“You need help,” he said. “Maybe I can supply it.”
She started her pacing again. “I just need to be let alone. Get away from me, I said. Get the hell away.”
He stood watching her. Her black hair looked soft and clean, shining under the light. Right now it was in a tangle from the frantic combing of her fingers. She rubbed her hands up and down her forearms, shivering. Her teeth began to chatter.
As she swung around from a wall, he said, “How long since you had one, baby?”
She was motionless, her eyes devouring him. “Who the hell are you?”
He smiled and didn’t answer. She leaned against the wall, her head thrown back, the embrace of her arms locking tighter. Tears seeped from under her lids and ran down her cheeks. After a few seconds, she began to sob. The sobs were deep upheavals, tearing at her chest. He stood waiting until they ceased.
“There’s a doctor downstairs,” he said.
“Doctors,” she said. “Damned doctors.”
“It’s a doctor’s business to relieve suffering. Did anyone ever suffer more than you are right now?”
She didn’t reply. The sobbing was ended, but the silent tears still ran down her cheeks.
“I’ll be back,” he said, and turned and went out.
Downstairs, Dr. Newman was just coming out of the taproom with his bag in his hand. Jeff waited for him to come even, turning back up the stairs at his side.
“You got morphine in your bag, Doctor?”
The little medico shot an oblique glance at him from under a cocked brow. “The pretty woman in the fur coat?”
“Yes. She’s tearing herself to pieces.”
“I suspected it.”
They went on up the stairs and stopped at the head. Dr. Newman looked down at the floor, pursing his lips. He looked, Jeff thought, remarkably like a toad.
“I’m not supposed to do it, you know.” He stood without moving a moment longer, and then said abruptly, “To hell with it. Which room?”
They went down and in without bothering to knock. The little doctor dropped his bag on a chair and snapped it open, barely glancing at the woman who stood pressed against the wall.
“Roll up the sleeve of your blouse,” he said.
Jeff turned back into the hall, waiting there until Newman came out a few minutes later.
“Thanks, Doctor,” he said. “For her, I mean.”
The ugly medico looked up with a twisted smile. His right hand crept over in a gesture of which he seemed unaware, to rub gently his left forearm. His eyes, turned inward, were characterized by an odd vacuity.
“You ever read Whitman?” he said. “If you don’t, you should. He wrote something once; I am the man. I suffered. I was there. Greatest line of poetry ever written. Good night, son.”
Chapter III
He went down the hall with choppy strides, his bag swinging, and Jeff crossed to his own door. Inside, he left the door cracked and the light off. Removing his outer clothing, he shoved the room’s one overstuffed chair into position before the crack and sat down. Damned foolishness, he told himself. No kidnapper would openly approach a contact in a hotel room. A kidnapper would always work under cover. But no matter. Jefferson Pitt had been hired to do a job. The job was to keep an eye on Cleo Constance. He sat in the chair patiently, looking down the hall at the door through which Constance had vanished.
He was aware, after a while, of the murmur of voices. Twisting, looking up at an angle over the back of his chair, he saw a rectangle of weak light high in the wall behind him. Then he saw that it was not really in the wall at all. The light came through an old-fashioned transom above a tall, narrow door. The door obviously led to the next room and had apparently been locked and nailed shut to make two singles out of a double.
Getting up, he fumbled in darkness for a straight chair and carried it over to the door. Standing on the chair, he could look through the transom into the next room. Up there, with his ear near the crack along the bottom of the rectangle, he could even distinguish words.
The mouse stood looking out the window into the rainy night. She had taken off her dress and had on a sleazy pink slip. On the bed behind her, her companion on the bus lay in pants and undershirt, looking at the ceiling. His hands were under his head. A cigarette hung from his slack lips.
Pretty soon the mouse turned away from the window to look at the sprawled figure on the bed, and Jeff saw that her eyes were red and swollen. Her voice was pleading.
“It won’t be so bad, Dickie. Honest, it won’t. We can get a justice of the peace to do it in Darrowville tomorrow.”
He didn’t answer.
“We can get an apartment, Dickie, and maybe after a while we can buy a little house of our own. And some furniture. I’ll work, Dickie. After the baby comes, I’ll get a job right away.”
The cigarette bobbled. “Yuk, yuk, yuk. For God’s sake, shut up.”
“It could be fun, Dickie. It could be fun, if only you’d let it.”
“Fun. Oh, for God’s sake.”
“You didn’t talk like that when you were talking me into it.”
“I was drunk.”
“Don’t hate me, Dickie. It wasn’t my fault. Please don’t hate me.”
“Hate you? Hell, yes, I hate you. I hate your ugly face, and your skinny body, and most of all I hate your damned whiney voice. How the hell I was ever nuts enough to get in a fix like this with a dame like you, I’ll never know. Times sure must’ve been hard.” He sat up, swinging his legs off the bed. “I’ll get hitched, all right, because I see I’ve got to. And like you said, right after the kid comes you can get a job. At least you better, because I’m taking off. That’s as long as I stick around, see? Just till the kid comes. Maybe, if I’m lucky, you’ll both die.”
She didn’t flinch. There were no more tears. She just stood there against the window with the black rain outside, and Jeff got down off the chair in a hurry. His pulses hammered. He stood spraddle-legged in the darkness with sickness rising to make him dizzy. A drop of cold sweat fell away from his armpit and ran down his ribs.
It would be so easy to kill, he thought. Sometimes it would be so easy.
He sat in the chair again and stared blankly. The rectangle of light behind him winked out. Outside the cracked door, the shabby hall stretched silent and empty. His mind functioned now with a kind of cold clarity, receptive to intuition. An ugly little medico who quoted Whitman, remembered hell, and practised compassion. A pretty junkie now at peace. A mouse whose gray little life had reached the incredibly bleak point of being dependent on a pimply punk kid for pity. Kidnapper? Contact for a kidnapper? No. They were all on other business. The errands, the flights, the ceaseless, senseless motion between dark and dark.
And so, stepping on flotsam, he came back to the central figure. Cleo Constance, private detective. A handsome, cold fish. A man isolated, thinking his own thoughts, going his own way. Going his own way with fifty grand in his pocket.
He’s a bad one, Jeff. Under the cold correctness, the clipped aloofness, there’s an unplumbed potential for evil. A queer, cold fish; one of earth’s eternal exiles.
And there’s been no contact. You can’t prove it, of course. Somewhere along the way, in some unobserved fashion, the pass could have been made. But it wasn’t made, and it won’t be, because the ransom is already paid. It was paid in the house of Reed Roman hours ago. It was paid to a queer, ascetic-looking kidnapper with ice water in his veins, and right now he’s got it in a shabby room right down the hall.
Take it from the beginning. From the moment you knew immediately that it was all wrong, there in the house of the old man yesterday afternoon. Contact specified in the ransom note. Has it ever happened before? Kidnapper specifying himself as contact. Dammit, the guy must be nerveless. He must be put together differently from the rest of us. And it builds. The jewel case. The chance to initiate an acquaintance. Maybe more. A cold, handsome devil like that might make a hellish appeal to a wild dame like the Roman. The birth of an idea. The birth and slow growth and icy, calculated consummation.