All right, I said, I’ll do that, yes. And then I said I was sorry. Cathy, I said. Baby, I…
I made myself come out of it. Cop, I said. Be cop again, Fannin. Who did it, cop? I lifted the phone.
It was dead. I took the directory and looked up Kline, Sally. There were two of them. One of them lived on 200th Street. I dialed the one in Greenwich Village.
She must have been poised over it like a kitten at a wounded housefly. The first ring didn’t even finish. And then she didn’t give me time to say hello.
“Who.;, who is it?”
“Easy,” I said, “Fannin.”
“Oh, thank heaven! Are you drunk, Mr. Fannin? Is that it? Every time I call you— Oh, please don’t be drunk, Mr. Fannin.”
“I’ll talk now.”
“It’s Cathy, Mr. Fannin. It’s those two boys she went away with yesterday, I think. Those hoodlum ones. Oh, Lord, I told her she’d get into trouble. And the one who’s out there watching the house. I don’t know if he’s one of them or somebody else, but he goes away and then he comes back, it’s been all night now, and then the phone keeps ringing and when I pick it up there’s nobody there, and—”
I pulled out the plug. She was dialing me every channel on the set. “Look,” I said, “I’ll come down. Are you in any trouble yourself?”
“Oh, thank heaven. No, I don’t think so. I don’t know. But I’m scared, Mr. Fannin. That one outside, just standing there. In the alley across the street. I can see his shadow from the window. And I don’t know what to do. I wanted to call you earlier. I thought you would be better than the police, but then I didn’t know whether I should or not because you’re not married to her anymore, but I couldn’t think of anything else, and… can you do something, Mr. Fannin? Do you think you can?”
“What’s your apartment number?”
“Five. We’re on the top floor in front.”
“Your lights on or ofl?”
“I’ve got the bedroom lamp on, Mr. Fannin. But not the ones you can see from the street, if that’s what you mean. That’s how I can see him. He was there when I came in — that was about eleven — but he must think I’m in bed now. I can look out through the blinds in the dark.”
“Keep it that way. Don’t put on any extra lights when I ring.”
“But won’t he see you come in?”
“There’s a front apartment below yours?”
“Yes, but—”
“What number?”
“Three, I think. Yes.”
“All right.”
“But what are you—?”
“Never mind that now. Look, I’ll be thirty minutes, more likely forty. You sit tight and keep your door locked. I mean that.”
“Gosh, Mr. Fannin, you make it sound so—”
“Never mind how I make it sound.” I wanted her to stay edgy and cautious until I got there. The duck outside seemed a pretty good bet to be watching for Cathy, but I didn’t know whether Sally Kline might be in any danger from whoever else was involved in it. Whatever in hell it was.
“All right,” she told me hesitantly.
I didn’t tell her about Cathy. She did not sound like the first girl you’d pick to share a rooftop with when the dam broke. “Sort the laundry or something,” I said again.
“All right, Mr. Fannin.”
I hung it up. The alarm clock said 3:49. Fifteen minutes. Maybe only ten. That would have been the time to get downstairs, when Cathy had first buzzed. So I’d sat here thinking it was some lush or other. Now I wasn’t going to find anything outside but frustrated mosquitoes who’d missed the last open window.
I had to ease her leg aside to get through the door.
There were stains along the floor in the hall, still wet. There were prints of her hand on the wall where she had had to brace herself. None of it looked real. It never does. It always looks like a promotion stunt for a cheap horror film where you follow the painted gore across the lobby to the ticket office. I went down the steps and out.
No one was around. I hadn’t been expecting a B.P.O.E. convention.
There was a red MG at the curb with the keys in the ignition, but the blood did not lead to it. It went off at an angle to the edge of the sidewalk about a dozen feet behind it. To where the second car I’d heard had probably pulled in behind her.
There had been a rush of blood when the knife had come out. It had slowed quickly but you could have painted a country firehouse with what had spilled in those first seconds. If she’d fallen it must have been to her hands and knees, because it had hardly stained her coat.
It was as easy to read as a scrawl in a latrine. It just made you sicker.
She’d been in a jam or she wouldn’t have been coming here, but she hadn’t thought the trouble was the kind you can get dead over. She’d seen the second car and she’d known the person driving it She’d gotten out of the MG and walked back to talk things over with whoever it was. The poor kid had walked right into it.
I tried to map the rest of it. She must have hung there a minute, long enough for the killer to decide she was dead or dying before he gunned off. Or had he seen her get up and start for my door first? Had he seen that and been just too gutless to go for her a second time?
I hoped that was it. I hoped he had seen her make the door and was having to sweat over whether she’d managed to tell me what it said on his dogtags. Oh, yeah. I hoped he was sweating over that enough so he figured he would have to get me next. I hoped he would try that, the son of a bitch.
Yes, I said, try that. Come on, you son of a bitch.
I was standing there in the empty street. Probably I looked like the neighborhood drunk. I must have, because the drunk from the next neighborhood pegged me for a brother the second he reeled around the corner. He let out a bellow like he’d found out what happened to Amelia Earhart and started circling the sidewalk for a landing, coming on full throttle. I went back to the MG and took out the keys. There was a celluloid case on the steering rod which said the car belonged to an Adam Moss of West 113th Street. I left that where it was, pocketed the keys and caught the drunk by the shoulders before he nose-dived the sixty or eighty feet to his shoe tops.
“Buddy,” he said. “Frien’. Customer. You wanna buy a polishy? Sure, you wanna buy a polishy.” He was about fifty. He had gray hair cropped short and he was still very well dressed in spite of the two quarts he’d spilled on his tie. It was an expensive tie and there were probably two maids and a butler watching anxiously for him with a light in the window. “No policy,” I said. “Be nice and sleep it off in your own gutter, huh?”
There was no point in asking him if he’d seen anything. He was too far gone. He wouldn’t be seeing anything but hideous pink snakes.
“Extra speshal polishy,” he insisted. “New kind.” I would have let him go but it would have been like letting go of a piano from high up. “New polishy. Group shuishide plan. Why die wish strangers when you can die wish friends? We pick time, plaish, monuments. Monuments won’t wilt, won’t shrink, won’t shiver, Guar’raranteed. Painlish and inshtant death. Torture clause—”
I caught him off balance and stepped away when the sidewalk wasn’t tilted. I’d tricked him. He hung there on a cord. “You hate me,” he decided then. “Jush how long have you hated me? When did it start? Jush tell me when it started?”
I left that one for his head doctor. He’d have one at about forty bucks a session. The hall had not gotten any prettier but I’d have to leave that, too, for the cops who didn’t make forty bucks in two days. I went upstairs and inside.