We drove along for eight or ten blocks at almost a snail’s pace, then suddenly she stepped on it.
“Well, that’s something,” I said.
“What?”
“That you’ve decided where we’re going.”
“I knew that all along — where I am going.”
“Where’s that?”
“To my apartment and change my clothes.”
“And I take it the emphasis on the first person pronoun means that my ride terminates when we get to the apartment?”
“What did you want me to do,” she asked, “adopt you?”
I grinned.
“I don’t have any etchings if that’s what you mean.” I didn’t say anything.
She turned toward me, started to say something, checked herself and remained silent.
After four or five minutes, she eased the car into the curb. “It’s been nice knowing you.”
I said, “Don’t bother, I’ll wait.”
“You’ll have to wait a long time.”
“That’s all right.”
“What are you waiting for?”
“Waiting to hear why you were so curious about Mrs. Crail.”
“Well,” she blazed angrily. “Sit there and wait then!”
She flounced out of the car, walked around behind the machine, took keys from her purse, latchkeyed the door of an apartment house and went inside.
I was very careful not to turn my head, but by watching from the corner of my eye, I could see that she stopped after a few steps and remained standing there in the dimly lit lobby. She stood there for one minute — two minutes. Then she melted into the shadows and was gone.
Three minutes later and the door opened. A figure that clutched a knee-length fur coat tightly about her came running down the stairs toward the car.
I got out and started around politely to open the door.
Cold fingers grabbed my wrists. “Come,” she said in a hoarse whisper. “Please come — quick! Oh, my God!”
I started to ask her a question, then took another look at her face, changed my mind and plodded along behind without a word.
The door had clicked shut, but she had the latchkey in her right hand. Her left hand was clutching the coat about her.
She unlocked the door and walked through a lobby which was but little more than a wide place in a hallway, climbed three steps, walked down a carpeted corridor, entered an automatic elevator that wheezed and rattled up to the fourth floor.
She led the way down the corridor, paused before a door on the left. Once more her latchkey clicked back a lock and she pushed the door open. The lights were all on.
It was a three room apartment, if you classified a little kitchenette as a room. It was on the street side and cost money.
Her purse, gloves and the jacket she had been wearing, lay on the table in the entrance room. There was an ash tray on that table with a single cigarette about half smoked. Through an open doorway I glimpsed a bedroom, and on the bed saw the skirt and blouse she had been wearing.
She followed the direction of my eyes, said in a hoarse whisper, “I was just changing my clothes — getting ready to take a bath. I flung on the first thing I could find to cover me up.”
I looked again at the fur coat.
The left hand that was clutching it had puckered up a bit of the coat. Through it I could see the pink of satiny flesh.
“What’s the rest of it?” I asked.
Wordlessly she crossed over to the door of the bathroom, then hung back.
“Please,” she said, “you do it.”
I opened the door and looked inside.
The bathroom light was on.
The body of the man who had escorted Mrs. Ellery Crail to the Rimley Rendezvous that afternoon was in the bathtub, the knees high up against the chest, the head back against the sloping end of the bathtub, the eyes about two-thirds closed, the lower jaw hanging limp leaving the mouth partially open.
Telling the girl to keep back out of the way and reaching for the lifeless wrist was only a mere formality.
Rufus Stanberry’s heart was as still as a churchyard on a frosty morning.
Even in death, however, he had that shrewdly calculating leer on his face. The man might have been making an audit of eternity.
“He’s... dead?” she asked from the doorway.
“He’s dead,” I said.
6
We went back to the bedroom. She was shaking with nervousness.
I said, “Sit down. We have a little talking to do.”
“I don’t know a thing about it,” she said. “You know as well as I do that I wasn’t up here long enough to...”
I said, “Let’s let that go and start with facts. What happened?”
“I’ve already told you. I came in here and started to undress. I headed for the bathroom, switched on the lights and... and...”
“You switched on the bathroom light?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“You’re sure it wasn’t on already?”
“No. I switched it on, and then I saw him and... well, I just ran back and grabbed the first thing I could throw around me and ran down to get you.”
“Pretty much of a panic?”
“What do you mean?”
“You were frightened?”
“Of course.”
“You didn’t know he was here?”
“No, I...”
“Take another look.”
“I...”
“Go ahead. Look.”
I pushed her over to the bathroom door. She grabbed at the side of the door. The coat fell open. She had on a bra, panties and dark lustrous stockings. She gave a short, sharp exclamation and kept clinging to the side of the door, not bothering about the coat. “Take a good look,” I said.
She said, “What is there to see? Just a dead man in a bathroom.”
She twisted out of my grasp, darted back to the bedroom.
I carefully closed the bathroom door. “Where’s the telephone?”
“Right there.”
“Oh, yes,” I said. I sat down and took one of the packages of cigarettes she had sold me that afternoon from my pocket, shook a cigarette a third of the way out, extended it to her, “Smoke?”
“No, I...”
I took the cigarette from the pack, tapped it on my thumbnail, put it in my mouth, lit it and settled back in the chair.
“The telephone,” she said. “It’s right there.”
I nodded.
“Aren’t you going to call the police?”
“Not yet.”
“Why?”
“I’m waiting.”
“For what?”
“For you.”
“What about me?”
“To think up a better story.”
“What do you mean?”
I said, “The police won’t believe that story of yours. That will make it bad — for you.”
A hot flash of anger crossed her face. “What do you mean?”
I inhaled cigarette smoke and slowly exhaled it.
“If you don’t call the police, I’ll call them,” she threatened.
There were magazines on the table. I picked up one, settled back in the chair and started turning the pages, looking at the pictures. “Go ahead.”
The silence lasted for ten or fifteen seconds, then she moved toward the telephone. “I’m not kidding. If you’re not going to call the police, I’ll call them.”
I kept turning the pages of the magazine.
She picked up the telephone receiver, started to dial, looked back at me and then slammed the receiver back into place. “What’s wrong with my story?”
“Two or three things.”
“Bosh!”
“One thing,” I said, “that the police will notice. A couple of other things they won’t.”
“What’s the thing the police will notice?”
“The thing that proves you’re lying.”
“I don’t like the way you’re saying that.”