Tricia stepped back from the staircase. Try to look at the bright side, she said to herself. At least now you have a way back.
“Quick,” she whispered, and tugged Heaven with her toward Coral’s room. “You’ve got to let me in. That’s one of the men who’s holding Colleen.” And when she didn’t budge, “Heaven, he’s got a gun.” They heard heavy steps on the stairs, coming up. “A gun, Heaven. He’ll kill us both.”
“No he won’t,” Heaven said. “You just keep calm.”
Mitch’s head emerged above the top step, then his shoulders and his torso and, held at the level of his waist, his clenched gun hand. The barrel of his revolver was pointing directly at them.
“You think you’re clever, don’t you,” he said to Tricia. Then, to Heaven, who was standing in front of her, “Out of the way, Scarface.”
“You put that gun down, mister,” Heaven said, “and we can talk about this like civilized people.”
Mitch raised his gun till it was aimed directly at her head. She didn’t flinch, just looked sad, dug her hands into the pockets of her robe. “I’m sorry, mister,” she said.
“That’s all right,” Mitch said, “just go back in your room and forget you saw anything.”
“No, I’m sorry for what I have to do,” Heaven said and, pulling a Luger from the pocket of her robe, shot him twice in the chest.
18.
Say It With Bullets
Four or five things happened then, all at once, it seemed: A child’s voice rose behind the door of 3-F, wailing like a police car siren; doors swung open up and down the hall, then shut again when the people behind them saw Mitch tumble forward, his gun striking the floor and discharging, sending a bullet speeding at ankle level into the far wall; Heaven grabbed up Mitch’s gun and stowed it with her own in the pocket of her robe; and more footsteps began pounding up the stairs, two or three people’s worth.
“Here,” Heaven said, and unlocked the door to 3-D. She shoved it open with the heel of one hand and stepped back. “Get him in there, close the door, stay inside. Don’t take anything. I’ve got to see to Artie.”
Slightly dazed, Tricia lugged Mitch’s body into the room, left it lying beside a potted plant and a stack of old magazines. She had to bend his knees to get the door to close. It looked uncomfortable, but the man was past complaining.
Staying in the room wasn’t much of an option. There was a trail of blood outside leading right to this door—she could hardly expect to hide here. But at least while she was here she could look for what she’d come to find.
There was an icebox in one corner of the room and a small chest of drawers in another. She opened each of these in turn and found no leather box and no photos. A vaguely rectangular object in the icebox turned out to be the re-frozen remnants of a Swanson TV dinner. (There was no TV in the room, Tricia noted—but then 98 cents for the dinner was a lot easier to scrape together than the 98 dollars it would cost for a television set to eat it in front of.) The drawers held blouses and skirts and scanties with labels from Orbach’s; they held a necklace and earring set with plastic beads that didn’t look much like pearls but were clearly supposed to; they held a slim bible and a New York City telephone book. But no box, no photos.
Tricia riffled quickly through the pages of the bible and the phone book and then, one by one, the magazines. There were footsteps outside and a babble of voices and some knocking on doors, Coral’s and others. She ignored it all. She got down on her hands and knees and peered under the bed—nothing. She pulled up the coverlet and the sheet under it, stripped the cases off the pillows, lifted the corners of the mattress. What else? What else? There was a tiny, shallow closet that took just a minute to search thoroughly. A night table with some makeup on it. A rug with no suspicious bulges showing. She lifted it anyway, let it drop. Damn it, where would Coral have left the box?
There was one window in the room, shaded by venetian blinds and a curtain, and she pulled the latter and raised the former. Outside, a rusted fire escape led up and down. On the windowsill behind the curtain Tricia spotted a metal key ring with a pair of keys on it, together with a plastic disk embossed with the name and address of a local garage: ROYAL AUTO STORAGE (TUNEUPS — REPAIRS — SUPPLIES — 24 HOURS). Which made no sense—what would a single woman living in Manhattan need with a car? And where would someone who couldn’t afford a TV set find the money to buy one?
The knocking at the door was louder now, and the landlady’s voice called out, “The police has been called, young lady. You better open door.”
What Tricia opened was the window. Pocketing the key ring, she climbed out onto the fire escape, taking a second to draw the curtain, lower the blinds behind her, and pull the window down as far as she could from the outside.
A choice loomed. Up or down? The sound of a police siren coming around the corner decided it for her: Down would put her right in the path of their headlights.
Tricia shot up the metal steps, one hand to her hip to keep the keys from jingling in the pocket of her dress. She thought about Heaven as she went, still trying to digest what had happened. Where had the gun come from? You heard about people bringing trophies back from the war, and a German gun, well, that could certainly have been someone’s trophy. But this one hadn’t just been polished up and left on a shelf, it had been loaded and ready. This was clearly a tool, not a conversation piece, and what’s more, Heaven must’ve had it close at hand, to be able to jam it in her pocket when a knock came out of the blue. What other secrets was she hiding? Hell—had she been working at the Sun the same afternoon Coral nabbed the box out of Nicolazzo’s safe? Somebody had taken the money—and Tricia could certainly see Heaven LaCroix lugging fifty or sixty pounds without breaking a sweat.
But she’d seemed so decent—
Yeah, said a little voice in Tricia’s head, she seemed decent until she shot a man dead in front of you.
But that was self-defense—
Yeah, said the voice. Still.
Tricia reached the top of the fire escape and climbed the narrow metal ladder leading up from there to the roof of the building. She threw one leg over the edge of the cornice. Before she could follow it with the other she heard an amplified voice from the street below.
“You! Freeze!”
She hesitated a moment, half on the ladder, half on the roof, her dress up around her thighs. Glancing back and down, she saw a pair of policemen, hunched behind their open car doors, guns drawn and pointing up toward her. One had a bullhorn in his other hand.
“Come on down, lady, nice and easy, we don’t want to have to shoot you.”
Well, that was all well and good, since Tricia didn’t want to be shot. But she didn’t want to be arrested either, particularly now that the charges against her had presumably escalated from assaulting a police officer to manslaughter. She heaved her other leg up and over and an instant later heard bullets splintering the stone of the wall the ladder was anchored to.
Well, that was one way to send the message that they meant business.
Staying on her hands and knees, she crawled past a huge ventilation fan in a dented tin housing, crossing to the rear of the building. The wall separating this building from the next one over was barely a separation at all, just a few rows of bricks that Tricia went over like a champion high-jumper. She didn’t hear any more gunshots, at least, so she took a chance and rose from her knees, scampering across the next roof in a low crouch, a little like Groucho Marx if Groucho Marx had been running for his life across a tenement roof.