“Room Six. If he’s here he’s in it. If he’s not he’s not. You want to go upstairs, then go. The top floor.”
She didn’t wait to be thanked. She turned bulkily and went back to the kitchen and he started up the stairs. They creaked under his feet. At first he tried to walk softly and slowly, placing his feet on the edges of the steps to cut down their creaking. But it didn’t matter whether or not anyone heard his approach. Now he was just another man walking up the flight of stairs.
The dying flowers at the second-floor landing were roses, their petals mostly gone. He thought, The woman can be a witness, she can identify me. But that didn’t matter either, he decided. Her description would not be enough to lead the police to him, and if he were picked up by them, they wouldn’t need her as a witness. If he and Jill were picked up, they would confess. He was fairly sure of this.
He climbed another flight of stairs to the top floor. There were four rooms on the floor, four doors off the small hallway. Room 6 was at the end of the hall away from the staircase. The door was closed. He walked over to the door and tried to listen for movement inside the room. He couldn’t hear anything. Downstairs, in another part of the rooming house, someone flushed a toilet, the noise carried clearly. He waited while the plumbing noises died down and listened again at the door. No sounds came from within.
He took the gun out and held it in his right hand. He positioned himself at the side of the door and held the gun so that it was pointed just above and slightly to the side of the knob. His finger curled expectantly around the trigger. He held his breath for a moment, then let it out slowly, then breathed in again. With his left hand he reached for the doorknob.
Chapter 15
The room was anticlimactically empty. The door was not locked. He turned the knob and threw the door open, gun in hand, like Broderick Crawford bulling his way into George Raft’s hideout, and the room was empty. He stood in the doorway looking at an unmade empty bed. Cigar butts filled an ashtray on the bedside table. There were ashes on the floor. He stepped inside and pulled the door shut quickly. He started to bolt the door, then decided that was crazy. He took a deep breath and sat down on the edge of the unmade bed and put the gun down beside him, then remembered and rotated the gun’s cylinder so that there was no bullet under the chamber.
Ruger wasn’t around. But this was Ruger’s room and the man would come back to it, sooner or later. And he would be waiting for him. Ruger would open the door and he, Dave, would be sitting on Ruger’s bed with a gun in his hand, waiting.
The bathroom. He remembered the flushing of the toilet and thought that Ruger might still be in the house. He could be in the bathroom on a lower floor. He could bump into the woman and find out that a man had come to his room, looking for him.
He ran his hand over the bed linen. It was cool, and he guessed that it hadn’t been slept in for hours. He picked up the ashtray and several of the cigar butts. They were cold and smelled stale. The air in the room was also stale, and there was a thin layer of dust over the chair and dresser and night table. It didn’t look as though anyone had been in the room in a day or more. Just to make sure, he slipped out of the room and walked halfway down the stairs. The door of the second-floor bathroom was slightly ajar. He perched himself on the stairs and waited until the bathroom’s occupant finished and left. It was a man, a very old man who walked with a slight limp, carrying a towel and a toothbrush and an old-fashioned straight razor down the hall to his room.
So Ruger was out. He got to his feet and went back up to the third floor again and let himself into Ruger’s room once more. He closed the door and walked over to the window. There were curtains, lacy ones that didn’t quite fit the image of the hired killer. He pushed them apart and looked out through the window. It needed washing, and the room needed airing out. He opened the window three inches at top and bottom and looked out through the glass. A small boy was riding his bicycle in the street, poised precariously on a seat that was too high for him. The boy rode off. A sports car breezed by and cornered sharply at Elderts Lane. A mailman, his leather sack bulging, walked down one driveway and up another.
Perfect, he thought. Ruger was out, and sooner or later Ruger would come back. Alone, or with Dago Krause in tow. Either way, he would be able to see them coming from the window. That was luck, the window facing the street. Ruger couldn’t get to the house without being seen on the way. He would be ready for him, ready and waiting.
His mind hurried ahead, sketching in the details. The escape shouldn’t be too difficult. There would be no gun battle to draw attention, because Ruger wouldn’t know he was there until it was too late for him to do anything about it. There would only be one shot, the one he himself would fire. People would hear it, but few people ever recognized a single shot for what it was. A truck backfiring, a kid with a firecracker — no one ever thought it was a gun-shot. And by the time people reacted to the shot he would be on his way out of the house.
Jill, thank God, was out of the way around the corner. He would kill Ruger and get clear of the house. He would hurry around the corner and find her, and they would get a cab back to Manhattan or get on a subway, anything at all. All he had to do was wait.
Fingerprints. With Ruger’s body left behind, the police would be all over the place checking for prints. And his were on file. He had been printed in the army, and he had vague memories of his fingerprints having been taken years ago as a matter of course when he held a summer job with the Broome County welfare department. He went around the room wiping the things he had touched — the doorknob, the ashtray, the window. He did a thorough job, then hauled Ruger’s chair over to the window and cleared a pile of dirty clothes off the seat. He sat down facing the window and waited.
Time crawled. Three cigarettes later he got up from the chair and began searching Ruger’s room. There might be something the police shouldn’t find, he thought. A note mentioning Washburn of Lublin or Corelli, anything that would enable the cops to make a connection between Ruger and them. But there was nothing like that. Ruger’s room was strangely barren of artifacts of any sort. There were two or three paperbound books, their bindings cracked and pages dog-eared. There was a mimeographed thirty-page pamphlet of hard-core pornography illustrated with crude drawings and featuring a sadomasochistic theme and a semiliterate prose style. There were clothes, selected with little evident thought for quality or fashion. There were no guns, so Ruger was evidently carrying one — Dave couldn’t believe the man could get along without owning one. There was a knife, a switchblade stiletto with a five-inch blade. The edge was quite sharp. There was a homemade blackjack — a length of lead pipe with a leather loop for a handle and several thicknesses of black electrical tape wrapped around the pipe.
No notes, no addresses, no telephone numbers. There was a key, evidently to a safe-deposit box somewhere. Dave pocketed it; there was no telling what the police might find in the box, and he decided it couldn’t hurt to keep them from it.
He wiped everything clean of prints and sat down again. Outside, the street was calm and clear. He wondered how long it would be before Ruger came back. If the man had been out hunting them all night long, he would probably be tired, ready to sleep. But he might have slept. He could have spent the night with a girl, or anywhere.
And his mind filled suddenly with a picture of Ruger with a girl and then of Ruger with Jill. He closed his eyes and gritted his teeth painfully. The image passed and he opened his eyes again and gazed again out the window.