on the carpet under his chin. He didn’t have any ear at all on the side I could see.
His face looked like fresh killed beef. It glistened wetly, dark red. I touched the door, opened it a little wider, without thinking to look behind it. Keever’s outflung hand was warm to the touch, but no pulse flickered in him.
This time I heard something, a step and the rustle of cloth, and remembered about looking behind doors. Then it was too late, of course. Something swished and thudded on top of my hat. I yelled. My hat fell off. The swishing noise came again. I tried to duck. I grabbed blindly at a pants-leg full of muscle and then a third blow landed on the side of my neck. Thunder rumbled in my head. The room turned over and the floor fell on top of me. I straightened my arms and tried to heave the floor off my chest but the room began to rock. Then the lights went out and the room rocked harder. It rocked itself right side up.
I stood up, groggily, took a step, banged my shins on something, moved in another direction, tripped over somebody’s leg, pitched forward and almost smashed my face on a bedpost. The post slid past my ear and caught me in the shoulder. More searing pain.
I got my feet untangled, after a while, and hauled myself onto the bed and sat on the edge of it until my head had cleared. Then I got up and toured cautiously around the dark heap on the floor and got the light back on.
Keever hadn’t moved. He was still quite dead.
I prodded once more for any sign of a pulse. The killer was messy but thorough. I backed away and got stiffly to my feet. Keever’s one unmashed eye stared bleakly at a spot on the carpet about a foot ahead of his nose. His big chin made a deep dent in the nap. Blood was still collecting in the dent. He was not long dead.
A black leather briefcase lay against the wall on the other side of the bed. Papers littered the floor around it. I wiped some blood off my hand on the bed and went around it and tried to read the scattered sheets without bending over. I was afraid if I bent over I would be sick. My head felt large and hollow and salty saliva was welling in my mouth. My jaws ached with it.
One corner of a velvet document protruded from the briefcase. I looked at it and thought about it. It seemed to be a photostat. Photostats have many uses. Huge corporations spend fortunes on photostats every year. Blackmailers never spend a dime on them — but they sometimes collect on them.
I swallowed hard and took a deep breath and bent over.
The brown document was a photostat of a marriage certificate. The ceremony had been performed in the state of Nevada, in some town with a name I’d never heard of. The girl’s name had been Helen Baird. The groom’s name was Duke Mazonik. After careful deliberation, I decided that Helen Baird’s legal married name must be Mrs. Duke Mazonik. It was still a little groggy.
Voices reached me from a long way off. I shook my head to clear it some more and the voices got louder — gruff voices, cop voices. Heavy feet thumped the patio stones in the court. I staggered to the light switch,
slapped it off.
I was in the kitchen when the door chimes sounded. I wondered how long it would take them to give that up and go on in to find Keever and then charge out the back after me. A lot less time than it would take me to reach the street at the end of the alley, probably. I closed the back door. The soft cool night breeze brushed the last of the cobwebs out of my brain. I went up the back stairs.
When the little Jap maid came into the kitchen and saw me, she yelped and fled back through the serving pantry. I plunged after her. The swing door hit me in the face and staggered me for a moment. Then I butted it open and jumped into Gall Tremaine’s living room and halted.
The hand that held the Luger was like a stone block. Behind the hand was a dark sleeve. The dark sleeve was part of a beautifully cut midnight blue dinner jacket with Lew Gannon inside of it.
We stood there for seconds, a few feet apart, and glared at each other like two stray cats that have come nose to nose at the end of a board fence.
He moved first. He put the Luger against my chest and patted me over and dug the sawed-off thirty-two out of my pocket. “You must own a regular arsenal,” he drawled, stepping backwards, away from me. The Luger muzzle made a slight arc in the air. “Better come in and explain yourself.”
He put the Luger away under his arm and shoved the thirty-two into his left side pocket and held it there. I went past him. Gail Tremaine came out of the bedroom in a strapless evening gown of pale blue. It was enough to make me forget the man with the guns — almost.
“It’s you,” she said coldly. “You frightened Mina half to death.”
“I didn’t mean to,” I told her. “I was in a hurry.”
“So are we,” Gannon said dryly. “What’s the idea?”
A smoky haze came between them and me. I rubbed the side of my face and shook my head from side to side. My legs began to tremble. I tottered to a chair and dropped into it. The smoky haze got thicker. Voices murmured. Glass tinkled on glass. A cloud of spicy fragrance wrapped itself around my head and a slim white hand with crimson fingernails held a drink under my nose. I grabbed the drink and gulped it. The gray fog evaporated.
“What’s the matter with you?” Gannon asked, sharply.
“It’s the high cost of living,” I said. “It gets me.”
“Save the gags,” he snapped.
“Living is a big problem,” I said. “Just staying alive. Too many guns. Too many hits in the head.”
“He sounds punchy.” Gail Tremaine said, and laughed harshly.
“A party is what I need. Let’s have a party.”
“We’re late for one now,” Gannon said. “Some people are waiting for us at the club. If you don’t feel like explaining the intrusion, then get going, but fast.”
“No,” I said. “Don’t rush me. A fellow I know got married. That was a long time ago, but I only just now found out about it. It and a little more. I owe him something. I owe you something. I owe your trigger something. I owe my landlord, my tailor and the finance company, too. Got to begin squaring accounts. Let’s go.”