I had to have that earring, even if it meant — going all the way back there in person, at this hour. And there was no place under the sun or the moon I wouldn’t have rather returned to than there.
I took the gun with me once more. I didn’t think Carpenter could really be cowed by such a midget, but it made me feel a little less defenseless. I unlocked the door and sidled down the hall. If I could only get out without bumping into Jimmy, then when I came back the second time, he could think it was the first time. That I’d stayed late with the Perrys at the club or something.
The light was gone from under the library door! He must have finished and gone out for a walk to clear his head, after battling with those taxblanks all night. That was all to the good, provided I didn’t run into him outside just as I was leaving. The milk-bottle with its paper funnel was still on lonesome duty.
I made it. I was dying to ask the night liftman, when he brought me down, “Did Mr. Shaw go out just a little while ago?” I forced myself not to. It sounded too underhanded.
I gave the cabdriver the address, and slumped back on the seat with a sigh of relief.
When I got out in front of the sinister-looking place I told the driver to wait for me. I looked up the front of it, and I saw just the one lighted window — his. He was up there, and he was still awake. Maybe he’d stepped out for just a minute at the time I’d rung.
I said to the driver, “Have you got a watch on you?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Well, I want you to do something for me. Time me. If I haven’t come out in ten minutes, step over and ring the bell. The one that says ‘Carpenter’ on it.” I smiled insincerely. “Just to remind me. I don’t want to stay too long, and I have a bad habit of losing track of the time.”
“Yes ma’am. Ten minutes.”
I went in. The entrance door was supposed to work on a spring lock, but somebody had forgotten to close it, so I passed right through without waiting and started the long climb that I’d already made once before. The place was a walk-up!
I knocked muffedly, when I finally got up to the top. It was the only flat on that floor; an extra story must have been added when the building had been converted to multiple tenancy.
He didn’t move, didn’t make a sound. I’d expected that. Live dangerously, and a knock on the door can make you freeze. I could visualize him standing at bay somewhere in there, holding his breath.
I knocked again. I inclined my head to the seam, said in a guarded voice: “Let me in. It’s me again.” I couldn’t bring myself to use his name. As far as I was concerned he didn’t deserve one, only a number. I had sense enough not to use my own.
He still didn’t stir. I wrangled the knob in growing impatience, and the door fell inertly back before me.
I ventured in after it, expecting to find him sighting a gun at me. That was the usual trick they pulled, wasn’t it? He wasn’t in the main room, he must be in the little darkened bed-alcove. Had lain down in there and forgotten to put the light out in here.
I didn’t go in there. There was just a slim chance — a very slim one — that he hadn’t found the earring himself yet, that it was still lying around out here unnoticed, and that I might be able to pick it up on my own hook and slip out again without having to accost him. I doubted it very much; it would have been too good to be true. But I started to look just the same.
First I looked all over the sofa where I’d sat riffling through the letters. Then I got down on all fours, gold dress and all, and started to explore the floor, around and under and alongside it. It was a decrepit, top-heavy thing and threw a big shadow behind it from the ceiling light.
My groping hand crept around the corner of it, and nestled into somebody else’s, in a macabre gesture of a handclasp. I whipped it back with a bleat of abysmal terror and sprang away, and at the same time I heard a sharp intake of breath.
I stepped around and looked down, and he was lying there. The position of the bulky sofa had hid him from me until now. Did I say just now he deserved a number? He’d gotten one. And it was up.
One arm was flung out along the floor — the one that I’d just touched. He was lying on his back, and his jacket had fallen open. You could see where he’d been shot; it showed on the white of his shirt. It must have gone into his heart; the hole in the fabric and the bloodied encrustation that surrounded it were around that region. The gun he hadn’t had time to use had fallen uselessly over to one side.
My first impulse, of course, was to turn and race out. I fought it down. “Find that earring first,” I reasoned with myself. “You’ve got to get it back!” It was more vital to recover it than ever. It wasn’t just a case of keeping my presence here from Jimmy’s knowledge now, it was a case of keeping it from the police! What was blackmail compared to being dragged into a murder case?
I found myself doing something I wouldn’t have believed I had the nerve to do: bending down over him and going through all his pockets. He didn’t have it on him. He didn’t have the ten thousand cash any more either, but I didn’t care about that; it wasn’t identifiable.
I crouched there, suddenly motionless. My hand had just then accidentally, as might have been expected, fleetingly contacted his in the course of my search. The brief touch was repellent, yes, but that wasn’t what made me freeze rigid like that, stare unseeingly along the floor before me. It was this: the touch of his clammy skin was already cool, far cooler than my own. My sketchy knowledge of such matters was sufficient to tell me that meant he’d been dead some little time, at least half an hour or an hour. The point was, he’d certainly been dead by the time I’d come into the room just now.
And belatedly, like a sort of long-delayed and not at all funny mental double take, I was just remembering that I’d heard a sharp intake of breath at the moment I’d jolted back and given my own strangled little cry of discovery just now.
If he was dead, he hadn’t made the sound. And you can’t cry out, and still draw in your breath, so I hadn’t either.
Not a muscle moved. Just my optic nerves. My eyes traveled over the floor to the arched, doorless entrance to the dark sleeping-alcove, and the musty green hanging, bunched together, that hung down on one side of it. It hung perfectly motionless, just as everything else in the place was perfectly motionless — including myself and the dead man on the floor. But it hung just short of the floor — oh, not more than a couple of inches. And I could see the hub of a single shoe standing there; in the gap. Perfectly motionless, deceptively motionless.
It could have been a discarded shoe of Carpenter’s, dropped to the floor in there and happening to land upright. Even though it was pointing straight toward me, as if to match an unseen pair of eyes somewhere high over it, looking out through an unsuspected rent in the drape. It could have been, but then it wouldn’t have moved.
As if the direction of my eyes had power to lend it motion. It shifted stealthily back and was gone.
There was only one coherent thought in the fireworks display of panic going off inside my head: “Don’t scream. Don’t move. Someone in there has been watching you ever since you came in. He may let you go, if you don’t let on you’ve spotted him. Work yourself over toward the door, and then break Out fast.”
I straightened up. The earring was forgotten, everything else was forgotten. I just wanted out. My feet took a surreptitious step under the cover of the gold dress. Then another. Then a third. Like in that kid’s game, where they’re not supposed to catch you moving. I was halfway over to it now. But even if the maneuvering of my feet couldn’t be detected, the position of my body in the room kept changing. That was enough to give me away.
About one more step now. I was just starting to raise my hand unnoticeably in front of me, to tear at the knob and fling myself out, when I heard a click behind me. The sort of a click that a triphammer makes when it goes back. My eyes went around in spite of myself. The drape was out of the way and a man had taken its place now. He was holding a gun at about belt-buckle level.