Rawne took a short puff and waved his cigar impatiently. “You’ll pay me now. The detective put an exercise boy on your tail. You came straight home. The money’s here. So make it easy for yourself.”
The wrinkled lids came down over Greer’s pop eyes. He went to the closet muttering, and fished a bulging wallet from an old coat. The corner of his mouth kept twitching while he counted hundred-dollar bills into Rawne’s palm.
Rawne gave them a second count and put the money in his wallet. He buttoned the wallet down in his back trousers pocket. He stood there, scowling thoughtfully, smoking, his gaze shifting about the eluttered room. The radio was on, tuned low.
Across the way a man and woman leaned together on a window sill.
Rawne looked at Greer and shook his head. Greer’s cheeks were unnaturally red. He stood rigidly. His thin lip had its mean little curl and the corner was working. His eyes were like black agates. With a final wondering glance, Rawne turned around and went out, humming.
The hallway was pitch-dark. He walked down the creaking stairs, his cigar a red lamp in the blackness. Radios blared. Somewhere a woman was screaming. A child was crying. Rawne groped along the third-floor hall.
Starting down the next flight he felt along the wall. He touched somebody who was crouching in the wall niche just below the landing. Rawne started to speak. He got a violent shove from this somebody, a terrific shove. Rawne crashed into the railing, almost toppling over it. He cut loose with loud, short words and threw his right fist.
His fist hit this somebody in the face and there was a groan. Rawne got slammed in the stomach. He got slammed with a foot that caught him on his belt. His breath left him in an agonized grunt. His cigar went spinning.
He went crashing down the stairs, backwards, feet out from under him, left arm hooked over the railing. His head hit the floor, and the vertebrae in his neck clicked.
He lay there like a drunk sleeping it off. Somebody yanked at his back pocket. A button rolled off into the stairwell. The stairs creaked going up.
Pretty soon Rawne began cursing and then he was able to push himself to his knees. There was no weight under the left armpit and his voice grew as loud as the radio’s. The baby was still squalling and the shrill lady hadn’t worn herself thin. Rawne slapped around in the darkness until he found his gun. He stuck it in the holster and got up.
A sag was in his knees. He labored up the stairs, lurching from side to side. On the fourth floor a line of soft light came from 4A. The door of Greer’s apartment was opened a crack. Rawne kicked it wide. He went into the foyer and looked at himself in the cracked mirror. His hair was rumpled and his face was dirty. The right side was covered with blood.
Rawne went into the living room, still waltzing a little. The odor of Lulie’s perfume still hung in the wet air. The room was lit by a parchment-shaded reading lamp on an end table by a studio couch. The glass over one of the pictures was shattered and the policeman’s nightstick wasn’t hanging over the bookcase any more.
The bulky scrapbook of Tarnished Lady lay on the floor and clippings were scattered everywhere. James Cullen Greer, lying face down between the dropleaf table and the lounge chair with the torn gray slip cover, was almost covered with clippings, almost buried with them.
The nightstick lay there, too, with blood and black hair on it. The back of Greer’s head was crushed.
Rawne’s bleak gaze traveled from the bludgeoned skull down the threadbare robe to the shabby, runover slippers. His square face was blank. The telephone rang and he gave a little start. It rang again and stopped. In the kitchen a mouse was gnawing at something. The radio picked up the scrape of a phone that was being dialed somewhere in the house.
In the house opposite Rawne, the man and woman stood back from the window. Their features were indistinct but they were facing the Greer apartment. Rawne’s lower lip slid out slowly and his heavy brows pulled down.
Suddenly his eyes opened wide. He jerked his head around. Lulie Nolan was standing in the doorway. Her lips and hair were very red against the blanched face. She was holding a gray corde handbag and a worn black wallet.
Rawne slapped at his empty back pocket. His brows went up. He reached the frightened girl before she could do anything. She cried out. Her green eyes were shiny with fear. Rawne took his wallet and was rough with her. He flung her into a lounge chair where she broke into convulsive sobs, her long red nails digging into hair stuffing which tufted through the torn gray slip cover.
“Oh, please!” the girl cried. “Oh, please!”
Rawne opened his wallet to nothing but black leather. “Lady, lady,” he chided her. “You’ve had a busy evening.”
The man across the way stood at his window. He was telephoning.
“You and Searle working as a team?” Rawne asked her.
Lulie Nolan leaned forward, sobbing, her red hair tumbling across her shoulders.
Rawne’s fingertips touched the hair lightly. “You do something to me,” he said. “You sure do. If you didn’t knock off old Jim, it’d be a pleasure to be seeing you in all the old familiar places. Provided you come across with twenty-three hundred bucks.”
“I haven’t your money!” She pounded the arms of the chair. “I walked to the corner, but I was worrying. Nineteen hundred dollars, that’s how much I was worrying. I came back and the halls were dark and I stepped on something and it was this — this wallet. Then I—”
Rawne whirled around. This time his hand was moving to his left armpit. Lee Searle was in the room. His lopsided mouth was puffed, the upper lip split, and fresh blood was trickling over a dried smear. He was sobbing. His right hand was wrapped around something that he pressed his thumb against. A long blade leaped out with a click.
“I used to win bets throwing a knife,” he said.
Rawne lowered his hand. “Your mouth is bleeding,” he said. “I was standing on the stairs is the reason you’re only skinned up. If I’d got you solid, you’d be wearing your teeth through your lip.”
Searle broke into tears. “I shoulda stayed. Jim always said you was a dog. Jim said you was a low-grade moron. Poor Jim. He was a genius and you killed him. You murdered a great heart. Jim never turned a Joe down. Jim believed in the brotherhood of man—”
“Jim was a bum,” Rawne said. “Just like you. He fed you phonies and drifters to delude himself that he was a right guy. He was a chiseler, a plain thief.”
Searle was trembling. His entire mouth had become an ugly smear of blood. His right shoulder went back and Rawne scooped an egg-encrusted plate from the dropleaf table and let it go. Searle dodged and the plate shattered itself against the door frame. The knife left Searle’s hand. A silver flash went by Rawne’s head and an inch of blade sank into the picture on the wall behind him.
A siren shrieked outside. Rawne’s heavy fist got to Searle’s chin and the stiffened body went back and down, Searle’s head striking a taboret and upsetting a pile of books. Dust spiraled around Searle, and he sat there on the floor, head against a cane-backed chair, quite unconscious of the reading matter which tumbled into his lap.
Lulie Nolan was standing up. Her lower lip was caught between her white teeth and she was too frightened to move. Rawne pulled her into the cramped kitchen, getting tangled in drying shirts and underwear hanging overhead. She skidded on a piece of bacon and knocked over the garbage pail, scattering eggshells and coffee grounds.
Rawne opened the dumb waiter, measuring the width of the shaft with his shoulders. “Hear that?” A siren wailed and faded. “Another radio car. There’ll be more. The house will be swarming with cops. Our inquisitive friend across the way phoned Centre Street.”