“But you’ve simply got to help me! I mean you really have to! I’ve all these people here... I’ve tried to call a dozen repair men and you’re the only one who answered. Please, Mister Rixey! I’m sure there’s hardly anything the matter with the ole fool set... probably only a silly little tube or something you can fix in a minute!”
“Where you live?” If she was way across town, he wouldn’t bother with it no matter how she squawked. He’d promised to get back to Annalou at the Outside Inn by nine and it was eight-thirty already.
“Forty-two Chestnut. At Highland. Know that big apartment house at the corner?”
“Sure, Which apartment?” Chestnut was only six blocks over; he could make it there in a hop-skip.
“Three B... name’s Garnet... Mrs. Francine Garnet, How soon can you make it, Mister Rixey?”
“Oh, five minutes or so. What kind of set you got?”
“It’s a Klaravox... one of those console things...”
“Okay. Be right over.”
It might be a five-dollar job at that. The Chestnut Street address was pretty ritzy — anybody who owned one of those big Klaravox boxes ought to be willing to pay more than a two-buck service fee, for overtime work, and a rush call. Annalou could use that five for her hope-chest fund.
He put some extra toggles and trimmers in his kit, checked the chart for the tube numbers and added them — took along his loan-out portable in case there might be something he couldn’t fix offhand.
He parked his truck in front of the apartment. That ‘Ring Regal for Rapid Repairs — Main 4266’ sign on the side of the panel looked a little out of place, jammed in between the snazzy station wagon and that convertible with its canary-yellow leather upholstery — but maybe the free advertising would drum up a little extra business. He could use it...
There was no one in the lobby. No row of mailboxes, as in more modest apartment houses.
The elevator was upstairs. He’d walk up the two flights anyhow, rather than risk some gold-braid flunky snooting him by asking why he hadn’t used the service entrance.
The door to 3B was open a couple of inches. The radio across the hall was tuned up full blast on the night ban game; he couldn’t hear any partying inside the Garnet apartment. He thumbed the buzzer.
“Come in...” Mrs. Garnet’s voice, from somewhere inside.
“Radio man.” He pushed into a small, shadowy lobby with bulbous gilt antique mirrors and spindly-legged gilt chairs.
“Come right in here.” She was evidently calling from the living-room beyond the arched doorway.
He took off his hat, marched in. He got two steps beyond the arch when the roof fell in on him!
An overpowering screeching in his brain, as if some gigantic oscillator was vibrating out of control. A searing flare like a million flash bulbs exploding simultaneously. Then Voom! Blackout!
Instantly, the nerve-torturing screech again. The piercingly painful light once more. It penetrated his closed eyelids — or did it?
He opened his eyes. Dazzling light blinded him with a nauseating glare. The light wouldn’t stay still. Kept zooming up close to him, then receding. He tried to recoil from it, found he couldn’t. He was flat on his back. The light was a chandelier overhead.
Walls swam dizzily into focus. The screeching became a fierce, grinding ache at the back of his head.
“Hey!” He managed a thick-tongued mumble.
No answer.
“HEY!” Cold fear numbed him as memory poked through the haze of pain. “What happened?”
Still no answer. He rolled on his side. He still had his kit. No. It wasn’t the leather handle of the repair kit — it was cold metal. A gun!
He dropped it as if it were a live wire. Stared at it as if it really was alive. A heavy, blue-steel, ugly-nosed automatic!
He pushed him s elf back on his haunches, blinked around. He wasn’t alone, after all!
But the man on the floor behind him wasn’t going to be able to explain what had happened. Three bright scarlet threads flowed from blackened holes in the white triangle of shirt which showed above his vest, down toward his right armpit, out of sight beneath his coat.
Don lurched to his feet.
Maybe the dead man couldn’t talk. But his half-open eyes, showing nothing except the red-veined bloodshot whites... the gaping mouth where slack muscles had let his jaw fall open — they said plenty!
They said “Murder”! And “Frame-up!”
Don bent, whipped out his handkerchief, wiped off the butt of the automatic, dropped it on the carpet again.
He looked around for his kit. There it was, against the wall. He grabbed it, stumbled toward the arched doorway.
Probably the smart thing would be to search the place, see if “Mrs. Garnet” was still there, dead or alive.
But Don didn’t care about being smart. All he wanted was out.
He had his hand on the knob of the hall door, when he remembered his hat. He turned, his eyes searching the lobby, the little corridor leading to the living-room. No hat on the floor anywhere.
He didn’t dare leave that here. He started back.
“That’s it,” a voice behind him commanded harshly. “Don’t turn! Just stick your thumbs in your ears! And stand still! I said — don’t turn around!”
Don froze rigidly, head tipped back, hands tensed at his sides. He held his breath waiting for the shock of the bullet. Sweat trickled down his nose, dropped to his chin.
An ugly, blood-caked face stared at him from the round gilt mirror on the wall directly in front of him. His own face, distorted by reflection in that convex surface! But the blood smear wasn’t any optical illusion; half his face was covered with reddish-brown streaks.
“Give him the pat!” The harsh voice. But it wasn’t addressed to Don.
Thick fingers fumbled at his hips, armpits, belt.
“Clean,” announced another, less aggressive voice close behind him.
In the mirror, Don saw the man’s cold eyes and hard-jawed face.
“Poosh him in,” ordered Harsh Voice.
A gun poked into the small of Don’s back. He stalked stiffly into the living-room.
The hard-jawed man moved the muzzle of his gun up a little, so it prodded Don’s spine between his shoulder-blades.
“Ha. A casket case. Why’d you kill him, bud?”
Don let his breath go out in a long whoosh. “I didn’t. I never saw him before in my life until a few minutes ago. You cops?”
Harsh Voice came around Don to inspect the body. “You think we was brush salesmen?” He was a barrel-chested individual with a face like a prize fighter’s, battered, flattened nose and scarred eyebrows. “Siddown there.” He waggled his revolver at a lowslung chair. “Call in, Eddie.”
Don thought he was going to be sick, soon, as he plumped down into the chair. It wasn’t merely the cobblestones being cracked, up there in the top of his skull, either. It was the realization he was in a very nasty corner indeed.
“Say you never saw this lug before?” The broken-nosed plainclothesman squatted beside the corpse, his gun still aiming carelessly toward Don’s wishbone.
“Not until about five minutes ago. When I came out of it after somebody dropped the boom on me.” Don heard Eddie, out in the hall, asking for Lieutenant Wiley at headquarters. That might be a break. Don and Annalou both knew Wiley; the Lieutenant and his prowl partner sometimes dropped into Outside Inn for a snack, late at night.
Frank stuck out his lower lip. “How you happen to be here, alone with this stiff?”
Don told him.
“Anybody with you when you got this phone call, Rixey?”