“Did she tell you anything at all about last night?”
“Nothing that wasn’t a lie. It must have something to do with that gun-with why she brought it with her. Don’t you think?”
“Maybe,” I said, but that was what I thought, all right. Something to do with the gun, and possibly with its theft from her room. Something to do with Russ Dancer, too? I wondered. Suppose he got Cybil alone somewhere last night, made a pass at her, and swatted her one when she rejected him?
Kerry seemed to be reading my mind. She said, “It could be Russ Dancer who beat up on her. He was drunk again at the party.”
“Yeah.”
“If it was him, I want to know it.”
“So do I. I’ve been looking for him since you left.”
“I’ll help you find him.”
“No. Better let me handle him alone.”
“Tough-guy stuff?”
“I hope not. Why don’t you go ahead and have lunch? I’ll join you as soon as I can-or meet you in the auditorium for Colodny’s panel at one if I run late.”
She said all right, not without reluctance, and I went off to check the Continental Bar. No sign of Dancer there. And no sign of him in the registration area or the huckster room. I went up to the mezzanine and looked into the auditorium and the Pulp Art room. He was not in either of those places. Which meant he’d left the hotel again, maybe to do some more drinking, or he was up in his room after all, passed out or partying.
I got back into the elevator and rode up to the sixth floor. When I turned along the east corridor, a middle-aged maid with loose piles of butterscotch hair was just coming past the little cul-de-sac that contained the entrance to Dancer’s room, pushing one of those big all-purpose hotel carts loaded with fresh linen, detergents, trash receptacles, and the like. She looked harried, the way most hotel maids always seem to, and as I moved toward her she lifted one hand and rubbed the back of it across her forehead.
That was when the gun went off.
The flat, banging sound seemed to erupt ahead of me and to my right, behind where the maid was-Dancer’s room. The maid had stopped dead and so had I, and for an instant we were staring at each other across twenty yards of empty carpeting. Then there was a low cry and a series of other sounds muffled by the walls that I couldn’t identify.
The hackles went up on my neck, and there was a prickling sensation along my scalp like something scurrying through dry grass. I uprooted myself, went charging ahead along the hall. The gunshot had come from Dancer’s room, all right; I was sure of it. Ahead of me the maid had backed off and was peering into the cul-de-sac with a seriocomic expression of confusion and fright. I pounded past another of the cul-de-sacs, past her cart. More noises came from behind the thick corridor wall, still deadened and unidentifiable. When I neared the maid she scrambled aside, but she was slow doing it and I almost collided with her. We veered off from each other, her squeaking a little, stumbling, and I caught hold of the wall at the corner and pulled myself around it into the cul-de-sac.
Nobody was in the passageway. All three doors-the entrances to 617 and 619 and the one to the storage closet at the end-were shut. I ran
to Dancer’s door and grabbed the knob and twisted hard; it bound up halfway through the rotation. I hung onto it, rattled the door in its frame. Then I quit rattling and held a breath to listen.
Silence inside there now.
“Dancer?” I shouted. “Open the door!”
Nothing.
I looked back toward the corridor. The maid was still poised there, watching me huge-eyed, like one of the children in a painting by Keane. “I’m a detective!” I yelled at her. “I need your passkey!”
I had to yell it a second time, moving back toward her, before it got through and she responded. She held the key out at arm’s length, timidly, as if she were afraid I might want to take her arm along with it. I jerked it out of her hand, ran back to 617, and slotted it into the lock. The latch clicked; the knob rotated all the way in my hand this time and the door popped inward. I shoved it all the way, tensing, and took two quick steps into the room.
Dancer was ten feet away, in the middle of the carpet near the couch, swaying a little. His face was gray, blotchy, and his eyes were only half focused and so red-rimmed and red-lined they looked bloody. The smell of raw whiskey coming off him and from the open quart bottle of rye overturned on the couch, mingled with the stench of cordite, was nauseating.
And lying back-sprawled at his feet, one leg drawn up and both arms wrapped across his chest, was Frank Colodny. You only had to look at him once-the position he was in, the facial rictus and the blank staring eyes, the blood showing beneath the crossed arms-to know that he was dead.
Dancer turned his head toward me, blinked, blinked again, and seemed to recognize me. “I didn’t do it,” he said in a sick, slurred voice. “Christ Almighty, I didn’t kill him.”
But the gun he held pointed downward in his right hand said otherwise.
Cybil Wade’s gun, I thought-the missing.38 revolver.
TEN
I said slow and careful, “Put it down, Russ.”
“What?”
“The gun. Put it down.”
He squinted along the length of his arm, and his face registered confusion, as if he hadn’t known he had anything at all in his hand. A belch came out of him, an ugly sound in the stillness. Then he grimaced and threw the.38 at the couch, the way you throw something too hot to hold, or too foreign. It hit one of the back cushions and plopped down next to the overturned rye bottle.
“It was lying on the floor next to him,” he said. “I must have picked it up. But I didn’t kill him.”
I eased over past him, still tensed, not taking my eyes off his face, and caught up the gun by the tip of its barrel. Still warm. Dancer had not moved and he still didn’t move as I backed off again to the door, dropped the.38 into my jacket pocket.
“What’s he doing here?” he said, meaning Colodny. He sounded amazed. “How did he get in here?”
“Stay where you are,” I told him. “Don’t move.”
I backed out into the passageway. The maid had not gone anywhere, nor was she alone; three other people I didn’t know, all of them gawking, were grouped at the far corridor wall. I called out to the maid, keeping Dancer in my line of sight. “What’s your name, Miss?”
“Greta.”
“All right, Greta. Go downstairs and tell the manager there’s been an accident in Room 617 and a man’s been killed.”
Her eyes got even wider. I could hear her suck in her breath.
“Tell him I’m going to call the police,” I said. I gave her my name. “But don’t say anything to anyone else; just the manager. And don’t leave the hotel. The police may want to talk to you.”
I waited for her to hurry away. Then I went back inside and shut the door. The lock on it was a deadbolt, not one of those spring jobs with a button you can push on your way out so the door will lock automatically; you had to use a key from the outside to lock this one, or turn the handle on the deadbolt latch from inside. I turned the handle now, and then went over near Dancer again. But not too near because I had no way of knowing how he would react when he came out of his daze.
He was no longer looking at the body; his eyes had shifted toward the bottle on the couch. “I need a drink,” he said. “Christ, I need one bad.”
“No more drinks,” I said.
“I’m getting the shakes …”
“No more liquor. Sit down in that chair over there.”
The chair was a Victorian replica; he sat on the edge of its plush seat and got a tight grip on both knees. His chest kept jumping, and his mouth worked as if he were trying not to vomit.
hi the wall beyond him, the bedroom door stood wide open. I went over to it and looked inside. The windows in the outer wall were undraped, giving me a view of Telegraph Hill and Coit Tower; they were also closed and locked. The bed was rumpled, blankets kicked into a tangle at the foot end, but there was nothing else to see. And nothing to see in the bathroom, either, most of which was visible through another open door across the bedroom.