“Get dressed, sister. We have to go for a ride in the rain. Okey?”
The girl stared at Malvern now. He shrugged, smiled a little, spread his hands.
“That’s how it is, angel. Might as well fall in line.”
The lines of her face got thin and contemptuous. She said slowly: “You... you—” Her voice trailed off into a sibilant, meaningless mutter. She went across the room stiffly and out of it into the bedroom.
The albino slipped a cigarette between his sharp lips, chuckled with a wet, gurgling sound, as if his mouth was full of saliva.
“She don’t seem to like you, rube.”
Malvern frowned. He walked slowly to the writing desk, leaned his hips against it, stared at the floor.
“She thinks I sold her out,” he said dully.
“Maybe you did, rube,” the albino drawled.
Malvern said: “Better watch her. She’s neat with a gun.”
His hands, reaching casually behind him on the desk, tapped the top of it lightly, then without apparent change of movement folded the leather photo frame down on its side and edged it under the blotter.
8
There was a padded arm rest in the middle of the rear seat of the car, and Malvern leaned an elbow on it, cupped his chin in his hand, stared through the half-misted windows at the rain. It was thick white spray in the headlights, and the noise of it on the top of the car was like drum-fire very far off.
Jean Adrian sat on the other side of the arm rest, in the corner. She wore a black hat and a gray coat with tufts of silky hair on it, longer than caracul and not so curly. She didn’t look at Malvern or speak to him.
The albino sat on the right of the thick dark man, who drove. They went through silent streets, past blurred houses, blurred trees, the blurred shine of street lights. There were Neon signs behind thick curtains of mist. There was no sky.
Then they climbed and a feeble arc light strung over an intersection threw light on a sign post, and Malvern read the name “Court Street.”
He said softly: “This is woptown, Critz. The big guy can’t be so dough-heavy as he used to be.”
Light flickered from the albino’s eyes as he glanced back. “You should know, rube.”
The car slowed in front of a big frame house with a trellised porch, walls finished in round shingles, blind, lightless windows. Across the street a stencil sign on a brick building built sheer to the sidewalk said: “Paolo Perrugini Funeral Parlors.”
The car swung out to make a wide turned into a gravel driveway. Lights splashed into an open garage. They wait in, slid to a stop beside a big shiny undertaker’s ambulance.
The albino snapped: “All out!”
Malvern said: “I see our next trip is all arranged for.”
“Funny guy,” the albino snarled. “A wise monkey.”
“Uh-huh. I just have nice scaffold manners,” Malvern drawled.
The dark man cut the motor and snapped on a big flash, then cut the lights, got out of the car. He shot the beam of the flash up a narrow flight of wooden steps in the corner. The albino said:
“Up you go, rube. Push the girl ahead of you. I’m behind with my rod.”
Jean Adrian got out of the car past Malvern, without looking at him. She went up the steps stiffly, and the three men made a procession behind her.
There was a door at the top. The girl opened it and hard white light came out at them. They went into a bare attic with exposed studding, a square window in front and rear, shut tight, the glass painted black. A bright bulb hung on a drop cord over a kitchen table and a big man sat at the table with a saucer of cigarette butts at his elbow. Two of them still smoked.
A thin loose-lipped man sat on a bed with a Luger beside his left hand. There was a worn carpet on the floor, a few sticks of furniture, a half-open clapboard door in the corner through which a toilet seat showed, and one end of a big old-fashioned bathtub standing up from the floor on iron legs.
The man at the kitchen table was large but not handsome. He had carroty hair and eyebrows a shade darker, a square aggressive face, a strong jaw. His thick lips held his cigarette brutally. His clothes looked as if they had cost a great deal of money and had been slept in.
He glanced carelessly at Jean Adrian, said around the cigarette:
“Park the body, sister. Hi, Malvern. Gimme that rod, Lefty, and you boys drop down below again.”
The girl went quietly across the attic and sat down in a straight wooden chair. The man on the bed stood up, put the Luger at the big man’s elbow on the kitchen table. The three gunmen went down the stairs, leaving the door open.
The big man touched the Luger, stared at Malvern, said sarcastically:
“I’m Doll Conant. Maybe you remember me.”
Malvern stood loosely by the kitchen table, with his legs spread wide, his hands in his overcoat pockets, his head tilted back. His half-closed eyes were sleepy, very cold.
He said: “Yeah. I helped my dad hang the only rap on you that ever stuck.”
“It didn’t stick, mugg. Not with the Court of Appeals.”
“Maybe this one will,” Malvern said carelessly. “Kidnaping is apt to be a sticky rap in this State.”
Conant grinned without opening his lips. His expression was grimly good-humored. He said:
“Let’s not barber. We got business to do and you know better than that last crack. Sit down — or rather take a look at Exhibit One first. In the bathtub, behind you. Yeah, take a look at that. Then we can get down to tacks.”
Malvern turned, went across to the clapboard door, pushed through it. There was a bulb sticking out of the wall, with a keyswitch. He snapped it on, bent over the tub.
For a moment his body was quite rigid and his breath was held rigidly. Then he let it out very slowly, and reached his left hand back and pushed the door almost shut. He bent farther over the big iron tub.
It was long enough for a man to stretch out in, and a man was stretched out in it, on his back. He was fully dressed even to a hat, although his hat didn’t look as if he had put it on himself. He had thick gray-brown curly hair. There was blood on his face and there was a gouged, red-rimmed hole at the inner corner of his left eye.
He was Shenvair and he was long since dead.
Malvern sucked in his breath and straightened slowly, then suddenly bent forward still further until he could see into the space between the tub and the wall. Something blue and metallic glistened down there in the dust. A blue steel gun. A gun like Shenvair’s gun.
Malvern glanced back quickly. The not quite shut door showed him a part of the attic, the top of the stairs, one of Doll Conant’s feet square and placid on the carpet, under the kitchen table. He reached his arm out slowly down behind the tub, gathered the gun up. The four exposed chambers had steel-jacketed bullets in them.
Malvern opened his coat, slipped the gun down inside the waistband of his trousers, tightened his belt, and buttoned his coat again. He went out of the bathroom, shut the clapboard door carefully.
Doll Conant gestured at a chair across the table from him: “Sit down.”
Malvern glanced at Jean Adrian. She was staring at him with a kind of rigid curiosity, her eyes dark and colorless in a stone white face under the black hat.
He gestured at her, smiled faintly. “It’s Mister Shenvair, angel. He met with an accident. He’s — dead.”
The girl stared at him without any expression at all. Then she shuddered once, violently. She stared at him again, made no sound of any kind.