She continued to stand there for a few seconds, her eyes fixed in a blind stare of intense absorption. And then, saying nothing, she went out.
I leaned back to study the wall beside the door. Outside in the reception office, the voices of Kitty and Wanda Henderson were engaged in a brief exchange. Then the hall door opened, closed, and silence descended.
Suddenly, beyond my door, Kitty’s typewriter began a furious clattering. Shadow on the glass, I thought. The clattering ended abruptly, and Kitty’s voice rose brightly. Almost immediately, my door swung open, and my reflexes had me reaching for a stack of paper, while I thought unkindly of Kitty’s negligence in forgetting to cue me in. But I didn’t complete the action. I knew, somehow, that the two guys who entered would not be susceptible to the routine.
One of them leaned against the door. The other moved in on my desk, with a cordial smile on his face. He even removed his hat, placing if carefully on a corner of the desk. His hair was light brown and clipped close to a skull. He was tall, topping six feet, with heavyweight shoulders that moved in easy co-ordination with his legs. A pretty nice-looking guy, really, except that his light tan eyes were cold and shining with conditioned wariness. There was about him the delicate and indefinable scent of violence and death.
“You Solomon Burr?” he asked, pleasantly.
“Yes,” I said. “Have a chair.”
The cordial smile spread a trifle. He reached into the inner pocket of his coat and removed a thick, green packet. He fanned the edge of it with a thumbnail and laid it on the desk among the legal papers.
“No, thanks. We won’t stay. The girl who was just here — Wanda Henderson — this will pay you to forget her.”
It was a lot of money, a hell of a lot of money for a lawyer with a relatively new shingle. I looked at the packet, and my palms were itching.
“Go to hell,” I said.
The guy with tan eyes kept smiling. He picked up the money and returned it to his pocket. Leaning across the desk, as if he were going to argue the point, he slashed the horny edge of his hand across my mouth. My chair teetered, crashing over backward, not so much from the blow as from my effort to get away from it. The guy came around the desk and kicked me. I tried to move away, but all my muscles were drawn in a kind of excruciating contraction. I felt myself hoisted, jammed against the desk. Stony knuckles raked my face and the pleasant voice, spaced precisely between blows, reached me faintly on a rising wave of thunderous nausea.
“You could have made a nice bundle, just for turning down a job. Now you’ll turn it down without the bundle, just because I ask it. You hear me, counsellor? You hear me real plain?”
I heard him, but I didn’t answer. I slipped away under cover of night and descended in soft and sweeping gyrations a thousand sickening miles to the blessed sanctuary of the floor.
Chapter Two
More Women in the Act
My head was lying, on something delightfully soft. Far off above me, a voice said, “Damn it, you’re getting me all bloody.”
Opening my eyes, I saw through a swimming pink mist the shimmering, elusive face of Kitty Troop.
“Pardon me,” I said, shutting my eyes again.
The effort detonated a bomb inside my skull.
“Shut up,” Kitty said. “If you’ve got to bleed, bleed quietly.”
When I’d accumulated enough strength to lift my lids once more, the pink mist had thinned a little, and Kitty’s face was closer and clearer.
“You’ve been crying,” I said.
She sniffed. “Like hell I ‘have. You think I’d waste any tears on a guy three months delinquent on my salary? What the hell you trying to do, sonny, make like Perry Mason?”
“Perry Mason never gets beat up,” I said. “Perry Mason is a hero. Has anyone ever told you that you’ve got nice legs?”
“You’d be surprised,” she said. “Anyhow, you ought to use a more direct approach. Between you and me, lover, this is a damned devious technique. Now get up. The fun’s over.”
I tried a grin and suffered for it. “You’re profane, honey. You’re a very profane dame.”
“To hell with you,” she said.
Slipping an arm across my shoulders, she made enough clearance to draw her leg out from under. Then, very gently, while bells rang and sirens whined in a vivid shower of colored sparks and streamers, she deposited me into a chair.
She went away, and I let my eyes close. Pretty soon, she returned, and I let them stay closed. She swabbed the cut on my cheek hone- with liquid fire.
“Ouch,” I said.
“Merthiolate,” she said.
“Take it easy, honey.”
“It ought to have a stitch.”
“Nothing doing.”
“Okay. I’ll pull it together with tape. That way, it’ll leave a cute little scar. Make you look experienced.”
She did things with gauze and tape, and after a while, I began to feel much better, the fire diminishing in my face. With the tips of my fingers, I explored tenderly a swelling along the line of my jaw, the bloat of my lips. Kitty held a small mirror in front of me, and I was surprised to see that the reflected face wasn’t nearly so misshapen to the sight as it was to the touch. It had its purple patches and its distortions, to be sure, but the damage was minor to a face like mine.
“Nothing much I can do for the lips,” Kitty said.
“You might try kissing them.”
“No, thanks.”
“All right. I wouldn’t let you kiss me, anyhow, because you’re vulgar. You’d have to wash your mouth out with soap and water first. By the way, where’d you get all the first aid stuff?”
“I keep it in the drawer with my novel. I’ve been holding it for the day you get tired of watching your lousy spider and start looking around for more basic entertainment.”
“I’m not the rough type, honey.”
She gave me another grin, a little firmer around the edges this time, and perched on a corner of the desk. The nylon, even with runners, was very alluring.
“I was keeping it for you, lover, not me. Any guy who can’t handle a couple of gorillas wouldn’t get far with Kitty.”
I eased my head back wearily against the chair, and her hand came out suddenly, her fingers trailing lightly down my bruised cheek.
“It isn’t funny, Sol.”
“No,” I said, “it really isn’t.”
“What’s it all mean? Why do you rate a treatment by professional gorillas?”
I sat there with my head back, looking up at the ceiling. It was still the same old ceiling. Kitty sat on ray desk, and she was still lovely, desirable, and unpaid. Everything was the same and in order. Yet nothing was the same, and nothing was in order.
“It means, honey,” I said quietly, “that a very deadly character wants Hal Decker to burn for a murder he didn’t commit. It means that anyone who gets in the way will get to be considered strictly expendable.”
“Who is he, Sol?”
“That’s something I’ve been thinking about real hard, and I keep getting an answer that scares the hell out of me. On the evidence, it’s really a pretty simple problem. Wanda Henderson is Hal Decker’s only alibi. Hal hasn’t told anyone about her, because he’s afraid of what might happen to her. On her own, Wanda went to Austin Stark, the district attorney, and told him Hal had spent the night of Danny Devore’s murder with her.
“What did Stark do? He laughed politely and sent her home under threat of a perjury rap. But Wanda didn’t go home. She came here instead, because Hal had mentioned to her that I’m a lawyer and that we used to be pretty good friends. She leaves here, and five minutes later a trio of gorillas make an appearance. One of them tries to buy me off the case. When I won’t buy, he gives me a sample of available consequences. Here’s the point, honey. How do they know Wanda Henderson is an alibi for Hal Decker? What’s the only way they could know?”