Bill Piker had finished his test and removed the smooth coating of paraffin from Nancy Howell’s hands and examined it. “It’s perfectly clear,” he said. “There’s not a sign of nitrate.”
“That means...?” she asked.
“That means you haven’t shot a gun in the thirty-six to forty-eight hours.”
She turned to me. It was the first time I had ever seen her actually smile without shock or tears or terror in her eyes. And I thought then that she was completely beautiful. She had a clean, washed look that was almost spiritual. She took my hand in both of hers. “Thank you, Eddie! Thank you. Take me home now.”
At her front step I told her good-night. I had to go back to the paper and work. She said: “You’ve got time for one drink with me, Eddie. I feel so... so free. And it seems like years since I’ve felt that way. I want somebody to talk to.”
Well, I should have been at the paper for the last hour but, well... I went in with her.
We went into the living-room and Nancy Howell took off her hat and tossed it on the sofa. She ran her fingers through her blond hair and shook it back from her ears. She called: “Mazzie, make a couple of Manhattans, please.”
There wasn’t any answer.
Nancy Howell said: “Now I wonder where that girl is.”
She called Mazzie’s name again, loudly this time. And still there was no answer.
“She must have gone to the store for something. Well, we can make the drinks ourselves.”
We went into the kitchen and mixed a couple of Manhattans. Pots simmered on the stove. Dishes were stacked on a table. The cook had evidently gone out while in the middle of preparing the dinner.
We went back into the living-room and sat down on the sofa. It was a warm evening with the windows wide open. I remember that twice I heard insects bump against the screens. Nancy Howell sipped at her drink, then leaned and put one hand on my left hand. She said: “You’ve been awfully nice, Eddie. You don’t know how terrible it is to feel that your friends suspect you of something horrible, and have no way to prove to them you’re innocent.”
“I’m glad if I helped.”
“You did, a lot. Now—”
That was when we first heard the sound. In that first instant I don’t believe that either of us recognized it, knew what the sound was. Yet after we heard it we both sat as silent and still as statues. I remember noticing that the liquor in my glass was not even trembling.
We must have sat like that for five full seconds. It seemed like five hours. And then we heard it again.
This time I knew what it was.
It was a man moaning. Not in agony but in something worse than that. If a corpse could struggle to reach life again, it might make a sound like that. Then the moan ended and I heard the faint scratching of fingernails on wood. It seemed to come from somewhere in the little foyer that we sat facing.
I said: “What was that?” I didn’t look at Nancy Howell. I was staring at the empty foyer. And Nancy Howell didn’t answer. After a few seconds we heard that muffled horrible moaning again, and again the sound of fingers clawing on wood.
I said huskily: “It’s in the hall closet.”
“Yes.”
That was all she said. But it brought me around like the cracker on a whip.
It was a sensation that I felt not in any one place, but all through my body: in my fingertips and my brain and my feet, in my stomach and my lungs and my throat. It was a kind of electrical shock that seemed to shrivel my body, to make it shrink in upon itself. I couldn’t move. I just stood there and stared at Nancy Howell’s face.
I hardly recognized her. Her face was contorted and hideous. It was an animal face with the cheek bones sharp across it and the eyes narrowed and the lips peeled back from the teeth. She never dropped her glass, never spilled the liquor, and somehow that seemed the most horrible part of the whole business, the perfect way she balanced that glass as she backed across the room. Her eyes were riveted always on the closet door in the foyer, but she moved steadily backward to a desk in the corner of the living-room and reached back and put down the cocktail glass.
I noticed the way she was breathing, in deep quick gasps between parted lips — quick gasps that pressed her breasts tight against her dress.
Still looking at the closet door she reached behind her and opened a drawer in the desk. She did something I couldn’t see plainly — there must have been a false bottom to the drawer — and drew out a key and transferred it to her left hand. She reached into the drawer again and this time her hand came out with a small pearl-handled revolver.
“Open that door,” she whispered.
I gulped.
She looked at me for the first time and her gaze and the gun swung together. I thought the bullet was already plowing into my stomach and I felt sick. “Open that door!” She was still whispering — and for the first time I realized that she was insanely afraid.
I stumbled across to the closet and the key made jittery noises as I groped for the lock. I turned the key and backed away.
There was absolutely so sound from beyond that door now. There was no sound in the whole house. Not even the sound of breathing.
The doorknob began to turn. It moved very slowly. With a kind of infinite furious patience it turned a little at a time. There was a sudden, loud click as the latch turned free.
The door swung open and the corpse walked out into the room.
It was Ben Steiner. He wore the same white suit he had worn the night before, but the front of it now was the dark brown-black of dried blood. The bullet hole was directly over the heart. His hands hung rigid at his sides, and he looked at me with open, blank, dead eyes. I have seen men electrocuted at the state prison. I’ve seen them when the mask was taken off. That look on the face of the dead can’t be copied and you don’t have to look twice to recognize it. Ben Steiner was dead — and he was walking.
Nancy Howell must have tried to scream and the terror in her throat stopped her. She made a kind of choking gasp. Her gun was pointed straight at Steiner and her finger was white around the trigger, frozen there.
I don’t think I ever really saw the Bishop back of Ben Steiner although he spread out a couple of inches on each side. But I heard him yelclass="underline" “Ai God, Eddie! Grab her gun! Don’t stand there all night! Grab her gun!”
I was still too numb to move. I heard him and I knew what he said, but for at least two seconds I just stood and gaped. And in those two seconds Nancy Howell swung her gun to cover my stomach.
The front door crashed open with a noise as loud as a cannon. Nancy Howell jumped, and fired — and the bullet made a hole in my coat. Then she was swinging away from me toward the door and she fired once as she swung, hitting nothing hut the wall.
Mrs. Good was standing in the open doorway and yelling at me: “Grab her, stupid!”
And finally I moved.
I grabbed her before she could shoot again.
She stopped struggling instantly. She dropped the gun and turned, and I released her and she went over and sat down on the sofa. She sat there and looked at us and didn’t say a word. She pushed the blond hair back from her face and just sat there and stared at us.
Mrs. Good was leaning against the doorsill, mopping her face with a handkerchief that was already soaking wet with perspiration. She was panting out names, one after another, without even commas between them, and I gathered that she was referring to me and the Bishop, tracing our ancestry back through generations of various kinds of livestock. Finally she paused for a breath.
The Bishop beamed at her. “You’re in rare form indeed tonight, Mrs. Good!”